CHAPTER 1
THE LAST PEW
POV: NOEMI
He's here again.
I know it before I see anything. I know it the way you know a storm is coming in this city, by the pressure in your ears, by the way the air stops moving.
Six o'clock mass at Saint Veronica's. Eleven sisters in the front two rows, two novices behind them, Father Duclos mumbling the Kyrie like he's late for something.
And in the last pew, alone, a man in a black coat who has come every morning for twenty-nine days and never once walked up for communion.
I have never seen his face.
I've never turned around. Novices don't turn around in chapel. We keep our eyes on the altar and our hands folded and our thoughts on God, and I've been managing two out of three for three years.
My thoughts are on the back of my neck.
That's where he looks. I can feel it, just below the edge of my veil, a warm, steady weight like a hand that hasn't landed yet. Every morning it settles there at the Confiteor and doesn't lift until the final blessing.
I should be afraid of it.
I'm twenty-two years old. I have thirty-seven dollars hidden in the spine of a missal and a dead father who owed forty thousand.
I've lived in this building since I was nineteen, since the night my father's car left the Chef Menteur Highway and the diocese took me in because nobody else was going to.
I know what men want from girls with no one.
I learned that before I learned the rosary.
I should be afraid.
Instead, every morning at the Confiteor, when his eyes find my neck, I feel chosen.
Through my fault, I pray, striking my chest. Through my fault. Through my most grievous fault.
The weight on my neck grows heavier.
Like he heard.
***
After mass, I climb the scaffold in the side chapel and open the missal.
Not to pray. To count.
The bills are folded flat inside the spine where the binding's come loose.
A five from an old man at a funeral who thought I was a real nun.
Ones from the tourists who wander in to photograph the altar and feel guilty enough to leave something.
A twenty I found in the gutter on Burgundy Street and didn't turn in, and confessed, and kept.
Thirty-seven dollars. Three years.
I know the other number because a man named Tee-Jean says it to me every other Sunday through the iron gate on Dauphine Street, grinning around a gold tooth.
"Your daddy promised Mr. Boudreaux something, Sister," he told me last week. "Mr. Boudreaux's a patient man. Ain't infinite, though."
I'm gilding this altar for the bishop. The diocese pays eight hundred dollars for the work.
Mother Agathe keeps it. A novice owns nothing. Not even the gold under her fingernails.
I fold the bills back into the spine.
In the pocket of my habit, loose, I have thirty-one cents.
***
At noon, Mother Agathe sends me to the French Market for lemons, and I spend the whole walk thinking about a satsuma.
They're early this year. Small and bright and loose-skinned, piled at Earl Guidry's stall under a cardboard sign: 3 FOR $1.
"Forty cents, Sister."
"The sign says three for a dollar."
"Sign says three. You buying one?"
I look at my palm. A quarter, a nickel, a penny.
I put the fruit back.
Earl's hand closes on my wrist before I can straighten. His thumb finds the inside, where the skin is thin, and rubs.
"Tell you what," he says, low. "You come around back, you can have the whole crate."
I don't scream. There's no one to scream to, and screaming in the French Market just gets you a ring of strangers holding up their phones. I twist my wrist free the way you learn to in a house like my father's, and I step back.
"God sees you, Mr. Guidry."
He laughs.
I walk away with the lemons and without the satsuma, and halfway down Decatur Street the hair on my neck rises.
I stop.
For the first time in twenty-nine days, I turn around and look.
Tourists. A mule cart. A man hosing down the sidewalk in front of a bar. A black car at the curb, windows dark, engine running.
Nobody.
But the air smells, faintly, like figs.
***
I lay gold until the light goes. Compline. Bells. The long stair to the third floor.
Cell nine is the last one on the hall, over the kitchen, which means it's warm in winter and an oven in summer and smells like onions until ten o'clock.
Tonight it smells like figs.
I stop in the doorway with my hand on the knob.
The knob is new.
Brass. Heavy. Cold. The old one was cracked glass and never latched, and Sister Perpetua used to walk in without knocking. This one has a keyhole.
It turns when I try it. Not locked.
Left open for me.
On my pillow is a satsuma.
Peeled in one long spiral, the skin still attached at the base and curled around the fruit like a ribbon. The way I do it. The way I've only ever done it alone.
Beside it, a thin gold chain lies coiled on the blanket. Threaded on the chain is a key no longer than my thumbnail.
And a card. Thick cream stock, the kind they use for wedding invitations in the Garden District, sealed with black wax pressed into a single letter.
V.
I break the seal.
Four words, in black ink, written by a hand that pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
Your sins are mine.
My knees find the floor before I tell them to.
I stay there on the boards with the card in both hands.
Get up. Get Mother. Tell someone.
I look at the window. Third floor, painted shut since before I came. The curtain over the closet. The gap under the bed. The brass crucifix over my pillow, Christ with his head bowed like he's embarrassed for me.
Nobody.
He came in while we were at compline, put a lock on my door, peeled a fruit on my bed, and left. In a building full of women who notice everything, nobody saw a man on the third floor.
I could take the card to Mother Agathe. She'd call the police.
The police would come the way they came the night my father died: two hours late, bored, asking if I'd been drinking.
They'd write possible prank. Then Mother Agathe would move me to the room beside hers, and the man in the last pew would stop coming.
That's the thought that keeps me on the floor.
Not that he'll come back.
That he'll stop.
***
I get up. I try the key.
It fits the new lock like it was cut for it, because it was. It turns with a heavy, oiled click that I feel in my back teeth. For the first time in three years, I can lock my own door.
I do.
Then I stand with my palm flat against the wood and understand the rest of it.
There are always two keys.
***
I eat the satsuma sitting on the floor with my back against the bed.
I don't mean to. I mean to throw it out the window, the way a sensible girl would, a girl who knows not to eat what strange men leave on her pillow. But breakfast was coffee and bread, and it's so bright in the lamplight, and he peeled it for me.
All in one spiral.
Who has watched me closely enough to learn that?
It's sweet and cold and a little sour at the center. Juice runs down my wrist. I lick it off, and then I eat the peel too, the way I always do when nobody's looking, and halfway through I stop chewing.
Because somebody was.
I finish it anyway.
***
The notebook lives under my mattress.
Mother Agathe gives each of us one when we enter. An examination of conscience. Every night, write down your failings. Every Saturday, burn the pages in the kitchen stove and offer the ashes to God.
I stopped burning mine twenty-nine days ago.
I sit on the bed in my nightgown with the card propped against my knee, and I write the truth, because it's the only place I'm allowed to.
You were in my room tonight.
You touched my pillow. You know how I peel fruit. You put a lock on my door and kept a key, and I'm supposed to be afraid, and I am. Just not the way I should be.
I'm afraid you'll stop.
Every morning I feel you on my neck and I think, this is what it's like to be wanted by something that doesn't ask. And God forgive me, I want it. I want the thing that doesn't ask.
My hand is shaking. The last line runs crooked across the page.
Your sins are mine, you wrote.
Then take them.
I close the notebook.
I don't put it back under the mattress.
I lie down with the card in my hand and press it to my mouth. It smells like figs and pepper and something sharper under that. Metal. Oil. It smells like him. It's the closest I've ever been to him.
My other hand slides down.
Over the thin cotton of the nightgown. Over my stomach. Lower. I tell myself I'm only going to stop the ache, only this once, and I've told myself that before and it has never been true.
I imagine a glove.
Black leather, cool at first and then warm, the seam of it dragging over me. A big hand. Patient. A hand that has already been in my room and my notebook and my mass, and knows exactly where I'm going to break. I imagine it pressing where mine presses, slower than I would, refusing to let me hurry.
I imagine a voice I've never heard telling me to be still.
My heels dig into the mattress. My breath catches against the card, and I bite down on the edge of it to keep quiet, because Sister Perpetua sleeps on the other side of the wall, and because the brass Christ over my bed has his head bowed, and because I'm about to say something I've never said to a man whose name I don't know.
It hits me like the Confiteor.
Through my fault.
My whole body lifts off the bed and hangs there and comes down shaking.
For a long time I lie still with the taste of paper and figs in my mouth.
Then I cry. Quietly.
Not because I'm sorry.
Because I'm not.
***
Later, much later, I fasten the gold chain around my neck.
The key slides down and settles in the hollow of my throat, under the collar of my nightgown, where a veil would cover it. Where no one would ever see.
Where he looks.
I lie on my left side facing the door, the way I always do, and I close my fist around the key, and I don't pray.
I listen for footsteps on the stairs.
I can't wait for him to come back.
The key is warm by morning.
So am I.