Forgive Me

by Joshua Corin

  “Cupcakes,” said Chau.

  “Cupcakes,” agreed Konquist.

  “And now we pay a visit to your buddy Officer Cumen.”

  “Have I mentioned how much I hate this case?”

  Chapter 18

  When the police asked Xana for directions to her apartment, she instead gave them the address of Em’s bookstore. However, if they found it at all odd that their destination was a strip mall on Clairmont Road in Decatur, they kept it to themselves. Officer Vance opened the door for her. Xana thanked him for the lift and scooted out of the squad car.

  “I’d tip you,” she said, “but all I have is a piece of nicotine gum.”

  “I’ll take it,” Vance replied.

  “I was kidding.”

  To which Vance grumbled, “Story of my life,” and he returned to the passenger seat.

  Book Em was nestled between a take-out Chinese place, Kim’s Cantonese, and a Chinese nail salon, Kim’s. Both the restaurant and the nail salon were owned by a family of first-generation Mexican Americans, none of whom were named Kim and all of whom were the bane of sweet Em’s existence. They made no secret of the fact that they wanted to own the twenty-five hundred square feet occupied by the used bookstore. Sometimes they would send their children out to deliberately play in front of Book Em, thus dissuading passersby from entering.

  “Why?” Em asked once, late at night. “What could they possibly build there?”

  “Kim’s Laundromat.”

  Em playfully slapped Xana on the shoulder. “You’re so racist.”

  “Everybody’s racist.”

  “I’m not.”

  She was right. She wasn’t. She was a saint. Was that her allure? Was it that Xana simply had never before fucked a saint? If so, they wouldn’t still be together and yet here they were, entering month four of their relationship and neither of them had gotten antsy or bored, although Xana knew that when that day did come, the breakup wouldn’t be instigated by Em. The very thought of causing anyone pain would be the furthest thing from Em’s mind. She really was Xana’s opposite.

  For example, at the moment, she was leading a circle of kindergarteners in story time. The rear of the store had an empty space covered by a colorful stain-resistant rug and occupied by an assortment of plastic benches that were just the right height for a child to pop a squat on. The picture book Em was reading seemed to be about a bear who was captain of a cruise ship. As Xana settled in behind the circle of tots, Em gave her a happy wink and continued without pause to the next page. The children were enthralled. Their parents, mostly mothers, were enthralled that their children were enthralled. But Em had a hypnotic voice, full of soft feathers when it needed to be, full of storm clouds when it needed to be, full of melody—always. No wonder the other bums at AA loved to hear her talk. Maybe that was what first had attracted Xana.

  At the front of the store, beside the cash wrap, stood a pillar of thin books. Leftovers from this morning’s event? Xana wasn’t exactly sure what time the author’s signing had been scheduled. It was a bit weird that a children’s author wouldn’t stick around to lead story time, but then again, this world was not Xana’s world. The rules here were different.

  Em finished with the book and segued into the Q & A portion of story time. The children were excellent listeners and had some creative responses and Xana heard none of them, because she went next door and ordered two pints of chicken and broccoli. This Mexican clan, hateful though they were, really knew their way around an American Cantonese cookbook. By the time the slices of chicken and broccoli florets were stir-fried, soaked in soy sauce, and boxed, most of the parents and their children were filing out of Book Em. By the time Xana returned with her spoils, the bookstore was empty of all customers. Marjorie Fisk sat behind the cash register, oblivious to all but the Jodi Picoult novel in her hands. Em was cleaning up the play area in the back.

  “I bring gifts from your nemeses,” announced Xana.

  “Oh, they’re not my nemeses. I don’t have nemeses. Give me a minute to finish here and I’ll meet you in the office.”

  Xana set up their cartons on the small wooden table in the small office/stockroom catty-corner from the unisex lavatory. The chairs here were barely taller than the kiddie benches and Xana, being a wink shy of six feet tall, ended up sitting with her knees against her chin. She also took out two small bottles of water from the small office’s small fridge.

  Em swigged down half her bottle before even dipping into her meal.

  “Rough day?” Xana asked her.

  “Oh God yes. For starters, the author never showed. No phone call, no email, nothing. Meanwhile, I have seventy-five of his books on display and a line out the door and many of them kids and I did my best to entertain them, but they weren’t here for me. They were here for him. Finally, his publisher gets back to me. The author overslept. Can you believe it? He flew all the way here. His publisher is putting him up at the Peachtree Marriott, and he never shows up in the lobby to meet his publisher’s rep to take him here. Why? Because he’s still asleep. Never got his wake-up call.”

  “The Peachtree Marriott?”

  “I know, right? How the other half lives. And when he does call to tell me he’s on his way, it’s two hours late and everybody has left so I tell him why bother. I guess I could have had him come to story time. I should have had him come to story time. Then I might have at least sold some signed copies. Why didn’t I ask him to come?”

  “You were angry.”

  “And anger makes people stupid. Which I know. And forgot. Because I was angry. And stupid.”

  “Then you’re lucky that’s how I like them,” remarked Xana. “Stupid and pretty.”

  Em smiled, blushed, looked away, fed herself a broccoli floret.

  They ate in silence for a bit until Em finally posed the dreaded question.

  “So how has your day been?”

  “Oh, you know. Same old life.”

  Ah, to lie again. For Em’s benefit, true, for the greater good, yes, for all the right reasons, blah blah blah, but no amount of justification could alter Xana’s acute awareness that she was, simply put, deeply disrespecting the woman who loved her. Ugh. She felt like a knave. She was a knave. She thought about Aaron Solo, obfuscating so effortlessly this morning at the Serendipity Group. And had his motives been any different from Xana’s? Weren’t they both lying to protect those they cared about?

  Except among Aaron Solo’s protectees was a certain somebody jonesing for vengeance against a certain ex-FBI agent.

  “What’s on your mind?” asked Em.

  Another dreaded question. Xana considered, once again, informing her lover about the situation. Forewarned was forearmed. If the authorities did not succeed in shutting down this whole operation, in three days someone with malice on their mind would be making an appearance. What if Em got caught in the crossfire? It would be Jim Christie all over again. Someone close to her getting hurt as a direct result of her obstinacy.

  But these were not the real dreaded questions. The real reason Xana knew she would continue to keep Em in the dark about this, about so much of her past, about so much of herself: What if Em left her?

  Whether out of shock or out of fear, freeing herself from Xana’s dangerous orbit would be understandable. As she had often mused, Xana believed it was nearly proof of God that Em had even accepted her into her life in the first place. Even saints had limits, and Xana was not about to martyr this one.

  And so they talked about the weather. Was it supposed to rain tonight? That’s what the meteorologists predicted, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. They talked about sports. Were Em’s mighty Atlanta Falcons going to win this Saturday’s matchup against their rivals in New Orleans? Absolutely.

  Superficial questions, superficial answers. A Magic 8 Ball would have been just as witty. Xana’s excuse was obvious. Em’s excuse, as with all things Em, was simple and adorable: Story time had tuckered her out.

  “I need to do some s
erious yoga if I’m going to last the day,” she said.

  “I’ll watch,” replied Xana.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  This was hardly the first time that the carpet in the bookstore’s play area had doubled as a yoga mat. Em slipped off her shoes, took a deep breath, and began her preliminary stretches. As promised, Xana watched. Marjorie Fisk ably assisted the three customers who showed up during the next forty-five minutes, one of whom, a man in his fifties, also stood and watched Em for quite a while. Em didn’t appear to mind, so Xana didn’t appear to mind.

  After all, what harm was another lie in a long, long series of them?

  Chapter 19

  Hayley showed up during the seven o’clock rush, when the bookstore’s evening traffic was at its peak, so Xana bid Em a quick good-bye and rushed out the door past a pair of teenagers who were rushing in from the new rain. They managed to make it to Hayley’s car with only a mild soaking.

  “Did you get the letter?” Xana asked her.

  After regulating her oxygen intake, Hayley responded, “Let me answer your question with a question. Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Oh come on.”

  “No, seriously. I’ve got so many skeletons in my closet they call me the crypt keeper.”

  “That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “I’m trying to diffuse the situation with bad comedy,” said Xana. “What are you talking about?”

  “There is someone trying to kill you!”

  “Oh yeah, that.”

  “ ‘Oh yeah, that.’ ”

  “So who did they assign to lead the investigation? Is it Del Purrich? Just tell me it isn’t Del Purrich.”

  Hayley brushed some loose wet strands of hair from her forehead.

  “Well, shit. But at least you got me the letter from my file, right?”

  “Funny thing about that letter…”

  “Oh fuck.”

  “How did you not get fired?”

  “So you read the letter.”

  “Of course I read the letter!” Hayley took a steadying breath. “I haven’t read a reprimand that bad since—”

  “Since when?”

  “Since ever! That’s how bad it was!”

  “Well, yes, but you’re only nineteen years old. How many reprimands have you read?”

  “Was it true?”

  “Was what true?”

  “What they wrote. What HR said you did.”

  “Oh. That. Absolutely.”

  “Then how did you not get fired? How did you not get arrested?”

  Xana glanced forward at the rain rippling circles against the windshield. “Jim Christie.”

  Hayley glanced forward at the rain rippling circles against the windshield. “Oh.”

  After a minute, Xana elaborated. “He buried the letter. Kept it from getting to DC. Kept it from getting added to my digital file. He wagged his finger at me and told me that I needed to behave myself and then he protected me.”

  “Even though you…?”

  “Yes. He valued what I brought to the table. He believed my abilities outweighed my baggage.”

  “My baggage’s worse,” muttered Hayley, “and he hired me too.”

  “Your baggage is not worse.”

  “I’m dying, Xana.”

  “Did you not read the letter?”

  Hayley frowned. “You have a point.”

  “And yes, someone is out to get me. One of the many, many people that I’ve ‘done wrong.’ So I figured it might be handy to make a list of who might be after me…and it occurred to me that someone had already made that list, outlining every incident in my career where I may have crossed a line.”

  “May have?”

  “Real life doesn’t have straight lines, Hayley. You know that.”

  “Well, I didn’t take the letter,” she replied. “But I did write down each of your ‘incidents.’ ”

  She took out a piece of paper and clicked on her vehicle’s dome light. The white paper lit up a dim orange.

  Xana read down the list. Each bullet point brought with it a memory, but not every memory was vivid. A lifetime of booze made the mind a little slippery.

  “Imagine what you could have accomplished with your life had you never picked up a drink.”

  That was Diane, her counselor during rehab. That was Diane being uncritical.

  Diane was much better at being critical.

  Hayley turned the white paper over. Oh look—more on the back. At least they were chronological.

  “I added the final incident myself,” Hayley said.

  The final incident?

  Ah. Of course.

  Yuri.

  Yuri was an ancient-aged Cold War defector who ran a pawnshop in the city. Xana knew him from back in the day and had actually paid him a visit last July with Hayley in tow. In the end, Yuri had proved extremely helpful, but only after Xana had applied enough brute force to send him to the hospital.

  Yes, Yuri might hold a grudge.

  “His name isn’t really Yuri,” said Xana.

  “I don’t care,” replied Hayley. “He belongs on the list.”

  “I guess.”

  “In fact, I think he should be the first one we visit.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Well, you don’t have your driver’s license back, do you?”

  “I hate relying on the kindness of cripples.”

  Hayley rolled her eyes. “You’re so sweet. But if we’re going to do this, I have one condition.”

  “Is that blackmail I hear? Look at you. My little girl is all grown up.”

  “I learned from the best,” answered Hayley. “Anyway, here it is, and you’re not going to like it but it’s nonnegotiable. Are you ready? OK. When we visit these people—and I’ve already highlighted the ones who are A) still alive, B) not incarcerated, and C) living local—it’s not enough that we find out if they’re working with the Serendipity Group. You’re going to need to apologize.”

  Xana chuckled, falling into accidental harmony with the percussive rain.

  “I’m serious,” Hayley insisted.

  “No, I know. It’s just…did you read up on who some of these people are?”

  “I’m sure they’re all dirty rotten scoundrels. Doesn’t matter. The FBI considered your treatment of them excessive and that’s good enough for me. You need to apologize. Isn’t that one of your twelve steps anyway? ‘Making amends’?”

  “Yeah, except I don’t feel guilty about what I did to any of these people, and you want to know why? I got results. Each person on this list led to the conclusion of a bad situation. What I did saved lives. Jim Christie knew it.”

  “You can’t know that an alternative method, a less physically confrontational method, might not have yielded the same results. Look at the controversy about the CIA black sites in the War on Terror.”

  “You can’t compare what I did to the heavy-handed garbage perpetrated by the CIA.”

  “I was with you when you attacked Yuri! I know what you did to him! Here was this old man who—”

  “The ends justified the means.”

  “There could have been another way! But Yuri insulted you. And so you skipped over all the other methods of information extraction and you struck him in the face with a glass. It’s a wonder he didn’t sue you.”

  “Not really. Yuri has a profound distrust of the American judicial system.”

  “Oh yeah?” Hayley sighed. Shadows of raindrops played off the shallow curves of her pale cheeks. “I can’t imagine why.”

  Frustrated, Xana stared out at the strip mall’s parking lot. Nearby, a coed in an Emory shirt was dismounting her motorcycle. Under her helmet was a canary-yellow hijab. Through the downpour she hustled, helmet under her arm, toward—the Chinese restaurant? The nail salon? No! The bookstore.

  Xana thought about Em.

  Xana thought about making amends.
Step nine. It wasn’t just about apologizing. It was about atonement. It was about reparations. The idea was to come clean to those hurt by bad behavior, even if the consequences of doing so might lead to incarceration. Yuri would never sue, but some of these others might. If she admitted culpability…

  Some cans contained a whole mess of worms.

  And who was to say that her bad behavior, if it was bad behavior, was directly related to her alcoholism? Her interrogation of Yuri had occurred after her stint in rehab. She had been stone sober. She owed Yuri nothing.

  But she owed Hayley everything.

  “Where is this coming from?” she asked Hayley. “Why is this a deal breaker?”

  “I…I keep thinking about Jeremiah Stanhope.”

  “The execution?”

  “Why didn’t he apologize? He knew his victim’s family was in attendance. He’d had years to reflect on his actions. Is it selfishness? Is it evil? I just don’t get it. And it’s not like I can ask him.” She looked Xana in the eye. “But I can ask you.”

  Xana nodded. Then she took the piece of paper. Read it over again. The names brought back so many memories. None of them good.

  “There’s no guarantee, you know, that it’s one of these people,” she pointed out.

  “But it’s a lead. That’s why you had me get it.”

  “The ones who are in prison…it could be one of them, pulling strings from behind bars. We shouldn’t cross them off.”

  “Then we’ll uncross them,” agreed Hayley. “And…”

  “And?”

  “I understand why we’re having this conversation in my car instead of in the bookstore…kind of…but Em is your girlfriend. Don’t you think you should maybe, I don’t know, loop her in?”

  “What Em doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

  “OK, except that’s not true, I mean, at all. Like, people in the Middle Ages knew nothing about the bubonic plague and it killed a third of Europe’s population.”

  “Are you comparing my past deeds to the bubonic plague?”

  Hayley shrugged, grinned.

  “If Em loves me,” said Xana, “it’s this me. Sober me. There’s no reason she needs to meet…her. Besides, in around sixty hours, none of this might matter. I could be dead.”