Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

And the odd thing was that he had never felt more like an addict than he did on the day of his discharge: the world beyond that leafy, unmanned gate was suddenly a pretty scary prospect. His car was still in the lot. He let the engine run for a few minutes and tried to think what, of a practical nature, he should do. The first thing was to call the lawyer, Bonifacio, and tell him to close the escrow account they’d set aside for his treatment. He left a voice mail. The second thing was maybe to alert Helen that he was out? But then he recalled that that tie was no longer there, that they had severed it, legally and otherwise. He didn’t know what he would say to her anyway — or to Sara, at least not yet. He hadn’t spoken to his daughter in almost three months; the counselors had forbidden it for the first two, and even after that any phone call would have had to have been monitored, a condition Ben could not accept. In any case Sara would be in school with her phone turned off for another six or seven hours. Still, he had nowhere else even to point himself toward, no place of employment, no other home, and all his possessions outside of one suitcase were still in the house on Meadow Close, unless she’d stored them, or sold them, or burned them. He imagined he could feel the eyes of Paul on his idling car. Without coming to any conclusion about anything, he backed out of the lot and began the drive of forty minutes or so back to Rensselaer Valley.

As before, he made it most but not all of the way. A few exits east of his turnoff on 684, he had to pull over into the half-empty lot beside an office park because he thought he might be hyperventilating. Ten minutes later he got back on the highway; this time he made it all the way to the hill at the top of Meadow Close before stopping again. The house seemed almost to change its contours, to shrink or tighten against the bare trees and the cold, gray overcast. The yard looked like hell. A light was on in the bedroom window. He recalled that, in a fit of righteous remorse brought on by therapy, he had signed the house over to Helen while sitting on his bed one night in rehab; it was highly unlikely that she could have sold the place as quickly as that, but still, for all he knew some stranger might be lying under that light. He had no real right to go in there anyway, no reason sounder than whimsy to go anywhere. The fear whose physical symptoms he marveled at was not unmixed with other sorts of feelings, for in a way, he had to admit as he sat staring through the windshield with his hands in his lap, he now had exactly what he had wanted. He was a new man. Whatever step he took next would not be one he had taken many times, or even once, before. All that survived of his old life was the disgrace of its end, and there was something almost comfortable about that disgrace, about the burden of it; it seemed to be what he’d been courting all along, and now it was his. That was what had first begun to exasperate him about Helen, way back when: she believed in him too blindly, she refused to see how he bore the weight of what he was capable of. Out of nowhere, an amplified horn blasted right behind him and nearly put his head through the roof; a huge yellow Hummer drifted to a stop on his left, smack in the middle of the road, and the tinted passenger-side window, two feet above his head, rolled down.

“Is that Ben Armstead?” Dr. Parnell said.

The two of them turned off their engines and spoke through their windows. That Parnell was a boor and a prick and a windbag was something Ben had known for years, but never had he felt as repulsed by his old neighbor as he did now, when with a raised eyebrow and a puerile smirk he kept trying to convey to Ben that they were hypermasculine birds of a feather, that boys, whether driving obnoxious monster cars or nailing hot underlings in hotel rooms, would be boys. But he did at least invite Ben inside his home, and serve him a cup of coffee. And he did seem to understand something about the limbo in which Ben found himself, because out of nowhere he offered the use of a cottage he kept on Candlewood Lake, for fishing, he said. No one used it this time of year. Ben thanked him and took down the directions, and when he had finished his coffee he drove straight there.

The presence of candles and old wine bottles and a king-size bed cast suspicion on Parnell’s claim that he used the cottage only for fishing. It was winterized, thank God. None of the few other cabins visible from its tiny back porch were occupied, even on weekends. Maybe in another month or so, Ben thought, when the lake iced over. In the meantime, the days crept safely by. He spent Christmas there, with the relief of a secret, cordial, but uneventful hour with Sara the day before to sustain him. He made no contact with his ex-wife but assumed that she knew he was out of Stages, that either Sara or Bonifacio would have found occasion to mention it to her. He’d had Bonifacio send her the rest of the escrow money, labeled as back child support. No response. Then, a few days after New Year’s, when he broached with Sara the idea of arranging another meeting, she texted him peremptorily that they were moving — in fact had already moved, the previous weekend — to Manhattan. He was left to contemplate that during a raw, muddy January in which the lake ice never thickened to more than an inch or two. Even if it weren’t his inclination, he wouldn’t have had much choice but to wait: his future, in a legal sense at least, was still being negotiated elsewhere, without his direct involvement, and until that process was over, there wasn’t much to plan for.

What had he done? It was a question he asked himself more in wonder than in regret. He couldn’t even bring himself to regret the manner in which it had happened, the damage done to others, because the damage itself defined him now, defined even his flickering relationship to Sara, in that he had something to prove to her, though he wasn’t yet sure what, or how. He had renounced himself: that was as far as it went. But that was pretty far.

It was a ten-mile drive to town, and there was nothing in town anyway, so Ben had little to do all day but think — not that different from rehab, really, save for the atmosphere of relentless silence. The cabin resembled Stages too in its technological isolation from the wider world, for it was socked in by hills and Ben’s phone got no reception whatsoever. It wasn’t wired for cable either. Once a day, sometimes twice, Ben would drive into town, park around the side of the Mobil station where he couldn’t be seen from its front windows, and check for messages from his few remaining contacts in the world. In truth, if you left out all those emails that still came to him robotically for one reason or another, like bank statements and unchanging frequent-flier account updates, he was down to two correspondents. In the gray late afternoon when he was likeliest to catch her on her way home from school, he sat in the driver’s seat with the heater on high and texted his daughter. This was both satisfying and frustrating, for Sara was a stingy texter, and he was left unsure whether this was a generational thing, or a measure of her own impatience and lack of thumb-typing skills, or whether she was trying to forget about him but lacked the fortitude to come right out and tell him so.

Hows ur new school?

Ok .

Hows ur new apt?

Sux .

She had an entirely new life, but you wouldn’t know it from her lack of affect, if it even made any sense to criticize text messages for a lack of affect. At least she hadn’t blocked him. After ten or fifteen minutes of this sort of exchange — she didn’t know where on earth he was; she didn’t seem to need to know — he’d walk into the Mobil station for a poisonous cup of six-hour-old coffee and a New York Times , and then he’d go back out to the car and call his lawyer.