—
Absorbed in his thoughts, Spurlock had thrown out the message from the bishop and picked up the next item in the stack on his desk, an old-style airmail envelope, the light paper a pale blue, the words Par Avion in the corner. Across the envelope’s face, a crabbed, arthritic hand had spelled out in blocky capitals a strange name and a familiar address:
MLLE. OPPEN
CHURCH OF THE INCARNATION
NEW YORK, NY
He called out to Mrs. Nickerson, “Do we have a Millie—no, a Mademoiselle Oppen in the parish records?”
There was a brief clatter of keystrokes before she said, “Not a one. Did someone send you a mail-order bride, chief?”
Who was this Mademoiselle Oppen, and what had he to do with her? Even as he phrased the question to himself, he was aware of not wanting to know the answer. Nevertheless, he peered once more at the envelope. In the lower corner the same crabbed block capitals spelled out:
AUX BONS SOINS DU PÈRE NELSON SPURLOCK
EXÉCUTEUR TESTIMENTAIRE DU DÉFUNT, M. DAVID EVERETT OPPEN
He did not know what aux bons soins meant, and he was executor of no one’s estate, certainly not this David Everett Oppen. Surely someone had erred. He would hand the letter back to Mrs. Nickerson. But he did not move. He stared at the envelope. For an instant it was as though the years had not passed at all, as though he’d awakened from a seven-year dream to find himself still staring at the sheet of paper that the girl Clementine Abend had first unfolded the day she appeared in the church. But she was not here, and the hands the paper trembled in were his own. And of course, the name was different. A pulse of relief spread through him, only to vanish as abruptly as it had arrived. The girl had found Spurlock because Spurlock’s name had appeared on a will, or rather a fragment of a will, that sheet of paper she had received in the mail, from her father. The fragment had said that any future correspondence would be addressed to Spurlock, at the church. And so it had been. Within weeks, Daniel Abend’s testament had arrived in its envelope. But Spurlock remembered Abend’s closing words: 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.
—
Deliberately, Nelson Spurlock set the envelope on his desk, sealed, addressed to a Mlle. Oppen, the daughter of one David Everett Oppen.
As though to test its reality, Spurlock said the name aloud: Oppen.
Not Abend, but Oppen. That was his name.
David Oppen.
Daniel Abend (who was not—is not—Daniel Abend) is instead David Oppen.
—
For a moment, Spurlock shut his eyes. Behind his closed eyelids he looked out over a great congregation, pews occupied to capacity all the way to the back of his church, packed as they would be only for the funeral of a young person. They formed a receding trapezoid of faces upturned toward him in the pulpit, faces indistinct and backlit, the blare of sunlight from the avenue flooding in through the west doors. Over his shoulder, in the chancel, he sensed it, the body of Jessica Burke, shut in its coffin, the coffin covered with a white linen pall. Daniel Abend would have been among the congregation. Yes, on the day of Jessica Burke’s funeral, Daniel Abend would have been somewhere in the congregation, seated beside the doorman Itzal—Daniel Abend, who was instead David Oppen.
Oppen would be the last name of the daughter too. The sealed envelope on his desk made this plain.
—
“Are you feeling all right, chief?” Mrs. Nickerson asked when he opened the door to his office.
“Can you find a death notice or obituary for a David Oppen, in 2008?”
Another brief squall of keystrokes. “Oppen…Oppen…David Oppen, psychoanalyst, age fifty. A drowning. In France. Did you know him?”
“Children?”
“No children—hold it—yes: one child, a daughter, an Em Oppen.”
“Em Oppen…Can you find her?”
The keys clattered again.
“Oppen…Oppen. There are several: Em Oppen, M. Oppen, Emma Oppen, E. Moppen. An Oppen Emilie. Wait, no—it looks like they are all the same person, all twenty to twenty-five years old, all in the same place, somewhere in Ohio. A town called Sidon.”
“Twenty-five,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She would be twenty-five. Just.”
“You know this Em Oppen?”
“I’ve never heard her name in my life.”
Mrs. Nickerson cocked her eyebrow. “Do I get to know what this is about?”
“Not if I don’t,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
—
Of your charity, remember him.
As Spurlock read again the last pages of Daniel Abend’s confession, the plane had begun to shed altitude. They would touch down in seventeen minutes (the pilot had announced) at the Akron-Canton Airport, two hours east of the town of Sidon and Sidon College, whose library website listed on its staff roster an Em Oppen, librarian and archivist, assistant curator of Special Collections. How rapidly, suddenly even, his itinerary had snapped into place. In his satchel, alongside a change of clothes and the airmail letter addressed to “MLLE. OPPEN,” Spurlock carried David Oppen’s written testament, the pages he’d read seven years ago and kept in his office ever since.
—
For the long taxi ride from Akron-Canton Airport to the campus of Sidon College, Spurlock stared across the landscape’s bleak expanse, the secondary roads sweeping
