When the news came, Robin offered to come along. I said no. As much as I don’t belong in this family, she is positively repelled by it. In the six years of our marriage, Adam never expressed a desire to meet her. He wouldn’t have liked her. She’s too intuitive, too willing to accept that for which she has no evidence. We were making love when the call came, and it was she who sensed that I ought to answer.
We’ve been in an ongoing discussion, Robin and I, over a span of years. She wants children, but the prospect fills me with terror. Such responsibility, so many choices, millions of places to go wrong—I can’t bear the thought of ruining a life, permanently warping someone’s psychology. Maybe in a year or two, I tell her. I’m just not ready.
“I’m not getting any younger,” Robin says. She’s thirty-seven.
“Women are having babies later and later,” I say. “Into their forties.”
“And I intend to have one,” she says. “I’d like it to be with you.” I want to give her everything she needs, but every time I try to say yes, I say no. These arguments won’t last much longer. The decision is mine to make: find a way to get past it, or let her go.
Carl Chesterfeld approaches. I’m glad for the familiar face. Perhaps he will even do his old quarter trick, and I won’t feel quite so much like I’ve stumbled into the wrong funeral. He starts with my father, patting him gently on the back, then kisses my mother on the cheek and clasps Katie’s hand. Then he comes to me.
“Who’s this fellow?” he says. I wait for one of them to remind him. Carl, that’s Ben, they’ll say. My son. My brother. The room roars around us. No one speaks.
Finally, I step in and introduce myself.
“Oh, yes, yes,” Carl says. “The little boy with the notebooks.” He means the journals I kept as a boy, scribbled in mirror-writing in a vain attempt at privacy. “Sorry for your loss,” he adds. For the first time since the news came, sadness hits me.
“Thank you very much,” I say to Carl Chesterfeld. “Excuse me.” I’ve had enough of this.
There is a small empty room off the main parlor with a handful of chairs and a box of tissues. The room where they take people who become upset. I take a seat. Robin meant well with her advice, but she doesn’t understand. I remember the first time I began to see that they would never claim me as their own. I was eight years old, and grumpy. I’d been dragged along to help Adam move to a new home when I would’ve preferred to stay in my room, putting the finishing touches on my elaborate village of Legos. Though in theory we were coming only to make a few trips with our van full of boxes, my father had insisted we get an early start, and had blocked out an extra day in our schedules to allow for the sorting and packing he knew we’d have to do.
We pulled up shortly after nine. My father knocked, then led us inside without waiting for the door to open. It was a sprawling, one-story house with red tile floors and dark wooden ceilings, built after the war as Los Alamos tried to transform itself from a bivouac into a permanent, comfortable town. Nothing was packed. There were stacks of empty boxes in the living room and the kitchen. Books overspilled the shelves, which lined every wall; half-empty coffee cups stagnated on wobbly side tables; faded Indian rugs were scattered haphazardly about the floor. I ran my fingertip along a window sill and lifted it to study the coat of dust it had collected. Soft, odorless, gray.
“Nine o’clock already?” came Adam’s muffled voice from the back of the house. A moment later he appeared in the kitchen. “Couldn’t have made it ten?” A dollop of toothpaste foam was escaping the left corner of his mouth. He was a tall man with a slight shuffle to his step who wore stained, too-short ties and always had dull pencils sticking out of every available pocket—pants, shirt, jacket, even the pockets of his bathrobe.
“Looks like you could use a hand with the packing,” my mother said, her voice tight. She never would have dared to come right out and say that he’d promised to be ready, that she considered this to be an abuse of our goodwill.
“Since I’m being forcibly evicted, it seems fair,” Adam said. Adam had lived in that house for thirty-five years, but without his wife, Angeline, who had died of ovarian cancer two years earlier, something finally had to be done. My father didn’t want him living on his own, with the slick tile underfoot and neighbors whose attention was too firmly on the microscopic to notice if anything happened to the old man next door. The two of them had struck a deal: Adam could keep his driver’s license if he’d move to a smaller, safer place. He was furious, but he knew he’d never pass the test if he had to take it again, so there we were, packing.
As soon as we’d finished eating the bagels we’d picked up on the way over, Adam Brooks took me aside. My parents stayed in the kitchen, as though tethered by a short leash to the gurgling coffee pot. We stood in a corner of the chaotic living room. The smell of burned crumbs from the toaster lingered in the air. Katie, seeing that I was being singled out, immediately came over and stood nearby, ready to wedge her skinny frame into our huddle. She never could bear to be shown up; any time someone demonstrated a skill, she rushed to display her own abilities, and the appearance of some new toy or piece of clothing at school would send her scurrying for her own possessions to show off.
Katie was much better suited to the sorts of projects Adam Brooks dreamed up than I was. It wasn’t just her extra two and a half years that gave her such skill and confidence in matters of adventure; she had always been that way, from the moment she’d charged out of the womb feet first before the doctor could set up for the Caesarian he wanted to perform.
“Dr. Brooks,” Adam said in his booming voice, though I would become the only member of the family who never got an advanced degree. I was nervous, already wary of Adam’s brand of fun, so when Katie appeared, ponytail swinging, I turned my shoulder to include her. “I’ve got a job for you,” Adam said. He had a kind look on his face, as though he were about to give me an extravagant gift, but I knew the kinds of gifts he chose: lab goggles and textbooks, little vials and jars full of rare elements, ingredients for fireworks, of no use to me.
“What job?” I asked, keeping my eyes on his tufted white hair. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, he had finally caught on to the kinds of things I was good at: sorting, alphabetizing, finding the most efficient way to fit things together.
“I need you to dig up some buried treasure,” he said. His breath smelled of coffee. I wasn’t sure how to take this. It could’ve been a joke, or some term of the secret and serious world he, my parents, and increasingly, Katie, inhabited. Not knowing what to say, I kept quiet.
“Treasure?” Katie said. “What kind of treasure?”
“I buried two big Mason jars of silver under the house when your father was a little boy. For emergencies.”
“You mean like if the world blew up?” Katie asked.
“Something like that,” Adam said. And I, having been raised in a house where emergencies were constantly forecast, didn’t think to ask any further questions.
Most people aren’t worried about the end of the world. They have a general sense of security, the tendency to postpone things, the ability to go to bed angry, a set of long-term plans. Then there are the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the UFO watchers and Elvis worshippers who are sure the world is about to end. They stand on street corners with signs, run websites tracking the evidence, and generally set themselves apart. Most people are aware of this dichotomy.
What they don’t generally experience is the third group, whose fears are fully founded and based on the probability of an astronomical event, such as the sudden extinction of the sun or the collision of a massive interstellar object with the Earth, or an understanding of the massive power in the world’s nuclear arsenals. There are countless ways in which we could all be obliterated: A small but fanatical group could start a nuclear war. An accident in a lab or at one of the test sites could blow up a good chunk of the United States. A misinterpreted gesture could send a skittish Eastern country running for its red bu
tton, and we, if we survived, would be left in a barren nuclear winter. Most people are completely unaware of the incredibly close calls we have survived since man first began to play with fire, and that is how it must be; it is not practical to be conscious of our own fragility.
So when Adam said the word “emergency,” we took him seriously.
“Now,” he said, “there are two big jars down there full of silver in scrap and coin. Worth a lot of money. I was saving it in case the currency collapsed.”
“How long have they been there?” asked Katie, her eyes growing wide.
“Let’s see. It’s what, 1987 now? I buried them in 1960.”
“Twenty-seven years,” I said. I had been drilled on math facts until I could barely blink, and by considering the numbers through the words that indicated them, I had managed.
“Good man,” Adam Brooks said. “I’ll give you a map, and there’s a trowel and a couple of flashlights out in the lab.” The lab was the garage. I stood still on my spot. It would be dark and dirty under the house. I’d seen all sorts of things crawling in the yard, snakes and spiders, and once, a scorpion.
“Can I go too?” Katie asked. “If there’s two jars, we can each get one.”
“You’d better ask your brother,” Adam Brooks said, straightening. “He’s in charge of treasure retrieval.” I had thought at the time that it was because I was a boy that the task had been assigned to me, but I wonder now if it was because I was the child he considered more in need of toughening up.
“You can come,” I said quickly. I would’ve liked to say that she could go in my place, that I would stay inside and pack books into neatly labeled boxes, but I couldn’t say that to Adam Brooks as he towered over us.
“I’ll get the map,” he said, and disappeared into his study. Our parents were still in the kitchen, silently sipping the cooling dregs of their coffee. When Adam Brooks had a plan, they never interfered.
I tried not to look at Katie—I had no wish to see the challenge I knew would be in her freckled face—so instead I looked at the stack of papers that was nearest to me, on the scarred teak coffee table.
MEMO: PROJECT LEADERSHIP,
GROUP D-55. CONFIDENTIAL.
I knew I should look away and forget it was there, but of course, I couldn’t. It explained that there was a new procedure regarding the archiving of confidential files. Anything pertaining to design should be stored in locked cabinet A; testing, cabinet B; military use, cabinet C. No documents should be left on your desk when you leave the room. Should you observe—
Suddenly I was being choked by my collar. Someone was yelling, but in my struggle to breathe, I couldn’t understand. I could smell the cedar of his aftershave, the sensation oddly heightened in my state of oxygen deprivation. Intrigued and startled, I did not struggle.
“Put him down!” Katie shrieked, as though she, at eighty-two pounds, could have done anything about it if he had refused. She was trembling; she had put herself in danger by confronting him. Once my feet hit the ground, I began to make out Adam’s words.
“You know better than this! This is a question of national security! Do you want the FBI knocking on your door? Do you?” At the time I believed him—I had done something terrible. But now I wonder: at sixty-eight, was he still at the cutting edge of the research? He knew secrets, certainly, but this memo was about file cabinets. If it was private, he never should’ve brought it home and left it out. I find it more likely now that it was just a security reflex from the days when his work really was secret and dangerous. But that didn’t stop him from unleashing his wrath on the eight-year-old Ben Brooks, that disappointing child who sat in his bedroom scribbling pages in a notebook while his sister set off impressive explosions in the back yard. My breath was still coming in gasps, my throat burning.
“I didn’t know it was a secret,” I said. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” A faint thrill of hope struck me; perhaps, as a punishment, I would be deprived of the fun of the treasure hunt. But Adam let it drop. He handed me a folded, yellowed piece of paper that looked in danger of falling apart. Then he turned his back and resumed his place in the kitchen; we were on our own.
Katie looked over my shoulder as I gingerly unfolded the map. I could smell her bubblegum and feel her cool breath on my ear. The map displayed an irregular polygon, a rectangle with a trapezoid stuck on the end. I turned it around and around and finally figured out which room was which. There were two small x’s, each with lines showing the distance from the walls. I knew where the opening to the crawlspace was on the side of the house, covered by a wire mesh panel to keep animals out, but beyond that, I had no idea how I was going to translate this map into the dusty, dark reality under the house.
I briefly considered an appeal to my mother, who, with her soft turtlenecks and pale lipstick, was slightly more likely than the other adults to offer comfort, but she was already irritated by the state of the house, and I knew better than to make requests of her when she wasn’t in the mood. If I had asked for a different job instead, my father and Adam would’ve laughed and pounded me on the back and told me to get down there. It wasn’t malice, but a misconception so deep that its possessors didn’t even recognize it.
“Come on.” Katie dragged me by the hand to the lab. We found a pair of trowels and two red plastic flashlights and carried our tools out into the yard.
I stood in the New Mexico sunshine for perhaps thirty seconds, listening for voices from the house, hoping that someone would come out to tell us never mind, they’d forgotten that the silver had already been retrieved, or that it wasn’t worth much after all and we’d be put to better use indoors. But no one came.
“Come on!” Katie was getting impatient, as though we were waiting in line for a carnival ride rather than preparing to carry out an assigned chore.
“You can go alone,” I said. “If you’re so excited.” I reached down to swat away the invisible bug that I was sure was climbing on my leg. “I could time you.”
“No way, chicken!” She tugged on her ponytail to tighten its band. She had me cornered and she knew it. This was payback for all those times when she’d wanted my help with some project or experiment, and I’d elected to read, or practice the piano, or run as fast as I could up and down the block with my stopwatch trying to beat my previous record. If I didn’t go down there, neither would she, and I’d be held responsible. I didn’t know what Adam would do if we came back without the jars, but I didn’t want to find out.
She stood behind me while I prepared to pry the cover off the crawlspace. I smelled mildew. The cover was more secure than it looked, and I tried to wedge it off with the tip of my trowel, but it didn’t budge. I looked back at Katie for support, but she just cracked her gum and put one hand on her hip.
I strained and tugged and all of a sudden, I was flying through the air with the cover in my hands. I landed on my rear end a few feet back. Katie laughed. She would’ve done it easily. Gracefully.
Embarrassed but not injured, I handed her the map, took a flashlight, and prepared to go in. There was less than two feet between the ground and the house, and I could already feel the grime settling in my pores. I tried to imagine Adam Brooks climbing down here to place the jars to begin with, but I couldn’t picture him as anything other than a stiff, slightly deaf old man.
I took a deep breath of above-ground air and aimed myself head-first into the void. The first thing I noticed was the cold. Beyond the small window provided by the opening to the outside, the darkness was near complete. Once I got myself all the way inside and aimed the flashlight, I could see only about three feet in front of me. There was something sharp digging into my left forearm. There were pipes overhead, and the ground was littered with the carcasses of vines that had tried to grow their way in from outside and withered in the absence of light and moisture.
For a moment, I feared that Katie would not come. She had no obligation here, and I wasn’t at all sure that I could locate the jars myself. If I
’d been nearly strangled just for reading a paper that was face-up in the living room, what kind of punishment would this failure bring? There was no precedent among the Brookses for backing out of things.
Mercifully, Katie’s freckled face soon appeared in the hole and she shimmied in on her elbows. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do this thing.” Her gum was gone; she must have swallowed it. I felt, for a moment, that I was going to be sick, and I concentrated on keeping my breakfast where it belonged. My throat stung with acid.
“We’ll each take one jar,” Katie said, spreading the map between us. “Divide and conquer. Which one do you want?”
“Can’t we do it together?” I said. “One jar at a time?”
“No,” she said, “faster this way. I’ll take the far one—” she pointed to one of the x’s— “and you can take this one. We’ll just get as close as we can to where it looks like it is, and dig. They can’t be buried very deep. And if we don’t find anything after a few inches, we try again in a new spot.”
“I don’t know,” I said, as though we had an alternative. “That sounds like a lot of digging. And if we don’t find them—”
“We’ll find them,” she said. She studied the map intently for half a minute more, then lifted her head. “Okie dokie. See you in a few.” And she crawled off toward the other end of the house. I shone my flashlight on her as she went, watching her snake-like progress, choking on the dust she kicked up as she disappeared behind a cement pillar. Then the noise of her crawling stopped and she began to dig. I studied the dirt in which I was lying. It was pale, more like sand than soil. There were all sorts of things in it, bits of dried leaves, pebbles, dead bugs. Poor bugs. Thousands of bugs, sow bugs, cockroaches, ants, spiders, must have died here this year alone, and in the space of the universe, as Adam Brooks had told us again and again, I was really no greater than they were. I thought of our parents in the bright kitchen, the tubs of cream cheese still on the table. That was where I wanted to be. But Adam Brooks was there. No matter how much I hated this dusty, buggy crawlspace, it was better than facing him.
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