A Simple Plan Page 28

  My second gift to Sarah was a grand piano. This was something she'd always wanted, ever since she was little. She didn't know how to play, it had nothing to do with that; a piano simply represented to her, I think, the concrete embodiment of wealth and status, and as such it seemed fitting that I should give it to her now.

  I shopped around, calling music stores from work, astonished at how much pianos cost. I'd had no idea; it was something I'd never even considered. I ended up finding one that had been marked down because there was an imperfection in its varnish, a large, hand-shaped stain on its lid. It cost me $2,400, virtually the balance of our account.

  I had them deliver it to the house the morning of the twelfth. Sarah was working at the library, so she wasn't there when it arrived. It came in with its legs off, three men straining to carry it. I had them reassemble it in the living room. It looked absurd there, monstrous, dwarfing the rest of the furniture, but I was pleased with it. It was something special, something she'd like, and I knew it would look better in our next house.

  I taped a little red bow to a sheet and draped it across the piano. I'd saved the page from the catalog with the condominium on it, and I put this next to the bow. Then I sat down and waited for her to return.

  SARAH seemed much more impressed with the piano than the condo, perhaps because it was a physical presence in the room, concrete, undeniable, something whose keys she could touch and make a sound, rather than a mere picture of an object thousands of miles away. It was an actuality, whereas the condo remained nothing more than a promise.

  "Oh, Hank," she said as soon as she saw it, "you've made me so happy."

  She tapped out "When the Saints Go Marching In," the only song she knew. She opened the lid and looked at the strings. She pressed the pedals with her feet, ran her hands across the keys. She tried to sound out "Frere Jacques" for Amanda but couldn't seem to get it right, and each time she made a mistake the baby would begin to cry.

  Later that night -- after the unveiling of the gifts; after a special dinner of cornish hens and stuffing and green beans and mashed potatoes, all of which I cooked myself; and after two bottles of wine -- we made love on top of the piano.

  It was Sarah's idea. I was nervous that it might collapse beneath our weight, but she took off her clothes and jumped right up onto its lid, reclining there on her elbows with her legs spread wide.

  "Come on." She smiled at me.

  We were both a little drunk.

  I stripped out of my own clothes and slowly, listening all the time for the warning creak of a collapsing leg, climbed up on top of her.

  It was a remarkable experience. The piano's hollow chamber echoed our own sighs and moans back up at us, returning them subtly altered -- adding a peculiar resonance and fullness, embedding within them the soft choral vibrations of its tautly stretched wires.

  "This is the beginning of our new life," Sarah whispered in the middle of it, her mouth pressed up tight against my ear, making her breath sound like a scuba diver's, deep and passionate and strangely distant.

  As I nodded in response, I banged my knee down on the piano's lid, and the whole thing seemed to moan for a moment, a long, mournful echo seeping up through the wood, making it vibrate, so that it trembled against our naked bodies.

  When we finished, Sarah got a bottle of furniture polish from the hall closet and wiped away our sweat.

  MONDAY, on my lunch break, I made a quick visit to the cemetery. I walked from spot to spot, reading headstones -- Jacob's, my parents', Pederson's, Lou's, Nancy's, Sonny's.

  It was a cloudy afternoon, gray and overcast, the sky hanging low above the ground, pressing down like a tarp. The view was desolate, empty. Beyond the church and the low scattering of tombstones, there was nothing but the horizon, and it was miles away. A bouquet of flowers was resting beside the Pederson plot, chrysanthemums -- yellows and reds -- their vivid colors looking garish in the dim light, more like splashes of paint from a passing vandal than the sincere symbols of grief they were meant to be. Inside St. Jude's, someone was practicing the organ. I could hear the sound coming faintly through the brick wall, the same low, throbbing sequence of notes repeated over and over again.

  It hadn't snowed since the last rush of funerals, nothing more than the brief flurry the day Jacob was buried, and the fresher of the graves stood out along the cemetery's floor, a handful of large, black rectangles, each one slightly sunken.

  When I was little I'd pictured death as an animated pool of water. It looked just like a puddle, a little darker maybe, a little deeper than usual, but when you walked by, it would reach up with two liquid arms and pull you into itself, swallowing you down. I have no idea where I got this image, but I held on to it for a long time, probably until I was ten or eleven years old. It may've been something my mother had told me once, the way she had of explaining it to children. If this were true, then Jacob must've held the same idea.

  The fresh graves looked like puddles.

  Before leaving, I stood for a few minutes beside our family plot. Jacob's name had been chiseled onto the marker, right beneath our father's. The blank spot in the stone's bottom-right-hand corner was waiting for me, I knew, and it was a nice feeling to realize that -- unless I were to die within the next few months -- it would never be filled in. I was going to be buried a long way from here, under a different name, and thinking this gave me an instant's rush of happiness. It was the best I'd felt since the shootings, the most confident in our course: for perhaps the first and only time, what we'd gotten seemed worth the price we'd paid. We were escaping our lives. That cube of granite had been my fate, my destination, and I'd broken away from it. In a few months, I'd set out into the world, free from everything that had formerly bound me. I would re-create myself, would chart my own path. I would dictate my destiny.

  THURSDAY evening I returned from work and found Sarah in the kitchen, crying.

  At first I wasn't sure. All I noticed was a stiffness, a strained formality, as if she were angry with me. She was standing at the sink washing dishes. I came in, still in my suit and tie, and sat down at the table to keep her company. I asked her some questions about her day, and she answered them in monosyllables, short little grunts from deep in her throat. She wasn't looking at me; her head was tucked down against her chest, watching her hands working at the dishes in the soapy water.

  "You okay?" I asked finally.

  She nodded, not turning around, her shoulders hunched forward, making her back look round. The plates clinked together in the sink.

  "Sarah?"

  She didn't answer, so I got up and came to the counter. When I touched her on the shoulder, she seemed to freeze, as if in fright.

  "What's the matter?" I asked, and then, leaning forward to catch her eye, I saw the tears rolling slowly down her face.

  Sarah wasn't a crier; I could count the number of times I'd seen her in tears on the fingers of one hand. They appeared only in the wake of major tragedies, so my first reaction to her weeping was one of panic and fear. I thought immediately of the baby.

  "Where's Amanda?" I asked quickly.

  She continued to work at the dishes. She turned her face off to the side, made a sniffling sound. "Upstairs."

  "She's all right?"

  Sarah nodded. "She's sleeping."

  I reached forward and turned off the water. In the absence of its rushing, the kitchen took on a sudden silence, and it seemed to add a peculiar weight to the moment, which frightened me.

  "What's going on?" I asked. I slid my arm along her back until I had her in a half embrace. She stood there rigid for a second, her hands draped over the edge of the sink, as if they'd been broken at the wrists, then she let herself fall toward me, let a sob work its way raggedly up through her chest. I hugged her with both arms.

  She cried for a while, returning my embrace, her wet hands dripping soapy water down my neck and onto the back of my suit.

  "It's all right," I whispered. "It's all right."

 
When she quieted down, I brought her over to the table.

  "I can't work at the library anymore," she said, sitting down.

  "They fired you?" I couldn't imagine how she could possibly be fired from the library.

  She shook her head. "They asked me not to bring Amanda anymore. People were complaining about the noise." She wiped at her cheek with her hand. "They said I can come back after she's outgrown her crying."

  I leaned forward and took her by the hand. "It's not like you really need the job right now."

  "I know. It's just..."

  "We've got enough money without it." I smiled.

  "I know," she said again.

  "It doesn't really seem like it's worth crying over."

  "Oh, Hank. I'm not crying over that."

  I looked at her in surprise. "What're you crying for?"

  She wiped at her face again. Then she shut her eyes. "It's complicated. It's all sorts of things put together."

  "Is it about what we've done?"

  My voice must've come out strange -- nervous maybe, or scared -- because she opened her eyes at the sound of it. She looked directly at me, as if she were appraising me. Then she shook her head.

  "It's nothing," she said. "It's just me being tired."

  THAT weekend a thaw arrived.

  Saturday the temperature rose to fifty degrees, and everything, the whole world, began to melt in a sudden dripping, sliding, oozing rush. Large, perfectly white clouds floated across the sky throughout the afternoon, pushed gently northward by the moist touch of a southerly wind. The air smelled deceptively of spring.

  Sunday was even warmer; the thermometer eased its way up into the lower sixties, accelerating the melting. By late morning, the ground had begun to reappear in small squares and slashes the size of footprints, dark against the dirty whiteness of the retreating snow, and in the evening, when I went out to untie the dog and put him in the garage, I found him sitting in an inch-deep puddle of mud. The earth was unveiling itself.

  I had trouble falling asleep that night. Water dripped loudly from the eaves beyond the window with an incessant ticktock sound. The house creaked and moaned. There was a sense of movement in the air, of things breaking free, coming undone.

  I lay in bed and tried to trick my body into fatigue, consciously relaxing muscles, forcing my breathing to slow and deepen, but every time I shut my eyes, a vivid image of the plane floated up before me. It was lying on its belly in the orchard, its wings and fuselage free of snow, its metal skin glinting brightly in the sunshine, like a beacon, attracting the eye. Looking down at it in my head, I could sense it waiting, could feel its impatience. It was yearning to be found.

  ON WEDNESDAY of that week, a strange thing happened to me. I was sitting at my desk, working on an account discrepancy, when I heard Jacob's voice out in the lobby.

  It wasn't his voice, of course, I knew that, but its tone and pitch were so eerily familiar that I couldn't resist rising from my chair, walking quietly over to my door, opening it, and peeking out.

  There was a fat man there, a man I'd never seen before. He wasn't a customer; he'd merely come inside to ask for directions.

  He didn't look at all like Jacob. He was old, balding, with a thick, drooping mustache, and as I watched him speak, watched the unfamiliar gestures of his hands, the way his face moved above his mouth, the illusion that he was using Jacob's voice gradually disappeared. It started to sound a little too throaty, a little too rough. It was an old man's voice.

  But then I shut my eyes, and it instantly became my brother's once again. I stood there very still, focusing my whole mind on the sound of it, and, listening, I felt an irresistible surge of sadness and loss rise up within myself. It was overwhelming, stronger than anything I'd ever felt before, so powerful that it had an actual physical effect on me, like a wave of nausea. I bent forward slightly at the waist, as if I'd been hit in the stomach.

  "Mr. Mitchell?" I heard.

  I opened my eyes, straightened my body. Cheryl was standing behind the checkout counter, staring at me with an expression of grave concern. The fat man stood in the center of the lobby, his right hand touching the corner of his mustache.

  "Are you all right?" Cheryl asked. She seemed as if she were about to come running toward me.

  I tried quickly to recall the past few moments in my mind, to see if I'd made some sort of sound standing there, a groan, or a gasp, but everything was blank. "I'm fine," I said. I cleared my throat, smiled toward the fat man. He gave me a friendly nod, and I returned it.

  Then I stepped back into my office and shut the door.

  THAT evening I read an article in the paper about a giant confidence game that had been operating lately in the Midwest, bilking millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors.

  A fake advertisement would be placed in the local paper, announcing a government sale of goods seized in drug raids. People would bid on this merchandise sight unseen, apparently believing that since the government was running the auction nothing fraudulent could be occurring. The con men would have several confederates mixed in with the crowd, to help artificially raise the bidding. Their victims would make payments by check, assuming that they'd bought things at less than 10 percent of their appraised value, then show up two weeks later to find that their purchases were nonexistent, simply photographs in a catalog.

  I took this news with remarkable calm. My check had cleared the day before; I'd gone by the bank to see. My account balance was listed as $1,878.21. I'd given away $31,000, virtually our entire savings, but I couldn't force myself to believe it. It seemed like too horrible a thing to have happened so quietly. A calamity had struck, undoubtedly one of the worst I'd ever encountered, but it had arrived with such little fanfare, a tiny article in the middle of the paper, that I had trouble accepting it. I needed something more, needed to be woken from my sleep late at night by the ringing of the phone, needed the sound of sirens in the distance, needed a sudden flash of pain in the center of my chest.

  I surprised myself, in fact, by feeling more reassurance than grief. As long as I maintained the image of the duffel bag in my mind, I could make the $31,000 seem inconsequential, a minor mistake, an unfortunate lapse in judgment. And I found the idea of someone stealing it, rather than my merely losing it, strangely comforting. There were men out there who were just as bad as me, even worse, a whole gang of them traveling the country and robbing innocent people of their savings. It made what I'd done seem a little more explicable, a little more natural. It made it seem easier to understand.

  There was a tremor of fear, too, of course -- I can't deny that -- a cold, little kernel of terror mixed in with my reassurance. The safety net that I'd strung up to aid our descent into crime, the idea of burning the packets at the first sign of trouble, had been swept away. We could never relinquish the money now, no matter what might happen in the future, because without it we had nothing. My last illusion of freedom had been stripped from me -- I realized this with perfect lucidity -- and it was this thought that lay at the core of my fear. I was trapped: from here on out, all my decisions about the money would be dictated by its indispensability; they would become choices of necessity rather than desire.

  When I'd finished studying the article, I tore it out of the paper and flushed it down the toilet. I didn't want Sarah to know until we were safe and far away.

  LATE that night, while I was untying Mary Beth from his tree to take him into the garage, I noticed that the raw spots beneath his collar had grown dramatically worse. They were open sores now, bleeding, oozing runny streams of pus. Mud was plastered into the surrounding fur.

  Seeing this, I felt a burst of compassion for him. I knelt beside him on the wet ground and tried to loosen his collar a notch, but as soon as I touched him, he tucked his head, and, very quickly, very neatly, like someone pruning a branch off a bush, bit me on my wrist.

  I jumped up, shocked, and he cowered before me in the mud. I'd never been bitten by a dog before, and I wasn't sure
how I ought to react. I considered kicking him, stomping into the house and leaving him to spend the night out in the yard but then decided against it. I wasn't really angry, I realized; I merely felt like I ought to be.

  I carefully inspected my wrist. The sun was set, and the yard was dark, but just by the way it felt, I could tell that the dog hadn't broken the skin. It was only a nip, a sort of slap rather than a closed-fisted blow.

  I watched Mary Beth lie down in the mud and begin to lick at his paws. Something, I knew, had to be done about him. He was sick, unhappy, like an animal in the zoo, tied up all day, imprisoned during the night.

  The front light flicked on, and Sarah leaned out the door. "Hank?" she called.

  I turned toward her, still holding my wrist in my hand.

  "What're you doing?" she asked.

  "The dog bit me."

  "What?" She hadn't heard.

  "Nothing," I said. I bent down and carefully took Mary Beth by his collar. He let me do it. "I'm putting him in the garage," I said to Sarah.

  THURSDAY night, late, I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, my body literally shaking with an irrational, panic-filled sense of urgency. Deep in the depths of sleep, I'd devised a plan, and now I turned to wake Sarah and tell her.

  "Sarah," I hissed, shaking her shoulder.

  She rolled away from my hand. "Stop it." She groaned.

  I turned on the light and pulled her toward me. "Sarah," I whispered, staring down at her, waiting for her eyes to open. When they did, I said, "I know how to get rid of the plane."

  "What?" She glanced toward Amanda's crib, then blinked up at me, her face still half asleep.

  "I'm going to rent a blowtorch. We'll take it out into the woods and cut the plane into little pieces."