CHAPTER 8
THE ROOM BESIDE HIS
POV: NOEMI
He carries me up three flights of stairs without breathing hard.
The house is dark except for a lamp on the first landing, where a woman in a quilted robe is waiting with her hands folded. Sixty, maybe. Grey hair in a net. The housekeeper who brought my trays on Friday and Saturday and never said more than good night, Miss.
She sees my mouth and crosses herself.
"Madame Odile," Gideon says, not stopping. "Coffee at noon. Nothing before."
"Yes, Mr. Gideon."
On the second floor, he doesn't turn down the hall toward the room with my lock.
"My room is that way."
"It was."
"You said that one I'd open myself."
"The second floor is for guests." He takes the next flight. "You're not a guest anymore."
***
The room on the third floor is twice the size of the whole east wing of Saint Veronica's.
Grey silk on the walls. A bed with white linen and four posts of dark carved wood. Tall windows full of oak branches and the orange shine of the streetlamps on Prytania. A fireplace with the fire already laid. A chair by the window, deep and leather, the kind a man sits in to read.
And in the wall across from the bed, a door.
It isn't the door to the hall. That's behind me. This one is in the middle of the wall, dark wood, with a brass knob and no keyhole. No bolt. Nothing.
I know what's on the other side of it before he tells me.
He doesn't tell me.
He carries me through another door, into a bathroom tiled in white marble with a tub on clawed feet, and he sets me on the edge of it and turns on the taps.
"Not hot," he says, testing the water with his wrist. "Hot will hurt worse. It has to come up slow."
He kneels on the marble.
He takes my right foot in his hands.
The skin is grey-white and I can't feel his fingers at all. He lowers it into the water, and then the other one, and holds them there, his big hands wrapped around my ankles under the surface, his shirtsleeves soaking up to the elbow and turning the water faintly pink with somebody else's blood.
Then the feeling comes back.
It comes back like fire. Like a thousand needles. I grab the edge of the tub and make a sound through my teeth.
"It hurts."
"It's supposed to. That's the blood coming back." He doesn't let go. "Breathe."
I breathe.
He washes my feet.
He does it slowly, with his bare hands, working the grime of the shrimp plant from between my toes and the grit from the soles and the dried blood from a cut on my heel I didn't know I had. His thumbs press into my arches.
Every Holy Thursday, Father Duclos washes twelve feet at the altar rail and doesn't look at a single one of them.
Gideon Valcourt looks at every toe.
I watch the top of his dark head bent over my feet, the water going pink, and something happens in my chest that I don't have a prayer for.
When he's done, he dries each foot in a white towel and sets it on the bath mat like he's putting down something he'll need later.
He stands.
"Wash," he says. "There are clothes on the bed. That door locks." He nods at the bathroom door. "If you want it to."
He leaves.
I sit on the edge of the tub with my feet burning and look at the lock on the bathroom door for a long time.
I don't turn it.
***
I sleep until noon.
When I wake up, the sun is high in the oak branches, and there's a tray on the table by the window. Coffee in a silver pot. Bread, butter, a dish of fig preserves. A bowl of satsumas, four of them, every one peeled in a single spiral.
My cardboard suitcase sits open on a bench at the foot of the bed.
Someone brought it up from the second floor. Someone brought more, too: the few things from cell nine. My second habit, folded. My second veil. My toothbrush. The cracked burnisher. My missal.
I open the spine.
Thirty-seven dollars.
Nobody took it. It's still there, folded flat, three years of funerals and tourists and a twenty from the gutter. It looks like nothing now. It looks like something a child saved.
I close it again.
The closet is a room of its own.
I open it expecting nothing and stand in the doorway with my hand on the frame.
Grey. White. Soft charcoal. Cashmere cardigans in a row on cedar hangers. Dresses in wool and silk, nothing bright, nothing low, every one cut long and plain like something a very rich woman would wear to confession. Nightgowns folded in a drawer, silk, the color of milk. Shoes on a rack.
I pick one up. Size six.
I'm a size six.
The drawer under the nightgowns is underwear. I close it again as soon as I open it, my face on fire.
My size. All of it. Every piece.
He's never touched me anywhere but my mouth and my feet.
He knows my size anyway.
***
Madame Odile comes for the tray at one and stands in the doorway a moment longer than she needs to.
"Mr. Gideon's never brought anybody up to this floor," she says. "Not since his mother."
"Whose room was this?"
She looks at the grey silk walls. At the door in the middle of them.
"Hers," she says, and takes the tray, and goes.
***
He's waiting for me in the dining room at eight.
I come down in the plainest dress in the closet, grey wool with long sleeves and a high collar, and my own veil. It's the only thing I'm wearing that's mine.
He looks at the veil and doesn't say anything about it.
He's changed. A dark suit, white shirt, no tie. His knuckles are scabbed over. And his mother's rosary is back on his left wrist, onyx beads wound twice, gleaming in the candlelight like they've just been polished.
There's one place set, to his right. Not across the table.
Beside him.
I sit.
"Eat," he says.
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since Saturday. Eat."
There's gumbo. There's bread. There's a satsuma on a white plate beside my spoon, peeled. I eat the satsuma first, the peel too, because I'm too tired to pretend I don't, and he watches me do it.
When I'm halfway through the gumbo, he puts an envelope beside my bowl.
Thick. Cream-colored. The same stock as the card.
I don't touch it.
"Your commission," he says. "Four thousand. Paid in full."
"I haven't finished the altar."
"You will."
"What does a prisoner need four thousand dollars for?"
"You're not a prisoner."
"The door upstairs doesn't have a lock."
"Not on your side."
I put my spoon down.
"Rules," he says, before I can say anything.
He says it the way Mother Agathe says compline, like it's a fact of the day.
"You don't leave this house without me. You eat what's put in front of you.
The door between our rooms stays as it is.
" He turns his glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth.
"And nothing in this house faces the wall. "
"And if I break one?"
"Break one and see."
His voice doesn't change. It doesn't need to.
"The sisters," I say. "Mother Agathe. What did you tell them?"
"That Saint Veronica's has a new owner who likes it exactly as it is. The deed was signed at seven this morning. The boiler will be replaced before Christmas. Father Duclos will say mass at six." He drinks. "And that Sister Noemi has been called to other work."
"I want my notebook back."
"No."
"It's mine."
"It was written to me."
I stare at him.
He sets his glass down.
"Every night for a month, you wrote to a man in the last pew," he says. "I'm the man in the last pew. I've read my letters. I'm keeping them."
***
He comes through the door at eleven.
I'm in bed in one of the milk-colored nightgowns because there's nothing else to sleep in, lying on my left side, facing it. I've been facing it for an hour. I heard him in the next room, the water running, a drawer. Then silence.
Then the knob turns.
He comes in barefoot, in dark trousers and a white undershirt. The rosary is on his wrist. He doesn't look at the bed. He crosses to the leather chair by the window and sits down in it, and settles, and puts his elbows on the arms.
He looks at me.
"What are you doing?"
"Watching."
"You have cameras for that."
"Not in this room." He tips his head back against the leather. "I wanted to see it without a screen in the way."
The fire has burned down to coals. The only light is the streetlamp through the oak leaves, orange and moving.
"Get out."
"Say it like you mean it, and I will."
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out of it.
He waits. He's good at waiting. He waited in a pew for twenty-nine days.
"Tuesday night," he says quietly. "My card in your teeth. Show me."
"No."
"Then tell me to leave, Noemi. One word. I'll go through that door and you'll never see me in this chair again."
The coals tick in the grate.
I don't tell him to leave.
I turn onto my back. I look at the canopy of the bed, the carved wood, the grey silk, and I put my hand on my stomach over the sheet, and it's shaking.
"Sheet," he says.
I push it down to my knees.
The nightgown is thin enough that the streetlight goes through it. I know he can see everything. My skin is so hot I feel it against the silk, everywhere, like the fabric is a hand.
My fingers move down.
"Slower."
I go slower.
"Eyes open."
I didn't know they'd closed. I open them. I turn my head on the pillow and he's there in the chair, not moving, not leaning forward, just his eyes on me in the dark, and it's worse than the crucifix, it's worse than anything, because I can see him seeing me.
This is the sin. This is the one.
And he's watching you commit it.
My hand is between my legs under the silk, and I'm wet, I've been wet since the dining room, since break one and see, and I press where I pressed on Tuesday with his card in my mouth.
It isn't Tuesday. There's no card. There's him, six feet away, with his mother's rosary wound around a wrist that isn't moving.
"Don't bite your lip," he says. "It's split."
I let go of my lip. A sound comes out instead.
"Good."
The word goes through me like a hand.
I move faster. He doesn't stop me this time. The streetlight shifts through the oak leaves, gold, dark, gold, across the ceiling, and my heels press into the linen, and my other hand is fisted in the sheet, and I'm looking at him, I can't stop looking at him, at his hands on the arms of the chair.
His knuckles have gone white.
The rosary beads click once against the leather.
That's what does it. That tiny sound. The only proof in the room that he isn't made of stone.
"Say my name," he says. "When you come. Say it."
I say it.
I say it the way I've never said anything, not a psalm, not a vow. It breaks in the middle. My back comes up off the bed and hangs there, and his name is the only word left in me, and I say it again on the way down, smaller.
Then there's just breathing.
Mine.
The coals. The oak leaves. The streetlight going gold and dark across the ceiling.
He stands up.
I lie there with my hand still between my legs and my nightgown twisted around my waist and watch him cross the room. He doesn't come to the bed. He doesn't touch me. He stops at the door in the wall with his hand on the knob and looks back at me once.
"Good," he says again.
He goes through.
The door closes behind him. A second later I hear it: the heavy, oiled turn of a bolt.
On his side.
I pull the sheet up to my chin and lie in his mother's bed with my face burning and my body still shaking and his name in my mouth like a stone.
He never touched me.
That's the part I can't forgive.