Page 30 of Truth in the Treme

Maya had stopped chasing a motive and started chasing a person, and she called him in that morning to show him who.

“One name will not go away,” she said. She had the council records spread across the table again, and a single file set apart from the rest, and she tapped it as she talked. “The firefighter's widow. She is in everything. Every hearing on the redevelopment fights, every public meeting where the commissioner's office got questioned, going back years. She showed up to all of it. She stood up and spoke at most of it. Her husband died in the line, and the city denied the death benefit on a technicality out of that same office, and she fought it in every room the city would let her into, and she lost every single time.” Maya's jaw was tight. “She never got a dollar. She never got an apology. She never got so much as a hearing that went her way.” She slid the file forward. “And then, about three years ago, she stopped. No more meetings. And when I went looking for her, there is nothing. No current address. No employer. No tax filing in three years. She did not die, there is no death record, she just walked out of every list a person is supposed to be on and vanished.” She looked up at him. “I am not hunting a motive anymore, Durand. I am hunting a woman. I want to find her before she lights the next one.”

Bastien looked at the file and felt the human half of the case finally close its hand around a shape, and it was, at last, entirely her problem and not his. A vanished woman with a real grief and a real fire in her. He told Maya she was right, and to find her, and that he would help however he could. And he meant it. But even as he said it, the truth of where his own attention lived was plain to him. Maya was hunting an arsonist. He was living with a mystery a great deal older, and it had begun, very recently, to feel less a case than a wonder.

Because he was happy. That was the thing he could no longer pretend around. He had noticed it in himself slowly, and then all at once. He laughed now, easily, at small things. He reached for her hand before he thought about reaching for it. He had stopped holding a wall between himself and every good moment, stopped bracing for the loss that had always come. Delphine saw all of it. She had watched him do the opposite for so long that the change could not hide from her.

“You are finally letting yourself be happy,” she told him that morning, standing in the kitchen light with her coffee, not making a question of it. “I have been waiting the whole time I have known you to see you do it. And there it is.”

He did not answer her. He could not, and he did not need to, because she was entirely right and they both knew it, and answering would only have put words on a thing that was better left as the look he gave her across the kitchen. He had loved this soul through three lifetimes and buried her through two of them, and for the first time in all of it he was letting himself simply be glad she was here. He should have known better. He, of anyone, should have known that the world waited for exactly that kind of gladness before it took the floor away.

The tenth fire came in the afternoon, and he no longer went to it to search. He went to be beside her when the smoke did what smoke did now. He stood her back from the tape and put himself at her shoulder and did not once look at the burning building, because the building was Maya's and the woman beside him was his, and he had learned where his work truly lived. He had grown almost easy at these scenes, in a way that would have appalled the man he had been a month before. He knew the shape of the afternoon now. Maya would find her origins and he would find nothing, because there was nothing of his to find, and somewhere in the middle of it the smoke would come and take Delphine and give her back a piece of a life. He was braced for a piece of a life. He was not braced, standing there in the ordinary dread of it, for what the smoke handed her instead. He watched her face and waited for the door to open, and it opened, and everything he thought he understood about her went out from under him.

It began where they all did now, which was to say with Delia. He could tell from her face that she had gone somewhere in that first life, somewhere ordinary, her expression softening into a recovered gladness he had learned to read. And then, halfway down, it changed. He felt it change. Her face changed, a confusion crossing it, a doubling, as though a second image had been laid over the first and would not fit it. The gladness stayed but the shape of it altered. Whatever she was seeing was not the boarding house and not the green door and not the streets of the city he knew. He watched her travel somewhere he had not sent her, somewhere further back than a hundred years, and a cold understanding began to rise in him before she said a single word.

She surfaced with tears standing in her eyes and a name on her lips that he had not heard from her in any life he could remember.

“Charlotte,” she whispered.

The whole world stopped around him. The trucks, the crowd, the smoke, the burning storefront, all of it dropped away into a roaring silence, and there was only that one word, that one name, coming out of the mouth of the woman he loved on a sidewalk in the twenty-first century. Charlotte. The first of them. The first face, the first life, the beginning of everything, two full centuries before Delia was ever born. He had believed, with everything in him, that Delphine was remembering a single lost life. He stood frozen at the edge of a fire and understood, all at once, that she was not remembering it — she was reaching past it, into a life she had always known existed but had never, until this moment, been able to feel.

She could barely speak of it, back at the apartment, and what she could give him came in pieces, none of them whole.

“It was not the same,” she kept saying, turning her hands over as though the memory might be resting in them. “The other ones, they are a place, a room, a street, they have edges. This was not like that. There was almost nothing to hold. Only feelings.” She pressed her fingers to her temple. “A garden. Somewhere green and walled and quiet, with white flowers, some tree dropping white blossoms everywhere. Peace. So much peace it hurt. And your hand. I was holding your hand, I know that much, and I was laughing, and I called you by your name, and I looked at you and I knew, the way you know your own heartbeat, that we belonged together. That we always had.” She looked up at him, lost. “It was you. It was absolutely you. But it was not our life, Bastien. It was older than our life. I don't understand. How can I finally remember it? I knew about her. I always knew about her. But this is the first time I have ever felt it.”

He held her and gave her no answer, because the only answers he had were ones he could not begin to say. He knew the garden. He knew the wall around it and the white blossoms coming down off the trees and the sound of her laughter in it, from a life so far back that the city she had lived and died in this time was still being dreamed into being. He had walked in that garden holding that hand, and he had loved the woman who laughed there, and her name had been Charlotte, and she had been the first. Delia had come after her. Delphine had come after Delia. And the soul that had worn all three faces was climbing back through every one of them, not stopping at the boarding house, not stopping at the theater, going further and further back toward a beginning he had spent his whole existence keeping her from ever having to see.

He had not let himself think of Charlotte in longer than most nations had stood. She was the oldest wound he owned, the first face this soul had ever worn, the first time he had loved her and the first time he had lost her, so far back that the city she would die in this time was still young mud and ambition. He had built careful walls around that grief and lived behind them for two hundred years. Now the woman he loved stood in his own front room describing Charlotte's garden to him, feeling Charlotte's certainty in her own chest, reaching with her own living hands toward a life he had sealed away so completely that he had half persuaded himself it had happened to some other man. There was no wall left that would hold against this. She was going to remember all of it. It was only a question of how much, and how fast, and what it would cost her to carry once she had it.

“I don't know why,” he told her, which was almost true, because he did not know why now, why the door had opened this far, why after a hundred years of merciful forgetting the whole of it was coming home to her at once. That part was still a mystery even to him. But he no longer had any doubt about what was happening, and the what of it was enough to take the ground out from under two centuries of certainty. She was not remembering a life. She was remembering lives. She was reaching back past the one he had let himself grieve, into ones he had never dared believe she would touch, and if she kept reaching, if the door kept opening, there was a room at the very end of it that he would give anything she would never have to enter.

He got her to sleep eventually, spent past dreaming, and then he sat alone with the notebook that held their life and could not make himself open it for a long while. When he did, he turned past all of it, past the pecans and the river and the last good night, past the green door, all the way to the very front, before the first page he had ever written, and he took the pen and he made a new heading there, at the beginning of the book, before everything else. His hand was not steady. He had written a great many hard things in this notebook. This was the hardest, because writing it made it real, and real was the one thing he had spent a century refusing to let it be. Before Delia, he wrote, and then he sat with the pen shaking over the empty space beneath it and could not yet bring himself to fill it in.

He closed the book. For weeks he had believed he was helping the woman he loved remember one lost life, one stolen future, one fire. He sat in the dark with the notebook shut under his hand and understood at last the true size of the thing that had come for them. She was not remembering a life. She was remembering all of them. And there was only one life left at the far end of that road, one last door past Charlotte and the garden and the white blossoms, and behind it waited the last truth of all, the one he had paid everything he ever had to keep from her, and he did not know how much time he had left before she reached it. He had spent a hundred years certain the worst thing that could ever happen to him was to lose her again. He was no longer certain of that. There were things she could remember that would be worse than any grave, and every one of them was waiting for her at the end of a road she was walking faster with each passing day.

TWENTY-SIX

He opened the shop early, for the first time in weeks, and for a little while the world remembered how to be ordinary. Durand Antiquities had sat mostly dark through the whole of the fires, its bell silent, its cases gathering the fine gray dust of a city too frightened to shop for old things. This morning the door stood open to the street and the light came in gold across the cabinets, and customers wandered in off the banquette to finger the estate jewelry and haggle over a cracked Sèvres cup, and the small ordinary business of it was a balm he had not known he needed. Delphine came down and worked the counter beside him and teased the tourists into buying things they did not need, A regular wandered in who had been dead since the Storyville days and liked to price the pocket watches he could no longer wind, and Bastien let him browse, because the shop had always kept a place for the kind of customer no one else in the room could see. For an hour or two the fires and the memories were only a rumor from some other life.

He had a music box open on the workbench in the back, a walnut cylinder piece a century old, its comb gummed and its governor seized, brought in by a woman who wanted her grandmother's lullaby back. He had the mechanism apart under the lamp and was easing the last of the old oil out of it when his hand slipped on the stop-work and the cylinder turned, and the comb caught its teeth, and the box began, all on its own, to play.

It was a small tinkling waltz, thin and sweet and very old, and it filled the back of the shop before he could stop the cylinder. And behind him, at the counter, Delphine went utterly still.

He was around the workbench and across the room before the second bar. No smoke. No fire. No warning at all, only a hundred-year-old tune from a stranger's music box, and it had reached into her exactly as the burning houses had, and taken her down into a life. He caught her against the counter and held her while the little waltz played itself out, and he understood, with the box tinkling its lullaby into the dusty gold light of the shop, that the door in her did not need the fires anymore and perhaps never had. It only needed the right key, and the world was full of keys, and any of them would do now.

She came back with white blossoms in her eyes, if such a thing were possible, a soft and faraway and unfrightened wonder.

“It was the garden again,” she said, when he had gotten her upstairs with tea she did not drink. “Charlotte's garden. I was sitting beside you under the trees, and you were reading to me, out loud, from some book, and you had gone so far into it you had stopped seeing me at all.” She laughed softly. “I remember teasing you about it. I told you a woman could grow old and gray waiting for you to look up from a book. And you did look up, finally, all startled, as though you'd forgotten I was there, and I was not even a little bit angry, because—” She stopped, searching for it. “Because I loved that about you. That was the thing I remember loving. The way you could forget the whole world existed. I told you so. I told you I loved the man you were when you forgot everyone else was in the room.” Her eyes found his. “And then we danced. Under the trees, with the white flowers coming down, no music at all, just dancing. I have danced with you under trees before, Bastien. In a life I never lived.”

He sat with her and let the tea go cold and said nothing that would give it away, and inside a quiet astonishment was working through him that had nothing of fear in it at all. He had loved Charlotte in that garden two hundred and more years ago, and she had loved him, and the reason she had given him then, laughing under the flowering trees, was the very same reason Delia had loved him in a boarding house a century later, and the very same reason the woman in front of him loved him now. The absorption. The forgetting. The way he went so deep into a thing that the world fell away. Three women, three faces, three centuries, and the same soul had looked at the same man each time and loved the exact same thing in him. It was not three love stories. He saw that now with a clarity that took his breath. It had only ever been one, told over and over, in different dresses, on different streets, and he had been too busy grieving the endings to notice that the beginning kept coming back.

Delphine, being Delphine, refused to let it stay solemn. She studied him over the cold tea for a moment, and then a wicked light came into her that he had learned to brace for.

“I have a very important question,” she said gravely. “About these memories.” She waited until he was properly worried. “Have I always found you this handsome? In all of them? Or is that a new development, because I would like it on the record that I have excellent and apparently consistent taste.”

He laughed before he could help it, the tightness in his chest breaking apart. “I am afraid I have no objective opinion on the matter.”

“No,” she agreed, entirely satisfied. “But apparently I do. Across two hundred years. That is what I call commitment.” She sipped the cold tea and made a face and set it down. “I think that is the part no one warned me about. Everyone would tell you a thing like this should be terrifying. Remembering dying, remembering a whole other life, remembering a life before that one. And some of it is. But underneath the terrifying part, Bastien, every single one of these is a love story. They are all just me finding you. Over and over. How am I supposed to be frightened of that?”