EPILOGUE
THE KEY
POV: NOELLE
One year later
It does that sometimes in a warm November. One flower, high up, thick and white as a candle, opened overnight. My mother’s nurse noticed it first. She came to the door this morning when I walked in and said, “Look, Mrs. Delacroix, look what she did,” as if my mother had done it herself.
Maybe she did.
It’s All Saints. One year.
I sit on the edge of her bed with her hand in mine. Shell pink. I did them Thursday. I do them every Thursday now. The nurse lets me.
I don’t talk to her anymore the way I used to, telling her everything. I sing.
I don’t know when I started. Some night in the spring.
I was sitting here, and I had nothing left to tell her that she didn’t already know, so I hummed the only song I know all the way through: the little tune I played on the recorder at the recital when I was nine, the one she wasn’t late for.
Au clair de la lune. Badly. I’ve never been able to carry a tune.
I sing it now.
On the second line, her fingers move.
Not much. The ring finger and the little finger of her right hand, curling against my palm. Once. Then again.
The first time it happened, in June, I screamed, and the four men outside the door came through it with their hands in their coats, and the nurse came running, and the doctor said, Reflex, Mrs. Delacroix, I’m so sorry, it’s a reflex.
She does it every time I sing that song. Only that song.
The doctor doesn’t say reflex anymore.
I finish the song. I kiss her fingers.
“Next year,” I tell her.
***
He’s waiting in the lot, in row F, under the live oak.
He’s always there. For three years I never once looked at the car. Now I look every time, and every time he’s already looking at me.
On the drive back I watch his hands on the wheel. The scarred knuckles. The ring. The rosary. And on the inside of his left wrist, just above the beads, a small dark shape inked into the skin.
A keyhole.
I drew it on him in March. In charcoal, one morning in his bed while he slept, the way I’d draw anything: the tiny oval keyhole of the reliquary at my throat, exactly its size, a little smudged at one edge where my ring finger shaded it.
When he woke, he looked at it without a word.
Then he got up and dressed and went out without washing his wrist.
He came back that night with it inked. My smudge and all.
“Marchand says it’s a lock tattoo,” I say. “He asked me who has the key.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I do.”
***
The house on Prytania is the color of old cream in the afternoon light.
The iron cage is still on the balcony. I’ve never asked him to take it down.
I have coffee out there in the mornings with my feet up on the rail, and I look through the bars at the city, and I like it.
You can see everything from behind bars. Nobody can reach in.
The study is on the third floor.
The bookcase stands open. It’s always open now. The screens are on. The second one still shows a green number in the corner, beside a map with a single blue dot on Prytania Street.
Ninety-one. Mine.
He’s never turned them off. I’ve never asked him to.
Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake in his bed and he isn’t there, and I know where he is. He’s upstairs in the cold blue room, watching me sleep on a screen, one floor above me.
Sometimes I look straight up at the camera in the ceiling and smile.
The number jumps when I do. I know, because he tells me.
The wall has three hundred and forty-five drawings on it now.
My mother. Ray Tibbs. Grant Whitlock behind his bars. Cormac Brannigan on the back of a menu, dated. And one more, pinned in the center of the wall above all the others, the only one on the whole wall that isn’t a stranger or a dead man.
Him.
Asleep, one arm flung over his head, the scar along his jaw. The drawing I started the night Remy came through the gate. The one I left unfinished on the window seat.
I finished it in December.
I did the hands last.
***
That night, alone in the study while he’s downstairs with Marchand, I stand in front of the wall and take the key off my chain.
I’ve never used it. A year. I’ve worn it on my own chain, a quarter inch below the lock, every day, in the bath, in bed, in the office on Tchoupitoulas where I sit now at my mother’s old desk with my mother’s ledgers and read the river’s books. I have never once put it in the keyhole.
I don’t know why tonight.
Maybe because of her fingers.
I fit the key into the lock at my throat. It’s so small I have to do it by feel, using the dark glass of a screen as a mirror.
It turns.
The reliquary opens.
It’s hinged like a locket. I never knew. I thought it was solid. I thought it was only a lock. Inside, the two halves are polished gold, and on the inner face of the back half, engraved in letters so small I have to hold it to the lamp and squint, there are words.
Not a name.
Four words, in a hand that slants hard to the right, the way it slanted across a missal page a year ago.
I heard every word.
I stand there with it open in my fingers until the lamp hums.
Then I close it. I lock it. I put the key back on my chain, a quarter inch below, where it lives.
Downstairs, a door. His footsteps on the stairs. Fourteen of them. He stops on the ninth. He always stops on the ninth now. He says it’s for luck.
I look up at the camera in the ceiling.
“Come up,” I say.