“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—”