by Scott Smith
It came out like a joke, but I only half meant it that way. All through our childhood our father had told us how we ought to take care of each other, how we couldn't depend on anyone else. "Family," he used to say, "that's what it always comes down to in the end: the bonds of blood." Jacob and I had never managed to pull it off, though; even as children we were always letting each other down. Because of his weight, he'd been mercilessly teased at school and was constantly getting into fights. I knew that I was supposed to help him, that I ought to be jumping to his defense, but I could never figure out a way to do it. I was weak, small for my age, a thin, bony kid, and I'd just stand with everyone else, in a tight circle around my brother and his tormentors, watching, in absolute silence, while he was beaten up. It became the template for an interaction that we'd ceaselessly repeat as we aged: Jacob would fail somehow, and I -- feeling impotent and embarrassed and unworthy -- would do nothing but observe.
I reached over the dog's head and punched Jacob lightly on the shoulder, feeling silly doing it, an awkwardly forced attempt at fraternal camaraderie. "I'll take care of you," I said, "and you'll take care of me."
Jacob didn't respond. He just watched me open the door, pull the duffel bag out of the truck, and, straining, hoist it over my shoulder. Then, as I was picking my way carefully up through the snow to the house, he reversed down the driveway and drove off.
I ENTERED quietly, setting the bag inside the hall closet, on the floor toward the back. I draped my jacket across its top.
There were sliding doors on either side of the entranceway; the one on the right led to the dining room, the one on the left to the living room. Both were closed now. The dining room's was rarely open; except for the extremely sporadic occasions when we had company over, we always ate in the kitchen. The living room's, on the other hand, was closed only when we had a fire going.
Straight ahead, the entranceway divided into a flight of stairs on the left and a long, narrow hallway on the right. The stairs led to the second floor, the hallway to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Both of these were sunk in darkness.
I slid open the door to the living room. Sarah was in there, reading in a chair beside the fire. As I entered, she looked up: a tall, thin-boned woman with dark blond, shoulder-length hair, and large, brown eyes. She had some lipstick on, a bright shade of red, and her hair was pulled away from her face with a barrette. Both things -- the lipstick and the barrette -- made her seem younger, more vulnerable, than she really was. She was wearing her bathrobe, a huge tent of white terry cloth with her initials sewn in blue thread above her heart, and its folds masked the distension of her abdomen somewhat, making it look like she merely had a pillow resting on her lap. Beside her, on the table, was a half-finished bowl of cereal.
She saw me looking at the bowl. "I got hungry," she said. "I wasn't sure when you'd be back."
I went over to kiss her on the forehead, but just as I was bending down, she cried, "Oh!" grabbed my hand, and placed it on her stomach beneath the robe. She gave me a dreamy smile. "Feel it?" she asked.
I nodded. The baby was kicking. It felt like an erratic heartbeat, two firm thrusts and then a softer one. I hated when she made me do this. It gave me an uneasy feeling, knowing that something was alive inside her, feeding off her, like a parasite. I pulled my hand away, forced a smile.
"Do you want dinner?" she asked. "I could cook us an omelet." She waved toward the back corner of the room, where an open doorway led into the kitchen.
I shook my head. "I'm all right."
I sat down in the chair on the other side of the fireplace. I was trying to decide on the best way to tell her about the money, and as I attempted to work my way around this, it suddenly came to me that she might not approve; she might try to make me give the money back. This idea led me to a disturbing revelation. I saw for the first time how much I actually wanted the money. Up till then -- with Jacob and Lou -- I'd always been the one threatening to relinquish it, and this had allowed me to nurture the illusion that I was relatively disinterested in its fate: I would keep it, but only if certain rigorous conditions were met first. Now, confronted with the possibility of being forced myself to give it back, I understood how artificial those conditions really were. I wanted the money, I realized, and I'd do almost anything to keep it.
Sarah sat there, the book in her lap. She had her hand on her belly, the dreamy look on her face. She came out of it slowly.
"Well?" she asked. "How did it go?"
"It was all right," I said. I was still thinking.
"You spent all this time at the cemetery?"
I didn't answer her. The room was dark, except for the fire and the little lamp on the table beside her chair. There was a miniature grandfather clock on the mantelpiece and a bearskin rug on the floor before the hearth, both wedding gifts from my parents. The rug was fake, a storybook bear with perfect, glass-marble eyes and white plastic teeth. On the opposite wall was a window-size mirror in a wooden frame. Its surface reflected the room back at me so that I could see myself in it, along with Sarah and the fireplace.
Sarah leaned toward me in her chair. "What happened to your forehead?"
I touched my bump. "I banged it."
"Banged it? On what?"
"Sarah," I said. "I'm going to give you a hypothetical situation, okay? Like a game."
She set her book face-down on the table beside her and picked up the bowl of cereal. "All right."
"It's a thing of morals," I said.
She took a spoonful of cereal, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, getting lipstick on it.
"Let's say you were out walking and you found a bag of money."
"How much money?"
I pretended to think. "Four million dollars."
She nodded.
"Would you keep it, or would you turn it in?"
"It's somebody else's money?"
"Of course."
"So it'd be stealing to keep it?"
I shrugged. That wasn't the direction I wanted her to move in.
She barely even seemed to think about it. "I'd turn it in," she said.
"You'd turn it in?"
"Of course. What would I do with four million dollars? Can you see me bringing home that much money?" She laughed, slurped loudly at another spoonful of cereal.
"But imagine all the stuff you could do with four million dollars. You could start a whole new life."
"It's stealing, Hank. I'd end up getting caught."
"What if you were sure you wouldn't get caught?"
"How could I be sure of that?"
"Maybe you knew no one was looking for it."
"But how would I explain my change in lifestyle? My fancy clothes, my trips to the Caribbean, my jewelry, my minks? People would start asking questions."
"You'd move away. You'd go somewhere where people didn't know you."
She shook her head. "I'd always be worried about getting caught. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night." She stared down at her fingernails. They were painted bright red, the same color as Jacob's jacket. She wiped at the lipstick on her hand. "No. I'd turn it in."
I didn't say anything. Sarah lifted her cereal bowl to her mouth and sipped the milk from it. She watched me over its rim.
"You'd take it?" she asked, her face half hidden by the bowl.
I shrugged. I bent over and untied one of my shoes.
She set the cereal bowl down. "It seems to me like it'd be an awful lot of trouble."
"Let's say you got rid of the problem of getting caught." I made a cutting motion with my hand. "There's absolutely no way it'll happen."
She frowned. "Whose money is it?"
"What do you mean? It's yours."
"But who am I stealing it from?"
"A drug dealer. A bank robber."
"If it were a bank robber, it'd be the bank's money."
"All right, then it's a drug dealer."
"Oh, Hank," Sarah said. "You just want me to say I'd take it."
<
br /> "But isn't it conceivable that you might?"
"I'm sure that in some situations I'd think twice before turning it in."
I didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't at all what I had hoped for.
She glanced toward me. "Why're you asking me this?"
I decided suddenly that I'd made a mistake. Hypothetically, I realized, I wouldn't have taken the money either. I got up and walked back toward the hallway.
"Where are you going?" she called after me.
I gave her a little wave with my hand. "Wait."
I went to the hall closet and took the bag out from underneath my jacket. I dragged it behind me, across the hallway's tiled floor and into the living room. Sarah had the book open in her lap again, but she closed it when she saw me with the bag.
"What--?" she started.
I brought it right up in front of her, loosened its drawstring, and, with a dramatic flourish, emptied it at her feet.
The money fell into a large pile, packets sliding out across the bearskin rug.
She stared down at it, shocked. She set her book on the table. Her mouth opened, but she didn't say anything.
I stood in front of her, holding the empty bag. "It's real," I said.
She continued to stare at it. She looked pained, as if she'd just been struck in the chest.
"It's all right," I said. I stooped down, like I was going to start putting the money back, but instead I just touched it with my hand. The bills felt cool against my fingertips, their paper soft and worn, like cloth. They were old, their edges a little tattered, and I thought of all the hands they must've passed through already before reaching my own -- millions of different people, in and out of wallets and purses and vaults, so that they could end up here, finally, spread out in a pile across my living-room floor.
"You took it from the feedstore?" she asked.
"No. I found it."
"But it's somebody's. They have to be looking for it."
I shook my head. "Nobody's looking for it."
She didn't seem to hear me. "It's four million dollars?"
"Four point four."
"You found it with Jacob?"
I nodded, and she frowned.
"Where?"
I told her about the fox and Mary Beth, about the hike into the park and our discovery of the plane. When I told her about the bird, she squinted at my forehead, a pained, sympathetic look coming over her face, but she didn't say anything.
After I finished, we sat for a bit in silence. I picked up a packet and held it out toward her. I wanted her to touch it, to see what it felt like, a dense little brick of money, but she wouldn't take it.
"You want to keep it, don't you?" she asked.
I shrugged. "I guess so. I mean, I don't see why we shouldn't."
She didn't say anything. She put her hands on her stomach and stared down at it, a distracted look on her face. The baby was kicking.
"If we keep it," I said, "we'll never have to worry about money again."
"We don't have to worry about money now, Hank. You've got a good job. We don't need this."
I stared into the fire, thinking about that. It was dying down, the flames flickering low. I got up and added another log.
She was right, of course: we couldn't claim -- as Jacob and Lou probably did, and as my parents might've had they lived long enough to join us in our present situation -- that the money was something we needed, something we couldn't live without. Our life wasn't a struggle in that way. We were solidly middle class; when we worried about the future, it was not about how we were going to feed ourselves, or pay our bills, or educate our children, it was about how we'd manage to save enough for a larger house, a better car, more complicated appliances. But just because we didn't need the money didn't mean we couldn't want it, couldn't see it as a salvation of a different sort, and put up some struggle to keep it.
I'd gone to college to become a lawyer, only to give it up when I hadn't gotten the grades. Now I was an accountant in the feedstore of my hometown, the same town I'd spent all my childhood vowing to escape. I'd settled for something less than I'd planned on when I was younger and then convinced myself that it was enough. It wasn't, though; I saw that now. There were boundaries on Sarah's and my life, limits to what we could do and where we could go, and the pile of money lying at my feet illuminated them, highlighted the triviality of our aspirations, the bleakness of our dreams. It offered us a chance at something more.
I tried to find a way to communicate this to Sarah.
"My job's never going to amount to much," I said, pushing at the fire with the poker. "I'll be manager someday, after Tom Butler dies or retires, but he's not much older than me, so neither of those'll happen very soon, and by the time they do, I'll be an old man myself."
I'd thought this several times over the previous few years, a gray, depressing probe into the future, but I'd never spoken it out loud before, and I was astonished to hear myself do so now. It was as if someone else had uttered the words; I had to pause a moment to let them sink in.
Sarah nodded, her face calm, expressionless, and I got a further shock from that: she wasn't surprised by what I'd said. She'd already known the extent of my possibilities at the feedstore as well as I had. I waited for her to say something, to protest in some way, but she didn't.
"Think of the life we could give the baby," I whispered. "The security, the privilege."
I glanced over at her, but she wasn't looking at me. She was looking down at the packets. I continued to poke at the fire.
"It's lost money, Sarah. Nobody knows anything about it. It's ours if we want it."
"But it's stealing. If you get caught, you'll go to jail."
"Nobody gets hurt by our keeping it. That's what makes it a crime, isn't it? People getting hurt?"
She shook her head. "It's a crime because it's against the law. It doesn't matter whether anybody gets hurt or not, you'll still get arrested. I'm not going to be left bringing up a child all by myself because you've done something stupid and ended up in jail."
"But we can do it for the right reasons," I said. "We can do it so that something good comes from it." I was beginning to flounder. I wanted the money, and I wanted her to want it too.
She sighed, as if in disgust. When she spoke again, her voice rose a step. She was becoming angry. "I'm not worried about the morality of it, Hank. I'm worried about getting caught. That's what's real; the rest is just talk. If you get caught, you'll go to jail. I'd let you keep it if there wasn't that risk, but there is, so I won't."
I stopped short at this, startled. I'd assumed from the beginning that any reluctance I'd encounter on her part about keeping the money would stem from moral grounds. It had given me a helpless, fatalistic feeling -- I knew that there was no way to argue against something like that -- but now I saw that it was much simpler. She wanted to keep the packets, but she was afraid of getting caught. I should've realized this from the beginning, too. Sarah, above all else, was a pragmatist -- it was the quality I loved best in her -- she dealt with things at their most basic level. For her, a decision to keep the money would be predicated on two simple conditions. The first -- which I'd already dealt with -- was an assurance that no one would be hurt by our actions; the second was that we wouldn't get in any trouble. Everything else, as she'd said, was just talk, a distraction from what mattered.
I told her about my plan.
"The money's the only evidence that we've committed a crime," I said. "We can sit on it and see what happens. If someone comes searching for it, we'll just burn it, and that'll be that."
She pursed her lips. Watching her, I could see that I'd gained a foothold.
"There's no risk," I said. "We'll be in complete control."
"There's always a risk, Hank."
"But would you do it if you thought there wasn't?"
She didn't answer me.
"Would you?" I pressed.
"You've already left a lot of clues."
"Clue
s?"
"Like your tracks in the snow. They lead in from the road, right to the plane, and then back out again."
"It's supposed to snow tomorrow," I countered triumphantly. "They'll be gone by tomorrow night."
She half-nodded, half-shrugged. "You touched the pilot."
I frowned, remembering Jacob asking Carl about the plane. It was starting to seem stupid again, rather than clever.
"If they suspect you for any reason," Sarah said, "they'll be able to figure out that you were there. All they need is a single follicle of hair, a half-inch thread from your jacket."
I lifted my hands in the air, palms up. "But why would anyone suspect me?"
She answered quickly, though she didn't have to. I knew what she was going to say. "Because of Jacob and Lou."
"Jacob's all right," I said, not sure if I really believed it. "He'll do whatever I say."
"And Lou?"
"As long as we have the money, we can control Lou. We'll always be able to threaten that we'll burn it."
"And after we divide the money?"
"He'll be our risk. He'll be what we have to live with."
She frowned, her forehead wrinkled in thought.
"It seems like a small price to pay," I said.
She still didn't say anything.
"We can always burn the money, Sarah. Right up to the very last moment. It seems silly to give it up now, before anything's even gone wrong."
She was silent, but I could see that she was coming to a decision. I returned the poker to its stand, then went back and crouched down over the packets. Sarah didn't look at me. She was staring at her hands.
"You have to go back to the plane," she said, "and return some of it."
"Return it?" I didn't understand what she meant.
"Just part of it. You'll have to go early tomorrow morning, so when it storms later it'll cover your tracks."
"We're keeping it?" I asked, a little thrill of excitement running over my body.
She nodded. "We'll put five hundred thousand back, and keep the rest. That way when they find the plane, they'll assume no one has been there yet."
"That's an awful lot of money."