'Are you happy?' I asked.
She made a noncommittal gesture with her hand, as if she were flicking away a fly. 'We can't get caught,' she said. 'That's the important thing.'
I shook my head, leaning forward across the bag to take her hand. 'No,' I said. 'We won't.'
She frowned down at me. 'You promise you'll burn it if things get out of hand?'
'That's right,' I said. I pointed toward the fireplace. 'I'll burn it right here.'
I HID the bag of money beneath our bed, pushed all the way back against the wall, with two empty suitcases jammed in after it, masking it from view.
We stayed up late, watching a New Year's show on TV. When the orchestra played 'Auld Lang Syne,' Sarah sang along, her voice high and tremulous, but hauntingly pretty. We drank sparkling cider, nonalcoholic, because of the baby, and clinked glasses at the stroke of midnight, wishing each other the best for the coming year.
Before we went to sleep, we made love -- gently, slowly -- Sarah crouched over me, the weight of her belly resting flat upon my stomach, her breasts hanging full and heavy in the darkness above my face. I cupped them carefully in my hands, squeezing her nipples between my fingertips until she moaned softly, a low, animallike sound coming up from deep inside her chest. Hearing her, I thought of the baby, pictured it rocking within her, enclosed in a watery bubble, waiting to be born, and the image gave me a strange, erotic thrill, sent a shiver running across the surface of my skin.
Afterward Sarah rested beside me on her back, holding my hand to the tautness of her belly. We were underneath the blankets; I was pressed up tight against her. The room was cold. Ice was forming along the edges of the windowpanes.
I listened to the sound of her breathing, trying to guess whether she was asleep yet. It was slow and steady, which made it seem like she might be, but there was a tenseness about her body, as if she were listening very hard for something to happen. I caressed her stomach, a light, feathery touch. She didn't react.
I was starting slowly to slip into sleep myself, thinking of the bag of money sitting right beneath us on the floor, and of the dead pilot out in his plane in the darkness, with the ice and the orchard full of crows, when Sarah turned her head and whispered something at me.
'What?' I asked, struggling back awake.
'We should just burn it, shouldn't we?' she said.
I raised myself on my elbow, looked down at her in the darkness. She blinked up at me.
'People don't get away with things like this,' she said.
I lifted my hand off her belly and brushed the hair from her face. Her skin was so pale, it seemed to glow. 'We'll get away with it,' I said. 'We know exactly what we're doing.'
She shook her head. 'No. We're just normal people, Hank. We aren't sneaky, we aren't smart.'
'We're smart,' I said. I brushed my hand across her face, making her shut her eyes. Then I laid my head down beside her on her pillow, snuggling up against her warmth. 'We won't get caught.'
I'm not sure if I actually believed this: that we were unassailable. Certainly I must've been aware even then of the dangers of our course, must've felt some fear when I stopped to consider all the difficulties yet to be overcome. There were Jacob and Lou and Carl and the plane and a hundred other ways that I could only guess at through which trouble might come and find us. On the most basic level I must've been scared simply because I was committing a crime. It was something I'd never even considered doing before, something far enough beyond my realm of experience to give me a lost feeling in and of itself, even without the fear of punishment that hung all about it like an aura. But I don't think these thoughts weighed on me then as much as they do now, in hindsight. I think I was happy then; I think I felt safe. It was New Year's Eve. I was thirty years old, contentedly married, with my first child soon to be born. My wife and I were lying curled up in bed together, having just finished making love, and beneath us, hidden away like the treasure it was, sat $4.4 million. Nothing had gone wrong yet; everything was still fresh and full of promise. I can look back now and say that in many ways this was the absolute apogee of my life, the point to which everything before led upward, and from which everything after fell away. I don't think it was possible at that moment for me to believe we could ever be punished for what we'd done: our crime seemed too trivial, our luck too great.
Sarah was silent for a long time. 'Promise me,' she said finally, taking my hand and placing it back on top of her stomach.
I tilted my head and whispered in her ear, 'I promise we won't get caught.'
Then we went to sleep.
3
I AWOKE around eight the next morning. Sarah was already out of bed; I could hear her showering in the bathroom. I huddled there beneath the covers, warm, still a little sleepy, and listened to the pipes creaking under the pressure of the water.
The pipes in my parents' house had made a similar sound whenever someone opened a faucet. As a child, Jacob had told me that there were ghosts within the walls, moaning, trying to escape, and I'd believed him. One night my mother and father had come home, drunk, and started dancing in the kitchen. I was six, maybe seven years old. Roused by the noise, I arrived just in time to see them, wrapped in each other's arms, trip over a chair, my father's head knocking a fist-size hole in the wall as he went down. Terrified, I rushed into the room with a wad of newspaper, to patch the hole before the ghosts could escape, and at the sight of me -- a scrawny, nervous kid in pajamas, my hair tousled with sleep, frantically jamming paper into the wall -- my parents broke into hysterical laughter. It was my first memory of embarrassment, of being ashamed, but thinking back on it that morning I felt no bitterness toward them, only a curious sort of nostalgia and longing. I missed them, I realized, still half asleep, my mind wandering, half-dreaming, so that, as I thought of them, they somehow usurped Sarah's and my places -- my mother, young, pregnant, was washing herself in the bathroom while my father waited beneath the covers, the shades pulled down, the room dim, listening to the pipes softly creak behind the wall above his head.
That was how I always tried to think of my parents, as young -- like Sarah and me -- with their life together just beginning. It was more invention than recollection: I hadn't been born very long before things started to fall apart, so the memories I retained of my parents, the real ones, the ones that came floating up unbidden, were from when they were already aging, both of them drinking too much, the farm slipping away behind their backs.
The last time I saw my father alive, he was drunk. He'd called me at the feedstore one morning, his voice sounding shy and embarrassed, to see if I could stop by sometime and take a look at his accounts. I consented gladly, feeling a little shy myself, but flattered, too, because he'd never really asked me for help before.
I drove out to the farm that evening, straight from work. My father had a little study that opened directly off the kitchen, and there, on the folding card table he used as a desk, I spent the next fifty minutes disentangling his finances. He kept track of his bills in a huge leather-bound ledger. The book contained a mess of hastily scrawled numbers, columns merging one into the other, computations scribbled illegibly in the margins. He'd written most of the notations in ink, so when he made a mistake -- which appeared to have been quite often -- he had to cross it out rather than erase it. Even through this morass of disorder, though, it was instantly clear to me that my parents were about to lose their farm.
I'd known they were in trouble, had known it for as long as I could remember, but I'd never imagined that things could get this far out of hand. They owed money to just about everyone -- the electric, phone, and water companies, the insurance company, the doctor, and the government. It was lucky they didn't have any livestock, because then they would've owed Raikley's, too. They owed money for repairs on their combine, for fuel and seed and fertilizer. Those were just bills, though: they were bad to get behind on, and my parents would've had to pay them eventually, but they weren't how you lost your farm. It was the bank that would take your property, and it was to the bank that my father owed the bulk of his money. He'd overborrowed and mismanaged. He'd mortgaged his home, mortgaged his land, and now, in a matter of weeks, he was going to lose them both.
