A Thousand Pardons

by Jonathan Dee

  “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.”

  “I don’t want to talk about anything,” she said. He nodded sympathetically and waited; as a parent, he still had some game. He wasn’t sure, but he thought there used to be some kind of bird feeder hanging from the tree on their front lawn; he wondered what had happened to it.

  “I don’t like it the way it is now,” Sara said. “I thought I would, but I don’t. I mean living in New York, living with Mom, the whole thing. I think I belong here, with you. I just feel like you know me better. So,” she said, gesturing vaguely behind her, “I guess this is what I wanted, actually. I just don’t particularly appreciate the way it happened, Mom kidnapping me and all.”

  “What do you mean,” Ben said, “you feel like I know you better? How would such a thing be possible? I’ve been a horrible father to you for the last year or so. I wasn’t really interested in knowing anything about anybody other than myself.”

  “See? Like right there. When you’re all humble, it seems real, but when Mom does it, it just seems over the top, like capital-H Humble. There’s something fake about her.”

  “Fake, huh,” he said. “Your mother’s a lot of things, but personally I don’t think fake is one of them. Of course, it’s been a strange year.”

  “For instance, I knew you would be cool with this,” said Sara, waggling her beer bottle. “One beer, at home. Safe environment and whatnot.”

  “And she would not be cool with that?”

  “Perfect children don’t drink beer,” Sara said.

  The house ticked behind them. It was fully dark now; the other homes on the street glowed like embers.

  “I mean, it goes both ways,” Sara said. “I understand you too. I get why you’d just wake up one day and say, Is this really my life? How did I even get here? And if you can’t answer that question, you might start to act a little crazy.”

  Ben sighed. He didn’t want to discourage any point of connection she might feel to him, but at the same time, to allow his own failings to be employed as a parable of any sort was, in a way, to absolve them, and that he did not want.

  “The important thing,” he said, “is that none of it was about you. I mean it should have been much more about you, really, but I wasn’t seeing things that way at the time. It was like I couldn’t see past the walls of my own head. My life just seemed so questionable to me that I had to give it away. I’d already given it away in my mind, but that didn’t actually change anything, so I guess I had to find some way to do it that everyone else would see too.”

  “And so now, you’re, what, like trying to buy your old life back?”

  “Now I have no life at all,” Ben said. “But that’s a start. In the meantime, it just feels right to be here, as strange and masochistic as I’m sure it looks to everybody else.”

  “So you’re just basically waiting,” Sara said.

  “Tha
t’s right.”

  “And you don’t know for what.”

  “That’s right too. Something, though. Just trying to stay open to it.”

  “Maybe it was this,” Sara said.

  She put her beer bottle down on the step and slapped a bug on her leg.

  “I used to get drunk after school with the guy I was with,” she said softly. “Almost every day. He’s a little crazy. To tell the truth, I’m starting to get a little afraid of him.”

  “Why? What did he do to you? Or say he would do to you?”

  “Wow,” she said, laughing. “The lawyer in you comes out. No, he didn’t really do or say anything. It’s not that explicit or whatever. More like I can see there’s something in him. And I think he knows I see it, which makes me feel like if it ever comes out, it’ll come out in my direction, you know?”

  She was pretty perceptive after half a beer, he thought. “Well, you’re safe up here at least.”

  “True dat. Now nobody knows where the hell I am.”

  “Does Mom know about this guy?”

  “Nope. It is not possible to talk to Mom about certain things, you know? Her world is pretty limited. It’s like talking to a nun or whatever.”

  From somewhere on the dark block they heard the sound of a child crying, and then a window being slammed shut. For a moment, that silenced even the bugs.

  “I’m not going back,” Sara said.

  They listened to somebody’s dog barking, miles away probably.

  “It’s out of your hands,” Ben said gently. “Mine too.”

  She shrugged.

  “You should see me at Price Chopper, or at the Starbucks,” he said, grinning. “It’s pretty hilarious. All the local moms. Sometimes they actually get out of a line just because I’m in it.”

  “Well, you buy back your own house and then live in it with no furniture, like some hobo monk. You must know how pointless and creepy that looks.”

  “Yeah,” he said, swigging forgetfully from the empty bottle. “I’m sure it does.”

  “So are you working again tomorrow?”

  “Yep.” She seemed disappointed, though he wasn’t sure how he could tell, now that it was too dark out to see her face. “You want to see any of your old friends while you’re here?”

  She made a kind of hissing sound and tilted her bottle in the air. “If you don’t mind a little advice,” she said, “you need to purchase some chairs, and rugs, and forks and knives and such. It’s a little ghetto in there.”

  “I don’t really know how to buy furniture,” he said, pulling out his phone. “You want to go online with me right now and order some stuff?”

  She shrugged and nodded. “No offense,” she said, “but it’s not because you’re broke, is it?”

  “Not quite yet,” he said. “Anyway, our credit is still good.” He took her hand and helped her to her feet. “But listen, you don’t happen to know, by any chance, where your mother stored all our old furniture?”

  “No clue.”

  “Okay. Well, probably for the best, anyway.”

  “Can I have another one?” she said, holding up her empty bottle.

  He ran his hand along the black hair at the back of her head, the silky spot that had always been there. “Nope,” he said.

  HELEN SPENT THE NIGHT in the car, sleeping fitfully, waking with her head tilted back to watch the moonlit clouds sliding over the tree line. Hamilton slept inside, on a chair he had dragged in from the porch, under a blanket made of threadbare towels, as he apparently had for the previous few nights. He would not go near the bed, or even look at it. At dawn she walked up to the cabin that served as an office; it was empty and unlocked. There was no guest registry either. Maybe the whole operation was illegal; in any case, whoever ran it seemed to have other things on his or her mind, which was, for Helen, the first good break. She left cash to cover four nights, plus an extra sixty dollars, which she stuck under a flyswatter that lay across the countertop; on a piece of paper she found in her bag, she wrote, “Cabin 3—Sorry for the mess—Thanks!”

  Then they were back on the road, pointed south again, but with no realistic destination in mind. Hamilton, who smelled repulsive, fell asleep almost instantly in the car, like a dog or a baby; he probably hadn’t slept much, under those towels, for days. The first thing she determined to do was to stop in town and buy a new charger for his dead cellphone. She took the phone from him and went into a Best Buy in the largest of the endless mini-malls. He was too recognizable to risk getting out of the car. In fact she wasn’t crazy about his exposure even in the car, so she parked behind the store, next to a dumpster. The Best Buy clerk, upon learning that Helen apparently didn’t even know the make and model of her own phone, sold her with maddening condescension a charger that came with an adapter for the car—she hadn’t even thought of that. They got back on the highway, waiting for the phone to wake up so Hamilton could check his voice mail. Finally he got enough of a charge and a signal to learn that his mailbox was full. It took almost twenty minutes for him to listen to the first few seconds of each message and delete it, tears forming in his eyes, until finally he repeated in terror the words the phone spoke robotically into his ear.

  “That’s the last message,” he whispered, flipping the phone shut. “Nothing from her.”

  “But she wouldn’t have your cell number anyway, would she?”

  “No,” he said, no less gloomily.

  Helen’s heart raced. “Anything from the police, though? Or any media?”

  “No police. There’s always some media, but they never say what they want. Mostly it’s studio people, agency people, whatever, freaking out because they don’t know where I am.”

  “So you’ve missed some appointments?” Helen asked.

  “Probably,” he said. “Definitely, going by their tone of voice.” He stared out the window at the other cars, while Helen, her fingers tight on the wheel, tried to think of a way to ask him not to do that. “I’m hungry,” he mumbled.

  The problem was that they couldn’t just walk into any restaurant anywhere, because someone would notice, probably within seconds, his face and his dissipated state. Outside of a small professional circle, he was probably not yet considered missing; those studio people were pretty good at keeping information private when they wanted to. But it didn’t matter. Wherever he went, people would react as if they’d found him; they’d pull out their phones, they’d need to upload some record of their public proximity to him. Helen pulled off the highway just over the Massachusetts border and tooled around a likely looking small town until she found an actual drive-in restaurant, the kind with picnic tables in the back and a big steel garbage can capped by a cloud of bees. She wasn’t about to risk even the picnic tables, though. She went to the window and a few minutes later brought back to the car an array of fried things on a red plastic tray. He tore into the food for the first few bites but then slowed down and grew morose again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be difficult to feel like you can’t show your face, even in a place like this where you’re a total stranger, or should be. But it’s only for a little while, until we get everything straightened out.”

  He frowned. “It’s forever,” he said. “You’re always being watched by some unseen eye, everywhere you go, all the time, in your most intimate moment even. You’re always being judged.”

  A car pulled into the space right next to them, on the driver’s side mercifully, and a beleaguered looking mother got out and began unbuckling kids from car seats.

  “And this is why,” Hamilton said. “This is why they watch. Because they’ve been waiting for the mask to come off like this. They’ve been waiting for the real me to come out.”

  Helen picked at the hot dog bun and rolled bits of it between her fingers. “So look,” she said, laboring to sound calm. “We’ve had a chance to get away from that place and take a deep breath and clear our heads a little bit. So let me ask you again, and you think about it again: wh
at is the last thing you can remember?”

  He shook his head. “I know you think things are going to come back to me, but they won’t. Trust me, I have been through this before.”

  “Through what?”

  “Well, through blackouts. But usually either I’m alone when it happens or there’s someone else there when I come around who can fill in the blanks for me. Not this time.”

  “And so this time you’re afraid you’ve done what, exactly?”

  He scowled. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “where is she, then?”

  “You’re not saying you think you killed her?”

  “There’s no other explanation,” he said sullenly.

  “There are a million other explanations! But look, you admitted you don’t remember anything about it. So all you really have to go on is a feeling of dread or guilt—”

  “And a missing person,” Hamilton said irritably, “and a bunch of bloodstains—”

  “That blood could be months old for all you know. You think they really care, at that place? The cabin didn’t look like it had been cleaned in a year.”

  “You can put whatever spin on it you want—”

  “And your clothes. There is no blood at all on any of your clothes.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t wearing them at the time.”

  “And what do—” Helen said and stopped; she was going to ask him what he supposed he had done with the girl’s body, but that aspect of things was probably not worth bringing up. There had been rowboats and canoes pulled up on shore near the cabins; and to tell the truth the lake itself had creeped her out from the moment she got out of the car. “The point is you don’t know what happened,” she said firmly. “You don’t know. And it’s ridiculous to just assume the worst, because frankly I know you’re not capable of that—”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I do,” Helen said, feeling herself start to choke up a little bit. “I do know you, Hamilton. So the situation, as I see it as your adviser here, is that we need to stash you somewhere, just briefly, while I figure out where this woman is. This woman whose name you can’t remember.”