A Simple Plan Page 25

  "We should get the money out of the house," I said, the words seeming to speed up on me as they came out, a thread of panic stitching them tightly together, squeezing out the spaces between them. "We should bury it somewhere, or take it--"

  "Shhh," Sarah soothed. "It's all right, Hank. We're going to be okay."

  "Why don't we just run?" I asked quickly, the idea coming to me as I spoke it.

  "Run?"

  "We could pack right now. Take the money and disappear."

  She gave me a stern look. "Running would be a confession. It's how we'd get caught. We've done what we've done; now we just have to wait and hope for the best."

  A car drove by on the street outside; Sarah watched it pass in the rearview mirror. When she spoke again, her voice came out very soft.

  "The doctors think he's going to die."

  "But I don't want him to die," I said, less because it was true than because it made me feel better to say it.

  She turned and looked at me full in the face. "We can survive this, Hank, if we're careful. We just can't allow ourselves to feel guilty over what we've done, not for a single instant. It was an accident, the whole thing. We didn't have a choice."

  "Jacob wasn't an accident."

  "Yes, he was. From the moment Lou went out and got his gun, the whole thing became an accident. It ceased to be our fault."

  She touched Amanda's cheek with her hand, and the baby, finally, fell silent. Without her crying, the car seemed suddenly to fill with space.

  "What we've done is horrible," Sarah said. "But that doesn't mean we're evil, and it doesn't mean we weren't right to do it. We had to save ourselves. Everything you did, every shot you fired, was in self-defense."

  She turned to look at me, pushing the hair out of her eyes with her hand, waiting for my response. And she was right, I realized. This was what we had to tell ourselves, that what we'd done was understandable, forgivable, that the brutality of our actions had stemmed not from our plans and desires but from the situation in which, through no fault of our own, we'd been trapped. That was the key: we had to envision ourselves not as the perpetrators of this tragedy but simply as two more unfortunates in its extensive cast of victims. It was the only way we'd ever be able to live with what we'd done.

  "Okay?" Sarah whispered.

  I stared down at Amanda, at the round dome of her head: my baby girl.

  "Okay," I whispered back.

  AS WE were climbing from the station wagon, the garage filled suddenly with light. A car had pulled into the driveway. I turned to squint at it.

  "It's the police," Sarah said.

  Hearing her say this, I felt my entire body shiver with exhaustion. If I panicked at all, it was purely intellectual. Jacob's spoken, whispered a voice in the back of my mind. They've come to arrest you. The thought flickered and danced through my skull, birdlike, but it didn't sink in, it didn't touch my depths. I was too tired to be moved like that; I was too near the end of what I could do.

  The lights went out, and the police car took shape, a shadow in the driveway's darkness. The door opened.

  I heard myself moan.

  "Shhh," Sarah said. She reached toward me across the top of the car, her hand stretched out flat against the roof. "They're just here to tell you he died."

  But she was wrong.

  I forced myself down the driveway and found the deputy with the farm boy's face waiting for me by the car.

  He'd come by to drop off Jacob's dog.

  INSIDE, Sarah heated up the leftover lasagna. I ate it at the kitchen table, and she sat across from me. She put some of the lasagna into a bowl for Mary Beth, but he wouldn't eat any of it. He simply sniffed at it, then turned and walked out of the kitchen, whimpering. As I ate, I could hear him moving about the house.

  "He's looking for Jacob, isn't he?" I asked.

  Sarah looked up from her own lasagna. "Shhh, Hank," she said. "Don't."

  I picked at my food. The sight of it made me think of my last dinner with my brother. I felt a wave of emotion at this, not so much sadness or guilt but rather some nameless surge of warmth, a tidal sense of movement within my chest. I was tired enough to cry, but I didn't want Sarah to worry.

  She got up and took her dish to the sink.

  Amanda started to wail again. We both ignored her.

  The dog came into the kitchen, whimpering.

  I stared at my food for a while; then I rested my head in my hands. When I shut my eyes, I saw the doctor's chart with the diagram of Jacob's body on it.

  Sarah was running water in the sink.

  There were red circles everywhere.

  I WOKE up in the bedroom. I was sore, logy. My body felt leaden, as if it had been sewn to the mattress. I assumed that Sarah must've put me to bed, but I didn't remember. I was naked; my clothes were folded in a pile on a chair across the room.

  Judging from the gray light filtering in from behind the shades, I decided it was morning. I didn't feel like turning to see the clock. I wasn't disoriented; I had no trouble remembering what had happened. There was a tender spot on the side of my rib cage, the beginning of a bruise, from where the shotgun had kicked me when I fired it.

  Only gradually did I realize that the phone was ringing. I heard Sarah pick it up downstairs, heard the murmur of her voice. I couldn't make out what she was saying.

  The dog was still whimpering, though he sounded far away now, like he'd been put out in the yard.

  I started to drift off, still tired, but I was pulled back by the sound of Sarah climbing the stairs. Half asleep, my eyes just barely slitted open, I watched her come into the room.

  I could tell by the way she moved that she thought I was still sleeping. She went first to the window, carrying Amanda to her crib. Then she came up beside the bed and began, very slowly, to undress. I watched her body through my eyelashes as she gradually unveiled it, taking off first her sweatshirt, then her bra, then her socks, then her jeans, then her underwear.

  Her breasts were swollen with milk, but she'd already lost much of the weight she'd gained during her pregnancy. Her body was slim, compact, beautiful.

  Amanda started to cry again, mimicking the sound of the dog beyond the window, a slow, soft, and melancholy whimpering.

  Sarah glanced from me to the crib and back again. She seemed to hesitate; then she took off her earrings one at a time and set them down on the night table. They made a clicking sound when they touched the wood.

  Naked, she slipped beneath the covers. She pressed her body tightly against my own, her right leg creeping up across my groin, her arm slipping around my neck. I lay perfectly still. Her skin was soft and powdered, and it made me feel unclean. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, then put her lips up to my ear.

  I knew what she was going to whisper before she even began, but I waited for it, tense, as if it were a surprise.

  "He's dead."

  8

  IT TOOK the media thirty-six hours to locate my house. I suppose they must've thought I lived in Ashenville rather than Delphia, or perhaps they held off for a bit out of some archaic sense of decorum, but by Sunday afternoon they'd arrived in full force. There were vans from each of the three Toledo television stations -- channels 11, 13, and 24 -- as well as one from Channel 5 in Detroit. There were reporters and photographers from the Toledo Blade, the Detroit Free Press, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

  They were all surprisingly polite. They didn't knock on our door, didn't peer through our windows, didn't harass our neighbors. They simply waited until Sarah or I appeared, as we pulled either into or out of the driveway, then they clustered excitedly around the car taking pictures and shouting questions. We passed them with our heads down. I'm not sure what else they might've expected.

  Their ranks gradually thinned in the following days. The television crews left first, that very night, then the newspaper reporters, one by one, drifting off to other, more pressing stories, until finally, a week later, the yard was suddenly empty, quiet; the dark oval
scars of boot prints in the snow and the crumpled remains of coffee cups and sandwich wrappers along the curb were the only signs to remind us of their presence.

  The funerals came and went in quick succession, one right upon the other -- Nancy's on Tuesday, Sonny's on Wednesday, Lou's on Saturday, Jacob's on the following Monday. They were all held at St. Jude's, and I went to each of them.

  The news media came to these, too, and I got to see myself on TV again. Each time I was astonished at how I appeared. I looked somber and mournful, limp with grief -- more serious, more dignified than I'd ever felt in real life.

  Jacob hadn't owned a suit, so I had to buy one for him to wear in his coffin. Though it seemed wrong in a way -- he never would've worn it in real life -- I was still pleased with its effect. The suit made him look young, even fit, a brown paisley tie knotted beneath his chin, a handkerchief sticking up crisply from the breast pocket of his jacket. The casket was closed for the funeral -- all of them were -- but I got to see him before the service. The undertaker had fixed him up; you couldn't have guessed how he'd died. His eyes were shut, and they'd put his glasses on. I stared down at him for a few seconds, then kissed him on the forehead and stepped back, allowing a young man with a white carnation in his lapel to come forward and screw shut the lid.

  Sarah brought Amanda to Jacob's service, and the baby cried through the whole thing, whimpering softly against her mother's chest. Occasionally she broke into a sudden, startling wail, and the sound of it would echo off the low dome of the church, stretching itself out like a scream in a dungeon. Sarah jiggled her and rocked her, hummed songs to her and whispered in her ear, but nothing helped. She refused to be consoled.

  The church was fairly full, though none of the mourners were Jacob's friends. They were people who'd known us growing up, people I was associated with through Raikley's, people who were simply curious. His only real friend had been Lou, and he was already buried, waiting for Jacob in the earth out behind the church.

  The priest had asked me if I wanted to say a few words, but I declined. I said that I wasn't up to it, that I'd break down if I tried, which was probably true. He was understanding and did the eulogy himself, pretending, with a fair amount of success, that he'd known Jacob intimately and thought of him as a son.

  After the service we walked out to the cemetery, where the grave was waiting, a rectangular hole in the snow.

  The priest said a few more words. "The Lord giveth," he said. "The Lord taketh away. Blessed is the name of the Lord."

  It started to snow a little as they lowered the coffin into the earth. I threw a handful of frozen clay in on top, and it landed with a hollow thud. A photo of me doing this showed up in the Blade that evening -- me set off a few feet from the other mourners, dark suited, leaning over the open grave, the dirt falling from my hand, flecks of white drifting down through the air around me. It looked like something from a history book.

  Sarah came forward and dropped a single rose on the casket, Amanda weeping in her arms.

  As we were leaving, I turned to take one last look at the open grave. An old man with a backhoe was already preparing to fill it in, tinkering at his machine. A half dozen yards beyond him there was a woman playing hide-and-seek with two tiny boys among the tombstones. She jogged off and crouched behind a large marble cross, and the boys, giggling, came stumbling toward her through the snow, shouting with glee when they found her. She stood up to run to the next stone, but then, halfway there, saw me watching and froze. The two boys circled her, giddy with laughter.

  I didn't want her to think that I was insulted by her lack of mourning, so I gave her a little wave. The boys saw me, and they waved back, hands high over their heads, like people departing on a cruise, but the woman whispered something to them, and -- instantly -- they stopped.

  I could sense Sarah behind me, waiting to leave, could hear Amanda mewling in her arms. I didn't turn, though; I stood perfectly still.

  It was the closest all that day I came to weeping. I don't know what it was -- perhaps the two boys reminded me of myself and Jacob as children -- but I got a shaking feeling, a tightness in my chest and head, a ringing in my ears. It wasn't grief, or guilt, or remorse. It was simply confusion: a sudden, nearly overwhelming wave of bewilderment over what I'd done. My crimes spread themselves out before me, and I could find no sense in them. They were inscrutable, foreign; they seemed to belong to someone else.

  Sarah brought me back with a touch of her hand.

  "Hank?" she said, her voice soft and concerned.

  I turned slowly toward her.

  "Are you okay?"

  I stared at her, and she smiled calmly back at me. She was wearing a long, black woolen coat and a pair of winter boots. Her hands were tucked into thin leather gloves; a white scarf was wrapped around her neck. She looked startlingly pretty.

  "Amanda's getting cold," she said, taking me by my arm.

  I nodded and then, like a senile old man, allowed myself to be led back down the path to the car.

  As we climbed inside, I heard the backhoe's engine rumble to life.

  IN THE following days the world reached out to us. Neighbors dropped off casseroles on our doorstep, jars of homemade jam, loaves of fresh-baked bread, Pyrex containers full of soup. Acquaintances and coworkers called me up on the telephone, expressing sympathy. Strangers, moved by my story, wrote me letters, quoting psalms and self-help books on grief, offering advice and consolation. It was astonishingly generous, all this unsolicited solicitude, but it had a strangely unsettling effect on me, pointing as it did to an absence in my and Sarah's life that I hadn't really been conscious of before: we had no friends.

  I couldn't exactly say how this had happened. We'd had friends in college; Sarah'd had whole troops of them. But somehow, after we'd moved to Delphia, they'd disappeared, and we hadn't replaced them with new ones. I didn't feel their lack -- I wasn't lonely -- I was simply surprised. It seemed like a bad sign, that we could exist all this time as a closed system, totally satisfying each other's needs, neither of us desiring any outside connection with the world. It seemed deviant, unhealthy. I could imagine what our neighbors would say if we were ever caught -- how they weren't at all astonished, how we'd been so reclusive, so antisocial, so secretive. It was always loners who you heard about committing murders, and that this label might apply to us led me on to further considerations. Perhaps we weren't the normal people trapped in extraordinary situations that we'd been pretending to be. Perhaps we'd done something ourselves to create these situations. Perhaps we were responsible for what had happened.

  I only half-believed this, if at all. In my mind, I could still go through the long succession of events that had culminated, ultimately, in Jacob's funeral and logically explain how each one had led inexorably to the next, how there'd been no alternatives, no branches in the path, no opportunities to turn back and undo what we'd already done. I'd shot Jacob because he was going to break down because I'd shot Sonny because I needed to cover up shooting Nancy because she'd been about to shoot me because Jacob had shot Lou because he'd thought Lou was going to shoot me because Lou was threatening me with his shotgun because I'd tricked him into confessing to Dwight Pederson's murder because Lou'd been blackmailing me because I didn't want to give him his share of the money till the summer because I wanted to make sure no one was looking for the plane...

  It seemed as though I could keep working my way back like that forever, each cause's existence obviating the need for me to accept responsibility for its effect. But the mere fact that I felt the need to do this -- and I was doing it frequently, obsessively, repeating it like a mantra in my head -- seemed reason enough for worry. I was starting, just perceptibly, to doubt myself. I was beginning to question our motives.

  WITHIN a week of Jacob's funeral, the public attention suddenly faded.

  I returned to work that Monday, and my life immediately resumed its daily routine. Every now and then I'd overhear people in town talking about what had happ
ened, and invariably they used words like tragedy and shocking and horrible and senseless. No one seemed to suspect a thing. I was above suspicion: there was no motive; even to speak of the possibility would've been cruel, tactless. After all, I'd lost my brother.

  They found Nancy's robe and lipstick in Sonny's trailer. I saw an interview with one of her coworkers, and she said she thought the affair had been going on for quite some time. She didn't say why she thought this, and the reporter didn't ask her; her retroactive suspicion was enough. People talked about how belligerent Lou had been at the Wrangler that night, how he'd accused some kid of trying to trip him. They remembered him as being angry, combative, a drunk teetering on the edge of violence. And finally, to add the last note of credence to our story, the Toledo Blade published an article about Lou's gambling debts. His life had been falling apart, they said, disintegrating. He'd been a time bomb, a calamity waiting to happen.

  The baby grew. She learned to roll over, which her mother claimed was precocious. Sarah started her job at the Delphia library again, part-time. She brought Amanda with her and laid her on the floor behind the checkout counter while she worked.

  February slowly passed.

  I KEPT putting off cleaning out Jacob's apartment. Finally, toward the end of the month, his landlord sent me a note at the feedstore, saying it had to be done by the first of March.

  I continued to procrastinate right up to the twenty-ninth. It was a Monday, and I left work an hour early, swinging by the grocery store first to pick up some old boxes. I carried these, along with a thick roll of tape from Raikley's, over to the hardware store and climbed the steep flight of stairs to Jacob's room.

  Inside, I found things exactly as I'd remembered them. There was the same smell, the same sordidness, the same disarray. The same dust motes floated through the air, the same empty beer bottles studded the floor, the same dirty sheets sat half stripped in a shapeless mound at the foot of the bed.