Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

She struggled to think of something to say, but she was not fast enough to stop him from trying to interpret her silence.

“It’s true that I have taken a special interest in you,” he said. “Arturo and the rest of the merry band downstairs, they do a good job, but frankly I don’t think they see it yet.”

“See what, sir?”

“See you. See what you do.”

“I’m starting to wonder,” Helen said, “if I’m seeing it yet myself.”

“Well, sure,” Malloy said. “That doesn’t surprise me. But I see it. What you’re doing is the wave of the future. I think we’re going to rewrite the textbooks for crisis management before we’re done.”

“There’s a problem of scale,” said Helen. “The bigger it gets, the less real it seems to me.”

“I think what you should be asking yourself,” Malloy said kindly, “and what others will be asking themselves as they continue to watch you succeed, is not how real the process is, whatever that may mean, but what the results are.”

His office was not as big as she’d imagined. He kept the blinds wide open. Her eyes refocused on a woman in the building across the street who was hitting a printer repeatedly with the heel of her hand, and then again on her boss, an old man with seemingly infinite patience, or maybe he just didn’t have that much to do.

“You’re telling me the archbishop wants to meet with me?” Helen said.

“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.

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.