The purpose of your sermon, you said, was to set us a challenge. The first part of the challenge was for us to make an admission: that Jessica Burke had taken with her the possibility of consolation, the possibility of satisfactory explanations, that she had abandoned us on a hard, unmarked terrain. The second part was to make a leap of faith, not faith in the providence or wisdom of God (because that would merely be another consolation), but faith that her own journey, every bit as solitary, every bit as hard, was now over. What we must begin anew each day, each one of us alone, was now for her completed. For her, something entirely new has begun. Jessica Burke is not who is lost, you said. The faith you wanted us to have that day was the faith that we were the lost.
You went on to say more, but by then my mind had withdrawn into itself, its cloud of memories, among them the memory of what a police officer had said to me afterward, after he had asked what he called “his routine slate” of questions. “It must be hard for you guys,” he said, “when you lose one like this.” It moved me how he had said it, his grave and serious “you guys.” “Yes, it is,” I had replied. He had been right, as you had been—the hard, unmarked terrain. But against that hardness, that flinty ground, something had kindled itself in me (or so I felt in the pew), something that could never go out, a grief making itself known like a dim but unkillable flame. Unkillable! Good God, how gratified I was by the thought, by the satisfactory phrase, as though the words alone could feed her unappeasable memory—or mine. And so I wept, without shame, as though it were my due. Hiding my face in my hands, old Itzal’s impassive form beside me, I wept.
Had I written you, perhaps that is what I would have told you, how satisfied I had been by the funeral. I must admit it: what I felt then was a kind of happiness, as though a slaking grief, sweet and unkillable, were my compensation and inalienable right, as though that moment were not the last happiness I was to feel, the last of my life’s allotment, as though the death of Jessica Burke were not for me the end of all satisfactions—all, that is, but the very last.
—
There: I have made a beginning to it, this confession. Will you hear it? Will you hear it even though I believe nothing, even though I cannot say whether it is a confession of guilt or a confession of sin, or whether it is a confession at all? I tell you I believe nothing. I do not offer it in hope of forgiveness, much less of absolution or redemption. What is more, when I tell you that it is I, that I am the one who caused the death of Jessica Burke, you will not believe me. You will think there is nothing to forgive, that what I need is not forgiveness but help. That is what you will believe right until the end, until my story forces its conclusion on us both. Then you will see how the man I was is beyond all forgiveness.
TWO
But know this, Father: I never laid violent hands on Jessica Burke. In fact, after shaking hands in our first consultation, I never touched her at all. I knew she lived just six blocks from my building, but I never saw her on the street or in the neighborhood. Even in all the hours she spent in my office, how fleetingly her face turned toward me. Only for an instant at the end of the session, as she rose from the couch, would she lift her eyes to meet mine, and always as though she had forced herself to do it, just as she seemed to force herself to say, So long.
I believed I had done my part, that without reproach I had safeguarded the integrity of the analysis, revealing nothing of myself, interpreting each instance of transference, defense, or resistance with equanimity and objectivity, as professional obligation required. I believed then that she had come to appreciate, as patients often do, this neutrality, this bland and studied featurelessness in her analyst. Is it horrible that I don’t know more about you? she had asked once. Is it horrible that I don’t want to know more?
“Sometimes you lose one,” the police investigator had said when he interviewed me. Surely he was right. Who isn’t touched, from time to time, by accident and evil luck? So I thought at her funeral, as though the story had ended, while in reality it had yet to begin.
—
After the funeral, for a few days’ grace, life appeared to resume its rhythms, though I scheduled no new sessions in the daily hour that had been Jessica Burke’s. I entertained vague plans of spending that freed time in observance of her disappearance, walking around the reservoir, maybe, or if my daughter, Clementine, had a free class period, meeting her for a coffee or cocoa and an elephant ear at Esmé’s, a café we liked, just across the street from her high school. The plans, however, remained unrealized, and I passed Jessica Burke’s empty hours staring at the tetrahedron of daylight the sun cast on the strip of wall at the foot of the couch. Over the hour it would change shape, though never so quickly that I could see the change as it happened.
That shape of light had been what Jessica
