Inside Henry, some truth was descending like an avenging angel.
“I don’t want to be here. Let’s go down to the river, baby.” Henry pulled desperately on Louis’s arm, but Louis resisted.
“I need to tell you, cher. And you need to hear it. My head hurt something fierce. A real mal de tête. So I lay down right there on the ground to rest.” Louis plucked a purple blossom from the lush patch of flowers and twirled it in his fingers. “It was a bleed on the brain. Nothin’ to be done about it. The men come back and they found me on the ground, cold and still. And they buried me right there, under the morning glories. And that’s where I am still, cher. Where I been since you left New Orleans, a long time gone.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is true, cher.”
“You’re here! You’re right here.”
“Where is here, Henri?” Louis insisted. “Remember, Henri. Remember.”
Henry closed his eyes and shut out the world. It was astonishingly simple to do, a birthright, passed down to him from parents who never wanted to see the truth of anything, including their son. But just because someone refused to see the truth didn’t mean it ceased to exist. Henry didn’t want to remember, but it was too late. Already, he was surfacing.
“I waited for you. At Grand Central. But you never got off the train. Just like you never got my letters or my telegrams.”
He remembered. The piano fund. Theta. When he opened his eyes, the tops of the trees were losing color. Dull pain throbbed in his body. His face was wet. “I want to stay with you.”
“Can’t, cher. You got all those songs to write.”
Henry shook his head. “No. No.”
“I don’t know how I got here, or why I got to have this last time with you. I’m mighty grateful for it. But it’s time for me to go now. You, too. You gotta wake up, Henry.”
Henry looked at Louis. His lover was achingly beautiful. In Henry’s memories, Louis would look like this always: young and full of possibility, shimmering around the edges. Something about that triggered other memories. Who had told him about the dead shimmering? He could see a girl with bright green eyes trained on him, weighing.
Ling. Brusque, honest Ling.
She’d told him from the beginning: She could only find the dead.