“It is strange—” she said at last, then paused and started again. “No. What I mean is, nothing is stranger—nothing is stranger than knowing that you’ve been allowed—that you’ve been permitted to live.”
How inert it had lain, Oppen’s testament, and for so long nearly forgotten on the top of the filing cabinet in his office. But maybe, thought Spurlock, its weight had served all along as a kind of mooring. It had anchored the tail end of a long string, a kite string stretching its curve to a minute fluttering at the edge of sight. But no, that wasn’t right, not exactly, because when he had set out in search of that remote point, a point named Clementine Abend, he had discovered that Clementine Abend was not Clementine Abend. Cut free, the kite string had gone slack and laid itself down in illegible loops, tangled on the ground.
“A thread,” she said.
“A thread?” said Spurlock, astonished that the kite string in his reverie might have been a shared apparition. She, however, had intended something else.
“That’s what it was, a thread. The codicil to his will was a thread.”
“The codicil—that paper you showed me?”
“The first document, the one I showed you—the codicil to my father’s—to David Oppen’s will. On the first day we met, at your church.”
“The day I called you Clementine Abend and you vanished—”
“I vanished because I sensed it—how the codicil was a thread. It was handwritten, unwitnessed and unsigned, so it would have been useless as a legal document. And anyway, all it said was that correspondence addressed to his daughter, his only heir, would be addressed to you, Nelson Spurlock, at the Church of the Incarnation.”
“Except—”
“Except the daughter was this Clementine Abend, this person I didn’t know, a name I’d never heard.”
“And you thought he must have had another daughter, that you weren’t his daughter at all.”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t think that. I never thought it, not for an instant. Because I was his only daughter. Everything else was impossible: that my father could have died, had in fact died, killed himself, and in France—a place he said he’d never go again. The apartment had been emptied and was under contract to be sold. It was like the whole world had been dismantled. But even then, even when the codicil appeared, with the strange names—this Clementine person, this Nelson Spurlock—I never doubted that I was his daughter, his only child. I bolted because I knew—knew and couldn’t acknowledge—that Clementine Abend was me. For some reason, for some purpose, I was this person whose name I had never heard.”
“But why would he send the codicil to you, especially after taking such pains to seal up his story, to disguise the names?”
“It would have been—yes, it must have been the last thing he did, the last thing before meeting Itzal at the riverbank. He’d sent the handwritten codicil knowing it would bring me to you, knowing you could put a face to the name he’d given me, even though that name—Clementine Abend—was one I didn’t recognize. Don’t you see? In the end, he blinked. He made it so that you could find me, if you saw fit—” For the first time, he felt the intensity in her voice turn to strain, and when she tried to speak again, it broke. He thought at first she had been seized by pain, so forcefully did she press the balls of her hands against her eyes, but after a moment, and a single shuddering breath, she wiped her hands on her jeans, her tears leaving two dark streaks on the fabric.
“It was done. It was over. He’d built his labyrinth and he’d hidden his secret inside it, but he’d built it around a thread, a thread for someone to discover and follow.”
“For you to follow,” he said, “back into it.”
“Yes,” she said, then, “No. Not back into it. Out of it. A thread to lead you to me, and the way out.”
“But why would Itzal—why would Miriam’s father send his letter to you in my care? Why wouldn’t he send it to you directly? Surely he knew where you were.”
“His letter wouldn’t have made sense without the confession.”
“But still, he could have told you what he needed you to know, then directed you to me, in New York, to learn more.”
“There was too big a chance you wouldn’t tell me anything. Maybe if he directed me to you in New York, if I just appeared, the seal on the confessional would oblige you to keep your peace.”
“But isn’t that all the more reason why he would contact you directly?” Spurlock heard the insistence in his own voice: how badly he wanted to believe his presence had not been required in the unfolding of this plan, that he was a peripheral figure, a bystander.
“And anyway,” she said, “if he had told me to go find you, I wouldn’t have gone. After Hale, the lawyer, told me my father had killed himself, I didn’t want to know more. I wanted to unknow it all. Starting then, I was in flight. Itzal knew that if he told me outright, I just would have fled farther away. It’s like I’ve been swimming like mad away from a sinking ship so I don’t get sucked down behind it. The odds are bad, they say, for the children of suicides….”
The odds were terrible, Spurlock knew, but what wasn’t terrible in her story? “Why would Itzal have cared that you read the confession?” he asked.
She looked at Spurlock directly, and a glint, something like amusement, crimped the corner of her eye. “He did care.”
She went on: “For Itzal, it was no longer a question of telling me what really happened.”
“But isn’t that just what he’s done?”
“That’s exactly what he didn’t do. He sent his letter to you, trusting you
