A Thousand Pardons (28 page)

But how do you find someone? How do you prove she exists? Helen had no skills in this area whatsoever. She Googled the girl, and found the usual sludge of five thousand random mentions of a woman with that name who may or may not have been Bettina. One had just finished first in the long jump at River Oaks High School in Winnetka, Illinois. So you could eliminate that one, but how many of the other hits might be referring to that one too? There was no way to know, or else the ways, Helen thought, were opaque to someone like her. She clicked on Images and, with a sharp gasp she was glad no one was around to overhear, recognized her, the horrid bitch from the screening
a week ago. She’d been photographed by Patrick McMullan at some society benefit, smiling into the camera with her tattooed arm around some other austerely proportioned girl, both of them standing the way skinny women bred a certain way always stand. She looked utterly, aggressively self-conscious, like she was daring the camera to record her in any way other than the way she wanted to be seen. Beautiful, though. She and Hamilton must have made quite a couple, must have given off a concentrated glow in that moldy, colorless setting if, God forbid, anyone had seen them there.

There were all these professional directories, and all these services that promised to track down and collate vital information about anyone whose privacy you cared to invade. It was never more than two clicks before they started asking you for money, and Helen, using her personal credit card and address, subscribed to every one of them. She tried a phone number she found attached to Bettina’s real name; it had been disconnected, though there was no knowing when. The only information she got of any substance, twenty minutes and about two hundred and sixty dollars later, was a street address, on Thirty-first Avenue in Astoria. By now she could hear other Malloy employees strolling past her closed door, and she knew she didn’t have long.

Out in the street, head down in the rain lest anyone entering the building recognize her, Helen hailed a cab and rode all the way to Queens, repeating the street and apartment numbers to herself over and over, in keeping with her resolution not to write anything down. It was a narrow walk-up building next to a fish store. All the windows were dark. Shakily, Helen pressed Lauren Schmidt’s buzzer, a total of three times, the last time backing quickly down the steps into the street to look up at the third-floor window for any sign of movement. No one was there; in fact no one other than Helen was on the sidewalk at all in the light rain in the middle of the morning, certainly not anyone who might live in one of the other apartments in Bettina’s building and be able to answer a question about when she had last been seen.

But it could have meant anything Helen wanted it to mean. People with jobs, even temp jobs, were exceptionally unlikely to be at home during the day. Whatever emotion you felt as a result was just a matter
of faith, really, and she took the opportunity to remind herself of her faith in the idea that Hamilton was simply incapable of doing what he was convinced he had done. Even with drugs involved, he was not some killer. It didn’t matter that she had known him only as a child; her sense of what was and wasn’t in him was stronger and more reliable, she believed, than was his own. That’s why he had sought her out in the first place.

She couldn’t find a cab in the rain to save her life, so she wound up walking west until she found a subway stop, on the Q line. She hadn’t even known there was a Q line. She didn’t get back to the office until about lunchtime, and when the elevator door opened she was face to face with Ashok, who looked as jolted to see her as if he had been told she was dead. “Mr. Malloy has been looking for you,” he said in an unnecessary whisper. “He actually came downstairs to find you. He had somebody with him. He was not happy I didn’t know where you were.”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said. She took off her ruined shoes, and put them back on again. “I’m sorry to put you in that position.” Her own face was reddening. She struggled not to cry. “This guy he had with him,” Helen said. “Did he— It wasn’t by any chance like a cop or anything?”

Ashok looked reassuringly confused. “A cop?” he said. “No, you’re way off, actually. He was— He had the collar, like a priest or a minister or whatever.”

Suddenly it seemed like the most obvious mistake to have come back to the office at all. Big as it was, Malloy Worldwide wasn’t physically big enough to hide in. “Listen, Ashok,” she said, “I need to ask you to do something for me. I need you to tell Arturo and whoever else asks that I left you a voice mail saying I am taking a personal day. I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to be eligible for any personal days, but let’s say I didn’t realize that.”

“And why are you taking this personal day?” Ashok said, looking almost comically attentive, as he always did when strategy was being discussed.

“Let’s say”—she closed her eyes, and sighed—“let’s say that my
daughter is in trouble. I mean, don’t use that phrase, but … okay, that she’s very sick.”

He nodded.

“It is a terrible thing to ask you to lie about,” Helen said. She gave in to an urge to reach out and touch his round face. “Forgive me for asking.”

“For you, Helen, anything,” said Ashok.

AT FIRST BEN WAS AFRAID to let Hamilton Barth out of his sight for more than a few minutes, because he just assumed, from the oversolicitous way Helen treated him, that he was the kind of guy who’d be inclined to make a break for it, out the window or over the roof until somebody recognized him and gave him a lift to the nearest bar. As if Ben himself, and his home, were some form of rehab. He’d seen men like Hamilton at Stages—morose, narcissistic, making a big show of their passivity—and he’d seen how closely the counselors watched them. But a day passed—a day about half of which Hamilton spent sleeping in Ben’s bed—and by the next afternoon Ben was hovering for a different reason, which was that he thought the guy was sunk so deep as to be at risk of suicide. He had no idea what signs to look for, or anything like that; it was just something he felt. And he didn’t want his house to become a shrine where some tragic, martyred movie star had breathed his last.

He called Bonifacio to say that he wouldn’t be in to the office that afternoon; he said he felt he might be coming down with something. “Huh,” Bonifacio said with his usual light, teasing malice. “Sick day, eh? Well, this may come up at your performance review. Have some chicken soup and an Airborne and let me know what tomorrow’s story is.”

Ben hung up. Hamilton was back in the master bedroom again, not by choice but because Ben had stashed him there, as ordered, while two jumpsuited guys carried into the house a dining room table and four chairs. Once their truck had receded noisily up the hill, Ben expected Hamilton to come right out again, but the bedroom door remained
shut. He knocked, and nudged the door open, cautiously, when there was no response. Hamilton was lying sideways across the bed, in one of Ben’s polo shirts and a pair of his jeans, his hands between his knees, his eyes watery.

“You hungry?” Ben said boisterously. “You must be starving.”

“Not really,” Hamilton said.

Ben’s concern was mixed with relief since there was hardly any food in the house. Everything he’d been told about this Hamilton Barth character, or had read somewhere about him—his pretension, his genius, his tortured-soul routine—was suddenly dwarfed by the need to make some kind of masculine connection with him, to keep him from sticking his head in Ben’s oven or hanging himself with Ben’s belt. “How about a drink, then?” he said.

Hamilton’s head turned slowly in his direction. The windows were still covered by rags; new blinds had been purchased, but Ben was going to have to hire one of the hardware store owner’s sons to come put them up.

“What time of day is it?” Hamilton asked.

It was around one-thirty, but Ben just shrugged. “Five o’clock somewhere,” he said, an expression he’d always hated. “Come on, we can’t get in any trouble as long as we stay in the house. Come out to the kitchen with me,” he said as he might have said to a small child, “and let’s see what we’ve got.”

There was a bottle of rum, which he didn’t remember buying. It might have been there in the cupboard above the fridge since before the house went on the market, for all he knew. Anyway, mixed with some orange and cranberry juice it tasted like something legitimate to drink in the middle of the day. They finished their first one in silence; Ben took the glass from Hamilton’s fingers and poured another. He could see raindrops on the windowsill. So what, Ben thought, it’s not like we were going to take a stroll around the neighborhood anyway.

He found it surprising that Hamilton, distracted and depressed as he may have been, didn’t ask any more questions about where he was, neither about the place nor about Ben himself: How is it you are living in your own home without any furniture? Why don’t you have a job to
go to? That kind of thing. But the man was a celebrity, a movie star. Even at his lowest moment—especially at his lowest moment—he just took it for granted that people’s curiosity would bend toward him.

“So you grew up in Malloy, huh?” Ben said, into the mouth of his glass. Hamilton’s chin lifted slightly, and he nodded.

“I’ve never been there myself,” Ben said, just to keep silence from reasserting itself. “I’ve been to Watertown once, after her mother died.”

“Helen’s mother died?” Hamilton said.

“Yeah,” Ben said, trying not to sound unreasonably excited that he had gotten Hamilton to say anything at all. “In Florida, actually, but we had to go and close up the house and whatnot. She used to tell me that Watertown was like the big city compared to Malloy. But you’d know all about that.”

Hamilton considered it. “Probably I remember that about it,” he said. “I’ve forgotten a lot. Truthfully I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere anymore. I’m just here in the now.”

“Sure,” said Ben, as convincingly as he could. “Naturally.”

They heard a man’s voice outside in the street. Trying to appear casual, like an actor carrying out some stage business in a play, Ben crossed the kitchen and stood between Hamilton and the uncovered window.

“But you two did know each other as kids,” Ben said. “In a little town like that. So what was Helen like, as a kid? I used to wonder about that.”

“Truthfully,” Hamilton said, “I don’t remember her at all, but it’s seriously nothing personal, I forget everybody from then. It’s more like time travel with Helen, like she was sent here from my past.”

Ben nodded, credibly, he hoped. While he felt proud of himself for engaging Hamilton at all, in truth the guy was a little hard to talk to. Spontaneously, half out of desperation and awkwardness, he said, “So is it okay if I ask you something? It’s completely within the walls of this house. I know you don’t know me, but believe me, I wouldn’t want to betray Helen’s trust again.” That last word just slipped out, but Hamilton didn’t seem to notice. “Why are you here? What are we hiding you from?”

The muscles in Hamilton’s face worked a little bit, almost randomly, as if the rum were beginning to wake him up. “I think I had kind of a psychotic break,” he said glumly. “I did something that— I was going to say ‘that wasn’t really like me,’ but that’s just it, actually. I think it was the real me. And the rest of the time—like right now—I just have this face that I put on. I did something that showed me who I am. Now I can’t unsee it.”

That made even more sense to Ben than Hamilton might have expected, and he didn’t say anything in reply. He held his glass to his mouth until the ice cubes slid and clacked against his teeth. “You know what?” he said, taking Hamilton’s glass from him again. “I take it back. It’s your business. I know what I need to know.”

Just then he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket: another text from Helen. “She’s asking if you’re okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“So she hasn’t found Bettina?”

Ben didn’t know what that meant, or what an answer one way or the other might do to Hamilton’s mood. So he just shrugged noncommittally, and then he texted back to Helen,
Napping
. “So how long have you been a client of Helen’s?” he said. “I have to admit, I’m not sure what kind of work she does exactly.”

“I’m not a client of hers.”

“No? Oh. I guess I misunderstood—I thought this was a work-related thing.”

“Not so much,” Hamilton said.

“Did you meet professionally?”

“No,” Hamilton said. “I mean I wouldn’t call it that.”

“And you didn’t stay in touch over the years, or anything like that?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“Why did you call her of all people when you were in trouble, then?” Ben asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

For once, Hamilton met his eyes. “That is a really interesting question, man,” he said. “When I met her again, it reminded me right away of the nuns, right, at our old school? I mean nothing personal, I’m not calling her a nun, I know she used to be your wife. But I got that nun hit off her, where you kind of wanted to laugh them off because they
seemed so out of touch, but then when you got scared or in trouble you caught yourself thinking about them. Hey, I guess I do remember some of that Malloy stuff after all.”

Ben stood up and began mixing them two more drinks, even though the orange juice was now gone.

“She is a trip,” Hamilton said. “I totally get why you couldn’t stay married to her. Hey, can I ask you something? That Chinese girl that was here—that’s Helen’s daughter, so I guess she would be your daughter too?”

“That’s right,” Ben said. “Sara.”

“Is she from
China
China?” Ben nodded. “So you went over there to the orphanage and all that?”

“We went over there,” Ben said, “but not to the orphanage. They didn’t want us to see it.”

“So has it been awkward, ever?”

“Has what been awkward?”

“Having a child who’s a different race than you,” Hamilton said. “I always wondered that about adoption. I mean I guess I’ve always assumed that it was basically vanity that made people reproduce in the first place, and adopting a kid who looks nothing like you—it doesn’t seem like it would satisfy that. Am I wrong?”