Twenty-One Towers

She doesn't go home.

At the corner of Piety and Chartres, while the car alarm screams and porch lights come on up and down the block, she lets go of your arm, turns around and walks back toward Dauphine, fast, head down, keys already in her fist.

You follow her. Of course you follow her. It's your turn.

Batiste Wash & Fold is dark, the dryers silent, the windows reflecting the streetlight. She unlocks the side door with a key on a ring of about forty keys and goes in without turning on the lights. You catch the door before it closes.

"Go home, Ethan," she says, without turning around.

"No."

"Please."

"You keep saying that word like it's going to work on me."

"It's working on me." She pushes through the beaded curtain. The brass lamp clicks on, red scarf and all, and the little room glows like a coal. She drops into her folding chair. Her hat is gone; you don't know where. Her bob is a mess. She looks at the velvet tablecloth and doesn't look up.

You sit across from her, where you sat a week ago with five dollars in your hand.

"Six what, Coraline?"

For a long moment she doesn't move. Then she reaches under the table, into a tote bag full of paperbacks, and pulls out a black notebook. Moleskine-sized, elastic band, corners soft from handling. She slides it across the velvet to you.

You open it.

The first page says UNIT 3 at the top in silver ink, underlined twice. Below that, a list.

April 1. The new man moved in. Tall. Ohio plates on the U-Haul. Carried Miss Philo's groceries up without being asked. Today's pull: The Tower.

April 2. The Tower.

April 3. The Tower. Shuffled four times. Still the Tower.

April 4. The Tower. Smelled gas at his back door around 6 p.m. Fitting at the meter loose, not old, LOOSE. Called the gas company from the pay phone at Huey's. Didn't leave a name.

April 5. The Tower.

The handwriting gets smaller as it goes, tighter, more careful, like someone trying to stay calm.

April 9. The Tower. His bike was chained at the rack downstairs. Back brake cable cut almost all the way through, right under the clamp where you wouldn't see it. Fixed it with Achille's tools at 5 a.m. He doesn't know.

April 14. The Tower. In person this time. He picked it himself. Told Huey to stall him. Cornice came down on Dauphine. 12 seconds.

April 15. The Tower. 2 a.m. Man on his back stairs crouched by the gas line. Cap, dark clothes, couldn't see his face. Yelled from my window. He ran. Told him not to use the stove. I don't know what the man did. I don't know what he did.

April 15. Louisa Street. The stairs.

April 20. The Tower.

That's where it ends. Today.

You turn the pages back and forth, as if the dates are going to change. Twenty entries. Twenty Towers. And under each one, in her neat silver writing, some small, ordinary thing she did to keep you alive while you were riding your bike to work and measuring railings and thinking she didn't like you.

"The gas," you say. "The guy from the gas company. In my first week. He said a neighbor called it in."

"I called it in."

"My brakes."

"Your brakes."

"The stove."

"I watched your back door until the sun came up." Her voice is very flat. "Then I got Achille to come check your line, while you were at work. He found a piece of black tape on the porch. That's all. Maybe the man didn't have time to do anything. Maybe he just wanted to look." Her mouth twists. "Maybe I'm crazy."

You put the notebook down. You're not sure what you're feeling. It's a lot of things at once, and the loudest one is anger, and it surprises you.

"Three weeks," you say. "Three weeks, Coraline. Somebody cut my brakes three weeks ago, and you knew, and you didn't tell me."

"What was I going to say? Hi, I'm the goth girl from the laundromat, I read cards for five dollars, you don't know me, but the deck says you're going to die?" Her voice cracks on the last word and she presses her mouth shut, hard.

"You could have said someone cut my brakes. That's not the deck. That's a fact."

"You'd have thought I did it."

"I'd have called the police."

"And they'd have said, ma'am, bikes get messed with, it's New Orleans." She laughs, without any humor. "I know. I called them once. About something else."

"You don't get to decide what I can handle."

"I know that."

"You don't get to follow me around and save my life behind my back and not tell me why. That's not your call. It's my life."

"I know, Ethan." She looks up, finally, and her eyes are wet and furious. "You think I wanted this? I've spent three weeks sleeping in two-hour shifts and riding the streetcar to stare at the back of your stupid head. I sat on a step on Louisa Street with two coffees because I didn't know how else to keep you off it. I'm not doing this for fun. I'm doing it because I'm scared."

The room is quiet. A dryer ticks somewhere in the dark, cooling.

"Of what?" you say. "The cards?"

She takes a long breath. She reaches for the deck in its black silk scarf, unwraps it, and shuffles. Not the showy one-handed shuffle from last week. Slow, clumsy, like her hands don't belong to her. She glances at the clock above the curtain: 12:04. It's Monday now.

She cuts the deck and turns over the top card.

A gray stone tower on a black crag. A bolt of lightning splitting the crown off the top. Fire pouring out of the windows. Two tiny figures falling headfirst through the dark.

"I don't believe in them," she says quietly. "I've never pulled the same card for the same person two days running in my life. Not once. Not in seven years at this table. It's a seventy-eight-card deck, Inspector. Do the math."

You don't need to. You're good at math. You look at the tower on the velvet, at the little falling bodies, and the hair on the back of your neck goes up anyway.

"So I stopped looking at the cards," she says. "And I started looking at you. And at the people around you. And that's what scares me."

She picks up the notebook and opens it to April 9, and taps the line about the brake cable with one silver-ringed finger.

"Twenty-one days, Ethan. Twenty-one Towers. And the cards didn't cut your brakes. Somebody did."