A Thousand Pardons

by Jonathan Dee

  “Well, I can’t guarantee you that His Eminence will be there in the room with you, but as near as dammit, as they say. They thought they were coming to talk to me, but I told them that you were my designated crisis management specialist around here.”

  “And what,” she asked, “is the nature of their crisis?”

  Malloy smiled crookedly. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I assume you read the papers.”

  Angela knocked, and entered holding her key chain. A few minutes later Helen was downstairs in her office again. She felt sleepy. She felt like an instrument, but of what? She’d taken a job just to support her family, but now the job had grown to love her unabashedly and her family didn’t seem to need or even want her anymore. She shut her door just to give herself a few extra seconds if the basketball player and his agent happened to show up. Her phone rang; the caller ID showed the same number left on the weekend messages. Above the number was the unhelpful semi-legend LKSD INN CLT VT. She picked up and absently said her name.

  “Helen?” a man’s voice said urgently. “Oh God, is this really you? Or an assistant?”

  Helen’s face twitched in surprise. “No, this is me,” she said. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “There’s no one else on the line? Or in your office? Do these calls get recorded?”

  The voice had a little catch in it, like a sob. “It’s just me,” Helen said, a little testily in spite of herself. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Hamilton,” the voice said.

  “Hamilton? Why are—how did you—is something the matter?”

  “Yes,” he said in a whisper.

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “A pay phone. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You’re not still in the city, though?”

  “No, definitely not. I’m in some motel or something. I don’t remember how I got here. There’s a lake out the window. Champlain, maybe? I got on a binge after I saw you and I don’t remember how I got here.”

  “Hamilton,” Helen said, “that was five days ago.”

  “I remembered you said the name of your place was Malloy,” he said, sounding more like he was crying now, “and I found your card, and I need help, and I can’t call any of the people that I would normally call.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think I may have done something bad,” Hamilton said.

  6

  IN 1889, TWO CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES opened a home for wayward girls in Malloy, New York—at the time a town of fewer than three hundred citizens, which would seem to indicate an unusual rate of local waywardness. The home later became an orphanage, and a convent was established to staff it, which led to an influx, after World War I, of young Catholic women on missions from all over the world, though a good ninety percent of them were from Ireland or England. For decades the nuns were actually the most worldly element of Malloy, a town otherwise composed mostly of farmers and, from the 1930s onward, workers at the maximum-security prison near Plattsburgh. Such was the church’s civic influence that the convent went on to establish a school, called St. Catherine’s, in 1939, open to Catholic children of either gender. Over the decades, the prison expanded, the town correspondingly thrived, but the congregation, somehow, inexorably shrank. The orphanage was closed in the sixties, the convent in the seventies. The school, though, stayed open, and was still thought of, at least by those who could afford it, as a worthy alternative to Malloy’s one public elementary school, infamous for its dangerously low standards in all respects. St. Catherine’s enrollment was now only slightly less than what it was when Helen attended. At least that had been true seventeen years ago, the last time Helen was there. It might be gone completely now. Helen, with no remaining connection to the place—no family, no friends she remained in touch with—had lost track.

  This was the first time she’d driven that far north since then: in yet another rented car, along Route 7 through the western edge of Massachusetts, with a road map spread out awkwardly across the steering wheel. She should have asked for a car with one of those GPS systems included, even though the time that saved might well have been offset by the time it would have taken her to figure out how to operate the thing. She was useless with small gadgets, as her daughter seized every opportunity to remind her. Two hours after dropping Sara off in Rensselaer Valley, Helen still had the girl’s remonstrations ringing in her ears: what the hell are you doing, it’s a school day, are you kidnapping me or abandoning me, you’ve finally snapped, I knew it would happen one day, if you pick me up and then ditch me like this then don’t expect me ever to come home again, I don’t understand why the hell you won’t even tell me where it is you have to go in such a hurry. At least now, as she crawled through the Berkshires, there was no voice but her own to reprimand Helen for not having figured out some faster, smarter way to go. At yet another stoplight she checked to make sure her silent phone was still getting a signal. No call from Sara, no call from work yet, no call from Ben, no call from Hamilton. She’d be lucky to get to Vermont by dark at this rate.

  He’d never come right out and asked Helen to come rescue him, but there was no doubt that’s what he wanted; and she understood that, even in his most unguarded moment, Hamilton expected people would try to anticipate his needs, because that’s what he was used to. He would not say what was wrong, he would not tell her what he had done. Though technically not an actual client, purely in terms of visibility he was one of the biggest names on Malloy’s books, and so Helen felt justified in canceling all her appointments, heading for home to pack two bags, and directing the switchboard to tell anyone who asked that she had been called away on an emergency. She told Hamilton not to leave his motel room. He said he was hungry, though. She called the motel’s office, pretending to be a guest—this while she was walking from her apartment to the Hertz outpost three blocks away—and got the number of a pizza restaurant in the nearest town. She called them, ordered a pizza to be left on the doorstep outside Cabin 3, and paid with her corporate credit card. Then she drove to Robert Livingston Middle School and tried to explain to the security guard there that she was a parent who needed to take her child out of school immediately. In the end it took nearly twenty minutes just to get an assistant principal to come down the hall and talk to her.

  Sara surely could have survived at home on her own for a day or two—fed herself, gotten herself to school on time, refrained from burning the apartment to the ground. She’d never been asked to do that before, though, and Helen knew what her reaction would be; she could hear the whole enraged listing of worst-case scenarios that would ensue. All in all, it just seemed simpler and less worrisome to dump her on her father for a few days. Helen wasn’t unmindful of the bluff-calling element either. If they didn’t like it, that was on them. Certainly more had been expected of Helen, in terms of self-sufficiency, when she was Sara’s age. More had been expected of everyone else she knew.

  Somewhere around Pittsfield the traffic eased up and she started making better time. At the stoplights, when she wasn’t reconsulting the map, she kept trying to account for the fact that she was going to Vermont, of all places, or rather for the fact that Hamilton had gone there. Why Vermont? To make a movie? To hide? She’d read somewhere that even a cellphone with a dead battery could be used to track its owner’s whereabouts, if it came to that. Cellphones had changed everything, in terms not just of communication but of privacy, secrecy, absence, alibis. All the minutes of her own adolescence spent frantically composing some plausible story, as you walked the last hundred yards home at ten or eleven at night, about where you’d been! All the desperate effort that went into looking as though you believed what you were saying! Once, just a month or two before they left Malloy, she spent a Friday night riding around in Charlie Lopinto’s father’s car with Charlie and his older brother and three other friends, and the cops pulled them over, not because they were drinking or speeding but because the brother had apparently had some massive fight with his folks earlier t
hat evening and now they were reporting that the car had been stolen. Helen and her friend Libby cried so hard when they told the cop they hadn’t known anything about it that he finally consented, snappishly, to let them go without escorting them home to their parents. They had to walk about three miles to get there, though, and it was late, and Helen could still remember Libby tenderly wiping all the ruined mascara off of Helen’s face and making her rehearse their story one last time before she went in to lie to her mother and father about why she was getting home at that hour.

  Maybe Hamilton was even there that night—not in the car, but somewhere along their route, among one of the groups of friends they stopped to talk to. He probably wasn’t, but she could no longer remember every detail. She hated forgetting things like that, things she’d seen and done, even though it was only natural. Confession, when she was a kid, used to scare her for that very reason. Forgetting something wasn’t the same as lying, really, but sin-wise there was not enough of a distinction.

  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 righ
t 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.