Page 33 of Truth in the Treme

She looked at the can in her hand as though she had forgotten she was holding it. When she spoke again the words came out of somewhere very tired and very deep, and she told him the whole of it, standing in the doorway with the lighter loose in her fingers. How it had started with wanting only to be seen. How that had curdled into wanting them held to account. How, somewhere in the years, she had stopped being able to tell the two apart, until every anniversary tore the wound open fresh and every unanswered letter became one more reason to strike a match, and she had told herself, past all reason, that if enough people were made to lose everything she had lost, then someone, finally, would understand what had been done to her. And then she began to cry, standing there, not the sharp crying of a person caught but the slow exhausted weeping of a person who has been holding a thing upright for twenty-three years and has simply, at last, run out of the strength to hold it any longer.

She told him one more thing, too, without his asking, the only thing she had left that was not a grievance. That Thomas used to leave for a shift and always, always kiss the top of her head before she was fully awake, so that half the mornings of their marriage she had felt loved before she had even opened her eyes. That she had gone twenty-three years now waking up to nothing at all. That was the whole of what the city had really taken from her, she said, underneath all the paper. Not the house and not the money. The kiss on the top of her head in the dark before the alarm. Bastien stood in the doorway and thought of a green door and a woman who used to watch a window for his step, and did not trust himself to speak.

“I'm so tired,” she said.

“I know,” Bastien said. “Give me the lighter, Evelyn. You do not have to hold any of it up anymore.”

The silence stretched out between them, long and fragile, the river moving somewhere behind the building and the whole ringed dark holding its breath. Then Evelyn Broussard reached out and put the lighter into his open hand, and closed his fingers over it with both of hers, gently, handing it to a man she had decided to trust to carry it, and it was over. There was no chase and no struggle and no last wall of flame. There was only a tired woman in a doorway and a man holding her lighter, and then Maya was there, moving in quiet and sure, saying the words of the arrest almost kindly, and it was done.

They led her to the car unhurried, and at the door of it she stopped and looked back across the lot and found Bastien where he stood, and she said one last thing to him, meaning it for a kindness, not knowing she had reached straight into the oldest room in him and put her hand on the very thing that lived there.

“Don't spend your whole life remembering one terrible day,” Evelyn Broussard said. “You'll lose every good one that comes after it.” Then she got into the car, and they took her away.

The sun came up while he stood outside the station with Maya, the two of them not talking, watching the light come pink and ordinary over a city that had ten burned buildings in it and would, in time, forget most of them.

“That could have gone a hundred other ways,” Maya said finally. “Every one of them worse. If you had been wrong about her, if she had lit it with you standing there—” She shook her head. “I do not know what you said to her. I do not think I want to. But thank you. She would be dead right now, or somebody would, and instead she is alive and my city stops burning. So. Thank you, Durand.”

He watched the sun clear the rooftops. “Grief makes people dangerous,” he said, “when they have carried it long enough to believe no one sees it. That is the whole of what happened to her. She spent twenty-three years certain that not one living soul saw what she was carrying. A person can do almost anything, once they are sure of that.”

“You saw hers,” Maya said.

He did not answer. He thought of the lie he had told her on the first afternoon, the easy fiction of a medical condition, and of how far the truth was from anything she would have believed then, or perhaps even now. She had given him the whole of a case and asked nothing in return but the parts he could give her, and he found he was grateful for that, and a little ashamed of it, in equal measure. He was thinking, standing in the new sun, about a hundred years of his own grief carried folded and unfolded and worn soft with handling, seen by no one, set down for no one, and about how narrow the gap really was between the man he had become and the woman they had just driven away. He had been found in time. That was the only difference. He had been found, and she had not, and it had never once been virtue that separated them. It had only ever been luck, and a green door, and a soul that kept coming back.

He carried her last words home with him through the gray morning, the ones she had meant for a kindness. Don't spend your whole life remembering one terrible day. He had spent a hundred of them doing precisely that. He did not intend to spend the hundred that might still be coming the same way.

He went home. Delphine was asleep on the couch with a book open on her chest and the lamp still burning. She had said she would wait up for him, and she had. He stood in the doorway and looked at her for a moment, the whole ordinary miracle of her, and then he crossed the room and lifted the book from her chest and marked her place and set it aside, and drew the blanket off the back of the couch and covered her with it. She stirred, surfacing just far enough to find him with her eyes.

“You came home,” she murmured.

“I promised I would,” he said, and kissed her forehead, and she was asleep again before he straightened. He sat down on the floor beside the couch with his back against it and her hand loose in his hair, and for the first time since the first fire the apartment held nothing in it at all but peace. Out in the city an arsonist was in a cell and would trouble no one again, and the smoke was finished, and the woman he loved was sleeping three inches from him with her fingers in his hair. He looked toward the dark office where his two notebooks waited on the desk. For weeks he had been chasing two mysteries through this city. One of them, this morning, was finally and completely over. He thought, briefly, of the man in Gentilly with his crossword and his box fan, who had never once known how close the city had come to making him the answer. He hoped the man had slept well. The other, he understood, sitting on the floor in the gray dawn with her hand in his hair, was only just about to begin.

TWENTY-NINE

They had a morning, first. He would remember that, after, that the world had given them one quiet ordinary morning before it gave them everything else.

The fires were over. There was no case to drive to and no phone that would ring and nowhere either of them had to be, and he stood at the stove in the early light making breakfast for the two of them, badly, while she sat at the table with her feet tucked up and read him bits of the paper she found ridiculous. He had grown almost competent at eggs. He had never once mastered the toaster. He was watching her instead of the bread, the loose fall of her hair and the crease of concentration between her brows, and by the time the smell reached him the toast had gone to black.

She looked up at the burned-bread smell and started to laugh. “You did that on purpose,” she said. “Two hundred years old and you cannot work a toaster. Admit it.”

“It was entirely intentional,” he said, pulling the ruined slices out. “Charring is a technique. It is very sophisticated. You would not understand.”

“I would not,” she agreed, delighted. “Give me the burned one. I like you humble.”

And it was, for that one more moment, the most ordinary morning in the world, the kind of morning they had been building toward for the whole of this terrible season, two people and a small kitchen and the smell of breakfast slightly ruined. He carried the plates toward the table. The thin gray smoke off the blackened toast drifted up between them in the early sun.

She breathed it in, and she went still.

He knew this stillness. He had learned every shade of it over the months, and he knew before he had set the plates down that this was not one of the small ones. This was the deep one, the one that took her all the way under, and it had come on the smell of smoke on the one morning he had let himself believe the smoke was finished with them. He was around the table and on his knees beside her chair before her cup had finished tipping from her hand. He caught her as she came out of the chair and lowered her gently to the kitchen floor and gathered her against him, and he did the only thing there was ever anything to do. He held her hand, and he waited, and this time some cold certainty told him exactly where she had gone.

She had gone back through the doors.

He could not see it, but he did not need to see it. He had lived it. As her face moved he could read her passage through it as though it were written there, and every station of it was one he had walked himself a hundred years ago and every night since in his dreams. The lights of the theater and the music and the first wrong note under it, the first thread of smoke where no smoke should be. The confusion rippling through the rows. The moment it became a scream. He watched her face crumple as the memory gave her the crowd surging for the doors, the crush of bodies, the chaos between them, and he knew the instant the remembered Bastien reached her because her own hand tightened convulsively around his living one, exactly as it had tightened a century ago when he had fought his way back to her through the smoke and taken hold and sworn not to let go.

He knelt on the kitchen floor and held that hand and let her remember it, all of it, because there was nothing else he could do and because she was not alone in it this time. He had refused to let go then. He refused to let go now. The beam coming down in a roar of sparks. The heat. Himself throwing his own body over hers, shielding her with what he was still, the building letting go around them. And then the dark taking her while he screamed her name into the fire.

He thought that was the end of it. It had always been the end of it, in every telling, hers and his both. The dark. The place where Delia stopped. He braced for her to surface here, spent and weeping. She always did.

She did not surface. The memory kept going.