A Thousand Pardons

7



THE OBVIOUS COURSE—“obvious” in the sense that her only frame of reference in this situation was television—was to hire some sort of private investigator. There was no one to advise her on how to tell a good one from a bad one, though, so in the end, humiliatingly, she went with the one who had the most serious-looking website. His name was Charles Cudahy, and he was a retired New York City detective. Or maybe neither of those things was true. Conscious of the need to insulate Hamilton by exposing Cudahy to as little information as possible—just enough to get the job done—she called him from a pay phone, all the way over by Carl Schurz Park. Working pay phones were not easy to find anymore. She told him she needed to locate a young woman with an ordinary name.

“What else do you know about her?” Cudahy said, patiently enough. He had a much higher voice than she had been expecting.

“Her most recent place of employment,” Helen said, “though it seems like she was only a temp there. A recent home address. A phone number that’s I don’t know how old.”

“Let’s have them,” he said.

“Really? Right now? Don’t—shouldn’t we meet first, or at least talk about payment or something? I mean this is just an exploratory—”

“This is the age of the Internet,” Cudahy said, “and for people in my line of work, you would be surprised how many cases can be solved in the first thirty seconds, without my ass ever leaving the chair. Not very Humphrey Bogart, but there it is. So how about this: if I can find this person in the next two minutes, while we’re on the phone, you will owe me five hundred dollars. If not, if it’s more interesting than that, then we will discuss a more traditional fee structure. Sound good?”

She rattled off what little she knew, and then she listened to the sound of him typing. The pay phone was near the East River, not far from the mayor’s house; across the street was a posh new apartment building whose doorman rocked back and forth on his heels like an old Keystone Kop, while staring directly at her.

“Nope,” Cudahy said abruptly. “This is a fun one. I’ll have to put on my pants to solve this one. Just kidding, that’s a joke, I promise you I am wearing pants right now. I work on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar retainer. Cash only. I see you’re calling from a pay phone in Manhattan, so I assume you don’t know how to get to Bayside?”

She wound up messengering a cashier’s check—her own money—and then she waited. Her whole life felt like a pose now, a smokescreen, an alias. She was in backchannel communication with her own ex-husband, on whom, stupidly and perversely, everything now depended. She wouldn’t have minded some sort of webcam setup where she could watch him, unseen, 24/7, both because she didn’t trust him and because she knew that demonstrating that mistrust by texting him compulsively every hour was probably the best way to set him off. As for work, it was one thing to play hooky for a day, but she understood she couldn’t hide out indefinitely—it would put too much of a spotlight on her. So she returned to the office after a two-and-a-half-day absence, telling everyone who asked only that Sara was fine, not sick, back in school, all of which was true but still upped the stakes on the initial lie by making it sound as if whatever happened was so bad she preferred not to talk about it. She wanted to go up to Mr. Malloy’s office to apologize personally, but there was no way to access or even to buzz for his private elevator. So she settled for an interoffice email full of profuse and deceitful apologies. Two hours later, flowers were delivered to her office. She stared at them miserably.

And so that afternoon she finally, distractedly, went to work on what she still had trouble calling the Catholic Church account. They didn’t want to risk a meeting where anyone might see her; she took the subway to an unmarked office building down by City Hall. The New York archdiocese had been contacted by a Post reporter who led them to believe that a major story was in the works about a secret list of priests accused of sexual misconduct, priests who had not simply been reassigned to different parishes but who actually had their names changed.

“Does such a list exist?” Helen asked Father Clement, who was the archbishop’s PR liaison.

“Isn’t it easier for you to do your job,” Father Clement said, “if you assume that the answer is no?”

Helen blinked a few times while trying to think what to say next. “If it helps you,” she said, “think of me as your lawyer. I need to know the truth in order to do my job. While of course the notion of confidentiality is technically not legally binding around here, we do, actually, consider it”—she lost steam as she neared the end of this speech she had delivered to clients a hundred times before—“sacred.”

Father Clement just smiled. “I understand,” he said. “In that case, just between us: yes, while it does not preclude the likelihood that this reporter may be bluffing or exaggerating or making things up, a list of that sort exists.”

“Well, then, Father,” she said, aware that she was speaking with a touch less patience than she might have if there were fewer other things on her mind, “my crisis management advice is very simple—simpler in this case than in most, because presumably I don’t have to explain the concept to you.”

He smiled at her interrogatively.

“Confess,” she said.

His smile broadened until she saw the condescension in it. “To whom?” he said. “To you? To the New York Post? I am gratified that you’re looking out for our spiritual well-being. But we are pretty well taken care of on that plane. We come to you precisely because we are also living and operating in your realm, and, like any other institution, we need to keep moving forward.” They spoke like that for another twenty minutes, and then Helen, nettled and distracted and checking her phone, got on the Brooklyn-bound subway by mistake. She didn’t realize it until she felt her ears pop when the train was under the East River. By then it was too late to get back to the office by close of business anyway, so she consulted a subway map on the platform to figure out the simplest route home.

Her relationship with her daughter was now so cordial and businesslike that Sara had a vague sense of having broken something. Her mother hadn’t so much as asked her a question in days. She worked longer hours than usual, or maybe something else was going on, for when Sara called her at Malloy at four in the afternoon to ask about dinner, she was told that Ms. Armstead had already left for the day. When Helen finally did get home, around six, she seemed immensely distracted, but not in a good way. Maybe that Hamilton Barth dude had broken her heart. Exceedingly hard to imagine, but that was how all the signs read.

And then, after two days in which Sara was relieved to hear nothing, Cutter had started popping up on her Facebook wall again. She’d missed a day and a half of school, and now there were only three more perfunctory, movie-watching days left in the school year. She was ashamed to catch herself looking forward to having to deal with Cutter only on the phone or online. But when he wasn’t in school Wednesday, and she didn’t hear from him, Sara got up the nerve to ask her former friend Tracy if she’d seen him.

“Very funny,” Tracy said; then, catching the look in Sara’s eyes, her interest grew, vengefully. “You really don’t know?” she said. She told the story from her own perspective, as if that mattered to anyone: on Tuesday morning she had been running down the hall, trying not to be late for homeroom even though it was the last week of school so who would care, only to find the doorway blocked by cops, real cops. Apparently Cutter had gotten into an argument with Mr. Hartford, his American History teacher—not for the first time, Sara knew—that had ended with Cutter punching Mr. Hartford in the eye. So Cutter was gone and not coming back, that much was obvious, but past that point it was all ignorant speculation, about jail and lawsuits and whatever else, in which Tracy indulged gleefully.

Sara felt the water closing over her head. She hated herself for wanting to be free of him, for her weak and desperate hope that he would not try to contact her. She thought she might be in the clear after checking Facebook one last time before bed that same Wednesday night. Then on Thursday morning she had twenty-seven new posts on her wall, and they were all from him. The final one was a photo of her, taken on the sidewalk outside her building, in which she was wearing the clothes she wore yesterday.

She took down the posts and blocked him. He’s only trying to scare you, she said to herself; but guess what, it was working. She went to the front door, and a good thing too—her mother had forgotten to lock it. It must be nice, Sara thought tearfully, just to live in your own little bubble, without it occurring to you that something bad might happen to you or to anyone else.

Helen, meanwhile, lost more and more confidence in the situation in Rensselaer Valley. The fact that she communicated with Ben mostly by text, since she still felt a surge of anger and embarrassment whenever she spoke to him, naturally contributed to the clipped and ominously terse quality of his status reports to her. Still, the situation could only be decaying. You just could not take two men of that nature, ask them to do nothing, go nowhere, talk to no one but each other, and expect that request to be honored indefinitely; but that’s what she had done, that was her only plan. What r we waiting 4? was one of his last messages, followed a minute later by Literally? They were waiting for proof of Bettina’s continued existence on this earth, proof that was turning out to be maddeningly, alarmingly, expensively elusive. That night Helen nervously floated with Sara the notion that she might take another quick trip up to Rensselaer Valley after work on Friday, just for an hour or two, to check on Hamilton. She made it clear that there was no need for Sara herself to come; but Sara insisted that she would.

Ben had taken the risk of leaving Hamilton by himself once or twice by then, just to go to Bonifacio’s office for a couple of hours, and there hadn’t been any incident. He wasn’t a bad guy, Ben thought. A little self-absorbed, maybe. In the evenings they watched TV and drank. On their fourth night together, a Friday, there was a good old-fashioned, window-shaking thunderstorm, and about ten minutes later the cable, installed earlier that day, went out.

“That’s it,” Ben said. “It’s a sign. We have got to get out of here. I am trying so hard to do this for Helen, but it’s too much, it’s too open-ended. They are going to find us dead together in here and no one will ever know why.”

“You know, that brings up an interesting point,” Hamilton said. His eyes were glassy. “You two are divorced, right? I’ve never been divorced myself, but doesn’t it sort of mean you don’t have to do what she tells you anymore?”

Ben turned off the hissing TV. “It’s complicated,” he said. “I owe her something. I’m not sure even this is going to pay it off, actually.”

“What did you do?” Hamilton asked somberly.

Ben had an idea. He swirled the ice cubes in his glass. “I’ll tell you what I did,” he said, “if you tell me what you did.”

Hamilton considered it. “Okay, man,” he said. “Only fair. But you may regret asking. It may raise the stakes for you a little bit.”

“All right,” Ben said. He was excited now; he figured Hamilton had maybe slept with some producer’s girlfriend, like in The Godfather. “But not here. Seriously, we need a change of venue.”

“No bars,” Hamilton said warily. “I don’t mind saying or doing something stupid in front of you, but if we are out I’ll get recognized, and then we’re both screwed.”

Ben nodded. “Plus the nearest real bar is probably in New Castle, which is like ten miles from here, and if I get nicked for DWI again, it’s back to jail for moi.” Hamilton’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, I have an idea. It’s a little offbeat, but safe, at least. It doesn’t matter where we go, you said, right?”

“I think you were the one who said that, but yeah, it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Anywhere but this house. Okay. Do me a favor and go grab the vodka.”

Ben drove into town at about fifteen miles per hour and parked in the lot behind the hardware store. They stumbled up the steps and he opened the door with his key. “This is where I work,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, there’s ice. I’m going to turn on the light, count to three, and then turn it off again, because it would not be cool if anyone were to see us up here. Ready?”

He flicked the switch, and together they took in the tiny office, which, like any office, looked unfamiliar and slightly malicious when empty: the cheap, pocked desk, the noisy filing cabinets, the chair pulled up to the window so he could rest his feet on the sill, the water-stained curtains, the potted plant. Realizing he’d forgotten to start counting, Ben slapped at the switch again and they returned to darkness, a degree or two darker than before. “Now I forget where the chair was,” Hamilton said.

Ben’s cellphone chimed again, and he jumped. Without looking at the incoming number—he knew it anyway—he turned the phone off.

Helen had been trying to reach him for more than an hour, ever since she got out of that day’s meeting—another stalemate—with the Catholics; she’d dialed Hamilton’s number as well, but he rarely answered his phone even under the best circumstances. Her next call was to the accursed Hertz outpost near her apartment. She had a premonition something was wrong. Her messages and texts left no room for misunderstanding in terms of the need to check in with her right away: if Ben didn’t reply immediately, her last message had said, she was going to assume the worst and head up there. She picked up the car, called Sara to tell her to be ready in half an hour, and then drove to the pay phone outside Carl Schurz Park to make one more call that had been on her mind.

Not only had there been nothing in the papers or on the Internet about Hamilton Barth’s disappearance but she had actually come across a Hollywood Reporter item that claimed he had been at a gallery opening three nights ago in Venice Beach. They were good, those people, but if they were already going to the trouble of planting items, they must have been in a full-blown panic. Hamilton’s agent was someone named Kyle Stine—she’d looked it up—and with a prepaid phone card she’d bought at Duane Reade, she called his office from the lonely pay phone.

“No,” she had to say to three different people, “I’m not calling for information about Hamilton Barth. I’m calling with information about Hamilton Barth. Please just give that message to Mr. Stine, and I’ll hold.” Hold she did, for almost ten minutes. She could see the doorman behind the glass wall of the building across the street, sitting at his desk, in the glow of the security-camera monitors.

“This is Kyle Stine,” said a hostile voice.

Helen swallowed. “I’m a friend of Hamilton’s,” she said quickly, “and I know you probably haven’t heard from him in a while, and I just wanted to let you know he’s fine—”

“Where is he?” Stine said, in a tone whose attempt at calm could not have been more frightening.

“I can’t tell you that,” Helen said, “but I can tell you that he’s okay, he’s perfectly safe—”

“What the f*ck do you mean, he’s safe?” the voice thundered. “Who is this? Listen to me. You tell me where you have him right now.”

“He’s fine,” Helen said. “He will be back in touch when he’s ready.”

“Do you have any notion of the interests you are f*cking with? What, have you kidnapped him or something?”

“Oh God, no. I’m trying to help him.”

But the voice formed its own judgment. “You are committing all kinds of crimes right now, you psychotic cunt, and if you think there is anything that I wouldn’t do in order to track you down and eliminate every last trace of you, you are really f*cking mistaken. Do you have any idea what’s at stake here? What are you, some fan, you think he’s got some kind of special connection with you? Some relationship? Do you have any idea how pathetic you are? There will not be enough left of you to form a f*cking stain on my bootheel, if anything happens to him. Do you have any idea of the forces that are closing in on you right now?”

Red-faced, Helen hung up. The doorman was now standing and staring at her through the glass wall. She drove home and found Sara sitting in the lobby, staring at her cellphone, her purple duffel bag at her feet.

“What’s that for?” Helen said. “We’re not spending the night.”

“I’m not coming back with you,” Sara said. “I was going to take the train up tomorrow anyway, but this is better. I need to go home and be with Dad. I do not feel safe here. I do not feel safe with a totally checked-out mother who has no interest at all in her daughter’s life.”

“What about homework?” Helen said reflexively.

“I don’t have any more homework. School ended today, thanks for noticing. Your job has turned you into some kind of zombie, apparently, but whatever, I choose to be with Dad now.”

“It’s not your choice,” Helen said.

“Want to test me?” said Sara.

And, God help her, the thought flashed through Helen’s mind that, if Sara were up there at the house with her father and Hamilton, it would be easier to keep them indoors, it would be harder for them to go out. Ten minutes later Sara had her earphones in and Helen drove in angry, agonized, private silence up the floodlit West Side Highway.

Ben still wasn’t answering his phone, but now that bit of childishness on his part just made her laugh with anticipatory pleasure: oh, you wanted some warning that you were about to become a full-time parent again? Try checking your goddamn voice mail once in a while. When they got to the house on Meadow Close, every light in it was blazing, seeping around the closed shutters as if some sort of industrial hellfire was burning in there. Helen knocked on the door and then pushed it open, Sara two steps behind her. No one was home. She could not make the brazen fact of it sink in right away. Red-faced, she ran in and out of every room, each of which now looked like some half-assed warehouse full of unmatched new furniture.

“What’s going on?” Sara said.

“I can’t believe it,” Helen said. “I literally cannot believe it. How stupid could I be?”

A mile and a half away, Ben and Hamilton sat with their eyes accustomed to the dark of Bonifacio’s second-floor law office. Ben had stressed the need for quiet, which was why his phone was turned off. It was also true, of course, that he knew he was now much too drunk to pull off a non-alarming phone conversation with Helen anyway. The vodka was nearly gone, and they’d run out of ice half an hour ago.

“This is the first time I’ve been drunk since rehab, if you please,” Ben said, in a voice just above a whisper. “I mean, don’t worry, it was fake rehab. Real problems, fake rehab.”

“I know lots of guys who have done that,” Hamilton said.

“So look,” Ben said, “can I ask you something? You’re a f*cking movie star. Men want to be you, women want to be with you, or however that expression goes. What the hell is that like? Is it just incredibly great? Because I have to say, when I hear people complain about it, like boo hoo I have no privacy or whatever, I just think, what pussies.”

“Yeah?” said Hamilton idly. “You think you’d like that kind of life? Guys with cameras in your face everywhere you go, lies about you in the paper and on TV all the time? The true stuff is worse than the lies, actually.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “I think I might have liked it. I mean at least it’s a big life. At least it’s a consequential life. At least you’re at the center of your own life, not on the periphery of it.” He swirled the vodka in his glass and looked out the window at the streetlight. “Periphery,” he pronounced slowly.

“See,” Hamilton said, “you think that. People think that. But when you’re in it, it’s more like you’re a character in a story. You try to be the one telling it, but you’re not. And then you can try to get out of it, but when you do it’s like the story was already one step ahead of you anyway. It’s like Pirandello. Ever read Pirandello, man?”

“What?” Ben said. “No. What are you talking about? I mean look, let’s get down to brass tacks, man-wise. These four days or whatever it is that you’ve been living under my roof, that’s probably the longest you’ve ever gone without getting laid since like high school, right?”

Ben expected to bond over this bit of flattery and maybe to hear some good stories; but instead he seemed to have pushed a button. Hamilton put his drink down on the floor and placed his hands over his eyes. “I have this reputation as a very serious person,” he said. “And I used to be. I mean even when I wasn’t acting, in my downtime I painted, I wrote poetry. I actually published a couple of books. People liked to make fun of it because of who I was, but it was actually not that bad. But then I became less serious. Why is that? Older, and yet less serious. Why? Older, closer to death, less serious. It doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, that’s when I really started f*cking a lot of chicks I didn’t know. I’d say like over the last six, eight years. I mean it became really important to me. I never really knew what all that was about while I was doing it, what it was all pointing towards, but now I do know, man, now it’s obviously clear, but too late.”

“Right,” Ben said. “Wait, what? What do you mean, now you know?”

“I told you all this,” Hamilton said.

“You haven’t told me shit!”

“I killed a girl,” Hamilton said, and then that sentence hung there in the darkness for a while.

Ben felt the adrenaline cutting through his buzz. “What?” he said softly. “How?”

“I don’t know. Funny that’s your first question, though.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that either, except that it apparently was in me, and something in her woke it up. All those years of getting away with murder. So to speak. It’s emptied me out.”

“Are the—” Ben stopped when he thought he heard something outside on the steps, but it must have been just his paranoia. “Are the cops looking for you, then? Helen is helping you to hide from the cops? That doesn’t sound like—”

“I’m not hiding from anyone. Helen is making me stay here.”

“Why?”

“Because she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t believe I did it.”

“Who does she think did it?”

Hamilton didn’t answer.

“So the cops are not looking for you?”

“No. Nobody’s looking for me, except my agent, Kyle, probably. No reason to.”

“No reason to?”

“There has to be a body,” Hamilton said sadly, “before anybody will believe there was a crime.”

And there it was again—the creak from outside, but it was definitely not his imagination this time, there were feet on the steps that ran up the side of the building. What the hell is this turning into? Ben had time to think. He dumped the rest of the vodka into the plant and raised the empty bottle above his shoulder, without getting out of the desk chair. A face pressed up against the glass; then the knob turned and the lights went on and there, with as close to a look of disequilibrium as you were ever going to see on his face, was Bonifacio, wearing a Carhartt jacket over a pair of plaid pajamas, a set of keys in one hand and in the other, now dropped limply to his side, a gun.

“What the f*ck 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? Motherf*cker,” 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?”

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!”

“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 f*cked 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.