Page 34 of Truth in the Treme

He felt it keep going. He saw it on her, the dark on her face giving way to a thing he had no way to read, her brow smoothing, the grief loosening its hold, and a light beginning behind her closed eyes that had nothing of the fire in it, nothing of the red of the burning, a light that was clean and wholly other. Her lips parted, and the terror went out of her, and what came into its place was a peace so vast it frightened him more than any of the burning had, because he knew what lay on the far side of that dark, and he had spent his whole existence certain she would never have to see it.

The dark had given way to light. He knew, watching her, that she was standing in it now. Not another street. Not another life. Light, pure and without end and utterly at peace, and a voice moving in it that was not his voice, that had never been his voice, an old and enormous tenderness calling her by a name that was not any of the three he had loved her by, calling her home. He watched her turn her face toward that voice. He watched her see the light stretch away in front of her forever, and the peace of it sink all the way through her, and he knelt on his kitchen floor and could not breathe, because he had been left behind in that fire and had never once been permitted to follow her into that, and here she was, walking back into it in front of him a hundred years too late for him to stop her.

And then it changed again. He felt the exact moment it changed, because her whole body went taut against him, and the peace on her face cracked open into a thing older than peace, older than Delia, older than Charlotte, older than the city or the country or the language she thought in. Her hand came up off the floor, reaching, reaching for a thing above her that was not there in the kitchen and was there in the memory, and he understood with a horror and a wonder that stopped his heart that she had gone all the way back. Past the light. Behind it. To the beginning. To him.

She was seeing him. Not the man kneeling on the kitchen floor in a burned-toast morning. Him. What he had been before all of it, before the first face and the first life, before the fall of the first city. He could see her seeing it, the impossible radiance of it, the thing he had been that had no business ever being looked upon by mortal eyes, and he watched her reach for it with the same certainty she had always reached for him, in the garden, in the boarding house, in the antiques shop, the same soul reaching for the same self across the same unbridgeable distance. He watched her be told no. He saw it cross her face, the ancient refusal, the law of it, the vast and sorrowing voice explaining that what she was and what he was could never, must never, belong to one another. And he watched her do the thing she had done every single time since. He watched her refuse to let go.

And then he watched her remember him choosing. He could not stop the tears now and did not try. He knelt on the floor and watched the woman he loved remember the single act that had made everything that followed, watched it break over her face in the order it had happened, the reaching and the refusal and then his choice, his own choice, made in the full knowledge of everything it would cost, to take her over all of it. He watched her see the light break. He watched her see him fall. Down and down and out of the endless light and into time and death and a hundred years of grief and a green door and a burning theater and a dusty shop on Dauphine Street, falling the whole long way toward her, choosing her at the top of it and choosing her at the bottom and choosing her every terrible year in between.

Delphine opened her eyes.

The tears ran down her face without a sound. She did not gasp or cry out or come apart. She only looked up at him from the kitchen floor with her whole soul in her eyes, every life of it at once, and she lifted one hand, slowly, and laid it against his cheek, and she whispered the truth he had crossed out of eternity to keep from her.

“You fell,” she said. “For me.”

He could not move. He could not speak. Every wall he had built in two hundred years, every careful stone he had set between himself and this exact moment, every guard he had mounted over the one truth that was the whole of him, all of it came down at once and left him with nothing, kneeling on a kitchen floor in front of the only soul in all of creation who had ever been worth the ruin of him. He closed his eyes against the tears and could not stop them. A hundred years he had wept for her alone in the dark where no one could see. He wept now in the light, in front of her, at last, because she knew. She knew all of it, the whole impossible size of what he was and what he had given up and why, and she had not turned from it. She had put her hand on his face.

She drew him down. She, who he had spent three lifetimes and two deaths trying to protect, gathered his head against her heart there on the kitchen floor and held him while he came apart, her hand moving in his hair, her voice low and steady and unafraid above him, telling him it was all right, telling him she had him, telling him he was not alone with it anymore and never would be again. For the first time since he had chosen her over Heaven itself, someone was holding the one who had done the falling. He let her. He let himself be held. He wept a century of grief into the front of her shirt on the floor of their kitchen while the burned toast cooled on the table above them, and she did not once let go.

Long after the memory had faded, long after the last of it had left her and only the two of them remained, neither of them moved. The kitchen was silent. The plates sat untouched on the table and the toast had gone cold and hard on them. Outside the shutters New Orleans carried on exactly as it had the moment before, the delivery trucks and the first tourists and the saxophone finding its key down the block, a whole city that did not know and would never know that anything at all had happened. Inside, on the floor of a small kitchen on Dauphine Street, a fallen angel and the soul he had fallen for held on to one another and did not speak, because there was nothing left in all the world that needed saying. She knew. At long last, after everything, she knew. And everything had changed.

THIRTY

Neither of them moved for a long time. He knelt on the kitchen floor with his head against her heart and her hand in his hair and let the last of a century's weeping run itself out, and she held him through the whole of it and did not once loosen her arms. When he finally lifted his head, the light had moved across the floor and the toast had long gone cold on the table above them, and she was still there, still cupping his wet face in both her hands, looking at him with the thing he had never in all his existence expected to see turned on him by this soul. Recognition. She was not looking at a man she loved and did not understand. She was looking at all of him, the whole impossible truth of him, and she had not turned away.

That was what undid him past the grief and out the other side. Not that she remembered Charlotte. Not that she remembered Delia. That she remembered him, the real him, the thing under the two centuries of careful disguise, and that for the first time since he had chosen a fall over a life without her, he was not the only living soul who carried that memory. He had been alone inside the truth of himself for longer than nations had stood. He was not alone in it anymore. She knew, and she was still holding his face.

“Tell me,” she said. Quietly. Not a demand. An open hand. “All of it. I have pieces, Bastien. I have feelings and light and a garden and you falling and none of it fits together. Tell me the rest. I want to know the whole of what you are.”

And for the first time in his long existence, faced with the chance to protect her from a truth, he found he had no wish to. He had spent two hundred years keeping the size of himself from everyone, from her most of all, certain it would frighten her, certain it would cost him her. He was done with that now. He did not tell her the truth to unburden himself and he did not tell it to explain the cosmos. He told her because she had asked, and because she had earned every word of it a hundred times over, and because he wanted, at last, to be fully known by the one person he had ever wanted to be known by.

He told her, and he kept it simple, because the true part of it had never been complicated. He told her that he had loved her before she had this face or this name, had loved the soul in whatever form it wore, had chosen it over everything else he had ever been or had. He told her what he had been, and what it had cost to be it, and how little the cost had ever weighed against her. He did not describe Heaven to her. There were no words for it that would not have made it smaller, and it was not the point. The point was the choosing. He told her that leaving it had never once been the sacrifice everyone assumed, that he had not been cast down and left grieving the light, whatever the old stories said. He had walked away from it with his eyes open, gladly, for her, and the only thing he had ever grieved was not the light he left behind but the woman he kept losing on this side of it.

“I have buried you twice,” he said. “Charlotte, and then Delia. I stood in the ash of two lives and swore each time I would never survive it, and each time I did, because the alternative was to give up waiting for you to come back, and I would not do that. I would rather lose you a thousand times than never have found you once.” He held her eyes. “So if you are asking me whether I regret it. Whether I would take it back, unfall, go home, if I could. Delphine. I would make the same choice again this instant, knowing every year of grief it would cost me, without a breath of hesitation, and I would count myself the luckiest thing that Heaven ever made for the privilege. You were never what I gave up eternity for. You were what eternity was for.”

She was crying by the time he finished, but not, he understood, for the reason he expected. She was not weeping for the Heaven he had left or the deaths he had endured. She reached up and wiped her own eyes and then his, and when she spoke her voice was fierce underneath the tears.

“You carried all of that alone,” she said. “Two hundred years. Every bit of it, by yourself, and you let everyone believe you were just a quiet man with a sad past, and the whole time you were holding up the sky.” She took his face in her hands again. “You should never have had to remember for both of us, Bastien. That was never yours to carry alone. Never.”

And then he told her the last true thing, the one he had never said aloud to a living soul, because she had earned that too. “I was afraid,” he said, low. “That is the truth of why I never stopped. I was afraid that if I ever set it down, if I ever let myself forget even a little, I would lose you. That the remembering was the only thread still tying you to me across all that death, and if it ever went slack, you would be gone for good. So I held it. Every detail. For a hundred years. Because I was terrified that forgetting you was the same as losing you.”

“You won't lose me,” she said simply. She took his hand and pressed it flat over her own heart, where he could feel it beating, warm and present and here. “You don't have to hold the thread alone anymore. You don't have to hold it at all. I'm here now. I remember too. Whatever comes, we carry it together, and if I ever forget again, then you remind me, and I will believe you, because I have believed you across two hundred years and three lifetimes and I am not about to stop.”

He rose, then, and drew her up off the floor with him, and for a moment he only held her, in the ordinary afternoon light of their kitchen, with everything finally said. Then he crossed the room to the loose board he had pried up in another century, and he took out the small worn box he had carried through every year of his exile, and he brought it back and set it, closed, on the low table between them. He did not open it. He did not say anything about it. He only set it down where she could see it, and watched her look at it, and watched her look back up at him, and neither of them said a word, because the moment for it was not quite here yet. But it was close. It was very close now, and they both knew it, and the knowing sat warm and unhurried in the room with them, a promise waiting for its hour.

She reached for him first. He knew it was her because she had always been the one to close the last distance, in every life, in every room, the soul brave enough to reach across the unbridgeable and find him there. She rose from the chair and came to him and took his face in her hands, and he stood in the afternoon light of their kitchen with his whole truth finally told and let her look at him. Not the man she had loved across three centuries. Not the grief-worn guardian with his locked rooms and his careful distances. Him. All the way down. The thing he had been before the fall and the thing the fall had made him and everything in between, all of it in his face, and she was looking at it the way she had looked at the light in that last memory, with certainty and without fear and with the full intention of staying.

"There you are," she said, very quietly. Not the way she had said it in the shop, teasing him into the room. The way a person says it when they have found a thing they had stopped believing they would ever find.

He pulled her in.

Not carefully. Not with the old restraint, the arm's-length tenderness of a man who had spent two centuries bracing for the loss of whatever he touched. He brought her in close and kissed her with everything the last hour had stripped bare in him, and she met it without surprise, without hesitation, because she had always known it was there. She had been waiting a very long time for him to stop protecting her from it.

He walked her back from the table. She came with him willingly, her hands moving up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair, learning by touch the difference between the man who held something in reserve and the man who did not. He had kept a room locked in himself for two hundred years. She had walked into it that morning on the kitchen floor and found him there and stayed. The door was gone. There was nothing left to keep from her.

The bedroom held the last gold of the afternoon, the shutters throwing long amber bars across the floor. He turned her in that light and looked at her face, this face, Delphine's face, the one she had grown into in this century that was wholly hers and no one else's, and something held tight in him since before the French had named this city went slack all at once. He had spent so long mourning the faces that had gone. He had looked at this one across a breakfast table every morning for months and still, underneath it all, been waiting for it to be taken. He was done waiting. He intended to look at this face until there was no looking left in him.

She reached for the buttons of his shirt and he let her, standing still under her hands, which was its own kind of surrender he had been practicing since the shop. She worked slowly, unhurried, and he watched her face while she worked and she watched him watching and neither of them looked away. When she pushed the shirt off his shoulders she spread her palms flat against his chest, learning the warmth of him, the weight and the reality of what he was under the skin, and her hands went still for a moment as though she were reading something through them.