CHAPTER 18
HATE ME IN MY BED
POV: GIDEON
She doesn't speak to me for the rest of the day.
She leaves my study with her hands empty.
She doesn't take the photographs. She doesn't take the veil or the notebook or the button she spent a week looking for.
She walks out past me in my robe and goes up the stairs, and at noon she comes down again in a grey dress with her hair pinned and goes out across the courtyard to my mother's chapel and climbs the scaffold.
She works until dark.
I watch her from the sacristy door for an hour in the afternoon. She knows I'm there. She doesn't turn around. She lays gold on the halo of Saint Stephen, one square at a time, and she holds her breath for every one, and I stand in the doorway and I count her breaths.
At six, Madame Odile takes a tray out to the chapel. It comes back at seven. Empty.
She eats. That's the rule. She keeps it.
She doesn't come to dinner.
Ansel does.
He comes in through the kitchen while I'm sitting alone at the head of the table and stands in the doorway with his hat in his hand, which means he's brought something he doesn't want to bring.
"Your father's moving," he says.
"Tell me."
"Harbor police went through the Tchoupitoulas warehouse at four this afternoon.
Arceneaux's men. They didn't find anything, because there wasn't anything to find, but they took their time not finding it.
" He turns the hat in his fingers. "And the bank.
Your father called an emergency meeting of the Valcourt Savings board for Monday.
He still holds his seat. He's going to move to freeze the accounts you run through the port. "
"He won't get the votes."
"Probably not." Ansel hesitates. "There's something else. It came to the house an hour ago. Madame Odile wouldn't bring it in."
He steps aside.
On the back gallery, propped against the kitchen door, there's a funeral wreath.
White lilies. White roses. A white satin sash across the front, the kind they put on caskets at Lafourcade's. The smell of it comes in through the screen, heavy and sweet, the smell of every wake I've ever stood through.
Pinned to the sash, a card. Cream stock. My father's hand.
For Hélène's son.
I look at it for a long time.
"Burn it," I say.
"Yes, boss."
"Not in the incinerator. On the front walk. Where the street can see."
Ansel nods and goes out, and a few minutes later I hear the flat whump of lighter fluid catching, and the light of it comes up orange through the front windows of the dining room and flickers on my mother's china in the cabinet.
I sit at the table and watch it burn through the glass.
I don't touch what's in front of me.
At nine, I go up to my study and take the folder back out of the drawer.
I open it to the fourth photograph.
***
Three years and four months ago.
A bar on Paris Road called the Anchor, with a gravel lot out back that floods every time it rains. It had been raining since noon. I'd been sitting in the lot since two, in a grey sedan I'd bought for cash that morning, watching the back door.
I'd known about the meeting for a week.
I'd heard Luc Delacroix set it up. Ansel put a man on the stool beside him at the Anchor, and the man came back to me with every word, and one sentence of it I've never been able to get out of my head.
She's clean, Mr. Boudreaux. Nineteen and never been touched. Nine o'clock Thursday. I'll bring her myself.
The man who cut the brake line was a mechanic from Arabi who owed me for his daughter's surgery. He did it in four minutes while Luc was inside drinking his courage. He did it so the line would hold for a mile or two, and then let go all at once on the first hard stop.
I told him Luc would be alone in the truck.
I believed it.
At five-forty, Luc came out the back door and got in and pulled out onto Paris Road, and I followed him.
Not to Chef Menteur. To Chalmette. To a gilder's shop in a strip of storefronts by the canal, where the sign said CLOSED and the lights were on, and a girl I'd been watching for two months came to the screen door.
He didn't go in. He shouted at her through the screen.
She shouted back.
Then she came out, and she didn't get in the truck. She walked past it. Down the shoulder, toward Chef Menteur, in the rain, with her arms wrapped around herself and her hair plastered to her face.
He went after her in the truck.
I went after him.
For a quarter of a mile, I drove behind a man who was driving beside the woman I'd already decided belonged to me, shouting at her through his window, and I knew the brake line was cut, and I knew she was on foot beside him on the shoulder, and I understood for the first time in my life what it is to be afraid.
If he'd stopped hard beside her. If he'd swerved.
Then he gunned it past her to cut her off at the curve.
And the brakes went, and the truck went through the rail and into the canal, and she was standing on the shoulder, alive, forty feet away, with the rain coming down on her.
I pulled onto the shoulder with my lights off.
I watched her run to it.
I watched her break the glass and lean in, and I had my hand on my door handle, because if she'd gone in too far, if the truck had shifted, if the water had taken her, I'd have gone down that bank and pulled her out by the hair and let him drown anyway.
She didn't go in too far.
She stopped.
And she stood up, and stepped back, and looked down at the water, and turned around.
And walked toward me.
Straight toward my car. Down the shoulder of the Chef Menteur in the rain with blood on her chin and nothing in her face at all.
She passed my window so close I could have rolled it down and touched her hair.
She didn't look. She didn't turn her head.
She walked past me like I was a mailbox, like I was nothing, like she'd already left everything in the world behind her in that ditch and there was nothing left on this side of it that could hurt her.
Behind her, he was calling her name.
I sat in the dark and listened to him call it until he stopped.
Then I started the car and turned it around.
***
At eleven, the door in the wall opens.
I'm in bed. I'm not asleep. The lamp is off and the room is dark except for the streetlamp through the oak branches, and I'm lying on my back with my hands behind my head, looking at the ceiling. I've been looking at it for two hours.
She comes in and stops.
Barefoot. One of the milk-colored nightgowns. Her hair down.
She's carrying something in her right hand. When she moves into the orange light, I see what it is.
Her gilder's knife.
The thin one, from the kit on the vestment chest. A blade no longer than my finger, sharp enough to split a hair, meant for cutting gold leaf on a leather cushion.
She's been carrying it since Tuesday. In her cardigan pocket, in the pocket of her dress, in the sleeve of her nightgown. She thinks I haven't noticed.
She stands at the foot of my bed with it.
I don't move.
"You don't get to be sorry," she says.
"I'm not."
"Good."
She stands there. Her chest is going up and down under the nightgown. Her hand is white on the handle of the knife.
"Are you going to use that?" I ask.
"I haven't decided."
"Take your time."
She comes around the side of the bed. She stands over me in the dark. I can see her face now, in the streetlight, and it isn't a saint's face. It isn't carved. It's furious and wet and alive.
She puts the tip of the knife against my chest.
Right over my heart. I feel it through the sheet. A small cold point.
I lie still.
"Three years," she says. "I've knelt in that chapel every night for three years and asked God to make me sorry.
And He never did. And I thought it was because I was damned.
I thought I was the only person in the world who could do what I did and not be sorry.
" The point of the knife presses, just slightly.
"And you were sitting in a car forty feet away. The whole time. Watching."
"Yes."
"You could have told me. Any time. Any night. You could have walked up to me in that chapel and told me I wasn't alone."
"You weren't ready to hear it."
"You don't get to decide that."
"I decided it anyway."
Her hand shakes. The point of the knife moves on my skin.
"What did you do," she says. "After. After I walked past your car."
I look up at her.
"I followed you," I say.
She goes still.
"You walked eleven miles," I tell her. "Down Chef Menteur to Gentilly, down Gentilly to Elysian Fields, all the way into the city, in the rain, in the dark, in the middle of the night.
A girl alone on the side of the highway with blood on her face.
Nobody stopped. Did you ever wonder why nobody stopped? "
She doesn't answer. Her lips have parted.
"I drove behind you with my lights off," I say. "Twenty yards back. Eleven miles. Two cars slowed down to look at you. I pulled up beside them. They didn't slow down again."
"You—"
"You walked into the chancery at six in the morning. I watched you go in. Then I drove to Saint Veronica's and knocked on the door and told Mother Agathe she was about to get a gift from God, and it was going to need a room."
The knife is still against my chest.
She's crying now. She doesn't make a sound. The tears just run down her face and drip off her chin, off the comma, onto my sheet.
"I hate you," she says.
"I know."
"I hate you."
"Then hate me here," I tell her. "Hate me in my bed."
She throws the knife across the room.
It hits the wall and falls behind the dresser, and she comes down on me.
***
There's nothing gentle in it.
She pulls the sheet off me and climbs over me and pins my wrists to the pillow with her hands, and I let her.
She's not strong enough to hold me. We both know it.
I let her anyway. She puts her mouth on mine and it's not a kiss, it's a bite, her teeth in my lower lip until I taste copper, and she pulls back and looks down at me with my blood on her mouth.
"That's for the brakes," she says.
"All right."
She bites my shoulder. Hard. The flesh at the top, by my neck. I feel her teeth break the skin and I don't move.
"That's for the car."
"All right."
"That's for eleven miles," she says, and her voice breaks, and she puts her forehead down on my chest and holds my wrists and shakes.
I pull my hands out of hers.
I roll her under me. She fights it. She shoves at my chest, at my shoulders, she gets one hand in my hair and pulls, hard, and I let her, and I push the milk-colored nightgown up to her waist and she opens her legs for me while she's still pulling my hair, still shoving me, and I push into her in one stroke and she cries out and stops fighting all at once.
Her hands go still.
Then they go around my back and hold on.
"Hate me," I say into her neck.
"I do."
"Say it."
"I hate you." Her heels dig into me. "I hate you. I hate you—"
She says it with every stroke. She says it the way she said yours on the altar step, over and over, until it doesn't mean anything, until it's only a sound in the dark that means more and don't stop and here, here, here.
The headboard knocks the wall. My stitches pull and something tears and I feel warm wet run down my side onto her, and she feels it too, and she puts her hand flat on it and holds it there and doesn't let go.
She comes with her teeth in my shoulder again, in the same place, and her whole body pulling tight around me like a fist.
I follow her. I don't have a choice.
After, she doesn't let me move off her. She holds me there with her arms and her legs, my weight on her, my blood on her stomach and her hand, and she breathes.
"You drove behind me for eleven miles," she says, a long time later, into the dark.
"Yes."
"So nobody would stop."
"So nobody would touch you."
She's quiet.
"I thought God did that," she says. "All these years. I thought the one thing He ever did for me was get me home that night without anyone stopping."
"It wasn't God."
"I know that now."
She turns her head and puts her mouth against the bite she left on my shoulder. Gently. The way she put it on my wrist the night before.
"You bled on me," she says.
"You tore my stitches."
"I'll fix them in the morning."
"I know."
She lets go of me. She doesn't leave. She turns on her side, her left side, toward me instead of the door, and pulls my arm over her, and puts her bloody hand on my chest, over my heart, where her knife was.
"I'm not sorry," she says. "About him. I'm still not."
"I know."
"I'm not sorry about you either."
She falls asleep like that.
I lie awake in the dark with her hand on my heart and her teeth marks on my shoulder, and I look past her, at the wall across the room, at the door standing open in the middle of it.
I built that door so no one could ever lock a woman in this house again.
I put the lock on my side so she'd have to decide.
She came through the door.