“Be careful with your words, once they are said they can only be forgiven, not forgotten.”
Silvana Masoud
“I am ridiculous, didn’t you get the memo?!” Anna exploded at me as soon as the door closed on my truck.
I inhaled deeply. “I apologize. You are not ridiculous. I was angry.”
She glared at me. “You were angry.” It was not a question. “You’ve been angry all night. Your anger makes me tired, Darius.”
We rode in silence until the silence was louder than the unsaid words cycling through my brain.
Finally, Anna spoke again. “What did I say that made you shut down?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, attempting to believe my own words.
I could feel her watching me, and I deliberately avoided her gaze.
“Then you’re a liar, Darius. The very thing you condemn me for.”
White hot anger pounded through my veins, and I ground my teeth against the words that threatened to explode from me. “I don’t lie,” I breathed out.
“So that time you said we were friends wasn’t a lie? Because shutting me out and then pretending it doesn’t matter are not the actions of a friend. For that matter, neither is setting me up to look disrespectful to your family. That actually sucked. I felt stupid and sloppy and even more clumsy than usual, so thanks for that too.”
A wave of shame swept the anger away and I felt sick. “Anna …” I began, but then couldn’t find the next words. I looked over at her, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. I tried again. “I didn’t set you up, and they don’t think you’re disrespectful at all. They like you.” I exhaled. “That’s the problem.”
“Because I’m just so awful?” Her voice broke on the word, and she turned toward the window.
There were so many things I should have said. She wasn’t awful. She was the opposite of awful. She made me want things I couldn’t want, to be something I couldn’t be. Her voice had woven through my dreams, her scent was on my pillow, her laughter was under my skin. She was under my skin, and like an itch I couldn’t scratch, all I wanted to do was tear my skin off.
“Who is the bad guy in the three apples story?” Anna asked in a small voice that made my heart hurt. “Was it the guy who killed his wife and chopped her into little pieces, or the slave who tricked the guy with the malicious lie about his wife’s fidelity?”
“Or maybe it was the Caliph who forgave the criminals their behavior and gave them a second chance?” I said, feeling the anger seep back into my veins.
“What are we actually talking about? The fact that I think the Caliph is a misogynistic jerk?”
“He should never have forgiven the crimes, isn’t that right?” I said.
“The husband murdered his wife over a rumor,” she spat out. Obviously her anger was rising too.
“And because he forgave the murderer, he’s now complicit in the wife’s death.” I knew she didn’t deserve my anger in this, but I was angry.
“Yes!”
“Exactly.” Saying the word took the fight out of me. It was everything I knew, and everything I believed, and yet it made me inexplicably sad.
I felt her gaze return to me for a long moment, and then she turned her eyes to the play of streetlights on the dashboard. She traced the path of light with her hand. “We’re not talking about the Caliph at all.” The light disappeared and then reappeared with the next lamp. “And that’s why you withdrew tonight at dinner. Because you’re the Caliph. I broke into your orchard and stole the apples growing there. And no matter what other crimes are revealed later, it falls on you to investigate and judge.” She inhaled, and then sighed. “And if you forgive me, you become complicit.”
I turned onto West Burton and stopped my truck outside her building. I didn’t put it in park or turn it off, and Anna unbuckled her seatbelt and turned in her seat. The streetlight cast half her face in deep shadow as she studied me for a long moment. She was unendurably beautiful.
“I didn’t know you existed,” she said, “and now I do, but I don’t get to have you, and it hurts. A lot.” She sighed, and I felt her sadness creep into me. “I wouldn’t change what I’ve done, but I would change who I’ve done it to. I’m sorry.” Her last words were a whisper, and then she got out of my truck and walked in front of my headlights and into her garden gate, and was gone.
I drove mindlessly around downtown Chicago for a while, until the wildflower scent of her that still lingered in my car had faded. The parking lot at the harbor was nearly empty, as usual, but I recognized the old Bronco in a space near the pier gate.
My brother wanted to talk. I hoped he’d brought beer.
He lay on my bed reading a time travel fantasy, and I had to bite back a surge of anger that he could be erasing the last of her scent with his own. “Reza,” I said as I hung my coat on a hook near the door.
“Dar,” he said, without looking up from the book. “Mom sent fesenjan. It’s in the fridge.”
I checked the fridge and found a big tub of the stew, some rice, and a six-pack of beer. I grabbed two beers, opened them, and put them on the table as I kicked off my shoes and sat. “You can borrow the book,” I said, staring at the label on my bottle as if it held all the wisdom in the world.
He came out of the bedroom, grabbed a receipt to use as a bookmark, and dropped onto the bench seat across from me. “So, Anna,” he said as he took a swig of his beer.
I sighed. It couldn’t have been boat engines or a problem at work that inspired my brother to show up at ten o’clock at night?
“Do we need to talk about this tonight?”
Reza leaned back, sipped his beer, and regarded me. “We don’t ever need to talk about it, but if you’re not going to keep her, can I take a shot?”
“Fuck off, Reza.”
A smile crept along the edges of his smug mouth, and I wanted to wipe it off with my fist. I’d never punched my brother, not even when he had begged for an attitude adjustment, but he was finally bigger than me, and my degree of self-loathing was such that I actually wanted the fight.
“I think she’s the best thing to happen to you since you bought this tub,” he said, gesturing around him. He loved my boat and had spent long hours helping me strip and sand the wood.
“She’s gone,” I said, glaring at him. “And she’s not for you, either.”
The smugness disappeared, and he sighed. “What’d you do?”
Sometimes I hated my brother for his ease with himself, because it shone a spotlight on everything I struggled with.
What had I done? And worse, why had I done it? “I let myself forget what I believe in for a little while – told myself it didn’t matter, because whatever it was …” I trailed off, because I knew exactly what it was. “The attraction between us couldn’t be real.”
“The attraction is visceral, man. It sparks the air between you like electricity, but ungrounded, like a live wire.”
He was right. It was dangerous.
I picked at the label on my beer while I chose the words I hadn’t even said to myself. “If I let myself be with her, it would make what our parents stood for, what they left Iran for, what I built my own ethics from, a lie.”
Reza scowled at me. “What is she, man, a terrorist?”
I huffed a mirthless laugh. “No. With her it’s not one big thing. It would be death by a thousand cuts every time she bribed the police with coffee, lied for information, traded a favor, asked for forgiveness rather than permission.”
“She’s a bounty hunter, right? Isn’t that what they do?” It was so easy for Reza.
I peeled the label off the bottle in one continuous strip and found the words to explain. “It’s more than her work. She lives by her own code, and if I let myself play by her rules, I’ll lose my own.”
My brother was silent for a long time, turning the bottle in his hands. “Who made your rules?” he finally asked. “Because it seems to me that you made them yourself a long time ago, maybe even when you were a kid.”
Reza had been a toddler when we left Iran. All his memories came from other people’s stories, and yet he continued. “You heard the things people said, people who were afraid and maybe justifying their choices to leave Iran, and your little seven-year-old brain decided what was right and wrong, and how the world should be.” He held my gaze as though making sure I heard every word.
“You were three, Reza. You don’t remember,” I pushed back.
“I know the stories. I remember the dog …”
I flinched and he pushed harder. “You’ve been living by a seven-year-old’s rules, probably since the day we left Iran, and seven-year-olds don’t have the full picture of the world.”
Reza stood. “I don’t know about you, but kids don’t get to make the rules for me.”
He drank the last of his beer, grabbed the book off the table, and clapped me on my shoulder as he headed for the door. “Good talk,” he said, and was gone before I could have the last word.