May We Be Forgiven

rehabilitate myself, is real. It is only a matter of time before the cops are at my door. Hours pass. Days. If I had no other responsibilities, I would consider suicide. This may strike you as an overreaction, but what I am trying to say is that I feel guilt, shame, and responsibility on a profound level. Clearly it’s not just about the dead girl. I am aware of the damage to everyone—it’s as though this girl and Nate and Ashley weren’t real, as though nothing was real—except the stirrings below—until all this—until I got to know them. Before this I was detached. The depth to which I now feel everything, when it is not paralyzing, is terrifying. Again, I vomit.

    T hat 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