A Thousand Pardons (25 page)

All of a sudden she was almost there; she saw a sign for Exit 4, which meant, unless the numbers were going backwards and she’d missed it, that she had just one exit to go. The New England countryside, even along the highway, was so picturesque it was almost grating. The New York side, she knew, even though it was just across the lake, was far more grim and stubborn-looking. All she had been able to get out of Hamilton before leaving the office was that he was by himself, but his trouble seemed to involve some other person, and he kept saying that it was all over, without, it seemed, any consistent idea what he meant by “it.” His career, she assumed. She had agreed to come find him because he was in need and had called her—it was as simple as that. As for his calling her of all people, just because he’d recently sat next to her and she’d foisted a card on him and because the name of her employer had reason to stick in his mind, you could look at it as random or you could say it was fate. She left the highway and spent the next twenty minutes traveling four miles on a two-lane strip of county road choked at what was evidently, even here in rural Vermont, rush hour. Then a turn toward the water, sporadically visible when she crested the hills, and then a flaked sign for the Lakeside Inn, a collection of weather-beaten, mildewed cabins on dirt lots that in the halflight of evening was one of the most sinister-looking places Helen had ever seen.

The lights were off, luckily, in the cabin with the Office sign; she rolled to a stop in front of Cabin 3. No lights were on in there either. Helen got out and knocked, but heard no movement inside, not even when she put her mouth next to the crack in the door and softly called Hamilton’s name. She pulled out her phone and dialed his number, and only then did she notice a finger pulling back a corner of one of the old canvas snap shades at the window. It was rapidly getting too dark to see, though the lake still held some light. She heard the popping of an old hook-and-eye screen door latch, and then Hamilton was outside, next to her on the tiny porch, yanking the door shut behind him, his hand on her arm. She couldn’t really see his face yet.

“Don’t go inside,” he said shakily but quietly. “Let’s sit in your car.”

She got a brief look at him under the dome light before he shut the door again, and honestly she had expected worse. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he smelled awful, but he still looked like a movie star. He couldn’t look unlike one. There were scratches, or what looked like scratches, on one side of his face, between the crow’s feet at the corner of his eye and his ear. His eyes looked ill and afraid.

She waited for him to begin, but they just sat there in the growing dark. The surface of the lake still shone through the black trees. “Are you all right, Hamilton?” she said. “I mean, do you need any kind of medical attention or anything?”

“No,” he said, just audibly.

“Okay. Well, before I know what the next step is, then, I guess I should ask what on earth you’re doing here? In this place?”

“We were going to Malloy,” he said. “At least I think we were. I wanted to show her where I grew up. Then on the Northway we saw the sign for the Vermont ferry and she said she really wanted to ride the ferry so we just got on it. And then this place was more or less here when we got off on the other side. That’s all I really remember.”

Malloy? Helen thought, but then snapped out of it. “Who’s ‘she’? You said ‘she.’ ”

“Remember the premiere? Where we met?”

“Sure.”

“She from there. Bettina. You remember her. That short, hot,
bitchy one who tried to throw you out of your seat. Her. I picked her up at the party afterwards. Things got out of hand and we wound up taking off in her car.”

“Last Wednesday,” Helen said. “When did you get here, though?”

He shrugged, and made a coughing sound that might have been an effort to hold back a sob.

“Where is Bettina now?” Helen said.

He didn’t answer.

“So you went on a bender, and now she’s gone,” Helen said soothingly. “She probably sobered up and left you here? Without any money or anything? Well, it’s good you thought to call me—”

“Her car is still here. It’s parked up by the office. But she’s gone.”

Helen tried to figure out what she was supposed to be putting together. It was true she had a hard time imagining that imperious girl walking in her heels five miles back to town. Especially when her car was here.

“I’m worried something might have happened,” Hamilton said.

“Well, let’s not panic,” said Helen, which she knew immediately was the wrong thing to say. It was so dark now he had turned into a silhouette, and she couldn’t tell if he was crying or just cold.

“Can we please go inside?” she said.

He sighed, and when he opened the passenger door again she saw that his jaw was now set. Everything he felt had to pass across his face in some outsize manner. She followed him, through the riot of bug and frog noise, back up the two steps to the cabin door. When they were both inside, he snapped the wall switch, and in the light of an unshaded ceiling bulb Helen saw a stripped bed, its thin mattress stained with what she had to concede was not a huge but still definitely a disconcerting amount of blood.

“I can’t remember anything,” Hamilton said right behind her, and in spite of herself she jumped. “What if I did something horrible?”

BEN’S ORIGINAL PLAN was to go into the office Monday at about three in the afternoon, to look over a brief for the zoning commission, the
sort of menial help Bonifacio seemed to take particular, vindictive pleasure in paying him for. There was no reason he couldn’t have gone in at nine—he was up at six these days, in part because the rags he’d found in the garage and draped over the curtain rods reached only about halfway down his bedroom window—but Bonifacio liked him to come in at an hour when they could have a drink while they worked without feeling too much like derelicts. It was the company, of course, more than the hour, that gave Bonifacio his cover. “So much for rehab, eh, old sport?” he liked to say. “What the hell, I bet this went on every day back in that white-shoe firm you used to work at.” Which was far from true; anyone at his old job who required a drink during the day knew how to do it on the sly, in true alcoholic style. Ben’s own rehab may have been for show, but he had learned a few things there.

So he’d been sitting in the kitchen trying to read the
Times
on his phone, an exercise in frustration he’d taken up to save some money, when his ex-wife, Helen, called from out of nowhere and said she was in a car on her way to Rensselaer Valley to drop Sara off with him for a while.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Not your business,” she said.

“How long is a while?”

“Why? You have somewhere else on earth you need to be?”

“More out of curiosity,” he said.

“I will let you know when I know. Listen: you wanted back into your child’s life? Welcome to it. Not everything happens on your timetable. Sometimes your timetable just flies right out the damn window.”

“Is she right next to you?” Ben said. “Can I speak to her?”

“We’re on the Saw Mill,” Helen said. “We’ll be there in half an hour.” She hung up. He put on some clothes and rinsed out his coffee cup, but there wasn’t much preparation to be done apart from that: he was still living in the house virtually squatter-style, with a couple of canvas director’s chairs he’d bought on sale at the hardware store, a TV with rabbit ears that sat unsteadily on top of the box it had been shipped in, a disconnected gas stove, their old fridge, and hardly any food. He heard the thin drone of a cheap engine growing louder down the hill,
then one door opening and slamming, then the drone rising in pitch again and receding, and he pulled the front door open just before Sara got her fingers on the knob. She carried a duffel bag on her shoulder and looked furious.

“Hello, honey,” he said cautiously. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Sara dropped her bag to the floor, sank down next to it, and began rooting around inside. “Mom’s finally cracked, is what’s going on,” she said coldly. “Déjà vu. First you and then her. Well, to be honest, I think it’s probably better that I’m here anyway.” She began pulling out t-shirts and bras. “She packed this bag for me,” Sara said. “I do not have any frigging idea what’s in here.”

“You don’t know where she’s going?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“You don’t know how long she’ll be gone?”

At that Sara stopped and looked right into his face. “No,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

He found some leftover ten-ingredient fried rice in a take-out carton in the fridge. Sara accepted it and sat down wearily in front of the TV. Ben retreated to the bedroom to call Helen, but then decided against it; it felt like what she was daring him to do. For quite a while he just stood there. At two o’clock he changed his clothes and went back out to stand beside the television.

“I have to go to work,” he said. “I’ll just be a couple of hours and then I’ll bring home some dinner. Will you be okay?”

“Is there any food in the house besides this?” Sara said.

He wasn’t sure. But he could tell that her outrage was fading. “You have my number,” he said. “Will you call me if you hear from Mom? And I’ll do the same.”

All through the car ride into town and through the two hours he spent trying to focus on the brief in Bonifacio’s office, sitting in the folding chair by the window, he felt the touch of guilt, unfamiliar but somehow instinctive or natural-seeming, like the flare-up of symptoms from some seasonal allergy or chronic disease. He was at work, making money, and he hadn’t even known Sara was coming until twenty-five
minutes before her arrival. Still, knowing, for the first time in months, exactly where Sara was and what she was doing, and that he was responsible for her, stirred something in him, something he both welcomed and wished he could, just for the sake of his powers of concentration, dismiss. Rather than endure any questions from Bonifacio, any sarcasm or nosiness, he accepted his usual two fingers of Jameson and then, when Joe was on the phone with his wife, poured it into the dead plant.

He stopped at Price Chopper on the way home to pick up some food, all but paralyzed by the simple decisions involved. Of course it was never that simple a matter, going to Price Chopper. Women’s eyes narrowed at the sight of him. Strangest of all were the ones who, even after carefully setting their jaws and shaking their heads to communicate their condemnation of him, would still want to talk to him invasively, as if he were some sort of disgraced celebrity. Head down, he pulled from the shelves by the deli counter a rotisserie chicken and a six-pack of Corona.

Would Sara be with him for two meals? Two days? What if she was not exaggerating and Helen really had gone off the deep end? It would have surprised him, certainly, but it wasn’t as if he was in any position to judge her harshly. She had always been a little more tightly wound than she appeared to those who knew her only casually. He added ice cream, Cheetos, appeasements of all sorts to his cart. He felt a surge of panic as he opened his own front door, but Sara was still in the same canvas chair in front of the television, which, as she must long since have figured out, got only four channels. He put away the groceries, such as they were, put the chicken in the dead oven to stay warm, opened a beer, and stood against the windows behind the TV, facing her. Sara’s expression was noncommittal.

“I bought a chicken,” Ben said.

She glanced up for a moment as if she was going to get up and go find it—she must have been starving—but then she stayed in her chair. “Kudos,” she said.

“No word from your mother?” Her immobility was his answer. He couldn’t see what she was watching—
Entertainment Tonight
or some
such, it sounded like—but then she muted it and fixed her father with a long, direct look.

“Can I have one of those?” she said. She nodded at his beer.

What was she, fourteen? He tried for a moment to recall himself at fourteen.

“Ever had one before?” he asked.

She made a derisive sound. “I’m not home-schooled,” she said.

Well, he thought, if I’m in charge, then I’m in charge. It appeared neither of them was leaving home tonight. And she seemed to want something from him, he thought: not the beer, so much, but whatever the beer signified for her.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You can have one if you will turn off that god damn TV.”

He thought about bringing the two director’s chairs out to the screened back porch so they could drink their beers while gazing into the darkening woods behind the house, but there were holes in that screen he hadn’t figured out how to fix yet—he’d always hated those smugly, competitively handy suburban homeowners, but there were certainly days you wished you were one of them—and every time he’d ventured out there himself since moving back in, some high-pitched bug wound up causing him to slap himself painfully on the ear. It was a decent night, though, with some breeze. He went back to the kitchen, popped the top off a second Corona and handed it to her; then he opened the front door and sat on the top step facing the empty street, and Sara docilely did the same. Lights were on in windows all up and down the street, at Parnell’s and elsewhere. He thought it was probably too dark for the two of them to be seen; and then he thought, so what? What was left to fear there? None of them spoke to him anyway, and when he brought his garbage cans out to the curb they regarded him as if he was a madman. That was the point of living here now. Bring on their execration. “Cheers,” he said and tapped his daughter’s bottle.

He stared at her until she took a sip. Too dark to see what kind of face she made; that would have told him a lot. They were facing east, and all the color had gone out of the sky. They heard a distant police
siren, maybe from as far away as the Saw Mill. Probably not coming for us, Ben thought.

“So no idea where your mother might have gone?” he said again.

Sara shook her head and had another sip.

“You know,” Ben said, “we didn’t really talk about anything last time, you and me.”