by Jonathan Dee
Mona looked over Helen’s shoulder as she typed up the invoice to send to Bratkowski’s office. “Are you crazy?” she said. “This is government money we’re talking about. Double it.” Helen couldn’t quite get herself to do that, but she did bump it up another few thousand, and they paid it without a word. A week later, Helen went through the day’s office mail and found a Christmas card from Doug and Jane Bratkowski, with a photo of the whole family wearing matching sweaters. You couldn’t really tell anything from a photo. Still, she stood it on her desk.
Can it really be this simple? she thought. As with the Peking Grill job, word of the agency’s success seemed to filter out quickly and to generate an aura in which other jobs came their way, jobs that had nothing at all to do with the sort of apology wrangling she was starting to think of as her vocation, her accidental specialty. The aura seemed to magnetize even her life outside the office, and to bring other good news: Sara’s dentist told them that she was the rare child who would not need orthodontia, for instance, and then at the end of the soccer season she was named all-county, the only Rensselaer Valley girl so honored. And then Helen got a call at home on a Saturday morning from Joe Bonifacio. While the various lawsuits were still far from settled, there had been one breakthrough, which was that Cornelia Hewitt’s lawyers had agreed, for the sake of the child involved, to exempt the house itself from the list of court-frozen assets, on the condition that the deed be transferred to Helen’s name alone.
“What does that mean?” Helen said softly; it was ten-thirty, but Sara wasn’t up yet.
“It means that the house now belongs entirely to you, and that you are free to sell it and to profit by its sale.”
“Isn’t this something Ben would have to agree to?”
“He’s agreed to it,” Bonifacio said. “Done.”
Helen’s mouth still hung open after she got off the phone. Ben had to have worked all this out to his advantage, she told herself; he always had an angle, in any transaction involving money, at least—money and the law. In his fallen state he was paying no alimony anyway, though the court had vowed to revisit that, once the litigation against him was resolved and he was discharged from rehab. Belatedly she realized that she had neglected to ask Bonifacio if there was any new word on when Ben would be getting out—if indeed he wasn’t out already; invoices from Stages went straight to the lawyer’s office, so if no one thought to tell her, she supposed, she’d have no way of knowing. Broken or ashamed as he may have been, could he really be back in the world and not have made any attempt to contact, or even check on, his child? Not that she especially wanted him to, at least not yet. She almost called Bonifacio back to ask, but then Sara’s bedroom door groaned open, and Helen dropped the phone on the couch.
The next night at dinner, which they ate in front of the TV, Helen hit Mute and said, “Sara, remember a few months ago, we talked about moving?”
“We did?” Sara said.
“We did. We talked about moving to the city. Not seriously, at that point, which I guess is why you don’t remember, but anyway you allowed as how that was something you might actually like to do. Do you still feel that way?”
Sara’s eyes were very wide. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess.”
“Okay, then,” Helen said, “good to know,” and she relaxed back into the couch and put the sound on again, trying not to smile.
All of a sudden it seemed that this Christmas might well be their last in that house, the only home Sara had ever known. When Helen called Mark Byrne at Rensselaer Valley Realty, the same agent who had sold the house to them fourteen years earlier, to let him know that she wanted to see about putting it back on the market—tentatively, discreetly, exploratorily—it was like he was over there pounding a For Sale sign into their lawn before she’d hung up the phone. There were offers right away—not great ones, but Helen resolved, without a word to Mark Byrne or anyone else, that she would accept the best offer they had in hand before New Year’s, no matter what it was. Time to move on.
So in addition to her modest Christmas preparations—gifts for Sara, and a decent meal, and a clean house, and a little something for Mona and for Michael—Helen would have to scramble to find a halfway affordable apartment in Manhattan (two bedrooms, please God let them be able to afford two bedrooms, or Sara’s wrath would be ferocious) and a decent nearby public school. Exciting as it was to be able to think of a future that extended further than their next heating-oil bill, Helen felt oddly guilty as well—more nostalgic than guilty, actually, but in some ways it amounted to the same thing. For all that had gone sour within it over the last few months and years, this was their home, and the faith in the future required to walk away from it risked seeming arrogant, even reckless. What was behind you had, for better or worse, a substantiality that what was still in front of you could not exhibit. It was a big moment, and Helen found herself wanting to mark it somehow rather than just slip from one season into another like an animal; and then she recalled that there was something she’d long wanted to do at Christmas to which Ben had always firmly said no.
“Church?” Sara said. “Are you nuts?”
“Just the Christmas Eve service,” Helen said soothingly. “For a lot of people that’s the only one they go to all year. Not the midnight mass. It starts at five, and we’ll be home for dinner. Very mellow, lots of singing. Nothing too churchy.”
“Why?”
“It’s something I used to do as a kid. I’d like to do it again, maybe just to remind me of that. That’s all. I’m not born again or anything. Please? For me?”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Sara said. “On one condition.”
Helen was shocked. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “What condition?”
“I want to go to the movies before. Like that afternoon. A little of your idea of Christmas Eve, a little of mine. Okay?”
Helen beamed. “Sure. That sounds like fun. We could go see that movie A Time of Mourning that’s just opened, I know it’s at the Triplex, that’s the new Hamilton Barth movie—”
“Uh, Mom? Did I say ‘we’?”
“Oh. Well, okay. I just thought maybe you’d want to see A Time of Mourning and I know I would too—”
“Like I would pay eleven dollars to see some skeezy old guy you once made out with fifty years ago. Though I would gladly pay eleven dollars if someone could just scrub that image out of my head forever.”
“So you’d rather go see something on your own?”
“Yes,” said Sara, and something in her face, some studious attempt at expressionlessness, made Helen realize what was really going on here—oh my God, she thought, there’s a boy. Someone she was going to have to say goodbye to.
“Fine,” said Helen, coloring. “Just be back home no later than four, to change. No sweats in church.”
After lunch on Christmas Eve, Sara rode her bike up the hill to the top of Meadow Close, and by the time she got out to the main road she didn’t feel the cold anymore. She rode along the thin shoulder to the traffic light, across the five-way intersection where she always got honked at, over the highway bridge, and into town. There was very little parking for cars along the narrow main street, especially at this time of year, so behind the row of storefronts on the north side of the street it was all municipal parking lots, as if the town itself was just a façade built like a movie set. Sara cut behind the hardware store and rode through the silent lots all the way across town, even though she sometimes had to get off the bike to cross a guardrail or to thread her way between empty cars, because doing so reduced the chances of seeing anyone she knew. She passed the emergency exit behind the movie theater and kept going, past the blank rear walls of the jeweler and the Starbucks and the pharmacy, until she got to the lot at the back of a little family-owned Polish grocery all the way at the far end of Main Street, a mysteriously durable place where no one ever seemed to shop, with two small tables in the back in case someone wanted to sit and have a cup of Polish coffee. Sara leaned he
r bike against the concrete wall behind the recycling bins and walked through the back door, blowing on her hands, and there, standing up from one of the two little tables, was her father.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. He must have just gotten there himself, because his overcoat, though open, was still on; he held out his arms and took her inside it, and the sensation of being warmed in that way struck something too deep in her, so that she stepped back out of his embrace almost right away.
He stood there grinning stiffly. “You look great,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Sara, and remained standing.
After a few silent seconds he laughed and asked, “And? How do I look?”
She considered it. “Less tired,” she said.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, which was such a weird thing for your father to say to you. They took off their coats and sat; the owner brought him a coffee and her a hot chocolate, which irritated her because coffee was what she wanted, but then he brought over these two amazing hot rolls with some kind of cream inside. She ate hers and started in on his. He brought out a tiny giftwrapped present and said, “Merry Christmas.” She licked her fingers before taking it from him and put it straight into her pocket.
“Fine,” he said, “but just be careful where you open it. I don’t think you want your mom to find out it’s from me. It’s why I didn’t get you something bigger.”
“Are you coming home?” Sara said abruptly. “I mean just for Christmas Day or whatever?”
Ben flushed. “I don’t think so. I don’t see that happening. Not this year, anyway.”
“Did you even ask her?” He shook his head no. “Why not? Afraid she’d say no?”
“Too soon,” he said simply. “Too soon to ask her for anything, after what I did.” He watched her eat. “Why,” he said, “do you think she would have said no?”
“Probably, yeah,” Sara said. “But anyway, not this year pretty much equals never, because Mom’s selling the house. She says we’re moving to the city.” He didn’t look as surprised by that as she expected him to.
“The thing I was really afraid she’d say no to,” he said, “was this. Seeing you. Which is why I texted you directly, which I probably should not have done. But I don’t want to talk about me anymore. We don’t have a ton of time. I want to hear you talk. Tell me everything I’ve missed.”
She told him about school, and about soccer, and about her new routine as a latchkey kid while Mom was at work, which Sara had to admit she sort of liked—a couple of hours with the house all to herself. She asked him where he was living now, and he just looked embarrassed and said, “Nearby.” She didn’t know if he expected to be asked anything about how he’d spent the last few months in rehab, but she figured he’d talk about that if he wanted to. Maybe he wasn’t allowed. One thing he never said to her was “I’m sorry,” but in a way she was glad he didn’t, because it would have been too unlike him, and right now she just needed him to be as much like himself as possible.
Outside the front windows the streetlights started to come on. No one had come into the grocery the whole time they were there, but the owner was making no move toward closing the place. Ben paid the check and then pulled something out of his pocket and slid it across the table toward her: it was a movie ticket. “I stopped and bought it on my way here,” he said. “It’s for the one-forty show.”
She looked blankly at him.
“So you have the stub,” he said, almost proudly. “That’s where she thinks you are right now, right? So now you have your alibi. In case she gets suspicious.”
“Please,” Sara said, standing up to put her coat on, leaving the ticket where it lay. “It’s Mom.”
3
NO ONE COULD TELL YOU MORE about narcissism than an addict, recovering or otherwise; and during Ben’s first two weeks inside Stages, even though he wasn’t technically addicted to anything, in all the talk about narcissism he’d recognized enough of himself not to feel like too much of an impostor there. True, when his turn came around to talk (that’s all they did there was talk, in various configurations, over and over again until dinner), he had initially felt the need to amp it up a bit, in terms of the details of his drinking, his sexual compulsions, the destructive misbehavior that had left his life, and others, a ruin. And they could tell he was lying—they were expert at spotting it—but the funny thing was they read it as denial, they thought he was lying out of cowardice rather than fear of mockery or scorn for the relative luxuriousness of his problems. So he amped it up even further, until after a few weeks of group he had gotten quite good at it, so good even he couldn’t always distinguish the manufactured shame from the real. By the end of a month he felt like a lifer there, with an inmate’s sense of propriety and a protective attitude toward all the place’s earnest rituals and customs. He was as shocked as could be on the Monday after Thanksgiving when at the end of a one-on-one his counselor, Paul, tapped him on the knee and said, “Benjamin, I believe your work here is done.”
And the odd thing was that he had never felt more like an addict than he did on the day of his discharge: the world beyond that leafy, unmanned gate was suddenly a pretty scary prospect. His car was still in the lot. He let the engine run for a few minutes and tried to think what, of a practical nature, he should do. The first thing was to call the lawyer, Bonifacio, and tell him to close the escrow account they’d set aside for his treatment. He left a voice mail. The second thing was maybe to alert Helen that he was out? But then he recalled that that tie was no longer there, that they had severed it, legally and otherwise. He didn’t know what he would say to her anyway—or to Sara, at least not yet. He hadn’t spoken to his daughter in almost three months; the counselors had forbidden it for the first two, and even after that any phone call would have had to have been monitored, a condition Ben could not accept. In any case Sara would be in school with her phone turned off for another six or seven hours. Still, he had nowhere else even to point himself toward, no place of employment, no other home, and all his possessions outside of one suitcase were still in the house on Meadow Close, unless she’d stored them, or sold them, or burned them. He imagined he could feel the eyes of Paul on his idling car. Without coming to any conclusion about anything, he backed out of the lot and began the drive of forty minutes or so back to Rensselaer Valley.
As before, he made it most but not all of the way. A few exits east of his turnoff on 684, he had to pull over into the half-empty lot beside an office park because he thought he might be hyperventilating. Ten minutes later he got back on the highway; this time he made it all the way to the hill at the top of Meadow Close before stopping again. The house seemed almost to change its contours, to shrink or tighten against the bare trees and the cold, gray overcast. The yard looked like hell. A light was on in the bedroom window. He recalled that, in a fit of righteous remorse brought on by therapy, he had signed the house over to Helen while sitting on his bed one night in rehab; it was highly unlikely that she could have sold the place as quickly as that, but still, for all he knew some stranger might be lying under that light. He had no real right to go in there anyway, no reason sounder than whimsy to go anywhere. The fear whose physical symptoms he marveled at was not unmixed with other sorts of feelings, for in a way, he had to admit as he sat staring through the windshield with his hands in his lap, he now had exactly what he had wanted. He was a new man. Whatever step he took next would not be one he had taken many times, or even once, before. All that survived of his old life was the disgrace of its end, and there was something almost comfortable about that disgrace, about the burden of it; it seemed to be what he’d been courting all along, and now it was his. That was what had first begun to exasperate him about Helen, way back when: she believed in him too blindly, she refused to see how he bore the weight of what he was capable of. Out of nowhere, an amplified horn blasted right behind him and nearly put his head through the roof; a huge yellow Hummer drifted to a stop on his left, smack in the middle of the roa
d, and the tinted passenger-side window, two feet above his head, rolled down.
“Is that Ben Armstead?” Dr. Parnell said.
The two of them turned off their engines and spoke through their windows. That Parnell was a boor and a prick and a windbag was something Ben had known for years, but never had he felt as repulsed by his old neighbor as he did now, when with a raised eyebrow and a puerile smirk he kept trying to convey to Ben that they were hypermasculine birds of a feather, that boys, whether driving obnoxious monster cars or nailing hot underlings in hotel rooms, would be boys. But he did at least invite Ben inside his home, and serve him a cup of coffee. And he did seem to understand something about the limbo in which Ben found himself, because out of nowhere he offered the use of a cottage he kept on Candlewood Lake, for fishing, he said. No one used it this time of year. Ben thanked him and took down the directions, and when he had finished his coffee he drove straight there.
The presence of candles and old wine bottles and a king-size bed cast suspicion on Parnell’s claim that he used the cottage only for fishing. It was winterized, thank God. None of the few other cabins visible from its tiny back porch were occupied, even on weekends. Maybe in another month or so, Ben thought, when the lake iced over. In the meantime, the days crept safely by. He spent Christmas there, with the relief of a secret, cordial, but uneventful hour with Sara the day before to sustain him. He made no contact with his ex-wife but assumed that she knew he was out of Stages, that either Sara or Bonifacio would have found occasion to mention it to her. He’d had Bonifacio send her the rest of the escrow money, labeled as back child support. No response. Then, a few days after New Year’s, when he broached with Sara the idea of arranging another meeting, she texted him peremptorily that they were moving—in fact had already moved, the previous weekend—to Manhattan. He was left to contemplate that during a raw, muddy January in which the lake ice never thickened to more than an inch or two. Even if it weren’t his inclination, he wouldn’t have had much choice but to wait: his future, in a legal sense at least, was still being negotiated elsewhere, without his direct involvement, and until that process was over, there wasn’t much to plan for.
