"Go on," he called, as her cigarette smoke reached the bathroom. He looked in the mirror at the gray hair on his chest and stomach, drank a glass of water, then filled it again. "I'm listening."
"So I was meeting Rick outside Philadelphia at a mall and we were going to drive into New York," she continued from the bedroom. "If I couldn't get out of driving those boxes, then at least I wanted to see them, see what it was that I was carrying. It bugged me that I didn't know. There were two chances to get at them. One was on the drive up, and one was when we arrived in New York at the loading dock in Chelsea. I thought it'd be better if I could get at the boxes before we arrived in New York. My mother and father used to live outside Philadelphia, in Chester County. I know all the roads out there. It was farmland when I was growing up…" Her voice sounded sad. "Anyway, I planned it with Rick that we would stop for lunch. Just pull the truck in."
He handed her the glass. "Wouldn't that be sort of suspicious for the neighbors?"
"No, not really." She sipped the water. "It wasn't exactly the high-rent district, you know, sort of the edge of the suburbs. A big rig pulled up next to their place was nothing special. My mom and dad were going to move soon anyway-someone could think it was a moving truck. So we pulled into their house and they gave Rick a big welcome. My mother made a big meal for us and everything. Afterward I told Rick that I wanted to have sex, so we went in my old bedroom and had sex, and then he wanted to sleep, which is what I expected. I told him I'd wake him in a little while. My dad was watching television. He wasn't feeling great. He was worried about money and moving down to Florida. He'd just retired. So then I went out to the truck and unlocked it. We had the keys in case we got stopped by the police. Less suspicious if they can look at the load and compare it to the paperwork. The truck was parked so that the back faced into our yard. I jumped up and took a look. The air conditioner boxes were all the same, of course. I hadn't seen how they'd packed the truck. Frankie would expect his ten boxes to be in a certain spot, but they wouldn't necessarily be the first ten boxes you'd naturally take out." She sat up and pulled on Charlie's button-down shirt, the tie still threaded through the collar. "I couldn't find the pattern, so I just started opening boxes. What the hell, right? I opened about eight or nine and then I found one of the special boxes."
"And?" Charlie asked. "Drugs?"
She looked at him. "It wasn't heroin."
"What was it?"
" Cash."
"Cash?"
"Old hundreds and fifties. Two-inch stacks with red rubber bands. Kind of smelled. I carried my mom's bathroom scales out and weighed a box and one of the regular boxes with an air conditioner in it. They weighed the same."
"What did you do then?" Charlie asked, beginning to worry.
"I totally freaked out, what do you expect?" Christina said. "I thought about my dad sitting in there, worrying about how they were going to make it on his pension in Florida. He was sick and had worked his whole life and all he had to show for it was me, who'd dropped out of Columbia University, for God's sake, against his wishes, against his hopes, you know, and I thought I could just do something for him for once."
Suddenly she was crying, and despite his wariness, he pulled her toward him. "Oh, Charlie, it was so stupid, so incredibly stupid. I sort of panicked, which isn't like me! I just thought how much I'd disappointed them. I mean, I was the girl who got a five on her goddamn AP history test, and now I have some boyfriend in there with huge arms and an earring, you know?" She coughed, voice thick. "My mother didn't care, she liked Rick, she made a puddle whenever a man smiled at her, she's probably the orgasm queen of all time, but my father was actually sort of classy in his quiet way. He used to sit in his old chair and read books on the Civil War and everything and I-"
"Okay, now," Charlie said.
"— I was his only child, his only daughter, and I'd already disappointed him so much. And I was so afraid that he was dying and that he wouldn't have-I haven't told anyone this, I just couldn't-it took me a long time in prison to understand what I did-I was so, so stupid. I didn't want to cause any trouble… I've just always had this streak of something, anger and defiance and feeling that I would do everything my way, and my father was always so gentle with me, like you, so caring, he never got angry, he let my mother be the one who got angry, I guess. So all these things were in my head, and I was standing there with this big box of cash and not thinking like I should have been."
"What'd you do?"
She stood up nervously and edged toward the window. "I found another box with cash in it and put the two of them down on the driveway. Then I arranged the outer rows of boxes in the truck to make it look like nothing had been disturbed. You wouldn't be able to tell there was a problem until you removed a complete row of boxes. Then there was a gap."
"You were out of your mind."
" I know," Christina said, touching a fingertip to the glass. "I carried the boxes to the garage. My father had this old Mustang convertible that he fixed up. The upholstery was still original, with the thin steering wheel. My mother wrote me in prison that after my father died her boyfriends wanted to fix it up but she'd never let them."
"Like a shrine." Ellie's closet for Ben.
"Sort of, yes. I knew they were planning to have it taken down to Florida with them. I knew they'd just roll it into the garage down there and leave it. My father was going to be too sick to actually fix it up again. The back was full of spare engine parts. I took them out and put in the two boxes. I don't know how much was there."
"Could be a million bucks," Charlie said, thinking of the forty thousand he'd given Lo in Shanghai, how he'd been able to slip that into his breast pocket. "Easily, in fact."
"Could be more," she said. "I think it is."
"You never counted it?"
"No, I never had the chance. We had to go, we had to deliver the truck. Rick woke up, said we'd be late… so on the way back to New York I'm worrying about what to do. If Tony finds out, then-I don't know, we're in trouble. The delivery was going as planned, though. I could have the truck arrive, but this guy Frankie was going to be the first to unload and would figure out two boxes were missing within a few minutes. First thing he's going to do is call Tony, right? So I'm thinking about it and smoking a million cigarettes and looking out the window and thinking, How am I going to do this? I have to get out of this somehow… I realized that if the police arrive, then Tony can't do anything to me. I actually want the police to arrive. I want us to get busted, but I don't want myself to get arrested. I want to get away at the right moment. The problem with that is that there would be other guys from the crew there, and if they get arrested and I don't, one of them will talk. The police will come right after me. I'm not controlling the situation that way."
He was listening anxiously now. "You wanted it the other way?"
"Exactly," Christina said. "I realized that I had to get myself arrested, not the other way around. I get myself arrested and the others go free. And if I don't talk, at all, maybe Tony calls the whole thing square. Maybe I'm okay. I could wait a few years if I knew I was safe from Tony and my parents would have the money. It seemed like an okay trade-off. I mean, it was stupid to think that, but I was desperate. We were going to drive in there and everything was going to be fucked up. I'd rather deal with the police than with Tony. He has a sadistic streak."