CHAPTER 13
THREE YEARS
POV: GIDEON
She sleeps like she's guarding something.
Even here. Even in my bed, with my arm across her waist and the door in the wall standing open behind us, she sleeps on her left side with her knees drawn up and one fist closed against her chest, over the key.
Three years in a cell taught her that. Four walls and a door that didn't latch.
You sleep with your back to the wall and your face to the door and whatever you own in your fist.
Except sometime in the night, she turned over.
I woke at four and she was facing me. Not the door. Me. Her forehead against my collarbone and her breath on my chest, slow and even, and her fist uncurled against my ribs, just below the stitches.
I haven't moved since.
It's past six now. Grey light in the oak branches. The house is silent except for the pipes and Madame Odile two floors down, setting out cups she already knows nobody will come for.
I look at her.
I've looked at her for three years, five months, and twenty-five days. On screens, through windshields, from the back of a chapel, from the top of a stair. Never like this. Never from four inches, with the whole weight of her against me and nothing between us but the grey light.
There's a crease on her cheek from my pillowcase.
There's a small dark bruise on her hip, just above the bone, the exact shape of my thumb.
The bite on her throat has gone dark as plums, blue at the edges. Two days old. By Tuesday it will be nearly gone.
I'll have to do something about that before Tuesday.
Under us, on the white sheet, there's a small brownish stain from my side, where one of her stitches pulled open sometime after midnight.
I know exactly whose careful hands put that stitch there.
I don't have a word for what that does to me. I've never needed one. I lie in the grey light and look at her work holding my skin together, and I understand for the first time why people build cathedrals.
***
At six-thirty, I go down to the chapel.
The candles have burned out in their holders. My coat is still on the altar step, rumpled, with a dark patch on the lining I'll never have cleaned. The rosary is on the prie-dieu where I left it.
The six pins are in the offering dish.
I stand over them for a while. Six ordinary steel pins with black glass heads, the kind the sisters buy by the hundred from a supply house in Metairie. She pinned her veil with them every morning for three years, and last night she let me take them out one by one.
I don't touch them.
Her veil is on the floor beside the prie-dieu where it fell. I pick that up instead. Grey cotton, thin at the edges from washing, with a small mend near the hem in her careful stitches.
I fold it into a square.
In my study, in the bottom drawer of my desk, there's a velvet-lined box I had made three years ago, when I first understood what I was going to do. It's meant for cufflinks. It holds nothing like cufflinks.
A pencil stub she threw away at the French Market. A satsuma peel, dried now, one long spiral, brittle as parchment. A square of gold leaf she dropped from a ladder in Delacroix and never missed. A black button from a cardigan.
Her notebook goes in beside them.
Her veil goes on top.
I close the drawer and lock it and put the key on the ring with the others. Nobody opens that drawer but me.
***
Ansel is in the kitchen at seven, drinking Madame Odile's coffee standing up, like a man who's never been allowed to sit in this house and doesn't intend to start.
He looks at me once and away.
He knows. He'd have known from the car last night, from the way she wore my coat and would not look at him after the chapel. He'll never say anything about it as long as he lives.
"The three at the wharf were from Houston," he says. "Contract work. Ambrose paid thirty thousand through a cousin in Beaumont. I have the cousin's name."
"Keep it."
"And Ambrose called your father last night. Twice."
I pour coffee. "About Tuesday."
"About Tuesday." Ansel sets his cup down. "He'll be at the ball. With the daughter. Your father's putting them at the head table, next to the Archbishop."
"Where's Arceneaux sitting?"
Ansel glances at me. He doesn't ask why I want to know. "Table four. Near the dance floor."
"Good."
"There's one more thing." He hesitates, which Ansel does about once a year. "Boudreaux boats. They've got six shrimpers due in at the Industrial Canal locks this afternoon. Full holds. That's their October."
I think about it.
I think about a girl on a crate in a cold room at the end of Paris Road, her bare feet on the tile, humming a hymn she can't finish. Twenty-two meat hooks over her head.
"Nobody locks them through," I say.
"Boss. That's a lot of shrimp. It'll rot in the holds."
"Then it'll rot."
"Ambrose'll lose the season."
"He'll lose more than that. Call the lockmaster.
Tell him the Deacon says the canal is closed to anything flying a Boudreaux flag until I say otherwise.
" I drink my coffee. "Every boat. Every day.
Until Ambrose Boudreaux understands that he doesn't send men with knives to my wharf while the woman he stole is asleep in my house. "
Ansel nods and takes out his phone.
"And Ansel."
"Boss."
"The jeweler on Magazine. Tell him I'll collect the other thing today."
He stops dialing.
He's worked for me for nine years. He knows what the other thing is. He was the one who drove me to the jeweler three years ago, in May, with a photograph of a plaster saint's halo in my breast pocket.
"Yes, boss," he says.
***
The water is running when I come back upstairs.
The bed is empty. The bathroom door is open. Steam curls out into my room along the ceiling, and through it I can see her, in the glass shower, with her back to me and her head tipped back into the spray and her hair running black and heavy down her spine.
She didn't close the door.
She knows I'll come up. She knows exactly what I'll see. Three years in a convent and four days in my house, and she's already learned the thing it took my mother twenty years to learn and never use.
That I'll look.
That I can't not look.
I take off my shirt. The stitches have held, mostly. One at the top has pulled, and there's fresh blood crusted along it. I take off the rest and step into the shower behind her, and she doesn't turn around.
She goes still under the water.
"You left," she says.
"I came back."
"I woke up and you were gone. I thought—" She stops.
"What did you think?"
"That you got what you wanted." Her voice is flat. "That now you'd lock the door."
I put my hand flat on her back, between her shoulder blades, and leave it there. The water runs over it.
"I've wanted you for three years," I say. "I had you begging once. On a stone floor. With stitches in my side."
"So?"
"So I'm not finished."
She turns around.
Her face is wet and flushed and her mouth is still swollen from last night. She looks at me, down, all of me, deliberately, the way I looked at her on the altar step. Her eyes stop at my side.
"You pulled one," she says.
"You pulled it."
Color comes up in her cheeks. She doesn't look away.
She picks up the soap from the ledge.
She washes me.
She does it the way I did her feet on Sunday night, slowly, with her bare hands, her eyes on what she's doing.
My shoulders. My chest. The long red line of her stitches, so carefully I barely feel it, her thumbs moving around the knots.
My forearm. The old scars on my back that she finds with her fingertips and stops at, and doesn't ask about.
She kneels on the tile to wash my legs.
I put my hand against the wall.
She looks up at me from the floor of my shower with water running off her lashes, and I see her understand what's happening to me, and I see her decide that she likes it.
"Get up," I tell her.
"No."
It's the first time she's said it to me and meant it.
She puts her hands on my thighs. She leans forward. She doesn't know what she's doing, and I can see she doesn't know, and she does it anyway, the way she climbed my magnolia, carefully and all the way.
Her mouth is hot. The water is hot. The tile under my hand is the only cold thing in the world.
I let her.
I let her until I can't, until my hand is in her wet hair and I'm saying her name in a voice I don't recognize, and then I pull her up off the tile by her arms and turn her and put her back against the glass.
She gasps at the cold.
I lift her. My side screams. I don't care. She wraps her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck, and I put her back against the glass with the water running over both of us.
I kiss her until she forgets the glass.
Her hand slides between us. Mine follows hers. She is the one who closes my fingers where she wants them.
"Don't stop," she says against my mouth.
"I'm not stopping."
I am only not giving her the one thing I told her she would have to ask for twice.
She understands that a second later. Her eyes sharpen on mine.
"You're cruel."
"Yes."
She says my name anyway. She says yes. She says harder and looks shocked at herself, and then says it again.
"Whose?" I ask.
"Yours."
She comes with her nails in my shoulders and her head back against the glass. I hold her there while the water runs hot and then warm and then cool, and neither of us moves to turn it off.
***
Afterward, I sit on the edge of the bed with a towel around my waist and let her re-dress my side.
She's in my robe, which drags on the floor behind her. Her hair is wet down her back. She kneels between my knees again with the kit open on the rug and cleans the pulled stitch with iodine and tapes fresh gauze over it, and she doesn't talk, and neither do I.
She finishes. She sits back on her heels.
"Why did you leave this morning?" she asks. "Really."
"I went down to the chapel."
"For what?"
"Your veil."
She looks at me.
"Where is it?"
"Somewhere safe."
"It's mine."
"It was." I touch the side of her neck, the bite, still dark. "You don't need it anymore. You're not hiding under anything."
She's quiet for a long moment. Her hand comes up and covers mine where it rests on her throat.
"You keep taking things," she says. "My habit. My veil. My notebook. My tree."
"Yes."
"When does it stop?"
"When there's nothing left to take," I tell her. "When everything you have is something I gave you."
She should hate that.
She lowers her eyes. She turns her face, just slightly, into my palm.
Then she says, into my hand, "The scars on your back."
I go still.
"In the shower. I felt them." Her fingers move on my knee, tracing something in the air. "Long. Thin. Some of them have little hooks at the end, like a comma."
Like the one on her chin.
Nobody has ever asked. My mother knew. Ansel knows, because he was there the last time. The doctors who stitched them never asked, because my father paid them not to.
"A belt," I say. "With a buckle."
She doesn't say anything. She waits. She's learned that from me.
"When I was nine, I told him my mother cried at night. I thought he'd go to her." I look at the window. "He went to me instead. He said a Valcourt doesn't carry tales. He said it every time, after. For six years. Until I was fifteen and big enough to take the belt out of his hand."
"What did you do with it?"
"I put it in the river."
She rises up on her knees between mine. She puts her arms around my neck, carefully, avoiding my side, and she presses her face into my throat and stays there.
She doesn't say she's sorry. She doesn't say anything at all.
I don't know what to do with my hands.
After a while, I put them on her back, over my robe, and hold on.
***
Ansel brings it at four.
A small box. Old blue leather, gone soft at the corners, with the jeweler's name stamped in gold on the lid, almost worn away. He sets it on the corner of my desk and leaves without a word.
I don't open it right away.
I sit in my study with the door closed and look at it.
Three years ago in May, I walked into a shop on Magazine Street and put a photograph on the counter. A girl on a ladder. A plaster saint. A halo, half gilded.
Make me that, I told the old man. Small enough for her finger.
He made it in three months. It's been in his safe for three years, because I told him to keep it there until I came for it, and he was too frightened of me to ask when that would be.
I open the lid.
A band of twenty-three karat gold, soft as butter, burnished by hand until it shines like water. Around the top, a ring of tiny old-cut diamonds set so close together they read as a single circle of light. A halo. In the center of it, one stone. Not large. Perfect.
Inside the band, in letters so small you'd need a glass to read them: 4.22.23
I close the box.
She's upstairs, in my mother's room, sitting on the floor by the window with the cracked burnisher in her hands, polishing it on the hem of my robe for no reason except that her hands don't know how to be still.
She doesn't know what Tuesday is.
She doesn't know what this is.
I put the box in my breast pocket, over my heart, where her notebook was on Sunday night.
The ring's been waiting longer than she has.