A Simple Plan (29 page)

“I know,” I said.

“If there’s anything I can do…”

“That’s awful kind of you, Carl.”

The chime rang, the doors parted. We were at the second floor. I stepped outside. Carl held the doors open with his arm. “He say anything to you while you were in there?”

“Jacob?”

Carl nodded.

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

I glanced up and down the hallway. There were two doctors off to the right, talking quietly together. To the left, I could hear a woman’s laughter. Carl kept his arm across the doors.

“What were you three doing together last night, anyway?” he asked.

I looked closely at him, searching his face for some sign of suspicion. He’d been there when the deputies had asked the same question, and he’d heard my answer. The elevator tried to close, bucking his arm, but he held it back.

“We were celebrating the baby. Jacob took me out.”

Carl nodded. He seemed to be waiting for something else.

“I didn’t really want to go,” I said. “But he was all excited about being an uncle, and I was afraid I’d hurt his feelings if I turned him down.”

The elevator tried to close again.

“Did Lou say anything to Jacob before he shot him?”

“Say anything?”

“Did he swear at him, or call him names?”

I shook my head. “He just opened the door, raised his gun, and pulled the trigger.”

Down the hallway, the doctors parted, and one of them started to walk toward us. His shoes squeaked against the tiled floor.

“Going down?” he called. Carl leaned his head out and nodded.

“What about that night when I saw you three over by the nature preserve?”

My heart jumped at the mention of our encounter there. I’d hoped that he’d forgotten that by now. “What about it?” I said.

“What were you three doing then?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, couldn’t remember what, if anything, I’d told him at the time. I strained and strained, but my mind was too tired. The doctor was nearly upon us. “It was New Year’s Eve,” I said, trying to stall. It was all I could come up with.

“You guys were going out?”

I knew that this was wrong, but I couldn’t come up with anything else, so I nodded slowly at him. Then the doctor was there, sliding past me into the elevator. Carl stepped back.

“Don’t hesitate to call me if you need something, Hank,” he said, as the doors slid shut. “You know I’d be glad to help any way I could.”

T
HOUGH
the doctors said I might as well leave, I stayed at the hospital for the rest of the afternoon. Jacob drifted in and out of consciousness, but I wasn’t allowed to see him again. The doctors remained pessimistic.

Around five, as it was starting to get dark, Amanda began to cry. Sarah tried nursing her, then singing to her, then walking her around the room, but she refused to be quieted. Her crying got louder and louder. The sound of it gave me a headache, started to make the room seem smaller, and I asked Sarah to take her home.

She told me to come with them.

“You’re not doing anything here, Hank,” she said. “It’s out of our hands now.”

Amanda wailed and wailed, her tiny face red with the effort. I watched her cry, trying to think, but I was too tired. Finally, with a horrible wrenching feeling, as if something heavy were slipping from my grasp, I nodded to Sarah.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

I
FELT
a wonderful sense of release as I climbed into the car. All day long I’d been hoarding secrets way down inside myself, things I could say only to Sarah.

I could tell her now what had happened. Then I would go home, get something to eat, and fall asleep. And while I did that, while I slept, Jacob’s torn body, in its battle for life, would decide my fate.

Sarah put the baby into her safety seat in back, then climbed behind the wheel. I sat beside her, slumped over, my body drooping, drained. My muscles ached with fatigue; I was nauseated with it. Outside, the sun had set; the sky was a deep navy blue, edging each second a little closer to black. Stars were coming out, one by one. There was no moon.

I rested my head against the window, letting its coolness keep me awake. I didn’t begin to talk until we were out of the parking lot and on our way home. Then I told Sarah everything. I told her about the bar and the drinking, about the drive back to Lou’s, and how we tricked him into confessing. I told her about Lou getting his gun, about Jacob shooting him, and me shooting Nancy. I told her about going to Sonny’s trailer, about undressing him on the porch, and then chasing him up the stairs to the bedroom. She listened to me carefully, her head tilted toward me across the darkened seat. Every now and then she nodded, as if to reassure me that she was paying attention. Her hands pulled the wheel back and forth, guiding the car home.

Amanda, strapped into her seat behind us, continued to cry.

When I reached the point where Jacob began to break down, I paused. Sarah glanced at me, her foot easing just perceptibly from the accelerator.

“He started crying,” I said, “and I realized I had to do it. I realized he wasn’t going to hold up, that when the police and the reporters arrived, he’d end up confessing.”

Sarah nodded, as if she’d guessed this.

“There was no way he was going to pull himself together,” I said. “So I shot him. I made the decision and I did it. And it felt right, too. The whole time I was doing it, I knew it was right.”

I stared out the window, waiting for her response. We were passing the Delphia High School. It was a huge building, modern, brightly lit. There was something happening there tonight, a game or a play or a concert. Cars were pulling into the circular driveway. Teenagers congregated in loose groups at the edge of the pavement, cigarettes glowing. Parents streamed across the parking lot toward the big glass doors.

Sarah remained silent.

“But then,” I said, “after I called the police and realized he was still alive, I was just frozen by it. Even if I could’ve thought of a way to finish him off, I wouldn’t have done it.”

I looked at Sarah.

“I didn’t want him to die.”

“And now?”

I shrugged. “He’s my brother. It’s like I’d forced myself to forget it, and then it came back and surprised me.”

Sarah didn’t say anything, and I shut my eyes, let my body tug me toward sleep. I listened to Amanda’s crying, listened to the rhythm of it, how it came in waves. It seemed, gradually, to be moving farther away.

When I opened my eyes again, we were pulling into Fort Ottowa. A trio of boys popped up from behind a wall of shrubbery and launched a barrage of snowballs at our car. They fell short, skidding across the pavement before us, yellow in the headlights.

Sarah slowed the car. “If he lives, we’ll both end up in jail.”

“I wanted to do the right thing,” I said, “but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I wanted to protect us, and I wanted to save Jacob. I wanted to do both.”

I glanced at Sarah for a response, but her face was expressionless.

“I couldn’t, though,” I said. “I had to choose one or the other.”

Sarah dropped her voice to a whisper. “You did the right thing, Hank.”

“Do you think so?”

“If he’d broken down, we’d be in jail right now.”

“And do you think he would’ve broken down?”

I needed her to say yes, needed this simple reassurance, but she didn’t offer it to me. All she said was, “He’s your brother. If you thought he was a danger, then he probably was.”

I frowned down at my hands. They were trembling a little. I tried briefly to make them stop, but they wouldn’t obey me.

“Tell me the rest,” Sarah said.

So I did. I told her about shooting Jacob, about driving back to Sonny’s and turning out the lights. I told her about calling the police, and how my brother grabbed my ankle. As we pulled up into our driveway, I was describing my interview with the sheriff’s deputies. Sarah eased the car into the garage, and we sat there—the engine off, the air growing cold around us—until I finished. Amanda continued to cry, her voice sounding merely tired now rather than angry, as it had before. I reached back and unstrapped her from her seat, then handed her to Sarah, who tried unsuccessfully to comfort her while I talked, by bouncing her on her lap, and kissing her on the face.

I told her about going to see Jacob.

“He smiled at me, like he understood,” I said, not believing it. I looked at Sarah to see if she did, but she was making a face at Amanda. “Like he forgave me.”

“He’s probably in shock,” Sarah said. “He probably doesn’t even remember what happened yet.”

“Will he remember later?” I wanted desperately to believe that he wouldn’t; I clung to the idea. I wanted him to live and forget—about the money, the shooting, everything.

“I don’t know.”

“If he talks, we probably won’t have much warning before they come and get us.”

She nodded, then leaned her head down and kissed Amanda on her forehead. The baby was still crying, but quietly now, in little hiccoughs. Sarah whispered her name.

“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.

A
S 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.

I
NSIDE,
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.