Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HAVOC
Four minutes I sit on that floor after she goes.
Long enough for the light around the corner to start hummin' in that way it does, long enough to get my breath square, and the whole time there's a sentence sittin' in my mouth that I have been carryin' since eleven forty this mornin'.
Monday.
That's what I was fixin' to say when she stopped me. Seventy-two hours, called Friday, which makes it Monday, and after Monday a man in New Orleans starts puttin' his own people in this parish to look for her.
She's got a right to that. It's hers more than it's mine.
And she stood there in a hallway with her back to me and her hands doin' somethin' she didn't want me seein' and told me to hold it till mornin', and I understood exactly what she was askin' for, which was one night where the clock wasn't in the room.
So I hold it.
I get up off that floor and I go down the hall and I stand outside that door for about as long as a man can stand outside a door.
She opens it before I knock.
* * *
It's slower.
That's the whole difference and it's the difference that ruins us, because the first time you can put a name on.
First time was a doorway and a fight and nine days of somethin' with nowhere to go.
You could call that weather. You could get up the next mornin' and call it a thing that happened to two people who were standin' too close together.
This one she takes my face in both hands first.
Doesn't say anything. Just holds it, and looks at me for about four seconds in the dark with the window unit goin', and there ain't one thing accidental about any of it.
The cut comes off this time. She takes it off my shoulders herself and she does it slow, and she sets it on the dresser instead of the floor, and she knows what she's doin' when she does that, and I don't have a single thing to say about it.
Bed's too small. Neither of us mentions it.
She's got a hand on the back of my neck the whole time and she keeps it there.
I've had women hold on. This ain't holdin' on.
She's got two fingers up in the hair at the base of my skull and she keeps steady pressure there like she's makin' sure I don't go anywhere, and every time I get some distance she takes it back.
"Look at me," she says.
I do.
"Don't stop lookin' at me."
There's a wet stripe of light off the water comin' through the window and across the bed and it moves when the wind moves. She's got a scar under her collarbone I didn't see in the hallway. She's got a place on her left side that makes her laugh, once, before she stops laughin'.
I say her name a lot. More than I mean to.
She says mine at the end, and it's the wrong one, and it's the only name she's got for me, and that's a thing I turn over a long time afterward.
It's over slow and it's over quiet and neither of us gets up.
We lay there in the dark in a bed built for one person, and she puts her forehead against my shoulder, and outside the frogs are goin' and somewhere out on the water somethin' big goes down under.
"Okay," she says. "So that one wasn't a mistake."
"No."
"Damn."
"Yeah."
She laughs into my shoulder. I feel it more than hear it, and I lay there with my hand flat on her back countin' her breathin' and I don't sleep for a long while.
When it’s finally morning, I try to make her breakfast.
That's an actual crime. Not the woman in the house, not the lyin', not what I did to Roy Duplessis's door frame. What I did to that skillet.
"What is it?"
"Eggs."
"It isn't eggs."
"It's eggs, Lennox."
"Eggs are a color." She's leanin' on the counter in my shirt with her hair up in somethin' that's held together by one clip and hope. "That's a different color. That's brown. What did you do to brown an egg?"
"Fire does it."
"Fire does it," she says.
"Cooked 'em on high."
"Why?"
"Faster."
She looks at me for a while.
"Move," she says.
So I move, and I stand in my own kitchen with a cup of coffee and watch a woman throw out my eggs and start over with the heat at about a third of where I had it, and she does it one-handed with her weight off the bad heel, and she talks the entire time.
"Butter, not oil. There's no butter in this house. There's no butter, Havoc. There's nine hundred dollars in a coffee can and no butter."
"Eight hundred."
"Eight hundred," she agrees, and doesn't look up, and I laugh so hard I have to put the cup down.
They come out yellow. Soft, almost wet, folded over on themselves, and I eat three of them standin' at the counter and I ain't had anything like it in this house one time in eleven years.
"Who taught you that?" I ask.
"Nobody. I worked a line for two summers when I was twenty-two and a man named Curtis screamed at me until I stopped scrambling everything into concrete." She takes the pan off. "That's most of what I know how to do. Somebody yelled it at me once."
* * *
There's a boat under the house.
Sixteen-foot flat-bottom that ain't been out since March, and I get it down and run the motor for a minute in the shallow to clear it out, and she comes down the bank in my shirt and her own jeans and one boot with the heel cut out of it, which is a thing she did with a knife at the kitchen table and did not ask my permission for.
"Is this safe?"
"No."
"Okay," she says, and gets in.
We go out about a mile and a half through cuts I could run blind.
Cypress standin' in black water on both sides, knees comin' up out of it like somethin' tryin' to get born.
Spanish moss so heavy on some of them trees you can hear it drip.
Water's flat as a table and the whole thing goes green and gold where the sun cuts through, and there ain't one sound out here but us and the birds and the motor when I've got it on, and I cut it off.
We drift.
Her hand's over the side in the water, which is how people lose fingers out here, and I tell her so, and she leaves it there another ten seconds before she takes it out.
"He wasn't lying," she says.
"Who?"
She looks at the trees for a while.
"Nobody. Just somebody who told me once this was the prettiest swamp in Louisiana."
"It is."
"I know it is." Her voice does something and comes back. "I've been mad at it for twenty years for being pretty. Which isn't fair to the swamp."
A gator comes up forty feet off the bow and looks at us and goes back down without hurryin' about it, and she watches the ring of it spread out and don't say a word, and there's a heron up in the branches doin' nothin' the way they do.
We stay out there an hour and a half.
Nobody's huntin' anybody. Nobody's got a phone.
She sits up in the bow with her elbows on her knees and I sit in the back with my hand on the tiller I ain't started, and it's ninety-four degrees and the both of us are runnin' sweat, and I could not tell you the last time I went two hours without workin' out where every man I know is standin'.
Eleven years I've had this boat under that house.
Never once brought anybody out in it.
Back at the dock I tie it off and she sits on the edge with her feet in the water, which I've also told her not to do, and I sit down next to her because it's mine and I'll lose my own feet if I want to.
"I got the thing," I say.
"The morning thing."
"Yeah."
"Okay." She braces up on her hands. "Go ahead."
So I tell her.
Lucien Arceneaux called me Friday at eleven forty on my own phone instead of Storm's.
Seventy-two hours. That's Monday. After Monday he stops askin' this club and starts puttin' his own men in this parish, and there's about six of 'em I know by name and every one of 'em is worse than me by a distance.
I tell her I lied to him. I tell her the lie — that she stashed it, that grabbin' her hot gets him a woman and not his property, that she has to be brought somewhere she'll say where it's at.
"That's why you're still breathin'," I say. "Not because I said so. Because that's the version where he needs you alive, and I handed it to him myself on a Friday, and it's true, which is the only reason it walked."
She takes all of it without her face movin'.
Then she puts her head back and looks up through the cypress at a sky you can barely see.
"Thank you," she says.
"Ain't a favor. You'd have found out Monday."
"I know. I'm saying it anyway. You'd be amazed how few people tell you things on the fifth day instead of the ninth." She brings her chin back down. "My mother had four years to tell me one thing and she used all four of them not doing it. So you get a thank you. Take it."
The water goes past.
"Now I owe you one," she says.
"You don't."
"I do, and I'm going to pay part of it, and you're not going to like which part." She turns and looks at me. "You've had it wrong since the parking lot. All of you. Storm, that man on the phone, the kid with the computers. Every one of you has been working off the same idea and it's wrong."
"What idea?"
"That I was running."
I don't say anything.
"I wasn't running," she says. "I've never once been running. I got in a car in Baton Rouge nine days ago and I drove straight here, on purpose, with a full tank and a map and a plan, and I have been trying to get to Rosalie the whole time you thought I was trying to get away from it."
The dock creaks under us.
"I didn't run here, Havoc." She's got both hands flat on the boards on either side of her, and her voice comes out level as anything. "I chose here."
"Chose it for what?"
She looks back out at the water.
"Ask me Monday," she says.