Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Oh, where is the girl? Helen thought. Where is the stupid, arrogant, thoughtless girl who can end all this? She looked at the agony contorting his face: the curse of being a good actor, she thought — no difference between the truth and its flawless simulation, not even for him anymore. His whole life was a Method performance, a dream within a dream, but whatever he wanted from her, however preposterous, she was not free to refuse him. She put her hands on his two cheeks, brought his wide-eyed face to hers, and in full view of her ex-husband, kissed him as long and as deeply as she remembered how. After a few moments he began reciprocating. She opened her eyes to make sure his were closed, and they were. It went on for a full minute, at which point she realized it might start to get out of hand. Not that she could do anything to stop it if it did. A door opened inside her; and then she realized that that was the sound of a real door, which could only be Sara’s door down the hall, and she quickly but gently disengaged from him and stared, flushed and shaking, into his eyes.

He smiled at her, his movie-star smile, which she had not seen since the night they met at the premiere. “Thank you,” he said. Then he turned to Ben, who hadn’t moved an inch. “Brother,” he said, “could I trouble you for a ride somewhere?”

BY THE TIME Ben got him to the airport in Newburgh, the agency had chartered a plane there to return him to Los Angeles; even though they surely could have paid someone from the charter service to record the license plate of the Hertz rental car in which Hamilton was transported back to his old life, such vengeance was apparently forsworn, and neither the police nor anyone else turned up asking questions. Once Ben had texted her that Hamilton was safely in the air and that he was on his way back to the house, Helen went into her old bathroom and took a shower, even though she had no choice but to put back on the same clothes she had slept in. She went into the kitchen and found a brand new coffeemaker; rooting around in the fridge, which was still their old fridge, she unearthed a bag of ground coffee but very little else in the way of something an adult human might eat for breakfast. Pulling open the empty crisper drawers, muttering incredulously, she became aware of the presence of someone else, and when she straightened and turned around, she saw Sara leaning in the doorway, wearing an old soccer jersey and a pair of pajama bottoms, chewing lightly on a cuticle, and watching her.

“Did you sleep all right?” Helen asked.

“Yeah. I’ve been up for a while, though,” Sara said. She remained in the doorway. Helen pushed the fridge door shut with her foot and walked across the kitchen with her hands full. “This is a really high-end coffeemaker,” she said, trying to keep any tension out of her voice. She still wasn’t sure whether or not Sara had seen her kissing Hamilton on the couch, in front of her father. Good luck explaining that one. “Did you help him pick this out?”

“What are you making?” Sara said quietly.

Helen looked over what she’d put on the counter. “I guess I can do some sort of omelet,” she said, “although it might have chicken in it.”

She found a pan in the sink, rinsed it out, and turned the burner on. It was still her old stove. Well, what difference does it make if she saw? Helen thought. You have to start seeing your parents as real people at some point. She shredded some chicken with her fingers, dropped it into the pan, and looked at it skeptically. She looked at the spot on the countertop where the knife block and the spice rack used to be.

“It’s so strange,” Helen said, “to be back here and not know where anything is.”

“What do you need?” Sara said.

Helen bit her lip to keep from crying. She turned to look out the window. Sara walked behind her and, opening and closing drawers and cabinets, produced two plastic plates, two forks, and a rubber spatula. She placed them noiselessly on the counter beside the stove. “Thank you,” Helen said. Whatever it was she was making, when it seemed done the two of them sat at the small kitchen table and ate it.

“Are you all right, Mom?” Sara asked.

Helen put her fork down and sat back in her chair. “I’m all right,” she said. “Are you all right?”

Sara nodded. She finished eating but did not get up from the table.

“I’m sorry for everything,” Helen said. “I really am.”

“I don’t know why,” Sara said. “You did the best you could. You feel too responsible for what everybody else does, is the problem.”

“Oh,” Helen said. “So then why are you so hard on me?”

“Somebody has to be,” Sara said. She wasn’t smiling. Their heads turned toward the sound of Ben’s car in the driveway.

Helen drove back to the city on the pretext that the rental car had to be returned. Though it was Saturday, she went in to work, expecting the silence of the office to be more tolerable than the silence of her apartment. That night, and the next one, she went home to the East Side; but the solitude, and the worry over Sara, were too much for her, and she hardly slept. Without letting Ben know in advance of her plans, she took the train back to Rensselaer Valley after work on Monday, and on every weeknight thereafter.

She still slept on the couch, and the arrangement was not discussed. Since they had only one car now, Ben drove her to the train station in the morning; though cabs were available in the early evening, once he figured out what train she usually took, he thought he might as well go down to the station and wait for her then too. Something in her balked at the hassle of renting a truck to go to New Castle, where all their old furniture was still piled in the storage unit; and in any event deliverymen kept showing up at the house with previously ordered new stuff. Then one night toward the end of June, Helen looked into Sara’s bedroom and saw a profusion of familiar items there — posters, stuffed animals, old yearbooks — so familiar, actually, that they might well have been there for a few days already without her noticing. When asked about it, Sara admitted that she and her father had driven into the city one morning, while Helen was at work, and collected a few things she said she didn’t want to be without.

Helen might have been angry with them — in particular about this new flair they seemed to have developed for deciding things together without telling her — and she resolved to have a strong word with Ben about it, but by the next day her edge was dulled, and she never did get around to it. Later that summer it occurred to her to wonder, since no one had mentioned it to her, whether perhaps Ben had enrolled Sara in school for the fall. Again, something made her disinclined to ask. She rationalized it by recalling that she had spent the last decade or more in charge of these sorts of dull domestic necessities, and that it would not have occurred to her back then to bother her spouse with them either.

One sweltering evening in August, safe in the maxed-out air-conditioning of the northbound commuter train, Helen saw her phone light up inside her bag on the seat next to her. She pulled it out in case the call was from Sara or Ben — anyone else and she would let it go to voice mail; she did not want to be one of those people shouting into their cellphones over the noise of the train — and saw that the name on the caller ID was Charles Cudahy. When she got off the train in Rensselaer Valley twenty minutes later, she held up one finger toward Ben, whom she could see waiting in the car beside the platform, and called back.

“How did you get this number?” she said.

“I know, right?” Cudahy said cheerily. “It’s like I’m a detective or something!”