Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Maya asked him to come with her to the house, and he went, because a name had become an address overnight and she did not want to walk into it alone.
Evelyn Broussard had lived in a rented half of a double out in the Seventh Ward, and she had not lived there in three years, and it showed in pure evidence.
The power was long off. The rooms were sparse to the point of pain, a chair, a narrow bed, a table, the furniture of a woman who had sold or surrendered everything that was not strictly necessary to the business of getting through a day.
But it was not empty. That was the thing that reached into his mind and turned around.
She had left it exactly as it was, as though she had stepped out for an hour twenty years ago and simply never found her way back, and every surface in it told the same single story.
A woman had stopped living here the day her husband died, and had gone on occupying the space where a life used to be for two decades after.
The husband was everywhere. His photograph on the mantel, in his dress uniform, young and grinning and certain of his own immortality, with the blithe certainty only the young and the brave ever carry.
His helmet on a shelf, the leather cracked, a relic she had kept.
In the hall a doorframe was penciled with a family's heights, two children's names beside the little marks, the topmost of them dated more than twenty years back.
The growing simply stopped there, as though the children had ceased getting taller the same day their father died.
They had not, of course. They had only grown the rest of the way up somewhere else, in some other life with room in it for growing, while their mother stayed behind in this one and did not.
And the papers. Maya moved through the rooms with her gloves on, and Bastien moved behind her, and it was Bastien who stopped at the table where the papers were, because he saw the thing Maya's trained eye had passed over as mere clutter.
Every denial letter had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft and furred, some of them worn clean through at the fold, mended with yellowed tape and folded again.
She had not filed these away in a drawer and forgotten them.
She had carried them. She had opened them and read them and refolded them ten thousand times across twenty-three years, the same cruel paragraphs, the same official regrets, the same signatures of men who had never once had to look at her.
The ink was rubbed pale from the touch of her fingers.
He stood over that worn and terrible little stack and understood that he was looking at the physical shape of a grief that had refused, for twenty-three years, to be set down.
And he understood it far too well. He wondered, standing in that frozen house with the dead man grinning down off the mantel, how different this woman's life might have gone if anyone had ever taught her how to lay her grief down and walk on.
He wondered how different his own might have gone.
He had carried his losses the same way, folded and unfolded, read and reread, worn soft with a century of handling.
He had simply been rich enough in years to hide it better, and lucky enough, at the very end, to be found by the thing he was grieving.
Evelyn Broussard had been found by no one.
She had been left alone in a room with her denial letters until the grief cured into a thing that struck matches.
Standing in that frozen room, he found he did not want to catch Evelyn Broussard so much as he wanted to reach her, which was a useless thing to want, and he knew it.
There was no reaching her now. She had gone too far into the fire, taken lives or nearly, put a whole city in fear, and there was no tomorrow where she walked out of this free, and there should not be.
But some part of him that had lived a hundred years in her same country grieved for her anyway.
For the woman she had been before the grief went hard.
For the young wife in the photograph beside her grinning young husband, the two of them certain, once, the way Delia and he had been certain, that they had every year in the world ahead of them.
On the wall by the door, where another family might have hung a calendar, there was a map of the city.
And on the map, in careful ink, a number of small circles, and Bastien counted them and felt the floor of the thing drop.
Most of the circles had a date beside them, and most of those dates were behind them now, and beside each of those a small neat check.
The burned ones. Her list, kept on the wall by the door where she would see it coming and going, every target and every anniversary, methodical as a saint's calendar.
And one circle, near the river, had a date beside it and no check.
One place she had marked and not yet reached.
Maya stood beside him and read it in a breath.
“That is the next one,” she said, very quiet, very sure.
“That is where she goes next, and we know it before she does it, for the first time in this whole nightmare. I am putting eyes on that building tonight and I am not taking them off it. If she comes, we have her.” She was already reaching for her phone.
Bastien said nothing, and stood looking at the single uncircled date, and could not shake the thin cold thread of doubt that had run through him.
It felt too clean. He had felt this once before, standing over a tired innocent man in Gentilly, and he had been right to fear it then.
He walked with Delphine in the late afternoon to shake the house off his skin, down through the Quarter toward the old cemetery, where the tombs stood in their white crumbling rows and the light came slantwise and gold between them.
The old dead kept their own company here, and a few of them were about in the low light, a Creole gentleman tending a family tomb two centuries in the ground, a small girl chasing something only she could see down a row of crypts.
None of them minded him passing, and he minded none of them.
She did not ask about the case. She had learned the shape of the days he could not speak of, and she filled this one with her own small talk instead, and he let her voice pull the grief of that frozen little house out of him block by block.
A church bell began to ring the hour as they passed, close by, the big bronze voice of it rolling out over the rooftops, and Delphine stopped between one step and the next with her face turning toward the sound.
She did not go under. She only stood, and smiled, and when she spoke her voice had gone soft and warm and a long way off.
“We used to go to Mass together,” she said.
“You always got us there too early. Always. You could not help it, and I teased you for it every single week, standing in an empty church waiting for the rest of the parish to straggle in, and you would pretend you did not enjoy being teased and you enjoyed it enormously.” She laughed.
“And afterward we would walk through the market, hand in hand, and buy nothing, or almost nothing, just walk and look and be seen together. And one of those mornings I told you—” Her breath caught on it, gently.
“I told you I hoped every ordinary day for the rest of my life would feel exactly like that one. Just that. Just an ordinary morning, and you, and nowhere in particular to be.”
The memory faded off her face and left her looking up at him in the cemetery light, unafraid, only full.
He knew the church. He knew the empty pews and her teasing and the market afterward and the exact ordinary morning she meant, two hundred years gone.
And he was struck, standing among the tombs, by how little the soul in front of him had changed across all that impossible distance.
Charlotte in a market two centuries ago, wishing for nothing grander than an ordinary morning with him.
Delia on a bench, happiest doing nothing at all.
Delphine, tonight, wanting only next summer and the mountains and a boring gray stretch of years.
Different centuries, the same soul, and it had always, every time, wanted the smallest and truest thing there was.
A plain life, faithfully loved, beside him.
It had never once wanted anything else. And he had spent his whole existence believing he was not allowed to give it to her.
That evening he said a thing to her he had never said aloud to anyone.
They were doing the dishes, of all the unremarkable things, her washing and him drying, and it came up out of him without permission.
“I have spent so long remembering for both of us,” he said, “keeping all of it, guarding all of it, being the only one who held any of it. I think somewhere in all those years I forgot I was allowed to make new ones too. That the point was never only to keep the old life. It was to have this one.”
She set down the plate she was washing and dried her hands and reached up and kissed his forehead, a blessing laid on a thing she meant to keep.
“Then let's keep giving you reasons to close the notebook,” she said.
“As many as it takes. For as long as it takes.” And the line went into him and lodged somewhere good, and he thought, not for the first time and with more certainty than ever before, about the small worn box under the loose board, and about how very close he was, now, to being ready to open it in front of her at last.
Maya called near midnight. The surveillance was set, she told him, a full team on the one unburned building down by the river, front and back and every angle between, dark and patient and waiting.
If Evelyn Broussard came to light her last fire, they would take her before she struck the match.
She wanted him there before dawn, his eyes on it too, because his eyes saw things hers did not.
He told her he would come. He set the phone down and stood a moment in the dark apartment, and then he did the thing he had not managed in the whole long run of this nightmare.
He picked up the notebook off the desk, and he did not open it.
He held it a moment, closed, and set it back down, and left it closed.
Tomorrow he would stand in the dark by the river and watch for a grieving woman with a can of accelerant, and maybe it would end there, cleanly, the way Maya believed, and maybe it would not.
Tomorrow felt important in a way he could not name and did not entirely trust. But tonight the notebook was closed on the desk, and the woman he had loved across three lifetimes was warm in the next room waiting for him, and there was a ring under the floor that had waited a hundred years and would not have to wait much longer.
He turned off the light. Tomorrow he would go back to the work of the dead and the burning.
Tonight, and from every night the world would give him after it, he intended to live instead of merely remember.