Page 5 of Truth in the Treme

“For me.”

“I knew you were coming. I knew it the way I know my own name. I kept thinking, he will reach me, he always reaches me, I only have to hold on until he gets here.” Her eyes found his, wet and certain. “And you were coming. I could hear you calling for me through the smoke.”

“What happened then?” he asked, though he already knew. He had run that aisle. He knew exactly what happened then.

“Then I understood I was going to die before you reached me.” Her voice came apart on the last of it. “And I was not afraid of the fire. I was afraid of that. We had a whole life in front of us, and I was losing it in a room full of strangers, and there was nothing you could do but watch.”

She pressed her face into his shoulder and shook, and he wrapped both arms around her and let her. He asked nothing more. He had learned long ago that grief does not want to be questioned while it is moving through a person.

Everything she had described had happened. The theater, the burning curtain, the crowd climbing the seats, his own voice raw in the smoke. It had happened in the order she had laid it out, down to the turn of her body the wrong way through the crush, and it had happened long before she was born. He let the memory rise in him alongside hers, because he could not stop it. The gilt ceiling of the theater and the gaslights and the orchestra's last ragged notes before the screaming started. The first thread of smoke where no smoke should have been. The beautiful room turning, in a matter of minutes, into a killing box of velvet and gold and panic. He had fought through the crowd to reach the building, an immortal thing shouldering through mortals too slow to save themselves, and he had not reached her in time, and it had not been enough. More than a century he had carried that failure folded against his heart, alone, unspeakable, and now she sat weeping it back to him on their own bed, the two of them grieving the same death at last from opposite sides of it, and he did not know whether to call that a horror or a grace.

These were not dreams. He had spent enough nights inside his own to know the seam between them. Dreams blurred and forgave themselves their contradictions. What she carried had edges and weight. It had the grain of a thing that had truly occurred, recovered whole out of a place he had believed sealed past any opening. He held the woman he loved while she wept for a death she had died in another body, and he could not begin to understand how the door had come open. He thought of that door and could not stop thinking of it. For a hundred years it had stayed shut, not by silence — the tether had always been there, Charlotte's work woven into the soul itself — but by the plain mercy of ordinary forgetting. For a hundred years the door had held without his help, and now it had not, and he did not know what had changed or how fast the rest of it would come or whether he would be ready when it arrived.

The truth sat in his mouth. He could give her the name of the theater. He could tell her whose death she had borrowed, and his own part in it, and why a fire across the Tremé had reached inside her and pulled a hundred years loose. He said none of it. She was shaking against him with the grief of one death already, and he would not hand her the others tonight.

“I am so tired,” she whispered.

“Then sleep. I am not going anywhere.”

She cried herself empty against him. Between one breath and the next, sleep took her. He eased her down onto the pillow, drew the sheet over her shoulder, and waited until her face had gone slack with it before he moved. He sat in the dark a while after, listening to the old apartment tick and mutter around them, the cooling iron, the Quarter through the shutters, the river somewhere beyond it moving its enormous patient weight toward the gulf. He had chosen these rooms a lifetime ago for their quiet, for thick brick walls that held the century out. The century had found its way in regardless. It had come up the stairs and into their bed and laid its hand on the woman he loved, and there was not a wall thick enough anywhere in this old drowned city to keep it out.

He walked into the front room and stood at the window. The Quarter had begun its evening below him, lamps coming up gold along the iron, a clarinet finding its key somewhere toward the river. Somewhere off toward the cemeteries a slow horn was walking a body home, because this city buried everyone with music. New Orleans lit its evening face below him, beautiful and rotten and wholly uninterested in his fear. None of it reached him. His reflection hung in the dark glass over the street, and he watched his own face harden until he barely knew it.

He picked up the phone and called Maman Brigitte.

“I need you,” he said.

The line held a pause. She heard whatever lived inside those three words. She had listened to his voice for the better part of a century, and she knew its floor from its breaking point.

“I'm coming,” she said, and the line went dead.

He lowered the phone and stood with it dark in his hand. He had faced courts, curses, and things that wore the night for skin, and he had always, always known the next move. He looked toward the bedroom where she slept off a death that belonged to a woman a hundred years in the ground, and for the first time in longer than he could measure, he had no idea how to keep her safe.

THREE

Maman Brigitte came up the stairs after full dark, slower than she once had, a canvas satchel over one shoulder and the smell of tallow and dried sage riding ahead of her. Her silver braids carried their threads of purple. Her eyes found his face before her foot had cleared the top step, and they read him before he had said a word. She brought the night in with her, the wet-stone smell of the Quarter after dark and an older smell underneath it, graveyard-and-honey, the scent that had hung about her since before the Republic had a name. Maman Brigitte had walked this city when it was still being cut out of the swamp, had laid out its fever dead by the cartload and sealed its secrets into its above-ground tombs, and she carried all of it up the stairs in the set of her shoulders. When she came into a room, the room remembered it stood in New Orleans.

“You look worse than she does,” she said. “Sit down before you fall down, mon cœur.”

“I am fine.”

“You are not. But you will pretend, because that is the only trick you ever learned.” She set the satchel on his desk and crossed to the couch.

Delphine had woken an hour before, drained past speaking, wrapped to the chin in the quilt from the foot of the bed. She straightened when she saw who had come. Maman took her face in both hands and looked at her, full in the eyes, not past her and not through her.

“There you are, chère.” Her thumbs moved once across Delphine's cheekbones. “You gave us a hard afternoon.”

“I am sorry,” Delphine said. “I keep doing that to him.”

“Hush. You do not apologize for what walks up and takes you.” Maman lowered herself onto the cushion beside her and looked back over her shoulder. “Tell me. All of it. From the start.”

Bastien told her. He kept his voice even and his account clean, the smoke and the collapse, the moment Delphine had gone still at the edge of the tape, the search he had run through every sense he owned and the nothing it had returned. Maman did not interrupt him once. She asked her questions only when he finished, and she asked them carefully, turning each answer over before she reached for the next. How long had the stillness held. Whether the eyes had tracked anything. Whether the air around her had carried a chill, a charge, a taste. He answered all of it, and every answer was the same. There had been nothing to feel.

She watched him while he spoke. She had known him long enough to hear the fear under the flat report, and her face told him she had heard it, though she let him keep the pretense for now.

“All right,” Maman said. “Let me look at you proper, chère. You sit still and let me work.”

She opened the satchel and laid her tools out on the low table with practiced care as if she’d done this in sickrooms and back parlors for longer than the building had stood. A dish of gray salt. A stub of black candle she lit from a kitchen match. A small bone worn smooth at the grip. A square of indigo cloth she spread flat and touched at its four corners.