The Robin Hood Thief

by H. C. H. Ritz

  The young man called out a name: Lantern Houses, for children with disabilities.

  A good choice, but Helen shook her head. This kid had twenty-one million dollars and he was donating just over two thousand. It wasn’t the amount that hurt, when Justice for All would gladly take such a donation. It was the discrepancy between the two numbers. A thousandth of a percent? Seriously?

  After more announcements along the same lines, the MC stepped down from the stage to mingle and the event took on the quality of a silent auction. Every few minutes, the chime rang, followed by the appearance of a new name, net worth, and charity. Next came vigorous applause and ooohs and aaaaahs. More food and drink came out from the kitchen. The MC turned up the speakers for the live music. People drank too much and began to dance unsteadily.

  Helen worked her table with all the fervor of the newly converted. She tried to tease and charm the older men, especially, who thought that a woman in her forties was still young and vibrant. Winning a donation would come down to simple persuasion.

  She handed out flyers and talked about the issues Justice for All worked for, phrased to appeal to the ultrawealthy: keep young people off the streets, preserve the aesthetics of the city, decrease drug use, and reduce street crime and protests, all by helping the homeless and improving the economy. For this group of donors, she left off talk of economic and racial justice.

  As she scanned the crowd for a new target to engage, a shrill sound cut through the buzz of conversation.

  People stopped and looked around.

  The sound came again—it was a woman’s scream in the hallway.

  44 Days, 6 Hours, 18 Minutes

  The Entitled stood like wide-eyed statues, like the ice sculptures waiting to thaw. The hired help ran for the kitchens. Helen edged back in the direction of her table.

  There was a bang and a crash from the hallway. The sound of shattered glass.

  Gunfire.

  Three figures ran into the room from the hallway, all of them wet from the rain outside. They brandished weapons—

  From the ceiling, white spheres with blinking lights dropped down—

  A collision of air—

  Suddenly a fine, glittering net hung suspended in the air in front of the three figures, intercepting bullets.

  One of the intruders yelled, “We will never be silenced! We will never be—” Then gunfire rattled behind the activists, felling them.

  The glittering net subsided in slow motion toward the marble floor.

  Helen’s feet came unstuck and she ran to the kitchen. She stopped at the doorway and looked back.

  Private security forces took in the room at a glance, then checked each body to confirm death. To make sure of it, a guard fired an extra bullet into the slighter figure—a teenager or a woman.

  Helen hardly had time to flinch before it was over.

  The Entitled turned back toward one another. “Can you believe these people?” “That was so scary.” “Who do they think they are?” Someone cracked a joke Helen didn’t catch, and there was laughter. The conversation picked back up. The band started playing again.

  The guards unfolded body bags and lifted the bodies in, limbs rolling about awkwardly.

  The hired help rejoined the party, because it was that or not get paid. The chime rang out. Mr. White. One hundred forty-eight million dollars in net worth. A thousandth of a percent to Star Programs to help the homeless.

  Helen moved back to her table. Her mouth was dry. She gulped down half a glass of complimentary wine. Her muscles spasmed and she sat down quickly, clutching her glass.

  Riots and attacks like this happened all the time. Anarchists and revolutionaries tried to bring attention to the plight of the disenfranchised, the ignored, the impoverished and imprisoned. Helen could never endorse these methods, but she sympathized with their mission.

  For three to have broken through like this, she knew a hundred must have stormed the building and almost all of them been killed. The revolutionary forces were so poorly armed compared to the privatized police forces, they only got in when they had immense numbers on their side.

  The guards dragged the bodies out of the ballroom, and the cleaning crew came in for the blood.

  A latecomer to the party might have thought nothing had happened.

  As Helen drove home through floodwaters in the pouring rain, her clothes damp from her dash to Old Blue, another kind of storm brewed inside her. Maybe the shock of her diagnosis was wearing off, or maybe it was how the revolutionaries had been swept away like their lives meant nothing.

  Or, far more petty but still painful, the fact that she’d failed to get a donation for Justice for All. Their budget would be eight percent short now. She couldn’t have said what she did wrong that the others did better, but it didn’t matter anymore.

  Grief wanted to come, but it was caught up in the fine, glittering net and suffocated in the body bags.

  She swerved around and around the parking garage, up and up, to the familiar spot.

  She slammed the car door too hard, the fury within her expressing itself.

  The smell of mildew in the hallway, her door, the key in the lock. The three one-sided deadbolts, the purse on the kitchen table. The same tiny, dingy rooms that only grew dingier with every passing year.

  Mandy on the couch, her clamshell balanced on her knees, her Earworm at her temple, not even looking up. Just the way David was those last half-dozen years, lost in his own Earworm, never swimming up out of his suffering to do anything but glower and snap.

  Helen went to their room without a word.

  She took off her shoes and sat on her bed. Chilled, she wrapped the coverlet around herself and her damp clothes.

  Within her, she felt the storm gather.

  Something would break. Something had to break.

  She was going to die, and she couldn’t die without something breaking. Because otherwise it would be okay for her to die. It would just be something that happened. Unremarked. Unremarkable.

  Helen had known a couple dozen people who’d died. The world shrugged it off. There were so many people dying… what was the point in mourning them all? And were they really any worse off dead?

  Assuming there was no God, assuming no pearly gates—and Helen had never quite figured out where she stood on that—then once you were dead, everything you’d ever experienced was over. Any pain you’d suffered was done. You couldn’t remember it, couldn’t think about it. If every trauma was forever lost along with your consciousness, did it even matter that it had happened?

  Death was safe. It was the final refuge, and it was better to go there—to be finished with the struggle that was living.

  Yet it didn’t feel that way now. For her to die right now… it wasn’t right. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to see her daughter grow up.

  Intensity built in her, and her breath came faster and harder, as if she would sob, but she didn’t.

  She remembered what Oliver had said: “Twenty-five years in charity work. You must be so proud of all you’ve accomplished.”

  Twenty-five years in charity work, and what had she accomplished? Nothing. Things were worse. More kids in prison. Debtors in prison—and permanently disenfranchised, because felons couldn’t vote. More families starving. More people who didn’t even bother to vote anymore, because the elections were corrupted. More environmental destruction by the wealthy who had decided it didn’t bother them—and why should it, when they could just move to a part of the world the devastation hadn’t reached? Or, even, a part of the solar system the devastation hadn’t reached.

  Her breath came faster and harder. A knot in her chest ached. She moved restlessly, trying to find a way to get comfortable and calm down. She breathed deeply, counting: inhale for ten and exhale for twenty… inhale for ten and exhale for twenty…

  Calm down? Why?

  She threw off the coverlet and paced the three steps between her bed and the door.

&
nbsp; She’d spent her whole life in a battle to even things out, but still the ultra-wealthy lived in luxury and the poor struggled to survive. Maybe she had never really expected to succeed, but now hope was gone.

  She threw open her bedroom door, not sure why or where she was going or what she would do if Mandy saw her in such a state. She took in the tiny room at a glance. The loveseat was empty. Mandy had gone out.

  Helen went to the single, narrow, floor-to-ceiling window, threw back the shabby curtain, and stared out into the city night. Graying high-rises stared back at her. Each nuclear family in its own tiny box of poverty and struggle and isolation. Why did they have to live this way?

  It was a system created by their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, a legacy of other people’s choices that imprisoned them. It had been done to them, forced on them. What could any of them hope to do about it now? Who could oppose the devastating inertia of generations of past choices?

  She heard her breath coming audibly, almost a groan, almost a whimper. She was breaking down. And why shouldn’t she? She, who was dying.

  She collapsed to the ground and put her hands over her face. Was she going to cry now?

  No.

  She screamed instead.

  Wordless anguish and anger.

  Then words.

  Words that came of their own volition. “I’m not done!”

  It hurt her throat.

  She stopped, gasping. Then she stood and grabbed the heavy wood chair next to her and heaved it through the window, shattering the glass. She reveled in the destruction, so uncharacteristic of her. Stepping to the very edge of the window, she watched the chair spin on its way down to shatter in the drained and cracked swimming pool stories below. Rain and hot, humid air came in through the window.

  Again the scream tore from her throat. “I’m not done yet!”

  She didn’t know what it meant, just that it was completely true, true down to her soul.

  Dizziness overcame her, and she sank to her knees, her hands over her contorted face.

  She heard a shout from behind her.

  “Mom! What are you doing?”

  Mandy.

  Helen dropped her hands, her face suddenly calm. The emotion flew away, and all that mattered now was protecting her daughter from the truth.

  She stood up and turned around.

  “What did you do to the window?” Mandy shrieked. The dog, Jessie, peeked out from behind her, smart enough to stay back.

  “Nothing,” Helen said, and immediately felt stupid. “It’s fine. I was upset, but I’m okay now.”

  Mandy stared as if Helen were a three-headed alien. “What is wrong with you? You would never do this.”

  “I know.” Helen looked down. She felt as guilty and awkward as if someone had caught her doing vandalism. Which was . . . exactly what had happened. Expensive vandalism, that she couldn’t afford to fix. “Look, don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.”

  “Mom, seriously, this is crazy. Tell me what happened! Right now!”

  A jolt of irritation pierced Helen, and she lashed out. “Back off, Mandy! This is not your concern!”

  Mandy’s head jerked back, anger and pain evident on her face. “Fine. Do whatever you want. I don’t give a shit!” She turned to leave the room.

  “Wait!” Helen reached for her daughter, then stopped, knowing the gesture would be rejected, as Mandy had rejected all of her affection since David had died. “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry.”

  She couldn’t let things be like this again, like always, like ever. She would be leaving Mandy alone all too soon. Her face crumpled, but she forced it smooth. She struggled to find the right words. “I will—help you. I will make things better. I promise—it won’t always be like this.”

  Warm rain and wind came at her back.

  The look in Mandy’s eyes said she thought her mother had lost her mind.

  Helen wanted to say more. She wanted to tell her daughter that she loved her and that she would never abandon her on purpose. But it would be too much for Mandy to tolerate. Helen had already gone too far.

  “I’m going in,” Mandy declared. She retreated to the bedroom, Jessie with her.

  Helen stared after her. She wanted more than anything to know how to do this right, because she only ever did it wrong. Wanted to know how to bridge the gap between them that had only widened for the six years since the divorce.

  She sank slowly to the floor and looked out over the pool as the warm rain soaked her. And the sentiment that possessed her when she threw the chair bubbled back up.

  “I’m not done yet,” she whispered through gritted teeth.

  God help her, it was true. She was going to do something with this little shard of a life she had left. She was going to make a difference. She was going to help—help Mandy, and help everyone else.

  43 Days, 16 Hours

  Helen woke up in the same way as the previous day. Dreams or waking hallucinations—she couldn’t tell the difference. This time, gray-brown tree roots grabbed at her legs and pulled her down into dark loam. She fought them off and broke them, but they came back and came back again—rock- and dirt-encrusted tendrils dragging her down.

  She came to consciousness and found herself tucked half under her bed. She crawled out and took a waking pill.

  Were the dreams—or hallucinations—side effects of the sleeping pills, or was this just how her brain dealt with sleep now?

  By the time the waking pill took hold, she remembered that she didn’t need to go to work anymore, but also that she wasn’t ready for Mandy to know about any of this.

  It was a calculus every parent learned to do in the first few years. When to reveal information. How to say it. How to cause the least amount of pain, yet make their child understand what had to be understood.

  Mandy was six years old when she realized that her parents would almost certainly die before she did. She burst into inconsolable sobs. “Then I wish I had never been born,” she said. She cried about it for five days. Ever since then, every time Helen remembered, she felt her heart break all over again.

  She got up and got dressed as her heart rate went up and up, then lay down on her bed, curled into the fetal position, trying to get her heart to settle down.

  Jessie heard the movement and came out of Mandy’s half of the room to curl up on Helen’s bed. She petted him absently. In a few minutes, her heart rate slowed enough that she no longer felt her pulse in her hands and feet.

  She regretted snapping at Mandy last night. And then the apology had been too little, too late, too crazy.

  Helen hated it when she turned into David—rather, the David of later years, after his sadness finished shifting into anger, like a pile of dirt drifting from erosion. Helen had maintained the patience of a saint while David snapped and snarled, and then, when she finally sent David away, his anger expressed itself through her.

  She developed a theory that whatever a person got used to became necessary. Her psyche understood having anger in her home and could not live without it now. But she hated it. Hated herself every time she did it.

  Perhaps David had hated himself too.

  She went out to Old Blue, cranked her up, and drove aimlessly through an overcast day. She found herself caught up in road construction. Hemmed in by orange cones, she started and stopped for almost an hour before she could get to an alternate route.

  She had just gotten back up to normal street speed when, unexpectedly, her arms twitched and spasmed and nearly jerked her into oncoming traffic.

  She pulled over at the next opportunity, an old gas station where paint peeled off the exterior walls and weeds grew out of the cracks in the cement and destitute men sat lethargically on plastic crates and watched her with too much interest. She sat in the car, eyeing the men and worriedly flexing her arm muscles until the spasms stopped.

  Please don’t let me have to stop driving.

  Even through the fear, she could still feel last night’s
resolution. The determination that set in after the anger ebbed. “I’m not done,” she’d said, “I’m going to help”—and she knew it was true. It filled her spirit like a steel core.

  The remaining stages of grief were conspicuously absent. But she didn’t have time for them anyway. She had only forty-three days left, and she couldn’t spend them grieving. She had to do something before it was too late.

  Something.

  The proverbial high road had carried her along for years while her faith in her efforts slowly disintegrated. Now her faith was dust. She needed new tactics. It was time to get off the high road.

  Last night, when she heaved that chair through the window… the anger was the second stage of grief, but it was more than that, too. She’d felt something shift. She was willing to break things now.

  How far was she willing to go? she asked herself.

  In harder days, she used to daydream about the things she wanted to do to the Entitled. She let her mind go to that dark place for a moment. Would she hurt or kill someone now, knowing that she was out of other options?

  A corner of her mouth twitched. The still, small voice inside her said Anything goes.

  Then she remembered the revolutionaries at the Net Worth Notion, and her half-smile disappeared. No, not anything.

  What else could she do? Hold people for ransom? She almost laughed. How could she hope to kidnap anyone? She’d had three self-defense classes twenty years ago. That was it. Otherwise, she was a white-collar forty-something mother. With heart palpitations and muscle spasms.

  No, as much as she wanted to be a superhero in a cape, she couldn’t fight like that. She could use a gun, though.

  What was she after, really?

  She felt restless again. She pulled out of the gas station’s parking lot and drove aimlessly.

  What was her goal?

  It wasn’t to hurt people, that much was certain. She firmly believed that no one deserved to be hurt. Even the Entitled.

  She looked at the world outside her car window. In this neighborhood, the houses sagged, lopsided, decaying, with paint long ago worn off the gray wood. Cardboard was taped over broken windows. Yards were filled with clutter and broken cars, because poor people didn’t throw anything away—they never knew when they might need it. Three or four families lived in each house.