Chapter 5 #2
“We walked through Jackson Square.” The words came in a rush now, eager, tumbling.
“Your hand around mine, the whole way across, in front of everyone, and I remember thinking how bold it was and not caring. You had brought me flowers that morning. Not for any reason. You said they had made you think of me, and you were embarrassed to have said it, and I kept them until they fell apart.” She pressed her hand flat to his chest. “There was a bench. We sat on a bench and listened to a man play, and you put your coat around my shoulders, and I was so happy I could not look at you because I thought you would see all of it on my face.”
He held still and let her fill the room with it.
He had walked her across that square. He had carried those flowers up two flights with his ears burning, and he had draped that coat over those shoulders, and he had watched her refuse to meet his eyes on that bench and known exactly why.
Every picture she handed him was one he had carried alone in the dark for longer than the city had been American.
To hear her say them back to him, in her own voice, glad, was a joy so sharp it took the breath out of him and left an ache where the breath had been.
He had lived that afternoon in Jackson Square a hundred and more years ago, and he had lived it alone every day since, along with all the rest of it, a hoard of bright small moments no one else in the turning world remembered or could.
That was the particular loneliness of outliving everyone.
Not the grief of the deaths, which a man could learn to bear.
The slow erasure of the joys, every shared afternoon becoming, one funeral at a time, a thing only he still carried.
And now she was giving them back. One by one, out of the smoke, she was handing him the pieces of a happiness he had believed lost past all recovering, and he sat on the edge of their bed and received them, a man given water in a desert he had long stopped believing would ever end.
“We danced,” she said. “One night, in a kitchen, after the supper we ruined. We could not cook. Neither of us could cook. We burned a chicken so badly we ate bread and butter standing up, and then you turned me around the floor anyway with no music at all, and I thought, this. I thought, I will take a hundred years of this.” Her face crumpled and cleared.
“We were going to have a life, Bastien. I can feel how much we wanted it.”
“You did,” he said, because he could not say we, not yet, not without the rest of it pouring out behind it. “You wanted it more than anything.”
She studied him through the wet of her eyes, and for a moment he thought the question was finally coming, the one he could not answer in this room tonight.
It did not come. The remembering had emptied her again, and she sank back into the pillow with his name on her lips and slid down into sleep between one word and the next.
He waited until her breathing had gone slow and even. Then he went to the desk.
From the bottom drawer, under the case files and the spare cartridges and the things he did not look at, he took an old leather notebook, soft and dark with handling, most of its pages still empty.
He uncapped a pen and he wrote. The square and the flowers.
The bench and the coat and the man playing for coins.
The ruined chicken and the dance with no music.
He wrote them in her words where he could remember her words, and in his own where he could not, and he was careful with all of it, because a thing written down could not be taken twice.
He had not heard her stir. Her voice came soft from the doorway. “What are you doing?”
She stood with the quilt around her, watching him bent over the little book.
“I am writing them down,” he said. “All of them. The ones you bring back.”
“Why?”
He looked at the page, then at her. “Because I do not want either of us to lose them again.”
She came and read over his shoulder, and she did not ask how he had known the color of the flowers she had not described, and he did not offer it. She kissed the top of his head and went back to bed, and after a while her breathing told him she had gone under for good.
He stayed at the desk with the lamp low and read back what he had written.
For more than a century he had been the only keeper of this, the single living record of a life two people had built and one fire had ended.
He had guarded it alone because there had been no one to help him carry it.
He turned a page and smoothed it flat under his hand.
Piece by piece, in the worst possible way, by a road he could not explain and could not stop, she was finding her way back to the life they had lost. He did not yet know whether that was a mercy or the cruelest thing that had ever happened to either of them.
Outside, the Quarter had gone down into its deep-night self, the tourists gone home, the lamps burning low, the city belonging for a few hours only to those who did not sleep and those who no longer could.
He sat among them with the little book open under his hand, keeping his lonely watch over a life climbing back out of the grave, and for the first time it occurred to him to wonder what would become of the two of them on the day she finally remembered all of it.