My Darling Husband

by Kimberly Belle

  An Amex representative, a real person this time, sounds in my ear, and my knees buckle in relief. “Thank God. I need a pin for my card.”

  The teller gives me a look, one that says he’s glad there’s a thick slice of bulletproof glass between us, then goes back to counting out the cash while the Amex representative walks me through the steps. By the time the teller has clipped together the last stack of money, I have a working pin.

  When the last stack is counted and marked and fastened, the teller points me to a glass-enclosed room at the far end of the building. An office, boring and generic—a desk, two chairs, a computer monitor and a giant poster on the wall. The room is dark, much like the rest of the bank. The security guard turned the lights off ages ago.

  I turn back to the teller. “If you don’t mind, I’m kind of in a hurry. I’ll just take the money and go.”

  “Sir, I will deliver the money to you in that office.” Not so much a question as a demand. He gathers up the piles of cash and drops them into a zippered bank bag. “We’ll have more privacy there.”

  I turn, taking in the space around me, all of it empty. Even the security guard has moved on, disappearing with his rattling keys behind a padlocked door. I am the last man standing. We have all the privacy in the world.

  The teller leans the Next Window Please sign against the glass and takes off with my bag of cash. I match him step for step, following him down the glass until he disappears behind a wall. A few seconds later he steps out of a door farther down, the bag of cash tucked under an arm. I hustle to the office, where he flips on the light and closes the door.

  “Mr. Lasky, are you aware that according to the Bank Secrecy Act, we are required to report cash withdrawals of $10,000 or more to the IRS?”

  I plop into one of the chairs, thinking how to best respond. No police. That’s what Jade said. She said at the first sign of sirens, the man will start shooting, and he’ll start with the Bees. A fresh wave of panic climbs my chest at the thought.

  I can’t let that happen. He said no police.

  The IRS, on the other hand. The IRS is a bureaucratic behemoth, like most governmental agencies only speedy when they’re on the receiving end. It’ll takes weeks, months even, for them to follow up on this report. It’s already past five. The earliest they could get to it is tomorrow morning. All I need is a few hours.

  “Okay, fine.” I stretch a hand across the desk. “Report away.”

  On the chair across from me, the teller grips the bag of cash with both hands. He’s not blind. I watch him clock my sweaty face, the leg I can’t seem to stop jiggling, my frenzied eyes with a bank robber’s glint. He knows something is wrong. I might as well be wearing a sign: “Meth addict, need money for drugs.”

  “I am also required to ask why you want such an unusually large amount of cash.”

  I frown, my chest going hot. “It’s my money. Am I not allowed to withdraw however much of it I want?”

  “Of course you are. But I am required to include the reason for the withdrawal in my report, and refusing to provide one will result in a denial. Either way, I still have to report you to the authorities.”

  I breathe through a sour slice of panic and try to come up with an explanation that will result in me walking out of here with that money—my money. Something legal, something that won’t send up an immediate red flag with the police.

  Stick with the truth, or at least something pretty damn close, and look the person right in the eye. Say the lie without blinking, then smile and change the subject. I’ve only been doing it for months now.

  “There was a fire this morning at one of my restaurants. That means my employees are out of a job. People who depend on me for their livelihood, to feed their families and cover their health care costs and pay for the roof above their heads. This money is for them, just until the insurance comes through and we get the place back up and running.” I smile. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a kid’s ball game to get to.”

  It does the trick. The teller scribbles something onto a form and slides the money across the desk.

  Thirty seconds later the security guard reappears to sift through his keys while I shift from foot to foot, and then he opens the door and I’m out of there, racing to my car with a bag stuffed with $49,000 and some change, thanking a God I definitely don’t deserve for the fire that killed my business.

  T H E I N T E R V I E W

  Juanita: You mentioned your father—

  Cam: Pretty sure that was you who mentioned him, but okay.

  Juanita: Right. I mentioned your father, but only because you implied you weren’t eager to follow in his footsteps.

  Cam: Not many people would be.

  Juanita: Because he lost his business, a chain of three thousand-plus hardware stores that went belly-up after the divorce? Or because his investors then sued him for using off-the-books accounting to overstate profits and conceal debts? His conviction left your mother and you penniless.

  Cam: Yeah, well, in the end, so was he, so... [shrugs]

  Juanita: You say that like you think his bankruptcy and subsequent prison sentence were a justified result of his behavior. Do you see these things as some sort of karma?

  Cam: Not really a fan of that word, but yeah, I do. My father drove everyone he’d ever loved away, and then when his life went to shit, he blamed those same people for deserting him. Money was the only thing he cared about, so I’m not going to lie. When he lost all of his, it wasn’t necessarily a bad day.

  Juanita: He died in prison.

  Cam: Yes. Penniless and friendless, alone and bitter. The old man dug his own grave. And before you ask, no. We never reconciled.

  Juanita: And your mother?

  Cam: You’d have to ask her. That’s her story to tell, not mine.

  Juanita: But considering what you’ve been through, surely you must have gained some understanding into your father’s behavior. Surely you must feel some regret for the way things between you ended.

  Cam: No on both accounts. Not even a little bit. My father walked out on his family and never looked back. He replaced us with a girl half his age, who up and left after his company tanked. He never once apologized for what he did to us, not even when he got sick. I lost my father many years before he died.

  Juanita: And what would you say to the people who say “like father, like son”? Who put you in the same boat as him, as someone primarily motivated by money?

  Cam: I’d say they have it completely, one hundred percent back-ass-ward. Unlike my father, I wasn’t motivated by money, but by the way money eased the weight of my responsibility to the people I love. Jade and the kids, my mother. Every single thing I did was for them, to feed and clothe and take care of them. I would have never left them in the dust to fend for themselves. The last thing I ever would have done is walk away.

  Juanita: And yet you took your wife’s jewelry without her knowledge or permission, essentially theft. You pawned some of her most precious pieces and replaced them with fakes so she wouldn’t know.

  Cam: And then I used that money to pay my children’s tuition. For Beatrix’s violin lessons and the homeowner association fees on my mother’s condo. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not proud of what I did, but at least I stuck around. I did it to save my family the heartache of losing everything including their friends—because make no mistake. A bankruptcy is a surefire way of learning who’s in your life because they want what you have. I was trying to save them from that.

  Juanita: By being the polar opposite of your father.

  Cam: Exactly.

  Juanita: And yet, just like your father, you’ve also been accused of underhanded business practices. Things like employing undocumented workers and paying them under the table, for example.

  Cam: Have you ever been in a restaurant kitchen? Something like 95 percent of the folks working the cleanu
p lines are Latino. They are the hardest workers doing the dirtiest jobs. Lasky’s policy was to hire only the ones who had individual taxpayer identification numbers, which means they could pay the IRS without alerting ICE. Whether or not they actually filed is none of my business.

  Juanita: But were they legal?

  Cam: Also none of my business. And look, judge me all you want, but I did what it took to keep my family and business afloat.

  Juanita: So again, like father, like son.

  Cam: Well, Juanita, I guess it’s true what they say. In the end we all become our parents.

  J A D E

  4:47 p.m.

  It happens so fast, if I blinked I would have missed it.

  Beatrix in exaggerated tiptoe, slipping out the open doorway of the playroom into the hall. Back hunched, arms stretched out for balance, legs spread wide so the frilly cuffs of her shorts don’t brush together when she walks. It’s a Looney Tunes version of a tiptoe, skillful in its absolute silence, a careful and precise movement she’s clearly practiced. It makes me wonder how many times she’s done this while Cam and I were reading or watching TV downstairs, oblivious to our daughter sneaking about above our heads. Dozens, probably.

  She swings her head to the right, peering down the long hallway that leads to the kids’ bedrooms. It’s the direction Baxter and the masked man just disappeared down, only a few seconds earlier. Baxter was moving fast, his face strained with hurry, one hand gripping his bottom in a way that typically means he’s going to need a change of pants. He was in too much of a panic to notice me sitting across the hall, strapped to a chair, and the man didn’t look over, either, though I didn’t miss his grimace.

  I can hear them now, the low murmur of voices muffled by a door and two walls. Baxter’s bathroom, which is good news since it’s the farthest away. The last door at the end of the hallway, tucked around not one but two corners. Assuming the man is waiting just outside the bathroom door, there’s still a wall between him and Beatrix.

  Beatrix turns for the stairs, and almost by accident, her gaze lands on mine.

  She flinches so hard, her sneakers squeak on the hardwood floor. I wince at the sound, and my heart seizes, then trips into high gear. I hold my breath and listen for signs of someone coming.

  Beatrix must be thinking the same thing, because she looks in the direction of the voices, and I watch her face for a reaction. My daughter is like me, an open book. Everything she ever thinks is telegraphed straight to her face, as easy to read as blinking neon letters. If the masked man is bearing down the hallway, coming for her, I’ll see it on Beatrix’s expression.

  But her face doesn’t change. Her back slumps in a silent sigh of relief, and she looks back.

  Heart pounding, I study my daughter from top to toe. I take in her dry eyes, count her fingers, search her skin for blood or bruises. The bow on the hem of her pink polka-dot shirt has come untied, and her shorts are rumpled at the crotch from sitting, but there’s no rips or bloodstains. Her hair is pillow-mussed, that cowlick I’m always trying to wrangle into submission pushing the hair high on the left side of her crown, but otherwise she looks fine. Frightened, but fine.

  And then I notice the marks on her socks, and I wonder if she was tied to a chair, too. No, taped to the chair, one of the reclining theater seats in the playroom. That was the sound I heard before, the harsh creak of the duct tape ripping off leather so Baxter could race to the bathroom.

  But it doesn’t explain how Beatrix managed to wriggle free.

  Especially if her bindings were anything like mine, double and triple wrapped around my skin, as unforgiving as steel cuffs. Other than a slimy arm and a dull throbbing behind my front teeth, I’ve gotten nowhere with the knot at my wrist. Clearly, I am not one of those mothers who could lift a car to save her children, or bust out of chains like the female version of the Hulk. I strain against my bindings, but my arms and legs don’t budge.

  I’m stuck.

  Helpless.

  But not Beatrix. She stands there and stares at me, her eyes big and wide and round.

  Go, I mouth, but I don’t dare call out to her, not even a whisper. And honestly, go where? Not back to the playroom, certainly. The man will be back in what—thirty seconds? A minute? Not enough time for Beatrix to get very far. And as soon as she opens any of the doors downstairs, she’ll trip the alarm.

  At the sound of the first siren I start shooting, and the first two bullets are for the kids.

  If Beatrix is lucky, she might escape, but Baxter and I surely won’t. There are no good answers here.

  Go.

  Beatrix nods, but her feet don’t come unglued from the floor.

  I hold my breath and listen to the noise coming from farther down the hall. Baxter is still chattering away, the occasional word piercing the low hum of water running through the pipes. Washing his hands at the sink, I’m guessing, which means he’s close to finishing up. The man is still silent, nearby but unaccounted for, which terrifies me. He could be waiting by the door. He could be halfway to the hall by now. What if he comes back to check on Beatrix?

  I shake my head at her, but I don’t know what I mean by it. Don’t get caught? Don’t leave me here? Both, probably. My hands ball into tight, frustrated fists.

  On the other end of the hall, a toilet flushes. A door creaks, followed by footsteps.

  Go! I mouth the word again, stretching my lips around it so she understands, leaning forward and adding another: Run!

  And this time—finally, thankfully—she does.

  * * *

  I first tried my hand at acting in middle school, mostly to escape from the dark cloud of misery hanging over our house—a silent father who spent his evenings dozing in front of a TV, a surly older sister eating her feelings and everything else in sight, rooms that without my mother’s touches had grown faded and dusty. I coped by cloaking myself in someone else’s skin—a lighthearted mermaid falling in love for the first time, or the dancing, singing, footloose daughter of a strict preacher father. Anyone but a sad and lonely eighth-grader longing for her mother.

  It’s those old, sucky acting skills I call upon now when I hear noises at the end of the hall. I sit up straight as my body goes rock-hard, my fingers digging into the velvet armrests of the chair. I wipe my expression clean and force my muscles to relax, my face to look normal—or as normal as a mother’s face can be, tied to a forty-pound chair.

  An animated Baxter comes first, his stuffed gorilla Gibson pinned under an arm, skipping like he’s headed for a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. He blathers on about the shows he wants to watch, the popcorn his mommy would let him have. I stare at him, gritting my teeth and trying to appear fearless, courageous. My son doesn’t so much as glance over.

  The man follows behind. He comes into view, and my heart clenches.

  Showtime.

  I can’t quite see him from this angle, but I know the second he spots Beatrix’s empty chair. I hear his grunt of surprise, the stumble in his footsteps when he comes up on an empty room. He curses, a long string of expletives followed by Baxter’s high-pitched giggle.

  “Beatrix! You get your butt back in here, missy. Right now.”

  There’s a long stretch of silence while he waits for an answer. I hear the low volume on the TV, fast and heavy footsteps, breaths huffing with emotion, but nothing from Beatrix. Of course there’s not. By now she’s had a good thirty, maybe forty-five seconds to get wherever she’s going, and I already know her tiptoe skills are stealth. I picture her downstairs, sneaking from room to room, trying out all her normal hiding spots until she finds the best one.

  The man stomps into the hall. “You better believe I’m going to find your scrawny little butt, so you might as well come out now. Come out and take your punishment like a girl.” He looks at me, eyes flashing. “Where is she? Where’d she go?”

  I frow
n, blink my eyes in stage-managed confusion. “I thought she was with you.”

  Jesus, that was bad. Overacted, leaned way too hard into the enunciation and my voice cracked on the last word.

  “Bullshit. If she’d come this way, she would have run right past you. No way you didn’t see her, not unless she—” He lurches backward, one long leap from the hallway into the playroom. I clock his movements by sound, footsteps moving deeper into the playroom, solid furniture scraping across the floor, a door creaking open. The hidden hallway to the guest room bath. He knows about it, too.

  “Beatrix, now’s the time to get out here, hon.” The man’s voice is muffled now, and it’s coming at me in stereo—from the playroom across the hall, louder from behind me, somewhere deep in the bathroom. Heavy footsteps come from that direction, too, elephant stomps moving closer. “Beatrix!”

  Baxter steps into the hall in a fresh shirt and Batman pajama pants, and I choke on a sob. I hate that he’s seeing me like this. I hate that I can’t protect him.

  He sees me and waves. “Hi, Mommy.”

  It rolls over me like a hurricane—how helpless I am to help him, strapped to this chair. If I told Bax to run, he’d never make it far. If I told him to hide, his giggling would give him away. I can’t do anything to protect him because I am tied to a chair.

  I suck down my tears. Push a smile up my cheeks so as not to frighten him. “Hey, big guy. How’re you doing?”

  “Good.” He bounces his shoulders. “I had an accident, though.”

  “That’s okay, baby. It hap—”

  “Jade.”

  He’s here now, coming in long, angry strides out of the bathroom. He pulls the gun from his cargo paints and aims at my head, not stopping until the metal makes contact with my forehead. I squeal and rear back until my head is flush against the wall.

  “Did she come through here? Because if she did and you lie about it, you and I are going to have a big problem.”