Clementine was studious, precocious at school but goofy at home and with friends, inoculated by my patient, dedicated attentions (I liked to think) against the miseries of middle school, the ennui of the only child, adrift on the slack-tide of her solitary afternoons. On evenings when I saw patients, she would sprawl on the lobby floor of our building, doing her schoolwork, or reading, or chattering at Itzal in her rapidly improving French. Of course I knew (or thought I knew) that it all had to end, that the storm-front of adolescence would arrive one day and blow everything sideways….
—
When can I get pierced ears?
Thirteen, like everyone else.
Thirteen! That’s more than five months away! Other girls got their ears pierced by now.
They’re probably thirteen already.
No, Dad, they aren’t. I swear to God.
But when I insisted she wait, to my surprise she acquiesced and asked only if she could borrow the kitchen calendar. That night, with scissors and tape she produced what she called her “countdown machine.” She had found a second calendar for the month of April and had cut it into little squares, one for each day. These she had pasted with great care on top of the days of the intact calendar, but in reverse order, counting down until her birthday or, as she labeled it, “Day Zero,” marking it with a thumbtack right in the middle of the “Zero”: her birthday, the day of what she insisted on calling her “puncturing.”
Do you have to call it that, Clem?
I do, and anyway you’re a shrink and you’re supposed to be able to deal with these things.
Was I? I suppose I was.
Don’t worry. You’ll get over it. In time.
Nothing more than a moment’s breeze, it seemed, shook the days from Clementine’s reverse calendar and turned the Day Zero thumbtack into a little gold stud in each earlobe.
—
One morning not long after that I found her at the table with a Merck Manual open in front of her.
So, what was it, a rampant systemic infection? Or an ombolism? Or was it a stroke? What’s an ombolism anyway?
An em-bolism. It’s a kind of blood clot.
You couldn’t save her?
The doctors couldn’t save her.
But you are a doctor.
She couldn’t be saved.
(Clementine was still looking down at the book.)
How do you know that?
—
What was she asking me? That was, I thought, all I needed to know. That was my profession, after all; if one could never know the answers, one could, at least, know the questions. There were so few to know. Among my patients, every quandary and confusion proceeded from one of the few, the elemental questions: What can I change and what must I accept? Of what, of where, of whom am I the issue? Can the past be touched? Can it be healed?
That, as I had understood it, was my task as an analyst: not to answer the unanswerable question, but to accompany my patient to the threshold of the mystery. It was not the answer that healed. Indeed (I thought), belief in answers was the root of all anguish. What healed was the articulation of desire, the act of setting it down, laying it out, offering it up. I believed that it was only in uttering its question—not in receiving the answer—that the soul came into being, released into longing, which is its native element. In such a way I believed myself to be the midwife of the new soul, a creature squalling and alive because hungry and exposed.
You see now how I have been repaid for such a belief, such a presumption. See with what new and terrible questions I have been repaid, questions demanding an answer: Who is the killer of Jessica Burke? Where is my daughter?
ELEVEN
Yes, Clementine has gone.
What she must have suspected in some way all along, she had proved. The old article about her mother’s death floated to the floor. The door slammed, and she was gone. Is gone. For more than a month now. For me, forever.
Forever? you say. Without hope of reconciliation? But God is merciful, you say. Like God, you say, a child is capable of more forgiveness than we can imagine, more even than we can bear.
But she had said, Jesus, you are sick! when she stomped her belongings into her backpack like you’d stomp garbage into a pail. She had repeated, Sick, Daniel, sick! and slammed out the apartment door, having informed me how much more viable her life would be had you never existed, had you, Daniel, been the one to die, you and not Miriam.
Surely then I could search for her, raise the cry! alert the authorities! Of course in my panic, in my denial, I did so. I made my urgent plea at the precinct house. The officer who took my statement asked me, Was I certain she was missing? Maybe she’d just gone off with some friends? Between missing and gone—almost no difference, yet all the difference in the world.
Gone, then, and all for something I could have told her years ago, something like the truth. How easy to imagine her a child once again, the same child, yet with a slightly different story, announcing to a stranger that her mother “succumbed to postpartum depression, and took her own life.” I can hear even now (in the ringing silence of the apartment) how she would have said it, her voice alive with the thrill of this news. One way or another, Clementine would have had to extricate herself from the tarry shadows of the
