Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
The fourth one came on a Sunday, and the city had stopped pretending to be calm about it.
He knew before he answered the phone. By now the hour alone could tell him, and the cold drop in his gut told him the rest, and he had stopped being surprised by either.
Maya's voice came tight and fast. A shuttered meeting hall off Claiborne, slated for the wrecking ball the month after its redevelopment money fell through, fully involved by the time the first truck arrived.
Four fires in under two weeks. The morning shows had a name for the arsonist already, and the mayor's office had a statement, and none of it was helping the people who lived on the blocks where the houses kept burning.
“I have to go,” he told Delphine. “You are staying here.”
She did not argue. She set down her coffee and looked at him, and she asked the one thing he had no defense against.
“If this were happening to you,” she said, “would you stay home?”
He opened his mouth and closed it. He would not. He would have walked into every fire in the parish on the chance one of them held an answer, and she knew it, and she let the question do its work without saying another word.
“Stay beside Maya,” he said at last. “If it starts, you do not fight it and you do not wander. You find her and you let it take you where she can see you. Promise me that much.”
“I promise.” She was already reaching for her shoes. “Beside Maya. I can do that.”
He drove out toward Claiborne with Delphine quiet beside him and the Sunday streets surrendering to the smoke.
The Quarter thinned into the Tremé, the shotgun rows, the corner stores, the overpass laying its long shadow down the middle of the old avenue.
A second-line had come through earlier and left the street confettied with bottle caps and dropped flowers, and among the living stragglers he marked the other kind, a tall figure keeping pace with no one in the shade of the concrete pillars, there and then not there.
He drove past it toward the black column standing over the rooftops.
The meeting hall had been somebody's pride once, a low brick building with a peaked roof and tall windows, the kind of place a neighborhood christened its children and buried its dead out of.
Now it stood open to the sky, its roof fallen in, its windows blown black.
The crowd behind the tape was bigger and angrier than the last. A woman was crying into a phone.
A man kept asking the officer at the line who was going to be next, and the officer had no answer for him, because no one did.
Maya met him with a face that had stopped sleeping.
“This one was already condemned,” she said.
“Empty, scheduled for demolition, nothing in it worth a dollar. He did not burn it for money or for cover. He burned it to be seen burning it.” She lowered her voice.
“I think he is sending somebody a message. I have thought so since the third one. I just cannot tell you who is supposed to be reading it.”
He stood at the tape a moment and counted the four of them, not by where they had burned but by how.
A vacant double on a quiet street. A corner house loud enough to draw a news van.
A single by the fairgrounds with the cameras already waiting.
Now a condemned hall off the busiest avenue in the district, lit on a Sunday with half the neighborhood home to watch it go.
Each one louder than the one before. Each one staged a little nearer the center of things.
Whoever this was had stopped hiding some fires ago.
He was building toward an audience, and a man who wanted an audience was a man working toward a last act.
He walked the scene while she worked the crowd, and he did the thing that had become a grim ritual.
He opened himself to the ruin and he searched it down to the foundation, and the meeting hall gave him exactly what the three before it had given him.
Wet char. Burned brick. The poured line of an accelerant.
And underneath all of it, where his whole long life had taught him to expect at least a whisper, nothing.
A fourth time. Nothing a fourth time. He had reached the point where the absence frightened him worse than any presence could, because a curse he could have named by now, and this clean, deliberate emptiness named nothing at all.
The smoke found her near the line, and he was watching for it this time, and it caught her anyway.
He felt the change in the air and turned and had his arms around her before she folded.
He was calmer than the first time, the second, the third.
He had learned the shape of it now, the moment her eyes emptied, the slack that came into her shoulders, the count he would have to wait out.
He lowered her to the curb with her head against him and shielded her face and told Maya without words that he had her.
He was calmer, and he was no less terrified, because calm was only what a man wore over terror when he had carried it long enough.
He took her home before she surfaced. He had stopped letting strangers watch it happen.
She came back to him in their own bed, in the gray light through the shutters, and she was smiling before her eyes were fully open.
“It was Christmas,” she whispered. “We had a tree. A little crooked thing, you could close your hand around the trunk, and we could not afford a single ornament for it, so you made them.” She laughed softly, her eyes still closed.
“You carved them. Out of scrap wood, at the kitchen table, after I had gone to bed, and you thought I did not know. Little stars. A bird. A clumsy angel with one wing bigger than the other. I kept them for years.” Her hand found his chest. “And you wrapped the presents so perfectly it was absurd. Corners like a soldier. I teased you for hours. I asked what a man who could not boil water was doing wrapping like a department store, and you went red and would not tell me.”
“What else,” he said, because he could not help himself, because he wanted every grain of it she would give him.
“You were nervous.” She opened her eyes.
“That whole season, underneath the happiness, you were nervous about something, and you kept practicing speeches at the window when you thought I was asleep. Quiet, under your breath, the same few sentences over and over.” She studied his face with a soft, knowing pleasure.
“You were hiding something from me. That entire winter, you were hiding something, and you were terrible at it, and I loved you so much I let you think you were getting away with it.”
He said nothing. He smiled, and let her read into the smile whatever she liked, and held the rest behind his teeth.
She had walked right up to the edge of it and stopped, remembering his nervousness, the speeches at the window, the thing he had carried that winter and never gotten to give.
She did not remember the ring. She remembered only the man who had been afraid to ask, and even that, even the shape of it without the center, undid him.
“You found out eventually,” he said, which was not a lie, only a door he closed before she could see what was behind it.
“Did I?” She smiled and let it go and pulled his arm around her. “Good. I hate a mystery I never get the end of.”
Then her smile faltered at its edges. “It is a strange thing to feel,” she said against his arm.
“I am happy in there, Bastien. I can feel how happy we were, every single time. And now, underneath the happiness, there is an ache, because I already know how the winter ends. I am living a Christmas and grieving it in the same breath, and I do not know how a person is supposed to hold both at once.”
“You do not hold it alone,” he said. “Whatever you carry up out of those rooms, you bring it to me, and we hold it together. That is the only rule there is.”
She turned her face into his shoulder and nodded against him. He tightened his arm around her and did not tell her that he had been holding exactly that, the joy and the ending in one breath, alone, for longer than her whole new life had lasted.
Long after she had slipped back under, he got up and went to the drawer beneath the floorboard he had loosened a long time ago, in a different lifetime, in a different set of rooms, and he took out the small box.
It was worn soft at the corners from a century of being carried.
He opened it in the dark and the little stone caught what light there was and threw it back at him, the same stone he had chosen in a jeweler's on Royal Street in a year she had been alive and someone else, the ring he had bought to give Delia, carried that night toward the question he never got to ask.
He had never given it. He had carried it out of that fire and through every empty year since, through the single face the soul had come to wear since, now sleeping in the next room, waiting for a moment that kept not coming.
He remembered the night he bought it. He remembered the heft of the box in his coat on the long walk toward the theater, the speech rehearsed and ready, the certainty that tomorrow — one more night, then tomorrow — he would finally tell her everything he was and ask her the only question that had ever mattered.
He had carried the box into that fire and out the far side of it with her gone, and he had not opened it for a living soul since.
A hundred years, and the speech was still smooth in him.
He had only run out of tomorrows to say it in.
He turned it over in his fingers and made himself think the thought he had been circling all night.
The memories were climbing through Delia's life in order, and tonight they had reached the last good winter of it, the carved ornaments, the season of the small crooked tree.
There was not much of that life left for her to remember.
A proposal he never made. A theater. A fire.
And then the place where Delia stopped, and beyond it the rooms he had spent a hundred years making sure she would never have to enter.
She was almost to the end of the life he could bear for her to have back.
He did not know what she would find when she ran out of it.
“Not yet,” he whispered to the ring, to the dark, to the woman asleep a wall away who had loved him enough to let him keep his secret one winter long ago. “Not yet.”
He closed the box. For over a century he had been waiting for the right moment to give it to her.
He had waited through wars and floods and the slow turning of the city, through two deaths and three faces and more grief than he had ever found the bottom of.
He could wait a little longer. He slid the box back into the dark under the floor and went to lie down beside her, and he did not sleep, and he did not let go of her once until morning.