CHAPTER 12
THE ALTAR OF HER
POV: NOEMI
"Get dressed," he says through the door in the wall. "We're going to church."
It's the first time he's taken me outside these walls on purpose.
I put on the grey wool dress with the high collar, because it covers the bite, and then I stand in front of the mirror and look at the bite anyway. It's gone dark overnight, a crescent of plum-colored marks under my ear, like a row of little thumbprints.
I put on my veil. My last one. It hides everything.
He waits for me at the foot of the stairs in a black suit. He moves carefully on his left side. When he sees the veil, something happens in his face that I can't read, and then he opens the front door for me, and I walk out of his house beside him in daylight.
***
Saint Casimir's is a church the way a skeleton is a person.
The shape is right. Spire, rose window, a nave long enough to hold four hundred people.
But the pews are gone and the Stations of the Cross have been pried off the walls, leaving pale crosses on the plaster where they hung, and the nave is full of wooden crates stacked to the height of my head.
The air smells like river water and machine oil and, underneath, very faintly, old incense that got into the stone and never came out.
There's a stain on the brass of the altar rail. Dark. Scrubbed at, not gone.
I don't ask.
I already know.
He takes me up a narrow stair behind the baptismal font. The font is full of rainwater, dark and still. Forty steps. Stone, worn hollow in the middle by a hundred years of choir boys.
At the top, the choir loft.
Twelve screens, in two rows, glowing in the dim. A leather chair in front of them. A desk. A coffee cup. It's the most ordinary thing in the world, a man's office, and I stand at the top of the stairs and can't make my feet go any further.
The third screen from the left is my cell.
The camera is still up there, in the crucifix over the bed. The crucifix is still turned to the wall, so the picture is only plaster, grey and grainy. But I know which one it is. I know that stain on the plaster. I've stared at it every night for three years.
Beside it: Saint Veronica's side chapel, my scaffold, the Virgin with half a crown. The Dauphine gate. The front gate. The market. A long hallway in the Prytania house I recognize, the one outside my room.
"You said there weren't any in my room," I say.
"There aren't."
"There were in my cell."
"That was before you were mine to look at in person."
He says it like it's obvious. Like it's arithmetic.
I make myself walk forward. I stand beside his chair, and I look at the screens, and then I look up.
And I see the wall.
***
Behind the screens, where the organ pipes used to rise, the plaster has been covered in photographs.
Hundreds of them. Pinned in rows, edge to edge, from the floor to as high as a tall man can reach.
Me.
Me at the Dauphine gate with a broom. Me on the scaffold, from below, a brush in my teeth.
Me at the French Market, bent over a crate of satsumas, counting coins in my palm.
Me at six o'clock mass from behind, kneeling, the white line of my neck between collar and veil.
Me walking down Decatur in the rain. Me laughing at something Sister Perpetua said.
I don't remember laughing. I don't remember what she said.
Me asleep.
Grey stills from the crucifix. Night after night, in rows. On my left side, facing the door. My hand under my cheek. My mouth open a little.
I walk along the wall. I can't stop. It's like reading a book about a stranger and realizing halfway through the stranger is you.
There's a whole column of my hands. Just my hands. Laying leaf, holding a burnisher, folding bills into the spine of a missal. There's a photograph of my shoes, the cracked black ones, on the chapel step.
And at the very end, at the top, in the place where you'd hang a crucifix, there's one photograph by itself.
A girl on a ladder.
Barefoot on the rungs. Paint on her shirt. A brush between her teeth. She's laying gold on the halo of a plaster saint, and there's gold dust on her cheekbone where she wiped her face, and she's smiling at the saint like they've just shared a secret.
Behind her, out of focus, shrimp boats hung with flags.
"The Blessing of the Fleet," I say. My voice comes out of somewhere very far away. "In Delacroix. I was nineteen. The old gilder I swept for got the job and his hands were too bad that year, so he sent me up the ladder instead."
"April twenty-second."
"I don't remember the date."
"I do."
I turn around.
He's standing by his chair, one hand on the back of it, watching me. He hasn't moved since I started walking.
"You were there," I say.
"At the back. Bleeding. I'd come to collect money from a man, and I forgot his name before you finished that halo."
"Three years."
"Three years, five months, and twenty-four days."
"Why?" It cracks. "Why me? I'm nobody. I was a girl on a ladder."
He doesn't answer right away.
He looks past me, at the photograph at the top of the wall, and something in his face I've never seen before comes up close to the surface. It isn't soft. There's nothing soft in it. It's the look of a man looking at the only thing in a burning house he'd go back in for.
"Because you didn't hear the band," he says.
I don't understand.
"The whole town was shouting. There was a brass band ten feet from your ladder.
A priest throwing water. Children. Dogs.
And you didn't hear any of it. You were holding your breath so the wind wouldn't take the leaf.
" His hand tightens on the chair. "I've never been that quiet inside in my life.
Not for one second. And I stood there and watched you do it for twenty minutes, and for twenty minutes, neither was I. "
I stand in front of three years of myself and I can't breathe.
Nobody has ever looked at me this long.
Not my father, who looked at cards. Not my mother, who looked at the door the whole time I knew her, until she walked through it. Not the sisters, who looked at God. Not God, who, as far as I can tell, has never looked at me once.
This man looked. He looked every day for three years and pinned what he saw to the wall of a church and knelt in the last pew in front of the real thing and never once took communion, because the thing he'd come for was two rows from the front with her back to him.
I should run.
I should run down forty stone steps and out past the font and the stained rail and into the street and never stop.
I don't. Because I've never been wanted like this, and I would rather be caged by it than go back to being invisible.
I turn back to the wall.
I reach up, on my toes, and touch the girl on the ladder. Just the edge of the photograph.
Behind me, I hear him let out a breath.
***
In the car, I sit beside him in the back.
Not across from him. Not by the door. Beside him, my knee almost touching his, because it's where I want to sit, and I'm too tired to pretend I don't.
Ansel drives. The partition is up.
For a long time, neither of us says anything. The Marigny slides by. The Quarter. I watch the old balconies with ferns hanging off them and think about a girl on a ladder, smiling at a saint.
His hand comes down on my knee.
Over the wool. Just resting there. Big and warm, the knuckles scabbed, his mother's rosary against the side of my leg.
I look down at it.
I don't move it.
After a while, he moves it for me. Slowly. His fingers find the hem of my dress and slide under it, onto my stocking, and up, over the top of the stocking, onto bare skin.
My breath goes.
"Tell me to stop," he says quietly.
I look out the window at Canal Street.
I don't tell him.
His hand moves higher. The inside of my thigh.
His palm is hot and his fingers are slow, so slow, like he's laying leaf and doesn't want to breathe on it.
I open my knees. I don't decide to. My body decides for me, and my face goes up in flames, and I keep looking out the window like a woman on her way to mass.
His knuckles brush the cotton between my legs.
A sound comes out of me. I put my hand over my mouth.
"No," he says. "Let me hear it."
I take my hand away.
His fingers press, through the cotton, exactly where I've pressed my own for a month, and I grab his wrist, not to stop him, only to hold on to something, and the rosary beads bite into my palm, and I'm—
His phone rings.
He doesn't take his hand away. He doesn't even stop moving it. He reaches into his jacket with his other hand and looks at the screen, and something in his face goes cold.
He answers.
"Father."
His fingers go still against me.
Still. Pressed there. Not moving, not leaving, while I hold my breath in the back of his car and listen to him talk to his father with his hand under my dress.
"Yes. Tuesday." A pause. "Black tie. I know." A longer pause. His eyes slide to me. "Yes, I'll bring her."
I can hear the voice on the other end, faintly. Pleasant. Old. It says something that makes Gideon's hand tighten on my thigh.
"Let them look," Gideon says. "Good night, Father."
He hangs up.
He takes his hand out from under my dress, slowly, and smooths the wool back down over my knee, and pats it once, the way you'd pat a dog.
I stare at him.
"The Archbishop's charity ball," he says. "Tuesday. You're coming."
"You can't just— you can't stop—"
"I can." He looks out his own window. "And you'll ask. Not in a car."
***
At eleven, I go down to his mother's chapel.
I tell myself I'm going to work. The size I mixed this afternoon will be ready by now, and there's a square of cracked gold over the Madonna's shoulder I've been meaning to fix.
I put on the grey dress. I put on the veil. I pin it with six pins, the way the sisters taught me.
I don't let myself think about why.
I work for forty minutes on the scaffold by lamplight. I lay the square. It takes. I burnish it with the smallest agate, the one the color of weak tea, and it comes up bright.
At midnight, the chapel door opens.
I don't turn around. I don't need to. I hear something heavy set down on the pew behind me, metal on wood, and I know what it is, and my hand goes still on the burnisher.
"Come down," he says.
I come down.
He's in his shirtsleeves, his left side stiff. His mother's rosary is not on his wrist. It's in his hand.
He kneels me at the prie-dieu in front of the altar, and I let him.
He winds the rosary around my crossed wrists, twice, and knots it at the crucifix, and it isn't tight. I could slip it. I don't.
He takes my veil. One pin at a time.
I count them. Six. Each one he drops into the brass offering dish, and each one rings like a coin.
He tells me everything he's bought. The roof. The bishop. Mother Agathe. The lock. The hand of the man who sold me fruit.
He tells me the things he knows. The Salve Regina. The satsuma peel. My left side, facing the door.
He tells me he's done lending me out.
His hand is flat on my stomach, low, waiting, and I'm crying, and I don't know why, and I've never wanted anything the way I want that hand to move.
"Say amen, novice."
"Amen."
It comes out of me whole. Clear. Not a whisper. The way I'd say it at the end of the Creed, like something I believe.
His hand doesn't move.
"And?" he says against my ear.
I know what he's waiting for. I wrote it in a notebook he keeps in his pocket.
"Please," I say. "Take them."
***
He unwinds the rosary from my wrists.
I thought he'd keep me tied. He doesn't. He wants my hands. He turns me around on the kneeler, and I put my hands on him before I can think about it, his face, his jaw, the scar through his eyebrow, the collar of his shirt, and I pull him down to me.
This time I kiss him first and it's not clumsy.
He lays me down on the altar step on his coat.
The candles are behind him. I can see them through his hair, going red and gold.
The stone under the coat is cold. He isn't. He takes his time with the buttons of the grey dress, all the way down, and opens it, and looks at me in the candlelight like I'm the thing on the wall of the choir loft come to life.
"I watched you for three years," he says. "I never once got to do this."
He puts his mouth on my throat, on the bite, and then lower.
I stop thinking in words.
His mouth on my breast through the thin cotton, and then without it.
His hand sliding down my stomach and under, finding me wet, and he says something rough against my skin that I don't catch, and then his fingers are inside me, slow, and I arch up off his coat and my hands are in his hair and I hear myself say his name to the ceiling of his mother's chapel.
"Look at me."
I look at him.
"Breathe."
I breathe. His fingers move. His thumb moves.
He's watching my face the whole time, the way he watched from the chair, and this time I watch him back, the concentration in him, his eyes gone black in the candlelight, and when I come apart it's with his name in my mouth and his eyes on mine and nothing between us at all.
He doesn't give me time to come back.
He pulls his shirt over his head. I see the stitches I put in his side, thirteen black knots in a long red line, and I put my palm flat beside them. His heart is going under my hand like it wants out.
It isn't steady. It isn't slow.
It is going as fast as mine.
"Tell me," he says. He is over me, braced on his good arm. "One more time."
"Yes."
"Say whose."
"Yours."
For a second I think this is the moment he takes everything I offered him.
Instead, he catches my wrist and puts my hand flat over his heart.
"Not yet."
The words hit harder than if he had moved.
"Why?"
His mouth finds the bite on my throat. "Because I want you to know exactly what you're asking for when you ask again."
His hand slides between my thighs once more, and he makes me come apart with my veil in the offering dish and my wrists free on the altar rail.
I say his name. I say yours. I say amen because I have run out of every other word.
When it is over, he stays over me, forehead against mine, both of us breathing too hard in his mother's chapel.
He looks wrecked. There is no other word for it. The scar through his eyebrow, the dark eyes, the mouth, all of it undone, like somebody took the lock off.
He does not apologize for stopping.
I do not forgive him for it.
***
He carries me upstairs wrapped in his coat.
He puts me in his bed, not mine. The door in the wall is standing open. He lies down beside me with his arm across my waist and his mouth against my hair and falls asleep before I do, heavily, all at once, like a man who hasn't slept in three years.
I lie awake in the dark and listen to him breathe.
My veil is still downstairs.
In the morning, when I go down to the chapel, the six pins are still in the offering dish, in a little heap, shining.
I leave them there.