CHAPTER 10
THE BITE
POV: NOEMI
The magnolia holds.
I knew it would. I've been looking at it for two days from the window of his mother's room, the way I'd look at a crack in an altarpiece, and I know where it's strong and where it isn't. At six in the morning, while his car is still pulling out onto Prytania and Madame Odile is banging pots in the kitchen, I climb it in my own habit and my own veil with four thousand and thirty-seven dollars inside my collar.
The bark scrapes my palms. A twig catches my veil and I tear it free.
At the top of the wall, the iron spikes are old and blunt with rust. I put my foot between two of them the way I'd put a brush between two squares of leaf, and I swing over, and I drop.
The sidewalk on Prytania is wet. I land on my hands.
Nobody shouts. No alarm.
I stand up and brush off my skirt, and a woman walking a white dog looks at me, a nun on the sidewalk at dawn with bleeding hands, and crosses the street.
Walk. Don't run. Nuns don't run.
I walk.
***
The streetcar on St. Charles costs a dollar and a quarter.
I pay it with one of the tourists' dollar bills and the quarter I've carried in my pocket since the French Market, since the satsuma I didn't buy. The fare box swallows them both.
It's the first money I've spent on myself in three years, and I'm so frightened and so light I almost laugh.
I sit on a wooden bench halfway down the car, by the window.
The streetcar rocks. Oak trees go by, and big white houses with their porches still in shadow, and joggers, and a man hosing down the sidewalk in front of a restaurant. I hold my collar closed over the envelope and I make a plan, the way I'd plan a panel of gilding. One square at a time.
Canal Street. Walk to Saint Veronica's. It's early; the side door will be open for the sisters. Go into the chapel. Finish the Virgin's crown, even if it's only one square. I left her with half a crown, and I can't stand it.
Then the bus station. A ticket to anywhere with a name I don't know.
I don't let myself think past the ticket.
At Napoleon Avenue, the car stops, and people get on, and the doors close, and the car rocks forward again.
And the weight comes down on the back of my neck.
I don't move.
I don't turn around. I sit with my hands in my lap and my eyes on the window and feel it settle there, below the edge of my veil, warm and patient, the way it did every morning for twenty-nine days.
He's in the seat behind me.
"Where are you going, novice?"
His voice is low. Nobody else on the car hears it. A student with headphones across the aisle is nodding along to something. An old man is reading a paper.
"Away," I say to the window.
"With my money."
"My money. You said so. Paid in full."
"So I did."
The car sways around a curve. His knee is against the back of my bench. I can feel it through the wood.
"You weren't going to the bus station first," he says. "You were going to Saint Veronica's. To finish her crown."
My hands close in my lap.
"You left her with half," he says. "You couldn't stand it."
I don't answer. There's nothing to say to a man who knows the inside of you better than your confessor.
"Lee Circle is the next stop," he says. "There's a car there. You'll get in it."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you'll ride to Canal. You'll walk to the convent and lay your square of leaf, and then you'll walk to the bus station and buy a ticket to wherever you think I'm not.
" He leans forward. I feel his breath on my neck through the veil.
"And when the bus pulls out, I'll be sitting across the aisle. "
"You can't follow me everywhere."
"I've followed you for three years."
The streetcar bell rings. The car slows.
Out the window, a black car is idling at the curb by the traffic circle, and Ansel is leaning against it with his arms folded, looking at nothing.
I sit very still.
Stay on. Ride to Canal. Make him do it.
Make him follow you onto a bus in front of everyone.
But I know he would. I know he'd sit across the aisle all the way to wherever, and I'd get off in some town where nobody knows my name, and he'd get off too, and I'd have a room with a door that locks from the inside, and he'd be on the other side of it.
He's always going to be on the other side of it.
The doors open.
I get up and walk off the streetcar, and I don't look back, and I hear him get off behind me.
***
He doesn't say anything in the car. Neither do I.
He doesn't say anything when we pull through his gates, or when Madame Odile opens the front door with her face grey, or when I climb the stairs ahead of him, two flights, to his mother's room.
He follows me in and shuts the door.
The hall door. Not the one in the wall.
I turn around to face him with my back to the bed and my bleeding hands at my sides, and I wait for it. Whatever it's going to be.
He looks at me for a long time.
At my scraped palms. At the tear in my veil where the twig caught it. At the habit.
"Why the habit?" he says.
"It's mine."
"Not anymore."
"It's the only thing in this house that is."
He crosses the room in three steps.
I brace, and he doesn't hit me. I knew he wouldn't. I don't know how I knew, but I did, the way I knew the magnolia would hold. He takes my chin in his hand instead, not hard, and turns my face to the side, so my neck is bare above the high grey collar.
His mouth comes down just below my ear.
It isn't a kiss.
It's his teeth.
He bites down on the side of my throat, above the collar, in the exact place a veil would hide it, and holds.
Not hard enough to break the skin. Hard enough that I feel every one of his teeth.
Hard enough that my knees go, and I grab his shirt with both bleeding hands to stay on my feet, and I don't let go.
A sound comes out of me that's nothing like pain.
Oh God.
Oh God, he can hear that. He can feel it in his teeth.
He holds on. His hand is on the back of my neck now, under the veil, where his eyes have been for a month, and his thumb is moving on the knob of my spine, slow, and his teeth are in my throat, and I'm clinging to his shirt in his mother's bedroom like it's the only thing holding me above the floor.
When he lets go, the air on the wet place is cold.
He doesn't step back. He puts his mouth against my ear.
"Run again," he says, "run from me to anyone, and I won't be this gentle."
I can't answer.
I can feel the mark he left, pulsing. Already I know it's going to be dark tomorrow. Already I know exactly how it's going to look: a crescent of small bruises, a ring of him, where no one will see it as long as I wear a veil.
That's why he put it there.
"Take it off," he says.
"What?"
"The habit." He steps back at last. "Take it off. All of it. Then put on something from the closet."
"Turn around."
"No."
We look at each other.
I could refuse. I could stand here in my habit until he tore it off me, and I think he wouldn't. I think he'd wait. I think he'd sit down in that leather chair and wait all day, and all night, until I did it myself.
I reach for the first button.
My hands are shaking and scraped raw, and the buttons are small, and it takes me a long time. He doesn't help. He stands with his back to the window and watches every one of them come undone.
The habit slides off my shoulders and down to the floor.
Underneath, I have a white cotton slip, washed so many times it's nearly transparent, with a darn at the hem I did myself. I stand in it on his mother's rug with my arms at my sides. I don't cover myself. I don't know why I don't.
He looks at me.
He looks at me the way he looked at my feet in the bathtub, like every inch of me is something he means to remember.
Then he bends and picks up the habit and the torn veil from the floor, and folds them over his arm, carefully, the way the sisters fold vestments.
"Madame Odile," he says, not raising his voice.
The hall door opens. She's been standing just outside it.
He hands her the habit and the veil.
"Burn these."
Madame Odile looks at me in my slip. She looks at him. She takes the bundle against her chest like it's a baby.
"Yes, Mr. Gideon."
"And tell Ansel to take down the magnolia."
That gets through to me when nothing else has.
"It's a hundred years old," I say.
"Then it's lived long enough."
He goes out. Madame Odile follows him with my habit in her arms.
I go to the window.
From here, I can see the whole back garden, the grass still wet, the wall, the spikes, the old magnolia with its low branch bent toward the bricks. The branch I climbed an hour ago. My blood is probably still on the bark.
After a while, Ansel comes out of the garden shed with a chainsaw.
After a while longer, smoke starts to rise from the incinerator behind the kitchen. Grey smoke. Grey like a habit.
I could run down there. I could pull it out of the fire. It's the only thing in this house that was mine.
I stand at the window in my slip, with his teeth in my throat and his money in the envelope on the bed, and I watch it burn.