CHAPTER 26
THE ROSARY
POV: GIDEON
She's holding the gun wrong.
Both hands wrapped around the grip, elbows locked, her thumbs crossed over the back of the slide where it will take the skin off if she fires again.
The barrel is shaking. Her face is white and splashed with something brown that smells like perfume gone bad, and her hair is coming down, and there's blood at her hairline, dried, and blood on her dress that isn't hers.
A man on the floor at her feet with a hairpin in his eye and a hole in his chest.
She did that.
I stand in the doorway of my mother's room and look at her, and for a moment I can't do anything else.
"Noemi."
She doesn't lower the gun.
"Noemi. It's me."
"I know." Her voice is very far away. "I know it's you. I can't— my hands won't come down."
"You found the safety," I say.
"Is that what it was? The little lever?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know. I just pushed it." She's looking at the man on the floor. "He was coming. I just pushed it."
I cross the room. I step over the man on the floor. I put my hand over hers on the grip, slowly, the way I put my thumb on her lip in the sacristy, so she can watch it come.
Her fingers are locked. I have to unbend them one at a time.
"You found the safety," I say again.
She looks up at me. She doesn't ask what that means. She knows what it means.
I take the gun out of her hands. I thumb the safety back on and put it in my belt.
Then I take something out of my breast pocket and put it in her empty hand.
Her knife.
She looks down at it. At Remy's blood dried on the blade. Her fingers close around the handle like they're coming home.
"Where is he?" she says.
"On the Public Belt tracks under the bridge," I tell her. "In his car."
She looks up at me. She doesn't ask what that means. She knows what it means.
She puts the knife in the pocket of her cardigan, where it lives.
***
I haven't been in the blue room since I was twenty-four.
I look at it now over her shoulder. The rack of dresses in their plastic bags. The shoes lined up under them. The vanity with its broken bottles. The prie-dieu with the dead man's head resting against its foot. The chair by the window, turned to the river.
The chair.
She's watching my face.
She reaches into the front of her dress and takes something out, a piece of paper folded once, and unfolds it, and holds it out to me.
A photograph.
The belvedere. My mother, too thin, with the whole city behind her and her hair blowing. A boy on her hip, holding a fistful of her collar. Both of them looking at the river.
I don't remember it being taken.
I remember the collar. I remember holding it that tight, every afternoon, because I thought if I let go she'd go over the rail.
"I thought you should have it," she says.
I take it.
I can't say anything. The words won't make a line. I stand in my mother's room holding a photograph of her with a dead man at my feet and my father downstairs, and my throat has closed like a fist.
She doesn't say anything either.
She puts her hand flat on my chest, over my heart, the way she did at the Beauregard.
Then she takes it away, and turns toward the door.
"Where is he?" she asks.
***
Ansel is at the head of the back stair.
"Front's holding," he says. "They've pulled everyone to the avenue.
They think we're coming up the drive. Six down in the garden, two in the kitchen.
The library's lit." He looks at Noemi, at the knife in her pocket, at the blood.
His eyes stay on her a moment longer than they have to. "He's in there. Alone."
"Keep the stair."
"Yes, boss."
I start down the hall toward the main staircase.
She comes with me.
"Stay with Ansel."
"No."
I stop. I look at her.
"I've been in that library," she says. "He stood in front of me and touched my throat and told me I'd end up in a chair by a window waiting for you." She lifts her chin. "I'm coming."
I look at her for one second longer.
Then I hold out my hand, and she takes it, and we go down the stairs together.
***
My father is sitting behind his desk with a fire in the grate and the windows open to the river.
He doesn't get up.
He has a glass of cognac in one hand and a small black pistol lying on the blotter in front of him, next to the other, not touching it. He watches us come in. His eyes go to our hands, linked. Then to her face. Then to mine.
He smiles.
"Gideon," he says. "And the saint. You've been busy."
"You too, Father."
"Remy?"
"On the tracks."
"Mm." He sips. "I always said he didn't have the stomach.
A pity. He had lovely manners." He sets the glass down.
"Well. Here you are. I did leave the porch light on, but you came up the back.
Through the kitchen garden, I suppose. The old gate.
" He almost laughs. "I used to beat you for climbing that gate. "
"You used to beat me for a lot of things."
"Yes." He looks at Noemi. "I suppose he's told you all about that. He tells you everything. He has a box in his desk, did you know? Remy told me. Full of your things. A button. A peel of fruit." He turns my mother's ring on his finger. "The apple doesn't fall far, does it, my dear?"
"No," she says. "It doesn't."
That surprises him. I see it.
"You're standing in front of me," she says, "in the room where you touched my throat. And you think I'm Hélène."
"Aren't you? You're wearing his ring. You're living behind his door. You'll sit in his chair by his window, and he'll bring you your trays."
"I'm not sitting," she says. "I'm standing."
My father looks at her.
For a long time, he looks at her, the way he looked at me when I was a child, like a horse he wasn't sure he should have bought. And I watch him understand something he's never had to understand in sixty-seven years.
"Queen of a dead man's church," he says softly. "Well."
He moves his hand toward the pistol on the blotter.
I shoot him through it.
The bullet goes through the back of his hand, between the bones, and into the leather of the desk. He makes a sound like a dog stepped on. The pistol spins off the blotter onto the rug. His hand, his left hand, is a ruin of blood and bone, and on the little finger of it, still, my mother's ring.
It slides off.
It slides off the ruined finger and falls onto the blotter and rolls, and stops against the base of his cognac glass. A little circle of old gold in a spreading pool of red.
I come around the desk.
He looks up at me. He's holding his wrist in his good hand. His face is grey. He's still trying to smile.
"You'll become me," he says. "You already are. The locked room. The key. The box in the drawer. You'll keep her until there's nothing left of her but things."
"I became you years ago," I tell him. "She's the difference."
I take the rosary off my wrist.
My mother's rosary. Onyx beads, worn smooth by her fingers, and then by mine.
One bead missing, in my pocket, from a lawyer's office on St. Charles.
It's the only thing of hers he didn't get into the blue room, because she pushed it under the door to me the week he locked it, and I've worn it under my sleeve every day since so he'd never find it.
He sees it. He knows what it is.
For the first time in my life, I see my father afraid.
I put it around his throat from behind.
He grabs at it with his good hand. His ruined hand flaps on the desk, splashing blood. He's still strong. He's always been strong. He bucks in the chair and I hold on, and the beads bite into my palms, and he gets his fingers under the cord and pulls.
"Noemi," I say.
She's already there.
She comes around the desk and kneels on the rug in front of his chair, and takes both his hands, the good one and the ruined one, and pulls them down from his throat, and holds them in her lap.
She holds them the way she held mine in the rectory. Firmly. Like she's holding something she's afraid will shake.
"Look at me," she says to him.
He looks at her. He can't help it. She's in front of his face.
"She stopped waiting," Noemi tells him quietly. "At the end. She sat in your chair by your window, and she waited for someone to open the door. And then she stopped. Didn't she? She stopped waiting, and she stopped eating, and she left you anyway."
His eyes are bulging. His mouth is open. The beads are sunk in the skin of his throat.
"So did I," she says.
She keeps looking at him. She doesn't close her eyes. She doesn't look away, not once, not at me, not at the fire, not at the ring on the blotter in its pool of blood. She holds my father's hands in her lap and watches him die the way she watched the water rise in a ditch on the Chef Menteur.
At the very end, when his eyes have stopped seeing anything, she leans forward and says one word into his face.
"Amen."
***
I take the rosary off his throat.
Some of the beads are wet. I wipe them on his shirt, one by one, and put it back on my wrist.
I pick up my mother's ring from the blotter.
It's warm from his hand and sticky with his blood. I clean it on my handkerchief. It's tiny. I'd forgotten how tiny her hands were.
Noemi is still kneeling on the rug in front of his chair. She's let go of his hands. They've fallen into his lap.
"What will you do with it?" she asks, looking at the ring.
"She's in the Valcourt tomb in Metairie. He put her in it with his parents." I close my hand around it. "I'll open it. I'll put this on her finger."
She nods.
I look at the fire in the grate. At the logs, and the coals under them. At the old dry books all the way to the ceiling, and the velvet curtains, and the open windows letting in the air off the river.
"Ansel," I say, not loudly.
He's in the doorway. He's been in the doorway the whole time.
"Get our people out. All of them. Tell his people they have five minutes to be off the property, and after that I'll stop counting."
He looks at the fire. He looks at me. He understands.
"Yes, boss."
***
It goes up fast. Old houses do. The curtains first, and then the books, and then the floors, two hundred years of cypress and heart pine going up like kindling.
We stand at the end of the avenue under the oaks and watch it.
Noemi stands beside me with her hand in mine and the other in her cardigan pocket, on her knife.
The fire is in her face. The blue room is on the second floor at the back, and I watch the windows there light up orange, one by one, and I think of the rack of dresses in their plastic bags, and the hairbrush, and the chair by the window.
She'll never sit there again. No one will.
"Your mother's things," Noemi says.
"She doesn't need them," I tell her. "She never did. He did."
I take out my phone.
Ambrose answers on the first ring. He's been waiting by it. I can hear it in his breath.
"Augustin?"
"No."
A silence. Behind me the fire roars. He can hear it. I hold the phone up a little so he can hear it better.
"What is that?" he says.
"River Road," I tell him. "Burning. My father's in the library. Remy's on the Public Belt tracks under the bridge. Your partners are dead, Ambrose. Both of them. Tonight."
He doesn't say anything for a long time.
"The canal opens at six tomorrow morning," I say. "For every boat but yours. You don't have any left. You'll need to buy new ones. You'll need to borrow money for that. My bank will be happy to discuss terms."
"You son of a bitch."
"Yes."
"You burned your own father's house."
"With him in it." I watch the second-floor windows. "You'll call me when you're ready to talk about what's left of your family's business. You won't talk to me, though. You'll talk to her."
"To who?"
Beside me, Noemi turns her head from the fire and looks at me.
"To my wife," I say. "The saint with the knife. The one your men are afraid of. You'll sit across a table from her and you'll ask her what she wants, and you'll give it to her, and you'll say thank you."
I hang up before he can answer.
Noemi is still looking at me.
"Your wife," she says.
"Soon."
"You didn't ask."
"I asked on an altar step," I tell her. "You answered."
She turns back to the fire. But her hand in mine tightens, hard enough that the halo bites into my fingers.
The roof of the house on River Road comes down with a sound like the end of the world. Sparks go up into the dark over the oaks, a whole sky of them, and blow out over the levee toward the river, and go out over the water one by one.
She doesn't close her eyes. She doesn't look away. She watches it all come down.
And I think that of everything I've ever taken, everything I've ever bought or burned or kept in a box, the only thing I'll remember when I'm dying is this:
The last thing my father saw was her face. The last thing he heard was her amen.