by Jonathan Dee
“It’s not that I can’t remember it. It’s that she told me it wasn’t her real name.”
“But if I can produce this woman, then you will have to exonerate yourself, and then all we have to do is come up with some plausible story about where you’ve been the last few days, if anybody even asks. Right? We just can’t let it go on for too long. So: it can’t be a hotel.”
“No way.”
“It can’t be anyplace with any sort of doorman or any employee like that.” She could already feel where this line of reasoning was going, even as she thought it through, but she wasn’t ready to get there yet. “We’re too exposed, just sitting here,” she said, starting the car again. “Did you get enough to eat for now?”
They were back on Route 7 a short while after that, headed south, but Helen wasn’t frustrated by the pace of the traffic this time; she was in no hurry to get where she was going. This is crazy, she said to herself soothingly. We will figure out what happened. The girl is fine. She is somewhere telling the story of her weekend sex romp with a movie star. Hamilton is no judge of what’s inside him.
“We were on the Northway,” Hamilton said suddenly, softly, “and we saw the ferry sign. We were so high. It must have been me driving. ‘We have to ride it,’ she kept saying. ‘We have to see what’s on the other side.’ It’s the kind of thing that sounds really important when you’re that high. We’d stopped in Beacon because she knew a dealer there, which should have been a red flag, obviously. She knows a dealer in Beacon? Anyway, I gave in and turned around, partly just because I knew I needed to stop driving for a while. And the ferry: you’re in the car, and the car is moving, but you’re not driving it, so that’s pretty great. I remember she wouldn’t stay in the car, though, once we were out on the water, even though it was freezing. She sat on the roof, over my head. I was so sure she was this once-in-a-lifetime woman. She was so fragile, so hurtful, so wounded and vicious, it just made you want to cry for her. She started yelling at the ferry pilot to cut the engine. Which he obviously wasn’t going to do, but he did blow the horn for her. Why would she have been yelling at him to do that, though? She knew. She knew where we were going, that it would be horrible, but it felt so great getting there. Then she climbed down and got in the car again and I turned the heater up all the way and we smoked another rock, and I don’t remember anything at all after that.” He started crying. Helen kept her eyes on the road.
Half an hour later he was asleep again, but she had no such luxury. She hadn’t done this much driving in one stretch since college. Her eyes ached in the sunlight. When they crossed the border into Connecticut, the dashboard clock said ten minutes to five, and that gave her an idea. She called the main switchboard at Malloy and asked to be put through to Shelley.
“Girl, where are you?” Shelley said excitedly. “Arturo has been in here three times asking if I’ve seen you today. He is ripshit about something. I told him your daughter is sick. I’m wrong, right?”
“Everyone’s fine,” Helen said and asked if Shelley knew anyone in Personnel, or in the promotions department, who would maybe be kind and patient enough to do her a favor. Shelley connected her to someone she knew from yoga named Courtney, who worked in their events division. “Courtney,” Helen said, “I am so sorry to trouble you, but I need to contact someone who was working the Code of Conduct premiere last week, and here’s the thing: I don’t even know this person’s name. I don’t even know if she works for us.”
“Shoot,” Courtney said, “ask me something hard,” and Helen wished she were powerful enough to do something astounding for this Courtney, to change her life.
“At least she was kind of striking-looking, if that makes it any easier,” Helen said. “Short, like about five two, with short red hair and a short black skirt and just a beautiful face. And one of those arm tattoos, a sleeve or whatever they’re called. She was working the VIP seating inside the Ziegfeld. Tiny, like a little doll, but superintimidating.”
“Give me five minutes,” Courtney said, and in five minutes she called back with the information that the woman whom Hamilton knew as Bettina was named Lauren Schmidt. She worked for a company Malloy sometimes used called Event Horizon. They were L.A.-based, but they had a New York office, to which Courtney was able to put Helen through. Even though this brought her abruptly closer to her goal, Helen felt a shiver of fright. Hamilton slept on, his forehead against the window.
“Hello?”
Helen’s heart pounded; someone behind her honked as she inadvertently took her foot off the gas. “Lauren Schmidt?” she asked.
“No, this is Katie,” the voice said. “Can I help you?”
“Is Lauren in today?”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Gone home for the day?”
“Lauren works as a temp for events. She doesn’t have an office here. Can I help you with something?”
“Oh. Well, do you happen to know how to get ahold of her? This is a friend of hers.”
“I can’t give that information out,” the voice said, losing interest now.
Asking more questions would probably only generate suspicion, Helen thought, so she said she would try back later and hung up. This was the problem with the situation they were in: it took an ever-increasing measure of belief to distinguish no news from bad news. She looked over at Hamilton, who was drooling slightly onto his collar. Please don’t let anybody see him, she thought.
She’d known for at least a couple of hours what her only practical option was, but she’d been putting it off. Now, with time and space running out and with Hamilton sound asleep, she told herself the moment had come. She told herself the same thing four more times before she finally took out her phone again. She hated making calls while driving. Maybe someone would arrest her for it, she thought, and take this whole mess out of her hands.
“Are you all right?” Ben answered. “Where are you?”
“Not even a hello?”
“I saw the number, and we’ve been—”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. It was a real effort not to hate him, now that she needed something from him. “Is Sara okay?”
“Of course she’s okay. I have to warn you, she’s a little pissed off at you.”
“Really!” Helen said. “How unprecedented!”
“How are you, though?” Ben said. “I don’t want to be nosy or anything, but is everything okay? I’m a little worried about you.”
The hell you are, she thought. “Listen, I know you’re probably really asking me how long you’ll have to have Sara there—”
“Sara can stay here for as long—”
“But the news is I’m on my way there right now to get her. I’m in, I don’t know, I think Cornwall right now, or whatever is south of Cornwall, so it’ll be maybe another forty-five minutes. I don’t want to get on 84, so it’ll take me a little longer. But tell her to have her stuff packed—actually, I don’t even know why I said that, she can just leave her stuff there if she wants. And there’s something else you have to do for me, Ben.”
“What are you doing in Cornwall? What’s there?”
“Nothing. Just driving through it. Listen to me. I will be picking up Sara, but I will also be dropping somebody else off. A friend of mine is in trouble and needs a place to stay. It has to be a secret. I know that the house is now legally all yours or whatever, but it is still my home too, Ben, in some sense, and on top of that it would be a huge, huge understatement to say that you owe me one—”
“Okay,” Ben said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I do owe you one. It’s fine. We’re a little short on beds, though. Sara and I just ordered a new one today, obviously it won’t get here in time—”
“Just give him yours,” Helen said.
“Of course. I’ll give him mine. That makes more sense. So who is this friend of yours who’s in trouble, if I’m allowed to ask?”
Helen sighed. “Well, better I should tell you now, probably, than have you
make a big deal when you see him. It’s Hamilton Barth.”
There was a silence. “The actor guy?”
“Yes.”
“He’s in trouble?”
“Well, probably not. I can’t really go into the whole—It’s not what you should be focusing on, anyway.”
“I thought you said it was about a friend of yours.”
Helen’s jaw dropped. “You don’t remember,” she said, “that I went to St. Catherine’s in Malloy with him? You don’t remember me telling you that story about two hundred and fifty times?”
“Wait,” he said. “Vaguely.”
Give me strength, she thought. “Anyway, doesn’t matter; he is here in the car with me, and he needs a safe place to stay where no one will look for him, just for a day or two probably, and we will be there in a while. I will pick up Sara and drop off Hamilton, and, Ben, I swear to God, you cannot let him be seen, you cannot let him out of the house, you cannot say one word to anyone except me about him being there.”
“I can’t let him out of the house?” Ben said. “So will there be paparazzi on our lawn and the whole bit?”
“The goal is precisely to avoid that.”
Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Helen was entering a traffic circle, something she’d always hated. “So we’re kind of like the Underground Railroad,” Ben said. “But for celebrities.”
“If that helps you,” Helen said. “I have to go.”
“Do you want to talk to Sara?”
There was a police car in the rotary. “No,” Helen said and hung up.
Hamilton woke when she stopped for gas in Danbury, and she explained to him where she was taking him. “A safe house,” he said, nodding. “Good.” She told him that she would not be staying there with him but would go back to the city to find the woman he knew as Bettina so he could come out of hiding and admit that he was being ridiculous, that his world, and the world’s esteem for him, were unchanged.
“What if you don’t find her, though?” he said. “Or what if you do but—”
“The only thing you have to do,” Helen said firmly, “is nothing. I know that will be hard for you. You can’t go out. You can’t contact anyone but me. You can’t be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone, except my ex-husband, Ben, who will be there with you.”
“Your ex-husband,” Hamilton said. “You’ve got your ex-husband in a safe house too?”
Half an hour later, with the sun setting, Helen cut the headlights and rolled the rental car down the hill at the top of Meadow Close. She parked outside the garage, and she and Hamilton trudged up the steps and knocked softly on the door. Ben opened it almost before she’d lowered her hand again. It was the first time she’d seen him in nine months; he looked, much as the house looked, like some younger, scarily austere version of himself, but she had no time to dwell on such things now. He and Sara stood gaping on the threshold as if they couldn’t quite credit what they were seeing, even though she had told them exactly what they would see.
“Let us in, please, before some neighbor looks over here?” Helen said.
They took two more steps backward than strictly necessary. Hamilton walked in, and Helen quickly shut the door behind him, standing stiffly three feet inside her own home for the first time since moving out of it. In the middle of the living room was a couch with various tags still attached; sitting on the couch was a giant pile of plastic wrap. The floors were bare except for a blanket with dirty paper plates and empty soda bottles still on it. Nothing hung on the walls or windows. The TV played silently.
“Who lives here?” Hamilton said.
Ben meekly raised a hand. “There’s more furniture coming,” he said. “Tomorrow, and then later in the week. Sara and I just ordered a bunch of stuff.”
That’s sweet, Helen thought venomously, but she said only “Remember that the delivery guys cannot see him.”
Ben nodded. “Can I get your things out of the car?” he said to Hamilton, who replied by looking balefully at Helen.
“He has no things,” she said. “You might get back online and order some clothes for him, actually. I’ll reimburse you.”
All this time Sara had been staring at Hamilton as if he could not see her—and indeed he didn’t seem to—with an odd expression, her eyebrows down, that Helen finally recognized as the expression of someone who smells something terrible. And Hamilton did smell, it was true, though he still looked better than he had any right to, considering he had been wearing and sleeping in the same clothes for going on six days.
“You know,” Helen said to no one in particular, “maybe for starters, just a shower?”
Hamilton’s shoulders slumped with relief at the mention of it. “Follow me,” Ben said.
“And we’ll probably just get going, then,” said Helen.
Everyone turned to look at her. “Are you sure?” Ben said carefully. “No offense, but you look exhausted. You really want to get right back in the car?”
“It’ll be fine. Sara has to be back in school tomorrow, where she lives, and I have things to do. I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”
Something in the tightness of her voice made Ben resist questioning her further. He exchanged a look with Sara, and Helen saw him give her a quick, intimate, reassuring parental nod, to let her know everything would be okay. She wanted to punch him in the face.
He started down the hall after Hamilton. Helen could feel her daughter’s burning stare but did not return it. “Or a bath,” Hamilton was saying as they turned the corner toward the master bathroom. “Because I don’t know how much longer I can stand up.” Then Helen and Sara were left alone in the front hall, Helen never having advanced more than one step inside the door.
“This is a nightmare,” Sara said. “You are my nightmare.”
“Get your things, please,” said Helen.
“No.”
“How many beds are there in this house right now?”
“Two.”
“Get your things, please,” Helen said.
In the darkness of the underlit Saw Mill, she was soon crying from the effort to keep her eyes open. Sara’s vengeful silence in the passenger seat, dramatic though it was, proved too difficult for her to maintain after the first five minutes. “How could you do that to me?” she began. “What is the matter with you? Is it menopause? Have you gone out of your mind? You yank me out of school in the middle of the day so you can go off and have some pathetic affair with some pseudo-celebrity who looks like a total hobo? Smells like a hobo too. You are too old to be acting like this. Who else knows about it? Did you lose your job or something? Or maybe you quit. Maybe you quit your job for one last sex romp with Hobo Joe, who you made out with a hundred years ago but you just couldn’t bear to head into old age without going back and finding him to close the deal. God, it makes me want to vomit just thinking about it. Can’t you just accept who you are? Can’t you—”
Helen slammed on the brakes and jerked the car onto the shoulder, even though there was technically no shoulder there. Horns blared at them angrily, urgently, and headlights washed through their car. She turned in her seat to look at her daughter, who had pulled away so that the back of her head was up against the passenger-side window. Sara was trying hard to maintain her edge, but Helen could see that her chin was quivering. Helen no longer wondered, as she usually did when her daughter teed off on her, what exactly she had done wrong; she just accepted now that she had done something wrong, or many things, even if it was not given to her to know what those things were. She leaned in a little closer, over the frantic rise and fall of the horns.
“I am begging you,” Helen said.
THE NEXT MORNING Sara left for school without a word, and Helen rushed to get to Malloy fifteen or twenty minutes before everybody else. She knew she couldn’t stay in her office for long. Malloy himself would be apoplectic about her having skipped the meeting at the archdiocese the day before. His surge-protector smile was probably threatening to crack open
his whole head. Part of her was tempted to ask his advice on how to proceed with Hamilton Barth, a celebrity in hiding over something that had very likely not even happened; but even if Hamilton was, however tangentially or indirectly, a Malloy client, she felt that this was less a business issue than a personal one, and the idea of enlisting the boss felt like an evasion of responsibility.
It was all she could do not to call Ben again. She wasn’t sure how often was too often to call, at what point Ben would resent it, which mattered to her only because his feeling fettered or mistrusted might be all it took to cause him to do something perverse and stupid. They were the two most unreliable men she knew, which made it hard to feel good about any plan that depended on how they acted when they were out of her sight. Still, there wasn’t much trouble they could be getting into at 8:45 in the morning, so she turned to the other problem at hand, which was trying to locate this Lauren Schmidt.
But how do you find someone? How do you prove she exists? Helen had no skills in this area whatsoever. She Googled the girl, and found the usual sludge of five thousand random mentions of a woman with that name who may or may not have been Bettina. One had just finished first in the long jump at River Oaks High School in Winnetka, Illinois. So you could eliminate that one, but how many of the other hits might be referring to that one too? There was no way to know, or else the ways, Helen thought, were opaque to someone like her. She clicked on Images and, with a sharp gasp she was glad no one was around to overhear, recognized her, the horrid bitch from the screening a week ago. She’d been photographed by Patrick McMullan at some society benefit, smiling into the camera with her tattooed arm around some other austerely proportioned girl, both of them standing the way skinny women bred a certain way always stand. She looked utterly, aggressively self-conscious, like she was daring the camera to record her in any way other than the way she wanted to be seen. Beautiful, though. She and Hamilton must have made quite a couple, must have given off a concentrated glow in that moldy, colorless setting if, God forbid, anyone had seen them there.