CHAPTER 17
CONFESSION
POV: NOEMI
Philippe Arceneaux is on the front page of the Times-Picayune, above the fold, smiling in a photograph that must be ten years old.
PARISH COUNCILMAN SLAIN IN HOTEL KITCHEN.
Madame Odile brings it up with the coffee at eight and sets it on the tray beside the satsumas without a word, folded so the headline is on top. Then she goes out again and closes the door behind her very softly.
I read it sitting on the edge of his bed in his robe.
Police are investigating. A robbery of the hotel's kitchen office, possibly. The councilman may have interrupted it. A spokesman for the Archdiocese expressed shock and sorrow. The Archbishop will say a mass. Mr. Arceneaux leaves a wife and two grown sons.
There's nothing about a champagne sabre.
There's nothing about a hand.
I read it twice. I fold it back up the way she brought it, headline on top, and set it on the tray.
I wait to feel it. Sick, or sorry, or afraid. I sit there in his robe with the sun coming through the oak branches and I wait for it the way I waited in the shrimp plant, and in the last pew, and on the dance floor with that pink hand on me.
It doesn't come.
What comes instead is quieter, and colder, and I know exactly what it is, because I've felt it before.
Once.
On a highway, in the rain.
Behind me, in the bed, he's asleep. On his back, one arm flung out where I was lying.
The sheet at his waist. The stitches on his side, the ones I put there, dark against his skin.
His right wrist lying palm up on the pillow, where I put my mouth last night.
There's still a faint brown line around it, under the rosary.
He keeps killing for me.
Price. Lonnie. Tee-Jean. The men on Paris Road. The men on the wharf. Arceneaux, pinned to a kitchen wall.
He keeps killing for me, and he thinks he knows what he's killing for. A girl on a ladder. A girl who didn't hear the band.
He should know what I am.
***
I go down to the chapel.
I'm not dressed. I'm in his robe, barefoot, my hair down. It doesn't matter. There's no one to see but Madame Odile, and Madame Odile has stopped seeing things in this house a long time ago.
The pins are still in the offering dish.
I don't go to the scaffold. I go to the prie-dieu in front of the altar, where he knelt me on Friday night, and I kneel on it, and I fold my hands on the rail, and I wait.
He'll come. He always knows where I am.
It takes eleven minutes.
The chapel door opens behind me. I hear him stop just inside it. I don't turn around.
"Sit down," I say.
A silence.
He's never been told to sit down in his life. I can feel him deciding what to do about it.
Then I hear the pew creak. The front one, just behind me and to the left, where a confessor would sit if this were a church that still had one.
"Noemi."
"You're going to listen," I say to the altar. "And you're not going to say anything until I'm done. Not one word."
"I'm not a priest."
"You're the Deacon."
"Deacons don't hear confessions."
"This one does."
He doesn't answer. That's how I know he'll do it.
I look up at the altarpiece. At the saints I've been cleaning for a week, their faces coming clear of the rain and the smoke. The Madonna with her new square of gold on her shoulder. Her eyes look down at me the way they looked down at a hundred years of Valcourt women.
I start.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," I say. "It's been three years since my last true confession. Every week for three years, I've told Father Duclos about a twenty-dollar bill I found in a gutter. That was a lie. That was the thing I confessed so I wouldn't have to confess this."
I take a breath.
"The night my father died, he came to get me at the gilder's shop in Chalmette.
It was June. It was raining. He'd been drinking since noon; I could smell it through the screen door.
He told me to go home and put on my blue dress because a man wanted to meet me.
A Mr. Boudreaux. He said Mr. Boudreaux was going to forgive everything, the whole forty thousand, and we'd start over. He said it like it was good news.
"I knew what he meant. I'd known for a month. I'd heard him on the phone.
"I told him no. I told him I was going to the church and I'd sleep there if I had to. And I walked out of the shop into the rain and started walking down the shoulder of the Chef Menteur toward the bus stop.
"He followed me in the truck. He drove beside me on the shoulder with the window down, shouting. He called me ungrateful. He called me my mother's name. He said a lot of things. I kept walking.
"Then he got angry, and he gunned it past me, to cut me off at the curve by the drainage canal. And the truck didn't stop.
"It went through the guardrail. Nose first, into the canal. It didn't sink all the way. The back wheels were still up on the bank, spinning.
"I ran to it.
"I didn't think. I just ran. The cab was half under water and filling up, and he was pinned.
The steering wheel was pushed into his chest. I found a rock on the bank and broke the side window, and the glass cut me here.
" I touch my chin. The comma. "I leaned in through the glass.
The water was up to his ribs. It was so cold. I got my hand on his arm.
"And he looked at me and he said, Get me out, chère. Get me out and we can still make it to Mr. Boudreaux by nine."
My voice doesn't shake. I thought it would.
"I stopped pulling.
"He said it again. He said, Hurry up. We'll be late.
"I let go of his arm. I backed out of the window. I stood on the bank in the rain and watched the water come up to his shoulders.
"He started calling my name.
"I turned around and walked away.
"I walked down the shoulder of the Chef Menteur Highway in the rain, and I didn't call anyone, and I didn't flag down a car, and I didn't look back. I could hear him calling me for a long time. Longer than you'd think. And then I couldn't.
"I walked all night. In the morning I was at the chancery, and they sent me to Saint Veronica's, and Mother Agathe gave me a cell and a habit and told me God had brought me there.
"I let my father drown in a ditch to keep from being sold, and I've never been sorry. Not once. Not for one minute of one day. I've prayed to be sorry for three years, on my knees, every night, and God has never once given it to me."
I stop.
The chapel is so quiet I can hear the oak branches outside moving against the window.
"That's what I am," I say. "That's what you've been killing for. That's what's wearing your ring."
I don't turn around.
"For these and all the sins of my past life," I say, "I ask pardon of God, and penance, and absolution."
The words fall into the silence and lie there.
Behind me, he doesn't say anything.
For a long time, he doesn't say anything at all, and I kneel there with my hands folded on his mother's prie-dieu, and I wait for him to get up and walk out and lock the door.
Then I hear the pew creak.
His footsteps. Three of them. He's behind me.
He kneels down on the step beside the prie-dieu. Not touching me. Beside me. I can feel the heat of his shoulder an inch from mine.
"I know," he says.
I turn my head.
He's looking at the altar. Not at me. His face is very calm.
"You know," I repeat.
"I was there."
***
The world goes very quiet and very far away.
"You—"
"I was parked on the shoulder a quarter mile back," he says, "with my lights off. I'd been following his truck since the bar on Paris Road. I saw him drive past you shouting. I saw him cut you off at the curve." His voice doesn't change. "I saw you run to it."
I can't breathe.
"I saw you break the glass. I saw you lean in. I saw you stop." He turns his head, finally, and looks at me. "And I saw you walk away."
"You were there—"
"I watched you walk past my car. You were close enough to touch. You didn't look. You didn't look at anything. You walked by me in the rain with blood running down your chin and your face like a saint's, like something carved, and you never looked back once."
"You could have saved him."
"Yes."
"You could have saved him, and you sat in your car—"
"I didn't want to save him," he says. "I wanted him to never reach Ambrose's door with you."
I stare at him.
He stands up. He holds out his hand.
"Come with me," he says. "I'll show you."
***
His study is on the second floor. I've never been inside it.
Dark wood. Books nobody reads. A desk the size of an altar. He goes to the desk and takes a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocks the bottom drawer, and slides it open.
There's a box in it. Long, shallow, lined in black velvet, like a box for silver.
He sets it on the desk and opens it.
My veil. Folded in a square. The one he took off the chapel floor.
Under it, my notebook.
Beside it: a pencil stub, bitten at the end. A long curl of satsuma peel, dried brown and brittle as paper, one spiral. A square of gold leaf, crumpled. A black button from a cardigan I lost a year ago and searched for for a week.
I put my hand over my mouth.
I reach out and touch the satsuma peel. It's so dry it almost breaks under my finger.
"The French Market," I say. "A Tuesday. Last spring. I sat on the bench by the flea market and ate it and I dropped the peel in the trash can by the fountain."
"The one with the dented lid."
"You went through the trash."
"I sent a man to go through the trash." He looks at the peel. "Then I went myself. He didn't know which one was yours."
I pick up the button. Black horn, four holes, a thread still hanging from it. My grey cardigan. I spent a week looking for this button. I turned cell nine upside down. I finally sewed on a brown one that didn't match.
"Where?"
"The chapel step. You were carrying a box of candles. It came off when you knelt."
"You were in the chapel."
"I was in the last pew. You walked right past it."
I set the button back in the velvet, exactly where it was. My hands aren't steady. I don't know what I'm feeling. It isn't horror. A man has spent three years picking up the things I drop and keeping them in a locked drawer like the bones of a saint.
Nobody has ever kept anything of mine.
My mother didn't take so much as a photograph when she left. My father sold my bed the week I moved into the convent. The sisters gave my old habit to the next girl before it was even cold.
This man kept my garbage.
He lifts the box out of the drawer, and under it there's a folder. Plain manila. Thick. He sets it on the desk in front of me and opens it.
Photographs.
The first one is the truck. Nose-down in the drainage ditch. Back wheels up on the bank. Rain in the headlights.
The second one is me.
Leaning in through the broken window. My whole upper body inside the cab. My feet on the bank. My blue shirt soaked black.
The third one is me standing on the bank, my arms at my sides, looking down at the water.
The fourth one is me walking away.
Close. Much closer than the others. The rain, the dark, the shoulder of the Chef Menteur, and my face in the edge of somebody's headlights, looking straight ahead. Blood on my chin. My eyes wide and dry.
I don't recognize her.
I've never seen my own face that night. I didn't know I looked like that.
He's right. I look like a saint in a niche.
Under the photographs, there's more paper. I turn it over with fingers that don't feel like mine.
An invoice from a garage in Arabi. Dated the day my father died. Brake line service, 1998 Ford F-150, and a license plate I know by heart, because I used to read it off the tailgate every time he left the house. In the notes, in blue ballpoint: Cut, per instructions.
A wire transfer receipt. The morning after. Valcourt Savings & Trust to the Sisters of Saint Veronica. Twenty-five thousand dollars.
A handwritten note on cream stock, the same stock as the card on my pillow.
Cell nine. The one over the kitchen. It's warm in winter.
I set it down.
"You cut his brakes," I say.
"I had them cut. That afternoon. In the lot behind the bar." He's standing on the other side of the desk with his hands flat on the wood. "He was going to deliver you to Ambrose at nine. I wasn't going to let him get there."
"You killed my father."
"I stopped him. You killed him." He doesn't look away. "We did it together, Noemi. I cut the line. You let go of his arm. He'd be alive if either one of us had wanted him to be."
"And then you bought me a cell."
"I bought you a door."
"You let me think God sent me there. For three years. Every night—"
"God didn't have the money."
I come around the desk.
I don't decide to. My body does it. I hit him in the chest with both fists, once, twice, hard enough that it hurts my hands.
He doesn't stop me. He doesn't move. I hit him again and he stands there and takes it, and I'm crying, finally, for the first time since I came down the stairs, and I don't even know which one of us I'm crying for.
"You were there," I say. "You watched me do it. You watched the worst thing I've ever done, and you—"
"I watched you do it," he says, "and I knew you were mine."
I stop hitting him.
My fists are against his chest. His heart is going under them. Not slow. Not steady.
"Every man in this city would have looked at that girl on the bank and seen a monster," he says quietly.
"Every priest. Every sister. Your Mother Agathe.
God, if He was looking, which He wasn't." His hands come up and close around my wrists.
Not hard. "I looked at her and saw the only other person I've ever met who could do what I do.
Who could walk away from a man calling her name and not look back. "
"And what do you call that?"
"I don't have a name for it," he says. "I know what I did for three years. I know what I did last night with a sabre. I know I've never once looked at anything the way I looked at you walking down that highway in the rain."
I look up at him.
He doesn't let go of my wrists.
"You watched me leave him," I say.
"I've never looked at anything else."