Even when I had seen you poring over maps of Nevers and its environs at that café in Paris, I had thought only of how David Oppen would respond if he learned you were planning such a trip. I had never considered it possible that you would in fact locate my little, hidden house. Yet there you were, leaning against the side of the door, scratching your pen against the paper, struggling to make it write. You shook it, touched the tip to your tongue, scratched it again—but nothing. You pried the little plug from the rear of the pen and blew into it. Finally you gave up, and after walking once around the house, hoisting yourself on tiptoe beneath the windows to peer inside, you stared for a long minute out over the valley before turning and walking down toward the main road.
What would you have said to old man Levaux, had he appeared from behind the hedgerow? What would you have done when you realized, as he approached, that the Yves Levaux you sought was none other than Itzal Etxebarria? And what would I have done? Watching you struggle with the pen, watching you hesitate before knocking a second time on the door, or standing on tiptoe, your hand cupped against the dark glass, I knew then that I could never touch a hair of your head.
I had climbed up behind the house so that I could watch you as you departed. If you had looked up onto the hillside, I think now that you would have seen me. But of course you did not look up, and of course you did not see me. You did not see that I was weeping. I know now that I would not see you again, the little American girl who had called me Itsy, the little American girl who was now a beautiful young woman who had come to find me, out of the desire to know her past, out of love for the woman she believed to be her mother—and had now disappeared forever. But at that moment I believed I wept because I had released my grip on the snare I had knotted and reknotted, night after night. I wept, I thought, because I myself had been freed from the snare.
That was the moment, precisely, when it ended. The dream had simply released me, the dream of revenge that had devoured all the long years since Miriam took her life. When I reached the house, there was no trace of you anywhere, no note, no exhausted pen, not even a crumpled scrap of map. I knew then there was no chain that could not be cut, no sentence that could not be commuted. I knew that there was no one who could not be freed, even from such a snare as I had knotted—night after night, year after year. I cannot explain the joy I felt when I thought: You are no kin to me. No blood of mine flows in your veins. It was with an unspeakable tenderness I thought: You, child, are a stranger to me.
On the heels of that recognition came another. I understood that the letter I had sent, my final invitation to David Oppen, would be the last contact between us. I knew that he would not obey my summons and appear. I was not disappointed. In fact, this realization seemed to restore me to a spotless innocence, accompanied by a surge of distilled contempt. Of course he would not appear. Holding those tickets, reading their dates and destinations, he would see the path open before him, the path that justice required him to take. He would see the path, he would hesitate, and in the end he would turn away, his future a coward’s future.
With what pleasure I envisioned for him the agony of the following weeks, the wait between his refusing my summons and the moment when finally after months of silence he would hear your voice again. You would tell him you were tired and penniless and done with traveling and wanted to come home. Without your knowing it, your voice would also inform him that I had released you. He would know then that perfect justice had tracked him down, had lain in wait, had breathed upon him, and with godly disdain had cast him aside.
It was not that my plan had failed, only that its fruition was utterly unlike what I had imagined. The moment had arrived, and the plan had been accomplished, but not in the service of revenge. Instead, the accomplishment was an intolerable mercy. My trap would shut, but not on a victim. It would instead shut like a book, a book of accounts zeroed out and closed forever.
Just as I had let you walk free, down the hill away from my house, I had let him free as well. No one would appear on the bank of the Loire at the appointed hour. I alone would be the one to finish it, carrying the weight of chain and the flywheel out into the channel. I would be the one to lay down the burden in the Loire, to cast it away and emerge again on the bank, alive, dripping, and released.
—
That is how it could have happened. That is how it should have happened. So you can imagine my astonishment when he did appear on the riverbank, at the appointed hour. What froze me was the realization that the net I had knotted night after night was not of my solitary handiwork, but that it had been a secret, silent collaboration. All along another set of hands had been just as busily knotting and reknotting
