May We Be Forgiven: A Novel

by Homes, A. M.

  That evening, just before dusk, the doorbell rings. She is standing impatiently on the flagstone step. “I thought you were dead,” I say.

  “May I come in?” she asks.

  I am alternately angry and relieved. My tolerance for not knowing, for obliviousness, is gone.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  She says nothing.

  “Your ID belongs to a dead girl.”

  “I found it,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “In a trash can.”

  “You have to call the police.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I am not going to continue this conversation until you give me your real name and address.” I hand her a Post-it and a pen. She writes down the information and hands the paper back to me: Amanda Johnson. “I’m Googling you,” I say, walking away—leaving the front door open.

  “You might also use my father’s name—Cyrus or Cy.”

  “I will,” I say, yelling from deep within the house. According to the Internet, her father, Cyrus, now in his late seventies, was the top dog of a large insurance agency and was forced out following a corporate scandal.

  “He stole money,” she yells a moment later.

  “Apparently,” I say. “And you were the maid of honor at your younger sister Samantha’s wedding and played the flute at the reception, ‘a once-promising flautist.’…Are you still playing the flute?”

  “Fuck you,” she says, coming into the house and finding me at George’s desk. “I told you I played the flute.”

  “So how does it happen that you’ve got a dead girl’s ID?” I ask.

  “Like I said, I found it.”

  “Like I asked—where?”

  “In a trash can in the parking lot of a church.”

  “And you didn’t tell the police.”

  She shakes her head no.

  “Why not?”

  “It was a while before I put it all together, and because I go there and I don’t want to have to stop going there.”

  “To the church?”

  She nods.

  “On Sundays?”

  “During the week.” She pauses. “I have a problem.”

  “You drink?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “Drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Sex?” I ask, somewhat guiltily.

  Again, she shakes her head no.

  “Then what?”

  She begins to cry.

  “Is it so bad?”

  She nods.

  “Tell me,” I say. “Really, Amanda, you can tell me.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “If I tell, you’ll never trust me.”

  “It’s not like I trust you now,” I say.

  She laughs and starts crying again.

  “Shoplifting? Eating issues?”

  “Quilting,” she blurts. “I’m a quilter, okay?”

  “We all feel like quitting sometimes. You mean you quit a lot?”

  “QUILT,” she shouts. “I MAKE FUCKING QUILTS. And if I tell the police, they won’t believe me, and then the whole wretched story will come out, and it will all be an enormous mess, and I’ll be more alone than I already am.”

  “Do you know who killed the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, well, that’s a start.”

  She’s still crying. “I’m a liar,” she blurts.

  “You do know who killed her?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m a compulsive liar, I lie about everything. That’s why I go to that group at the church, it’s a group for liars; even just then I was lying. I don’t fucking quilt, and if I tell the police, they’ll think I’m lying, since that’s what I’m there for. That’s why, the other day, it was so important to me that I told you the truth about the seven-layer bar—the gift that I bought you and ate.”

  “Slow down,” I say.

  “What’s the point of telling the police?” she says.

  “It’s a clue—like, maybe the woman was robbed, maybe the killer left something of his own in the same trash can, maybe his fingerprints are on the very same piece of ID you’re using, maybe they’re going to trace it all back to you and say you’re the one who did it.”

  “Maybe I should just burn the ID,” she says.

  “Destroying evidence,” I say. “How about just going to the police and saying, ‘Hi there, I found these in a trash can and realized they belong to the girl in the garbage bag.’”

  “It’s kind of fascinating,” she says, “what you find in the garbage.”

  “What made you look in there?”

  “I don’t know. Something caught my eye. I used to have a boyfriend who was into Dumpster diving.”

  “Why would you appropriate someone else’s identification?”

  “Haven’t you ever just needed to be someone else?” she says.

  I shrug no.

  “I was working, I had a job, I lived in Brooklyn. I really liked it. I was dating this guy, flawed but a warm body; we had a cat. And then my mother fell and my father couldn’t take care of her, and so I came home, and it’s like sinking into quicksand. I had to give up my job, my boyfriend wasn’t really into family. Let’s be real, let’s not drag it out, I said, but I’m coming back soon. He didn’t believe me. He kept the cat, won’t let me see or speak to her—says I’m an unfit mother.”

  “Your friends?”

  “My boyfriend didn’t like most of my friends, so I’d already dropped them. I lost my health insurance and stopped taking my medication and started taking my mother’s, which is covered—but it’s not really the same.”

  “I have lots of medication,” I offer, wondering, is everyone on medication?

  She says nothing.

  “It still feels like something’s missing from the picture—you’re taking care of your parents and you’re pretending to be someone else? Amanda?” I repeat the name. “Amanda, was that always your name?”

  “Are you picking on me? I feel like you’re picking on me.”

  “I’m just trying to understand. When you’re taking care of your parents, are you yourself, or this other person—the assumed identity?”

  “When I’m taking care of my parents, I live in the bedroom where I grew up, with my same books and toys on the shelf, and it’s like I’m still in junior high, like I just got home from school and happened to find them there, sitting on the living-room sofa, but maybe now my dad has wet his pants.”

  “Do they know what year it is?”

  “Sometimes, and sometimes it changes many times in the course of a day. ‘Do you have homework?’ my mother will ask. ‘Just a little,’ I say. ‘I may have to go to the library—so-and-so’s mom is giving me a ride.’ When I take them to the doctor, she asks, ‘How did you learn to drive, and do your feet reach the pedals?’”

  “And what do you say?”

  “I’m tall for my age.” She pauses. “This is my life for now,” she says.

  “And later?”

  “I’m leaving and never coming back.”

  She says this and I’m frightened—I don’t really know her, and I already feel abandoned. Racing thoughts: What about me? Take me with you—we’ll go to Europe, we’ll travel the globe.

  She notes the shift in my expression. “Oh, come on,” she says. “Really? You’re living in your brother’s house, wearing his clothes, and I’m living with my parents—you can’t think this is a relationship?”

  “We need to find the guy who put the girl in the garbage bag. I would feel a lot better if that was resolved.”

  She gathers herself to leave. “You’ve been watching too much TV.”

  In the morning, the phone again summons me. I answer quickly, thinking it might be her. “Is this Harold?” a woman asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Good morning, Harold,” she says, “this is Lauren Spektor, the director of celebrations here at the synagogue.”

  “I didn’t know there was a director of celebrat
ions.”

  “It’s a new position,” she says. “Formerly I worked in development at City Opera.” Another pause, as though she’s reviewing her script. “We were going over our calendar and I see that we’ve got Nathaniel down for a bar mitzvah on July 3.” Another pause. “I was wondering where we are with that?”

  “Good question.”

  “Does Nathaniel know his Hebrew? Has he been studying? No one here has heard a peep.…”

  “Actually,” I say, “I tried to make an appointment with the rabbi a while ago, but his assistant demanded a contribution of not less than five hundred dollars and I found that off-putting.”

  There is a long pause. “That issue has been addressed.”

  “Is the Chinese woman no longer working at the temple?”

  “She’s gone back to school,” Lauren Spektor says.

  “Good,” I say. “Hopefully, she’ll find something that’s a good match.”

  “She’s studying at the yeshiva.”

  A moment of contemplative silence passes between us.

  “There are two ways we can go with this,” Lauren says. “I can refer you to some party planners and our preferred vendors for catering, flowers, personalized yarmulkes, or we could consider a postponement—I hate to use the word ‘cancellation.’”

  There’s something in her tone that gives me the sense that the temple would rather there not be a bar mitzvah on July 3.

  “The temple is mindful of its image; between your brother and his wife and the Ponzi, we’ve been slightly higher-profile than some of the community is comfortable with.”

  I take a breath and start again. “Tell me, Lauren Spektor, is there still such a thing as the Sisterhood Luncheon?”

  “Are you talking about egg salad, tuna, and cherry tomatoes galore?”

  “That’s the stuff.”

  “Long gone,” she says. “Our current Sisterhood is mostly working women who don’t have time to cook—but we have several caterers who can provide something similar.” She pauses. “I don’t mean to pressure you, but I’d like to know sooner rather than later. We’ve got a gay couple looking for a wedding that morning—they want to be done by eleven so they can get out to the Pines for the weekend and beat the traffic.”

  “Something to think on,” I say, at a loss for words otherwise. “As you can imagine, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what the plans may have been.”

  “I would think Jane had a file—everyone has a file,” Lauren says. “Also, she left a deposit. Typically, that’s nonrefundable, but we’re willing to work with you. We’d consider a partial.”

  “How much was the deposit?” I ask.

  “Twenty-five hundred,” she says. “So—how should we proceed?”

  “Let me talk with Nate and get back to you.”

  “It’s been a difficult time for everyone,” she says.

  “So it has.”

  When I raise the subject of the bar mitzvah with Nate, his voice cracks. I’ve been dreading this.

  “I don’t think I can do it—it makes me too sad. It was something Mom was working on.”

  “You could do it for her—in her honor?”

  “I can’t imagine everyone we ever knew just staring at me, somehow thinking I am a survivor. I can’t imagine writing the thank-you notes for all the iPods and all the crap people give me that will mean more to them than to me, because the truth is, I don’t want more stuff. I can’t imagine that any ‘god’ I believe in would think this is the thing to do.” He stops to take a breath. “If I was being honest,” Nate goes on, “I wouldn’t want to do anything that would bring the whole family together again. People talk about the nuclear family as the perfect family, but they don’t say much about meltdown.” He stops. “Did you have a bar mitzvah?”

  “I did,” I say.

  “And? Was it a good experience?”

  “You want to know about my bar mitzvah?” I pause. “My parents didn’t want me to get a swelled head—as though having any decent feelings about yourself caused something akin to encephalitis from which one might not recover—so I shared my bar mitzvah with Solomon Bernstein. It was pitched to me as a good deal, cheaper, and, with the Bernsteins further up the food chain, it put my parents in with the right people.”

  “Basically, it was all about your parents?”

  “Yes.” I pause. “After the ceremony there was what was called a Sisterhood Luncheon. All the ladies of the temple made egg salad and tuna fish. Some people got food poisoning—luckily, no one died. But there were new rules after that: all food for Sisterhood Luncheons had to be made at the temple, and they all used Hellmann’s mayonnaise and not Miracle Whip—which was deemed a goy food and not to be trusted.”

  “Goy food?”

  “According to my mother—your grandmother—all things, products, food, et cetera, can be divided into Jew and non-Jew.”

  “Such as?”

  “Crest toothpaste—Jew; Colgate—non-Jew.”

  “Tom’s?” Nate asks.

  “Atheist or Unitarian. Gin is non-Jew, as is Belvedere, Ketel One, or any artisanal liquor with the exception of Manischewitz, which is Jewish. In any Jewish household you might find a single bottle of honey-colored liquor that no one can remember if it’s Scotch or bourbon, rarely two—certainly not three. Crème de menthe on vanilla ice cream is assimilated Jewish. Mah-jongg and pinochle are Jewish.”

  “Back to the bar mitzvah,” Nate says.

  “There were two tables of gifts, one with my name, one with Solomon’s, and all during the party I kept going over and checking to see whose pile was higher, whose looked better.”

  “And?”

  “It was hard to tell—on account of how someone gave me a set of encyclopedias and wrapped each volume separately. The one thing I really liked was a pair of binoculars that were meant for Solomon but ended up with my gifts.”

  “How did you figure out it was for Solomon?”

  “The card: ‘For Solly, With Love from Auntie Estelle and Uncle Ruven.’ My mother wanted me to give them back to Solomon, but I refused. I took the binoculars and hid them outside, under the house.”

  “Is it unreasonable to expect a rite of passage to feel good or be essentially positive?” Nate asks. “What about losing your virginity?”

  “Look, Nate, I’m a lot older than you. I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  “So you pop the bubble now?” he asks. “You make me feel as miserable as you?”

  “No,” I say definitively and then stop. “I just want to protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “Life?” I suggest.

  “Too late,” he says. “Did you ever give the binoculars back to Solomon?”

  “I spilled the whole story to him one day at school. ‘Keep ’em,’ he said, ‘I already have binoculars.’” I pause. “I don’t think I ever told anyone that story before.”

  “Not even Claire?”

  “No.”

  There’s a pause. “Why didn’t you and Claire have children?” Nate asks.

  “Claire was afraid she’d be too cold as a parent; she thought she had no capacity to really love and that a child would suffer.”

  “And?”

  “I agreed.”

  There’s a long pause. “I used to pray,” Nate says. “Every night I said a prayer to cover my bases; I always believed there was something larger—some bigger idea. I’m not sure what I think now; my relationship to belief has changed.”

  “So—I get the feeling that you’re thinking no bar?”

  “I thought it was meant as a conversation.”

  “You’re right. It’s not something we have to resolve tonight.”

  After her cover is blown, Amanda of the A&P vanishes.

  Half as a prank, half because I’m genuinely curious, it occurs to me not to wait for her to come to me, but to go to her. I round up the half-empty cartons of Chinese food from the fridge, pack it all into the brown paper bag it came out of several days ago�
�receipt still attached—and staple it shut. Wearing Nate’s old white lab coat like a waiter’s jacket, I drive to her house, upscale Tudor, and ring the bell.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, opening the door.

  “I have half-order for you,” I say in a bad Chinese accent as I hand her the bag. Peeking into the house behind her, I see nothing except a faded Oriental rug, a coat-and-hat rack, and a heavy dark wooden banister and stairs—carpeted. I imagine that on the left is the living room, on the right the parlor or dining room, and straight back under the stairs a half-bath, and then the kitchen across the back of the house—with perhaps a breakfast nook.

  “You brought used Chinese food?”

  “There’s a lot of it,” I say. “Fried rice, moo-shu pork.”

  She hands the bag back to me as her mother comes up behind her: thin, with basketball belly pushing at the waistband of her bright-green pull-on pants; formerly tall, now substantially reduced; her fluffy white hair neatly fixed in tight rolls around her head, mid–George Washington.

  “We give to the Kidney Foundation regularly,” the mother says. “My husband doesn’t approve of door-to-door solicitations, but how about some of my pin money—do you take cash?” She clicks open a small wallet and digs out five dollars, which she moves to hand me.

  “Mother, he’s delivering food,” Amanda says, pushing her mother’s arm away. “And he has the wrong address. Better luck next time,” she says, closing the door in my face.

  Out of boredom I try again. In my mind, it’s humorous and demonstrates my determination—I want something more, some better conclusion. I drive to the 7-Eleven and get a gallon of milk and some orange juice and pull up at the curb outside her house. After cutting across the dewy lawn on foot, I hop up onto the front step and ring the bell twice. BING-BONG, BING-BONG.