A Thousand Pardons

6



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.

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.

He sighed, and when he opened the passenger door again she saw that his jaw was now set. Everything he felt had to pass across his face in some outsize manner. She followed him, through the riot of bug and frog noise, back up the two steps to the cabin door. When they were both inside, he snapped the wall switch, and in the light of an unshaded ceiling bulb Helen saw a stripped bed, its thin mattress stained with what she had to concede was not a huge but still definitely a disconcerting amount of blood.

“I can’t remember anything,” Hamilton said right behind her, and in spite of herself she jumped. “What if I did something horrible?”

BEN’S ORIGINAL PLAN was to go into the office Monday at about three in the afternoon, to look over a brief for the zoning commission, the sort of menial help Bonifacio seemed to take particular, vindictive pleasure in paying him for. There was no reason he couldn’t have gone in at nine—he was up at six these days, in part because the rags he’d found in the garage and draped over the curtain rods reached only about halfway down his bedroom window—but Bonifacio liked him to come in at an hour when they could have a drink while they worked without feeling too much like derelicts. It was the company, of course, more than the hour, that gave Bonifacio his cover. “So much for rehab, eh, old sport?” he liked to say. “What the hell, I bet this went on every day back in that white-shoe firm you used to work at.” Which was far from true; anyone at his old job who required a drink during the day knew how to do it on the sly, in true alcoholic style. Ben’s own rehab may have been for show, but he had learned a few things there.

So he’d been sitting in the kitchen trying to read the Times on his phone, an exercise in frustration he’d taken up to save some money, when his ex-wife, Helen, called from out of nowhere and said she was in a car on her way to Rensselaer Valley to drop Sara off with him for a while.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Not your business,” she said.

“How long is a while?”

“Why? You have somewhere else on earth you need to be?”

“More out of curiosity,” he said.

“I will let you know when I know. Listen: you wanted back into your child’s life? Welcome to it. Not everything happens on your timetable. Sometimes your timetable just flies right out the damn window.”

“Is she right next to you?” Ben said. “Can I speak to her?”

“We’re on the Saw Mill,” Helen said. “We’ll be there in half an hour.” She hung up. He put on some clothes and rinsed out his coffee cup, but there wasn’t much preparation to be done apart from that: he was still living in the house virtually squatter-style, with a couple of canvas director’s chairs he’d bought on sale at the hardware store, a TV with rabbit ears that sat unsteadily on top of the box it had been shipped in, a disconnected gas stove, their old fridge, and hardly any food. He heard the thin drone of a cheap engine growing louder down the hill, then one door opening and slamming, then the drone rising in pitch again and receding, and he pulled the front door open just before Sara got her fingers on the knob. She carried a duffel bag on her shoulder and looked furious.

“Hello, honey,” he said cautiously. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Sara dropped her bag to the floor, sank down next to it, and began rooting around inside. “Mom’s finally cracked, is what’s going on,” she said coldly. “Déjà vu. First you and then her. Well, to be honest, I think it’s probably better that I’m here anyway.” She began pulling out t-shirts and bras. “She packed this bag for me,” Sara said. “I do not have any frigging idea what’s in here.”

“You don’t know where she’s going?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“You don’t know how long she’ll be gone?”

At that Sara stopped and looked right into his face. “No,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

He found some leftover ten-ingredient fried rice in a take-out carton in the fridge. Sara accepted it and sat down wearily in front of the TV. Ben retreated to the bedroom to call Helen, but then decided against it; it felt like what she was daring him to do. For quite a while he just stood there. At two o’clock he changed his clothes and went back out to stand beside the television.

“I have to go to work,” he said. “I’ll just be a couple of hours and then I’ll bring home some dinner. Will you be okay?”

“Is there any food in the house besides this?” Sara said.

He wasn’t sure. But he could tell that her outrage was fading. “You have my number,” he said. “Will you call me if you hear from Mom? And I’ll do the same.”

All through the car ride into town and through the two hours he spent trying to focus on the brief in Bonifacio’s office, sitting in the folding chair by the window, he felt the touch of guilt, unfamiliar but somehow instinctive or natural-seeming, like the flare-up of symptoms from some seasonal allergy or chronic disease. He was at work, making money, and he hadn’t even known Sara was coming until twenty-five minutes before her arrival. Still, knowing, for the first time in months, exactly where Sara was and what she was doing, and that he was responsible for her, stirred something in him, something he both welcomed and wished he could, just for the sake of his powers of concentration, dismiss. Rather than endure any questions from Bonifacio, any sarcasm or nosiness, he accepted his usual two fingers of Jameson and then, when Joe was on the phone with his wife, poured it into the dead plant.

He stopped at Price Chopper on the way home to pick up some food, all but paralyzed by the simple decisions involved. Of course it was never that simple a matter, going to Price Chopper. Women’s eyes narrowed at the sight of him. Strangest of all were the ones who, even after carefully setting their jaws and shaking their heads to communicate their condemnation of him, would still want to talk to him invasively, as if he were some sort of disgraced celebrity. Head down, he pulled from the shelves by the deli counter a rotisserie chicken and a six-pack of Corona.

Would Sara be with him for two meals? Two days? What if she was not exaggerating and Helen really had gone off the deep end? It would have surprised him, certainly, but it wasn’t as if he was in any position to judge her harshly. She had always been a little more tightly wound than she appeared to those who knew her only casually. He added ice cream, Cheetos, appeasements of all sorts to his cart. He felt a surge of panic as he opened his own front door, but Sara was still in the same canvas chair in front of the television, which, as she must long since have figured out, got only four channels. He put away the groceries, such as they were, put the chicken in the dead oven to stay warm, opened a beer, and stood against the windows behind the TV, facing her. Sara’s expression was noncommittal.

“I bought a chicken,” Ben said.

She glanced up for a moment as if she was going to get up and go find it—she must have been starving—but then she stayed in her chair. “Kudos,” she said.

“No word from your mother?” Her immobility was his answer. He couldn’t see what she was watching—Entertainment Tonight or some such, it sounded like—but then she muted it and fixed her father with a long, direct look.

“Can I have one of those?” she said. She nodded at his beer.

What was she, fourteen? He tried for a moment to recall himself at fourteen.

“Ever had one before?” he asked.

She made a derisive sound. “I’m not home-schooled,” she said.

Well, he thought, if I’m in charge, then I’m in charge. It appeared neither of them was leaving home tonight. And she seemed to want something from him, he thought: not the beer, so much, but whatever the beer signified for her.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You can have one if you will turn off that god damn TV.”

He thought about bringing the two director’s chairs out to the screened back porch so they could drink their beers while gazing into the darkening woods behind the house, but there were holes in that screen he hadn’t figured out how to fix yet—he’d always hated those smugly, competitively handy suburban homeowners, but there were certainly days you wished you were one of them—and every time he’d ventured out there himself since moving back in, some high-pitched bug wound up causing him to slap himself painfully on the ear. It was a decent night, though, with some breeze. He went back to the kitchen, popped the top off a second Corona and handed it to her; then he opened the front door and sat on the top step facing the empty street, and Sara docilely did the same. Lights were on in windows all up and down the street, at Parnell’s and elsewhere. He thought it was probably too dark for the two of them to be seen; and then he thought, so what? What was left to fear there? None of them spoke to him anyway, and when he brought his garbage cans out to the curb they regarded him as if he was a madman. That was the point of living here now. Bring on their execration. “Cheers,” he said and tapped his daughter’s bottle.

He stared at her until she took a sip. Too dark to see what kind of face she made; that would have told him a lot. They were facing east, and all the color had gone out of the sky. They heard a distant police siren, maybe from as far away as the Saw Mill. Probably not coming for us, Ben thought.

“So no idea where your mother might have gone?” he said again.

Sara shook her head and had another sip.

“You know,” Ben said, “we didn’t really talk about anything last time, you and me.”

“I don’t want to talk about anything,” she said. He nodded sympathetically and waited; as a parent, he still had some game. He wasn’t sure, but he thought there used to be some kind of bird feeder hanging from the tree on their front lawn; he wondered what had happened to it.

“I don’t like it the way it is now,” Sara said. “I thought I would, but I don’t. I mean living in New York, living with Mom, the whole thing. I think I belong here, with you. I just feel like you know me better. So,” she said, gesturing vaguely behind her, “I guess this is what I wanted, actually. I just don’t particularly appreciate the way it happened, Mom kidnapping me and all.”

“What do you mean,” Ben said, “you feel like I know you better? How would such a thing be possible? I’ve been a horrible father to you for the last year or so. I wasn’t really interested in knowing anything about anybody other than myself.”

“See? Like right there. When you’re all humble, it seems real, but when Mom does it, it just seems over the top, like capital-H Humble. There’s something fake about her.”

“Fake, huh,” he said. “Your mother’s a lot of things, but personally I don’t think fake is one of them. Of course, it’s been a strange year.”

“For instance, I knew you would be cool with this,” said Sara, waggling her beer bottle. “One beer, at home. Safe environment and whatnot.”

“And she would not be cool with that?”

“Perfect children don’t drink beer,” Sara said.

The house ticked behind them. It was fully dark now; the other homes on the street glowed like embers.

“I mean, it goes both ways,” Sara said. “I understand you too. I get why you’d just wake up one day and say, Is this really my life? How did I even get here? And if you can’t answer that question, you might start to act a little crazy.”

Ben sighed. He didn’t want to discourage any point of connection she might feel to him, but at the same time, to allow his own failings to be employed as a parable of any sort was, in a way, to absolve them, and that he did not want.

“The important thing,” he said, “is that none of it was about you. I mean it should have been much more about you, really, but I wasn’t seeing things that way at the time. It was like I couldn’t see past the walls of my own head. My life just seemed so questionable to me that I had to give it away. I’d already given it away in my mind, but that didn’t actually change anything, so I guess I had to find some way to do it that everyone else would see too.”

“And so now, you’re, what, like trying to buy your old life back?”

“Now I have no life at all,” Ben said. “But that’s a start. In the meantime, it just feels right to be here, as strange and masochistic as I’m sure it looks to everybody else.”

“So you’re just basically waiting,” Sara said.

“That’s right.”

“And you don’t know for what.”

“That’s right too. Something, though. Just trying to stay open to it.”

“Maybe it was this,” Sara said.

She put her beer bottle down on the step and slapped a bug on her leg.

“I used to get drunk after school with the guy I was with,” she said softly. “Almost every day. He’s a little crazy. To tell the truth, I’m starting to get a little afraid of him.”

“Why? What did he do to you? Or say he would do to you?”

“Wow,” she said, laughing. “The lawyer in you comes out. No, he didn’t really do or say anything. It’s not that explicit or whatever. More like I can see there’s something in him. And I think he knows I see it, which makes me feel like if it ever comes out, it’ll come out in my direction, you know?”

She was pretty perceptive after half a beer, he thought. “Well, you’re safe up here at least.”

“True dat. Now nobody knows where the hell I am.”

“Does Mom know about this guy?”

“Nope. It is not possible to talk to Mom about certain things, you know? Her world is pretty limited. It’s like talking to a nun or whatever.”

From somewhere on the dark block they heard the sound of a child crying, and then a window being slammed shut. For a moment, that silenced even the bugs.

“I’m not going back,” Sara said.

They listened to somebody’s dog barking, miles away probably.

“It’s out of your hands,” Ben said gently. “Mine too.”

She shrugged.

“You should see me at Price Chopper, or at the Starbucks,” he said, grinning. “It’s pretty hilarious. All the local moms. Sometimes they actually get out of a line just because I’m in it.”

“Well, you buy back your own house and then live in it with no furniture, like some hobo monk. You must know how pointless and creepy that looks.”

“Yeah,” he said, swigging forgetfully from the empty bottle. “I’m sure it does.”

“So are you working again tomorrow?”

“Yep.” She seemed disappointed, though he wasn’t sure how he could tell, now that it was too dark out to see her face. “You want to see any of your old friends while you’re here?”

She made a kind of hissing sound and tilted her bottle in the air. “If you don’t mind a little advice,” she said, “you need to purchase some chairs, and rugs, and forks and knives and such. It’s a little ghetto in there.”

“I don’t really know how to buy furniture,” he said, pulling out his phone. “You want to go online with me right now and order some stuff?”

She shrugged and nodded. “No offense,” she said, “but it’s not because you’re broke, is it?”

“Not quite yet,” he said. “Anyway, our credit is still good.” He took her hand and helped her to her feet. “But listen, you don’t happen to know, by any chance, where your mother stored all our old furniture?”

“No clue.”

“Okay. Well, probably for the best, anyway.”

“Can I have another one?” she said, holding up her empty bottle.

He ran his hand along the black hair at the back of her head, the silky spot that had always been there. “Nope,” he said.

HELEN SPENT THE NIGHT in the car, sleeping fitfully, waking with her head tilted back to watch the moonlit clouds sliding over the tree line. Hamilton slept inside, on a chair he had dragged in from the porch, under a blanket made of threadbare towels, as he apparently had for the previous few nights. He would not go near the bed, or even look at it. At dawn she walked up to the cabin that served as an office; it was empty and unlocked. There was no guest registry either. Maybe the whole operation was illegal; in any case, whoever ran it seemed to have other things on his or her mind, which was, for Helen, the first good break. She left cash to cover four nights, plus an extra sixty dollars, which she stuck under a flyswatter that lay across the countertop; on a piece of paper she found in her bag, she wrote, “Cabin 3—Sorry for the mess—Thanks!”

Then they were back on the road, pointed south again, but with no realistic destination in mind. Hamilton, who smelled repulsive, fell asleep almost instantly in the car, like a dog or a baby; he probably hadn’t slept much, under those towels, for days. The first thing she determined to do was to stop in town and buy a new charger for his dead cellphone. She took the phone from him and went into a Best Buy in the largest of the endless mini-malls. He was too recognizable to risk getting out of the car. In fact she wasn’t crazy about his exposure even in the car, so she parked behind the store, next to a dumpster. The Best Buy clerk, upon learning that Helen apparently didn’t even know the make and model of her own phone, sold her with maddening condescension a charger that came with an adapter for the car—she hadn’t even thought of that. They got back on the highway, waiting for the phone to wake up so Hamilton could check his voice mail. Finally he got enough of a charge and a signal to learn that his mailbox was full. It took almost twenty minutes for him to listen to the first few seconds of each message and delete it, tears forming in his eyes, until finally he repeated in terror the words the phone spoke robotically into his ear.

“That’s the last message,” he whispered, flipping the phone shut. “Nothing from her.”

“But she wouldn’t have your cell number anyway, would she?”

“No,” he said, no less gloomily.

Helen’s heart raced. “Anything from the police, though? Or any media?”

“No police. There’s always some media, but they never say what they want. Mostly it’s studio people, agency people, whatever, freaking out because they don’t know where I am.”

“So you’ve missed some appointments?” Helen asked.

“Probably,” he said. “Definitely, going by their tone of voice.” He stared out the window at the other cars, while Helen, her fingers tight on the wheel, tried to think of a way to ask him not to do that. “I’m hungry,” he mumbled.

The problem was that they couldn’t just walk into any restaurant anywhere, because someone would notice, probably within seconds, his face and his dissipated state. Outside of a small professional circle, he was probably not yet considered missing; those studio people were pretty good at keeping information private when they wanted to. But it didn’t matter. Wherever he went, people would react as if they’d found him; they’d pull out their phones, they’d need to upload some record of their public proximity to him. Helen pulled off the highway just over the Massachusetts border and tooled around a likely looking small town until she found an actual drive-in restaurant, the kind with picnic tables in the back and a big steel garbage can capped by a cloud of bees. She wasn’t about to risk even the picnic tables, though. She went to the window and a few minutes later brought back to the car an array of fried things on a red plastic tray. He tore into the food for the first few bites but then slowed down and grew morose again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be difficult to feel like you can’t show your face, even in a place like this where you’re a total stranger, or should be. But it’s only for a little while, until we get everything straightened out.”

He frowned. “It’s forever,” he said. “You’re always being watched by some unseen eye, everywhere you go, all the time, in your most intimate moment even. You’re always being judged.”

A car pulled into the space right next to them, on the driver’s side mercifully, and a beleaguered looking mother got out and began unbuckling kids from car seats.

“And this is why,” Hamilton said. “This is why they watch. Because they’ve been waiting for the mask to come off like this. They’ve been waiting for the real me to come out.”

Helen picked at the hot dog bun and rolled bits of it between her fingers. “So look,” she said, laboring to sound calm. “We’ve had a chance to get away from that place and take a deep breath and clear our heads a little bit. So let me ask you again, and you think about it again: what is the last thing you can remember?”

He shook his head. “I know you think things are going to come back to me, but they won’t. Trust me, I have been through this before.”

“Through what?”

“Well, through blackouts. But usually either I’m alone when it happens or there’s someone else there when I come around who can fill in the blanks for me. Not this time.”

“And so this time you’re afraid you’ve done what, exactly?”

He scowled. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “where is she, then?”

“You’re not saying you think you killed her?”

“There’s no other explanation,” he said sullenly.

“There are a million other explanations! But look, you admitted you don’t remember anything about it. So all you really have to go on is a feeling of dread or guilt—”

“And a missing person,” Hamilton said irritably, “and a bunch of bloodstains—”

“That blood could be months old for all you know. You think they really care, at that place? The cabin didn’t look like it had been cleaned in a year.”

“You can put whatever spin on it you want—”

“And your clothes. There is no blood at all on any of your clothes.”

“Maybe I wasn’t wearing them at the time.”

“And what do—” Helen said and stopped; she was going to ask him what he supposed he had done with the girl’s body, but that aspect of things was probably not worth bringing up. There had been rowboats and canoes pulled up on shore near the cabins; and to tell the truth the lake itself had creeped her out from the moment she got out of the car. “The point is you don’t know what happened,” she said firmly. “You don’t know. And it’s ridiculous to just assume the worst, because frankly I know you’re not capable of that—”

“You don’t know me.”

“I do,” Helen said, feeling herself start to choke up a little bit. “I do know you, Hamilton. So the situation, as I see it as your adviser here, is that we need to stash you somewhere, just briefly, while I figure out where this woman is. This woman whose name you can’t remember.”

“It’s not that I can’t remember it. It’s that she told me it wasn’t her real name.”

“But if I can produce this woman, then you will have to exonerate yourself, and then all we have to do is come up with some plausible story about where you’ve been the last few days, if anybody even asks. Right? We just can’t let it go on for too long. So: it can’t be a hotel.”

“No way.”

“It can’t be anyplace with any sort of doorman or any employee like that.” She could already feel where this line of reasoning was going, even as she thought it through, but she wasn’t ready to get there yet. “We’re too exposed, just sitting here,” she said, starting the car again. “Did you get enough to eat for now?”

They were back on Route 7 a short while after that, headed south, but Helen wasn’t frustrated by the pace of the traffic this time; she was in no hurry to get where she was going. This is crazy, she said to herself soothingly. We will figure out what happened. The girl is fine. She is somewhere telling the story of her weekend sex romp with a movie star. Hamilton is no judge of what’s inside him.

“We were on the Northway,” Hamilton said suddenly, softly, “and we saw the ferry sign. We were so high. It must have been me driving. ‘We have to ride it,’ she kept saying. ‘We have to see what’s on the other side.’ It’s the kind of thing that sounds really important when you’re that high. We’d stopped in Beacon because she knew a dealer there, which should have been a red flag, obviously. She knows a dealer in Beacon? Anyway, I gave in and turned around, partly just because I knew I needed to stop driving for a while. And the ferry: you’re in the car, and the car is moving, but you’re not driving it, so that’s pretty great. I remember she wouldn’t stay in the car, though, once we were out on the water, even though it was freezing. She sat on the roof, over my head. I was so sure she was this once-in-a-lifetime woman. She was so fragile, so hurtful, so wounded and vicious, it just made you want to cry for her. She started yelling at the ferry pilot to cut the engine. Which he obviously wasn’t going to do, but he did blow the horn for her. Why would she have been yelling at him to do that, though? She knew. She knew where we were going, that it would be horrible, but it felt so great getting there. Then she climbed down and got in the car again and I turned the heater up all the way and we smoked another rock, and I don’t remember anything at all after that.” He started crying. Helen kept her eyes on the road.

Half an hour later he was asleep again, but she had no such luxury. She hadn’t done this much driving in one stretch since college. Her eyes ached in the sunlight. When they crossed the border into Connecticut, the dashboard clock said ten minutes to five, and that gave her an idea. She called the main switchboard at Malloy and asked to be put through to Shelley.

“Girl, where are you?” Shelley said excitedly. “Arturo has been in here three times asking if I’ve seen you today. He is ripshit about something. I told him your daughter is sick. I’m wrong, right?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Helen said and asked if Shelley knew anyone in Personnel, or in the promotions department, who would maybe be kind and patient enough to do her a favor. Shelley connected her to someone she knew from yoga named Courtney, who worked in their events division. “Courtney,” Helen said, “I am so sorry to trouble you, but I need to contact someone who was working the Code of Conduct premiere last week, and here’s the thing: I don’t even know this person’s name. I don’t even know if she works for us.”

“Shoot,” Courtney said, “ask me something hard,” and Helen wished she were powerful enough to do something astounding for this Courtney, to change her life.

“At least she was kind of striking-looking, if that makes it any easier,” Helen said. “Short, like about five two, with short red hair and a short black skirt and just a beautiful face. And one of those arm tattoos, a sleeve or whatever they’re called. She was working the VIP seating inside the Ziegfeld. Tiny, like a little doll, but superintimidating.”

“Give me five minutes,” Courtney said, and in five minutes she called back with the information that the woman whom Hamilton knew as Bettina was named Lauren Schmidt. She worked for a company Malloy sometimes used called Event Horizon. They were L.A.-based, but they had a New York office, to which Courtney was able to put Helen through. Even though this brought her abruptly closer to her goal, Helen felt a shiver of fright. Hamilton slept on, his forehead against the window.

“Hello?”

Helen’s heart pounded; someone behind her honked as she inadvertently took her foot off the gas. “Lauren Schmidt?” she asked.

“No, this is Katie,” the voice said. “Can I help you?”

“Is Lauren in today?”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Gone home for the day?”

“Lauren works as a temp for events. She doesn’t have an office here. Can I help you with something?”

“Oh. Well, do you happen to know how to get ahold of her? This is a friend of hers.”

“I can’t give that information out,” the voice said, losing interest now.

Asking more questions would probably only generate suspicion, Helen thought, so she said she would try back later and hung up. This was the problem with the situation they were in: it took an ever-increasing measure of belief to distinguish no news from bad news. She looked over at Hamilton, who was drooling slightly onto his collar. Please don’t let anybody see him, she thought.

She’d known for at least a couple of hours what her only practical option was, but she’d been putting it off. Now, with time and space running out and with Hamilton sound asleep, she told herself the moment had come. She told herself the same thing four more times before she finally took out her phone again. She hated making calls while driving. Maybe someone would arrest her for it, she thought, and take this whole mess out of her hands.

“Are you all right?” Ben answered. “Where are you?”

“Not even a hello?”

“I saw the number, and we’ve been—”

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. It was a real effort not to hate him, now that she needed something from him. “Is Sara okay?”

“Of course she’s okay. I have to warn you, she’s a little pissed off at you.”

“Really!” Helen said. “How unprecedented!”

“How are you, though?” Ben said. “I don’t want to be nosy or anything, but is everything okay? I’m a little worried about you.”

The hell you are, she thought. “Listen, I know you’re probably really asking me how long you’ll have to have Sara there—”

“Sara can stay here for as long—”

“But the news is I’m on my way there right now to get her. I’m in, I don’t know, I think Cornwall right now, or whatever is south of Cornwall, so it’ll be maybe another forty-five minutes. I don’t want to get on 84, so it’ll take me a little longer. But tell her to have her stuff packed—actually, I don’t even know why I said that, she can just leave her stuff there if she wants. And there’s something else you have to do for me, Ben.”

“What are you doing in Cornwall? What’s there?”

“Nothing. Just driving through it. Listen to me. I will be picking up Sara, but I will also be dropping somebody else off. A friend of mine is in trouble and needs a place to stay. It has to be a secret. I know that the house is now legally all yours or whatever, but it is still my home too, Ben, in some sense, and on top of that it would be a huge, huge understatement to say that you owe me one—”

“Okay,” Ben said.

“Okay?”

“Okay. I do owe you one. It’s fine. We’re a little short on beds, though. Sara and I just ordered a new one today, obviously it won’t get here in time—”

“Just give him yours,” Helen said.

“Of course. I’ll give him mine. That makes more sense. So who is this friend of yours who’s in trouble, if I’m allowed to ask?”

Helen sighed. “Well, better I should tell you now, probably, than have you make a big deal when you see him. It’s Hamilton Barth.”

There was a silence. “The actor guy?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in trouble?”

“Well, probably not. I can’t really go into the whole—It’s not what you should be focusing on, anyway.”

“I thought you said it was about a friend of yours.”

Helen’s jaw dropped. “You don’t remember,” she said, “that I went to St. Catherine’s in Malloy with him? You don’t remember me telling you that story about two hundred and fifty times?”

“Wait,” he said. “Vaguely.”

Give me strength, she thought. “Anyway, doesn’t matter; he is here in the car with me, and he needs a safe place to stay where no one will look for him, just for a day or two probably, and we will be there in a while. I will pick up Sara and drop off Hamilton, and, Ben, I swear to God, you cannot let him be seen, you cannot let him out of the house, you cannot say one word to anyone except me about him being there.”

“I can’t let him out of the house?” Ben said. “So will there be paparazzi on our lawn and the whole bit?”

“The goal is precisely to avoid that.”

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Helen was entering a traffic circle, something she’d always hated. “So we’re kind of like the Underground Railroad,” Ben said. “But for celebrities.”

“If that helps you,” Helen said. “I have to go.”

“Do you want to talk to Sara?”

There was a police car in the rotary. “No,” Helen said and hung up.

Hamilton woke when she stopped for gas in Danbury, and she explained to him where she was taking him. “A safe house,” he said, nodding. “Good.” She told him that she would not be staying there with him but would go back to the city to find the woman he knew as Bettina so he could come out of hiding and admit that he was being ridiculous, that his world, and the world’s esteem for him, were unchanged.

“What if you don’t find her, though?” he said. “Or what if you do but—”

“The only thing you have to do,” Helen said firmly, “is nothing. I know that will be hard for you. You can’t go out. You can’t contact anyone but me. You can’t be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone, except my ex-husband, Ben, who will be there with you.”

“Your ex-husband,” Hamilton said. “You’ve got your ex-husband in a safe house too?”

Half an hour later, with the sun setting, Helen cut the headlights and rolled the rental car down the hill at the top of Meadow Close. She parked outside the garage, and she and Hamilton trudged up the steps and knocked softly on the door. Ben opened it almost before she’d lowered her hand again. It was the first time she’d seen him in nine months; he looked, much as the house looked, like some younger, scarily austere version of himself, but she had no time to dwell on such things now. He and Sara stood gaping on the threshold as if they couldn’t quite credit what they were seeing, even though she had told them exactly what they would see.

“Let us in, please, before some neighbor looks over here?” Helen said.

They took two more steps backward than strictly necessary. Hamilton walked in, and Helen quickly shut the door behind him, standing stiffly three feet inside her own home for the first time since moving out of it. In the middle of the living room was a couch with various tags still attached; sitting on the couch was a giant pile of plastic wrap. The floors were bare except for a blanket with dirty paper plates and empty soda bottles still on it. Nothing hung on the walls or windows. The TV played silently.

“Who lives here?” Hamilton said.

Ben meekly raised a hand. “There’s more furniture coming,” he said. “Tomorrow, and then later in the week. Sara and I just ordered a bunch of stuff.”

That’s sweet, Helen thought venomously, but she said only “Remember that the delivery guys cannot see him.”

Ben nodded. “Can I get your things out of the car?” he said to Hamilton, who replied by looking balefully at Helen.

“He has no things,” she said. “You might get back online and order some clothes for him, actually. I’ll reimburse you.”

All this time Sara had been staring at Hamilton as if he could not see her—and indeed he didn’t seem to—with an odd expression, her eyebrows down, that Helen finally recognized as the expression of someone who smells something terrible. And Hamilton did smell, it was true, though he still looked better than he had any right to, considering he had been wearing and sleeping in the same clothes for going on six days.

“You know,” Helen said to no one in particular, “maybe for starters, just a shower?”

Hamilton’s shoulders slumped with relief at the mention of it. “Follow me,” Ben said.

“And we’ll probably just get going, then,” said Helen.

Everyone turned to look at her. “Are you sure?” Ben said carefully. “No offense, but you look exhausted. You really want to get right back in the car?”

“It’ll be fine. Sara has to be back in school tomorrow, where she lives, and I have things to do. I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”

Something in the tightness of her voice made Ben resist questioning her further. He exchanged a look with Sara, and Helen saw him give her a quick, intimate, reassuring parental nod, to let her know everything would be okay. She wanted to punch him in the face.

He started down the hall after Hamilton. Helen could feel her daughter’s burning stare but did not return it. “Or a bath,” Hamilton was saying as they turned the corner toward the master bathroom. “Because I don’t know how much longer I can stand up.” Then Helen and Sara were left alone in the front hall, Helen never having advanced more than one step inside the door.

“This is a nightmare,” Sara said. “You are my nightmare.”

“Get your things, please,” said Helen.

“No.”

“How many beds are there in this house right now?”

“Two.”

“Get your things, please,” Helen said.

In the darkness of the underlit Saw Mill, she was soon crying from the effort to keep her eyes open. Sara’s vengeful silence in the passenger seat, dramatic though it was, proved too difficult for her to maintain after the first five minutes. “How could you do that to me?” she began. “What is the matter with you? Is it menopause? Have you gone out of your mind? You yank me out of school in the middle of the day so you can go off and have some pathetic affair with some pseudo-celebrity who looks like a total hobo? Smells like a hobo too. You are too old to be acting like this. Who else knows about it? Did you lose your job or something? Or maybe you quit. Maybe you quit your job for one last sex romp with Hobo Joe, who you made out with a hundred years ago but you just couldn’t bear to head into old age without going back and finding him to close the deal. God, it makes me want to vomit just thinking about it. Can’t you just accept who you are? Can’t you—”

Helen slammed on the brakes and jerked the car onto the shoulder, even though there was technically no shoulder there. Horns blared at them angrily, urgently, and headlights washed through their car. She turned in her seat to look at her daughter, who had pulled away so that the back of her head was up against the passenger-side window. Sara was trying hard to maintain her edge, but Helen could see that her chin was quivering. Helen no longer wondered, as she usually did when her daughter teed off on her, what exactly she had done wrong; she just accepted now that she had done something wrong, or many things, even if it was not given to her to know what those things were. She leaned in a little closer, over the frantic rise and fall of the horns.

“I am begging you,” Helen said.

THE NEXT MORNING Sara left for school without a word, and Helen rushed to get to Malloy fifteen or twenty minutes before everybody else. She knew she couldn’t stay in her office for long. Malloy himself would be apoplectic about her having skipped the meeting at the archdiocese the day before. His surge-protector smile was probably threatening to crack open his whole head. Part of her was tempted to ask his advice on how to proceed with Hamilton Barth, a celebrity in hiding over something that had very likely not even happened; but even if Hamilton was, however tangentially or indirectly, a Malloy client, she felt that this was less a business issue than a personal one, and the idea of enlisting the boss felt like an evasion of responsibility.

It was all she could do not to call Ben again. She wasn’t sure how often was too often to call, at what point Ben would resent it, which mattered to her only because his feeling fettered or mistrusted might be all it took to cause him to do something perverse and stupid. They were the two most unreliable men she knew, which made it hard to feel good about any plan that depended on how they acted when they were out of her sight. Still, there wasn’t much trouble they could be getting into at 8:45 in the morning, so she turned to the other problem at hand, which was trying to locate this Lauren Schmidt.

But how do you find someone? How do you prove she exists? Helen had no skills in this area whatsoever. She Googled the girl, and found the usual sludge of five thousand random mentions of a woman with that name who may or may not have been Bettina. One had just finished first in the long jump at River Oaks High School in Winnetka, Illinois. So you could eliminate that one, but how many of the other hits might be referring to that one too? There was no way to know, or else the ways, Helen thought, were opaque to someone like her. She clicked on Images and, with a sharp gasp she was glad no one was around to overhear, recognized her, the horrid bitch from the screening a week ago. She’d been photographed by Patrick McMullan at some society benefit, smiling into the camera with her tattooed arm around some other austerely proportioned girl, both of them standing the way skinny women bred a certain way always stand. She looked utterly, aggressively self-conscious, like she was daring the camera to record her in any way other than the way she wanted to be seen. Beautiful, though. She and Hamilton must have made quite a couple, must have given off a concentrated glow in that moldy, colorless setting if, God forbid, anyone had seen them there.

There were all these professional directories, and all these services that promised to track down and collate vital information about anyone whose privacy you cared to invade. It was never more than two clicks before they started asking you for money, and Helen, using her personal credit card and address, subscribed to every one of them. She tried a phone number she found attached to Bettina’s real name; it had been disconnected, though there was no knowing when. The only information she got of any substance, twenty minutes and about two hundred and sixty dollars later, was a street address, on Thirty-first Avenue in Astoria. By now she could hear other Malloy employees strolling past her closed door, and she knew she didn’t have long.

Out in the street, head down in the rain lest anyone entering the building recognize her, Helen hailed a cab and rode all the way to Queens, repeating the street and apartment numbers to herself over and over, in keeping with her resolution not to write anything down. It was a narrow walk-up building next to a fish store. All the windows were dark. Shakily, Helen pressed Lauren Schmidt’s buzzer, a total of three times, the last time backing quickly down the steps into the street to look up at the third-floor window for any sign of movement. No one was there; in fact no one other than Helen was on the sidewalk at all in the light rain in the middle of the morning, certainly not anyone who might live in one of the other apartments in Bettina’s building and be able to answer a question about when she had last been seen.

But it could have meant anything Helen wanted it to mean. People with jobs, even temp jobs, were exceptionally unlikely to be at home during the day. Whatever emotion you felt as a result was just a matter of faith, really, and she took the opportunity to remind herself of her faith in the idea that Hamilton was simply incapable of doing what he was convinced he had done. Even with drugs involved, he was not some killer. It didn’t matter that she had known him only as a child; her sense of what was and wasn’t in him was stronger and more reliable, she believed, than was his own. That’s why he had sought her out in the first place.

She couldn’t find a cab in the rain to save her life, so she wound up walking west until she found a subway stop, on the Q line. She hadn’t even known there was a Q line. She didn’t get back to the office until about lunchtime, and when the elevator door opened she was face to face with Ashok, who looked as jolted to see her as if he had been told she was dead. “Mr. Malloy has been looking for you,” he said in an unnecessary whisper. “He actually came downstairs to find you. He had somebody with him. He was not happy I didn’t know where you were.”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said. She took off her ruined shoes, and put them back on again. “I’m sorry to put you in that position.” Her own face was reddening. She struggled not to cry. “This guy he had with him,” Helen said. “Did he— It wasn’t by any chance like a cop or anything?”

Ashok looked reassuringly confused. “A cop?” he said. “No, you’re way off, actually. He was— He had the collar, like a priest or a minister or whatever.”

Suddenly it seemed like the most obvious mistake to have come back to the office at all. Big as it was, Malloy Worldwide wasn’t physically big enough to hide in. “Listen, Ashok,” she said, “I need to ask you to do something for me. I need you to tell Arturo and whoever else asks that I left you a voice mail saying I am taking a personal day. I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to be eligible for any personal days, but let’s say I didn’t realize that.”

“And why are you taking this personal day?” Ashok said, looking almost comically attentive, as he always did when strategy was being discussed.

“Let’s say”—she closed her eyes, and sighed—“let’s say that my daughter is in trouble. I mean, don’t use that phrase, but … okay, that she’s very sick.”

He nodded.

“It is a terrible thing to ask you to lie about,” Helen said. She gave in to an urge to reach out and touch his round face. “Forgive me for asking.”

“For you, Helen, anything,” said Ashok.

AT FIRST BEN WAS AFRAID to let Hamilton Barth out of his sight for more than a few minutes, because he just assumed, from the oversolicitous way Helen treated him, that he was the kind of guy who’d be inclined to make a break for it, out the window or over the roof until somebody recognized him and gave him a lift to the nearest bar. As if Ben himself, and his home, were some form of rehab. He’d seen men like Hamilton at Stages—morose, narcissistic, making a big show of their passivity—and he’d seen how closely the counselors watched them. But a day passed—a day about half of which Hamilton spent sleeping in Ben’s bed—and by the next afternoon Ben was hovering for a different reason, which was that he thought the guy was sunk so deep as to be at risk of suicide. He had no idea what signs to look for, or anything like that; it was just something he felt. And he didn’t want his house to become a shrine where some tragic, martyred movie star had breathed his last.

He called Bonifacio to say that he wouldn’t be in to the office that afternoon; he said he felt he might be coming down with something. “Huh,” Bonifacio said with his usual light, teasing malice. “Sick day, eh? Well, this may come up at your performance review. Have some chicken soup and an Airborne and let me know what tomorrow’s story is.”

Ben hung up. Hamilton was back in the master bedroom again, not by choice but because Ben had stashed him there, as ordered, while two jumpsuited guys carried into the house a dining room table and four chairs. Once their truck had receded noisily up the hill, Ben expected Hamilton to come right out again, but the bedroom door remained shut. He knocked, and nudged the door open, cautiously, when there was no response. Hamilton was lying sideways across the bed, in one of Ben’s polo shirts and a pair of his jeans, his hands between his knees, his eyes watery.

“You hungry?” Ben said boisterously. “You must be starving.”

“Not really,” Hamilton said.

Ben’s concern was mixed with relief since there was hardly any food in the house. Everything he’d been told about this Hamilton Barth character, or had read somewhere about him—his pretension, his genius, his tortured-soul routine—was suddenly dwarfed by the need to make some kind of masculine connection with him, to keep him from sticking his head in Ben’s oven or hanging himself with Ben’s belt. “How about a drink, then?” he said.

Hamilton’s head turned slowly in his direction. The windows were still covered by rags; new blinds had been purchased, but Ben was going to have to hire one of the hardware store owner’s sons to come put them up.

“What time of day is it?” Hamilton asked.

It was around one-thirty, but Ben just shrugged. “Five o’clock somewhere,” he said, an expression he’d always hated. “Come on, we can’t get in any trouble as long as we stay in the house. Come out to the kitchen with me,” he said as he might have said to a small child, “and let’s see what we’ve got.”

There was a bottle of rum, which he didn’t remember buying. It might have been there in the cupboard above the fridge since before the house went on the market, for all he knew. Anyway, mixed with some orange and cranberry juice it tasted like something legitimate to drink in the middle of the day. They finished their first one in silence; Ben took the glass from Hamilton’s fingers and poured another. He could see raindrops on the windowsill. So what, Ben thought, it’s not like we were going to take a stroll around the neighborhood anyway.

He found it surprising that Hamilton, distracted and depressed as he may have been, didn’t ask any more questions about where he was, neither about the place nor about Ben himself: How is it you are living in your own home without any furniture? Why don’t you have a job to go to? That kind of thing. But the man was a celebrity, a movie star. Even at his lowest moment—especially at his lowest moment—he just took it for granted that people’s curiosity would bend toward him.

“So you grew up in Malloy, huh?” Ben said, into the mouth of his glass. Hamilton’s chin lifted slightly, and he nodded.

“I’ve never been there myself,” Ben said, just to keep silence from reasserting itself. “I’ve been to Watertown once, after her mother died.”

“Helen’s mother died?” Hamilton said.

“Yeah,” Ben said, trying not to sound unreasonably excited that he had gotten Hamilton to say anything at all. “In Florida, actually, but we had to go and close up the house and whatnot. She used to tell me that Watertown was like the big city compared to Malloy. But you’d know all about that.”

Hamilton considered it. “Probably I remember that about it,” he said. “I’ve forgotten a lot. Truthfully I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere anymore. I’m just here in the now.”

“Sure,” said Ben, as convincingly as he could. “Naturally.”

They heard a man’s voice outside in the street. Trying to appear casual, like an actor carrying out some stage business in a play, Ben crossed the kitchen and stood between Hamilton and the uncovered window.

“But you two did know each other as kids,” Ben said. “In a little town like that. So what was Helen like, as a kid? I used to wonder about that.”

“Truthfully,” Hamilton said, “I don’t remember her at all, but it’s seriously nothing personal, I forget everybody from then. It’s more like time travel with Helen, like she was sent here from my past.”

Ben nodded, credibly, he hoped. While he felt proud of himself for engaging Hamilton at all, in truth the guy was a little hard to talk to. Spontaneously, half out of desperation and awkwardness, he said, “So is it okay if I ask you something? It’s completely within the walls of this house. I know you don’t know me, but believe me, I wouldn’t want to betray Helen’s trust again.” That last word just slipped out, but Hamilton didn’t seem to notice. “Why are you here? What are we hiding you from?”

The muscles in Hamilton’s face worked a little bit, almost randomly, as if the rum were beginning to wake him up. “I think I had kind of a psychotic break,” he said glumly. “I did something that— I was going to say ‘that wasn’t really like me,’ but that’s just it, actually. I think it was the real me. And the rest of the time—like right now—I just have this face that I put on. I did something that showed me who I am. Now I can’t unsee it.”

That made even more sense to Ben than Hamilton might have expected, and he didn’t say anything in reply. He held his glass to his mouth until the ice cubes slid and clacked against his teeth. “You know what?” he said, taking Hamilton’s glass from him again. “I take it back. It’s your business. I know what I need to know.”

Just then he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket: another text from Helen. “She’s asking if you’re okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“So she hasn’t found Bettina?”

Ben didn’t know what that meant, or what an answer one way or the other might do to Hamilton’s mood. So he just shrugged noncommittally, and then he texted back to Helen, Napping. “So how long have you been a client of Helen’s?” he said. “I have to admit, I’m not sure what kind of work she does exactly.”

“I’m not a client of hers.”

“No? Oh. I guess I misunderstood—I thought this was a work-related thing.”

“Not so much,” Hamilton said.

“Did you meet professionally?”

“No,” Hamilton said. “I mean I wouldn’t call it that.”

“And you didn’t stay in touch over the years, or anything like that?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“Why did you call her of all people when you were in trouble, then?” Ben asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

For once, Hamilton met his eyes. “That is a really interesting question, man,” he said. “When I met her again, it reminded me right away of the nuns, right, at our old school? I mean nothing personal, I’m not calling her a nun, I know she used to be your wife. But I got that nun hit off her, where you kind of wanted to laugh them off because they seemed so out of touch, but then when you got scared or in trouble you caught yourself thinking about them. Hey, I guess I do remember some of that Malloy stuff after all.”

Ben stood up and began mixing them two more drinks, even though the orange juice was now gone.

“She is a trip,” Hamilton said. “I totally get why you couldn’t stay married to her. Hey, can I ask you something? That Chinese girl that was here—that’s Helen’s daughter, so I guess she would be your daughter too?”

“That’s right,” Ben said. “Sara.”

“Is she from China China?” Ben nodded. “So you went over there to the orphanage and all that?”

“We went over there,” Ben said, “but not to the orphanage. They didn’t want us to see it.”

“So has it been awkward, ever?”

“Has what been awkward?”

“Having a child who’s a different race than you,” Hamilton said. “I always wondered that about adoption. I mean I guess I’ve always assumed that it was basically vanity that made people reproduce in the first place, and adopting a kid who looks nothing like you—it doesn’t seem like it would satisfy that. Am I wrong?”

Ben’s phone vibrated again. That Hamilton plainly had no sense of this question as rude or invasive said a lot, Ben felt, about the kind of life such people led. “The whole adoption almost fell through, actually, at a couple of stages,” he said, “and at the time, I was ready to live without it. It was Helen whose heart would have been broken. I don’t think out of vanity. Do you? Anyway, it’s got f*ck-all to do with what they look like. You give them a life, and then they grow up and start calling you on your shit. You could maybe use one yourself.” Out the kitchen window he saw a Sears truck inching along Meadow Close from house to house, looking, he was sure, for his street number. It was either the rugs or the bookshelves, but in any case, Hamilton was going to have to be shut back in the bedroom for a while. Ben sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, also new, so new it still felt stiff underneath him. “You know what?” he said. “We’re going a little crazy locked up in here. Maybe later if we get in the car and drive out toward, say, Saugerties, get you like a baseball cap or something, I bet we can stay under the radar. I’ll do all the driving. We’ll find someplace to eat dinner and just sit and not say anything.”

Hamilton smiled and shook his head sadly. “Doesn’t work like that, man,” he said. “There is always an eye on you. I feel a little like there’s somebody watching me right now.”