'I want to know how much you lost.'
He shook his head again. 'That's not really your business, Mr. Accountant, is it now?' He stood there in front of me, patient, immovable, his hands in the pockets of his jacket.
'It's not like I carry that much money around with me,' I said. 'I can't just reach into my desk and hand you two thousand dollars.'
'There's a bank across the street.'
'I need time,' I said. 'You'll have to come back at the end of the day.'
AFTER he left, I went over to the bank and withdrew two thousand dollars from Sarah's and my account. I brought it back to my office, sealed it in an envelope, and dropped it into my top desk drawer.
I tried to do some work, but the day was shot; I couldn't concentrate on anything. I doodled in the margins of letters. I read a hunting magazine someone had left in my office.
I knew that giving him the envelope would commit me to splitting up the money. It was the only way he'd ever be able to repay me. I understood this but tried to pretend that it was irrelevant. What I told myself I was doing was buying time. I knew there had to be a way out, and I was sure that I could find it, if I only had a little space in which to concentrate. I needed to think; I needed to work things through.
Lou came back just before five, knocked on my door, and entered again without my calling him in.
'You get it?' he asked. He seemed to be in a great hurry. It made me move very slowly.
I reached over, slid open the desk drawer, and took out the envelope. I set it on the edge of my desk.
He stepped forward to take it. He ripped open the flap and counted the bills, his lips moving over the numbers. Then he smiled at me. 'I really appreciate this, Hank,' he said, as if I'd done it voluntarily.
'I'm not going to give you any more,' I said.
He counted the bills again, seemed to do some sort of computation in his head. 'When's Sarah due?'
'The twenty-fourth.'
'Next week?' His face brightened.
'Next Sunday.'
'And then we'll get the money?'
I shrugged. 'I'll need a few days, for things to settle down. And we'll have to do it on a weekend. I can't take off from work.'
Lou started backing toward the door. 'You'll call me?' he asked.
'Yes.' I sighed. 'I'll call you.'
I didn't tell Sarah about any of it.
THE DAYS passed one after the other. The twenty-fourth came and went. During all that time I neither saw nor spoke with either Jacob or Lou. Sarah talked incessantly about the coming birth. She didn't mention Lou or Nancy at all.
At night I would lie in bed and count off the people who knew. I'd test them in my head for weakness, picture each of them turning me in, trying to double-cross me, rob me, hurt me. I started to dream about it -- Lou beating me with a rolling pin; Jacob coming at me with a fork and knife, wanting to eat me alive; Nancy kissing Sarah, then whispering in her ear, 'Poison him. Poison him. Poison him.'
I'd wake in the middle of the night and picture Lou's beer can lying in the snow at the edge of the orchard, imagine someone from the FBI picking it up with a pair of rubber gloves, dropping it into a plastic bag, sending it off to the lab. Or I'd think of Carl, sitting in his office in Ashenville, waiting, when the wreck was finally discovered, to tie together Jacob's report of a downed plane with the appearance the next day of Dwight Pederson's lifeless body.
They'd exhume the corpse, they'd dig it up, they'd study it and pick it apart, and then they'd know.
But, strangely, nothing happened. The money sat undisturbed in its bag beneath the bed. No one seemed to suspect me of anything. No one seemed to be plotting against me. Lou left me alone. And, gradually, I began to resign myself to what my life had become. I could live with my anxieties, I realized. They were finite. Any day now the baby would be born. I'd call Lou's bluff, brave it out. In the spring the plane would be discovered. A few months after that we'd split up the money and move away.
Then it would all be over.
Early in the morning on Thursday, January 28, just as I was preparing to leave for work, Sarah went into labor. I rushed her to the hospital, fifteen minutes away on the other side of Delphia, and there, at 6:14 that evening, she gave birth to a baby girl.
5
I BROUGHT Sarah and the baby home four days later. The baby was healthy, pink. She weighed nine pounds even, had rolls of fat beneath her chin and pudgy little hands attached to her arms.
Driving home, we decided to name her Amanda, after Sarah's paternal grandmother.
I was stunned at how dirty the house had become in Sarah's brief absence. It embarrassed me that I hadn't been able to keep it clean on my own. There were dirty dishes piled in the sink, newspapers scattered about the rooms, a thick clot of hair in the bathtub drain.
I ushered them straight upstairs, to the bedroom. I put Amanda in her crib, which I'd set up beneath the window. Sarah watched me from the bed. The crib was the same one my father had dropped off at our house the week before his accident. It had been Jacob's and mine when we were infants; our father had built it himself.
I went downstairs and fixed Sarah some tea and toast. I brought it to her on a tray, and we talked while she ate. We talked about Amanda, of course -- about the sound she made when she was hungry, the way she jerked her leg if you touched the sole of her foot, the pale, limpid blue of her eyes. We talked about the hospital -- about the mean night nurse whose shoes had squeaked like they were full of water as she made her rounds through the darkened hallways; the nice morning nurse who'd spoken with a lisp and so tried to avoid saying Sarah's name; the doctor with the gap between his teeth who kept referring to Amanda as a he.
I stood over the crib through all of this, watching the baby sleep. She was on her back, her head turned toward the window, her eyes tightly shut, as if she were squinting at the sky. She held her hands in loose fists up beside her shoulders. She was very still. I kept wanting to touch her and make sure that she was alive.
Sarah finished her tea and toast. She talked and talked, as though she'd spent the past four days storing up things to tell me. I smiled and nodded, urging her along until she suddenly interrupted herself.
'Is that Jacob?' she asked, and I looked out the window.
My brother's truck was rattling into the driveway.
I GREETED him at the door and invited him in, but he said he didn't have time. He'd brought a gift for the baby, something wrapped in pink tissue paper, and he handed it over to me quickly, as if carrying it embarrassed him.
'It's a teddy bear,' he said. He'd left his truck running. The dog was sitting in the passenger seat, watching us. He barked once, at me, and his nose banged against the window, leaving a wet smear along the glass.
'Come see her,' I said. 'Just quickly. She's upstairs.'
Jacob shook his head, took a step back, as if he were afraid I might pull him in. He was on the very edge of the porch. 'No,' he said. 'I will later. I don't want to bother Sarah.'
'It's no bother,' I said. I shifted the teddy bear from one arm to the other.
Jacob shook his head again, and there was an awkward silence while he searched for something to say before he left.
