“Look, there’s no point in trying to make me feel guilty.”
“Why not?” she asked. “You should feel guilty. You are guilty.”
“Guilty of what? Of not loving you anymore?”
This was like a fresh blow, and she said nothing, not trusting herself to speak.
“I still love Eden though. I love her very much,” said Lloyd. “Then try showing it.”
“You don’t think I show it?” Lloyd was genuinely incredulous. “Why don’t you ask Eden about that? I’ll bet that she’ll have a different interpretation. I think she knows I love her. And I think you know that she knows.”
With that, Lloyd stood and reached for the pump to inflate the air mattress, which was folded neatly on the floor. Mia stood, too. She wished she could deliver some perfect parting shot, but suddenly, all the vitriol and fight was sucked right out of her, and she was sad, just sad, without being even the least bit drunk.
In the morning, she was still in bed when she heard the sound of the apartment door opening and then closing. She waited a few minutes before getting up. In the kitchen, there was an envelope with Eden’s name on it and underneath her name, a rather inept but still charming drawing of what she supposed was a snow leopard. Mia walked over to the apartment door and opened it. Lloyd was gone and the only sound she heard was a small, distinct woof from the Pomeranian who now lived across the hall.
SEVEN
MIA FINISHED HER work on All That Trash. She was confident her suggestions would make the book, already good, even more marketable. Nonfiction books rarely got the accolades in kiddie lit, and Mia understood the almost-universal preference for Harry Potter and vampire stories, though the charms of Mommy Mousie would forever remain elusive to her. Still, she hoped this one broke out and got some serious attention for the author; he deserved it.
Of more immediate concern was that her freelance job at Winthrop Lee Publishing was about to come to an end. She’d known this for some time but had not wanted to deal with it—she had been too busy dealing with Lloyd, the assorted cast of characters at Eden’s school, and Mr. Ortiz’s new dog, whom he’d named Mariposa. Within a week of her arrival, Mariposa developed a serious kidney infection, resulting in piteous howling and puddles of blood-clotted urine that were, thank God, confined to the litter box and elsewhere in Mr. Ortiz’s apartment, not the hallway. This had necessitated trips to the vet and various medications, all of which Mia paid for with her bills from her precious stash.
“You are so kind, Señora Saul,” said Mr. Ortiz. “I am forever in your debt.”
Something about those words unsettled Mia; she didn’t want anyone in her debt. That’s not why she had helped him. But she shook off the feeling; Mr. Ortiz was only trying to thank her.
WHEN HER LAST day at Winthrop Lee arrived, Mia started feeling the familiar thrum and pulse of what next. Lloyd’s check was some help, and she did have a little money socked away from her visits to
the machine. But this, she knew, was not to be confused with a long-term plan. Or even a short-term plan. She spent the morning cleaning out her cubicle and was treated to a farewell lunch by several of her coworkers. Then there was the obligatory good-bye visit to the editor in chief, a grandmotherly woman whose brass-buttoned cardigans, lace-up shoes, and short gray hair were totally at odds with her sharp-witted and occasionally foul-mouthed outbursts at the editorial meetings over which she majestically presided. After that, Mia was a free agent once more.
She walked slowly toward the subway station, for once not in a rush. The greenmarket tempted her, but she was already carrying quite a lot, and Eden wouldn’t be home that night anyway. Since it was Friday, she was going to Caitlin’s for a sleepover. Mia continued south, past the entrance to the subway, until she reached the Strand Book Store, on the corner of Twelfth Street and Broadway.
Ah, the Strand! Mecca for lovers of used, old, and rare books, it had been around for decades. Her father used to bring her here with Stuart on Saturdays when they were kids. He gave them each five dollars and let them loose in the store. While he pored over titles like The Night Sky and The Stars Above, she and Stuart tried to outdo each other by finding books with pictures of naked people. Stuart’s National Geographic volume showing bare-breasted and scanty-loincloth-covered Africans was the clear winner until Mia came up with A Passage of Wonder: Witnessing a Child’s Birth, which showed pictures of a real, live baby emerging from a painfully stretched, hair-covered orifice. They bought the book for $1.98 and spent the subway ride home trying to yank it out of each other’s hands for a better view of its many and reverently photographed images. Their father, deeply immersed in The Edge of the Universe—And Beyond, was oblivious to the precise nature of their purchase; not that he would have been perturbed had he known.
Mia checked her bulging canvas bag as soon as she entered the Strand and so prowled blissfully unencumbered through the stacks of books. Here was a hefty volume on medieval tapestries that she would have loved to own. Or how about this one, devoted exclusively to patterns on eighteenth-century French dinnerware? She skimmed the pages, almost tasting the dense, deeply saturated colors: cobalt blue, apple green, the wholly unreal, enamel-like pink of a perfect sugar rose. She dipped into the poetry section, and then toured through astronomy, where she felt the momentary presence—warm, like the wind in July—of her father’s ghost. Travelogues from the 1900s, novels whose reviews had intrigued her, twenty-six volumes of a child’s encyclopedia published in 1937, amply illustrated in Art Deco duotones. She was not planning to buy anything for herself; she had scores of books at home, and anyway, she was a big believer in the Brooklyn Public Library system. But she didn’t need to buy to be happy. The slight whiff of mildew in the air around her and the fine coating of dust gently anointing the spines and pages of all these books soothed and centered her; Mia was content just inhaling the aromatic and faintly mournful scent of the literary past.
A wide, flat book, no dust jacket, only a blue-cloth cover, attracted her eye. The Magic of Money. The cover alone was a curiosity. Books published today had cloth spines and cardboard covers. A fully cloth cover was obsolete, like subway tokens or milk in bottles. She picked it up. Roman coins, with their crisp-edged profiles of long-dead rulers; humble ha’pennies and farthings; a solid gold crown with a resplendent profile of Queen Victoria on the front. There were pictures of paper currency, too, the earliest notes printed in the brand-new United States, the intricately idiosyncratic bills of Western Europe before the euro homogenized everything like the monetary equivalent of Star-bucks. She looked at the title page; the book had been published in 1974. The Strand’s familiar neon orange sticker on the inside cover read $7.98. A veritable bargain. And the perfect birthday gift for Stuart, precisely the kind of book they would have loved and fought over in their childhood. She brought the book up to the cash register, where a by-now routinely pierced and tattooed young person took her money and handed her back the bagged book. It was a bit unwieldy when added to all the other things she was carrying, but she nonetheless managed to get everything home.
Without Eden, the evening seemed to stretch on forever. She read a chapter of Proust; she had a nap. Cooking for herself seemed like too much of a chore, so she ate an apple, a pear, a stale granola bar, and finally one of the shockingly sweet Milky Way bars she had been stockpiling for Halloween. Around nine o’clock, she opened The Magic of Money, which she planned to read before wrapping up for Stuart. But interesting as the book was, she couldn’t concentrate. The title just started her thinking about money all over again. Her job had ended; she would have to hustle to get something else. What else was new?
She closed the book with a decisive snap. The machine. The machine was new. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Because to think about it was insane, that’s why. This outpouring of unasked-for cash could not possibly continue. The bank must have found out, corrected the mistake, and was at this very second tracing the missing money directly to her. They would be comi
ng for her soon. No, not soon. Now. Guilt and dread turned her heart into a sodden sneaker, pounding in a dryer, ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump.
But she was being ridiculous. There was no possible way to trace this error to her. Her receipts, her statements from the bank—and she had saved every single one—offered no evidence, not a shred. No, she had been lucky, that was all. And she might just get lucky again. Before she could change her mind, Mia got her boots and jacket and was off.
The avenue was filled with people spilling out of the restaurants, into the bars. Mia hurried, head down, not looking anyone in the eye. She was at the bank in a matter of minutes, using her bank card to gain entry past the now-locked double doors. No one else was in the vestibule; thank God for small favors. She must have looked as guilty as if she’d just bought a gun and held up the Korean market across the street.
Mia slipped the card into the slot. Immediately, the screen brightened, as if it had been flooded with sunlight. So intense was this light that Mia had to shut her eyes, and even so, she could still sense the light through her closed lids, painting their insides with wavy red squiggles and incandescent red blobs. Instinctively, she brought both hands to her face, to shield it.
But when she heard the music—violins, the trill of a flute, a harp— her hands fell to her sides and she opened her eyes once again. The screen was still unusually bright, though the intensity of the light had diminished. The usual array of instructions and options had vanished; instead, there were these words:
A gift. For you, Mia. Use it well.
The music—a harp had come into it, too; she was sure it was a harp—swelled, filling the space in her head and in her chest. Then it subsided and everything was quiet. She stood there, trying to absorb what she had just seen and heard. She didn’t, contrary to cliché, feel that she was dreaming. Instead, everything had a lapidary clarity. The big, shiny squares of tile on the bank’s floor, the smudged fingerprints on the plate-glass window, and the crumpled receipt that had missed the trash can were as real to her as the unexplained music and the blinding light. And the words. The words that were still there.
Stunned, she looked down and saw the single bill that waited only for her to claim it. When she did, her hand began not so much to shake as to vibrate, like a cell phone with the ringer turned down. The bill she was holding—fresh, crisp, and that particular cool, silvery, goes-with-anything green—was not a twenty or even a hundred. In her tingling, electrically charged fingers, Mia held an honest-to-God ten-thousand-dollar bill.
EIGHT
AT LEAST SHE thought it was a ten-thousand-dollar bill. How would she know? She had never seen one before. She doubted that many people had. But this was neither the place nor the time to examine it. She had to get it home where she could look at it more carefully. She was too nervous to put the thing in her pocket, so she carefully inserted the bill down the front of her jeans, letting it lodge near the top of her panties, just under her belly button. Then she raced back to her apartment, trying to hold her stomach in, so the bill wouldn’t get wrinkled. Her heart was thudding like a hammer in her chest, quite possibly the precursor to a heart attack. Or maybe it was a heart attack and she was too stupid to know. But no, after a minute or two, the quiet of the apartment calmed her and her heart rate returned to something approaching normal. She had messages—one from Eden, calling to say good night. Another from her mother. She’d call them back.
Mia extracted the bill from her pants and set it on the kitchen counter. It certainly looked real. She rummaged through a drawer, rejecting an ice-cream scoop, chopsticks, a serrated knife, until she came up with her prize: a magnifying glass. Under the thick glass lens, the subtle, undulating weave of the paper was revealed. God, it looked convincing. There was a seal, and a serial number, and all that official-looking jazz that was on legitimate bills. She put down the magnifying glass and picked up the bill by its edges.
On the front was a portrait of someone named Salmon Chase. Who was Salmon Chase? He must have done something significant to earn such an exalted place. And what kind of a name was Salmon? Did his buddies call him Sally? Looking at his bald head, his stern, accusatory expression, she doubted it. She’d Google him right now, but her laptop was on the fritz; she had gotten by using the computer at Winthrop Lee, so it hadn’t seemed imperative to get it fixed. Now she wished she had. She turned the bill over. the united states of america, it read, and underneath, ten thousand dollars. The number 10,000 appeared, blocky and squat, at each corner and was superimposed, in a larger, lighter typeface, across the central panel.
Mia was burning to know whether this bill was the real thing. But there was no way for her to tell, and no one she could ask. Holding the bill away from her body by a single corner, as if it might be radioactive, she walked back into the other room. The Magic of Money was still on the floor where she’d left it.
She pounced on the book and pawed through its pages. Sure enough, there was a brief section on paper currency in the United States. Skimming it quickly, she hit pay dirt in the third paragraph:
From the late 1920s through the late 1960s, Federal Reserve Notes were routinely traded in commerce. Their most common use was bank to bank, when large sums of money were transferred. But the advent of bank wires rendered them obsolete. In 1969, the U.S. government asked the public to redeem any remaining in circulation for smaller denominations. These rare bills will always retain their face value at banks, but they possess a much higher value to collectors.
She felt the hum of excitement growing as she continued to read.
$500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 denominations were printed only in the 1928, 1934, 1934 A, 1934 B, or 1934 C series. Although all these denomination notes are highly uncommon, the 34 B and 34 C series are the most rare; no known examples have been encountered. The 1928 series were “Redeemable in Gold on demand.” The 1934 A, B, and C series were the last high denomination notes printed in 1945. Finally, on July 14, 1969, the
Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System announced that the high denomination notes would be discontinued immediately; they cited lack of use as the reason. All high denomination notes that are turned into banks are forwarded to the Federal Reserve and destroyed immediately.
There were a couple of pictures, too, though none of the ten-thousand-dollar note. But she was encouraged to learn that the Treasury had printed big bills at one time; while the bill she had might not be genuine, at least the possibility of its authenticity was there. She checked the series—A—and the year—1934. So it was not one of the rarest notes. But if—and this was a big if—it were real, it had to be worth something above and beyond the face value. The question was, how much? She would have to proceed very carefully here, try to figure out what to do with the damn thing. She certainly didn’t want to send it to the Treasury. But she couldn’t exactly spend it at the supermarket either. There must be someone who would want it, not as currency, but as the collector’s item that it obviously was.
Forcing herself to stop thinking about the bill for a few minutes, she called Caitlin’s apartment to say good night to Eden.
“Mom, is it okay if we watch a movie that’s rated PG-13?”
“What movie?”
“I don’t know yet. But Caitlin and I want to find one with that rating.”
“That’s no way to pick a movie.”
“Why not?”
“Let me talk to Caitlin’s mom.”
“We asked her already. She said it’s okay with her if it’s okay with you.”
“All right then. But nothing too bloody or scary.”
“We’re not interested in bloody or scary, Mom,” said Eden. She had that jaded, patronizing tone that Mia found so exasperating.
“No? So what are you interested in?”
“You know—kissing. Also cursing.”
“Kissing is okay,” said Mia, surprising herself by thinking of Fred, not Lloyd. “But just kissing. Nothing else.”
After she s
aid good-bye to Eden, she went into her bedroom, climbed onto the chair, and put the bill in the box with her wedding shoes. It was only when she was actually in bed with the lights out that she allowed herself to think about the other part of what had happened tonight: the mysterious light, the music, and, most unbelievable of all, the message: A gift. For you, Mia. Use it well. Three lines. Eight words. What possible explanation could there be for such a thing? A bank error, if this were a bank error, was a random occurrence. But this was not random, not at all. The machine had known her name. It was communicating with her. This was beyond weird, beyond strange. But it was also, in some entirely credible way, wonderful. Mia had not felt so special or chosen in years. She shifted under the new sheets, as alert and animated as if a pint of coffee had been injected directly into her veins.
Once upon a time, she had felt chosen. By Lloyd, as a lover and wife. By her brother, as his best friend. By her parents, whose occasional benign neglect and respective self-absorption in no way obscured their obvious, encompassing love. There had been a gym teacher in tenth grade—a hectoring, desiccated woman who decided to punish Mia for some infraction by making her stand on her head in a far corner of the perpetually dim and foul-smelling gym. Betty had swooped (literally— she had favored a long, flowing cape and ankle-length skirts in those years) into school, magnificent as a swan defending the nest. “I didn’t raise my daughter for you to abuse!” she told the teacher, cowing her into an apologetic submission that lasted at least until Mia’s graduation. And, years earlier, there had been the Halloween when Mia was the Queen of Hearts. Betty had painted a copy of the playing card onto two large pieces of cardboard. Mia, in a red pleated skirt, red sweater, and red shoes, had proudly displayed the likenesses of the gaudy queen looped over her shoulders. Her crown was cardboard covered in aluminum foil. Best of all was the white bakery bag, on which Betty painted a simple red heart. How Mia had loved that bag! It had lifted her out of the ordinary ranks of children, with their dreary, dun-colored bags, and made her feel uniquely prized. Somewhere along the way, though, she had lost the sense of being special, and she had not expected to find it again. Until now. She got up and went in search of the bank receipt. As usual, it showed a withdrawal of one hundred dollars.
Breaking the Bank Page 10