for Brandon if I ever got sick or was in need.
“Why don’t you just keep it, Jim? I’ll find another way.”
“Hil, c’mon. I’m trying my best to—”
“Just keep it!” I hung up on him, and with it the hope that anything was coming to my rescue.
“There’s this,” Robin had said, “and then there’s the other side of the road.”
I threw on a jacket and asked Elena if she could stay another hour.
Then I drove back out to the accident site that night.
The night was clear, the roads mostly empty. Every stop sign, I told myself I could always turn around. You don’t have to do this, Hil. There has to be some other plan.
I never turned.
On the Bedford–Greenwich road, the landmarks grew familiar. A stone barn I’d passed ten days before. The apple and vegetable farm. I remembered following that Honda, my life in a shambles, watching him swerve, seeing him spin off the road. I slowed, passing a bend in the road that looked familiar. Was it here? That curve? Or farther along?
The police tape was gone now. Everything looked back to normal.
It wasn’t until I passed the election poster that I realized I’d driven right by.
I turned at the first chance about a quarter mile past it and headed back around. There was a hole in the dense brush about the width of a car where Kelty’s car had gone through. I drove on about a hundred yards and found a turnoff with a chain blocking the drive and a NO ACCESS sign. Maybe for a property someone was hoping to develop.
I pulled my Acura in maybe twenty yards from the road. There was a long time between cars going by. I turned off the engine. I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to use a penny of it for my own needs. Only for Brandon. And keeping a roof over our heads.
For a while I just sat there, telling myself that there was this one last chance to drive away. I looked at my face in the mirror. It wasn’t my current face I saw, but strangely, the eyes of a child. Remembering the uncertainty I’d gone through as a nine-year-old, everything I loved and counted on ripped away in an instant.
It had taken me years to learn to trust life again.
I wouldn’t let that happen to my son.
I took my flashlight, and this time my face was filled with resolve.
Welcome to the other side of the road.
A car sped by in front of me and I ran across the road. I found the break in the bushes and shined my light and still saw the tire marks on the pavement, fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
I made my way down the slope.
I slipped this time as well, sliding a few feet down. The brush had been flattened by the path of Kelty’s car as well as all the emergency vehicles and personnel that had been down there. I made it down, casting my light on the tree where Kelty’s car had ended up, now pitched at a forty-five-degree angle. I stood where I was sure I’d been when I climbed inside his car, only a bare patch now. I shined the light over the area in the woods where I had flung the satchel.
I didn’t see anything there.
A flash of fear stabbed me: what if someone had found it? One of the emergency crew who went down there. Or maybe a policeman traipsing around. What if all this had been for nothing and now it was gone?
A week ago that might have given me some kind of relief. That the decision had been taken from me. But now I was more like a wolf who’d left a stash of food for her cubs that was now gone. As if that money was mine all along, not Kelty’s, and someone had stolen it from me!
I started to walk through the brush, sweeping the light in all directions, knee deep in dried branches and dense weeds. I’d spent so much time conflicted. Now there was no longer any doubt about what outcome I was hoping for.
Where the hell was it?
I kept walking, casting the light about haphazardly, nerves kicking up in me. I got to the spot where I was sure it had to be. Ten days ago, I’d seen it sink there amid the leaves and brush.
“Where the hell are you?” I said aloud.
I started to think how maybe I’d made someone else rich. How I was someone else’s lottery ticket. Some lucky Joe who was probably dragging a towline around. I wondered if he’d declared it. Or turned it in. If the police had it now.
No, if they did it would’ve made the news, Hilary. I would have seen it.
Angry, I used my light as a large stick, swatting brush and branches. Then I almost tripped over something. I looked down and didn’t see the bag, only the leather handles peeking through a blanket of leaves.
Thank God! I let out a grateful sigh of relief.
I bent, a bramble tearing at my hand, and pulled it out, the bag resisting for a moment. Then there it was! The same stuffed leather case, as heavy as when I’d hurled it into the woods a week before.
There was no pretending I felt anything but joy.
I took it back to the clearing and set it on the ground. I pulled open the zipper and shined my light in it. My skin tingled all over at what I saw. I was staring at the same bundles of wrapped bills, Ben Franklin’s wise, nonjudging face over and over and over, alit in the yellow, beatific light.
My blood surged ecstatically.
“Forgive me,” I said. To whom I wasn’t sure.
To Kelty. To the police. To my own conscience.
“I’m sorry.”
I zipped it back up, the taste in my mouth bitter and bile-like. I knew the expression, how one bad act opens the door to many others. Acts that flood the world with a hundred awful consequences you could never foresee.
All from a single mistake.
This was mine, I knew. No hiding it.
You’re not just a thief, I told myself as I lugged it back up the hill.
Congratulations, Hil, you just stole a half million dollars.
The heavyset blond-haired clerk in the
