I crawled to the side wall where the map indicated my jar would be and began scooting forward, trying to match the distance proportionally with the diagram. It was hard to gauge distance in the dark. I chose a place that seemed about right, rested the flashlight on the ground beside me, and began jabbing the pointy tip of the trowel into the dirt. The dust got in my eyes and throat. I wished I’d thought to bring water. I heard footsteps, clomping with a slight shuffle: Adam Brooks was moving around overhead. I began to dig faster. I could hear Katie digging in some distant corner. The ground was harder than I’d imagined. Eventually, I managed to dig four or five inches in and found nothing. My hands were chafing from squeezing the trowel. I moved over a few feet and started digging again.
I was on my fourth hole when I heard Katie shriek. “Got it!” she said. I was relieved—at least we wouldn’t have to return to Adam Brooks with nothing—but I was also disappointed. Though I’d been telling myself again and again that I was glad she was there, I knew then that I had wanted to find the jars myself.
“Great,” I called. “We can find the other one faster if we’re both looking for it, and then we can get out of here.”
“No way,” she said. “That one’s yours.” I heard her approaching, shimmying around the poles that supported the house, pushing the jar in front of her, and then the beam of her flashlight came into view. I kept digging and concentrated on not crying. If there was anything worse than failing to do what Adam Brooks had asked of you, it was crying in front of him. Last time I’d done it, when I’d slammed my finger in the front door, he’d given me a furious lecture about pain and how I didn’t know the meaning of the word. My mother had waited until he was finished before quietly offering an ice pack.
Katie watched me dig. I switched the trowel from my left hand to my right, then back again. She tilted her jar, and we both listened to the clink of the silver inside. Finally, she took pity on me. She looked at the map, then shone her flashlight up and down the space in which I was working, and selected a spot of her own. We worked a long time in silence, side by side.
I had no way of telling time, but I could count the holes: thirty-one. Thirty-one holes, and no second jar. My hands were blistered. My knees ached. The cold had not softened, even as the sun had presumably risen higher in the sky. I felt as though the floors were pressing down on us from above, sinking with the weight of every parental footstep. I rested my cheek for a moment on my hand, then lifted my head.
“It’s not here,” I said. I hadn’t planned to say it. I wished I could take it back.
“Of course it’s here,” Katie said. “It’s on the map.”
“This is where it’s supposed to be. We’ve checked this whole part.”
“We have to keep looking,” she said. “We can’t go back up there without it. He’ll kill us.”
“He won’t kill you,” I said. I pictured his face, the vein in his neck bulging, his cheeks red with rage.
“Do you really think we can go up without it?” Katie asked. I couldn’t tell if the edge in her voice was concern or hope. Her hands, like mine, were stiff and raw, and she was shivering. Could it be that she, too, had had enough? That what she needed was a hero, someone to lead her to the exit?
“It’s freezing,” I said, gathering steam. “And this map is no good.” I started crawling toward the door. Adam or no Adam, we weren’t doing anyone any good down there. After a moment, Katie followed.
The sun was so bright that we both stood blinking for a full minute before we could get our bearings. My mind swam with the process of digging, as waves still roll beneath you when you come ashore after hours of swimming in the ocean. I wanted to stay forever in the sun, out of the spooky darkness but not yet facing the judgment that we both knew would fall on us.
“We’d better go in,” Katie said. My terror grew deeper. My whole body began to tremble, not enough to see, but enough to render me unsteady. Katie stood tall and sturdy. She spoke their language. She could be my interpreter.
We brushed the dirt from our clothes, and I waited for my big sister to lead me gently inside, to take charge, to explain what had happened and how hard we’d tried, how even she, older and wiser, had been unable to find the second jar, but she did not. Stubborn Katie, already digging her heels in for what would be a lifelong battle over credit for her work.
It was either go inside to announce surrender or slink back into the dusty darkness, but I couldn’t see how we’d find the jar even if we went back. My mind was set: I led the way into the kitchen where the three adults were gathered. Our parents stood at the counter packing boxes with Adam Brooks behind them, supervising. Katie followed me, cradling her prize. I wanted to turn and run, but I knew I couldn’t escape. Katie nudged me in the back with her elbow. I had started this capitulation; it was mine to carry through.
“She found one of them,” I said, aiming the announcement nowhere in particular. I tried to take a deep breath but it caught halfway through. I had to say it. “I couldn’t find mine.” From behind, Katie plucked a withered vine from my hair.
“What do you mean, you couldn’t find it?” Adam Brooks said in the famous exasperated tone he used to take with colleagues who didn’t immediately grasp the complex physics of a solution he’d proposed. “I gave you the map.”
“We were looking that whole time,” I said.
“That jar is worth a lot of money,” Adam Brooks said, stretching his arms out to Katie and taking her jar, wiping the last of its dust on his pants. “It’s not something you can just quit on because you’re tired.”
“We tried,” Katie said, her voice now no more than a squeak. Her lower lip began to tremble. Our parents stood quietly at the kitchen counter, wrapping plates in old newspapers.
“Tried?” Adam said. “How hard can it be?” He was speaking only to me now. “Just follow the map. Your sister managed it.” And I wanted to say, Katie couldn’t find this jar either. I wanted to say, you’re the one who drew the map to begin with. You hid them too well. It’s your fault, not mine. And perhaps he knew that, and was angry mostly at himself, but I couldn’t understand that. I was only eight.
“There was no way to measure,” I said. “We dug a zillion holes.” That was all I had in me, and a glance at his tensed jaw told me I’d said too much already. I took two stumbling steps backward. I saw my father look up for a moment, as though he were going to come to my defense, but Adam had taken charge. He would issue the punishment, banning me from the dinner table that night and the next and confiscating two months’ allowance as a down payment on what I owed him, and no one would dare to object. I was right and he would win anyway. Adam Brooks raved on about what a simple task it was, how incompetent I must be. My parents kept their eyes on their packing. Katie opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.
And still, thirty years later, she won’t stand up for me. She won’t tell Carl Chesterfeld that I am her brother, that I belong here. How can I be sure that I won’t unwittingly act just the same if I have a family of my own? I picked up other patterns from them. Robin is often baffled by the things I find myself expecting: detailed explanations of the process by which minor decisions were reached, the exact source of every quotation used in conversation, the precise name for every food we eat. I know where I learned to expect those things. This inheritance is, I see now, what I have been afraid of, what has bubbled up in my stomach every time Robin has raised the question of children. Here it is: the decision I have been unable to make for four years.
I sit for a while with my choice, listening to the rise and fall of voices admiring my tyrant of a grandfather. This is such a strange city, so long on intellect, so short on empathy. I miss New York.
After a while, Katie comes into my hideout and sits beside me. “It’s the end of an era,” she says.
“I don’t know that it is,” I tell her. “Can’t you still hear his voice in your head?”
“I suppose so.” I want to hate her, but I don’t. She wasn’
t the one behind it all; she simply fell into line. “I don’t know what it’ll be like here without him,” she says. “Los Alamos, I mean.”
“It’ll go on,” I say. She shifts, uncomfortable, as though I have insulted her. “Remember that time we crawled under the house for those jars of silver?”
She looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles. “I’d forgotten.” There are deep lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that I didn’t notice earlier.
“It’s probably still there,” I say. “That other jar.”
“That’s right,” she says. “You never did find it.” After all these years, this is the thing she thinks to say. Adam is gone, and nothing has changed. It is as though she has come on purpose to confirm my decision: we are irreversibly warped. Unfit to reproduce.
“Come on out,” Katie says. “People are leaving. They’ll want to say goodbye.” There’s no use in arguing. I follow her back into the hall. I feel different, now that I know that we are the end of the line; we’d better make something of ourselves, Katie and I.
I am exhausted when I get to my hotel. Robin will be upset. I imagine the sound of her voice as she takes the news, trying not to cry, because she’ll know what it means: the end of us. She might try to reason with me. She might yell, or break down weeping. I’d better call her before I get worked up over a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. As I wait for her to answer, I feel my deepest loss: she is about to answer the phone for the last time as my loving, hopeful partner.
“You survived,” she says. “How’re you feeling? In need of someone to talk to who isn’t a scientist?”
I mean to ease into it, to say yes, I miss you, it went fine, something strange has happened, but instead, the decision spills from me. “I can’t be a father, Robin.”
“Did something happen?” she asks gently. “You’re upset. Let’s talk about this when a little time has passed.”
“Something did happen,” I tell her. “Thirty years ago.” I give her the nutshell version of our voyage under the house, of Adam’s brutal punishment, of my family’s refusal to defend me before him. “Not even a word,” I say. “All three of them just stood there and let him pummel me. And that’s the stock I’m from. I can’t pass that on.”
Robin begins to laugh. She laughs so long and hard that I’m sure tears are streaming down her cheeks and she’s clutching her stomach. I hold the hotel phone away from my ear for a minute and when I bring it back, she’s still laughing. Finally, she pauses.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” I ask.
“That’s your reason? That’s why you’ve been so afraid all this time?”
“You find that amusing?” I ask. I can’t help it: I start to cry.
“Don’t you get it, Ben?” she says. “You’re nothing like them. I don’t know how a family like that produced someone as stable as you.” Another giggle escapes her. “That’s the whole point. You can’t do what they do. That’s why they hurt you so much. That’s why you ended up here, with me.”
I consider this. She could be right.
“Now get back here and make love to me,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of planning to do. We have to pick names and paint the nursery,” she says.
“Come back to me,” she says. “Come back.”
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the unyielding support of my family. Thank you to my parents, Lisa and Dave, my sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Max, and my grandparents, Boz, Malcolm, Mary, and Bob. I also owe an eternal debt to Matthew Fickett, whose stories inspired me and whose friendship sustains me.
About the Author
Amy Knight is a civil rights and criminal defense attorney. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her dogs, Oscar and Ruby.
author photo by Richard Whitmer
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