Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“What the fuck is going on here?” he said. “I had three different people call and tell me someone had broken in. But it’s what, an office party? In the dark? Motherfucker,” he said, gesturing with the gun, “did anybody ever tell you you look just like Hamilton Barth?”

Ben stood and beckoned his boss into the desk chair. They had one more round, from Bonifacio’s desk-drawer bottle of Jameson, while everybody calmed down, and then Bonifacio, though likely drunk himself, drove the two men home. When they crested the hill, Ben saw a strange car in the driveway, and he reached out and grabbed Hamilton’s arm. “We’re dead,” he said. Bonifacio, tired and disgusted, made them get out at the top of the driveway. Trying gamely to sober up, they marched down the pavement toward the front door.

From the foyer Ben could see Helen sitting at the kitchen table and Sara stretched out on the new living room couch. He stood between them, paralyzed with fear, until Hamilton ungracefully squeezed past him, sat down across the table from Helen, and leaned toward her on his elbows.

“What have you found out?” he said.

“Where on earth,” Helen said in a gratingly high voice, “have you two been?”

“It’s not what you think,” Ben said.

“Helen, please!” Hamilton said.

“We just needed to get out,” Ben said. “But we didn’t do anything too stupid. We just went to Bonifacio’s office.”

“Bonifacio’s office?” Helen said incredulously. “At ten o’clock at night?”

“So we wouldn’t be seen,” Ben said.

“And did anybody see you?”

“Well,” Ben said, “Bonifacio.”

Helen put her head in her hands.

“Helen,” Hamilton said again. “Have they found her?”

“Have they what? Oh. No, there’s no word. We can’t find her, but on the bright side, no one has reported her missing either. She doesn’t really have a job to go to, and she has an apartment she hasn’t slept in in a while, but that doesn’t mean anything. Could just mean she found someone else to shack up with. Anyway,” she said, softening as she saw the anguish on his face, “that’s not why I drove up here, because I had news or anything. I just couldn’t get ahold of you and I was worried. Oh, and also,” she said to Ben, “apparently your daughter wants to live with you now. So there’s that.”

Hamilton sighed, got up, and wandered unsteadily toward the living room. He and Ben were clearly too drunk to keep up any kind of productive conversation for long; and Sara, scared and resentful and confused and tired, hadn’t spoken for more than an hour.

For a long moment, Helen, thinking of the three of them, felt that she would like nothing more than to get away from there, away from a sense of her own accountability for any of it, much less all of it. But a powerful inertia kept her in that ugly new kitchen chair, and she realized that she too was far too exhausted right now to get back in the car and go anywhere. “Hold it,” she said loudly, and everyone turned around. “Sara in her room. You two in the master bedroom. I’ll stay out here and then leave in the morning.”

The two men looked at each other. “I can sleep on the couch,” Hamilton said, “if—”

“That’s not happening,” Helen said. With great effort she rose, walked to the living room, and, after a brief search for the TV remote, just pulled the plug out of the wall, which caused Sara to stand up without a word to anyone, go into her once and future bedroom, and close the door. The men went off dutifully to pass out on the bed together, closing the door behind them as well, and finally, for as long as she could manage to keep her eyes open at least, Helen was alone.

No point, she knew, in even looking anywhere for extra blankets or sheets. She lay down on the stiff, new-smelling couch and closed her eyes. As she drifted off, she recalled that there was a cedar chest full of very nice blankets at the self-storage place in New Castle. One of them had belonged to her mother. Her eyes fluttered open again and took in the ceiling above her living room, strangely shadowed without all her old lamps and sconces, but still startlingly, reproachfully familiar. There had to be some meaning in it all, she thought, some logic, because it so strongly resembled a joke: the moment at which everything about her life seemed lost, useless, outside of her control, was also the moment when they were all reunited under one roof — not just any roof either, but their home, the home it had once comforted her to think she would die in. Now it was both itself and a mean-spirited parody, both a freshly sold, newly furnished suburban house and a ruin. She wished she had never lived there, and at the same time she began to dream, with her arms folded across her chest and her coat thrown over her like a too-short blanket, that the house was on fire, and that Sara and Hamilton and Ben were all standing on the lawn screaming at her to run out, to abandon it, to save herself, and she wouldn’t do it.

The next thing she knew, there was just enough light outside to let her see the overgrown back lawn painted in shadow, and Hamilton was kneeling patiently on the floor a few feet away, waiting for her to wake up. Her head jerked painfully.

“You were talking in your sleep,” he said.

She looked at him, disoriented.

“This obviously can’t go on,” he said, as if they had already been talking. “It isn’t viable, especially not now that you’re all back here. I mean, I can’t just live indefinitely in your basement or whatever. I have to just accept responsibility for what I’ve done and let you get on with your lives.”

“Well, good,” Helen said raspily, raising herself on one elbow. “I agree. I mean with the part about you getting on with your life.”

“I charged my phone this morning, and no surprise, people are out looking for me. Plus my agent says he got a phone call from someone who said she kidnapped me. Anyway, I just have to get back to the world and face the consequences. I can’t wait around for them to find me, because if they find me then they find you.”

“There won’t be any consequences, Hamilton, because you didn’t do anything. But I agree, you have to just go back to your life. It’s time.

So what do you want to do? How can I help? I mean, all you have to do is walk out the door, though you’ll probably want a car to the airport or something—”

“I need you to forgive me,” Hamilton said.

“For what?” She felt a slow surge of panic. “There’s still no reason to think you did anything worth forgiving. People will just think you’re insane.”

“Yeah, I know. Exactly. The whole thing will never make any sense to anyone except you and me. So the only person who can help me with it is you. I know something happened. I know I did something. So I’ll be going back to my old life waiting every second for the knock on the door, or for the hand on my shoulder. I can live with that. But I still need the other part. You know. The absolution.”

“The what?” She struggled to sit up. Ben had now wandered into the living room as well. “Do you — I mean are you saying you want me to take you to church?”

“No. I haven’t been inside a church in like thirty years.”

“So?” she said.

Absurdly he inched forward on his knees. “I just need it from you,” he said. “If you think about it, you’re the one who knows the most about me. You know where I started, where I came from. And when I ask to be forgiven for what I did, even if you disagree with me, you’re literally the only one in the world who knows what I’m even talking about in the first place.” He glanced down at the floor, and when he looked up again he was crying. She stared at him to try to gauge how real it was. “I’m so sorry, Helen,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry for ruining your life like this, and for being who I am and not who you think I am. Will you forgive me?”