did they think they were going? I watched other cars, commuters on their way home, diving for the side of the road, making way for a reckless chase into the final curve. But it was a ninety-degree turn onto PCH and the intersection was filled with cars. Parting the lanes, the Jag slowed, beginning to thread its way through, but the black sedan could not make the turn, nor could it slow quickly enough. Rather, it plowed into the slowing Jag, pushing it though the intersection and into the concrete barrier where both cars flipped and tumbled like tiny dice over the road, across a parking lot, off the embankment and out along the rocky breakwater.
Traffic stopped in all directions. Moments later the twisting, tortured sound of the collision finally reached me, softened by the distance. I watched the stopped drivers run from their cars, but not to pull the dead from the wreckage. Instead, they clamored, crawled, and climbed over one another in mad panic, groping wildly in the air, hoping to capture the cloud of money drifting aimless and indifferent through the light of the late-summer sunset.
Epilogue
Reilly lingered in the doorway. Our conversation was over but he couldn’t seem to leave. He just kept bringing it up. “Man, that must have been something! All that money just blowing away like that.”
“Yeah,” I responded, uninterested. Examining the office one final time, ensuring that I had everything. The man from the mailroom was loading my boxes onto a handcart, ready to take them down to my car.
“So you’re really leaving?” The prospect seemed foreign to Reilly, incomprehensible. He even seemed to have trouble asking the question.
I stared at Reilly as if into a mirror, or a perspicuous pool reflecting images of a future not yet written. I realized then and there that, despite all that had happened to me, I was essentially a weak man, a child thrown to the world. I had not escaped with my life because of my smarts or skills, but luck and luck alone. At each step I was confronted by my own hesitating self, afraid to do necessary things and opting instead to play it safe. The decision to go to law school, the decision to go to K&C, my reliance on Ed Snyder to formulate a plan and to make the world safe for me, all of these and more resulting from my inability to stick with my own convictions, or to have convictions at all. My eyes fell over the empty office one more time. I looked at Reilly and saw myself in a few lonely, frightened years.
“Yeah. All this happening, it just put some things in perspective. You know?” I stood with my hands in my pockets, nodding as I spoke.
“Oh, yeah,” Reilly nodded back, but could only guess at my meaning. Hovering at the door, silence fell between us and I thought about simply walking out and leaving him there.
And then, glancing down at the handcart, I reached out and took the top box from the pile, the one I’d taped up myself, and tucked it under my arm. “I’ll carry this one,” I said to the mail guy, who could have cared less. Then I smiled at Reilly and winked, “You know, never keep your eggs in one basket, eh?”
“Wow!” Reilly went on again, no longer paying attention to me. “That must have been something. I mean, five million dollars.”
“Yeah, well,” I hesitated at the door, aching to leave. “That’s what they said anyway. But who really knows. I mean, with it all blowing around like that, who’s to say if it was five million or three million?” I tapped the box under my arm again and smiled. I turned away from Reilly, leaving him to his thoughts and the safety of his imagination. The man with the handcart followed.
In my car at Fifth and Fig, I waited for the light to change. I glanced at the box on the seat beside me, but could not muster a smile. Despite its contents, I was alone and escaping once again. But to where? As I drove south toward the ten freeway, I contemplated Riverside, the drive east, and what it might mean to lose myself once again in safety, in choices born of risk aversion. But most of all, I thought of my luck and of the things I wanted most in the world.
As the sweeping concrete curves of the onramps stretched out in front of me, peeling off in