Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
He woke before her, in the full gold light of a clear morning, and for once he did not reach immediately to check that she was breathing.
He knew she was. He lay on his side and simply watched her sleep, her hair across the pillow and one hand curled near her mouth and the small scar above her eyebrow catching the light, and there was nothing braced in the watching at all.
For the whole of his long life, waking beside her had been a thing shadowed by the certainty of losing her.
This morning it was only a woman he loved, asleep in the sun, on the first day of the rest of a life he had finally let himself believe in.
He had done this a thousand mornings, watched her sleep.
He had done it in a boarding house with a green door, in a dozen rented rooms across a century, in this very apartment through the worst weeks of his existence, and always there had been fear folded into it, the low constant dread of the morning he would wake and find her gone.
There was no dread in it now. She had remembered everything there was to remember, and she had stayed.
Whatever came, she would meet it beside him, and if she ever forgot again he would be there to remind her, and she would believe him.
The watching was only watching now. It was a man, glad, looking at the woman he loved in the morning light, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and it was the whole of everything.
She stirred, and found him watching, and smiled with her eyes still half closed. “You're staring,” she murmured.
“I know.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Quite the opposite,” he said, and kissed her, and the day began.
He asked her to spend it with him, all of it, and he gave her no reason and no destination, and she agreed without needing either.
And the day that followed was the most extraordinary of his two hundred years for the single reason that nothing extraordinary happened in it at all.
They drank coffee at the little table by the window and argued cheerfully about the crossword.
They wandered into a bookshop on Chartres and lost an hour in it, and she made him buy a novel he had sworn never to read, and he made her buy nothing and she bought three things anyway.
They ate lunch outdoors and watched the Quarter go by.
They walked with no route and no hurry through the streets he had haunted alone for a century, her hand in his the whole way, and for once he was not the grieving immortal moving unseen through a city of the dead.
He was only a man spending an ordinary day with the woman he was going to marry, and the city held him gently, and let him have it.
Twice in the crowds he caught sight of the other city he had always seen, a shade drowsing in a shopfront, a not-quite-living face in the window of a passing streetcar, and both times he noticed that he noticed them without any of the old weight, with mild interest and no fear at all, and let them go, and looked back at her.
For a hundred years the unseen world had been his whole vocation and his whole loneliness, the thing that set him forever apart from every warm ordinary life going by on the banquette.
Today it was only scenery. He had crossed over at last into the ordinary life he had watched from the outside for two centuries, and he found it was everything he had always imagined it would be, and more, because she was in it.
It was, he understood somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, the exact life he had planned once, in another century, on the bare floor of an empty apartment with a woman named Delia.
The books and the small errands and the aimless hours and the plain, unremarkable, bottomless happiness of it.
He had promised her that life and never gotten to give it to her.
He was living it now, on a bright ordinary day on Chartres Street, with the same soul beside him in a new name, and the grief of the old promise and the joy of the new one had finally, after all this time, become the same feeling.
As the light went long and golden he walked her down to the river, out onto the levee where the water ran wide and slow and the far bank had begun to catch fire with the sunset.
They leaned on the rail where they had stood before, where she had given him back his own words about the river remembering everything, and the talk between them was light and easy and carried none of the heaviness they had both been under for so long.
Out on the water a tug pushed its barges up against the current, patient and enormous, and the last of the day gilded everything, the river and the far trees and her face turned up to the light.
He had stood on this levee a century ago with a woman who wore this same soul and told her the river forgot nothing.
He thought now that he had been only half right.
The river remembered everything, yes. But it also carried it, all of it, downstream and out to the sea, and ran clean again the next morning regardless, and he thought that perhaps a man was allowed to do the same.
To remember everything, and carry it, and still run clean into whatever came next.
And then he went quiet, and she turned to look at him, and he reached into his jacket and took out the small, worn box, and his hands, which had held steady through wars and fires and two hundred years of grief, were not steady now at all.
He put the box into her hands. She looked at it, and then at him, and then she opened it.
The ring lay inside it exactly as it had lain for a hundred and more years, the small stone he had chosen on Royal Street in a year she had been alive and someone else, kept perfect through every decade of his exile.
She went very still looking at it. And then her breath caught, because she knew it.
Not because she had ever seen it in this life.
Because she remembered it, from the other side of a fire, from a promise that had been coming toward her for a century and had never quite arrived.
“This is the ring,” she whispered.
“I bought it in 1906,” he said. “I had it in my coat the night the theater burned. I was going to ask you the next day.” He smiled, and it hurt, and it did not only hurt.
“I have carried it through every year since, and every life since, hoping that one day I would finally get to finish asking you the question that fire interrupted.”
He took the ring from the box. And then he knelt, there on the levee with the river burning gold behind him, not because he was recreating a night a hundred years gone, not to lay a ghost to rest or finish an old man's business, but because this moment belonged to no one who had ever lived but the two of them, here, now, in the only life either of them was living.
"Delphine Leclair," he said. "Charlotte.
Delia. Every version of you that has ever walked this world has been the single greatest blessing of my long existence, and I have loved every one of them with everything I am.
" His voice held steady, though his hands did not.
"But I am not asking Charlotte, and I am not asking Delia.
Today, at last, I am asking the woman standing in front of me, in this life, with her whole self, all of it, in her eyes. Delphine. Will you marry me?"
She was crying before he had finished, and laughing through the crying, both at once.
"Bastien," she said, and her voice broke on it and steadied.
She held out her left hand to him, and it was shaking, and so was his.
"Yes. Of course it is yes. It has always been yes.
It was yes before I even knew your name. "
He slid the ring onto her finger. It fit exactly. He had somehow always known it would.
He stayed kneeling for a moment after, his hands wrapped around hers, the ring warm between their palms, the river moving behind him and the last of the sun on her face, and he let himself have it.
All of it. The weight of what he was holding.
A hundred years of carrying the box and the question and the speech worn smooth and all the tomorrows he had run out of, and now this one, this actual tomorrow, kneeling on a levee in the city he had haunted for two centuries with the answer finally in his hands.
He had not let himself imagine this moment.
He had not believed he was allowed to. He looked up at her face, wet with crying and bright with laughter, and understood that he had been wrong about that, the way he had been wrong about so many things, and that the being wrong had never once mattered less.
She reached for him. He rose, and she came into his arms, and the river burned gold around the two of them at the end of an ordinary, impossible day.
They kissed on the levee with the sun going down, long and unhurried, in no danger anymore of running out of time.
And when they finally drew apart, neither of them said anything at all, because after two hundred years and three lifetimes and one fire that had taken everything and one that had, in the strangest way, given it all back, there was nothing left in the whole world that needed saying.
That evening, back in the apartment, he went into the office one last time while she waited for him in the light of the other room.
The investigation boards were already down, the maps and the photographs and the red string long since cleared away.
Only the notebook remained on the desk, the one that held their whole life, the loss and the recovery, the theater and the green door and the river, all of it, every page filled in his own careful hand.
He opened it, and turned past all of it, to the first clean page at the end, and he stood a moment with the pen over it.
Then he wrote a single line, the last entry, the only one that needed making now.
She remembers.
He closed the book. For a hundred years he had kept it locked away, this record of everything he had lost, taken out only in the dark, hidden from the light and from everyone.
He did not lock it away now. He crossed the office and slid it onto the shelf beside the others, in the open, where it could rest at last among the ordinary books, because it was not a record of loss anymore and did not need to be hidden.
It was only the story of how he had found her, and he did not intend to hide that from anyone ever again.
Delphine appeared quietly in the doorway, the new ring catching the lamplight on her hand. “Finished?” she asked.
He looked at her, and then he looked around the office, at the cleared walls and the shelved notebook and the desk with nothing left on it to solve, at the whole quiet room that had held two centuries of his grieving and did not need to hold it anymore.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, there was nothing left in it to hunt, nothing left to fear, nothing left to keep from anyone.
There was only her, in the doorway, with his ring on her finger, waiting for him to come out of the dark.
“Yes,” he said. “Finished.”
She held out her hand to him. “Good,” she said. “Come home.”
He took her hand. He turned off the light, and drew the office door closed behind them, and left the long grief of two centuries shut quietly away in the dark on the other side of it.
And as he stepped out into the warm New Orleans evening with Delphine's hand in his and the whole unwritten future opening in front of them, Bastien understood a thing that had eluded him for two hundred years.
He had spent all of them searching for what he had lost. He had very nearly missed the life that had been waiting, patiently, all along, to be lived.
He was not going to miss it now. This time, every beautiful and ordinary moment of it, he intended to live.