blood streaming down one side of his face. He wasn’t moving or uttering a sound.
The engine was smoking.
“Are you all right?” I rapped on the glass. “Can you hear me?”
He didn’t respond. It was clear he was either dead or unconscious.
“Mister, are you okay?” I tugged on the driver’s door one more time, but you’d have to rip it off or move the car.
From above, I heard the driver of the other car call down, “Is everyone all right down there? Do you need help?”
“Call 911!” I shouted back up. I’d left my phone in the car. “Tell ’em there’s a single driver who’s not responding. I can’t get to him. The door’s stuck, and I don’t know, I think maybe he’s dead. They need to send an ambulance.”
I could barely catch a glimpse of the guy through the brush as he hurried back to his car. I looked at the smoking hood and had a sudden fear that any second the engine might catch fire. Maybe the right thing was to back off and wait for help, but with the guy non-responsive, the engine smoking, the stronger voice inside me pushed me to see if he was alive.
I ran around to the passenger side. The door there wasn’t obstructed and opened easily. I wedged myself into the seat. In front of me, the driver’s head was pitched forward and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead as if it had been bludgeoned against the wheel. His eyes were rolled up. His white hair was matted with red. I reached across and pushed him back against the seat. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?” Again, he didn’t respond. I’d taken a CPR course a few years back, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do for him.
There was a black leather satchel on the floor mat that must have fallen off the seat in the crash. I picked it up so I could squeeze in closer.
My heart almost jumped out of my chest at what I saw.
A wad of money. Hundred-dollar bills. Neatly wrapped together. I couldn’t help but pick it up and flip through. There had to be a hundred of them—Jesus, Hilary!—bound together by a rubber band. A hundred hundreds would be what …? I did the math, ten thousand dollars. The satchel was open slightly at the top, and so far the guy hadn’t moved or even uttered a sound. I couldn’t help but satisfy my curiosity, unzipping it all the way open.
This time my heart didn’t jump—it stopped. And if my eyes had been wide before, they surely doubled now.
Holy shit, Hil …
The bag was filled with similarly bound packets of cash. All hundreds! Reflexively I pawed through them. There were dozens of them. This time the math was a little harder to calculate.
I was looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I looked over at the driver and tried to figure out what some old guy driving a beat-up Honda would be doing with this kind of cash. Maybe the receipts from a business. No, that wouldn’t make sense; they wouldn’t be all hundreds. Maybe the guy’s life savings that he’d been hoarding for years under his bed.
More likely something illegal, I speculated.
I pulled myself across the seat and tried to determine one last time if he was alive or dead. I even put my hand on his shoulder and shook him. He didn’t move. I spotted a cell phone in his lap and picked it up. There was a phone number and a partially written text on the screen. “Heading back wi—”
Heading back with what?
Heading back with the cash, of course. What else would it be? The message hadn’t been sent. On a hunch I looked for the time of that last entry: 6:41 P.M. It was 6:44 now. He’d probably been about to text that when the deer bolted out in front of him. That’s why he couldn’t control his car. Something that every father begs his own son or daughter not to do …
I put the phone back.
It was clear there was nothing I could do for him. The EMTs and the police would be here any second. The engine continued to smoke; I realized I’d better get out of there. I pushed backward on the passenger seat and my eyes landed once again on the open satchel of cash.
In business, I’d made a dozen deals for this amount of money, but I’d never actually seen so much in cash. At least, not staring directly up at me. It might have been only an instant in actual time, but yesterday’s events came flashing back to me: losing my job; the four-weeks’ severance; how I’d had to beg for an extra month on the health plan. And how the past couple of years were such a struggle …
Then this … Enough to take care of so many things: Brandon’s school, which was five months past due; a good chunk of my payments on a house that was now completely underwater. Even help my folks. Life-changing money for me. I’d never done a bad thing in my life. I mean, maybe smoked a little pot back in college. Stolen a book or two out of the library. But nothing like this.
Nothing like what was suddenly racing through my mind. You must be crazy to even be thinking this, Hil …
Suddenly the guy called from back up on the road. “They’re on the way!” I still couldn’t make him out through the brush. “I’m coming down.”
Everything I’d been raised with, every code I lived my life by, every voice of conscience inside me told me just to let it sit. I didn’t know who it belonged to. It could be gambling or drug money for all I knew. Possibly even traceable. Whatever it was, it damn well wasn’t mine.
I just stared.
Then I felt my blood begin to surge. The guy was dead. Who would ever know? If I just got the hell out of here, didn’t take it with me now, but maybe hid it, then came back another time? I’d gone to a few Al-Anon meetings with a friend back in my twenties, and I remembered this role-playing game they used, on how easy it was to slide back into past behavior—in one ear, there was the addict side, to whom they gave the name Slick, and in the other, the person’s rational side. Slick, seductively whispering in your ear like the devil: “Come on, you can handle it; no one will know; it’ll just be this once.” On the other shoulder, your conscience countering, “You’ll know. This will only be the start of something bad. Once you do it you’ll never go back.”
We all have a Slick inside, the exercise was meant to show.
And it all just caught me at a point when my life was crawling on this teetering sheet of ice. And I saw Brandon there, all the good work he had done taken away, on that ice with me, about to split into a hundred pieces beneath my feet. And nowhere to go but in. Into the black, freezing water.
And I’d been there before.
“Shit,” I heard the guy cry out on his way down, sliding in the wet brush as I had.
“Be careful!” I yelled back. “It’s dangerous.”
If you’re going to do it, you have to do it now, Hilary.
In that moment there was no offsetting argument or rationale. Not that it was someone else’s money. Nor that it didn’t belong to me. Or whether it was legit or dirty.
There was just Brandon. And the fear that I no longer could take care of my son. I didn’t see it as right or wrong. Only that fate had
