BONUS SCENE
THE FIRST CANDLE
POV: LUCIEN
Three years earlier
The fourth floor of University Medical Center smells of floor wax and burned coffee and the particular sweetness of hospital soap, and my father’s voice is still in my ear from an hour ago on the boat.
The Arceneaux woman is at University. Fourth floor. Make sure.
I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve made sure before.
I walk down the corridor in my good coat with my hands in the pockets and my face turned from the nurses’ station, the way you do. Plastic chairs along the left wall. A vending machine humming. A door at the end with a number I already know.
There’s a girl in the chairs.
She’s the only one here at this hour. Twenty, maybe.
A coat too big for her, a man’s, gray wool gone shiny at the cuffs.
Jeans with paint on the knees. Her hair up in a knot, stabbed through with a ballpoint pen, coming down on one side.
A clipboard on her knee with an admissions form on it, turned over, and she’s drawing on the back.
Fast. Hard. The pen tearing the paper in places.
She’s crying. Not loudly. Just steadily, the tears running down and dripping off her chin onto the clipboard, and she doesn’t wipe them, and she doesn’t stop drawing.
I walk past her.
She doesn’t look up.
I’ll think about that later. For three years. That she didn’t look up. That if she had, I’d have kept walking to the door at the end of the hall and done what I came to do and gone home, and she’d have been a face in a hallway I didn’t remember.
She didn’t look up.
A nurse comes out of a door. “Noelle? Noelle Arceneaux?”
The girl stands so fast the clipboard slides. She catches it and sets it on the chair and goes, and the door closes behind her, and I’m alone in the corridor.
I look down at the chair.
It’s a woman’s face. On a hospital pillow. An oxygen line under the nose, hair spread out, eyes closed. Drawn in ballpoint in maybe four minutes by a girl who couldn’t see through her own tears.
It’s the best thing I have ever seen.
I’ve been to the Louvre. I’ve stood in front of the Caravaggios in Rome. My mother dragged me through every museum in Europe the summer I was ten, trying to teach me that the world held something besides my father.
This is better.
I pick it up. I fold it in half, carefully, along a line that doesn’t cross the face, and I put it inside my coat, over my heart.
Then I go into the room at the end of the hall.
***
I’ve told her what happened in that room. I told her standing in front of the wall with her handprint on my face. I told her the eleven minutes and the pillow and the call to my father.
I didn’t tell her all of it.
I didn’t tell her that for the whole eleven minutes I stood beside her mother’s bed with the pillow in my hands and didn’t look at her mother once.
I looked at the door.
I was listening for her to come back down the hall.
***
The next night, I follow her.
I don’t decide to. I’m in the car outside University at eleven, and she comes out the side door in the too-big coat and gets on a bus, and I follow the bus.
Down Canal. Across Rampart. To the edge of the Quarter, where she gets off and walks two blocks in the rain to a church I’ve driven past a thousand times and never once gone into.
St. Anselm.
I wait a minute. Then I go in after her.
It’s empty. It’s midnight. A sanctuary lamp burning red. A rack of candles by the door, most of them out. She’s standing in front of it with her hand in her coat pocket.
She takes out a quarter.
The sign says a dollar. She reads it. Then she drops the quarter into the brass box anyway, and lights one candle, and says very softly to the saint, “I’m sorry. I’ll bring the rest next week.”
She won’t. I know that now. She never has the rest.
She stands in front of that one small flame with her lips moving. I’m too far back to hear the words. She’s praying for her mother. Anyone would know that.
Then she leaves.
I walk up to the rack.
I stand in front of her candle until it gutters in the draft from the door.
Then I take out my wallet and fold a hundred into the brass box.
Seventy-five cents for tonight. The rest on account.
On my way out, I look up.
There’s a choir loft over the back of the nave. Black. Empty. A velvet rope across the stairs.
I think: You could see the whole church from up there. You could see the candles.
I think: You could see her.
I go home and take the drawing out of my coat and lay it flat on my desk under the lamp, and I look at it until the sun comes up.
***
At seven in the morning, Bastien calls.
He’s twenty-seven. He’s already the only man I trust. His voice is thick and strange.
“I’m at the ER,” he says. “University. Somebody on the Tchoupitoulas job had a knife. It’s not bad.”
“University.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “Lucien. There’s a nurse.”
“What?”
“She stitched me up. Nine stitches. She didn’t ask me one question. Not how. Not who. She looked at the cut, and she looked at my face, and she just did it. Then she said, ‘Next time, go somewhere they don’t know you,’ and walked out.”
“What’s her name?”
A long pause on the line.
“She wouldn’t tell me,” Bastien says.
I look at the drawing on my desk. At the girl’s lines, torn through the paper.
“Then find out,” I say.
He doesn’t. Not that year. Not the next.
He’s still looking.