Forgiveness 4 You Read online

  ANN BAUER

  FORGIVENESS 4 YOU IS A WITTY, BIG-HEARTED NOVEL ABOUT FAITH AND ABSOLUTION IN AN AMERICA ADDICTED TO QUICK FIXES AND INSTANT GRATIFICATION.

  Gabriel McKenna is an ex-Catholic priest, and with his quiet job at a quiet bookstore, he is—slowly—rebuilding his still-young life. But even outside the confessional, people feel compelled to share their stories and reveal to him their deepest, guiltiest secrets.

  One of these people is Madeline Murray, an ambitious advertising executive, who, hours after uncharacteristically confessing to Father Gabe, has a vision: A business that will offer confession and forgiveness—the comforts of religion, without the work.

  Without knowing exactly how it happened (and whether any of it is morally sound) Gabriel is transformed by Madeline and her colleagues into the centerpiece of the forgiveness brand. A therapeutic revolution unleashes itself on America—or is about to, until a terrible secret threatens to torpedo the business and the man at the middle of it.

  ALSO BY ANN BAUER

  The Forever Marriage

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015

  by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the address above.

  Copyright © 2015 by Ann Bauer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1185-3

  Contents

  Also by Ann Bauer

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  About the Author

  For everyone who lies awake at night aching with regret,

  I dedicate this to you and send a little absolution your way.

  “It is the confession, not the priest,

  that gives us absolution.”

  —OSCAR WILDE

  I

  IT BEGAN LIKE THIS:

  I was in the bookstore, sitting behind the counter reading Dostoyevsky, when a small woman walked in: short red coat, long dark hair, black boots with buckles down the sides. She stopped inside the doorway, unwinding the scarf from around her neck.

  Her face was interesting—strange and sad. Not beautiful according to the surgically-nipped-news-anchor style of our time. Yet striking and very beautiful in a way that evoked something ancient: deserts, roiling storms, hieroglyphics on the side of a cave. Her forehead was clear and broad, her nose a little hawkish, her mouth full and nearly as red as her coat. She stood looking me up and down, her large, dark eyes moving over my body like hands.

  This happened to me often. Over the years, I’d grown accustomed to being leered at when I was wearing my robes. What surprised me was that this didn’t stop when I switched them out for the uniform of the underemployed forty-two-year-old: khakis, sweater vest, cracked leather shoes. Some women, not all but a large minority, seemed to smell something of my old life—candle wax, incense, the ether of old unanswered prayers—because they pressed up against me on the L, breathing deeply, their excitable nipples making little dents under my upraised arm.

  That’s how this one looked at first glance: as if she were following my scent, preparing to leap the counter and take me in her teeth. So I cleared my throat and said, “May I help you find something?” At which point she swallowed and cleared her throat a couple of times. Her large dark eyes were damp.

  “Can you help me?” she echoed—incorrectly, I first thought. Then I realized she’d actually meant it as a question. Was it possible I could help her? She assessed me shrewdly, narrowed eyes gleaming even through her tears. Then she glanced around the room, and I followed along, seeing the neat, shabby shelves as if they were from a grade school library, as I imagined she might. Books spilled from everywhere—half-full boxes and glass cupboards and stacks on the floor. We had run out of space; it was part of the charm of the shop.

  “Do you have anything on regret and what to do about it?” the woman asked briskly. “Or maybe how to make it go away? Because I’m not sure I can …” Here, she broke off and stared down at her pointed boots. “I apologize,” she said after a moment, speaking again in her firm, certain voice. “That was terribly inappropriate—and completely unlike me. I don’t know why this is happening. I should probably leave.”

  This wasn’t unusual, I wanted to tell her: the sudden outpouring of sadness followed by apology and confusion. It was the way these things had to be unraveled; for two decades I’d specialized in exactly this, parsing the blame and responsibility and absolving the guilt for everyone but myself.

  I was marked. It had happened even before I took my oath, the day I went to God with what I’d done and He appeared to me in the form of a tattoo artist named Sol. Since the moment I confessed and his needle pricked my chest, I’d been unable to slip through life like a normal man. People regularly dissolved in my presence—even those who didn’t realize they were harboring shame. Old, young, every race and color, even dedicated atheists and thieves. Nine times out of ten it scared them, so they would abruptly say goodbye and leave.

  But this woman was—however reluctantly—standing her ground. Slowly she raised her head, and I watched as she recognized the Sol in me. I put my book down and came out from behind the counter, walking with my head straight forward, hands folded, in the slow, reverent way I was taught.

  It was just the two of us, which was not unusual for Brooks Books at 3:30 p.m. on a cold Tuesday in February. I put my hand on the woman’s shoulder and pressed down through her wool coat to the bones below. She was a 110-pound warrior dressed in thick winter clothes.

  “Would you like to sit?” I asked, pointing to the beat-up leather chairs that Oren, our owner, keeps near the gas fireplace—a set-up that encourages people to settle in and read, but not buy.

  “I’m so sorry!” she said again, pulling a pair of rhinestone-studded sunglasses from her purse and slipping them on, as if the sun—which had been in hiding for weeks—were suddenly breaking out in our shop. “Something is going on. I never do things like this! I actually just came in for a …” She gestured oddly with the toe of one boot, a masked Midwestern Audrey Hepburn in glittering frames.

  “Book?” I prompted.

  “No,” she said. “A manicure.” She pulled off one leather glove and presented me with a small, chapped hand. “There used to be a place. They had a paraffin wrap I loved. I could have sworn it was here.”

  “Next door,” I said, tipping my head to the east. “It closed in January.”

  “Well, I should go then,” she said uncertainly. But still she stayed, and I moved forward another inch or two.

  I didn’t want this one to leave. The image of an empty afternoon yawned in front of me. And it had been a long time since I’d met anyone who stirred my desire to m
inister. The last person who found me was a loud, bald man clearly in search of a quick fix. He’d been buying a guidebook to Prague, talking rapidly about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. She didn’t remember him anyway, so what did it matter if he saw her? That was the refrain. I’d kept my mouth shut and handed him his receipt without a word.

  But this sprite of a woman, hiding behind her dark glasses and fighting the urge to confess, was definitely different. I tested the air, leaning forward and then back. There was definitely something compelling me toward her. My spiritual radar was rusty, yet her appearance felt like a sign.

  “My name is Gabe,” I said, shaking the hand she’d offered as evidence. My own swallowed hers whole. “Why don’t you stay and warm up? I can’t help you with your nails, but I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  Just then there was a brief flash of light through the door’s half-window. “Thundersnow,” she said and shivered. We slid slowly toward the chairs in unison, as if on a conveyor belt.

  I flipped the switch on the fireplace, producing an immediate wisp of heat and a chemical orange glow. “I remember that manicure place,” I told her, chatting to put her at ease, “because when I started working here—it was a couple weeks before Christmas—I’d go home every night with the smell of chemicals on my clothes.”

  “Acetone,” she said, tucking into her wingback and nodding.

  I nodded, too, though this was the first time I’d heard the term. I didn’t tell her about those nights when I would walk through the lighted streets yearning for my old life the way children want their mothers, remembering until it was painful the candlelit silence and safety of a chapel at dusk. I didn’t tell her about climbing the stairs to my shoddy one-room apartment where the acetone—if that’s what it was—would rise in a vapor as I shucked off my coat. Or about how I would stand there, paralyzed, still aching to go back twenty-two years and save myself.

  At least, not yet. Some of this would come later at the nightclub down the street, over martinis she charged to her business account. Some of it would come much later, when I once again had everything to lose.

  “Listen,” she said, removing the sunglasses, her eyes an endless brown-black and once again unwavering. “I don’t know what that was back there. I’m not the sort of person who cries in front of strangers. I guess I’ve been under a lot of stress.”

  “That happens,” I murmured as I plugged in the hot pot.

  “It’s work,” she said, slipping off her little pointed boots and tucking her feet under her. “Which has been crazy. I mean, you don’t know crazy until you’ve run an ad agency single-handed.” She seemed to be warning me, in case I was considering doing such a thing.

  “That sounds very challenging,” I murmured, my back to her as I rummaged in the cupboard. When I get into the groove, I’m like a backup singer; all most people really need is to hear the familiar echoes and refrains. This woman was different though. She kept going off script.

  “It is. But, oh! I apologize. That sounded really pompous, didn’t it?” She shook her head. “This is exactly what my ex-husband used to accuse me of: ‘You’re constantly telling people how successful you are, Madeline.’” Her soprano had gone several notes deeper to become a parody of a man. “But he’s right, I shouldn’t do that,” she said in her own voice.

  The water was boiling, and luckily there were two packets of Earl Grey left. I made the tea and handed a cup to the woman. Madeline. “Sugar?” I asked. She shook her head no, hair rustling over her shoulders with a brisk and pleasant sound.

  “He was my second husband. My second ex-husband now, I suppose.” She set her tea down and removed her coat. Underneath she wore a tight, buttoned suit. “Damn. What an error in judgment that was. Second marriages! They never seem to work.”

  She glanced at me, and I was tempted to agree. Imagine, I might say to her, trying for a second marriage when your first spouse was God. Sometimes, inside my head, I’m kind of an ass.

  “But there was Cassidy.” She paused and looked into her lap, and I watched guilt draw its white blind down over her face. “This is ridiculous. I’m making a fool of myself, talking about all this. It’s just the surprise, I think. Finding you here. The thunder. Hormones, probably.” She spoke matter-of-factly, like the commercials for women’s remedies on TV. “Thanks for the tea. I should go.”

  It was the second time she’d announced her departure, and there was no earthly reason for me to delay her. I had books to unpack and an H. P. Lovecraft display to build. Yet there was something compelling me to keep her. Goodwill, loneliness, attraction, it didn’t matter. I acted on whatever it was.

  “You haven’t even tried your tea,” I said with more authority than I’d assumed in a year. “Sit. Tell me what happened. Maybe I can help.”

  She shook her head. But she didn’t get up. “You can’t help. No one can. I did a terrible thing to that girl, and there’s no way for me to ever make it up.”

  “Go on,” I said, settling back. There was a feeling of security: I knew exactly how this part should go. “It’s all right. What did you do?”

  She sighed and warmed her hands around her cup. “When I started seeing Kevin,” she began, “Cassidy was four. She was so sweet, and I really, truly thought I loved her father. So I took her out, to the zoo and Six Flags and the Christmas show at Marshall Fields. All the things I never got to do as a child.”

  “You grew up poor?” I asked, feeling a kinship.

  But Madeline shook her head again. “Not exactly. I mean yes, my parents survived mostly on welfare and food stamps. There was family money somewhere, a lot of it, from what I understand, but my grandparents kept cutting us off. And when my parents took us places it wasn’t to zoos or amusement parks, it was to union rallies and protests.” She looked at me squarely. “By the time I was in third grade, I knew how to chain myself to a fence.”

  I laughed, the image in my head of Madeline now in her nice suit with shackles around her arms. “So you wanted something different for Cassidy?”

  “God, yes. I wanted everything for her. Kevin and I were married when she was five, and Cass was the maid of honor. She had this gorgeous little blue dress. White flowers in her hair. She looked like an angel, you know?”

  “Yes.” This time I spoke with actual knowledge. I knew how it was to look down an aisle and see little girls floating toward you like seraphim.

  “Then, I don’t know what happened. It was like the minute we got married, Cassidy started to go … bad. She did disgusting things, like eating with her mouth wide open or picking her nose when we had company. And I mean aggressive nose picking, shoving a finger up there and twisting it and pulling out these long …”

  Madeline grimaced and shook herself. “Then there was her room. I tried promising her rewards, an allowance, more TV time, but she kept gathering trash. More and more of it, until the whole house smelled.” Again, she sighed. “Ooh, so awful. It was the kind of smell that made you just not want to come home. I spent every weekend cleaning her room, throwing out moldy applesauce containers and half-full cups of juice.”

  She stopped and took a sip of tea, looking around as if to reassure herself that she was no longer surrounded by filth.

  “Cass must have gained ten pounds that first year. And we’re talking about a six-year-old! Her hair was always snarled, and she wouldn’t let me brush it. She screamed like I was killing her whenever I tried. Then when she was in first grade, the real tantrums started. I told Kevin he had to deal with her. It was his responsibility. She wasn’t my …” She broke off as if startled.

  “Child,” I finished for her.

  “Right,” she said. “Only the thing is I’d promised at our wedding that she would be. There was a little part of the ceremony where I ‘married’ her. I, Madeline, take you Cassidy as the daughter of my heart, to love forever. I wrote it myself. It was …” Madeline sniffled, then her face grew stiff and disapproving. “A really good script, that’s what it was. Crowd pleasing.”<
br />
  “I see.”

  “Her mother was long gone; she took off when Cass was six months old. Never sent so much a birthday card. It was like she just zeroed out her own daughter. Moved on. But then I …”

  We sat staring into the licking tongues of our cozy fake fire.

  “You …?” I tried to resist, but the man I used to be squatted inside me, patient, offering up his psalms and birds of hope. “You did the very same thing?”

  That’s when Madeline wept. Not as she had before, the held-back tears of a woman standing at a counter in an unfamiliar shop. This was serious and personal. She turned slightly so I would not witness her shame.

  “Yes. By the time Kevin and I finally divorced, she was nine. And impossible. We’d have split up even without her problems, but Cass was a constant issue—she was all we ever talked about. She snuck food, stole it if she had to. She outweighed me by twenty pounds and she was only four and a half feet tall. She had no friends. There was an incident at school where she hurt a younger boy.” Madeline was staring at her hands, clenching them in her lap.

  “Cass was acting out constantly at school; at least twice a week we’d get called in to talk to the principal. We were considering sending her away to a special place for children with … issues.” She sighed and drew herself tighter in the chair.

  “That sounds like a hard decision.” As always when I heard a story like this, calamity building inevitably, I felt the pain of my penitent. But I also felt—corny as it sounds—like an instrument of God. Or at least like something finer than myself.

  “But we couldn’t. Kevin lost his job, and there wasn’t enough money. We started fighting all the time. The bills for Cass’s therapy were piling up. It seemed like there was no way out, except …” She held her hands up, palms open to the heavens. “I moved out, told him I was just done. I quit, as Kevin’s wife and as Cassidy’s mom. It was so freeing.” She shivered. “The relief was incredible. I don’t think anything in my life has ever felt that good.”