A Thousand Pardons (26 page)

“I don’t want to talk about anything,” she said. He nodded sympathetically and waited; as a parent, he still had some game. He wasn’t sure, but he thought there used to be some kind of bird feeder hanging from the tree on their front lawn; he wondered what had happened to it.

“I don’t like it the way it is now,” Sara said. “I thought I would, but I don’t. I mean living in New York, living with Mom, the whole thing. I think I belong here, with you. I just feel like you know me better. So,” she said, gesturing vaguely behind her, “I guess this is what I wanted, actually. I just don’t particularly appreciate the way it happened, Mom kidnapping me and all.”

“What do you mean,” Ben said, “you feel like I know you better? How would such a thing be possible? I’ve been a horrible father to you for the last year or so. I wasn’t really interested in knowing anything about anybody other than myself.”

“See? Like right there. When you’re all humble, it seems real, but when Mom does it, it just seems over the top, like capital-H Humble. There’s something fake about her.”

“Fake, huh,” he said. “Your mother’s a lot of things, but personally I don’t think fake is one of them. Of course, it’s been a strange year.”

“For instance, I knew you would be cool with this,” said Sara, waggling her beer bottle. “One beer, at home. Safe environment and whatnot.”

“And she would not be cool with that?”

“Perfect children don’t drink beer,” Sara said.

The house ticked behind them. It was fully dark now; the other homes on the street glowed like embers.

“I mean, it goes both ways,” Sara said. “I understand you too. I get why you’d just wake up one day and say, Is this really my life? How did
I even get here? And if you can’t answer that question, you might start to act a little crazy.”

Ben sighed. He didn’t want to discourage any point of connection she might feel to him, but at the same time, to allow his own failings to be employed as a parable of any sort was, in a way, to absolve them, and that he did not want.

“The important thing,” he said, “is that none of it was about you. I mean it should have been much more about you, really, but I wasn’t seeing things that way at the time. It was like I couldn’t see past the walls of my own head. My life just seemed so questionable to me that I had to give it away. I’d already given it away in my mind, but that didn’t actually change anything, so I guess I had to find some way to do it that everyone else would see too.”

“And so now, you’re, what, like trying to buy your old life back?”

“Now I have no life at all,” Ben said. “But that’s a start. In the meantime, it just feels right to be here, as strange and masochistic as I’m sure it looks to everybody else.”

“So you’re just basically waiting,” Sara said.

“That’s right.”

“And you don’t know for what.”

“That’s right too. Something, though. Just trying to stay open to it.”

“Maybe it was this,” Sara said.

She put her beer bottle down on the step and slapped a bug on her leg.

“I used to get drunk after school with the guy I was with,” she said softly. “Almost every day. He’s a little crazy. To tell the truth, I’m starting to get a little afraid of him.”

“Why? What did he do to you? Or say he would do to you?”

“Wow,” she said, laughing. “The lawyer in you comes out. No, he didn’t really do or say anything. It’s not that explicit or whatever. More like I can see there’s something in him. And I think he knows I see it, which makes me feel like if it ever comes out, it’ll come out in my direction, you know?”

She was pretty perceptive after half a beer, he thought. “Well, you’re safe up here at least.”

“True dat. Now nobody knows where the hell I am.”

“Does Mom know about this guy?”

“Nope. It is not possible to talk to Mom about certain things, you know? Her world is pretty limited. It’s like talking to a nun or whatever.”

From somewhere on the dark block they heard the sound of a child crying, and then a window being slammed shut. For a moment, that silenced even the bugs.

“I’m not going back,” Sara said.

They listened to somebody’s dog barking, miles away probably.

“It’s out of your hands,” Ben said gently. “Mine too.”

She shrugged.

“You should see me at Price Chopper, or at the Starbucks,” he said, grinning. “It’s pretty hilarious. All the local moms. Sometimes they actually get out of a line just because I’m in it.”

“Well, you buy back your own house and then live in it with no furniture, like some hobo monk. You must know how pointless and creepy that looks.”

“Yeah,” he said, swigging forgetfully from the empty bottle. “I’m sure it does.”

“So are you working again tomorrow?”

“Yep.” She seemed disappointed, though he wasn’t sure how he could tell, now that it was too dark out to see her face. “You want to see any of your old friends while you’re here?”

She made a kind of hissing sound and tilted her bottle in the air. “If you don’t mind a little advice,” she said, “you need to purchase some chairs, and rugs, and forks and knives and such. It’s a little ghetto in there.”

“I don’t really know how to buy furniture,” he said, pulling out his phone. “You want to go online with me right now and order some stuff?”

She shrugged and nodded. “No offense,” she said, “but it’s not because you’re broke, is it?”

“Not quite yet,” he said. “Anyway, our credit is still good.” He took her hand and helped her to her feet. “But listen, you don’t happen to
know, by any chance, where your mother stored all our old furniture?”

“No clue.”

“Okay. Well, probably for the best, anyway.”

“Can I have another one?” she said, holding up her empty bottle.

He ran his hand along the black hair at the back of her head, the silky spot that had always been there. “Nope,” he said.

HELEN SPENT THE NIGHT in the car, sleeping fitfully, waking with her head tilted back to watch the moonlit clouds sliding over the tree line. Hamilton slept inside, on a chair he had dragged in from the porch, under a blanket made of threadbare towels, as he apparently had for the previous few nights. He would not go near the bed, or even look at it. At dawn she walked up to the cabin that served as an office; it was empty and unlocked. There was no guest registry either. Maybe the whole operation was illegal; in any case, whoever ran it seemed to have other things on his or her mind, which was, for Helen, the first good break. She left cash to cover four nights, plus an extra sixty dollars, which she stuck under a flyswatter that lay across the countertop; on a piece of paper she found in her bag, she wrote, “Cabin 3—Sorry for the mess—Thanks!”

Then they were back on the road, pointed south again, but with no realistic destination in mind. Hamilton, who smelled repulsive, fell asleep almost instantly in the car, like a dog or a baby; he probably hadn’t slept much, under those towels, for days. The first thing she determined to do was to stop in town and buy a new charger for his dead cellphone. She took the phone from him and went into a Best Buy in the largest of the endless mini-malls. He was too recognizable to risk getting out of the car. In fact she wasn’t crazy about his exposure even in the car, so she parked behind the store, next to a dumpster. The Best Buy clerk, upon learning that Helen apparently didn’t even know the make and model of her own phone, sold her with maddening condescension a charger that came with an adapter for the car—she hadn’t even thought of that. They got back on the highway, waiting for the
phone to wake up so Hamilton could check his voice mail. Finally he got enough of a charge and a signal to learn that his mailbox was full. It took almost twenty minutes for him to listen to the first few seconds of each message and delete it, tears forming in his eyes, until finally he repeated in terror the words the phone spoke robotically into his ear.

“That’s the last message,” he whispered, flipping the phone shut. “Nothing from her.”

“But she wouldn’t have your cell number anyway, would she?”

“No,” he said, no less gloomily.

Helen’s heart raced. “Anything from the police, though? Or any media?”

“No police. There’s always some media, but they never say what they want. Mostly it’s studio people, agency people, whatever, freaking out because they don’t know where I am.”

“So you’ve missed some appointments?” Helen asked.

“Probably,” he said. “Definitely, going by their tone of voice.” He stared out the window at the other cars, while Helen, her fingers tight on the wheel, tried to think of a way to ask him not to do that. “I’m hungry,” he mumbled.

The problem was that they couldn’t just walk into any restaurant anywhere, because someone would notice, probably within seconds, his face and his dissipated state. Outside of a small professional circle, he was probably not yet considered missing; those studio people were pretty good at keeping information private when they wanted to. But it didn’t matter. Wherever he went, people would react as if they’d found him; they’d pull out their phones, they’d need to upload some record of their public proximity to him. Helen pulled off the highway just over the Massachusetts border and tooled around a likely looking small town until she found an actual drive-in restaurant, the kind with picnic tables in the back and a big steel garbage can capped by a cloud of bees. She wasn’t about to risk even the picnic tables, though. She went to the window and a few minutes later brought back to the car an array of fried things on a red plastic tray. He tore into the food for the first few bites but then slowed down and grew morose again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be difficult to feel like you can’t show your face, even in a place like this where you’re a total stranger, or should be. But it’s only for a little while, until we get everything straightened out.”

He frowned. “It’s forever,” he said. “You’re always being watched by some unseen eye, everywhere you go, all the time, in your most intimate moment even. You’re always being judged.”

A car pulled into the space right next to them, on the driver’s side mercifully, and a beleaguered looking mother got out and began unbuckling kids from car seats.

“And this is why,” Hamilton said. “This is why they watch. Because they’ve been waiting for the mask to come off like this. They’ve been waiting for the real me to come out.”

Helen picked at the hot dog bun and rolled bits of it between her fingers. “So look,” she said, laboring to sound calm. “We’ve had a chance to get away from that place and take a deep breath and clear our heads a little bit. So let me ask you again, and you think about it again: what is the last thing you can remember?”

He shook his head. “I know you think things are going to come back to me, but they won’t. Trust me, I have been through this before.”

“Through what?”

“Well, through blackouts. But usually either I’m alone when it happens or there’s someone else there when I come around who can fill in the blanks for me. Not this time.”

“And so this time you’re afraid you’ve done what, exactly?”

He scowled. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “where is she, then?”

“You’re not saying you think you
killed
her?”

“There’s no other explanation,” he said sullenly.

“There are a million other explanations! But look, you admitted you don’t remember anything about it. So all you really have to go on is a feeling of dread or guilt—”

“And a missing person,” Hamilton said irritably, “and a bunch of bloodstains—”

“That blood could be months old for all you know. You think they
really care, at that place? The cabin didn’t look like it had been cleaned in a year.”

“You can put whatever spin on it you want—”

“And your clothes. There is no blood at all on any of your clothes.”

“Maybe I wasn’t wearing them at the time.”

“And what do—” Helen said and stopped; she was going to ask him what he supposed he had done with the girl’s body, but that aspect of things was probably not worth bringing up. There had been rowboats and canoes pulled up on shore near the cabins; and to tell the truth the lake itself had creeped her out from the moment she got out of the car. “The point is you don’t know what happened,” she said firmly. “You don’t know. And it’s ridiculous to just assume the worst, because frankly I know you’re not capable of that—”

“You don’t know me.”

“I do,” Helen said, feeling herself start to choke up a little bit. “I do know you, Hamilton. So the situation, as I see it as your adviser here, is that we need to stash you somewhere, just briefly, while I figure out where this woman is. This woman whose name you can’t remember.”

“It’s not that I can’t remember it. It’s that she told me it wasn’t her real name.”

“But if I can produce this woman, then you will have to exonerate yourself, and then all we have to do is come up with some plausible story about where you’ve been the last few days, if anybody even asks. Right? We just can’t let it go on for too long. So: it can’t be a hotel.”

“No way.”

“It can’t be anyplace with any sort of doorman or any employee like that.” She could already feel where this line of reasoning was going, even as she thought it through, but she wasn’t ready to get there yet. “We’re too exposed, just sitting here,” she said, starting the car again. “Did you get enough to eat for now?”

They were back on Route 7 a short while after that, headed south, but Helen wasn’t frustrated by the pace of the traffic this time; she was in no hurry to get where she was going. This is crazy, she said to herself soothingly. We will figure out what happened. The girl is fine. She is somewhere telling the story of her weekend sex romp with a movie star. Hamilton is no judge of what’s inside him.

“We were on the Northway,” Hamilton said suddenly, softly, “and we saw the ferry sign. We were so high. It must have been me driving. ‘We have to ride it,’ she kept saying. ‘We have to see what’s on the other side.’ It’s the kind of thing that sounds really important when you’re that high. We’d stopped in Beacon because she knew a dealer there, which should have been a red flag, obviously. She knows a dealer in Beacon? Anyway, I gave in and turned around, partly just because I knew I needed to stop driving for a while. And the ferry: you’re in the car, and the car is moving, but you’re not driving it, so that’s pretty great. I remember she wouldn’t stay in the car, though, once we were out on the water, even though it was freezing. She sat on the roof, over my head. I was so sure she was this once-in-a-lifetime woman. She was so fragile, so hurtful, so wounded and vicious, it just made you want to cry for her. She started yelling at the ferry pilot to cut the engine. Which he obviously wasn’t going to do, but he did blow the horn for her. Why would she have been yelling at him to do that, though? She knew. She knew where we were going, that it would be horrible, but it felt so great getting there. Then she climbed down and got in the car again and I turned the heater up all the way and we smoked another rock, and I don’t remember anything at all after that.” He started crying. Helen kept her eyes on the road.