“Etxebarria, Itzal,” he said to me, and then, “Monsieur Levaux.”
“Do you know how long I have waited for this rendezvous, Mr. Oppen?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I do know how long.”
“Out there, just beyond this little island, which is called the Isle of Terns. That is where she drowned.”
“I know,” he said. “With our child.”
“Yes,” I said, “with the child.”
“I assume—you brought it with you, everything—” he said, “everything necessary.” Without waiting for confirmation, he continued. “First, though, a request,” he said, pressing into my hands something he had carried, a heavy package. “It is for a priest, in America. Please send it for me. It is, you could say, a sort of confession.” The package was a block of unbound pages, wrapped in a heavier paper and tied with twine.
“It is not for the girl?” I asked.
“She does not know. She cannot,” he said.
“She tried to find me—” I said, and sensed a chill pass through his body with this news, “but she did not. I saw to it. The girl is free.”
“Free,” he said, as though the word were strange to him. “She must learn that now. You know where she is. Let my lawyer know where he can find her. His name is Hale, Albert Hale. He will tell her what happened to me.”
“As are you, Oppen,” I said. “You are free. You are free to leave this place.”
I spoke again: “I mean what I say, Oppen. It is over.” I pressed the package back into his hands. “Go find the girl,” I said. “She has no parent but you.” It was only after speaking these last words that I understood how irreparably they had torn me. They had torn him too, I thought, because he grasped my shoulder and pressed his packet against my chest. I said, “Oppen, you must leave,” trying to push him away and failing because he was at least a half head taller than I. I felt again the force of his struggle, but the force had become a sheer weight, bearing down on me, so that I was no longer trying to push him away or fend him off but to hold him up. The package fell with a thud at our feet. I braced myself against his leaning bulk. I thought I would surely fall with him, but he buckled, first to his knees, then toppled sidelong onto the sand at the water’s edge, lying where he fell, even though his head was half-submerged in the water, and the river’s froth collected in his mouth. I moved to drag him back, but he was heavy, and I managed only to haul his head above the waterline before I slipped back into a useless position against the bank.
Only then did I realize that something had fastened onto my hand. Whatever it was had pierced the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb and hung there like a scorpion or eel, refusing to let go. I flailed my hand, trying to shake it free, but it held fast. Finally, I mastered my revulsion enough to hold the thing up to the lights of Nevers across the river. The part in my hand was a needle, connected by a short length of thin, flexible tubing to the cylinder of a hypodermic, the bore large, the plunger pressed home. Breathing deeply, I extracted the needle from my hand.
Though Oppen’s head was no longer in the water, the froth, pinkish, still trailed from his mouth. I pushed up his sleeve to reveal the tape where he had affixed the hypodermic to his arm, securing it in the vein, ready to be discharged when the moment arrived. I knew then that no breath would clear the froth from his throat, that my fingers, should I kneel beside him and press them to his neck, would find no pulse.
—
If I waded into the water and crouched on the other side of his head, I could get a better purchase on his body. At first I could not move him and sat for an impotent moment in the shallows. In the end, however, grabbing him beneath his armpits, I managed to haul him down into the river, across the shoal downstream of the Isle of Terns. Once past the shallows, the current took some of the weight of his body, little by little, until finally it suspended him in perfect equilibrium. A shift in the current lifted my feet from the sandy floor, and I was forced to cling to his body because together we had begun to move with the movement of the river. Seized with fear that we would be drawn out together, I shoved myself back from him, back-paddling until my feet regained their purchase on the riverbed. By the time I had steadied myself, the combined force of my shove and the strength of the river itself had pulled his body out into the current. It turned once, then sank beneath the surface.
—
The water had closed over it all: their three lives, Miriam’s, David Oppen’s, their unborn child’s. Somewhere else, far away, a lawyer would inform you—an orphaned girl—that your father had drowned in the Loire. With what sorrow or relief would you greet that news? Unbeknownst to you, you had been released from the lie that had made up your only reality. When you had heard the news, you would know only that you were alone—in reality no more alone than you had ever been, but now in possession of the fact.
As for me, standing on the riverbank, I was a shadow only—no, not even that. I was the shadow of something that had ceased to exist.
—
I returned to my house in the Morvan hills. Did I hope that you would try to find me again? Did I fear that others would now
