A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“How much is in the BM account?” I ask.

“As of yesterday, gifts total twenty-seven thousand, three hundred eighty-nine dollars, and eighty-six cents. I think Nate is going to have to pay taxes. I had no idea it would be this much — otherwise we could have set up some kind of nonprofit. Do you want to deduct expenses from the gross?” she asks.

“No,” I say, “I am paying for the bar mitzvah separately; whatever gifts were received should be absent of a processing fee.”

“It’s an enormous amount — I wonder if we should give it all at once — I wonder what should happen?”

“I’ll ask Nate when he’s home from camp.”

“Okay,” she says. “So about my fee …”

I’m thinking she’s coming in for the kill, this is how she’s going to get me. … I wouldn’t capitulate, so now she’s going to sting me. I brace myself.

“Usually I charge between thirty-five hundred and five thousand, but in this case, I want to donate a portion of my usual fee. Fifteen hundred would be fine, if that works for you?”

I’m flush with surprise. “That’s so nice of you — really generous,” I say, embarrassed by what I’d been thinking.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I enjoyed working with you — it meant a lot to me,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say.

And now she’s giving me the look.

“Please,” I beg, “you promised.”

“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she says, smiling.

Every Friday night, I take Madeline and Cy out for Chinese food. Mr. and Mrs. Gao, the owners of the restaurant, ask if I know about any available real estate — the commute from Brooklyn is getting to be too much.

It occurs to me that I could rent them Cy and Madeline’s house, which would at least cover the ongoing maintenance expenses. On Saturday morning, I take Mr. and Mrs. Gao to see the house.

“It is an American Dream house,” Mrs. Gao says. “It is Leave It to Believer, ” she says. I can tell from the way Mrs. Gao is touching things that she is moved by the very things about the décor that agitated me — to her it is like a museum of the American Dream.

“We can’t afford this place,” Mr. Gao tells his wife.

“You can,” I say. “We’ll make it work.” I ask what he pays currently and if that includes utilities. I offer him the house, including utilities, for a hundred dollars less a month.

“You drive hard bargain,” Mr. Gao says.

His wife slaps him. “Why are you always such a cheapskate?” She wags her finger at him. “Don’t ruin this for me.” And she turns to me. “Thank you,” she says. “We are very grateful.”

“I hope you will be happy here.”

The August days are bakingly hot, airless; every afternoon is punctuated by thunderstorms that start between five-thirty and six, often knocking the power out. I buy extra flashlights, batteries, and candles and make sure to have dinner cooked by five — just in case.

“What did Amanda die of?” Madeline asks one afternoon as the black clouds are quickly thickening and the first low rumbles of thunder echo through the neighborhood.

“Amanda?” I repeat, startled.

Madeline nods. “What did she die of? I keep thinking of the children with their mother gone — we must take good care of them.”

I realize that she has conflated Amanda and Jane into a single missing person.

“It was sudden.” I say, “Something in her head.”

“She always had headaches,” Madeline says.

“It couldn’t have been anticipated,” I say.

“We had another child,” she says, “an infant who passed before she was a year. Amanda and her sister don’t remember her — they were quite young when the baby came.”

“I think they knew,” I say softly, thinking of Amanda’s attachment to Heather Ryan.

“It’s possible,” she says. “They certainly knew something was wrong, Amanda kept making me get-well cards.”

The media exposure generated by the withdrawn Nixon short story is enough to get me access to agents. I strike up a correspondence with Franklin Furness, a fellow from an old political family who runs a mid-sized literary agency with a distinct interest in American history and politics. “We like representing those from the extremes — it’s the center that frightens me,” Franklin Furness writes. “Nothing good comes out of the middle — the action is at the edges.” Furness agrees to represent the book and will commence submission as soon as I forward him the final draft.

At 5:37 a.m. on an August Thursday, a time remembered only because that particular clock permanently stopped, a bolt of lightning struck the maple tree next to the house, splitting it with an explosive crash that only the heavens could have wrought. The tree was cleaved in a way that left one half standing as it had for the last half-century and the other half slumped against the house, one fat branch jutting through the wall of what had been George’s office, which suddenly looked like an arboretum.

The concussive crash, and simultaneous smell of something burning, hurls me out of my narrow bed in the maid’s room, next to the kitchen. I grab the fire extinguisher from under the sink and frantically search the house. After I discover the tree in George’s office, I dash upstairs to find Madeline’s arms wrapped around Cy, who is sitting bolt upright in bed, screaming, “Papa’s fired the derringer.”

“Nightmare,” Madeline says, patting her husband’s back. I hurry back into the hall and pull down the attic stairs.

The smell of ozone, of burnt eggs, of gunpowder, of molecules ripped apart and rearranged, fills the attic.

My laptop sits on the card table, the sleeping screen no longer shows a slide show of the South Africa trip; it is blinking, stuttering, searching for itself — blank.

The wall around the outlet where the cord is plugged in is black; there are fiery singe marks a good foot or more up, marking the boards with a sooty electrical fingerprint.

There is no fire.

Tessie is at the bottom of the attic stairs, whining. Madeline and Cy are standing there in their nightclothes, looking upward. “Shall we call in the cavalry?” Cy asks.

Is this what I’ve been waiting for?

The book is done. Cooked. There is no more need for perfection, it has simply ended — or, more specifically, electronically imploded.

It’s not as though the version on the computer was my only copy: there are others, various versions, iterations, three on flash drives, including one buried in the backyard in a time capsule — a fireproof box that I bought at the hardware store — and another e-mailed to the desk of Franklin Furness.

At another point in time, I would have been hysterical at having lost the changes since my last backup, or perhaps paralyzed, stunned dumb by the blinking eye of the black screen. Curiously, I feel relieved. It is as though something I carried with me for so long has vaporized, a great cloud lifting. I don’t have to do anything — beyond accepting that it is over. Finis. I am free. And I am oddly exhilarated.

And then it occurs to me — was the book the foul thing that Londisizwe said I was holding on to, the thing I’d been keeping close like a companion? Is this what lived inside and needed to come out? Is this it?

Just before the children are due to return from camp, a letter is forwarded from the hospital where Jane died, with a Post-it attached. “This arrived a couple of weeks ago, sorry to be delayed in sending it, I was on vacation. Do not feel pressured to engage if the enclosed is not of interest to you. But if you want to respond — I am happy to act on your behalf as a confidential courier. Hope you’re having a good summer. Best.” And it is signed by the doctor who was in charge of Jane’s case.