For David Oppen, Spurlock realized, the confession had served its purpose, the unburdening of a soul. For himself and for the girl, however, the confession’s purpose had become something wholly different, a purpose he could not have understood had she not appeared this morning in the arboretum. (He was aware now how much he had hoped she would appear, how this hope alone had steered him back to the bench where they had met the day before.) And appeared she had, just as she had years before in his church. Itzal’s final act had been to place that confession between them. What had been the reckoning of a debt, a closing of accounts, was now something living and shared, entrusted to their care, something (as she had put it) they could wonder about, could speak about, could hope in time to comprehend.
“He loved me, but there was no way out. There was no way out,” she repeated with a dry laugh, “and he took it. What am I supposed to feel about that?”
“Lost, for starters,” said Spurlock.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe bereft, while you are at it.”
“What I feel is maimed.”
“Maimed?”
“Mutilated.” The dryness in her voice, he thought, was a dryness beyond tears. “I loved him because he was my father. And he loved me. And now he is dead and I am disfigured.”
Disfigured. The word, uttered flatly, seemed to Spurlock an emissary from a realm of irrevocable aftermath. Her expression too had taken on a flatness, and he remembered her profile on the day he first saw her, in silhouette against the limestone wall of the church as though cut there in bas-relief. What had struck him then as her otherworldly beauty, he understood now, had been in fact that mark of aftermath. He had recognized it because he had seen it before, in a thousand different inflections but always the same, in the faces of the drifters and the lost who had sheltered themselves in the Incarnation’s unlicensed sanctuary.
“But isn’t that what we all are,” she said, “sooner or later, disfigured by love?”
“Are we?” The idea, alien to anything Spurlock knew of love, struck him suddenly as true.
“I believe we are,” she said.
They were quiet for a long moment.
“Maybe—” said Spurlock at last, “maybe when we recognize our disfigurement, we get a glimpse—we see ourselves as God sees us, with love. In love.”
“As love, even.”
“Yes,” said Spurlock. “As love.”
Afterward, without intending to, without thinking, he had assumed his accustomed posture of prayer: elbows on knees, thumbs braced under chin, hands together, with his forehead pressed against the tips of his index fingers. He had not known he was praying, much less what he was praying for, until he felt her hand slip between his palms. The shock of it jolted him, but she did not pull away. After a moment of inner tumult—what did she want? what should he do? what comfort had he to offer?—all disquiet subsided, yielding itself to the current of an unfamiliar solace, the solace that merely being there together, in that instant, was enough. It flowed from her hand and circulated through him before flowing, changed, back into her. The silence, he understood, was hers to break, and for a long time she did not break it.
It was at that moment he noticed as though for the first time what he had noticed years ago, when she had first appeared at the church: the glint of gold about her face, a ring or rivet somewhere odd, piercing her brow or the hood of her ear. But what he saw was neither stud nor loop. It was in her eye, a foil-like flash or fleck in the nickel gray of her eye, struck (because her head was turned toward him) by the sun which had floated free of the horizon. The glint was just a feature of her face, unchosen, and because unchosen, irreducibly alien and beautiful—alien and unchosen and beautiful, he thought, as every face is.
At last she said, “You will miss your plane, Nelson Spurlock.”
“I will?” he said.
“Unless you let me take you, and we hurry.”
“It’s Sonny.”
“So it seems, for once,” she said, and smiled her downturned smile.
“No,” he said, laughing, “my name. You should call me Sonny. Everyone else does.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s settled. I promise. I’ll call you Sonny.”
“And I promise I won’t call you Clementine.”
“Why not call me Miriam? No one else does.”
“Miriam, then,” he said, and this time it was Spurlock who extended his hand and Miriam who took it between both palms.
“Sonny,” she said. “Enchantée.”
—
Were you there, had you taken as I had the form of a crow in the crown of a yew tree—a crow hunched and inkily unkempt, hoarse from its dark, disconsolate colloquy—you would remark how they walk without haste, side by side, down the cinder path toward the sunrise and the eastern gate: my daughter, Miriam Oppen, and her kind companion, his head inclined toward her to listen.
For Laura
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bill Clegg, for your imagination, encouragement, and faith.
Chris Clemans, Simon Toop, Jillian Buckley, Marion Duvert, Drew Zagami, David Kambhu, and Kirsten Wolf, for your exemplary competence, seriousness, goodwill, and good cheer.
Kate Medina, for your trust and confidence and vision.
Anna Pitoniak, for your patience, precision, friendship, diplomacy, and incisive husbanding of the manuscript.
Erica Gonzalez, Derrill Hagood, Steve Messina, Robin Duchnowski, Joe Perez, Laura Klynstra, Susan Turner, Avideh Bashirrad, Andrea DeWerd, Sharon Propson, and Alena Jones, for steering the book with sure and light touch through each stage of its progress.
Families Baudot, Harrison, Gillies-Lattman, Jennings, and Rogers, for your love
