“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.