Clementine could have found them, could have cut the packing tape and lifted the lid just as easily as I had done. She could have read through the documents just as easily, in fact more easily, than I had, her French now fluent. The papers had always been here, never more than fifteen or twenty feet away. Stunned, sickened that chance alone had spared me, I waited for relief to break over me, to wash away the terror of what had not, in fact, happened. The relief, however, did not come, and what might have been seemed to press against me, a cold counterfactual. The possibility remained simultaneously present and entirely abstract, as an asymptomatic aneurysm must seem to a patient once it has been removed, at once lethal and unreal.
A couple of hours later, a document disposal truck arrived. Apparently the driver, a Russian, had mangled my name beyond recognition when announcing himself to Itzal, and Itzal had sent him away. Beaten back by Itzal but not defeated, the Russian had summoned me by cellphone from the cab of his truck.
“It’s okay, Itzal. He’s here for me,” I said, arriving in the lobby, the box in my arms.
The Russian hoisted us to the level of the truck bed on the hydraulic tailgate. “We shred right in truck, so people witness,” he explained, dumping out the box into a sort of broad hopper. In less than half a minute, the machine had devoured the box’s contents and then the box itself. “Maximum efficiency!” said the Russian. “I call shredder Cookie Monster. You know Cookie Monster? My wife she says to me, Dmitri, Cookie Monster teached you English!”
I paid the Russian’s fee in cash and watched as the truck disappeared around the corner.
A few days later, at dinner, Clementine announced, “I sold your French box to the Russians for a million dollars and one of those cool hats they wear. I figured you didn’t need it anymore.” I blinked at my plate. Clementine had made beets. She went on. “Actually, Itzal told me you had it ground up.”
“He told you?”
“What was in it?”
“Nothing was in it, Clem. Just what I told you. Papers. Drafts. Statements.”
“Then why’d you have it shredded?”
“I had several boxes shredded,” I said, lying. “Most of that stuff in the closet needs shredding. I would have done it all at once, but there was only so much I could carry down.” She looked at me, weighing what I had said. I took her hesitation as an opportunity to press home my explanation.
“You still think there was something in there from your mother, Clem. Am I right?”
“The box was from France, with the movers’ label still on it. It looked like it had never been opened.”
“You know I would never throw away anything you wanted.”
“How would you know what I wanted?” she said, suddenly flushed.
“Anything that had to do with your mother,” I said, correcting course.
After several endless seconds, she blinked and said: “I want to ask you a question.”
Those words would have chilled me any other time, but now, after her silence, they conveyed a reassurance, the pledge that she would be satisfied with what I had to tell her.
“You know you can ask me anything, Clementine,” I said.
“What I want to know is: Why wouldn’t I have stayed with either you or Mom’s parents during the hearings? I was going to end up with one or the other of you in the long run, right?”
I swallowed my last wedge of beet. “Miriam’s—your mother’s parents had alleged that I was an unfit father.”
“Okay, then, why didn’t I stay with them?”
I explained how I had been advised to file a countersuit claiming that they themselves were unfit. My chances of prevailing would be greater, my lawyers had said, even though in the short term the child was likely to be remanded to state care.
“Remanded?”
“Handed over.”
“Wow. Parked in state care. So was it like a showdown? Was it like one of those movies where two Chinese guys each jam a gun in the other guy’s eye and start screaming at each other?”
“Not quite.”
“So that’s how I was shipped off to the nuns,” she said, as though she’d been the one recounting the events.
I said that where she was there were lots of nurses, and only some of those nurses were nuns.
“So all you had to do was prove you weren’t some sort of satanic goon.”
“Easier said than done,” I said, trying a joke, but she was quiet again.
“But what did they say you had done to me?” she pressed.
“Done to you? What could I have done to you? You were hardly visible to the naked eye.”
“No,” she said, and repeated her question: “What did they say you had done to me?”
I explained that it had just been a strategy, an aggressive one, pursued by Miriam’s parents and their lawyer. “They simply hated the idea that you would end up with me, back in the States. Your mother and I had been having a difficult time. A very difficult time. Her parents had taken her side. That happens. If you were having a difficult time, I would take your side.”
“Okay, you were separated when I was born—” This was a statement and not a question. “That doesn’t mean you weren’t my parent.”
“They weren’t arguing that I wasn’t your parent. They were arguing that I was unsuitable.”
“But they hadn’t even met you.”
“They wanted to prove that I had already abandoned her, and you too.”
“What
