I am told the seal of the confessional prevents you from seeking her out, even should you conclude she is in immediate danger. But I can assure you she is in no danger. My correspondent has given me his quitclaim: her safety and her freedom have been paid in full. Whether with me or with the girl, he wrote, he will be satisfied. I will be that satisfaction, as he has known all along. Should some impulse, however, goad you to seek her out, I have made certain that you will not find her. From the beginning of my confession I have dissembled her name. It is not Clementine Abend. I pray, Father, that you let this be the end of Clementine’s story, and of mine. As for the man who wrote you these pages, his name makes no appearance here either. He is not—was not—Daniel Abend. Of your charity, remember him.
April 2016
The cough of a crow in the distance brought Spurlock to his senses, although day had yet to break.
It was as though she had appeared to him in a dream: “I’m going to go now,” she had said, holding the package he had given her. Except he had not been dreaming. She had led him to this stone bench, she had accepted the package, and although she had said only “I’m going to go now,” something careful, almost pained, in her inflection acknowledged how long he had waited, how patiently he had kept the package, and the fact that they would not meet again. He watched her receding form until a bend in the cinder path took her from his view.
Come daylight, Nelson Spurlock would begin his journey home, the job done, his purpose accomplished. He would wait for the sky to lighten, he would rise from the stone bench and return to the hotel. There he would hire a taxi for the two-hour trip to the airport, the road straight through the flat midwestern fields. Until day broke, however, he would wait here. Though the crow coughed again, night held.
The stone bench was cold and seemed to drink the heat from Spurlock’s body, but the earth breathed the odor of a deep thaw, and all night a sleepless wind had tossed in the treetops. Spurlock had not slept either. Last night, when he’d lain down on the hotel bed, he’d felt such fatigue that he’d wondered if he would sleep through his midday flight the next day. Might he even sleep through the onrushing onslaught of Holy Week back at the Incarnation? As tired as he was, though, his eyes had not closed, and all night the sleepless wind had paced back and forth outside his window, scrabbling at it, as though pleading to be let in.
Finally, avoiding the gaze of the clock’s red eye, Nelson Spurlock had risen from the bed and walked out through the town, under the solitary streetlight swinging over its intersection and across the tree-lined expanse of the town green, passing two students smoking on the steps of a monument. “I salute you, Night Walker,” said one slurrily, plunging his hand into a bag of chips held by his friend. Spurlock made his way along the streets of the college town, past slumbering nineteenth-century houses, sensing even in darkness the affably unkempt spaciousness of the Midwest.
He had not been aware of heading anywhere in particular, but he found himself at the split-rail gate of the arboretum. Beyond it lay the cinder path they had walked down the day before. “Why not?” he said to himself, and set off down the path through what he remembered was a sort of hummocky meadow to the stand of evergreens and the curved stone bench they enclosed. This was where they had sat side by side, the heavy envelope he had just given her resting on her lap, her hand palm-down on top of it. For a moment they had said nothing. A crow spoke in the distance, and she had said, as though in response, “I am going to go now.”
—
So it was over, he thought, the stone bench beneath him colder now than it had been yesterday, his brief mission concluded. Hardly brief, though, he thought, if you counted the eight years since she had appeared in his church. “Well, Nelson, I guess you should go now too,” he said to himself. But it was still night, and he would wait here, as good a place as any, for day to break over the state of Ohio.
Ohio, as the last letter had informed him. He had found it without looking for it. On sabbatical from his congregation, he had not stopped by the office for eighteen days. He’d tried, in an exertion of will, to make it for twenty-one days, three whole weeks, to find something else to do with his time, but one of his aimless walks through the city had conducted him to the church unawares. He’d hesitated only briefly. Oh, fuck it, he’d said, and gone in.
“Couldn’t quite manage, could you, chief?” said Mrs. Nickerson when he walked into the parish office.
“Any fresh horrors in the mail today?” he asked with strained jocularity.
“Nothing much, chief. The bishop called, wants you to nominate yourself for the Standing Committee. Mail’s on your desk. Nothing from the law firm. What happened to ‘you won’t see me for a month’?”
He’d asked Mrs. Nickerson to call him if anything had arrived from his wife’s attorney. The attorney referred to his client as “Ms. Pierce,” declaring that “her preference henceforth was to be known by her maiden name.” Maiden! thought Spurlock, but without bitterness. He supposed he should no longer refer to the lawyer as his wife’s attorney, if only because Bethany was no longer his wife. Soon enough, he’d been informed, the official decree of divorce would arrive in the mail “for his records.”
