CHAPTER 11
STITCHES
POV: GIDEON
Three of them. Governor Nicholls wharf, where I come every Thursday night to take the tithe off the banana boats. They were waiting behind a stack of pallets, and they came out quiet, which means they were professionals, which means Ambrose paid real money for them.
The first one is fast. He gets his blade between my ribs and my arm before I've turned all the way, and it opens me along the side like a letter.
The second one isn't as fast.
I break his wrist on the pallet and take his knife and put it into him, and he sits down on the planks with a surprised look on his face, like a man who's missed a step in the dark.
The first one comes again. He's good. He goes for my throat, and I give him my forearm instead, and his blade skids down it from elbow to wrist, and then my hand is on his face and his head is on the edge of a steel bollard, twice, and he doesn't get up.
The third one runs.
Ansel's already after him. I hear the shot, flat, down the length of the wharf. Then quiet, and the river going by.
I lean against the pallets. Blood runs down my side under my shirt, warm, and drips off my fingers onto the planks.
My mother's rosary is wet.
I wipe it on my trousers, very carefully, bead by bead.
***
"You need a doctor," Ansel says in the car.
"No."
"Boss. That's a lot of blood."
"I've seen it before."
"It's your blood."
"I've seen that too."
He drives. He doesn't argue again. He's worked for me for nine years, and he knows the difference between me saying no and me saying it twice.
I lean my head against the window and hold my coat against my side and watch the city go by. The Quarter. Esplanade. The oaks of St. Charles.
The first time I saw her, I was bleeding then too.
A graze across the scalp from a man named Duplantier who thought he could shoot straighter than he could.
April. The Blessing of the Fleet down in Delacroix, the town her father's family was named for three generations before any of them learned to lose money.
Shrimp boats hung with flags, a brass band, a priest in a white stole throwing holy water at the bows.
I was there to collect from a man. I stood at the back of the crowd with a handkerchief pressed to my head, bored.
And on a ladder beside the dock, a girl in a paint-stained shirt was gilding the halo of a plaster saint.
Nineteen. Barefoot on the rungs. Gold dust on her cheekbone where she'd wiped her face with the back of her wrist. She had a squirrel-hair brush in her teeth and a square of leaf balanced on her fingertip, and she was holding her breath so the wind wouldn't take it, and the whole crowd was pushing and shouting and the band was playing, and she didn't hear any of it.
She laid the leaf on the saint's halo like she was putting a coin in a dead man's hand.
Then she smiled at it. Just a little. Like the two of them had a secret.
I stood at the back of that crowd with blood running down into my collar, and I forgot the man I'd come to collect from, and I forgot my father, and I forgot my own name.
Two months later, she walked away from a wreck on the Chef Menteur without looking back.
And I knew what she was.
***
The house is dark when we pull in. Ansel wants to help me up the stairs. I don't let him.
He leaves the kit on my bed. Gauze, tape, a suture pack, a brown bottle of iodine. He stands in my doorway a moment longer, looking at the blood on the floor.
"The magnolia's down," he says. "Stump's still there."
"Go home."
He goes.
I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my shirt off. It sticks where the blood has dried. Underneath, the cut runs from my armpit halfway to my hip, long and clean, not deep, just deep enough. My forearm is worse. It needs stitches. I've done my own before.
I thread the needle.
My hands are not quite steady. That's the blood loss. I know it's the blood loss.
The door in the wall opens.
I don't look up. I don't need to.
She stands in it barefoot, in one of the milk-colored nightgowns, with a grey cardigan pulled around her and her hair loose down her back. No veil. I've never seen her hair loose in person. On a screen, yes. Not like this, black and heavy past her shoulder blades, with the lamp behind her.
The door had no lock on her side. That was the point of it.
It's the first time she's opened it.
"I heard you on the stairs," she says.
"Go back to bed."
She doesn't. She looks at the floor, at the trail of dark drops from my door to the bed. She looks at my side. At the needle in my fingers.
Her face goes very white, and then very still.
"Give me that," she says.
"No."
"Your hands are shaking."
"Go back to bed, Noemi."
She crosses the room and takes the needle out of my fingers.
I let her. I could have stopped her. I let her.
She kneels on the rug between my knees and looks at my forearm the way she looked at my mother's altarpiece, like it's a problem that can be solved if she's careful enough.
Then she picks up the bourbon from my nightstand, the bottle I keep there for nights I don't sleep, and pours it over the needle and the thread and her own fingers.
"That's forty years old," I tell her.
"Then it's lived long enough."
I look at her.
She doesn't look up. But the corner of her mouth moves, just barely, the way it moved at the saint's halo three years ago on a ladder in Delacroix.
She pours bourbon over my arm. It burns like a brand.
"Hold still," she says.
"You've done this before?"
"I've laid leaf on a saint's eyelashes." She puts the needle to my skin. "You're not harder than that."
The first stitch goes in.
She's good. Her hands are steady as a surgeon's.
She pulls the thread through and ties it off and cuts it with the little scissors from the kit, and moves down a quarter inch, and does it again.
Her breath is on my arm. Her hair falls forward and brushes my knee, and she tucks it behind her ear with the back of her wrist without looking up, the exact same gesture, the same wrist, and I have to look at the ceiling.
"Who did this?" she asks.
"Three of Ambrose's men."
"Because of Tee-Jean."
She says it flatly. I haven't told her about Tee-Jean. I look down at her.
"Madame Odile listens at doors," she says. "So do I."
"Then you know what I did to him."
"Yes."
"And you're still here with a needle in your hand."
"You cut down my tree," she says, "and burned my habit, and put your teeth in my neck. I'm still here." She ties off another stitch. "I've stopped asking myself why."
I watch her work.
On the side of her throat, just above the collar of the cardigan, there's a ring of small dark bruises. Crescent-shaped. Mine. She hasn't covered it.
"Now your side," she says.
She pours the bourbon. I don't make a sound. She sees me not make it.
She sews the long cut slowly, from the top down, her fingers flat and cool on my ribs to hold the edges together. I watch the lamp shine in her hair. I watch her lips move, counting stitches under her breath. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
At the bottom, she leans in and bites off the thread.
Her mouth is on my skin for one second. Less.
She stays there.
Her breath is warm on my hip. Her hands are flat on my ribs, one on each side of the cut she just closed, and she doesn't take them away. She lifts her head, slowly, and looks up at me from the floor between my knees.
Her pupils have gone wide and dark in all that green.
She comes up onto her knees.
She puts her mouth on mine.
It isn't a good kiss. It's clumsy. She's never done it before, and her lip is still healing, and she tastes like bourbon and her own fear. She presses her mouth to mine too hard and holds it there, shaking, like she's pressing a square of leaf onto something that might not take it.
I don't move for a second. One second. Three years, and then one second.
Then I take her face in both hands and open her mouth under mine and kiss her back.
She makes a sound into my mouth. She grabs my shoulders.
The cardigan slides off one arm. I pull her up off the floor and into my lap, her knees on either side of my hips, and she comes willingly, completely, all of her, the nightgown rucked up to her thighs and her bare legs cold against me and her fingers in my hair, and she's kissing me like she's been starving and nobody told her it was allowed to eat.
My stitches pull. I don't care.
She rocks against me, once, not even knowing she's doing it.
I take her by the wrists.
I hold them. I pull my mouth off hers. It costs me more than the knife did.
She's breathing hard. Her mouth is wet and red. Her eyes are half closed and full of me.
"Why," she says. It isn't a question. It's an accusation.
"Because you're shaking."
"I'm not—"
"You're shaking because I'm bleeding. Because you're frightened and you've had bourbon on an empty stomach and you just sewed a man shut for the first time in your life." I keep her wrists. I keep my voice level. "When you ask me, you won't be shaking."
"I'm not asking. I'm—"
"No," I agree. "You're not asking."
She stares at me.
I watch her understand. I watch her understand exactly what I'm waiting for, what word, where, and I watch her hate me for it, and want it anyway.
She pulls her wrists out of my hands.
She climbs off my lap. She picks up the cardigan from the floor and holds it in front of her and backs toward the door in the wall with her chin up and her face on fire.
At the door, she stops.
"You're going to bleed through those," she says, "if you don't lie down."
"Go to bed, Noemi."
She goes. The door closes behind her.
I sit on the edge of my bed with thirteen stitches in my side and the taste of her in my mouth, and I don't reach for the bolt.
Tonight, I leave it open.
She knows what I want. She knows the word. She's said it ten thousand times in buildings like the one across my courtyard.
She'll ask.
On her knees, in my mother's chapel, she'll ask.