Before I could share these perceptive insights with my host, we swooshed past Ms. Franklin, our eyes averted.
I felt Jen relax.
Until we heard footsteps fast approaching from behind and a woman’s voice calling out.
“Officer!”
You’re a cop, and you stop when someone calls to you. Even if this one was about to torment you. Even if she helped set Jen’s nightmare into motion. A woman who lied in court, a woman who may have taken a bribe.
We stopped. Turned. Looked.
Makela Franklin was one beautiful woman. But right now, her beauty was marred because she looked like a tangle of words were stuffed into her mouth and distorting her whole face.
“I’m—”
“I remember who you are,” Jen said, perhaps to shorten Ms. Franklin’s misery or perhaps to shorten her own.
We waited.
Ms. Franklin started, stopped, started, stopped.
Jen, bless her soul, took mercy on her. She touched her arm. “Forget it,” Jen said. “Shit happens.”
And as if that was a magical blessing, Ms. Franklin was beautiful again. Dazzling, really.
“Can I say something?” she asked.
Jen nodded. Waited.
“I’ve been planning this since the summer. Just in case I ever ran into you.”
Jen glanced down to make sure Makela didn’t have a weapon in her hand. Once a cop …
“It’s, well …”
Jen turned her head and gazed up the pathway. Makela rushed to speak. “I lied in court. I hope you won’t arrest me, or whatever you can do, but this has been killing me. I lied and that weasel of a fascist walked free.”
“Good to get things off your chest.”
Jen started turning to go.
“Wait!” Makela said. “I need you to know it was for my brother. He’s eleven years older than me. Tested positive. Our parents are in their late sixties and are too old to exit. They sent someone—”
“Richard O’Neil? The father?”
“I don’t know. A woman and a man. Sort of perfect looking. They told me that if I testified that I couldn’t identify James O’Neil for sure, they’d get my brother the treatment—you know, just like with exit. He’d be okay.”
“So you lied.”
“I saved my brother.”
Jen thought about that. A life versus a suspended sentence or a few months in prison for a rich thug. Screw it all, she thought.
“I probably would have done the same,” Jen said. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I said I won’t and—”
“No, I mean that you’d do the same?”
Jen shrugged. I could feel her trying to slap a sympathetic smile on her face, but it just wasn’t ready to stretch that far.
Jen said, “See you around.” She turned and we headed down the path.
* * *
I figured this out in those days: that the me who’s alive for five measly years as part of Jen, the three score and five years of the parents who die because of the cruel promise that their child will live, even the ninety or hundred years of a natural lifetime, none of this gets measured in years, but rather in how we live our days.
December had come, and instead of freak snowstorms, we were having a freak heat wave. Temperatures in the mid-seventies, pleasant as can be. Jen was two weeks back into work. The captain had returned too, but no one knew anything about what had happened to him once they let him out of jail. Jen and the captain hadn’t visited the roof. They hadn’t talked about the Eden investigation other than a briefing Jen did for him and the team. Any hope that his time in the clinker had changed him and he was now the avuncular leader who dispensed wisdom and charm had vanished like coins up a magician’s sleeve.
Les had been transferred to a rehab hospital. He still hadn’t spoken and still didn’t seem to recognize anyone. Doctors said they were hopeful, but I could tell they were mouthing platitudes like people feel they need to do. Jen talked to Les like old times, telling him he was going to pop out of this and they’d be buddies and partners once again. Who knows. You don’t program these things.
By then, Jen was switching me off at night and most of the time when she wasn’t working. I, though, was keeping an eye out for her. For my own peace of mind, I needed to make sure that nothing bad happened to her, even if she thought I was turned off.
It was another weirdly warm Sunday in early December. The water had returned to the Great Falls. The trails and lookout spots were bustling with hikers, bikers, picnickers, runners, climbers, and kayakers.
Zach and Jen snuck off into the woods to the spot they’d once found. They ducked and pushed through the soft needles of a balsam fir, abies balsamea. Jen wriggled out of her biking clothes; Zach did the same. The lay down on a bed of moss and laughed.
They kissed.
They made love, slowly at first.
Zach pulled his face a few inches away and gazed into her eyes. “Jen?”
“Don’t stop.”
“He’s turned off, right?”
She laughed and pushed at him. She knew Zach didn’t mean any harm. “Of course he’s off.” And she believed it was true.
He said, “I love you.”
She said, “And I love you.”
Slow got moving, moving became intense.
I thought to myself, Wow, so this is what all the fuss is about.
And intense became cosmic.
Good times! I thought. Damn good times.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY MICHAEL KAUFMAN:
Other novels
The Afghan Vampires Book Club (with Gary Barker)
The Possibility of Dreaming on a Night Without Stars
Nonfiction
The Time Has Come: Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution
Community Power and Grassroots Democracy (with Haroldo Dilla)
Cracking the Armor: Power, Pain, and the Lives of Men
Jamaica Under Manley
Author Biography
Michael Kaufman is the author of two novels and seven works of non-fiction. He has worked with the United Nations, governments, NGOs, educators, and companies in fifty countries to promote women’s rights.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Michael Kaufman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-567-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-568-4
Cover design by Melanie Sun
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
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First Edition: January 2021
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