I reached for her hand and raised it to my lips. I kissed the back of her hand, and her lips quirked into a tiny smile. I kissed her ring finger, and the white marks of my teeth became visible on her skin. The hidden tattoo of our stolen morning together. She turned her hand over so that I might kiss her lifeline, and I did, inhaling her scent.
Philippe's memories were very visual-he didn't store olfactory and auditory triggers-and the memory of Marielle's scent was mine. It had been the same way with Kat; what had survived during the years of trauma was the smell of burning lilacs. Marielle, on the other hand, had an ephemeral scent that was like nightfall in early April, as the ground starts to cool after the sun has gone down, and all the nocturnal flowers are opening. It was a scent that remained indescribable, and I could never quite recall it with confidence, but I always knew it the moment I was in its presence again.
It's a funny way to remember someone: as a sensory phantom haunting you when they are gone. They become a collection of elusive details; you cannot remember them completely, and the more you struggle to put the puzzle together, the more you obsess about the gaps between the pieces. But, when you find these people again, when you crush them to you and inhale their smell, when you hear their voice, when you feel their touch, the pieces arrange themselves and you can't fathom how you didn't see the whole picture before.
Being with her made my heart ache as much as it healed the rifts, for it reminded me of what I had lost in the wood, of what I had let into my soul, and even though I had burned out that disease, there was always going to be a stain. A permanent mark where my humanity had been scarred by the Qliphoth. No matter how much my memory felt whole and complete when I was with Marielle, I was never going to be that way myself. I would always be a patchwork man, no matter how much her presence made me feel otherwise. Because when she was gone, all I would have would be memory, and my memory was far from perfect.
"I dreamt about you a lot after the duel," she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. "Antoine claimed victory and his second Witnessed the event, and that was the official Record. But I kept dreaming about you, as if part of me didn't believe you were truly gone.
"Water dreams. You were drowning, and I would try to save you. At first, I was in a boat and you'd be floating out of reach, and no matter how much I rowed or bailed or tried to raise a sail, I could never reach you in time. You always sank before I could touch you. Later-eight or nine months after the duel-I would find myself on a bridge and you would float by underneath. Like Ophelia, after she drowned herself. It was always a different bridge, as if I was searching for the right one, the one that was low enough that I could lean over the railing and grab you as you went past." She looked at me, and her eyes were bright. "The Record said you fought beneath a bridge, but it didn't say which one, and Antoine would never tell me."
"Pont Alexandre," I said.
She nodded, and seemed to notice I was still holding her hand. She moved her fingers so she could grip mine. "When I was in the boat, your eyes would be open and you would watch me try to reach you, but when the dreams shifted to the bridge, your eyes were always closed. And you started to sink. Each time, you were a little further underwater, until one night, I dreamed of the river and I wasn't on the bridge anymore. I stood on the bank, watching the boats move on the water, and I never saw you again. You were gone, finally, and all that was left was memory."
What is done is done, what is gone is gone.
She opened my hand and examined the lines on my palm. The jagged arc of my love line, the broken strand of my lifeline with its tiny hook near the top and the deep groove it cut into the heel of my thumb. The tiny scars that bit and chewed at the line, never breaking it but transforming it into a spiky branch.
On the night before the duel, the night we had taken for ourselves, she had read my palm. We lay in the large four-poster bed, a king-sized king, surrounded by bolsters and comforters and pillows. We could have been disembodied spirits, lost in a sea of smoke. Like the pair in Toulouse-Lautrec's painting that hangs in the Musee d'Orsay. Marielle had put her hand next to mine, and we had compared lifelines. Hers was smooth and it wrapped all the way around the base of her thumb, seeming to go on forever. I traced it over and over again, like I was following the course of a great river on a map. All the way to its source. Yes, this is where we will go. All the way to where it begins.
The Chorus tickled my spine, and something Philippe had whispered to me floated up again. Nunc. Latin for "now." Both Bernard and Philippe had referenced it, both had said the word as if it was a marker, denoting a separation between the past and the present. This is how it begins.
This is where we will go.
What is done is done.
But that which is gone didn't stay gone. The world rotated, and the cycle bent back on itself. The world ended and began again. Nunc. The word spoken at the beginning, when the cycle starts anew. And where we stood was where it began.
The airport. Marielle had been surprised to see me there. But not in the way you'd expect when someone you thought dead showed up.
"You knew," I said. "You knew I hadn't died under the bridge."
Her lips tightened to a thin line, and she looked out at the river again.
I took her silence as confirmation. "You weren't that surprised to see me at the airport. You weren't expecting me. Not there. Not then. But, you knew I would be back. Almost as if, when I did turn up, you could stop wondering when I was going to. You could stop pretending I was dead."
"I thought you were," she said, and there was venom in her voice. "For a long time."
"Did Antoine tell you?"
She laughed. I had pricked an old wound in her heart, and what was leaking out was bilious and vile. "Why would he do that?" she asked. "That would be tantamount to admitting that he lied. That he failed."
"Failed to do what?"
She ignored my question. "When he came back from his trip to the States, he refused to see me. Father mentioned he had seen Antoine, in passing, as if it was nothing remarkable." Her voice thickened. "But, then, nothing Father ever said wasn't calculated. I knew he wanted me to see Antoine, just as he knew Antoine would refuse. When I called him, he brushed me off. 'I have something to do for your father, my dear'-you know that condescending tone of his-'I have to leave tonight. There isn't any time.' As if he could hide from me, as if I didn't know him well enough to know when he was lying, only because he was so bad at it. He wasn't working for my father. He was going into hiding, until he healed enough that no one would know what had happened to him."
"He went to a spa," I said. "Down in Sardinia, I think."
She nodded as I confirmed what she had suspected. "I could hear it in his voice, and not just because his throat was burned. He had been beaten, and he was going to crawl off and lick his wounds like an injured dog. And I knew there was only one person who could force him to run and hide like that, who could hurt him that badly."
"No," I argued. "There are others-many others-who could have done that."
"But he would have reported the fight; and whatever they had done to him, he would have done worse to them. And he would have been proud of his injuries, because it meant he was stronger. But he didn't. He crept off and hid, which meant he hadn't won. And whoever had bested him had shown him mercy and let him live."