Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

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 that 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.