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.