EPILOGUE
THE LAST PEW
POV: NOEMI
One year later
Six o'clock mass at Saint Veronica's.
Eleven sisters in the front two rows. Mother Perpetua at the end of the first, where Mother Agathe used to kneel, with her veil slightly crooked because she never learned to pin it straight.
Sister Agathe in the second row, beside the novices, her white head bowed.
Father Duclos at the altar in green, 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.
He's been doing it for a year. I don't think he'll ever stop.
We're in the last pew.
It's still the hardest pew in the chapel. The wood is split along the back where somebody's knee went through it in the hurricane. I asked Mother Perpetua not to have it fixed. She didn't ask why.
Gideon sits on my left, his thigh against mine, his hand on my knee.
In church. In front of God and Father Duclos and eleven sisters.
Nobody says anything about it anymore.
***
It's the sixth of October.
One year ago tonight, I came up three flights of stairs after compline and found a brass knob on my door that hadn't been there in the morning, and a satsuma on my pillow peeled in one spiral, and a key on a chain, and a card that said Your sins are mine.
I'm wearing the key now. Under my collar. Where a veil would hide it.
I've never taken it off.
This morning, before mass, he gave me another card. Cream stock, black wax, a V pressed into the seal. It was on my pillow when I woke, beside a satsuma, in the house on Prytania, in his mother's room with the door in the wall standing open.
Four words, in his hand, pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
I'm still watching. Always.
I put it in the black notebook with my initials on it, with the others. There are fifty-two of them now. One every Sunday for a year. He's never missed one.
***
There's a new postulant in the second row.
Her name is Sister Rose. She's nineteen.
She came to Saint Veronica's in August from a parish in Houma with one suitcase and a crucifix and a way of holding her shoulders that I recognized the first time I saw her walk down the hall.
Like someone waiting to be hit. Like someone who's learned exactly how to go still when a man reaches for her.
She kneels in the second row, where I used to kneel. Her veil is grey. Between the collar of her habit and the edge of the veil, there's a thin white line of neck.
I watch it.
I can't help it. I watch the back of her neck the way he watched mine, and I think about what it's like to kneel there every morning with nothing, with thirty-one cents in your pocket and a debt you didn't make and no one in the world who knows your name.
I found out last month who her father is. What he owes, and to whom.
He owes it to us, now. Everything on this river does.
I haven't told her. I haven't told anyone but Gideon.
On Friday, a man named Dupré from a bank in Houma will receive a letter informing him that Mrs. Noemi Valcourt of the Prytania Street Valcourts has purchased his note on the Babineaux house for the full amount, and that the debt is forgiven, and that if he or any man he knows ever goes near Rose Babineaux or the convent of Saint Veronica, the Deacon's wife will take it personally.
She won't know it was me.
She'll only know that one day the fear went away, and she'll think it was God.
I let her think it.
***
At the Confiteor, Sister Rose's shoulders tighten.
I see it. The small hitch of her breath, the way her head tilts a fraction of an inch, like she's listening for something behind her. Like she feels something on the back of her neck.
She doesn't turn around. Novices don't turn around.
Through my fault, I pray, and strike my chest, and beside me Gideon's hand tightens on my knee.
He sees it too.
He leans his head a fraction toward mine and doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. We've watched nine hundred nights together. We both know what it looks like when a girl in the second row feels someone watching and doesn't turn around.
"Leave her," I whisper.
"I wasn't going to touch her."
"I know." I watch the white line of her neck. "I'm only going to watch."
He turns his head and looks at me.
And something moves in his face. I've seen it only a handful of times. On an altar step. In a choir loft, with a wire in my fingers. On a dock in Delacroix with four hundred people taking off their hats.
It's not a smile. It's the thing underneath where a smile would go.
"There's a camera over the second row," he says, very softly. "In the Station of the Cross. The seventh one. Jesus falls the second time."
"I know," I say. "I told Ansel where to put it."
***
We don't go up for communion.
We never do. We sit in the last pew while the others file up to the rail, and I watch Sister Rose kneel, and receive, and walk back to the second row with her hands folded and her eyes down, and kneel again. She doesn't look at us when she passes. None of them do.
After the final blessing, when the chapel empties, we stay.
One breath longer than the rest.
Then Gideon stands and holds out his hand, and I take it, and we walk down the aisle together and out into Dauphine Street, where the sun is just coming up over the rooftops of Bywater, pink and gold, and Ansel is leaning on the car with his arms folded.
He looks tired. He looks like a man who hasn't slept.
"Boss. Madame." He straightens. "We need to go."
"What is it?"
He doesn't answer right away. He looks at the street. At the gate. At the pink sky.
"Clémence called," he says. "At four this morning."
Gideon goes still beside me.
"Her boats," Ansel says. "Both of them. La Reine and the Marie-Therese II.
Somebody came up the bayou at three and set them on fire at the dock.
She was aboard La Reine when it happened.
Asleep." His big broken hands open and close at his sides.
"She got off. She's all right. She's at the Prytania house with Madame Odile, and she wouldn't let anyone call a doctor. "
"Whose blood?" I ask.
Ansel looks at me.
"Not hers," he says. "She caught one of them. On the dock. Before he could get to his boat." His face does something I've never seen it do. "She says she had a gaff hook."
Nobody says anything.
"She asked for me," Ansel says. "Not the boss.
Not the police. She drove across two parishes at four in the morning in her nightgown with a man's blood on her, and she knocked on the door of the house on Prytania, and when Madame Odile opened it, she said Where's Ansel.
" He looks at Gideon. "She says she wants the men who did it.
All of them. And she wants me to help her find them. "
Gideon looks at him for a long time.
"And?" he says.
Ansel doesn't look away. For the first time in ten years, he doesn't look at the far wall, or the floor, or the street.
He looks at the Deacon.
"And I'm going to," he says. "I'm not asking."
Gideon doesn't answer. He looks at Ansel, and then at me, and then back at Ansel.
Then he steps aside from the car door.
"Then go," he says.
***
We watch the car pull away down Dauphine Street, fast, toward the river.
Gideon stands on the sidewalk with my hand in his, in front of the gate where a man with a gold tooth used to lean, and watches until it turns the corner.
"He didn't ask," he says.
"No."
"That's how I know he means it."
I lean against his shoulder, the bad one, carefully. The sun is up now, gold on the rooftops, gold on the saint in the niche over the convent gate, whose halo I laid last spring.
Behind us, through the open chapel doors, I can hear Sister Rose humming as she sweeps the aisle. The Salve Regina. Off-key.
She breaks off in the same place I always did.
The high note.
I close my eyes and listen to her try again, and miss it, and try again.
Gideon's hand tightens on mine.
"She'll get there," he says.
"I know."
Someday, someone will be watching when she does.