CHAPTER THREE
Misadventure
The Orleans Parish coroner's office kept its waiting room too cold, as though the chill that belonged downstairs had come up through the floor and decided to stay.
Maren sat in it in the dead man's jacket she lived in when the cold came on, a big worn thing that had outlasted whoever it first belonged to, the sleeves down past her knuckles, and still could not get warm.
They put Maren in a small side room with chairs the color of old gum and a clock on the wall that had stopped, and they left her there long enough that the panic wore itself out and she went somewhere flat and white behind it.
She had driven across the city in the last of the dark with both hands locked on the wheel and the mark over her heart lying very still, the way it had settled after that one slow turn before dawn.
She had not let herself think the word morgue, not once, the whole way.
Now she was in it, and the word had stopped mattering.
The building went about its work around her.
Phones rang somewhere and were answered in low voices.
A trolley passed in the corridor with the sound of a shopping cart with a bad wheel.
Twice, while she sat, people she would never see were moved through the cold on the far side of her door, other people's worst mornings running along beside her own, and the place took all of it in as it must every day, calmly, with forms.
A young man in scrubs came in and gave her his name, which she lost at once, and asked if there was someone who could be with her.
She said there wasn't. It was not quite true.
There were a handful of people who were theirs, hers and Lark's both, who would have come.
But every one of them would have to be told, and she could not be the one to start the telling, not while there was still a version of the morning in which it hadn't happened.
"You don't have to come in to do this," he said. "We can show you a photograph on a screen now. Most people find that easier."
"I want to see her."
He took her down a corridor that smelled of cold and bleach and, beneath the bleach, the thing the bleach was there for.
The room at the end was bright and clean and very quiet.
There was a table, and a sheet, and the shape the sheet made, and an attendant who waited with his hand on the edge of it until Maren managed to nod, and then folded it back as far as the collarbone, slowly, the way you turn down a cover on a sleeping child.
They had parted her hair on the wrong side.
That was the first thing Maren saw, the smallest wrong thing in the room, and the one that nearly took her legs out from under her.
Someone had combed Lark's hair to the side she never wore it, a stranger's idea of neat, and Lark would have hated it, and Lark would never know.
The rest arrived behind it. The gray that wasn't her color.
The stillness, wrong on a face that had not once in six years been able to hold still.
The water had got into her and done its slow work, and what lay on the table was a careful, swollen, secondhand copy of the face Maren had kissed at the door the night before last.
"Yes," Maren said. Her voice reached her from a long way off. "That's her. That's Lark Aldous."
Somebody wrote it down.
?
She should have left then. They were waiting for her to leave.
But there was a thing she needed to know that she could not have explained to a living soul in that building, and so she heard herself ask, in a steady stranger's voice, whether she could see the rest of her.
Her tattoos. She said, and this part was true, that she had put some of them there herself, and that she wanted to see her ink one more time.
The attendant hesitated, and looked at her, and whatever he saw in her face was past arguing with. He drew the sheet down further, and turned the cold weight of her shoulder with a gentleness that Maren would be grateful for later, when she could feel things again, and showed her.
The swallow was where it had always been, between the shoulder blades.
Small, neat, a little gone in the lines from six years of sun, but Lark's, the first thing Maren had ever given her, unmistakable.
Seeing it nearly broke the flat white thing Maren was standing behind.
She made herself look past it, lower, around to the ribs, over the heart, to the place Vesper had marked three years ago in a shuttered room off Esplanade.
It was gone.
Not cut. Not burned. The figure that had lived there, the small dark shape that was Maren herself wound round with fine lines of water, the twin of the one lying over Maren's own heart at that very moment, had drained clean out of the skin and left nothing but a flat pale scar behind it.
Raised, smooth, colorless. The mark a long-healed burn leaves. The ink was simply not in her anymore.
Maren had been putting color into skin since she was sixteen.
She knew what age did to ink, and what scar tissue did, and what a body did to a tattoo across a whole life, and not one of those things was this.
Ink did not leave. It faded and blurred and spread and went blue-gray with the years, but it stayed where you put it until they burned you or buried you.
It did not pour itself out of a person in a single night and leave the skin blank.
She stood looking at the empty place over Lark's stopped heart, and under her own shirt, over her own heart, the mark she carried lay warm and full and faintly, unbearably content, and Maren understood a thing with the whole of her body that her mind would not put into words.
Whatever had been in Lark was not lost. It had gone somewhere. It had only moved.
She said none of it. There was no one in the world to say it to.
Then she had to walk back up the bleach-cold corridor and leave her there.
Leave Lark on a steel table in a basement full of strangers, her hair parted wrong, and go out into the morning without her.
Maren made it as far as the lobby before her legs quit under her, and she stood gripping the back of a gum-colored chair until they would hold her again.
?
Detective Foley found her there.
He was a big tired man somewhere past fifty, gray coming in at the temples, with a department lanyard and a soft voice and the worn gentleness of a person who had done this exact thing more times than anyone should have to.
He told her his name and that he was sorry for her loss, and he said it like he meant it and like he had said it ten thousand times, and somehow both were true.
He told her the shape of it before she had to ask, which even then she understood was a mercy.
A woman alone in a backwater off the Rigolets, late at night.
No sign of a struggle. No marks the water didn't account for.
A blood alcohol over the line but not by much.
Warm, shallow, slow water, and a soft bottom, and the particular quiet way people went under out there, close to the bank, in water they could have stood up in if they had only kept their feet.
It happened more than people liked to think.
The file would read misadventure. He was sorry.
He knew it was an ugly word to be handed.
"She was afraid of the water," Maren said.
Foley nodded, slow, the patient nod of a man who had heard the grieving say a great many things. "People do things at the end of a long night they'd never do sober," he said. "I've seen it more times than I'd want to tell you."
"Not her. She wouldn't put her feet in a paddling pool. She couldn't make herself wade in past the knee, not anywhere, not ever. It wasn't a thing she could do." Maren heard how it sounded, heard it land as one more refusal to let a person be gone for no reason, and she made herself stop.
He asked her then, carefully, the way they have to ask, whether Lark had seemed low lately.
Whether there was any chance she had gone into the water herself.
Maren said no, and meant it, and it was the one thing in the whole morning she was sure of without any mark on her skin to tell her so.
Lark had not been sad. Lark had been afraid.
There was a difference between the two, and Maren had lived a month right beside it without seeing it, and saw it now, far too late: you do not go quiet and watchful and double-check the locks at night because you want to die.
You do that because you think someone is coming for you.
"Was there a phone?" she asked instead. "She never went anywhere without it. Not to the corner shop. Never."
Something moved behind Foley's tired eyes, there and then gone. "We didn't recover one," he said. "Could be in the water still. We don't always get them back from out there. The mud holds onto things." He let a small silence open. "Why do you ask?"
And there it all was, the whole impossible weight of it, ready behind her teeth: that Lark had been frightened for a month, that there was a notebook full of dead people's names and a drawing of a ring of water, that her tattoo had woken at the hour Lark died and Lark's own mark had emptied itself out of her skin overnight, that a phone with every answer on it had not gone into the water by accident.
Maren stood in the cold lobby holding all of it, and looked at this decent worn-out man who closed three of these a summer, and saw exactly what she would become to him the moment she opened her mouth.
The other kind of widow. The kind they were kind to, and stopped hearing.
"No reason," she said. "She just always had it on her."
There was a form after that, and Foley was sorry about the form.
They needed a next of kin to release her, he explained, watching Maren's face while he said it, and Maren was not it.
Three years of a shared bed and both their names on the sign over the shop and a marriage sworn in blood over a basin of black water, and on the page in his hand she was no one.
The next of kin was a mother out in Metairie that Maren had never once been allowed to meet, and a younger sister, Bryony, and the office would be reaching out to them, and they would be the ones to decide what happened to Lark now.
Maren had stood in a shuttered room at nineteen and promised to wear this girl until she died, and she did not have the standing to so much as bury her.
She thought of the hard pew Lark had run from and the harder God in it, and understood that they would come now and take her back, in death, into the house she had spent her whole life climbing out of, and that there was not one thing Maren could do to stop them.
Foley looked at her a beat longer than the answer asked for. Then he gave her his card, and told her to call if anything came to her, anything at all, and the offer was real and she knew she would never once use it.
?
She went out through the cold lobby toward a morning that had the nerve to be beautiful.
There was a woman waiting near the doors, on one of the gum-colored chairs.
Older, Black, in good church clothes, her hands folded on a handbag in her lap, sitting the patient upright way of someone who had waited in too many rooms like this one and knew how it was done.
Maren would not have marked her at all, except that as she came level the woman's eyes lifted, and did not go to Maren's face.
They went to her chest. To the place over her heart, and held there, and then rose to meet Maren's own with something in them that was not pity and was not nosiness, something closer to sorrow, or to apology.
"I'm sorry for your trouble, baby," the woman said, low.
An ordinary thing to say. Anyone might have said it. But she had said it to the mark first and to Maren second, and as the words left her, the mark under Maren's shirt went cold.
It went cold the way a held breath goes cold, all at once, a coldness with edges to it, spreading out from the center of her until she nearly made a sound.
Maren's hand came up to her chest before she could think.
The woman watched her do it, and her face closed over like a door easing shut, and she looked down at her own hands and would not look up again.
Maren wanted to ask her what she was, and how she knew to look there, and what she had seen.
She didn't get the chance. A name was called from the inner office, not Maren's, and the woman rose and went toward it without a backward glance, and was gone into the cold of the building.
Maren pushed out through the doors into the wet gold of the morning with her hand still flat over her heart. And on the top step, the cold turned over.
It turned to warmth in an instant. Not the full, settled warmth of the night before.
A reaching warmth, a leaning, the whole mark canting inside her chest like a needle swinging to find north, and pulling.
Gently. Without any doubt in it at all. South, toward the river.
Toward the brown water she could not see from here for the rooftops and the overpass, and did not need to see, because the thing in her chest knew the way.
For three years it had been ink. For one night it had been grief.
Now, on the coroner's step in the indecent morning light, it was pointing.
And Maren, who had nothing left, and nowhere she had to be, and no one she could tell, took her hand down from her chest and let the thing turn her, and went the way it wanted, toward the water, because it was the last place left in the world with any of Lark still in it.