Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
She planned the evening herself, start to finish, and told him only that he was not allowed to bring the case with him.
No notebook. No fire updates. No talk of memories, hers or Delia's.
Just dinner, and a walk by the river, and the two of them, and a whole evening spent as though they were nothing more complicated than a man and a woman in love with a night off.
He agreed to every condition. He found, a little to his own surprise, that he wanted it badly, more than he would have guessed.
Dinner was small and unhurried at a place off Frenchmen with the door open to the street and a trio working through standards in the corner.
They talked about nothing that mattered and everything that did.
A book she was trying to make him read. Whether the trumpet player was better than the one from last time.
A city with cold winters he kept threatening to take her to.
And somewhere in the middle of it, without deciding to, he heard himself say that next summer, when the heat came again, they should get out of it, drive somewhere green, somewhere with mountains, and he stopped with the fork halfway to his mouth because he had just planned a season he had no business assuming he would get.
Delphine caught it. Of course she caught it.
She said nothing, but a slow warmth came into her face, and she reached across the little table and laid her hand over his, and he understood that she had heard exactly what he had heard.
A man who had spent two hundred years refusing to imagine any future at all, because every future he had ever let himself want had been taken, had just casually planned next summer out loud, and meant it.
He did not take it back. He turned his hand under hers and let the plan stand between them on the table, next summer and the mountains and the assumption of time, and it was the bravest thing he had done in a century.
They lingered over the last of the wine until the trio packed up their horns, in no hurry to be anywhere, and when they finally rose she took his arm on the sidewalk without thinking, and he covered her hand with his, and they went out into the warm night with the whole slow evening still ahead of them.
They walked to the river after, down through the Quarter to the levee, and up onto the Moonwalk where the boards ran along the water.
The night had come on soft and clear, the far bank glittering, the ferry crossing in a slow chain of lights, a tug pushing its barges upstream against the black current.
The city hummed at their backs and the river breathed its old cold breath in their faces, and for once he was not marking the supernatural traffic of it, though it was there, a drowned man walking his stretch of the batture, a river-spirit older than the city turning over in the shallows.
A brass note drifted down off the levee from some second-line winding its long way home.
The water smelled of mud and rain and a hundred years of the city's washed-off secrets.
He let it all be. He kept her hand and walked.
“You are smiling more,” she said, halfway along the boards.
She said it lightly, watching the ferry, though it was not a light thing to her.
“I noticed it tonight. At dinner. You have been smiling more for days now, and tonight you did it without catching yourself and putting it away. I have been wanting to tell you. It suits you. I had begun to think the man I fell for only came out for emergencies.”
He had not known he was doing it. That was the truth of it.
He turned it over and found she was right, that somewhere in the last week the weight he had worn for the whole of his long life had eased without his noticing, and that she had noticed for him, because she watched him now with the same care he had once spent only on her.
She stopped at the rail where the lights lay broken and shimmering across the moving water, and she went quiet, looking down at them, and when she spoke again her voice had gone soft and far.
“You always said rivers remembered everything,” she said.
“That the water carried it all downstream and never let go of any of it. Every flood, every drowning, every secret anyone ever gave it. You said the Mississippi was the oldest memory in the whole country and it forgave nothing and forgot nothing.” She looked up at him, unafraid, only wondering.
“You told me that on a summer evening, standing just about here.”
He stopped breathing for a moment. He had said exactly that, on just such a summer night, to a woman with Delia's face, a hundred years and more ago, leaning on a rail over this same eternal water.
He had not thought of the words once in all the century since.
She had reached into him and pulled them back up out of the river-dark where they had sunk, and handed them to him whole, and he stood on the boards with the lights moving on the water and could only repeat them back to her, quietly, because they were true, and because she had kept them for him when he could not.
“Rivers remember everything,” he said. Neither of them said anything more. They did not need to. They stood at the rail with the old water going by beneath them, and let it remember for them both.
He reached for her first that night, at home, in the dark, and the reaching had no hesitation left in it at all.
That was the thing that had changed, and he knew she knew it the moment his hand found her.
For two centuries he had waited to be wanted before he let himself want.
He had answered her, always, but he had rarely once begun.
Tonight he began. He drew her to him in the dark of their room and kissed her without apology, without the old grief standing guard at the edge of it, a man who had finally let himself believe he got to keep her, and he felt the surprise and then the gladness go through her at the change in him.
“There he is,” she whispered against his mouth, and he heard the joy in it, and he answered her with his whole body and no part of himself held in reserve.
He took his time. He had a hundred years of restraint to spend and he spent it, learning her again slowly, saying her name into the dark, letting her feel exactly how much he wanted her and how little of it he was hiding anymore.
When she came apart it was his name she said, and when he followed she was holding his face in both her hands, watching him, and he let her watch, let her see all the way into him, because there was nothing left in there now that he needed to keep from her.
Afterward she lay against his chest in the tangle of the sheets and traced idle shapes on his skin, and neither of them hurried to speak, and the city murmured on beneath the shutters, and it was, he thought, the most present he had been inside his own life in two hundred years.
Later, in the dark, she asked him sleepy questions about the mountains he had promised her at dinner, whether there would be snow, whether he could possibly ski, laughing at the picture of him on skis, and he answered every one of them with a straight face, inventing a whole trip they had never planned, a cabin and a fire and a week with no city in it.
She fell asleep against his chest in the middle of it, the plan half-built between them, and he lay there and finished building it in his head after she was gone under, the cabin and the snow and the long string of years of trips that would come after this first one, and he did not once flinch from the assumption of all that time.
He had started, somewhere tonight, to believe in it.
The phone rang against that peace near midnight, and he almost let it go, and answered it only because it was Maya and Maya did not call at midnight for nothing.
“One more thread,” she said, tired but unwilling to stop pulling it.
“I went back further, years back, before any of the fires, and I found a night they all have in common.
A City Council meeting. Every one of the victims was in that room, or sent someone, the night the commissioner's people pushed through the decisions that ruined the lot of them. It was a big ugly public meeting, people shouting, cameras, the works. I have been going down the attendance like a census.” Paper turned on her end.
“Most of them are my victims already. But there are names in that room that are not on my list yet. People who stood up that night and lost just as much and have not burned. One of them—” a pause, incurious, filing it.
“One of them was a firefighter's widow. Lost her husband in the line, and then lost the death benefit to some ruling out of that same office, stood up in that meeting and read the city the riot act about it and got nothing for her trouble. Anyway. Another name for the pile. I will run them all down tomorrow.”
He told her it was good work and to sleep, and she laughed at the idea and hung up, and he set the phone down and did not think about the firefighter's widow again that night, because she was one name among two dozen and Maya had said it without weight and there was a warm woman asleep against his side.
The name went into the pile with the others and he let it.
He had his own wall to work, and it did not have a commissioner or a council meeting anywhere on it.
But before he slept he did one more thing.
He took up the notebook that held their life, and he turned past all the recovered pages, past Delia and the green door and the last good night, to a clean sheet near where the writing stopped.
And there, in the careful hand he saved for what mattered, he wrote a line that had nothing to do with a hundred years ago.
Today we talked about next summer, he wrote.
The mountains. Getting out of the heat. She heard me plan a whole season out loud and she did not say a word, she only put her hand over mine.
It was the first entry he had ever made that was not a memory recovered but a memory made, a thing that had happened today, to the two of them, in the present tense of a life they were actually living.
He read it over in the lamplight, the new line sitting there under a hundred years of old ones, and understood what he was looking at.
For the first time since the first fire, the past and the present were written on the same page, in the same hand, part of the same story.
It was a small line, four sentences about a summer that had not yet come.
It was also, he understood, a promise. Not the old kind, made on a street corner and broken by a fire before he had even made it home.
A new one, made in his own hand, in the present tense, to a woman who was here and warm and choosing him tonight of her own free will.
He meant to keep this one. He turned off the lamp.
He did not lie awake dreading the next memory.
He lay down beside her and thought about the mountains, and slept.