A very American set of teeth, a dentist in Lyon remarked, and given all the other evidence, my North American English, and the U.S. labels in my clothes, it would seem that he was right.
Except for the catastrophe that birthed me, I’ve come through life so far relatively unscathed. On the outside of my right ankle is a simple birthmark, three black dots that, if connected, might form a lopsided triangle. The skin on my upper arm is smooth, unblemished by the circular scar of a smallpox vaccination, confirming the fact that I was born no earlier than 1971. I do have one old scar, the healed remnants of a laceration that is at once my body’s greatest mystery and its biggest clue. It’s a small mark, unseeable unless one is looking, from a cut that was made on my perineum to allow a baby to pass through.
A child! Think of all the things you’ve forgotten and wish you hadn’t: the exact weight and shape of your first kiss; the last time you saw your father, your grandfather, loved ones who aren’t coming back. And yet, how could you forget your own child? How could you not remember such a thing? When they told me in the hospital, I insisted there had been a mistake.
The doctor who examined me was a woman, small and slightly round, with a spattering of fading freckles. Finally, she brought a mirror and held it so that I could see the scar, the faint, pale line of the episiotomy.
Whether my appearance in that field was accident or design has so far been impossible to determine. In the beginning it seemed inevitable that someone would come looking for me, and the violence of my arrival suggested that someone might not have the best intentions. Better not to advertise, the police had said, and so, other than a discreet correspondence with the U.S. Embassy in Paris, the nuns’ discovery was kept quiet.
Don’t worry, the U.S. consul told me confidently. People don’t just disappear without someone wondering where they’ve gone to. Especially not people with children, people who have been so obviously cared for. Yes, I thought, hoping he was wrong, not knowing this past year would prove him so, and that in the end I’d wish him to have been right.
All I could feel then toward the dark life behind me was a flush of fear, a dread not just of those who might hurt me but of my own capacity for rage. Though I needn’t have worried. In the thirteen months since that All Saints’ Day no one has come forward to claim me. Not a soul has inquired about a brown-haired, blue-eyed, young American with a scarred front tooth.
The life I have now, and everything in it, including my name, has been given to me by the sisters. It took them some time, but in the end they settled on Eve. The first, they told me, the name given by God. It seems fitting to me, this moniker of one so irreparably divided from the life she once knew. Though often my own separation seems far more powerful than sin.
It was snowing in Lyon, a weak effort, flakes sputtering down from a low blanket of clouds, but snowing nonetheless, with the promise of more to come. Out the window of Dr. Delpay’s office I could see the city’s rooftops in their various shades of gray, flannel and slate, ash and charcoal.
“You’re still planning on going?” Delpay asked from across the room.
I nodded, turning away from the window to face him. “I spoke to the consul last week. He’s making arrangements.”
“Do you know where they’ll be sending you?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t given the idea much thought. Somewhere quiet, I thought now, with mountains and pine trees, and the earnest and honorable people you see in movies about the American West. “It’ll take some time. There was talk of finding me a sponsor. It’s all a little tricky, the bureaucratic side of things.”
“You seem relieved by that.”
Yes, I thought, though I didn’t say it. It had been my decision, my idea to go to America, and yet I was guiltily happy to put it off.
Delpay settled into his chair. He was a kind man, fatherly in a no-nonsense way, not coddling, just always quietly there, and I didn’t want to disappoint him.
“You know, you don’t have to leave,” he offered.
I thought of the few Americans I’d known, the consul and his red-haired secretary, a group of Benedictine sisters from Michigan who’d spent two weeks at the abbey. They were all foreigners to me, loud and overly friendly, and yet somehow suspicious at the same time. I couldn’t imagine a country full of these people, could not imagine this place as my home. But it was, and somewhere in it, among those strange people, was a child. Mine.
“Yes,” I said, “I know.”
Delpay nodded, as if understanding some deep and complex problem. “What are you afraid of?”
I turned back to the window, touched my forehead to the glass, and peered straight down into the street toward the glazed hoods of the cars below, the pale pedestrians huddled against the wet December chill. I could taste Delpay’s vasopressin in the back of my throat, the bitter pungency of the drug.
The doctor waited patiently for my answer. I heard him shift in his chair. The old radiators came on, clunking and hissing. Down below, a woman emerged from the front door of the hospital and climbed into a waiting cab.
“I had the dream again last night,” I said, “the old one.”
“The warehouse?” Delpay asked.
I nodded. It had been months since I’d last had the nightmare, and Delpay and I had chalked it up to the piracetam he’d prescribed when we had first begun to meet. I’d had the dream almost nightly then, a terrible, suffocating vision in which I was trapped in a deserted warehouse, running from someone or something.
“And the ending,” Delpay prodded. “Still the same?”
“Yes.” Instinctively, I touched my hand to my throat and felt the unblemished skin there. In the dream it was not so. In the last panicked seconds of my nightmare a blade flashed in the warehouse’s dim light, then arced toward me, slicing across my neck. Again and again I woke to the great gaping throat of death, my fingers scrabbling to stanch the flow of blood.
In the end, we’d stopped the piracetam, and the dream had stopped as well. Now it was back, and I shuddered at the memory.
“And the man?” Delpay asked. “Are you still seeing him?”
“Yes,” I told him. The man was a newer vision, no less persistent than the warehouse had been, and almost as disturbing.
“Tell me about him.”
“I have,” I said, turning once more from the window.
Delpay smiled. “Tell me again.”
“It’s the same as it always is,” I explained. “We’re up high, on a roof, I think. There are mountains around us.”
“And the writing?”
“Yes. On the hillside. There’s something written on the hillside.”
“Can you read it?”
I shook my head. “It’s not a language I know.”
“But the letters? You can read the letters.”
“No,” I said, the frustration showing in my voice.
“It’s okay. Tell me about the man. Is he young? Old?”
“He’s young, close to my age, I think.”
“He’s an American?”
“I don’t know.”
“What else?”
I turned back to the window.
“What else, Eve?”
“He’s dying.”
“Why?”