But I did not help her, and we did not manage. Instead, one evening, a conversation I had feared and rehearsed for years spun out of control until she had stomped the contents of her laundry basket into her backpack, sobbed and then choked back her sobs, and posed her obliterating question: “Daniel, has it ever occurred to you how much more viable my life would have been if you had been the one to kill yourself, not Mom?”
“Clementine—”
“Has it? Just once? Ever?”
“What do you know?” I said.
“What do I know? What do I know?”
“Clem, there is nothing—” I said.
“Nothing you wouldn’t deny, Daniel. Just watch: you’re about to deny this too.” And she threw, or rather shoved toward me through the air, an unfolded sheet of paper. Once out of her hand, it floated in scooping arcs to the floor. In the wavering moment of the paper’s descent, she had gone. An echo had already subsided, and she was gone.
I don’t know where she found the article, though from the look of the gray, greasy mimeographed sheet, she had printed it from microfilm or microfiche in a library. What library in New York, I wondered, as though the question could possibly matter, subscribed to Le Journal du Centre, the paltry regional newspaper that had reported Miriam’s death? There they were again, in my hand, the old words:
The body of Miriam Levaux…Pont de Loire…suicide the likely cause…no foul play suspected…after midnight Monday, 12 March…residing in Paris…
I had read these very paragraphs before, on a day when under a cold Parisian sun they appeared in fresh newsprint, a copy of Le Journal du Centre set down before me on the café table. Mathieu, my friend from the institute and Miriam’s neighbor, had found me there, in the company of a single glass and an empty bottle. The body of Miriam Levaux…The little moment it took me to read the article was sufficient for the crowd to swallow him. In a clatter of chairs and breaking glass, I sprang after him in the direction I thought he’d gone, but the waiter seized my arm.
Monsieur! Monsieur! S’il vous plaît, il faut payer!
As indeed I must. Indeed, sir, I must pay.
TWELVE
Who will console me? Would you, Father? Could I not console myself, if only with falsehood? How is it possible that I, having fashioned for years such an intricate, vaulted structure of lies, could have lost, at last, my capacity to lie? Couldn’t I say to myself: Clementine will come back? Today or tomorrow or the next day, a backpack will thump on the vestibule floor, keys and cellphone will clatter on the vestibule table, because she will have come home? I can almost convince myself, just as I can almost convince myself that I am not here alone in the apartment, another envelope open before me on my desk.
I waited until I got home to open the envelope from Jessica Burke’s postal box. Its surface was the same smooth, striated beige of those that had come before. My fingers recognized at once the weight and gloss of the sheet it enclosed: another photograph. Would I have to look once more at the abstracted countenance of Jessica Burke, sealed in its plastic sack? Or would I see this time not Jessica Burke’s face but Clementine’s?
Instead, the photograph was an image of nothing at all, just a muddled blur, crowded glints and shadows, a mottle of blacks, streaks, and washed-out patches. I squinted at it, drew it up to my face, held it at arm’s length. Was it even in focus? Was it even a photograph, not just a mass of smears? But no, it was a photograph after all, the image of an expanse of water, flecked, clouded, some distance away, though taken from directly above. Perhaps the photographer had suspended himself somehow over the surface. This picture, however, disclosed nothing, only the water, its surface without reflection, without limit save the rough edge where, it appeared, the top portion of the photograph had been torn away, and a smooth edge at the lower border, where the printing of the photograph had left a narrow margin of unexposed paper.
So I thought, so I continued to think, even after long minutes of staring, paralyzed by foreboding. What did it mean? The earlier picture, the picture of Jessica Burke in the bathtub, had delivered its news like a blow. Look, it had said, what you had thought was an overdose, what you had thought was an accident, was not one, but instead the accomplishment of an aim, planned and executed, recorded for your eyes alone. But here, in this image, there was no face, no story, only the gaze of nothingness itself. Look, it said: here the unmarked depth where your daughter was drowned.
Minutes passed before I could beat back the panic of this conjecture. The picture was not of Clementine, said nothing of Clementine, was of water only…
Who could have conceived such a torment? The image suspended the idea of my daughter drowning in an element of pure possibility. That possibility was not a threat, not a warning, but something that quite simply had either happened or not. The very indeterminacy of the photograph had delivered me into the hands of a pure and formless dread.
Finally, however, when I had marshaled the resolve to look at the photograph again, I saw that the white edge at the bottom of the photograph was not, as I had
