In short, I was to have no say in the matter. The money was Clementine’s, all of it, to spend on her grand voyage overseas. “As for which seas, Tiny,” my father had written in a letter appended to his will, “that will be up to you. Whether you go to Goa and grow conjoined dreadlocks with a Danish hippie, or hoist a prayer flag on Mount Everest with my name on it, or stopper the headwaters of the Zambezi with your boot heel, I shall be happy. Be nice to your pop, because he’ll be lonely when you go. Try to remember that his brittle and high-strung nature is not his fault but mine and his mother’s. So watch out! You probably inherited it too. A brittle lot, we Abends, so be easy on yourself, and remember your old Grumpus, who loved his granddaughter very much when he was aboveground, and loves her even more now that he’s retired to Dirt City. Extinct though he is, he misses his Tiny like mad.”
By the time Clementine reached primary school, my practice had flourished and provided more than enough money to support what was, by Manhattan standards, a modest life. We hardly left the city, and because I detested the idea of leaving her with a sitter, we ate our meals at home. The trust for her education covered tuition for the Lycée. As my salary was sufficient for all our other expenses, I decided, in lieu of taking out a life insurance policy, to transfer the money I had inherited from my father to Clementine, adding it to the larger of the two sums left for her, the one designated for her education. Substantial to start with, that fund became sufficient to fund several educations undertaken simultaneously. This plenty, however, I never discussed with her. It was only the smaller sum, the travel money, that Clementine called her “riches.”
As trustee I received all statements and audits, affording me each quarter the pleasure of watching the corpus grow. This quarterly reassurance filled me with a satisfaction familiar from Clementine’s earlier childhood, when she finally took to her bottle and began to fatten, zooming in a matter of weeks from the thirtieth to the eightieth percentile of the weight charts. What gratified most of all, Father, was that the money was not mine. I believed there was no life to strive for beyond the life we had, our little enclosure, for as long as it should last.
The death of Jessica Burke had punctured my complacency, but the letters left it in tatters. During her treatment, I had listened to Jessica Burke as though to a scout, a forward observer transmitting reports from a future that Clementine herself would one day occupy. Jessica wasn’t all that much older than Clementine, after all. I fancied that Jessica Burke’s interior world must in some way resemble Clementine’s, even though Clementine hardly ever reported on her inner world, buffeted now by the forecast storms of adolescence. But then Jessica was dead, and instead of reports from a young woman’s future, I received the letters from my correspondent.
Perhaps I attempted to comfort myself with the hope that such evil luck—having brushed past me to claim the life of my patient—wouldn’t circle back for us. Hadn’t the odds of misfortune narrowed? And yet, even the most remote and abstract impossibilities had now fleshed themselves with ominous substance. Disaster was something that had happened, to someone I knew, someone who had spent hours with me, who had told me more of her cares and aspirations than Clementine ever had, who had stared with me for hours at the same patch of office wall, where a shape of light shifted without motion as the minutes passed.
The letters had never mentioned Clementine. They had made no concrete threat. And yet, a conviction, both visceral and moral, overtook me. The letters had been addressed to me, to the postal box rented in my name, but I was certain they pointed toward Clementine, keeping her in crosshairs.
As soon as Clementine learned of the bequest for the “grand voyage,” she declared she would go to France. It was unfair, unfair that we had never gone to Europe ourselves, that we never went anywhere, that my vacations never seemed to line up with hers, that all of her friends had already been to Paris, or Brussels, or Geneva “tons of times.” And France was where she had been born!
I had informed Clementine of the bequest when she turned sixteen, having delayed the moment as long as I felt I could. Just as my refusals to take her abroad began to seem not merely resolute but perverse, this little heap of money rose on her horizon. For her it meant the promise that she would finally be able to make her trip to France, while for me it meant that she would not make it, at least not yet. There was still time. There was time for her to change her mind, for her to hand herself over to a new enthusiasm, a hobby, a sport, a crush. Why (I said to myself), practically anything might distract her from her younger intentions. Buddhism could. A passion for Indonesian shadow puppetry. The plight of sea turtles. Some boy, wounded and aloof. For the first time in my life I found myself wishing that the storms of adolescence would blow her off course.
The two years passed, however, and her intent held. Then the photograph of Jessica Burke in the bath arrived, and my sense of reprieve splintered in a needle-squall of dread. From that moment, my only preoccupation was how to prevent her from going. No doubt, I declared my motives responsible
