Page 9 of Truth in the Treme

Maya met him at the line with soot on her jaw and no patience left for the day. She looked at Delphine, then at him, and chose not to spend a word on it.

“Same hand,” she said. “I have not finished the walk-through, but I do not need to. Multiple origins. A pour along the same kind of line. Set to climb fast and read as an accident once it all ran together.” She wiped her jaw with the back of her wrist and only moved the soot around. “Same accelerant when the lab confirms it, I will put money on it. Same precision. Whoever this is, they are good, and they are not stopping.”

“Two,” Bastien said.

“Two is not coincidence anymore. Two is a pattern, and a pattern has a person on the end of it.” She glanced at the news van and lowered her voice. “Come look while I still have a scene to show you. After today this block belongs to the cameras.”

He looked back once at Delphine. She had stationed herself well behind the barricade with her arms folded, exactly where he had asked, and she lifted her chin at him to say go on. He went.

He worked the shell with Maya at his shoulder, and he worked it twice, once with the eyes she had taught him to use and once with the senses she would never know he had.

The first reading told the same story as the house on North Villere, written in a larger hand. Three cones of deep char where there should have been one. The flat dark tongue of a pour licked along the base of a wall. A fire built by someone who understood exactly how a room surrenders to heat, and wanted this one to surrender fast.

The second reading told him nothing, and the nothing had begun to grind at him. He stood in the ruin and reached, wider than yesterday, deeper, hunting the faintest cinder of the unnatural. A curse would have answered. A spirit would have answered. Even the cold print of a thing long gone would have left him a thread to pull. He pressed himself open until the bones behind his eyes ached, and the burned house gave him heat and ruin and ordinary human cruelty, and not one whisper of his own world. He had spent two hundred years trusting the silence to break for him. It had become a door painted on a wall, an opening that had never been there.

He surfaced from the reaching to find his head already turned toward the barricade, checking. She was there. He had checked four times since he walked in, he realized, and counted none of them until now. He made himself face the wall and could not keep it up. He looked again.

Maya crouched over her diagram a few feet off. She had watched him drift to the line and back without comment, and she chose comment now, in the flat way she said most things.

“She is fine, Durand. The tape is holding. You can do your job.”

“I am doing my job.”

“You are doing half of it and watching your girl with the other half.” She marked a point on her diagram and did not look up. “I am not judging. I am telling you the part of your brain that keeps checking the door is the part I need on the burn. Pick one.”

She was right, and he could not do what she asked, and both of those things sat in him at once.

The witnesses had the same disease as yesterday's, and a worse case of it.

Maya let him sit in on three statements at the edge of the scene. A woman two doors down had heard another woman crying inside the house, clear as a kettle, before the roof took the second floor. A man across the street swore the flames had bent sideways into the wind and held there, against every law he knew, before they straightened. A boy not yet old enough to drive said there had been a figure standing in the upstairs window with the fire all around it, not moving, not burning, just watching the street, and then the window was empty and the glass was gone.

None of it agreed with any of the rest of it. A crying woman, a standing figure, flames that broke the rules of air. Three frightened people and three impossible nights, and not one detail that lined up with its neighbor. Maya weighed them at nothing and moved on, and the sound part of him agreed with her. The other part stood very still, because he had now heard, twice, that a woman had been seen inside a fire she could not have survived, and twice his own searches had told him no woman of his world had ever been near it.

It came for Delphine without warning, and he was watching the wrong direction when it started.

The crews had begun knocking down the last hot pockets in the shell, and a fresh roll of smoke broke loose and rolled low across the intersection, over the barricades, into the crowd. He felt the shift in the air and turned. She had taken half a step toward the car already, one hand lifted against the smoke, and she drew a breath of it before she could cover her mouth.

Her hand stopped in the air. Her eyes went past him to nothing. The phone in her other hand tipped and fell, and she did not reach for it, and her knees were already going when he reached her.

He caught her against his chest. Around them the crowd read it as a woman overcome by smoke, and a few hands reached to help while a voice called for the medics already on scene. He shook his head at all of it. He had her. He knew what this was, and he knew no medic carried a cure for it in a kit. He lifted her clear of the press of bodies and carried her to the car, and he did not let the firefighters near her, and he drove her home through streets he barely saw.

The light had gone long and gold in the windows by the time she came back to him.

She did not wake crying this time. She surfaced slowly, her face moving between grief and wonder, and when her eyes opened they were wet and shining and, impossibly, glad. She found his face above her and made a sound that was half a sob and half a laugh.

“I remembered us living,” she whispered. “Not dying. This time I remembered us living.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and gathered her up against him. “Tell me.”

“We walked through Jackson Square.” The words came in a rush now, eager, tumbling. “Your hand around mine, the whole way across, in front of everyone, and I remember thinking how bold it was and not caring. You had brought me flowers that morning. Not for any reason. You said they had made you think of me, and you were embarrassed to have said it, and I kept them until they fell apart.” She pressed her hand flat to his chest. “There was a bench. We sat on a bench and listened to a man play, and you put your coat around my shoulders, and I was so happy I could not look at you because I thought you would see all of it on my face.”

He held still and let her fill the room with it. He had walked her across that square. He had carried those flowers up two flights with his ears burning, and he had draped that coat over those shoulders, and he had watched her refuse to meet his eyes on that bench and known exactly why. Every picture she handed him was one he had carried alone in the dark for longer than the city had been American. To hear her say them back to him, in her own voice, glad, was a joy so sharp it took the breath out of him and left an ache where the breath had been. He had lived that afternoon in Jackson Square a hundred and more years ago, and he had lived it alone every day since, along with all the rest of it, a hoard of bright small moments no one else in the turning world remembered or could. That was the particular loneliness of outliving everyone. Not the grief of the deaths, which a man could learn to bear. The slow erasure of the joys, every shared afternoon becoming, one funeral at a time, a thing only he still carried. And now she was giving them back. One by one, out of the smoke, she was handing him the pieces of a happiness he had believed lost past all recovering, and he sat on the edge of their bed and received them, a man given water in a desert he had long stopped believing would ever end.

“We danced,” she said. “One night, in a kitchen, after the supper we ruined. We could not cook. Neither of us could cook. We burned a chicken so badly we ate bread and butter standing up, and then you turned me around the floor anyway with no music at all, and I thought, this. I thought, I will take a hundred years of this.” Her face crumpled and cleared. “We were going to have a life, Bastien. I can feel how much we wanted it.”

“You did,” he said, because he could not say we, not yet, not without the rest of it pouring out behind it. “You wanted it more than anything.”

She studied him through the wet of her eyes, and for a moment he thought the question was finally coming, the one he could not answer in this room tonight. It did not come. The remembering had emptied her again, and she sank back into the pillow with his name on her lips and slid down into sleep between one word and the next.