CHAPTER 19
THE ROOF
POV: NOEMI
I find the knife behind his dresser on Thursday morning, in a drift of dust and one of his cufflinks.
He's still asleep. I lie on my stomach on his rug in his robe and reach under the dresser up to my shoulder, and my fingers close on the handle, and I pull it out and look at it.
A blade the length of my little finger. I've split ten thousand squares of gold with it. I held it over his heart last night.
I blow the dust off and put it back in my pocket.
When I turn around, he's awake. Lying on his side, watching me.
He doesn't say anything about the knife.
He holds out his arm, so I can see the blood dried along his side where the stitches tore. I get the kit.
***
"I want to see the river," I say on Thursday night, at dinner.
He looks up.
"From the roof," I say. "There's a little glass room up there. On the top of the house. I can see it from the garden."
"The belvedere."
"Is it locked?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
He's quiet for a moment. He turns his glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth.
"My mother used to go up," he says. "In the afternoons. Before. My father said she was looking for someone to come and take her away."
"Was she?"
"She was looking at the river." He drinks. "The rule is you don't leave the house."
"The roof is the house."
He looks at me across the candles for a long time. Then something happens at the corner of his mouth that isn't a smile, but it's closer than I've seen.
"Ask Madame Odile for the key," he says.
***
On Friday, he goes to the port at four. Something about the Boudreaux boats. Ambrose has sent lawyers to the lockmaster, and the lockmaster has called Ansel, and Ansel has called Gideon, and Gideon has put on his coat.
"Stay in the house," he says at the door.
"The roof is the house."
He looks at me. He touches the bite on my throat with two fingers, like he's checking it's still there.
He goes.
At five-thirty, Madame Odile brings me a key on a faded blue ribbon.
"She used to go up at sunset," she says. "Every day. Even the last year, before he took the key away." She puts it in my palm and closes my fingers over it with her own. "Mind the third step. It's soft."
The belvedere stair is narrow and steep, more ladder than stair, and it comes up through a hatch into a glass room no bigger than cell nine. Eight windows, one on every side. A wooden bench under them, worn smooth. A glass door onto a little railed platform on the very top of the roof.
I go out onto the platform.
The whole city is under me.
The oak trees of the Garden District, black-green, rolling away in every direction like the sea.
The roofs. The steeples. The streetcar line cutting through it all like a seam.
And past it, past everything, the river, wide and brown and shining, with the sun going down on the far side of it and turning the water to gold leaf.
I stand at the rail with the wind in my hair.
I haven't been this high since the ladder in Delacroix.
She was looking at the river.
I think about a woman standing here every afternoon, locked in her own house, looking at the river going by. Looking at the one thing in New Orleans that always leaves.
I don't feel like her.
I stand here and look at the river and I don't want it to take me anywhere.
***
At 6:14, the streetlights on Prytania go out.
All at once, the whole block. The lamps on the corner. The porch lights across the street. Below me, in the house, something beeps three times, high and thin, and stops.
I look down.
The garden is going dark blue in the dusk. The fountain. The grass. The stump of the magnolia by the east wall, pale where the chainsaw went through it.
There's a ladder against the wall beside the stump.
Aluminum. Twelve feet. The kind painters use.
It wasn't there at five-thirty.
I stand very still at the rail.
Go down. Go down the stairs. Find Madame Odile. Lock a door.
But the hatch is behind me, and the stair is the only way down, and the stair comes up from the third-floor hall, and I don't know who's in the third-floor hall.
The glass door behind me opens.
I turn around.
He's not big. That's the first thing I think, stupidly.
He's not as big as Gideon. Wiry, in dark clothes, a black knit cap.
He must have come up the back gallery and in through a window and up the belvedere stair while I was watching the river turn gold, and I didn't hear him, because I never hear anything when I'm looking at something beautiful.
He has a gun. It has a long black tube on the end.
He doesn't point it at me. He holds it down by his leg, casually, like a man holding a newspaper.
"Evening, Sister," he says.
"I'm not a sister."
"Mr. Boudreaux says you are." He steps out onto the platform. There's barely room for two. "Mr. Boudreaux's got six boats of shrimp rotting at the locks. Got a man with no tooth buried in St. Bernard. Mr. Boudreaux says the tithe goes both ways."
My hand is in the pocket of my cardigan.
"He's not here," I say. "Gideon. If you want him, he's at the port."
"I don't want him." He smiles. It's not a friendly smile. Nobody in Ambrose Boudreaux's pay has ever smiled at me in a friendly way except Tee-Jean. "Nobody gets near him. That's the thing. Man's got more locks than Fort Knox." He comes one step closer. "But you like to look at the river."
I back up. The rail is behind me. Waist-high. Wrought iron.
Behind the rail, sixty feet of air, and the iron fence around the front garden, with its spikes.
"They'll say you jumped," he says. "Poor thing. A nun, locked up in a big house. Couldn't take it. Just like his mama."
He reaches for me with his free hand.
He grabs my arm above the elbow and pulls me against the rail, and the iron hits the small of my back, and I bend backward over nothing, and the sky swings over my head, pink and gold.
My hand comes out of my pocket.
I don't decide to. My hand knows the knife better than it knows anything. It knows exactly how thin the blade is and exactly how sharp. It knows how gold leaf parts under it without a sound.
I cut him.
Across the inside of the wrist holding my arm. One stroke. Deep. The way you'd cut a square of leaf on the cushion, clean, with the whole edge.
He screams.
His hand opens. Blood comes out of his wrist like water out of a pipe. I grab the rail with my left hand to keep from going over, and I cut him again, across the face, without thinking, from his eyebrow down across his cheek, and he screams again and staggers back, and the gun comes up.
It goes off.
A flat cough, like the ones on Paris Road. Something hits the glass of the belvedere behind him and a window goes white with cracks.
He lifts it again, blood running into his eye, and he's pointing it at me now, at my face, from four feet away, and I have nowhere to go but over—
Somebody comes up through the hatch.
I don't see him come. I only see the man with the gun jerk backward like he's been pulled on a rope, and the gun go spinning across the platform, and then Gideon has him.
He has him by the collar and the belt.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't make a sound at all. He lifts the man off his feet like a sack of feed and takes three steps across the little platform and throws him over the rail.
I hear him hit.
Not the ground. The fence. There's a sound I'll never forget. And then nothing.
Gideon stands at the rail looking down.
He's breathing like he's run the whole way from the port. His chest is heaving under his shirt. His coat is gone. His hands are on the rail, and they're shaking. I can see them shake. The rosary on his left wrist is rattling against the iron.
He turns around.
He looks at me. At the knife in my hand, bloody to the handle. At the blood on my cardigan, which isn't mine. At my face.
"Are you hurt."
It isn't a question. It's barely words.
"No."
"Are you hurt, Noemi."
"No. I'm not. He didn't— I cut him first."
He crosses the platform in one step and takes my face in both his hands. They're shaking so hard I can feel it in my teeth. He looks at me. He looks at every inch of my face like he's reading it, like he's checking it against the photographs on his wall.
"The feeds went dead," he says. "All of them. At six-fourteen. I was on the Esplanade wharf. I watched them go black one by one on my phone. The gate. The garden. The hall. The chapel." His thumbs move on my cheekbones. "I couldn't see you. For eleven minutes, I couldn't see you."
"I'm here."
"Eleven minutes."
"I'm here, Gideon."
I drop the knife.
I put my hands on his wrists, over his, holding his hands against my face. I feel his pulse going under my fingers like a hummingbird's.
And something comes up in me. Hot and fast and bright, like a match struck in a dark room.
It isn't fear. The fear's gone. I don't know where it went.
I cut a man's wrist to the bone a minute ago and watched him bleed onto the roof, and Gideon threw him onto a fence, and I'm standing in the dusk with his blood on my cardigan and I'm alive.
I've never been so alive.
I pull his face down and kiss him.
***
We don't make it back inside.
He pushes me back against the glass of the belvedere, the whole window, the one that didn't crack, and the glass is cool through my dress, and the whole pink sky is behind his head. I'm pulling at his belt. He's pulling up my skirt. Neither of us is gentle.
"Here," I say.
"Noemi—"
"Here. Now. I don't care who sees."
Nobody can see. There's no one higher than us for half a mile. The whole city is under us and going dark.
He lifts me against the glass. I wrap my legs around him and he pushes into me and I cry out into the wind.
It's fast. It's hard. It's nothing like the chapel or the mirror or last night.
It's two people who were almost dead a minute ago proving they aren't. His hands are under my thighs, still shaking.
My hands are in his hair, and they're not.
I hold his face and make him look at me.
"I cut him," I say, while he's inside me. "I cut him myself."
Something goes through his face.
"I know," he says. "I saw."
"Did you?"
"I came up through the hatch and I saw you do it." His voice is ragged. "The second one. Across the face. With your hand on the rail."
"And?"
He puts his forehead against mine.
"And you've never been more mine," he says.
I come apart against the glass with the sun going down behind him. He follows a moment later with his face in my neck, and the glass shudders at my back, and a long way down, in the garden, Madame Odile is screaming something at somebody, and I don't care.
***
Ansel is waiting at the foot of the belvedere stairs.
He looks at the blood on my cardigan. He looks at Gideon's face. He doesn't look at anything else.
"The power's cut at the box on the corner," he says. "Not an outage. Somebody opened the panel and pulled it. They knew the whole system runs off the house circuit and the backup battery lasts three minutes before it resets."
"Who knew that?" I ask.
Ansel looks at Gideon.
"Four people," Gideon says. "Me. Ansel. The man who installed the backup."
"And?"
He doesn't answer.
"The fourth?" I ask.
"Get your things," he says to me. Not unkindly. "Only what you need. We're leaving tonight."
"Where?"
"Somewhere with one door."
***
Somewhere with one door turns out to be a church.
Not a church. The house behind one. Ansel pulls into an alley in the Marigny, between a warehouse and a bar with its sign turned off, and stops in front of a narrow brick house pressed up against the back wall of a church so close they share a gutter.
Saint Casimir's. I recognize the rose window from the other side.
Gideon gets out and goes up three stone steps and unlocks a wooden door with two keys. Behind it is a second door. Steel. Painted brown to look like wood, and it doesn't look like wood at all, not up close. He puts his thumb on a panel beside it and it clicks.
He holds it open for me.
Inside, it smells like old paper and candle wax and, faintly, like somebody's been cooking onions for a hundred years.
A narrow hall. A staircase. A picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, faded almost to white.
A covered walk at the back, through a glass door, that leads to the sacristy of the church.
"The rectory," he says. "The last priest left in 2009. The archdiocese threw it in with the church."
He takes me upstairs.
The bedroom is small and square. An iron bed painted white. A crucifix. A chair. A dresser. And a window with iron bars on the inside of the glass, curled and twisted into shapes like grapevines, like something you'd see on a balcony in the Quarter.
I go to it and put my hand on the iron.
It doesn't move. It doesn't even hum. It's bolted into brick.
"They look like decoration," I say.
"That's the idea."
"They're not."
"No."
I look at him over my shoulder. He's standing in the doorway with my kit bag in his hand, and he looks tired for the first time since I've known him. Tired all the way down.
"My mother's room had a lock on the outside," he says. "This one only locks from within. The steel door downstairs opens for my thumb and Ansel's. Nobody else in the world." He sets my bag on the chair. "Nothing gets in here, Noemi."
"And nothing gets out."
He doesn't answer that.
I turn back to the window. The bars make black vines across the orange of the streetlight. Beyond them, the alley. Beyond that, the back of a bar, and a dumpster, and a cat.
It's smaller than cell nine.
I've never felt safer in my life.
***
He sits on the edge of the iron bed with his hands on his knees.
They're still shaking.
Mine aren't.
I look down at my own hands. Steady. Still. The hands that held the knife. I turn them over. There's still a little blood in the creases of my knuckles, dried brown, that the belvedere sink didn't get.
I cross the room and kneel on the floor between his knees, the way I knelt to stitch him, and I take his hands off his knees and hold them in my lap.
He looks down at them. At my hands around his.
He doesn't take them back.
My hands stop shaking before his do.