Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
They had a morning, first. He would remember that, after, that the world had given them one quiet ordinary morning before it gave them everything else.
The fires were over. There was no case to drive to and no phone that would ring and nowhere either of them had to be, and he stood at the stove in the early light making breakfast for the two of them, badly, while she sat at the table with her feet tucked up and read him bits of the paper she found ridiculous.
He had grown almost competent at eggs. He had never once mastered the toaster.
He was watching her instead of the bread, the loose fall of her hair and the crease of concentration between her brows, and by the time the smell reached him the toast had gone to black.
She looked up at the burned-bread smell and started to laugh. “You did that on purpose,” she said. “Two hundred years old and you cannot work a toaster. Admit it.”
“It was entirely intentional,” he said, pulling the ruined slices out. “Charring is a technique. It is very sophisticated. You would not understand.”
“I would not,” she agreed, delighted. “Give me the burned one. I like you humble.”
And it was, for that one more moment, the most ordinary morning in the world, the kind of morning they had been building toward for the whole of this terrible season, two people and a small kitchen and the smell of breakfast slightly ruined.
He carried the plates toward the table. The thin gray smoke off the blackened toast drifted up between them in the early sun.
She breathed it in, and she went still.
He knew this stillness. He had learned every shade of it over the months, and he knew before he had set the plates down that this was not one of the small ones.
This was the deep one, the one that took her all the way under, and it had come on the smell of smoke on the one morning he had let himself believe the smoke was finished with them.
He was around the table and on his knees beside her chair before her cup had finished tipping from her hand.
He caught her as she came out of the chair and lowered her gently to the kitchen floor and gathered her against him, and he did the only thing there was ever anything to do.
He held her hand, and he waited, and this time some cold certainty told him exactly where she had gone.
She had gone back through the doors.
He could not see it, but he did not need to see it.
He had lived it. As her face moved he could read her passage through it as though it were written there, and every station of it was one he had walked himself a hundred years ago and every night since in his dreams. The lights of the theater and the music and the first wrong note under it, the first thread of smoke where no smoke should be.
The confusion rippling through the rows.
The moment it became a scream. He watched her face crumple as the memory gave her the crowd surging for the doors, the crush of bodies, the chaos between them, and he knew the instant the remembered Bastien reached her because her own hand tightened convulsively around his living one, exactly as it had tightened a century ago when he had fought his way back to her through the smoke and taken hold and sworn not to let go.
He knelt on the kitchen floor and held that hand and let her remember it, all of it, because there was nothing else he could do and because she was not alone in it this time.
He had refused to let go then. He refused to let go now.
The beam coming down in a roar of sparks.
The heat. Himself throwing his own body over hers, shielding her with what he was still, the building letting go around them.
And then the dark taking her while he screamed her name into the fire.
He thought that was the end of it. It had always been the end of it, in every telling, hers and his both. The dark. The place where Delia stopped. He braced for her to surface here, spent and weeping. She always did.
She did not surface. The memory kept going.
He felt it keep going. He saw it on her, the dark on her face giving way to a thing he had no way to read, her brow smoothing, the grief loosening its hold, and a light beginning behind her closed eyes that had nothing of the fire in it, nothing of the red of the burning, a light that was clean and wholly other.
Her lips parted, and the terror went out of her, and what came into its place was a peace so vast it frightened him more than any of the burning had, because he knew what lay on the far side of that dark, and he had spent his whole existence certain she would never have to see it.
The dark had given way to light. He knew, watching her, that she was standing in it now.
Not another street. Not another life. Light, pure and without end and utterly at peace, and a voice moving in it that was not his voice, that had never been his voice, an old and enormous tenderness calling her by a name that was not any of the three he had loved her by, calling her home.
He watched her turn her face toward that voice.
He watched her see the light stretch away in front of her forever, and the peace of it sink all the way through her, and he knelt on his kitchen floor and could not breathe, because he had been left behind in that fire and had never once been permitted to follow her into that, and here she was, walking back into it in front of him a hundred years too late for him to stop her.
And then it changed again. He felt the exact moment it changed, because her whole body went taut against him, and the peace on her face cracked open into a thing older than peace, older than Delia, older than Charlotte, older than the city or the country or the language she thought in.
Her hand came up off the floor, reaching, reaching for a thing above her that was not there in the kitchen and was there in the memory, and he understood with a horror and a wonder that stopped his heart that she had gone all the way back.
Past the light. Behind it. To the beginning. To him.
She was seeing him. Not the man kneeling on the kitchen floor in a burned-toast morning.
Him. What he had been before all of it, before the first face and the first life, before the fall of the first city.
He could see her seeing it, the impossible radiance of it, the thing he had been that had no business ever being looked upon by mortal eyes, and he watched her reach for it with the same certainty she had always reached for him, in the garden, in the boarding house, in the antiques shop, the same soul reaching for the same self across the same unbridgeable distance.
He watched her be told no. He saw it cross her face, the ancient refusal, the law of it, the vast and sorrowing voice explaining that what she was and what he was could never, must never, belong to one another.
And he watched her do the thing she had done every single time since. He watched her refuse to let go.
And then he watched her remember him choosing.
He could not stop the tears now and did not try.
He knelt on the floor and watched the woman he loved remember the single act that had made everything that followed, watched it break over her face in the order it had happened, the reaching and the refusal and then his choice, his own choice, made in the full knowledge of everything it would cost, to take her over all of it.
He watched her see the light break. He watched her see him fall.
Down and down and out of the endless light and into time and death and a hundred years of grief and a green door and a burning theater and a dusty shop on Dauphine Street, falling the whole long way toward her, choosing her at the top of it and choosing her at the bottom and choosing her every terrible year in between.
Delphine opened her eyes.
The tears ran down her face without a sound.
She did not gasp or cry out or come apart.
She only looked up at him from the kitchen floor with her whole soul in her eyes, every life of it at once, and she lifted one hand, slowly, and laid it against his cheek, and she whispered the truth he had crossed out of eternity to keep from her.
“You fell,” she said. “For me.”
He could not move. He could not speak. Every wall he had built in two hundred years, every careful stone he had set between himself and this exact moment, every guard he had mounted over the one truth that was the whole of him, all of it came down at once and left him with nothing, kneeling on a kitchen floor in front of the only soul in all of creation who had ever been worth the ruin of him.
He closed his eyes against the tears and could not stop them.
A hundred years he had wept for her alone in the dark where no one could see.
He wept now in the light, in front of her, at last, because she knew.
She knew all of it, the whole impossible size of what he was and what he had given up and why, and she had not turned from it. She had put her hand on his face.
She drew him down. She, who he had spent three lifetimes and two deaths trying to protect, gathered his head against her heart there on the kitchen floor and held him while he came apart, her hand moving in his hair, her voice low and steady and unafraid above him, telling him it was all right, telling him she had him, telling him he was not alone with it anymore and never would be again.
For the first time since he had chosen her over Heaven itself, someone was holding the one who had done the falling.
He let her. He let himself be held. He wept a century of grief into the front of her shirt on the floor of their kitchen while the burned toast cooled on the table above them, and she did not once let go.
Long after the memory had faded, long after the last of it had left her and only the two of them remained, neither of them moved.
The kitchen was silent. The plates sat untouched on the table and the toast had gone cold and hard on them.
Outside the shutters New Orleans carried on exactly as it had the moment before, the delivery trucks and the first tourists and the saxophone finding its key down the block, a whole city that did not know and would never know that anything at all had happened.
Inside, on the floor of a small kitchen on Dauphine Street, a fallen angel and the soul he had fallen for held on to one another and did not speak, because there was nothing left in all the world that needed saying.
She knew. At long last, after everything, she knew. And everything had changed.