A Thousand Pardons (22 page)

“I think it sounds pretty messed up,” she said.

“Well, granted.”

“I mean, for one thing, I thought you were broke.”

“I wasn’t, it turned out. Though I kind of am now.”

“And then—” She closed her eyes, not because she was upset but just to try to get her thoughts in order. “Why would you want to go back there,” she asked him, “by yourself, when you made such a big display about wanting to get out when Mom and I were living there? You liked the house, it was just us you didn’t like?”

A lengthy pause on his end. “Good for you,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I know why, really. The short answer is, it’s my home. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way, because it’s kind of a mess right now, but I made it, and I feel like I should live in it. And it gets you and Mom some of the money you should have gotten in the first place, and it keeps somebody else from moving in and just painting over, papering over, what happened here. I have to live here because it reminds me every day of who I am.”

It was an event, this phone call, even apart from what was being discussed; she hadn’t heard the sound of her father’s voice in months. Texting had just seemed like the default way to communicate—it was the way she communicated with everyone, even Cutter—but she could see now that there was something else to it, some sort of insulation or remove, that maybe they’d both needed.

On the TV screen a baby’s crying was muted. Framing the set was a view out the window of hundreds of apartments, hundreds of lives, all too small and too far away to be made out in any detail.

“So you’re telling me all this why?” Sara said. “What do you expect me to do?”

“I don’t expect you to do anything. It’s not even important that you come back here ever if you don’t want to. I just like the thought of you knowing that the place where you grew up is still here and that nobody else is living in it.”

Her eyes began to sting. “This makes no sense to me at all,” she said. “You had this huge meltdown, and you just got out of jail for it. Why go back? Why not just take your money and go somewhere else and try something new?”

“Turns out it’s not so enticing,” he said. “Turns out it’s kind of frightening, being nobody. Anyway, telling yourself you’re nobody doesn’t make it true.”

“It’s better to be someone everybody’s mad at?” Sara said.

He said nothing for a moment, then laughed softly. “You should see what happens when I go into town, to buy food and whatnot. Everyone who recognizes me hates my guts. Which is both a bad feeling and a good one. Good because it’s bad. It’s hard to describe.”

Sara tried to imagine it. “Do any of them ever ask,” she said, “whatever happened to me?”

“No,” he said, “but that’s only because nobody who knows you will speak to me at all.”

“You said you’re broke now. Do you have a job?”

“Yes. Of sorts.”

“So you’re just going to live there like nothing happened?”

“No,” he said, “I am going to live here like everything happened.”

She had a strange urge to tell him about Cutter—the stealing, the
ditching, the self-destruction—and to ask for his advice, if only because she knew he wouldn’t lose his shit over it the way her mother surely would. “So,” she said instead, “what was jail like?” but then she heard the key turning in the front door lock behind her. “Gotta go, bye,” she said to her father and hung up on him.

Helen came and collapsed on the couch beside her, coat still on. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It just never ends. Every day I look up and suddenly it’s dark out. You poor thing.” She kissed Sara on the forehead, looking at the TV. “What on earth are you watching?” she said.

She disapproved lately of all of Sara’s habits, her likes and dislikes. As their circumstances bettered, her mother seemed determined to effect some corresponding improvement in Sara herself, some movement toward an ideal. This Sara resented intensely. Her mother wanted to change her wardrobe, to change the books she read, the TV she watched. She suggested that they join a gym together: “God knows I could use it,” she’d say, as if that made the whole notion any less repellent, or less insulting. In this atmosphere there was absolutely no question of discussing, or even mentioning the existence of, her shoplifting, class-cutting, alcohol-consuming, iPod-mugging, disobedience-encouraging boyfriend. Helen would have heard only the bad parts about him and would have devoted herself full-time to scrubbing this ethically compromised boy out of her daughter’s supposedly exemplary life. And this was why asking for advice on, or even mentioning, her sporadic contact with her father over the past several months would have been pointless as well. Her mother would have called the cops, and changed Sara’s phone number, and for what? For the sake of some perfectly untroubled adolescence she was apparently supposed to have, some perfect life she was supposed to aspire to, like that of some saint, never mind if the life she had right now, with all its flaws and drama, was hers. A saint was exactly what she was not.

Take the question of private school. Her mother wouldn’t let up about it lately. And it was true that the high school where she was enrolled next fall was overlarge and academically half-assed and socially fraught: but who imagined that Sara was too good for that? She herself was fraught in ways her mother was stubbornly unable to see. “It’s just
the two of us now,” Helen loved to say. But it wasn’t. Her father, the more she thought about him, constituted a kind of parallel universe, a splinter family, and Sara was starting to think that maybe that was the family to which she truly belonged. Just as he had—only more literally—she’d become aware as she grew older that she was not living the life she had been born to live. And the guilt generated by her escape from that life was something she, like her father, had no desire to run from. Why her, after all? She was not so special. She was not without her weaknesses, her faults. And her advantages—where did they come from? What made her more deserving of luck or grace than anybody else whose real parents didn’t want them? It was important that she not pretend to be better than she was. Her father understood this kind of self-censure—more so than ever, in his current state. Her mother’s heart was closed to it.

Two hours later Sara’s phone went off again, this time a text from Cutter.
Hungry?
it read. Sara glanced up at her mother, six feet away on the couch in front of the TV, sound asleep. She texted back a single question mark, and a few moments later he had sent another grinning photo of himself, this time at a booth in a restaurant. It took her a few seconds to recognize it, from the menu he held in his hand, as the Hunan Garden just down the block from her apartment building. She felt her face grow hot.

Wtf are you doing??
she texted him.

Come on out. Free wine
.

No way. Mom right here
.

So I’ll come up to your place, then?

“Whoo!” Helen said suddenly. “I just nodded right off there!”

Sara willed herself to be calm as her mother slowly made the move from the couch to her own bedroom and shut the door. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she had gone to the Duane Reade to buy a new highlighter—lame, but better than no note at all—and slipped out the front door and down the hall to the elevators as quietly as she could.

Cutter looked euphoric, fresh as a daisy. It was after ten o’clock, and the waiters were glaring at him. He beckoned her into the booth where he sat with a pot of Chinese tea and an untouched tofu stir-fry of
some kind. “I can only stay a minute,” she said. “You have to come back to school. Promise me you’ll be there tomorrow.”

“I was actually thinking about going out to the Island tomorrow,” he said. “The weather’s supposed to be nice. You should come with me. If we go tomorrow, we’ll have the house to ourselves.”

Her head drooped. If he didn’t go to school, he would fail, and if he failed, the two of them would not be together next year. But she didn’t want to make their relationship into the carrot. She was feeling a little locked in as it was. “So guess who called me tonight,” she said. “My dad.”

“No shit,” Cutter said, his face splitting into a huge smile. “Is he back in the joint? Making his one phone call?”

She shook her head. “He’s been out for a while. It was just a month, you know. Anyway, no, he actually called me from inside our old house upstate. He’s back living there now. My mother thought she was selling it to some stranger but she was actually selling it to him. Isn’t that insane?”

She was just hoping to amuse him and maybe garner some sympathy over the strangeness of her family; but he didn’t look amused at all. His brow furrowed, and his chin even shook a little bit, as if he might cry. “So he wants you to move back up there?” he said finally.

“No, he doesn’t. He said he doesn’t. He said he’s just doing it for himself. So he can go into town and have everybody hate him, or something like that. Crazy, right?”

Cutter shook his head. “Don’t you see what this is really about?” he said. “Your parents feel guilty every time they look at you and so they try to get rid of their guilt by buying you things. You see that, right? The guilt?”

Though she didn’t quite see it, Sara nodded soberly anyway, not wanting to agitate him any further. “Guilt over the divorce?” she said softly.

“No!” Cutter said. “Because you’re Chinese!”

“What?” she said in a harsh whisper, conscious that they were now under the probationary stare of the old Chinese guy who worked the register.

“It’s the American story in miniature,” Cutter said. “They came into your home and took you away from who you were, from everything you knew, and then, in order to have it both ways, they spend your life trying to buy you off to get you to forgive them for what they’ve done. They’ve deracinated you, and they can’t stand that you know that, and confront them with it, just by being. Just your face is a reminder of their crimes.”

Sara hadn’t heard the word “deracinated” before, but she got the picture. “I need to get back,” she said. “My mother could wake up and then I’m screwed.”

“Screwed how? What are you afraid of? What can they do to you they haven’t already done? She’d probably just feel guilty. All parents feel guilty. Because they are.”

She shrugged. He grabbed her wrist.

“You want to feel screwed,” he said, “come out to the Island with me.”

She shook him off and stood up. “Please go home,” she said tearily. “I’m worried about you. I don’t like being the only person who knows where you are.”

He folded his arms. “Whatever,” he said. “Go. I’m thinking about ordering dessert.”

The next morning there was no sign of him, and Sara’s chem teacher asked her to stay after class; her mind raced through all the different types of trouble she might be in, but it turned out that Ms. Markell wanted to nominate her for a scholarship to this summer chem-bio program at Columbia, a program designed to offer research opportunities to minority students. It was, she said, very prestigious, and down the road would put Sara on the radar of some very prestigious universities. “I guess I’ll talk to my mother about it,” Sara said, and Ms. Markell said of course, though she had already taken the liberty of emailing her mother with the great news. Sure enough, when Sara left school she had a text from her mom with three exclamation points and a suggestion that they meet at Hunan Garden for dinner.

“I hope you won’t be mad,” Helen said as Sara picked at some dumplings with her head down so that her hair concealed her face
from the waiters, “but I called Nightingale and scheduled a tour for next Thursday. I know it’s supposed to be hard to get in there after ninth grade, not a lot of spaces open up, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, especially not when you’ve got a credential like this in your pocket that very few other people have. Anyway, don’t worry, a tour doesn’t commit us to anything. It just seems worth a shot, especially now.”

“Mom, there’s something—”

“It’s all girls at Nightingale, as you probably know, which may seem strange to you at this point, but all the studies say it’s a good thing, at least in the classroom. Funny it isn’t all that common anymore. Anyway, it’s not like you’ll never have the opportunity to, I don’t know, date or whatever it is you—”

“Mom?” Sara said. “Shut up a second. I have to tell you about something.”

Helen’s BlackBerry made a whirring noise and started to squirm across the Formica, but she ignored it. “Okay,” she said cautiously. “What is it?”

“I talked to Dad,” Sara said. The whole restaurant seemed to fall silent. “I’ve been in touch with him almost all along. I even saw him once, back in Rensselaer Valley, before we moved. I want to go see him this weekend. I have a right to do that, and he has a right too.”

“Do you even know where he is?” Helen said, the color draining from her face.

Try as she might, Sara couldn’t completely suppress a smile. “Hold on to your hat,” she said.

SHE HADN’T DRIVEN ANYWHERE in a while—another old-life routine she didn’t miss a bit—but the next morning Helen walked to the Hertz three blocks from their apartment and returned behind the wheel of a clean, strange car. It wasn’t even nine in the morning but there was nowhere to park on their block; her plan had been to go back upstairs, but instead she had to call Sara on her cell and let her know she’d be idling in the car outside. Sara, of course, reacted as if the inability to
find a parking spot was purely a failure of intelligence. Helen hung up—she knew it would be a while now, that Sara would make a point of taking her time—adjusted the strange seat, which had a really disconcerting internal heating element she could not figure out how to control, turned the radio on and then off again, and then just sat there and grew furious.

She’d been made a fool of. What the hell could her ex-husband, the parolee, be trying to pull? Why buy back the house that was not only the scene of his disintegration but the reason for it as well, the house that had supposedly revealed itself to him over time as spiritually toxic and soul-snuffing and redolent of death? There had to be something. He did not play around where money was concerned. She tried to think what his angle was, but each idea made as little sense to her as the one before. Was it some sort of long con she was too dumb to understand? Though their divorce was technically final, they had agreed in principle to a future court date at which the judge would revisit questions of custody, alimony, etc., once Ben was done being sued and his financial picture was clearer. She had always assumed that the purpose of this hearing was to make sure she and Sara were sufficiently provided for, but why should she assume that? Was Ben somehow laying the groundwork to take all the money back from her, so that he would once again have everything? But that didn’t explain why he was actually living there. Surely it was enough, for whatever cryptic legal purposes, just to own the house. He hadn’t expressed anything but disgust toward it for as long as Helen could remember.