—
“Nelson,” she said.
He had not heard her approach. He turned and squinted: her face was indistinct, her hair loose and heavy, hazed with a coppery border against a sky red at her back. As she walked toward him, her feet had marked a green track in the dew. “I was afraid you’d already gone,” she said. “There was no answer in your room.” She sat down beside him on the bench.
“I didn’t sleep either,” he said.
“But still I had a terrible dream,” she said.
Spurlock said nothing. It was his doing. He had handed it over to her in a thick packet.
“It’s like he said,” she continued at last, “it’s like what Dad—like what David said: I am certain that on some level I always knew.”
“What did you know?” asked Spurlock.
“Just that…just…” As she hesitated, Spurlock noticed for the first time that her hands were empty. She had not brought the heavy envelope with her. “Just that I knew. I knew ever since I knew anything that something wasn’t right.”
“What did you know?” asked Spurlock, unaware that he had just asked the same question.
“Which is absurd,” she went on. “When did anyone, anywhere, ever feel that everything was exactly right?” She was looking down at her long shadow. “But I knew, and he knew I knew, that something wasn’t right. What he didn’t know was that it didn’t matter. When I grew up, I was pissed off, like every other teenager. I know he thought I was angry because I suspected something. He thought that my anger would drive me to hunt for reasons, causes. But he was wrong about that. I was angry not because I didn’t know something, I was furious because it didn’t matter what I knew. It didn’t matter what was fucked up in him or in his past or in Miriam. It didn’t matter because they were the people I came from. They weren’t even my parents, not my real parents, and still they were the people I came from. You can’t choose the people you come from.”
“He let your mother die,” said Spurlock, the fact real to him as it had never been before. “Your mother, the girl who gave birth to you, she was younger than you are now.”
“It didn’t matter.”
“He could have saved her, but he let her die instead.” The fact faced him, in its horrid nakedness. “It was an inhuman act.”
“Inhuman,” she repeated, in neither agreement nor denial.
“I thought…,” she said after a pause, “I thought last night—or rather this morning, when I’d finished reading what he’d written—all of a sudden it all seemed just incredibly strange, being here, in Ohio, in Ohio of all places, for God’s sake. Like I’d been dropped here by a freak waterspout. That I’d been abandoned.”
“You were.” Spurlock was aware that this expression of empathy concealed within it an insistence that she accept his conviction as her own.
“Yes, I know that. I believe I’ve always known that. And I was furious ever since I could remember. What is more natural? Inhuman, you say—which is strange, because what I thought last night, this morning, was that outrage is a human thing. But they aren’t human anymore, Miriam, David, the girl who was my mother. They are all gone, and whatever they were, they aren’t that any longer.”
She said, “It’s not that I’m trying to let him off the hook. It’s that I am the hook. Once he had me, he couldn’t let me go.”
“But he did let you go. He left you an orphan.”
“Like every parent does, sooner or later. And anyway, Reverend Father Nelson Spurlock, aren’t you supposed to say something now about my being the child of God, about forgiveness?”
“Am I?” The very possibility of forgiveness struck him as obscene, an offense, in some literal way unthinkable. He wanted to say that forgiveness would be an outrage. But he said nothing, silenced by the thought that true forgiveness must always be an outrage, an affront to justice’s imperious claims. In fact it was inescapably unjust.
“Anyway, if you had known him,” she said, “you would have seen it, the sadness. You would have felt that something was off, that there was a sickness, that he knew—” She stopped.
“That he knew what he had done?”
“He knew one day it had to end. That made him vigilant. To keep it…” She paused again.
“To keep the lie hidden.”
“No, not that, not that at all,” she insisted with vehemence. “He just wanted to hold on to it while he could. That was the sadness in him. Because he knew he couldn’t hold on to it forever.”
“To hold on to you.”
“To— Yes, no, you are right: to me,” she said, as though she had never thought of it that way. “I was his reprieve, right? As his child, I was a reminder of the past—its embodiment, even, in the most literal way. He knew that one day there would have to be a reckoning. But I was his daughter, and that meant that the reckoning had to wait. He had to see me grown, to send me off. So as his child I represented…” She hesitated. “I was his crime, but at the same time, I was his reprieve.”
“I see it,” said Spurlock. “I see it now.”
“Whatever his correspondent told him,” she went on, “David knew already. It wasn’t news. It was what he’d known all along.”
Spurlock said nothing.
She continued: “Even last night, as I was reading it, I was convinced—at least, I tried to convince myself—that he’d just made it all up. I mean, he’d already made up my past, he’d made up all the whole elaborate story of how Miriam was my mother. Surely then he could have made up the story of the letters too, the postal box, the photographs, the correspondent. Page after page, I told myself that was what he’d done.”
“Is it possible?” Hope surged
