Page 7 of Truth in the Treme

“And Bastien.” Her hand pressed once and dropped. “I am not going to stand here and tell you she is safe. I do not lie to you, and I will not start with that. I do not know if she is safe. I only know I could not find the thing that would tell me she is not.”

She went down the stairs without hurry, and the street took the sound of her and closed over it. He listened to her go, the slow certain tread of a woman who had outlived everyone who ever frightened her, down into a Quarter that was hers far more than it would ever be his. She had buried this city's dead and doctored its living for longer than the oldest tomb in Saint Louis Number One had held a name. If Maman Brigitte could not find the thing that had reached into Delphine, then it was not hiding. It simply was not there to be found, and that emptiness followed him back across the room colder than any curse could have.

Bastien stood alone in the front room. He looked at the bedroom door, behind which the woman he loved slept off a death she had borrowed from a grave he had dug. Then he looked at the desk, where Maya's preliminary report lay under his keys, the thin gray folder he had carried home and not opened.

For all his long life he had read every mystery the same way, certain the answer wore a face from his own world. He crossed the room and picked up the folder. He opened it, and for the first time he began to read not as the investigator who looked for magic, but as a man who would take the truth from wherever it agreed to come.

FOUR

He had not slept. He had spent the dark hours against the headboard with her tucked under his arm, counting the small movements of her face, waiting for the stillness to come back and take her again. It had not. Morning arrived gray and thick at the shutters, and she woke on her own, which felt like a gift he had not earned. The apartment had held its breath with him through the dark hours. He had sat propped against the headboard and watched the ceiling go from black to the drowned gray of a New Orleans dawn, listening to the city die down and start up again beyond the shutters, the last drunks and the first delivery trucks, a lone trumpet somewhere practicing grief. He had kept a thousand such vigils in rented rooms all across this city over two centuries, over the sick and the hunted and the doomed. He had never once kept one where the thing he stood guard against was already inside the person he loved, and there was nothing at the door for him to kill.

“You watched me all night.” She said it into his chest, not a question.

“I did.”

“You cannot do that every night.”

“I can do precisely that.”

She pushed up onto an elbow and looked at him. The exhaustion sat on her plainly, in the bruised skin under her eyes and the slowness of her movements, but her gaze had cleared overnight. The woman who had come apart in his arms had put herself back together while he was not watching.

He made the coffee and they took it at the kitchen table. He asked his questions slowly and left them open, careful never to put the answer in her mouth before she reached it herself.

“You said you heard me,” he said. “In the fire. Tell me that part again.”

“I heard you before I saw anything else. Your voice came through the smoke ahead of you.” She turned the cup in her hands. “I never saw your face. That is the strange part. The whole memory is sound and heat and smoke, and you are only a voice in it, getting closer and never arriving. And I was not afraid of burning. I keep telling you that because it keeps surprising me. The only grief in the whole thing was knowing we had planned a life and I was about to lose the front half of it.”

Every word matched. He had called her name through that smoke until his throat tore. He had never reached her face in time for her to see it. She was handing him the inside of the worst hour he owned, detail for detail, and she had no idea she was doing it.

“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Am I losing my mind?”

“No.”

“It does not feel like a dream. A dream comes apart when you wake. This does not come apart. It is still here this morning, every edge of it, as clear as you sitting there.”

He set his cup down and took both her hands across the table. “You are not losing your mind. What you saw was real. I cannot give you the rest of it yet, but I will not let you doubt that much. It was real.”

She watched his face for a long moment. “You say that like a man who knows.”

“I know what real looks like,” he said. “This is real.”

It was the truth and a coward's portion of it, and the larger truth pressed hot against the back of his teeth. He could have told her everything in that kitchen, with the coffee going cold between them. He could have given her the name of the theater and the year and his own part in that night. He held it back, because she had survived one death so far and he would not bury her under the rest of them over breakfast. She squeezed his hands, grateful for the half he had given her, and that was the worst part of all. He had gotten very good, across the long centuries, at carrying things by himself. It was nearly the only thing he had ever learned to do with grief. But there was a cruelty in sitting across a breakfast table from the one soul in all the world who had lived that grief beside him, who was even now describing it back to him detail by detail, and choosing, with every gentle question, to leave her alone inside it. He told himself it was mercy. He was no longer certain the mercy was hers, and not simply the old cowardice of a man who had never once learned how to let anyone help him carry anything.

He meant to spend the day at her side. She would not allow it.

“Go look at your fire,” she said, when he had hovered through a second cup and invented a third reason to stay. “You want the answer more than I do, and I will not have you pacing this apartment all day with that face on. I am going to read on the couch and drink your terrible coffee and be exactly here when you get back.”

“If it happens again⁠—”

“Then I call Maman, and then I call you, and you break every speed limit in the parish getting home. I know.” She rose onto her toes. She set his collar straight with both hands, smoothing it flat against his chest, and kissed him once at the corner of his mouth. “Go. The sooner you understand it, the sooner you stop looking at me like a bomb on a timer.”

He went, because she had asked him to, and because she had read him correctly. He did want the answer. He wanted it with an appetite that frightened him a little, since wanting things had a long history of costing him.

He drove back out to North Villere alone, and the house looked smaller in daylight and worse. With the trucks gone and the crowd thinned to a few neighbors on their porches, the ruin had nothing to hide behind. By daylight the burned double was uglier and sadder both, a wound gone dull and honest in the sober morning. The soot had dried to a flat black crust. The damp had raised the smell again, char and wet ash and the sweet rot of a hundred-year-old house opened suddenly to the air. A few of the old women kept their vigil on the galleries opposite, women who had watched this block bury and rebuild itself a dozen times, and they watched Bastien duck the tape with the flat unsurprised eyes of people who had long ago stopped expecting the daylight to explain the night. Maya waited for him at the tape with a hard hat under one arm and a tablet in her hand, and she handed him the hat without comment before she led him in.

“You ruled out your half yesterday,” she said. “Today I show you mine. Watch where you step. The floor is a suggestion in places.”

She walked him through it step by step. She crouched at a black cone of charring low on an interior wall and traced its edges with one gloved finger.