Page 31 of Truth in the Treme

He had no answer that would not have undone him, so he kissed her instead, there in the lamplight over the cold tea, and let her feel what he could not yet find the words for.

The kiss began as punctuation and became something else.

She did not let him pull back from it. Her hands came up to his face and held him there, not urgently, with the steadiness of someone who had been waiting and finally can stop. He went still under them. Then he stopped going still and simply stayed, and the staying was different from anything he had managed before, and she knew it — he could tell she knew it by the way her grip eased, just slightly, into something closer to rest.

He was thinking about Charlotte. He was always thinking about Charlotte now — the soul in front of him who had loved him in a garden two centuries before this lamplight, had crossed back to find him, had done it again, was doing it now. She must have felt him go somewhere, because she drew back just far enough to look at him, her thumbs still resting at his jaw, and what was in her face was not patience. It was something quieter and more decided.

"Stop," she said. "Whatever room you just walked into. Come out of it."

"I was not⁠—"

"You were." She did not say it unkindly. "You do it even now. Someone hands you something good and you take it and then you go somewhere I cannot reach you and you look at it from a distance, alone, the way you have looked at everything alone for two hundred years." Her thumbs moved once against his jaw. "I am right here. Be here with me."

He looked at her. At Delphine, who was also Charlotte and also Delia and who was most essentially and irreducibly herself, this woman in this lamplight, with the cold tea between them and the Quarter breathing through the open shutters and her hands on his face. He had spent two centuries at a remove from his own life, watching it like a man standing outside a lit window. She was asking him to come inside.

He reached for her.

Not carefully, not holding anything in reserve, braced for the cost of wanting. He kissed her with the whole of himself present, and she made a sound against his mouth that was partly surprise and entirely satisfaction, because she had known it was in him and she had been patient and now she had it.

He stood and drew her up with him and she came willingly, her hands moving from his face to his chest, learning the difference between him holding back and him not, and approving of it with a thoroughness that left him briefly unable to think in consecutive sentences. He walked her back from the table. She went, guiding them both, because she had always known where they were going and he was only now catching up.

The bedroom held only the last of the evening coming through the shutters in long amber bars, and in that light she turned to face him and reached for the buttons of his shirt with the calm, finding no reason to rush it. He let her. He stood in front of her without an inch of himself kept elsewhere, which was what she had been asking since the beginning, and her hands moved and he watched her face and she glanced up and found him watching and did not look away.

"There you are," she said softly.

He answered her with his hands.

He had learned her by now, knew the places that made her breath catch and the ones that made her laugh and the ones that made her say his name in the way that reached past everything he had built to keep himself at a distance from the world. He went to all of them deliberately, unhurried, a man not bracing against time for once in his long existence. She was not fragile. She had never been fragile. She had survived dying and remembering dying and she had looked at the full weight of what he was and what he had done and she had stayed, and the staying deserved everything he had, which was what he gave her.

She pulled him down to her and he went, and there was nothing in the room but the amber light and her voice saying his name and the fact of being wanted by someone who knew the whole truth of him and had chosen him anyway, across three centuries and two graves and one music box playing in a dusty shop on Dauphine Street. When she came apart she was looking at him, all the way at him, and he let her see everything in return.

Afterward the light had gone blue in the shutters and neither of them moved for a long while. He lay with her head on his chest and his hand in her hair and the city turning its quiet shift somewhere below.

"I have something to tell you," she said, into his skin.

He waited.

"Every time," she said. "In every single one of them. Charlotte knew. Delia knew. I know." She lifted her head and looked at him. "Whatever else we had to carry, we always knew it was worth it. That is what I keep bringing back out of all of it. Not the grief. That. I thought you should hear it."

He could not speak. He pressed his mouth to her forehead and held it there, and she settled back against him, and the Quarter moved through its blue evening below them, and after a while her breathing went slow and easy against his side, and he lay in the dark and held what she had given him, and for the first time in two hundred years he held it without bracing for the day it would be taken.

Maya came by in the late afternoon with the biggest thing she had carried up his stairs in a month, and she had it in a single manila folder.

“I have her,” she said. “The widow. She has a name now. Evelyn Broussard.” She opened the folder. “Widowed twenty-three years ago. Two children, grown now, gone their own ways. Her husband was a firefighter. He died the way they die, going into a warehouse that came down on top of him, doing his job.” Maya's voice stayed level, but there was a stone in it. “And then the city killed her a second way, slower. The death benefit got tangled in some paperwork out of the commissioner's office, a technicality, a filing deadline she supposedly missed while she was burying her husband. The insurance dug in behind the city. She fought it for years, every appeal, every hearing, and lost every one. She lost the house inside two years. And somewhere after that she just came apart and disappeared.” Maya looked up at him. “That is my arsonist. A firefighter's widow who spent twenty years being told by every office in this city that her husband's death did not count, and finally decided to make it count in the only way anyone would look at.”

Bastien read the pages, the marriage record and the death notice and the long ugly ledger of denied appeals, and he found the motive open in him, a wound, terrible and completely comprehensible. He understood her. That was the awful part. He understood Evelyn Broussard all the way to the bottom. A woman whose whole world had gone into a fire she did not set, who had been told by every authority that mattered that her grief was a clerical error, who had lived twenty-three years inside a single unbearable day and could not get out of it. He knew that country. He had lived in it himself for a century. He had spent a hundred years inside a single hour, the hour a theater burned, unable to walk out of it, and he had let one lost evening set the shape of his whole long existence. The only difference between his grief and Evelyn Broussard's was what it had made of them. His had turned him into a man who guarded a city and never let himself want a thing. Hers had turned her toward matches. He was not certain he had any right to the distance between those two things. He had only been lucky enough, in the end, to be found. The motive was heartbreaking. The crimes it had grown into were not, and both things were true at once, and he did not know how to hold them together any better than Maya did.

“Find her,” he said quietly. “Before she does another one.”

“I am trying,” Maya said. “She has been a ghost for three years. But I have a name now, and a name is a thread. I will pull it.” She gathered her folder and stood, and paused at the door, and looked back at Delphine curled in the window with the last of the light on her. “You two look well,” she said, almost surprised to hear herself say it. “Whatever else is going wrong in this city. You two look well.” And she went.

That evening he did a thing he had not done in the whole long stretch of the fires. He closed both notebooks, the one full of loss and the one full of the life come back, and he set them in the drawer and shut it, and he went out onto the balcony where Delphine stood with her wine watching the Quarter come alight below. He put his arms around her from behind and she leaned back into him, and neither of them said anything at all. There was nothing that needed saying. For weeks they had lived braced for the next memory, the next fire, the next door swinging open, their whole life arranged around waiting for the past to arrive. Standing on the balcony with the warm weight of her against his chest and the city breathing below, he understood that they had stopped waiting. They were not living around the memories anymore. They were living in the spaces between them, and the spaces had quietly become the whole of it.

She fell asleep before he did, as she often did now, and he lay in the dark and watched her face by the streetlight coming through the shutters, and one last thing came over him, quiet and enormous. Across two hundred years. Across three names and three faces and three whole lives. She had fallen in love, every single time, with the same man. Charlotte in her garden. Delia in her boarding house. Delphine in a dusty antiques shop on Dauphine Street. Different centuries, different dresses, two deaths and one life not yet finished, and always, always the same choice, made freely, made again. And somehow, against every year and every grave between them, she had found him every single time. He did not know what he had done to deserve being found like that, over and over, by the same brave stubborn soul. He only knew he was not going to waste whatever time this life had left in it grieving the ones before.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Maya asked him to come with her to the house, and he went, because a name had become an address overnight and she did not want to walk into it alone.