A Simple Plan (18 page)

He shook his head. “A bit more than that.” He winked. “This is just good-faith money, to hold people off till I get my split.”

“How much did you lose?”

“All I need is two thousand, Hank.”

“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.”

A
FTER
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.

T
HE 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.

“You decide on a name yet?” he asked.

I nodded. “Amanda.”

“That’s nice.”

“It’s after Sarah’s grandmother. It’s Latin. It means worthy of being loved.”

“That’s real nice,” Jacob said. “I like it.”

I nodded again. “You sure you won’t come up?”

He shook his head. He stepped off the porch, but then he stopped. “Hank,” he said. “I wanted to…” He faded off, glanced toward the truck.

“What?”

“Can I borrow some money?”

I frowned, shifting the teddy bear back to my other arm. “How much?”

He put his hands into his coat pockets, stared down at his boots. “Hundred and fifty?”

“A hundred and fifty dollars?”

He nodded.

“Why do you need that much money, Jacob?”

“I got to pay my rent. I’ll get my unemployment check next week, but I can’t wait that long.”

“When would you pay me back?”

He shrugged. “I was sort of hoping you could just take it out of my share of the money.”

“Are you even trying to find a job?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “No.”

I tried unsuccessfully to keep my voice free from judgment. “You’re not even looking?”

“Why should I look for a job?” He lowered his voice into a whisper. “Lou told me you agreed to split up the money.”

I stared down at his chest, considering this. I saw fairly clearly that I couldn’t tell him I wasn’t going to give them their shares until the summer—he’d tell Lou, and I wasn’t ready for that. But if I wanted to pretend otherwise, then I had no reason not to loan him the money. Behind him his truck rumbled and coughed in the driveway, spitting out clouds of bluish smoke. All up and down the street my neighbors’ houses were absolutely quiet, as if abandoned, their windows blank. It was trash day, and plastic garbage cans lined the curb.

“Wait here,” I said. “I’ve got to go upstairs and get my checkbook.”

S
ARAH
unwrapped the teddy bear while I stood at my dresser and wrote out Jacob’s check. The baby was sound asleep in her crib.

“It’s used,” Sarah whispered, a note of disgust running through her voice.

I went over to look at the bear. There was nothing obviously wrong with it—no stains or holes, no missing eyes or protruding hunks of stuffing—but it had an undeniably rumpled look. It was old, used. It had dark brown fur, almost black, and a brass key inserted in its back.

Sarah wound the key. When she let it go, music came out of the bear’s chest, a man’s voice singing:
“Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques/Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?”
As soon as I heard it, I realized why the bear looked so old.

“It was his bear,” I said.

“Jacob’s?”

“When he was little.”

The music continued, sounding flat and far away beneath the teddy bear’s fur:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines.

Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

Sarah held the bear up in front of her, reappraising it. The music gradually slowed—each note drawing itself out as if it would be the very last—but it didn’t stop.

“I guess it’s sweet of him, isn’t it?” she said. She sniffed at the bear.

I took the tissue paper and shoved it into the wastebasket beside the bed. “I wonder where he’s kept it all these years.”

“Is he coming up?”

“No,” I said, moving toward the door. “He’s in a rush.”

Sarah started to wind up the bear again. “What’s the check for?”

“Jacob,” I said, over my shoulder. I was stepping out into the hallway.

“He’s borrowing money?”

I didn’t answer her.

T
HE BABY
started to cry as I made my way back up the stairs. She began softly—something between a suppressed cough and a squawking sound like a bird might make—but just as I entered the bedroom, she suddenly, as if at the twist of a knob, increased her volume to a full-blown wail.

I lifted her from the crib and carried her to the bed. She started to cry even harder when I picked her up, her whole body tensing beneath my hands, her face going a brilliant crimson, as if she were about to pop. I was still surprised by her weight; I hadn’t thought a baby could be so heavy, and there was a peculiar denseness about her, too, as if she were full of water. Her head was huge and round; it seemed to take up half her body.

Sarah extended her arms toward me, lifting the baby from my hands, a pained expression on her face.

“Shhh,” she said. “Amanda. Shhh.”

The teddy bear was sitting beside her, its back to the headboard, its little black paws reaching out, as if it also had wanted to comfort the crying infant. Sarah held Amanda in the crook of her arm and with her free hand unbuttoned her pajama top, exposing her left breast.

I turned away, walked back toward the crib, and looked out the window. I was still embarrassed by the sight of Sarah nursing Amanda. It gave me a creepy feeling, the thought of the baby sucking fluid out of her. It seemed unnatural, horrid; it made me think of leeches.

I gazed down at the front yard. It was empty: Jacob and his truck had disappeared. The day was still, beautiful, a postcard of winter. Sunlight shimmered off frozen surfaces; the trees laid thick, precise shadows across the snow. The gutters on the garage were swaybacked with icicles, and I made a mental note to knock them off the next time I went outside.

When my eyes strayed upward from the icicles, they discovered, on the very peak of the garage, the dark outline of a large black bird. My hand moved involuntarily toward my forehead.

“There’s a crow on the garage roof,” I said.

Sarah didn’t respond. I massaged the skin above my eyebrows. It was perfectly smooth; the bump had left no scar. The baby was making a cooing sound behind me while she nursed, steady and insistent.

After a minute or so Sarah called my name. “Hank?” she said softly.

I watched the crow hop back and forth along the garage roof’s snowy peak. “Yes?”

“I thought up a plan while I was in the hospital.”

“A plan?”

“For making sure Lou doesn’t tell.”

I turned to face her. My shadow, framed in the window’s square of sunlight, fell gigantically across the bedroom floor, my head looking monstrous on my shoulders, like a pumpkin. Sarah was bent over Amanda, smiling in an exaggerated manner—her eyebrows raised high on her forehead; her nostrils flared; her lips parted, showing her teeth. The baby ignored her, frantically sucking at her breast. When Sarah turned toward me, the smile dropped from her face.

“It’s kind of silly,” she said, “but if we do it right, it might work.”

I came over and sat at the foot of the bed. Sarah turned back to Amanda, stroked the baby’s cheek with her fingertips.

“Yes,” she whispered. “You’re a hungry little girl, aren’t you?” Amanda’s lips worked eagerly at her nipple.

“Go on,” I said.

“I want you to tape him confessing to Pederson’s murder.”

I stared at her. “What’re you talking about?”

“That’s my plan,” she said. “That’s how we’re going to keep him from turning you in.” She grinned at me, as if she were very pleased with this idea.

“Is this supposed to be funny?”

“Of course not,” she said, surprised.

“Why would he confess to something he didn’t do?”

“You and Jacob invite him out for drinks; you get him drunk; you take him back to his house, and you start joking about confessing to the police. You take turns pretending to do it—you first, Jacob second, Lou last—and when Lou does it, you tape him.”

I assumed that there had to be something logical embedded within what she’d just proposed, and I tried for the next moment or so to find it.

“That’s insane,” I said finally. “There’s no way it would work.”

“Jacob helps you. That’s the key. If Jacob eggs him on, then he’ll do it.”

“But even if we could get him to say it—and I doubt we could—it wouldn’t mean anything. No one would ever believe it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “We just need something to scare him with. If we tape him saying it, and we let him hear it, there’s no way he’ll turn you in.”

Amanda finished nursing. Sarah took a dish towel from the night table and draped it across her shoulder. Then she picked up the baby and began to burp her. She pulled her pajama top back across her breast but didn’t button it. They were the pajamas I’d given her for Christmas. She hadn’t fit into them then—her stomach had been too large—so this was the first time I’d seen them on her. They were flannel, white with little green flowers. I could remember buying them at the mall in Toledo, could remember wrapping them in a box on Christmas Eve and then her opening them the next morning, holding them up against her swollen belly, but it all seemed as though it had happened ages ago. We’d come so far since then, so much had happened—I’d lied, stolen, murdered—and now that past, so close in a purely temporal sense, was utterly irrecoverable. It was a terrifying thing to recognize, the gulf that separated the two of us then—opening our presents together on the floor beneath the tree, a fire burning on the hearth—from the two of us now, sitting here in our bedroom, plotting how to blackmail Lou and frighten him into silence. And we’d crossed it not in any great leap but in little, nearly imperceptible steps, so that we never really noticed the distance we were traveling. We’d edged our way into it; we’d done it without changing.

“All you have to do is get him to understand that you and Jacob could claim he killed Pederson just as easily as he could claim you did it. If you make him think that Jacob would side with you, he’ll never risk bringing in the police.”

“This is dumb, Sarah.”

She glanced up from the baby. “What harm could come from trying it?”

“Jacob won’t want to help.”

“Then you’ll have to make him. It won’t work without him.”

“He’d be betraying his best friend.”

“You’re his brother, Hank. He’ll do it if you show him how important it is. You just have to get him so he’s as scared of Lou as we are.” She glanced up at me, pushed her hair away from her face. There were hollows beneath her eyes, dark, bruised-looking circles. She needed to sleep. “It won’t end when Lou has his money. He’ll be hanging over us for the rest of our lives. The only way it’ll stop is if we can make him fear us as much as we fear him.”

“You’re saying the tape’ll make him fear us?”

“I know it will.”

I didn’t say anything. I still couldn’t imagine Lou confessing to killing Pederson, not even in jest.

“We should at least try, Hank, shouldn’t we? We can’t lose anything by trying.”

She was right, of course, or at least it seemed as if she was. But how could I have known then all the loss to which her simple plan would ultimately lead? I could see no risk: if it worked, it would save us, and if it didn’t, we’d just be right back where we started.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to Jacob. I’ll see if I can get him to do it.”

I
TOOK
the next day off so I could help Sarah with the baby.