CHAPTER 29
THE CLAIM
POV: NOELLE
The Atchafalaya is the color of strong tea, and it goes on forever.
I wake to it. A gray-green light through a screen, the smell of wet cypress and woodsmoke, the sound of water under the floor. Not the crypt. Not the drains. Slow, brown, alive, knocking softly at the stilts beneath me, as though something out there wants to come in and doesn’t mind waiting.
I’m in a narrow iron bed under a pile of quilts. I’m wearing a man’s flannel shirt and a pair of wool socks and nothing else. My hair is dry and tangled and smells like smoke.
I don’t remember the boat. I remember the car, and the bridge going on and on over black water in the dark, eighteen miles of it, and then someone lifting me down into something that rocked. I remember a flashlight. I remember his voice saying hold still. That’s all.
The box is on the floor beside the bed.
He put it where I’d see it when I woke.
The camp is one room and a screened porch on cypress legs ten feet above the swamp.
A woodstove, cold now. A table made from an old door.
Two chairs. Shelves of canned food and shotgun shells and paperbacks swollen with damp.
A calendar on the wall from 1998 with a redfish on it.
A tin roof. It’s raining again, softly, and the rain on the tin sounds like someone drumming their fingers on a table, waiting.
There are no screens. No lenses. I look for them. I check the corners of the ceiling, and the place a smoke detector would be, and the lamp, which runs on kerosene.
Nothing.
He’s on the porch.
He’s sitting on the top step with his back against the post and a cup of coffee going cold beside him, looking out at the water through the screen.
He hasn’t shaved. His shirt is yesterday’s.
He looks like a man who hasn’t slept. A flat aluminum skiff is tied to the landing below, and beyond it there’s nothing but water and cypress knees and gray moss hanging from the trees like old lace, all the way to the edge of the world.
He hears me. He turns his head.
He looks at me.
That’s all. No screen, no number, no green dot. He sits on the step and looks at me standing barefoot in the doorway in his flannel shirt, and I feel it everywhere, the way I felt it on the square, that stove heat. Only now I can see where it’s coming from.
“How long have you been sitting there?” I ask.
“Since the boat.”
“That was hours ago.”
“Six.”
“You’ve been watching me sleep for six hours.”
“Yes.”
“Through the door.”
“There’s no other way to do it here,” he says.
I bring the box out to the porch.
I sit on the step below him, between his knees, with my back against his shins, the way you’d sit on a porch step with someone you’ve known your whole life.
I open the lid. The card. For Noelle, when it’s safe.
Two ledgers in green cloth. The bag of drives.
And under them, at the bottom, something I didn’t see in the crypt: a photograph.
Me at six, on the levee in a yellow dress, with a satsuma in my hand and the peel hanging from my fingers in one long curl.
I don’t make a sound. I just hold it.
After a while he says, “You knew. Where they were.”
“Since the cemetery.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
He waits. He’s good at that.
“Everything I’ve had for three weeks has been yours,” I say.
I don’t turn around. I look at the water.
“The lock. The room. The clothes. The fund. The ring. My mother’s life.
Even the charcoal.” I touch the edge of the card.
“This was hers. Then it was mine. It was the only thing in the world that was only mine.” I swallow.
“I wanted to put it in your hands myself. After your father. I didn’t want you to take it. I wanted to give it.”
His hand comes down on my hair. Heavy. Slow. It doesn’t pull. It just rests there.
“It’s still yours,” he says.
“I know.”
“Everything I have is going to be yours.”
I tip my head back and look up at him.
“What does that mean?”
“Friday,” he says. “You’ll see.”
I open the first ledger.
It’s her handwriting. Page after page, in columns, small and neat and slanting hard to the right.
Ship names. Dates. Amounts. Initials. Little penciled notes to herself in the margins.
Check w/ customs 4/12. Call re: tug invoice.
And once, at the bottom of a page in the middle, in pen instead of pencil, as though she’d written it without meaning to:
N.’s recital Thursday. Don’t be late.
I was nine. I played the recorder. She wasn’t late.
That’s when I cry.
Not the way I cried to the 911 operator about Ray. Not the way I cried in the ICU corridor. It comes up from somewhere under all of that, three years of it, and I bend over the ledger so the tears won’t fall on her handwriting, and I cry until I can’t breathe.
He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t tell me it’s all right. He doesn’t tell me she’s alive, she’s safe, it’s over. He sits on the step above me with his hand on my hair and lets me, and when my shoulders shake so hard the box slides, he reaches down with his other hand and catches it and holds it steady on my knees.
That’s all.
It’s everything.
***
In the afternoon his phone buzzes on the porch rail. The only signal is at the far end of the landing, standing on one leg with the phone held up toward the sky. I watch him do it, this man who owns the river, balanced on a board over the swamp like a boy.
He comes back.
“Bastien,” he says. “He’s sitting up. Odile’s cooking for him. She won’t let him eat anything she didn’t make.”
“And your father?”
“Hasn’t left the house on Third Street since Friday night.” He sits down across the door-table from me. “Remy was found this morning. On the Hélène. The harbor police are calling it a robbery.”
“Does he know?”
“He knows.”
“And Tuesday?”
“Tuesday he’ll go to Lafayette. He’s gone every Tuesday for twenty-two years. He went the week after her funeral. He went the morning after Katrina, through four feet of water.” Lucien looks out at the swamp. “He’ll go.”
“And I’ll be there.”
“You’ll be there.”
The rain gets heavier toward evening. The light goes gold and then gray. He lights the kerosene lamp and the woodstove, and the room fills with the smell of cypress burning, and the tin roof roars.
I stand up from the table.
I walk around it to his chair.
He looks up at me. He doesn’t move. He’s learned that too. He waits to see what I’ll do.
I take his wrists.
Both of them. I lift his hands off the arms of the chair and hold them in mine and look at them.
The scars across the knuckles. The ring.
The bare place on the left wrist where the rosary used to be, a pale band of skin where it lay for twenty-two years, still there, still paler than the rest of him.
“Get up,” I say.
He gets up.
I walk him backward to the narrow iron bed.
I push him down onto it. He goes. I climb on after him and straddle him and hold his wrists against the quilt on either side of his head, and he lets me, this man who has never in his life let anyone hold him down, and he looks up at me with those black eyes, and he doesn’t breathe.
“You watched me for three years,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You watched me sleep. You watched me cry. You watched me touch myself and say your name to a ceiling.”
“Yes.”
“Now you’re going to watch me,” I say. “And you’re not going to move your hands.”
His throat works.
“Yes,” he says.
I take off the flannel shirt.
I don’t know how long it lasts. The rain doesn’t stop.
The lamp gutters, and nobody fixes it. I remember his hands fisted in the quilt beside his head, the knuckles white, the scars standing out, and how he kept them there even when I could see what it cost him, even when he said my name in a voice I’d never heard him use, low and cracked and begging.
I remember the iron bedframe cold under my palms, and his heart under my hand, and nobody counting it but me.
I remember leaning down at the end and putting my mouth on his throat, on the left side, where the pulse was hammering, just below the scar on his jaw.
And biting.
Hard. Not a kiss. Not a nip. The way he bit me on the boat in front of the whole river. I held on, and he made a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life, and his hands finally came off the quilt, and I let them.
After, he lies with his head on my breast and his arms locked around my waist so tightly I can barely breathe, and I touch the mark on his neck with one finger. It’s already coming up dark.
“Everyone will see that,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Marchand will see it.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” I say.
He laughs. I feel it more than hear it, against my skin.
***
Later, when the rain has stopped and the swamp has gone loud with frogs and the lamp is out, I lie awake with his breath against my chest and my hand on the gold at my throat.
The reliquary. The keyhole. The dent where I tore at it.
He still has the key. I haven’t asked for it since Thursday morning in his bed.
I think about asking now.
I know the voice. I found it.
I lie in the dark in a cypress camp in the middle of a swamp with no road and no cameras, and a man who has killed for me more times than I can count asleep on my body, and I hold his lock in my hand, and I think: I chose this. I chose it with everything I have. I chose it knowing everything.
I don’t ask for the key.
I don’t need it anymore.