“You go,” she said.
“I cannot leave you here,” I said. “I will bring you home.”
“Chez moi.”
“Chez vous.” I said. “I will bring you there.”
“Chez moi. Here,” she said.
“Your home where?”
“Bring me just down,” said the girl. “You go then.”
And with that she grasped the edge of the board and worked it open until the gap was wide enough to pass through. The opening gave onto a broad ramp leading down into the darkness of the unbuilt building. As we descended, a bird, disturbed, burst into flight above us, the slap of its wing-beats twanging off the foundation walls. At its base the ramp leveled out, opening into a broad, flat space. We stood in some sort of underground garage or warehouse.
“Attends,” said the girl, and moved off with the dog into the obscurity. At the cough of a match, with a sudden hiss, a kerosene lantern drove hard shadows toward the corners of the room.
“You go,” she said again. “Chez moi.”
Along the wall, beside the lantern, cardboard sheets had been stacked to form a pallet; a muddle of blankets lay on top. Without looking to see if I was still there, the girl lowered herself onto the pallet and unknotted the string from her wrist. “Vas-y, Obus, tu bois,” she said, and the dog, checking once to see if the length of string had agreed to follow him, drifted toward two enamel bowls laid out, in surprising tidiness, on a pink bath mat. The dog lapped water from one bowl, sniffed the other, then sighed downward between splayed legs, belly and muzzle resting on the concrete floor.
Crouching by the pallet, I asked the girl if she knew when she was supposed to give birth. “Baby,” I repeated. “Baby soon. One month? Two weeks? When? Bébé quand?”
“Yes,” was all she said. “Medicine.”
“You need to be on methadone,” I said, not knowing if the word existed in French. “You need to see a doctor.”
“Need medicine,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “A doctor, to help you.”
“No, medicine only,” she said.
“I am a doctor, me, un vrai médecin,” I said, tapping my sternum, and the pinprick of her pupil shifted toward me. “If you need me, you can find me. I am staying at the campground. Le camping, vous comprenez? Do you know where it is? Just by the bridge, across the river.”
Her lips parted as though to speak, but a voice called out from above, and footsteps descended the ramp, growing louder. The voice, in a torrent of profanity, was saying something about luck or chance, but when the owner of the voice reached the bottom of the ramp and saw me, he broke off abruptly.
A gaunt man looked rapidly between me and the girl. Who was I? And what the fuck was I doing here? The voice sounded young, but the face was drawn and creased in the lamplight, lips thin, teeth prominent. His French, though rapid, seemed to have been assembled from guttural, alien sounds.
“Doctor—” the girl started.
“Speak up!” he snapped, but didn’t wait for her to continue. “You,” he said to me, “you get the fuck out now.”
She needed help, I was trying to say, she would soon be in labor.
“And remember,” he said, pressing the tip of his index finger between my eyes, his voice now a whisper, “you were never here.”
“Never where?” I asked, with the unformed notion that I could find my way back to this place if required.
“That’s the idea,” he said. “This is nowhere and you were never here. Vas-t’en.”
I felt his stare on my back as I mounted the ramp and passed back out into the cold, the rain falling heavier now.
FORTY
Did I think—and with satisfaction—that I was discharging a Samaritan’s obligation, helping a girl, sick and pregnant, make her way home? Did I harbor the notion that something in me was capable of redemption, or if not of redemption, then reprieve? Did I imagine that in time I would be delivered, that messengers would be sent, disguised as the poor, the needy, the sick, even a wheezing dog on a string, to lead me out of the wilderness I’d wandered in since Miriam’s death? Was it within such notions, Father, that my pride and self-aggrandizement concealed themselves?
—
The walk with the girl out to the abandoned construction site had been an ascent, a
