Search For Change
It wasn’t long before they found her. She had been hiding among the tall trees on the other side of town and she offered no resistance when they reached for her. They hauled her out, one on each side of her. Iron hands gripped her arms, bills floating dreamily from her pockets and now untucked shirt. Nearby, the baby wailed, and she strained to catch a glimpse of one of the officers trying to soothe him while at the same time checking him for signs of harm.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
It began just a day earlier.
She had gone to all of the usual hiding spots. The jam jar in the kitchen held two dimes, three nickels, and seven pennies. The junk drawer housed a lone dollar bill stuck between a Canadian Tire receipt and some useless bills. She spent over an hour searching behind bookcases and furniture and could only scrape up another seventy-two cents. After a futile search through jacket pockets, even the winter coats in the back of the closet, she was still at a meager two dollars and fourteen cents. There was nothing left.
He had been decent enough to leave her a note. Scrawled on the back of a flyer, it read simply:
Suze,
Have tried my best to work things out, but we both knew this was coming. Sorry I couldn’t leave anything for you, but I’ll send you a cheque as soon as I find work. Don’t bother trying to find me. There’s no point. I love Michael. Tell him that.
Matt.
‘Send you a cheque’, was the line that kept coming back to her. He knew how desperate the money situation was for them. Mikey had less than seven diapers left, and her baby bonus wasn’t going to go into her account until the twentieth. She wasn’t worried about Matt clearing out their bank accounts on account that they were already in the red. All the money went for the move out to this godforsaken town. This town where she knew nobody. This town that she had stepped foot in, only once.
It was Matt’s final effort in ‘trying to work things out’. How she had let him convince her to move to Alden Mills, a lone lumber town out in the middle of nowhere was beyond her now. Hell, it was beyond her then. They had packed up their Chevette and headed north to the job Matt had claimed was waiting for him. He had assured her that everything would change, that their lives would be so much better away from their interfering parents and noisy neighbours. Yes, going north would allow them the opportunity to settle down, raise Mikey in a safe place away from the highways and high-rises. And as they drove away, each kilometre fading in the distance seemed to push them further apart.
The ride up was terrible. With Mikey screaming endlessly in his car seat, the silence between the two of them was oppressive. His cries were almost welcomed by the both of them because it meant that they didn’t have the opportunity to really say what they were thinking. That this was a mistake. That it had been a mistake for the past two years. That moving wasn’t going to solve anything and that they might as well stop spending money on gas that was just going to be needed when they both realized that they should just go back home, call a lawyer and split as amicably as possible.
But Matt had been insistent. Matt had talked to her in that voice that he only used for her, and tried to get her to remember the good times. And she relented. And now it was finally over.
The robbery certainly didn’t go off as planned. Probably because she hadn’t planned on it at all. She had walked down the dirt road towards town the next afternoon, shifting Mikey from arm to arm once his weight started to numb her. With her whole two dollars and fourteen cents, she hoped to buy a quart of milk… hoped to. With the prices in town, she didn’t know what she would do if it was any more than what she had in her pocket. And after that, she thought that she’d mail the letter that was in her other pocket. The one addressed to her parents admitting her failure in living her life.
She spent the whole night working on writing that letter. After brewing a pot of coffee and using the last of the cream, she sat at the kitchen table and started to write the words that finally proved that what her parents had said would happen, had happened. She knew she had to write the letter asking them to send her money for the two of the to come back home, because she knew that she couldn’t take hearing the triumph in her mother’s voice telling her that “Everything will be just fine, dear. It’s going to be all right, now.”
But that was last night. The next afternoon however, she was only focused on one thing. Making the walk into town, getting milk and then mailing the damned letter. She was lucky she already had stamps in her purse, and she thought that they had enough food to last until her parents sent the money. The milk wouldn’t last, but they had juice enough in the freezer, and it wouldn’t take more than three days at the most for the letter to reach her parents. After that, well… she would wait to see what happened.
When she and Mikey had finally reached the outskirts of town, she was in a state of rage. She had walked the whole way while phrases of Matt’s letter and her own words in response rang in her head. ‘Tried my best’. Oh yes, that’s right. Tried his best to screw me over. There wasn’t a job. There hasn’t been a job for a long time now. Just me, trying to make ends meet with the crap jobs that I was qualified for. ‘Don’t bother trying to find me’. The dramatic asshole. Always trying to have the last word. Well, there was ‘no point’ because she already knew that he was headed to one of his friends’ houses, either Cooper’s or Murrison’s. It’ didn’t matter either way, both houses were dumps in their hometown; rentals designed for students or aging wannabe rock stars. Either house would have an ancient foldout couch that Matt would be welcomed to call home, or at least, long enough for him to realize that all the beer and girls in the world wasn’t going to give him what he was looking for. Soon enough, she would hear from him. Soon enough, he’d be wheedling her again, pleading for that last chance. And just as soon after, life at her parents’ place would make life with Matt look good.
It was that last thought that made her stride into the nearby bank. It was that last thought that drove her feet towards the teller and demand in a voice she had never heard before to hand over the money. It was enough to allow her to ignore Mikey’s cries and the teller’s urgency in advising her to think it over. Just enough to allow her to say that she had a gun in her jacket and that she was going to blow the bitch’s face off if she didn’t move that instant.
“Think of your baby,” the teller had said, almost pleadingly, as Mikey clambered to be let down. With her free hand in her pocket and a finger pointed like a gun, she made the motion that sealed her fate. The teller shook her head as she began emptying drawers and signaling the other tellers to follow suit.
Perhaps it was when she had set Mikey down on the ground and began stuffing bills into her shirt that they knew she was unarmed. Probably they had known all along. But they gave her enough time to bolt out of the bank, after grabbing Mikey with her free arm. She sprinted around buildings and houses. Looking. Searching. And as she drew near the woods, the sirens began. And with the sirens, grew Mikey’s cries. And as the sound grew louder and got closer, she felt much the same as she did in the car with Matt and Mikey. That it was a mistake. That this was a mistake and had been all along.