A Simple Plan (14 page)

“I’m saying don’t scare him. All you’ll end up doing is forcing him into Lou’s arms. They don’t have families like you. They could just walk in here, shoot you, take the money, and run off.”

“The money’s hidden. They don’t know where it is.”

“Let’s say they came in here with a gun, held it to your head, told you to show them where it was.”

“They’d never do it.”

“Let’s say they held the gun to me.” She patted her stomach. “Held it right here.”

I pushed the spaghetti around my plate with my fork. “I can’t really imagine Jacob doing that, can you?”

“Can you imagine him killing Pederson?”

I didn’t answer. Here was another opening; I sensed it beckoning to me, and I hesitated. It would merely be a matter of speaking, no more than a few words, a simple declarative sentence. I sat there for perhaps thirty seconds, staring across at Sarah, trying desperately to survey all the possible consequences, both of speaking and of keeping silent, but they evaded me, hovering just beyond the edge of my vision, so when I finally made my choice, I did it blindly.

“Can you?” she prodded.

“Jacob didn’t kill Pederson,” I said, and, as in my office the day before, there was the sudden lightening of confession. I shifted my body in the chair, searched Sarah’s face for a reaction.

She stared across the table at me, expressionless. “You told me—”

I shook my head. “He knocked him out, and we thought he was dead. But when I picked him up to set him on his snowmobile, he let out a moan, and I had to finish him off myself.”

“You killed him?” she asked.

I nodded, a great wave of relief rolling over my body. “I killed him.”

Sarah leaned across the table. “How?”

“I used his scarf. I smothered him.”

She touched her chin with her fingertips, shocked, and for a brief moment her face seemed to open, so that I could look inside and watch my words slowly taking hold. I saw bewilderment there, a quick flicker of fear, and then a glance at me that had something like repulsion in it, a glance that put a distance between us, pushing me away. For an instant she was frightened, but then, as quickly as it had come, it passed; her face closed, and she brought me back.

“Why didn’t Jacob do it?” she asked.

“He was already gone. I’d sent him off to meet me at the bridge.”

“You were alone?”

I nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

I struggled for a truthful answer. “I thought it might frighten you.”

“Frighten me?”

“Upset you.”

Sarah didn’t say anything. She was following some thought inside her head, rearranging things to fit this new scenario, and it gave me a panicky feeling to watch her, as if she were hiding herself from me, pretending to a composure that she didn’t really feel.

“Does it?” I asked.

She looked at me for a second, but only halfway, with her eyes and nothing more. Her mind was still somewhere else. “Does it what?”

“Upset you?”

“It’s…,” she started. She had to concentrate to find a word. “It’s done.”

“Done?”

“I don’t think I would’ve wanted you to do it, but now that it’s happened, I can understand why.”

“But you wish I hadn’t?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Then she shook her head. “I guess not. We would’ve lost the money. Jacob would’ve been arrested.”

I thought about this for a second, searching her face for some further reaction. “Would you’ve done the same thing? If you’d been there instead of me?”

“Oh, Hank. How could I…”

“I just want to know if it’s possible.”

She shut her eyes, as if attempting to imagine herself crouched over Pederson’s body, his scarf balled up in her hand. “Maybe,” she said finally, her voice a whisper. “Maybe I would’ve.”

I couldn’t believe this, refused to, and yet, even as I did so, sensed that it might be true. She might’ve killed him just like I had. After all, would I have imagined Jacob knocking Pederson down, kicking him in the chest and head? Or, more to the point, would I have imagined myself smothering the old man with his scarf? No, I thought, of course not.

I saw with a shudder that not only couldn’t I predict the actions of those around me, I couldn’t even reliably predict my own. It seemed like a bad sign; it seemed to indicate that we’d wandered, mapless, into a new territory. We were as good as lost.

“Jacob doesn’t know?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I told him.”

Sarah winced. “Why?”

“It seemed like he was falling apart. He was crying. I thought it’d be easier on him if he knew that we shared the blame.”

“He’s going to use it against you.”

“Use it against me? How could he use it against me? If one of us is going to get in trouble, we both will.”

“Especially if you threaten him. He’ll go to Lou, and they’ll use it to plot against us.”

“This is paranoia, Sarah. This isn’t real.”

“We’re keeping secrets from Jacob, aren’t we?”

I nodded.

“And you and Jacob are keeping secrets from Lou?”

I nodded again.

“Then why can’t you believe that he and Lou are keeping secrets from us, too?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

L
ATE IN
the evening, around eleven, Sarah’s stepmother, Millie, called, long distance from Miami. Sarah’s mother and father, like mine, were both dead. Her mother had died when Sarah was very young, her father right after she and I were married.

Millie had become Sarah’s stepmother when Sarah was still in her early teens, but they’d never been very close. The last time they’d seen each other was at my father-in-law’s funeral. They talked once a month on the phone, though, a ritual that they both participated in seemingly more out of a sense of familial obligation than from any desire to speak with each other.

Sarah had grown up in southern Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky. Millie had been a nurse in the hospital where Sarah’s mother died, slowly, of leukemia. That’s where she’d met Sarah’s father. She was originally from West Virginia and, even after a full decade in Miami, had a slight southern accent, which Sarah picked up from her whenever they talked.

Their calls were long collective monologues—Millie drawled on about the mundane activities of her small coterie of friends, bemoaned the increasing decrepitude of Miami in general and her apartment complex in particular, and ended with an irrelevant anecdote or two from Sarah’s father’s life. Sarah talked about her pregnancy, about me and the cold weather we’d been having, about things she’d read recently in the paper or seen on TV. They never asked each other questions; there was very little interaction between them at all. They talked at each other for twenty minutes, and then, as if they’d agreed beforehand upon a mutually acceptable time limit, said good-bye and hung up.

Tonight Millie called just as we were getting into bed. When I realized who it was, I whispered to Sarah that I was going downstairs to get a snack. I didn’t like being in the room with her when she talked on the phone; it made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

In the kitchen, I poured myself some milk and made a cheese sandwich. I ate standing up at the counter, in the dark. Through the side window, ten yards away across a thin strip of lawn, was my next-door neighbor’s house, a mirror image of my own—everything exactly the same, but reversed. A TV was on in the master bedroom; I could see its bluish flickering through the upstairs window, like light reflected off a pool.

I stood there in the darkness for several minutes, finishing my sandwich, while I reviewed my earlier conversation with Sarah. I was relieved by the calmness of her reaction to my confession, immeasurably so. I’d been worried that what I’d done would frighten her, that she’d treat me suddenly as some sort of psychopathic monster, but nothing of the sort had happened. There was no reason for it to have, I saw now—just as I still looked upon myself as a good man despite my crime, Sarah did too. We had our entire past together to weigh against this one anomaly. There’d been that initial shock, of course—I’d seen it—that flash of fear and repulsion, but in a matter of seconds she’d filed it away somewhere, pragmatic as always, and resigned herself to what had happened. It’s done, she’d said and then moved forward, focusing on the future rather than the past. Her concerns were simply practical—whether or not Jacob knew of the crime and what effect this would have on our relations with him and Lou. She was imperturbable, a rock. If all else failed, I realized, standing there in the kitchen, she’d be the one who’d carry us through.

Next door, the television flicked off, and the house went dark. I set my empty glass in the sink.

On my way upstairs I noticed that the dining-room door was partway open. I flipped on the light, peeked inside. There were papers scattered across the wooden table, magazines and brochures.

Upstairs I could hear Sarah’s voice, talking on the phone. It sounded soft, muffled, as if she were speaking to herself. I slid the dining-room door open all the way and stepped inside.

I approached the table hesitantly, as if I were afraid Sarah might hear me, though that wasn’t a conscious thought. I scanned its surface. There were all sorts of brochures, at least thirty, probably more, travel brochures with pictures of tanned women in brightly colored bikinis, of families skiing and riding horses, of men on tennis courts and golf courses, of tables laden with exotic food. “Welcome to Belize!” they read, “Paris in the Spring!” “Crete, Island of the Gods!” “Come Sail the Pacific with Us!” “Nepal, the Land Time Forgot!” Everything was shiny, slick looking; everyone was smiling; all the sentences ended in exclamation points. The magazines—
Condé Nast Traveler, Islands, The Caribbean, The Globetrotter’s Companion
—were exactly the same only larger.

There was a notebook off to the side, folded open, with Sarah’s handwriting in it. At the top of the page was written “Travel.” Below it were listed the names of cities and countries around the globe, each one numbered, apparently in order of preference. The first one was Rome, the second Australia. On the facing page was another list, this one headed “Things to Learn.” Below it were listed such things as sailing, skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding. It was a very long list, reaching to just above the bottom of the page.

These were Sarah’s wish lists, I realized with a pang; this was what she dreamed of doing with the money. My eyes ran up and down the pages: Switzerland, Mexico, Antigua, Moscow, New York City, Chile, London, India, the Hebrides…. Tennis, French, windsurfing, waterskiing, German, art history, golf…. The lists went on and on, places I’d never heardher mention, ambitions I’d never dreamed she had.

Ever since I’d met her, I’d thought of Sarah as more confident and decisive than myself. She’d been the one to ask me out on our first date; she’d been the one to initiate our first sexual encounter; she’d been the one to suggest that we get engaged. She’d picked the wedding date (April 17), planned the honeymoon (a ten-day trip to Naples, Florida), and decided when we’d begin trying to have a baby. It seemed like she always managed to get what she wanted, but I realized now, standing there looking down at the magazines and brochures scattered across the table, that she hadn’t really, that behind her facade of assertiveness and drive there must lay an enormous reservoir of disappointment.

Sarah had received a B.S. in petroleum engineering from the University of Toledo. When I first met her, she was planning on moving down to Texas and landing a high-paying job in the oil industry. She wanted to save up her money and buy a ranch someday, a “spread” she called it, with horses and a herd of cattle and her own special brand, an
S
embedded within a heart. Instead, we got married. I was hired by the feedstore in Ashenville in the spring of my senior year, and suddenly, without really choosing it, she found herself in Delphia. There weren’t many openings in northwestern Ohio for someone with an undergraduate degree in petroleum engineering, so she ended up working part-time at the local library. She was a trouper; she always made the best of things, yet there had to be some regret in all this; she had to look back every now and then and mourn the distance that separated her present existence from the one she’d dreamed of as a student. She’d sacrificed something of herself for our relationship, but she’d never attracted attention to it, and so it had seemed natural to me, even inevitable. It wasn’t until tonight that I saw it for the tragedy it was.

Now the money had arrived, and she could begin to dream again. She could draw up her wish lists, page through her magazines, plan her new life. It was a nice way to envision her—full of hope and yearning, making promises to herself that she felt certain she could fulfill—but there was also something terribly sad about it. We were trapped, I realized; we’d crossed a boundary, and we couldn’t go back. The money, by giving us the chance to dream, had also allowed us to begin despising our present lives. My job at the feedstore, our aluminum-siding house, the town around us—we were already looking upon all that as part of our past. It was what we were before we became millionaires; it was stunted, gray, unlivable. And so if, somehow, we were forced to relinquish the money now, we wouldn’t merely be returning to our old lives, starting back up as if nothing of import had happened; we’d be returning having seen them from a distance, having judged them and deemed them unworthy. The damage would be irreparable.

“Hank?” Sarah called from upstairs. “Honey?” She was off the phone.

“Coming,” I yelled. Then I flicked off the light and quietly slid the door shut behind me.