Caroline, who had glimpsed the child only for a moment, died within the hour—not from birth, but from shock. Thomas, heartbroken and horrified, did what any man of his era might do: he wrapped the ancient infant in a shawl and carried him down the dark stairs of their Garden District mansion. He did not go to the hospital. He went to a boarding house on the fringe of the French Quarter, where a kind, exhausted woman named Queenie ran a home for the unwanted.
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing. She looked at his hands—young, strong, unscarred—and then at his eyes, which were the same old eyes she had known as a child. She screamed. She ran. She came back an hour later, drunk on bourbon, and pounded on his door.
She died in 2010, at the age of ninety, holding a blue ribbon in her hand. The nurses said she was smiling. And somewhere, in the space between the ticks of a broken clock, a boy who was once an old man, and an old woman who was once a girl, finally met in the middle—and stayed there.
"We're passing each other," she said one night, lying in bed, tracing the lines on his smooth face. "I'm going one way. You're going the other."
"Excuse me," he said. "Do I know you?"
As the hands spun counterclockwise, Gateau whispered, "I made it so the boys who died might live again. So they might come home, plow their fields, marry, have children." No one had the heart to fix it. And so time, in New Orleans at least, seemed to flow the wrong way.