Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

Sam eventually drove off, and Fiona was finally able to relax. If it was up to her, she’d be sitting poolside and negotiating a gun deal for some Peruvian revolutionaries-something she’d had to cancel from her itinerary for the week when this new job came up, and which, upon reflection, seemed like a fairly good idea. She’d never liked doing business with Peruvians. They always had such inferiority complexes. Now, that was annoying. Besides, what could be more exciting than viewing the world through a pair of high-powered binoculars while waiting for some girl to come walking out of a building?

It took another twenty minutes, but eventually Fiona spotted her mark. She focused the binoculars on her to make sure, but Fiona could tell just by how the girl carried herself that she was the one. If you live inside a pressure cooker, you’re bound to have some outward signs. In the girl’s case, it was the way she immediately exhaled when she walked out of the building. Not just a release of breath, because that would be impossible to see, but one of those full-body experiences favored by sixteen-year-old girls in front of their parents. She then looked both ways, like she was crossing the street, though she was just standing in the middle of a grassy expanse, and then trudged with her head down toward Fourteenth Street.

Fiona wondered what Junior had on the girl, because she didn’t seem like the perfect corporate spy. Too much angst, for one thing, though Fiona supposed that angst was most likely the default emotion for many of the tough kids who end up in Father Eduardo’s care-you can only pretend to be bad for so long.

It didn’t matter to Fiona what the girl had done in the past, only what she was doing now. That was another way to keep from getting annoyed: focus on the present. Fi got out of her car and walked a safe distance away from the girl. Fi was maybe fifty yards behind her, which was fine, since both were walking at a normal pace down a straight road. The girl had reason to believe she was being followed-clearly, her nerves told her this much-but didn’t have any reason to believe she was being followed by an Irish woman wearing a Betsey Johnson dress and still smelling of suntan lotion.

At the corner, the girl ducked into a beauty shop. Perfect. Fiona liked beauty shops for all of the promises they offered-blemishes hidden, sexier lips, new hair colors-none of which seemed to materialize in quite the manner you’d expect once you got the products home.

Fi lingered in front of the store for a moment and pretended to talk on her cell phone. Inside, she could see that the girl was regarding a long wall of lotions and creams. She’d set her purse down at her feet, a sure sign that she was in for a long haul and, more importantly, comfortable in her surroundings.

The store wasn’t one of those well-lit chains staffed by matching women in matching black outfits and matching attitudes. Fiona hated those places. The women who worked in those places truly were annoying. You can’t have airs and work retail. It simply wasn’t allowed. No, Fiona could tell even from the street that this was a small business, the kind built out of someone’s savings, low rents in a neighborhood that wasn’t exactly considered prime property and stock aimed at the very people who lived and worked in walking distance. There were also two hair stations in the back that, Fiona assumed, were staffed by women who regularly dyed people’s hair a color they’d regret sometime later in life.

She pushed open the doors and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of hairspray, enough that she began to cough almost immediately, which made the girl look up with a frown.

A good opening. Fiona continued to cough until the girl had to say something.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Fiona said. “Just swallowed wrong.”

“Oh, I hate that. Makes me feel stupid.”

“Me, too,” Fiona said. “Like, what, I can’t even swallow right?” The girl laughed. Pleasant. Just two girls talking about saliva.

Fiona realized she had an avenue and had to keep it up. It was so silly sometimes, the lengths we have to go to get information from people, Fiona thought. Bugs, breaking and entering, torture… sometimes just talking to a person can yield so much more than any covert operation. Now, granted, it wasn’t as if Fiona intended to portray herself as precisely who she was, but it was her intention on this day to be as normal as possible, because Fiona believed most people responded to normal.

“What are you looking for?” Fiona asked.

“I don’t really know,” the girl said. “My skin, you know, it gets so scaly sometimes. Around these scars on my neck especially.”

Fiona pulled a bottle of Neutrogena off the shelf. “I use this,” she said, and handed it to her. “It keeps me feeling silky smooth.”

“Oh, that’s too expensive for me,” the girl said. “And I can’t have anything with too much scent in it. I’m allergic.”

It was odd how much the girl was willing to divulge of herself to a complete stranger in a beauty supply store, but, invariably, that was what people holding on to other big secrets ended up being like. Every alcoholic or drug addict Fiona had known was, during the course of his life, always quick to admit some other damning piece of information at a moment’s notice. And then the ones who were clean always wanted to tell you about how they got clean, or how much they’d used, or how many people they’d slept with to get to this new enlightened version of themselves. It wore Fiona out most of the time, but in this case, with this poor girl, Fiona couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for her. She’d clearly been through a lot, and now she was going through something else, too. She was probably lit to pop with guilt.

“Have you ever just put vitamin E oil on your scars?” Fiona asked.

“That doesn’t really work,” the girl said. “I’ve tried everything. But I’m going to get surgery one day. So, yeah, it’s all good.”

It’s all good. If there was ever a sentence young women uttered that meant the direct opposite, it was that one. No one said it when things actually were all good, only to deflect what was clearly a bad situation.

Fiona thought that if she abducted this girl, tied her up and began questioning her, within minutes she’d get every secret she’d ever been told or ever uttered.

“Are you saving up for it?” Fiona said.

“No. I work at Honrado. Down the street. And they’ve got doctors who volunteer to remove tattoos and fix things. So I’m just waiting on that to come through. It’s a good job, right?”

“Right,” Fiona said. She kept trying to get a feel for the girl, get some insight into why she’d be in business with Junior when she had such a good deal with a person like Father Eduardo. Fi decided the best way to bridge that gap would be to set that bridge on fire. “How’d you get a job there? When I got out, I would have killed to get to work with someone like Father Eduardo.”

The girl looked shocked. “You did time?”

“Five years,” she said.

“For what?”

Fiona decided to keep it as real as possible. “I robbed a bank,” she said.

“And you only did five?”

Fi leaned in to the girl, close enough that she could smell the girl’s cheap perfume and an underpinning of sweat. The girl leaned, too, sensing that they were about to tell some secrets. “I gave up my ex. He was the one who got me into it. No sense letting him off easy if I was doing real years.”

“You didn’t feel any guilt about that?”

“No,” Fiona said.

The girl bit down on her bottom lip and seemed to be thinking about something. “You wanna get some coffee or something?”

The honest truth was that Fiona really did not like hanging out with other women. They were usually so… girlish. Always concerned about who was talking about them, what they were wearing, who had the bigger whatever. Now, certainly, Fi liked wearing nice things, and she didn’t like people talking about her and could appreciate big things; she just didn’t require the requisite estrogen-fueled drama that went along with those desires when women got together to discuss them.