CHAPTER 32
CELL NINE
POV: NOEMI
Mother Agathe is waiting for me in the refectory, sitting at the end of the long table where the novices sit, with her hands folded on the oilcloth and a suitcase at her feet.
She's in black. Not the habit. A plain black dress, like a widow's, and a black cardigan, and black shoes. Her veil is gone. Her hair is white and thin and cut short, and I've never seen it before, not once in three years, and it makes her look like someone's grandmother waiting for a bus.
She stands when I come in.
She doesn't know what to call me. I watch her not know.
"Sit down, Sister," I say.
She sits.
I don't. I stand at the end of the table with my back to the window, the way Gideon stands in rooms, and I look at her.
"Your sister," I say.
"On Sunday." Her voice is thin. "In her sleep. At the end, she didn't know me. She thought I was our mother." Her hands tighten on each other. "I stayed through the funeral. I came back this morning on the bus. Sister Perpetua let me in the side door. She said you'd be here today."
"I'm here every day."
"Yes. She told me that too." Mother Agathe looks down at her hands. "She told me the order has made her Superior. At your request."
"Yes."
"And that the house is yours now. Not his. Yours. He gave you the deed." She says it to the oilcloth. "As a wedding present."
"Yes."
She's quiet for a long time. The refectory smells like coffee and floor wax and the onions cooking in the kitchen for lunch. Somewhere upstairs, Sister Marie-Claude is practicing the Salve Regina on the out-of-tune piano in the community room, and missing the same note I always miss.
"I've come to ask if I may stay," Mother Agathe says. "I have nowhere else. I've been in this house since I was nineteen." She looks up at me. "The same age you were."
I look at her.
At the thin white hair. At the hands that took an envelope out of a drawer every month for three years and put it back in. At the mouth that told me God had brought me here, and told me to pray on it, and told a man on the telephone Friday at seven, she'll be ready.
At the woman who called the FBI because she wanted to believe she was the kind of woman who would.
"You can stay," I say.
She lets out a breath.
"In the second row," I say. "Where the novices kneel.
You'll take cell eight, next to the one that was mine.
It's over the kitchen. It's warm in winter.
" I fold my hands. "You'll take your turn at the laundry and the floors like everyone else.
And you'll never hold a key to anything in this house again. "
She stares at me.
She could say no. She could pick up her suitcase and walk out the side door onto Dauphine Street with nowhere to go.
She won't. I know she won't. I know exactly what it is to have nowhere to go.
"Yes," she says finally. "Thank you."
She looks at me for a moment longer.
"They say things about you," she says. "On the bus from Lafayette, there were two men from the docks.
They were talking about a queen. The Deacon's queen, who poisons men in cafés and cuts them on rooftops.
" Her voice is very small. "I told myself it couldn't be you.
The girl who came to the chancery with blood on her chin and couldn't speak. "
"It's me."
"Yes," Mother Agathe says. "I see that now."
She picks up her suitcase and goes out, toward the third floor, toward cell eight.
I stand in the refectory and listen to Sister Marie-Claude miss the high note, and try again, and miss it again.
***
Sister Perpetua finds me on the scaffold at two.
Mother Perpetua, now. She hasn't gotten used to it.
She keeps forgetting she's allowed to sit in the big chair at the end of the refectory table.
She climbs the first two rungs of the scaffold the way she did the day she brought me sandwiches, with her skirt bunched in one hand, and holds something up to me in the other.
A square of gold leaf.
Crumpled at one corner. A little dusty.
"You dropped it," she says. "That Tuesday. When Mr. Remy came." She doesn't look at me. "It was on the tiles by the scaffold after they took you. I picked it up and kept it in my pocket. I didn't know what else to do." She holds it higher. "I thought you'd want to finish."
I take it from her fingers.
I look at it for a long time. The square of leaf I was laying on Saint Jude's halo when the chapel door banged open and a man with pig's blood on his shirt said he's been shot. Two weeks ago. Two weeks and three dead men and a burned house and a café by the cathedral ago.
"Thank you, Mother," I say.
She goes pink to the ears.
I lay it.
Saint Jude, patron of lost causes, with a face like a tired uncle and a crack down his cheek I filled with gesso, gets the last quarter of his halo. I hold my breath. The leaf settles onto the size and takes. I tamp it with the tip of the brush.
I burnish it.
It comes up bright.
The bishop's altar is finished.
I sit back on the plank and look at it. Four saints. Four halos. Every one of them laid by my hand, square by square, holding my breath, in a house I own.
Below me, in the doorway of the side chapel, Mother Perpetua starts to cry again.
When she's gone, I take the notebook out of my kit bag.
It's new. Black leather, soft as a glove, with heavy cream pages and my initials pressed into the corner in gold. N.V. Gideon gave it to me the morning after the wedding, on the breakfast tray, beside a satsuma peeled in one spiral. There was no card. There didn't need to be.
The first page is still blank.
I sit on the plank of the scaffold with my legs hanging over the edge and the bishop's altar shining behind me, and I uncap my pen, and I write.
There's a man in the last pew who doesn't take communion.
I know his name now. I know what his hands look like. I know what he did on the Chef Menteur and what he did in a kitchen with a sabre and what he did to his father with his mother's beads.
I know what I did too.
I'm not sorry. I've stopped asking to be.
I turned around.
I close it.
I don't hide it under anything. I put it back in my bag on top of everything else, where anybody could find it.
He'll read it tonight. I want him to.
***
At five, the chapel doors open for vespers, and I feel it on the back of my neck.
I don't turn around.
I kneel in the second row where I've always knelt, beside Sister Marie-Claude and, now, Sister Agathe, with her white head bowed.
I fold my hands. I look at the altar. And I feel him settle into the last pew behind me, and his eyes come down on the white line of my neck above my collar, warm, and heavy, and patient.
Twenty-nine days I felt that without knowing his name.
Now I know everything.
The Magnificat. The old women's voices, cracked and thin. Father Duclos fumbling with his book, glancing toward the back of the chapel every few minutes like a man checking if a dog is still in the yard.
At the end, when the others file out, I stay kneeling.
One breath longer than the rest.
Then I get up and go down the aisle to the last pew, and he's there, in his black coat, with his arm healing and his mother's bead on his finger and the rosary on his wrist, and he stands up when I come.
"Mrs. Valcourt," he says.
"Come upstairs," I tell him. "I want to show you something."
***
The back stairs. Three flights. The long hall on the third floor that smells like floor wax and onions.
The last door.
Cell nine.
The brass knob he put on it. The lock. The key he gave me on a gold chain, the first night, that I've worn every day since, even now, under the collar of my dress where a veil would cover it.
I take the chain off over my head.
I put the key in the lock and turn it, and it turns with the same heavy oiled click I felt in my back teeth the first night. For a second I'm twenty-two and alone and there's a satsuma on my pillow and I'm on my knees on the floor with a card in both hands.
I open the door.
It's so small.
I'd forgotten how small. Eight feet by ten. An iron bed with a thin mattress and a grey blanket. A chair. A curtain over a closet the size of a coffin. A window painted shut, looking out at the back of the kitchen roof.
And over the bed, on the wall, a brass crucifix, turned to face the plaster.
Gideon stands in the doorway behind me.
He's been in here before. Once. The first night, with a man who owed him more than his life putting in the lock, while the sisters were at compline. He stood in the middle of this floor and peeled a satsuma on my bed and left.
He's never been in here with me in it.
I go to the bed and kneel on the thin mattress and reach up and take the crucifix off its nail.
It's heavier than I remember. Brass, hollow at the back. There's a tiny hole in the body, in Christ's side, where the spear goes in. So small you'd never see it unless you knew.
I turn it around.
I hang it back on the nail, facing the room. Facing the bed.
"Nothing in this house faces the wall," I say.
I turn around on my knees on the mattress and look at him.
He hasn't moved from the doorway. He's looking at the crucifix. At the tiny hole in its side. Then at me.
"It's still recording," he says.
"I know."
"To the loft. At Saint Casimir's. Everything goes to the loft."
"I know." I start on the buttons of my dress. The black one, the one I wore to the café. "I want you to have it."
He comes in.
He shuts the door behind him. It's so narrow that when he turns around, his back is against it and his knees are almost touching the end of the bed.
"Lock it," I tell him.
He reaches behind him without looking and turns the key.
***
The bed's too small for him. His feet hang off the end. The springs complain under both of us, loud, and I think of Sister Agathe on the other side of the wall, and Sister Marie-Claude across the corridor, and I don't care.
I'm on top of him on a mattress I cried into for three years.
I've got my dress off and my slip off and his shirt open, and my hands flat on the gold still caught in the scars on his back where it hasn't worn off, and his hands on my hips, and I'm riding him in cell nine under a crucifix with a camera in its side, slowly, with my hair coming down out of six pins, and I'm looking up.
Straight into the lens.
"Every night," I say. "For a month. I lay in this bed and touched myself and thought about you, and you watched."
"Yes."
"You watched me say your name before I knew it."
"Yes."
"Did you touch yourself?"
He looks up at me from my old pillow. His face in the grey light from the painted window.
"No," he says. "Not once. I held my mother's rosary until it cut my hand."
"Why?"
"Because it wasn't mine yet," he says. "You weren't mine yet. I don't take what isn't given."
I stop moving.
I look down at him, the Deacon, the monster in the last pew, who took my habit and my veil and my notebook and my tree and my father and my whole life, one piece at a time. Who never once took the thing I hadn't handed him.
I lean down. I put my mouth against his ear.
"It's given," I tell him.
And I move again, harder, and he makes a sound I've never heard him make, and his hands come up and pull me down against him, and the old iron springs of cell nine shriek like the Salve Regina's high note, the one I've never hit in my life.
I hit it.
I hit it with my mouth open against his neck and my whole body shaking, and he follows me with my name in his throat, and somewhere down the hall a door opens and closes again very quickly, and neither of us cares.
***
After, I lie on top of him in the narrow bed with his heart going under my ear.
The window's gone dark. The kitchen roof. A streetlamp coming on somewhere on Dauphine. The smell of onions, and him, and us.
Over my head, on the wall, the brass Christ looks down at us with his tiny eye in his side, and I look back at him.
"Tonight," I say, "when we get home to Prytania."
"Mm."
"I want to watch it."
He goes very still under me.
"In the loft," I say. "In your chair. I want to sit in your lap in front of your screens and watch it with you. All of it." I lift my head and look at him. "And then I want to go through every recording you have. Three years. I want to see what you saw."
He looks at me for a long, long time.
"All of it?" he says.
"All of it."
"There are nine hundred nights."
"Then we'll start tonight."
I turn my head on his chest.
I look straight into the lens in the crucifix. At the tiny dark eye in its side. At the man in the choir loft, in the chair, in the dark, who's going to be us.
Tonight, we'll watch it together.