A Thousand Pardons (31 page)

The two men looked at each other. “I can sleep on the couch,” Hamilton said, “if—”

“That’s not happening,” Helen said. With great effort she rose, walked to the living room, and, after a brief search for the TV remote, just pulled the plug out of the wall, which caused Sara to stand up without a word to anyone, go into her once and future bedroom, and close the door. The men went off dutifully to pass out on the bed together, closing the door behind them as well, and finally, for as long as she could manage to keep her eyes open at least, Helen was alone.

No point, she knew, in even looking anywhere for extra blankets or sheets. She lay down on the stiff, new-smelling couch and closed her eyes. As she drifted off, she recalled that there was a cedar chest full of very nice blankets at the self-storage place in New Castle. One of them
had belonged to her mother. Her eyes fluttered open again and took in the ceiling above her living room, strangely shadowed without all her old lamps and sconces, but still startlingly, reproachfully familiar. There had to be some meaning in it all, she thought, some logic, because it so strongly resembled a joke: the moment at which everything about her life seemed lost, useless, outside of her control, was also the moment when they were all reunited under one roof—not just any roof either, but their home, the home it had once comforted her to think she would die in. Now it was both itself and a mean-spirited parody, both a freshly sold, newly furnished suburban house and a ruin. She wished she had never lived there, and at the same time she began to dream, with her arms folded across her chest and her coat thrown over her like a too-short blanket, that the house was on fire, and that Sara and Hamilton and Ben were all standing on the lawn screaming at her to run out, to abandon it, to save herself, and she wouldn’t do it.

The next thing she knew, there was just enough light outside to let her see the overgrown back lawn painted in shadow, and Hamilton was kneeling patiently on the floor a few feet away, waiting for her to wake up. Her head jerked painfully.

“You were talking in your sleep,” he said.

She looked at him, disoriented.

“This obviously can’t go on,” he said, as if they had already been talking. “It isn’t viable, especially not now that you’re all back here. I mean, I can’t just live indefinitely in your basement or whatever. I have to just accept responsibility for what I’ve done and let you get on with your lives.”

“Well, good,” Helen said raspily, raising herself on one elbow. “I agree. I mean with the part about you getting on with your life.”

“I charged my phone this morning, and no surprise, people are out looking for me. Plus my agent says he got a phone call from someone who said she kidnapped me. Anyway, I just have to get back to the world and face the consequences. I can’t wait around for them to find me, because if they find me then they find you.”

“There won’t be any consequences, Hamilton, because you didn’t do anything. But I agree, you have to just go back to your life. It’s time.

So what do you want to do? How can I help? I mean, all you have to do is walk out the door, though you’ll probably want a car to the airport or something—”

“I need you to forgive me,” Hamilton said.

“For what?” She felt a slow surge of panic. “There’s still no reason to think you did anything worth forgiving. People will just think you’re insane.”

“Yeah, I know. Exactly. The whole thing will never make any sense to anyone except you and me. So the only person who can help me with it is you. I know something happened. I know I did something. So I’ll be going back to my old life waiting every second for the knock on the door, or for the hand on my shoulder. I can live with that. But I still need the other part. You know. The absolution.”

“The what?” She struggled to sit up. Ben had now wandered into the living room as well. “Do you—I mean are you saying you want me to take you to church?”

“No. I haven’t been inside a church in like thirty years.”

“So?” she said.

Absurdly he inched forward on his knees. “I just need it from you,” he said. “If you think about it, you’re the one who knows the most about me. You know where I started, where I came from. And when I ask to be forgiven for what I did, even if you disagree with me, you’re literally the only one in the world who knows what I’m even talking about in the first place.” He glanced down at the floor, and when he looked up again he was crying. She stared at him to try to gauge how real it was. “I’m so sorry, Helen,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry for ruining your life like this, and for being who I am and not who you think I am. Will you forgive me?”

Oh, where is the girl? Helen thought. Where is the stupid, arrogant, thoughtless girl who can end all this? She looked at the agony contorting his face: the curse of being a good actor, she thought—no difference between the truth and its flawless simulation, not even for him anymore. His whole life was a Method performance, a dream within a dream, but whatever he wanted from her, however preposterous, she was not free to refuse him. She put her hands on his two
cheeks, brought his wide-eyed face to hers, and in full view of her ex-husband, kissed him as long and as deeply as she remembered how. After a few moments he began reciprocating. She opened her eyes to make sure his were closed, and they were. It went on for a full minute, at which point she realized it might start to get out of hand. Not that she could do anything to stop it if it did. A door opened inside her; and then she realized that that was the sound of a real door, which could only be Sara’s door down the hall, and she quickly but gently disengaged from him and stared, flushed and shaking, into his eyes.

He smiled at her, his movie-star smile, which she had not seen since the night they met at the premiere. “Thank you,” he said. Then he turned to Ben, who hadn’t moved an inch. “Brother,” he said, “could I trouble you for a ride somewhere?”

BY THE TIME Ben got him to the airport in Newburgh, the agency had chartered a plane there to return him to Los Angeles; even though they surely could have paid someone from the charter service to record the license plate of the Hertz rental car in which Hamilton was transported back to his old life, such vengeance was apparently forsworn, and neither the police nor anyone else turned up asking questions. Once Ben had texted her that Hamilton was safely in the air and that he was on his way back to the house, Helen went into her old bathroom and took a shower, even though she had no choice but to put back on the same clothes she had slept in. She went into the kitchen and found a brand new coffeemaker; rooting around in the fridge, which was still their old fridge, she unearthed a bag of ground coffee but very little else in the way of something an adult human might eat for breakfast. Pulling open the empty crisper drawers, muttering incredulously, she became aware of the presence of someone else, and when she straightened and turned around, she saw Sara leaning in the doorway, wearing an old soccer jersey and a pair of pajama bottoms, chewing lightly on a cuticle, and watching her.

“Did you sleep all right?” Helen asked.

“Yeah. I’ve been up for a while, though,” Sara said. She remained
in the doorway. Helen pushed the fridge door shut with her foot and walked across the kitchen with her hands full. “This is a really high-end coffeemaker,” she said, trying to keep any tension out of her voice. She still wasn’t sure whether or not Sara had seen her kissing Hamilton on the couch, in front of her father. Good luck explaining that one. “Did you help him pick this out?”

“What are you making?” Sara said quietly.

Helen looked over what she’d put on the counter. “I guess I can do some sort of omelet,” she said, “although it might have chicken in it.”

She found a pan in the sink, rinsed it out, and turned the burner on. It was still her old stove. Well, what difference does it make if she saw? Helen thought. You have to start seeing your parents as real people at some point. She shredded some chicken with her fingers, dropped it into the pan, and looked at it skeptically. She looked at the spot on the countertop where the knife block and the spice rack used to be.

“It’s so strange,” Helen said, “to be back here and not know where anything is.”

“What do you need?” Sara said.

Helen bit her lip to keep from crying. She turned to look out the window. Sara walked behind her and, opening and closing drawers and cabinets, produced two plastic plates, two forks, and a rubber spatula. She placed them noiselessly on the counter beside the stove. “Thank you,” Helen said. Whatever it was she was making, when it seemed done the two of them sat at the small kitchen table and ate it.

“Are you all right, Mom?” Sara asked.

Helen put her fork down and sat back in her chair. “I’m all right,” she said. “Are you all right?”

Sara nodded. She finished eating but did not get up from the table.

“I’m sorry for everything,” Helen said. “I really am.”

“I don’t know why,” Sara said. “You did the best you could. You feel too responsible for what everybody else does, is the problem.”

“Oh,” Helen said. “So then why are you so hard on me?”

“Somebody has to be,” Sara said. She wasn’t smiling. Their heads turned toward the sound of Ben’s car in the driveway.

Helen drove back to the city on the pretext that the rental car had to be returned. Though it was Saturday, she went in to work, expecting the silence of the office to be more tolerable than the silence of her apartment. That night, and the next one, she went home to the East Side; but the solitude, and the worry over Sara, were too much for her, and she hardly slept. Without letting Ben know in advance of her plans, she took the train back to Rensselaer Valley after work on Monday, and on every weeknight thereafter.

She still slept on the couch, and the arrangement was not discussed. Since they had only one car now, Ben drove her to the train station in the morning; though cabs were available in the early evening, once he figured out what train she usually took, he thought he might as well go down to the station and wait for her then too. Something in her balked at the hassle of renting a truck to go to New Castle, where all their old furniture was still piled in the storage unit; and in any event deliverymen kept showing up at the house with previously ordered new stuff. Then one night toward the end of June, Helen looked into Sara’s bedroom and saw a profusion of familiar items there—posters, stuffed animals, old yearbooks—so familiar, actually, that they might well have been there for a few days already without her noticing. When asked about it, Sara admitted that she and her father had driven into the city one morning, while Helen was at work, and collected a few things she said she didn’t want to be without.

Helen might have been angry with them—in particular about this new flair they seemed to have developed for deciding things together without telling her—and she resolved to have a strong word with Ben about it, but by the next day her edge was dulled, and she never did get around to it. Later that summer it occurred to her to wonder, since no one had mentioned it to her, whether perhaps Ben had enrolled Sara in school for the fall. Again, something made her disinclined to ask. She rationalized it by recalling that she had spent the last decade or more in charge of these sorts of dull domestic necessities, and that it would not have occurred to her back then to bother her spouse with them either.

One sweltering evening in August, safe in the maxed-out air-conditioning
of the northbound commuter train, Helen saw her phone light up inside her bag on the seat next to her. She pulled it out in case the call was from Sara or Ben—anyone else and she would let it go to voice mail; she did not want to be one of those people shouting into their cellphones over the noise of the train—and saw that the name on the caller ID was Charles Cudahy. When she got off the train in Rensselaer Valley twenty minutes later, she held up one finger toward Ben, whom she could see waiting in the car beside the platform, and called back.

“How did you get this number?” she said.

“I know, right?” Cudahy said cheerily. “It’s like I’m a detective or something!”

“Do you know my name?” Helen said, trying not to grow frantic. Even at seven o’clock it was so hot she was already sweating again.

“Course I know your name,” Cudahy said. “Your check had the name of your bank on it, and I have friends here and there, and like this and like that. Anyway, no need to freak out, I only bothered to track you down because I have news for you.”

Helen said nothing. She looked at Ben, who smiled back patiently. Patience was itself one of those new things that threatened to make him unrecognizable to her sometimes.

“Lauren Schmidt,” Cudahy said. “I found her.”

Helen’s eyes closed. “She’s alive?” she said.

“What? Yes, of course she’s alive,” Cudahy said, his tone a little less friendly all of a sudden. “I didn’t even know that was the issue. She was in some fancy rehab center in Vermont, but here’s what made it so tough: she checked herself in under a fake name. They don’t care what you call yourself at those places. She didn’t want her family to know, was the issue, I guess. And so maybe that’s you? You’re family?”

“How did she get there?” Helen asked. “Her—I know she wasn’t driving her car.”

“Well, that was the key to the whole thing, actually. She got sprung from rehab and went looking for her car, which had been towed to some small-town police station and was just sitting there with grass growing around it. She came and showed her license to prove it was
hers, and they run the registration online, and bam, she’s back on the grid again.”

“So you know where she is?” Helen said. “You’ve spoken to her?”

“Not really my business to speak to her, but yeah, I know where she is. She’s back with her parents in Laguna Beach, California. I’ve got an address, an email, a phone number, the whole schmear. You want it?”

She couldn’t imagine anything good coming of it. It was enough to know. She asked him if she owed him any more money and he said no, he’d technically made the crucial phone calls on his own time, just because unsolved cases raised his blood pressure. She hung up, walked across the parking lot, and motioned to Ben to roll down the window.