Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“Do you know my name?” Helen said, trying not to grow frantic. Even at seven o’clock it was so hot she was already sweating again.

“Course I know your name,” Cudahy said. “Your check had the name of your bank on it, and I have friends here and there, and like this and like that. Anyway, no need to freak out, I only bothered to track you down because I have news for you.”

Helen said nothing. She looked at Ben, who smiled back patiently. Patience was itself one of those new things that threatened to make him unrecognizable to her sometimes.

“Lauren Schmidt,” Cudahy said. “I found her.”

Helen’s eyes closed. “She’s alive?” she said.

“What? Yes, of course she’s alive,” Cudahy said, his tone a little less friendly all of a sudden. “I didn’t even know that was the issue. She was in some fancy rehab center in Vermont, but here’s what made it so tough: she checked herself in under a fake name. They don’t care what you call yourself at those places. She didn’t want her family to know, was the issue, I guess. And so maybe that’s you? You’re family?”

“How did she get there?” Helen asked. “Her — I know she wasn’t driving her car.”

“Well, that was the key to the whole thing, actually. She got sprung from rehab and went looking for her car, which had been towed to some small-town police station and was just sitting there with grass growing around it. She came and showed her license to prove it was hers, and they run the registration online, and bam, she’s back on the grid again.”

“So you know where she is?” Helen said. “You’ve spoken to her?”

“Not really my business to speak to her, but yeah, I know where she is. She’s back with her parents in Laguna Beach, California. I’ve got an address, an email, a phone number, the whole schmear. You want it?”

She couldn’t imagine anything good coming of it. It was enough to know. She asked him if she owed him any more money and he said no, he’d technically made the crucial phone calls on his own time, just because unsolved cases raised his blood pressure. She hung up, walked across the parking lot, and motioned to Ben to roll down the window.

“One more call,” she said. “I don’t want to make it from home. Sorry to make you wait.”

He shrugged. “You don’t want to make it in the car? Nice and cool in here,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. She turned away. At rush hour trains into Rensselaer Valley ran only about twenty-five minutes apart; cars were already starting to flow into the lot again. She didn’t have much time. She dialed Hamilton’s cellphone number and listened to a recording informing her that it had been disconnected.

She’d Googled him idly once or twice over the summer, and found a fully restored flow of gossip items and trade-journal mentions linking him to this or that actress, or to this or that unproduced script. Variety had him shooting a new movie this summer in Copenhagen, playing the part of Paul Gauguin. There was no way of knowing how unmanufactured these various sightings were, but they sounded right to her.

She remembered the agent’s name, Kyle Stine, and got that number through information, dreading the call but feeling she had no choice. An assistant halfheartedly offered to take a message; “Tell him it’s the woman who knew where Hamilton Barth was,” Helen said. She felt the eyes on her as she waited — the only person out on the steaming pavement — the stares of all her neighbors inside their idling cars. Nothing new there: she and Ben were stared at everywhere they went now. “What can I do for you?” Kyle Stine said. “Holding another one of my clients hostage, maybe?”

“I need to speak to Hamilton right away,” Helen said, seeing even as she said it how this conversation was going to go. “I have some information that could save his life.”

“You don’t say,” answered the agent. “Listen, um — hold on a second — Helen Armstead, who works at Malloy Worldwide in New York, this phone call has actually made my day. And not just because it’s so funny. Because you seem not to know who I am. If you knew who I am, you would know how badly you have just fucked up by calling me on your own phone. Tomorrow, when you go to work? There’ll be someone else’s name on the door, because you won’t have a job anymore. I can make that happen and more.”

“Please,” Helen said. “It doesn’t matter. I just need to speak to Hamilton. Will you at least ask him to call me?”

“Not in this lifetime,” Kyle Stine said and hung up.

The next train’s headlight was on her, and she hurried down from the platform rather than be swallowed in the next discharge of passengers. She got into the passenger seat of the Audi, and Ben pulled out of the lot without a word. She knew every quizzical face they passed in the parking lot; she knew he did too. They had lived here forever. But they had only each other now, and she was surprised to feel a pang of something like contentment when it occurred to her that Ben was the one person in the world who could listen to the story of what had just happened to her and understand what the hell she was talking about. As for Hamilton, the more she thought about him on the ride home, the more she imagined that he was probably leading a better life now anyway, on some set somewhere waiting for his own personal judgment day, feeling, with equal parts humility and arrogance, that it was inevitable. There would be no such judgment, in the end, but knowing that felt like a burden, and thus she was happy to keep it to herself.

“Are you picking up Sara?” she said to Ben as the car crested the hill. Sara had a summer job at the multiplex in town, taking tickets. She had to wear a red vest and complained of the toxic effects of prolonged exposure to morons.

“She says she has a ride,” Ben said. “Some boy.”

Helen turned to stare at him as he made a right into the driveway. “Some boy,” she repeated skeptically. “Driving a car. At eleven o’clock at night.”

Ben sighed. “I think we can trust her to make good decisions when it comes to that stuff,” he said. “But I can go pick her up if you want.”

Good decisions! She was fourteen. Still, the theater was barely a mile from home. And Ben had a fair point about their daughter: it didn’t pay to underestimate her. Consciously or not, the girl had achieved the impossible dream of every child of divorce ever; if she could pull that off, it was hard to think of any other life situation she couldn’t manipulate. Helen laid her hand on Ben’s arm, feeling sorry already for this overmatched boy. Sara was probably inventing her own field sobriety test for him right now.

“Her I trust,” she said gently, “but this anonymous boy, not so much. Boys and cars — you never know. I’d feel better if you went and got her.”

Ben shrugged. “At your service,” he said. They pulled up in front of the garage door; he got out and stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing at the sunlight sieved by the tree line, until Helen had made her way around the car and started up the path ahead of him. “The yard still looks like hell,” she said distractedly as they walked up the steps.

“Sorry,” Ben said. “Tomorrow.” He held the door for her and then let it swing shut behind them.

JONATHAN DEE is the author of five novels, most recently The Privileges , which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine , a frequent literary critic for Harper’s , and a former senior editor of The Paris Review . He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.