A Thousand Pardons (23 page)

It crossed her mind, of course, while everything else was crossing it, that he wanted to reconcile with her. But even if such a thing was imaginable, this was a pretty antagonistic way to go about it. Their one phone conversation last night had been angry on her end and perversely calm on his. She’d threatened, with no sense of how realistic she was being, to have him arrested, for communicating with their daughter without her knowledge. His refusal to raise his own voice just made her crazier. He wanted to see his daughter again. That’s all he said.

What really frustrated her, though, was that no matter how fearful
and protective all this made her feel on behalf of Sara—this poor girl whose life had been flipped upside down by the father who had rejected and embarrassed her, and was now summoning her back to a parody of her old home as if none of that had happened—she couldn’t find any pretext for expressing it because Sara herself was as happy as a clam. Every time Helen undertook some speech about how Sara didn’t need to be scared or about how it was okay to be angry, her daughter would just laugh at her. Literally. Here she came now, waving charmingly to their weekend doorman, through the glass doors and practically skipping into the passenger seat.

“Look at you,” Sara said in a tone of condescending gaiety. “Ten and two. What a good girl. Even when you’re not moving.”

“Did you lock the door?” Helen said, but Sara’s earphones were in, which meant conversation, such as it was, would be one-way only.

Helen hated the angry network of New York City highways, even on a Saturday morning, when they would presumably be less choked, so despite the extra time it took, she crossed all the way over to the West Side; from there it was a straight shot to Rensselaer Valley. It was a beautiful morning, and a pleasant enough trip up the Saw Mill, and if Sara wasn’t talking to her, at least that meant she wasn’t mocking or insulting her. But somewhere around Chappaqua, when things outside the car began looking familiar to her, Helen started to feel so nauseous that she thought she might have to pull over. She hadn’t expected to react so strongly. It wasn’t as though she’d hated it while she lived there. They took the Rensselaer Valley exit, and Sara immediately perked up, like a dog, Helen thought uncharitably. There was the train station; there was the elementary school Sara had gone to, back when Helen was stupid enough to think that all was right in their world. That was it: she hated this place because she believed that some earlier, embarrassing version of herself still lived here. A kind of muscle memory took over once she passed the school, and in another moment, almost as if she were only a passenger in the car herself, they were at the top of the hill that led down to Meadow Close. There didn’t appear to be any curtains or shades on any of the windows, but apart from that the house, from the outside, looked haughtily, insultingly unchanged, as if it
could not have cared less what had gone on inside it. Helen turned in to the driveway and coasted to a stop.

“Are you coming in?” Sara asked.

“Absolutely not,” Helen said. Sara shrugged and opened her door. Helen watched her walk up the flagstones and then push through the front door just as if she still lived there. Then there was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The wind came up and blew some of last fall’s dry leaves around the brown, brittle, shameful yard.

Was she just going to sit there in the car for—she checked her watch—six hours, until the agreed time came for the end of Sara’s visit? Maybe. There didn’t seem anything particularly wrong with that plan right now. She certainly didn’t feel like moving a muscle. But then it occurred to her that Sara and Ben might not plan to just sit and talk inside the house for six hours. They might want to go into town for some reason—to eat, for instance, since she doubted Ben had picked up any cooking skills in the joint—and if the garage door opened to expose Helen still sitting there in her rental car like a zombie, well, the looks on their faces would be a humiliation that didn’t bear thinking about. Her face reddening as if they were already staring at her from behind the nonexistent curtains, she started up the car, backed out of the driveway, and headed into town.

There wasn’t much to do in Rensselaer Valley on a Saturday, or any other day for that matter. There were two restaurants, three if you counted that little Polish bakery where no one ever went. Having had just a glass of cranberry juice for breakfast, she was tempted; but wherever she might go, the chances were too great that Ben and Sara would walk into the same establishment and find her sitting there alone. No version of what would ensue was acceptable to her. She thought about texting Sara to ask her to please stay out of the deli, but if a request like that sounded a little crazy to Helen’s own ear, it would sound ten times as crazy to her daughter and she would never hear the end of it. At length she went to the newsstand across Main Street from the train station, bought a cup of foul coffee and a bag of peanut M&M’s, and went back to the lot behind the storefronts to sit in the front seat of her car, which she still had trouble recognizing. The newsstand guy, a put-upon
old Arab gentleman, was someone she had spoken to perhaps two hundred times before, but her face provoked not a glimmer of recognition in his. Good. She did not want to be recognized.

She hadn’t brought any work with her—she hadn’t given a thought, it seemed, to how she would spend this first-ever afternoon in which she had ceded custody of her daughter—but she was able at least to open up her email, and there was plenty there to keep her occupied. The board of supervisors in a town in California that was seeking bankruptcy protection apparently still had money in its budget to hire Malloy to burnish its image enough to get its members reelected. The head of a charity that had collected millions of dollars to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan was combating news reports that the schools themselves did not actually exist. A corporate client in Poland, of all places, had been personally referred to Helen by the London office; the client was a natural-gas extraction outfit that had secretly released several tons of toxic chemicals into the Danube River, not just destroying livelihoods and threatening industries but actually killing people—eight or eleven, depending whose count you accepted. Strategy here was not the problem: the problem was the chairman of the company, who was a hoary veteran of the old Communist days and who magnificently resisted all efforts to squeeze out of him any sort of admission, public or private, of wrongdoing. The London team had grown so frustrated that they were trying to punt the case all the way across the Atlantic to Helen, just because they knew, or at any rate had been told about, her particular specialty. It was hard to tell whether they admired her or considered her a convenient sap.

She remembered her coffee, and took a sip, and just then a pair of gloved knuckles rapped softly on her driver’s-side window and caused her to lose half the mouthful down her chin. The tapping startled her worse than a shout would have done. Holding the BlackBerry at arm’s length to protect it, she turned to her left and saw Patty Crane, the mother of Sara’s former best friend, Sophia, hunched over and staring at her through the glass as if Helen were Amelia Earhart. She made a ridiculous motion with her hand that Helen finally recognized as a plea to roll down her window. Sighing, she worked up a smile and obliged.

“Helen?” Patty said theatrically. She was one of those local women whom Helen had never really liked and yet with whom she had somehow spent, over the years, an awful lot of time. “I feel like I’m seeing things!”

“Nope,” Helen said, laughing gamely, but not opening the door. “It’s really me.”

“Are you back in town? I drove by your house a week or so ago and saw lights on, but I just thought it had finally sold. It is so good to see you!”

No reference was going to be made to the past, to the source of her and her family’s disgrace. More than that: it dawned on Helen that Patty knew exactly who was living in the old Armstead place, that every vicious gossip in town must have known about it within a day of Ben moving in there, but she was going to go on pretending that she didn’t. Why? Why must it all be so ritualized? The mechanics of sparing Helen humiliation and actually humiliating her were so indistinguishable that surely even Patty didn’t know which of the two she was doing, or why.

“I’m just here for the day,” Helen said. “I’m waiting to pick up Sara.” She waved the BlackBerry. “Doing a little work while I’m waiting.”

“Oh, you’re working? How exciting. What are you doing?”

“Public relations,” Helen said. “Crisis management.”

“How exciting,” Patty said.

“How is Sophia doing?” Helen said, just to get the focus off of her; but then she failed to listen to the answer, which, unsurprisingly, went on for some time. She was thinking instead about Patty, with her bobbed hair and her down vest and the jeans stretched over her wide, field-hockey hips, and how if you took all that off her and put her in a bonnet and a gingham dress she might have been cheerfully handing out rocks with which to stone Helen and her whole family, or spitting on her in the stockade. Just then her BlackBerry buzzed; she glanced at it and saw an automated text from the IT department at work, informing her that the office servers would be down overnight, as if anyone would be sending business emails at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday anyway.

“It’s Sara,” Helen lied shamelessly. “She’s waiting. Gotta go. Patty,
it was so great to see you, please give our love to Sophia and to”—she couldn’t summon the husband’s name—“to your whole family,” and she started the car and backed away. In truth she still had almost four hours to kill. She couldn’t return to Main Street now, though. She drove slowly through the familiar lanes. Across the train tracks, past the high school, and toward the fancier end of town there was a small pool club, to which the Armsteads had belonged when Sara was younger. Even on a Saturday, it seemed bound to be unpatronized this early in the season, and two minutes later Helen pulled into its empty parking lot and switched the car off again. Then, with the branches waving in-audibly in front of her windshield, she began to cry. She kept telling herself to stop. She didn’t have a good enough excuse for it, she felt. Everything in her life, if you took a step away from it, was going pretty successfully.

STILL, SHE’D BARELY COLLECTED HERSELF by the time she picked up her daughter at the foot of their old driveway. “So how did it go?” she asked, expecting cruelty, in the form either of silence or of a diatribe about what a relief it was to have at least one parent who knew how to mind his own business, but what she got was even worse than that: six hours in her father’s company had left Sara calm and expansive. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m sure that was a bummer for you, being stuck all afternoon with nothing to do but worry. But there’s nothing to worry about. He’s great. I wouldn’t say ‘same old Dad,’ exactly. He does seem a little different, but in a good way, to be honest. We just sat and talked. I think it would be good for me to spend more time with him. It didn’t really seem that weird at all. The weirdest thing about it, actually, was being back in our old house. It shouldn’t have seemed weird, but it did. It’s like a cave. There is seriously almost no furniture in there.”

Helen drove on, listening, more murderous than relieved. And she didn’t feel much better even by Monday morning, when she arrived at work to find six messages already on her desk, left by the weekend switchboard: four were from London, but the other two had a U.S. area
code, one she didn’t recognize. No name, though, so she ignored them. She was supposed to get ready for a hastily scheduled meeting with someone who currently played in the NBA. Nobody seemed to know exactly when he was coming in. His name meant nothing to her, but she could tell he was a big deal from the way the male employees on her floor kept popping their heads in her office door, pretending to look for one another. It was something about a paternity suit filed by a teammate’s wife, or maybe child support, but whatever it was apparently didn’t constitute enough of an emergency to get him out of bed in time to meet before ten-thirty, so Helen went off to the morning meeting, where she hoped she wouldn’t be expected to speak knowledgeably on the current state of mind of the dithering Polish executive.

At least she wasn’t the only one feeling besieged. Arturo had new assignments for all of them—a rebranding in the wake of a mine collapse, a newspaper caught plagiarizing a blog—and affected to be unmoved by their complaints of being overworked already.

“I have to be able to service my existing clients,” Ashok said hotly.

“Your clients might be just as happy to see a little less of you,” said Arturo. “Everyone, these things go in spurts, as you know very well. So you have too much work and not enough time? It’s a crisis. Manage it. See you tomorrow, unless you fuck something up between now and then.”

Helen, having caught Shelley yawning three or four times, squeezed in next to her as they were filing out of the Fishtank. “You’re buried too?” she said. “Anything I can help with?”

Shelley smiled and pantomimed embarrassment. “It’s not work, actually,” she said in a low voice. “Had a date last night. It went well, yada yada yada, I should maybe go down to the caf for a Red Bull. Want to come with me and hear the tabloid details?”

Helen begged off and walked back to her office alone. A date on a Sunday night? Well, why should that seem odd? There were ways to live other than the one she knew. She could be leading some other life herself. She could have gone out Saturday night: at one point on the drive up to Rensselaer Valley, Sara had taken her earphones out and asked about staying the night with Ben in their old house, and Helen
had said no, but why? Why hadn’t she just said yes? Then she could have driven alone back to the city—a single woman on a Saturday night in Manhattan, the most decadent place in America—and picked up some guy and brought him back home and screwed him and kicked him out and then picked up her daughter at the train the next day like a spy or a con artist, as if the two sides of herself didn’t even care to know each other. But it was too late for that. Not just in terms of the weekend, but in terms of her ever becoming the kind of woman who knew how to do that kind of thing, without exposing herself as deluded or pathetic or ridiculous.