The Worst Best Luck (5 page)

James Plant looked at Peter anew, surprised at the question.  “You could.  But if there’s one single piece of advice I’d give you, Peter, it would be not to make any rash decisions.  Not to cash it this second, not to quit your job today, not to start any new friendships or new relationships.  Just keep your life the way it is today until you’ve had time to think about what you really want to do.” 

He paused.  “I know it’s an enormous amount of money.  And honestly, Peter, I’m impressed that you’d even consider just walking away from that kind of wealth.  But there’s a world of good you could do with that money, too, you know.  You could give it to some stranger on the street, who’d just spend it on…”

“A solid gold house,” Peter said ruefully, remembering Matt’s joke.

“Right.  And if you decide to give the money to charity, in the end it would be even more, it would be the whole $440 million cash payout, because giving it away would eliminate the tax penalty.  Yes, you could hand the ticket, unsigned, to one charity, and walk away.  But honestly, if you think that kind of money doesn’t belong in a single person’s hands, I can tell you that it doesn’t belong in a single charity’s hands, either.  It would ruin most organizations.”  He paused.  “It’s a responsibility.  It’s your responsibility now.”

Peter nodded. 
Don’t start any new relationships.  Too late for that.

“And honestly, I’d recommend therapy.  I know someone who’s good, who’s trustworthy.  She’s an expert on what they call SWS, Sudden Wealth Syndrome.”

Peter had to laugh.  “What a terrible illness to have.”

“Right?” James laughed with him.  “But it’s still a shock to your system.  It’s something that changes your relationship with everyone in your life.  And talking to a professional about the feelings you’re having right now can help you make a better decision when the time comes.  We’ll put the ticket in our safe here, or you can get a safe deposit box, and you can spend a couple months working out what you need to do.”

Peter nodded.  “Okay.”  He exhaled, and signed the ticket.  “If you’ll hold on to it here, that’s fine.”  Pushing it across the desk felt good, putting it out of his reach, his sight, the weight of it he’d been carrying now put on someone else.  For now.

Two days later, he had his therapy appointment.  “Thanks for coming in,” Jessica Zane said, her warm brown eyes matching her smile as she shook Peter’s hand. 

Everyone’s so nice,
he thought bitterly,
now that you’re rich. 
But then he stopped himself.  Thinking like that, trying not to think like that, was why he was here.

“Thanks.” 

She’d noticed it, smiled, nodded, gestured for him to sit down.  “It’s normal to feel suspicious of people right now.  It’s healthy, actually, given how most of the people in your life are about to change when your circumstances change.”

“To be suspicious and paranoid is healthy?”

“When you wake up one morning with hundreds of millions of dollars, yes.  How’s work going?”

Peter shrugged.  “Honestly, it’s a blur.  I mean, it’s a good thing I’ve been there for two years, and can do the job in my sleep, because honestly it feels like that’s what I’m doing.  Sleepwalking.  I mean, I know I’m not supposed to quit or do anything else impulsive, but it just seems…insane, you know?  Getting up early and riding a crowded subway to make $20 an hour, cashing a paycheck for a few grand.” 

He stopped.  “I know that sounds ridiculous, right, when people are broke and hungry, to talk about a ‘few grand,’ but it does seem so insignificant when all that money is sitting there in a safe.  And it’s not like I’ve got a meaningful job, I’m not saving lives, you know, I work in
advertising
.”

“You’re conscious of how things are changing,” she reflected back to him.  “You know you won’t have to get up early, or ride the train at rush hour, or work in advertising, and clearly these are things you don’t like to do.”

“Well, I’ll have to keep doing those things if I give all the money away.”  But he could feel it, like the One Ring burning a hole in his pocket, even though it wasn’t literally in his pocket anymore. 
The Ring is mine!
  he could hear himself shouting. 

“Is that one of the options you’re considering, giving it all away?”

Well, not all of it
, he thought glumly.  He already owed money to a lawyer, and now to a shrink.  Something had to pay for that, and it wouldn’t be his paycheck; the margin he lived on was tight enough already.  The money was already getting its roots in him, generating its own expenses.

“Yeah.  But it’s getting harder to think about that.”

“When people have to do things in life that they don’t want to do, they adjust.  They put on blinders to get on a crowded subway, use coping mechanisms like Internet browsing to get through their work day.  That’s what you’ve been doing.  And when all of a sudden you just…don’t have to, when the option of not dealing is suddenly available, the whole coping system can break down.”

“That’s it,” Peter sighed, relieved.  “That’s what it feels like.”

“How about relationships, do you have a partner, are you seeing anyone?”

“Yeah, I just…I just met someone.  Like days before I found out about…all this.”

“And have you told him?”

“No.  Not because I think he’d want my money,” he said hastily.  “Just the opposite.”

“That he wouldn’t want you
because
you have money?”

Peter nodded.  “Yeah, exactly.  Unearned money, crazy stupid huge money.  He’s…he’s so awesome.  And he walked away from a consulting job, making bank I’m sure, to be an auto mechanic.  I mean, it’s good money, but it’s not tons of money.  Not this kind of crazy money.  He has… He has a really good life.  He’s really happy.”

“Would you say you trust him?”

He looked at her.  “Aren’t I supposed to distrust him if I just met him?”

“You met him before this.  And it sounds like the attraction was immediate, and deep, and that it’s based on the respect you have for him.  And you do have to trust someone.  Do you have family?”

“Not really.  Not anymore.”

“Did you grow up with money?”

He laughed.  “Not even close.”

“Run, Forrest, Run!” the boys screamed.  “Run, Peter Rabbit!  You fucking ‘tard!”

Peter ran.  The housing complex made it easy, with its wide strips of concrete laid out between flat-faced buildings.  There were no benches to leap over (removed, as they had become locuses for drug dealing), and no trees to run around (the tender saplings had been smashed down by kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome).

But the wide open spaces meant there was nowhere to hide.  All Peter could do was outrace the free-floating rage behind him, the black cloud that had fixed its eye on him as the perfect, defenseless target for its massive charge of lightning.

He ran through the dark tunnels through the buildings, their lights shattered or burnt out.  He ran through the parking lot, where old junkers with open hoods made “working on the car” an excuse for a bunch of guys to hang out – all the better to sell you drugs from, my dear. 

“Run, faggot!” one asshole shouted, and the rest laughed.  He was being chased and he wasn’t turning to stand and fight, so of course he was a faggot.

The huge security guard sat on his camp stool, his ass practically consuming it, and watched the hunt go by.  If Peter stopped and asked him for help, he’d be safe, sort of – the man would be obligated to heave himself to his feet and go through the motions of protecting him. 

But that would only make the next cycle of violence worse,
you fucking pussy, run to the cops you snitch you bitch
and so he ran and ran some more.

He dashed up the steps of his own building two at a time.  It was a game, but it wasn’t.  If he could win, they’d wander away, their short attention spans turning elsewhere.  If he slowed, or turned to face them, it would be a disaster.  Worst of all, if he tripped and fell to the ground, the wild animals behind him would go into a frenzy of kicking and punching.

He’d mastered a fluid entry motion through the apartment door – holding his key out as he approached, stabbing it straight in the lock, turning it hard to flip the deadbolt, flying inside without breaking stride, pulling the key out as quickly and smoothly as a ninja would pull his blade out of a body, slamming the door behind him with a hand on the bolt, and snapping it tight just as the door shut.

Then he could stop, breathe, bend over, his hands on his thighs. 
Just a few more days,
he thought.  It was the 28
th
, and the end of the month was the worst – every family was out of money, waiting for the payment on the 1
st
(disability, welfare, food stamps, Social Security) that would restock the shelves with food, booze, or drugs. 

Fear and anxiety pooled everywhere the longer the month stretched out, as cupboards went bare and tempers frayed.  But fear wasn’t an acceptable emotion to express; it could only be expressed as rage, anger.  Chasing faggots was one way to vent it. Nobody would stop you from doing that.

“Peter,” his mom’s weak, faint voice said from the bedroom. 

He dropped his school bag and went in to greet her.  “Hey, Mom.”

“You’re flush.  You’ve been running.”  Her skin was grey and papery, but her eyes were bright, feverish, the eyes Peter saw in the art books in the library – martyr’s eyes, he thought, full of rapture, ready to burn.

“Yeah,” he said lightly.  “It’s nice out.  We didn’t have practice today so I ran home.”  Which was a lie.  The track team did have practice, but Peter had quit the team, because he had to be here, he had to take care of Mom.

She closed her eyes, and Peter kicked himself. 
You should have wiped the sweat off your face first, now she’s all guilting again.

“We’ll get out of here, Peter, I swear, when I’m better.”

He sat on the bed next to her.  “I know, Mom.  Don’t worry.”  He broke into a grin.  “I’m getting faster every day.”

She laughed weakly.  “My little trouper.”

“I’m gonna get you some soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I know,” he said, meeting her eyes.  It was there, between them, the knowledge. 
We’re probably not going to get out of here, you’re probably going to go to foster care when I die, there’s probably nothing we can do about any of this.

He winced as he reached up to get the soup off the shelf.  His shoulders were killing him, never mind his aching back.  The landscape job he worked on the weekend was the least suitable job for his small, wiry frame. 

God, he missed the bookstore job.  He hadn’t exactly
lied
about his age to get it.  He’d just let his maturity and intelligence lead Connie to assume he was more than fifteen years old.  And since she was an old hippie and paid under the table, the issue of ID and paperwork had never come up. 

Peter had spent his days in the quiet little used bookstore running the register, making the deposits, and reading, reading, reading.  For the most part, like any other used bookstore that was still in business, most of Connie’s income came from Internet sales. 

Peter’s real job wasn’t “bookstore clerk” so much as it was web business manager; he was responsible for posting books for sale to Connie’s Amazon seller account, after checking to see what the price point was at other retailers for a copy in the same condition (if they could beat it by just a penny they could make the sale first), filling the orders, answering customer service emails, scheduling package pickups.

But the wages hadn’t been enough after Mom got sick, and though Connie had bumped him up a bit, it was never enough.  The math around their house became ruthlessly simple:  sick + poor + uninsured = dead.  Mom had been on a half-ass insurance plan when she was working at MaxVal, and when, unlike the last boyfriend, the cancer got serious about sticking around, she couldn’t work anymore. 

She couldn’t keep her insurance unless she COBRA’d and paid the premium herself, but that was going to cost them the hundreds of dollars they didn’t have now.  So now she was on Medicaid, “means tested” to ensure that they stayed poor enough to get benefits.  Rumors of some health insurance reform that might happen sometime in the future didn’t mean shit in the here and now.

So Peter had become the breadwinner, and his under-the-table income was the difference between life and death.  And they, too, faced the 28
th
, or the 25
th
, or the 21
st
, with nothing to eat, with more mail arriving with bold red text on the envelope…

So when one of his mom’s better-quality ex-boyfriends offered him a job at $12 an hour under the table, working on his crew, instead of the $9 he was getting at the bookstore…

He was sensitive.  He tried not to be.  Sensitive equaled weak everywhere in his world – on the landscape crew, in the halls at school, God knows it did in the gladiatorial Coliseum of the housing project. 

He rode with the crew in the back of Chuck’s truck, neon green full length shirt making him a nonperson to the people whose houses they serviced.  He would drag one heavy bag of grass behind him, when the others hauled one over each shoulder. 

“You better stay in school, Rabbit,” the crew would needle him.  “This is no life for you.”  And he’d smile, and take it, and take it.  The ribbing, literally, the poke in the ribs from someone who resented him more than a little, making the same amount for half the work, but it was all the work his body could do, what more did they want?

Of course someone on the crew knew someone at the projects, and since everyone had to have a nickname, well, he got stuck with “Rabbit” again here, no escape, was there.  And when you were small and weak and shy and your full name was Peter Rabe, well, you were screwed there, right?

But to hell with today
, he thought as he heated some soup for Mom, hoping she’d at least get some of its broth down.  Tomorrow was a field trip.  Tomorrow the “disadvantaged” students would be put on a bus to New York City to see a free Broadway show, “The Lion King.”  What a word, Peter thought, stirring the off-brand, dollar store soup on the stovetop.  “Dis” meant
reversal, negation, removal…
as if he’d ever had an advantage to be dis’d of.

He jumped when his mom spoke from the doorway.  “I have something for you,” she smiled, leaning on the door frame, holding an envelope. 

“What…” he was afraid to ask.  What could possibly be good news, what could possibly be anything but more bad news, that Mom was trying to put a brave face on?  “You should go back to bed, Mom.”

“Fuck that,” she said with a bit of her old vigor, and Peter laughed involuntarily.  “Here, this is for you to use tomorrow.”

Peter took the envelope warily, opened it.  “Mom, shit, this is forty bucks!”  It was a fortune.

“Buy yourself a t-shirt or something at the show tomorrow.”

He hugged her, took her weight, knew the effort it had taken her to get up.  “Come on, now, let’s get you comfortable.”

Back in the kitchen, he put the envelope in a drawer.  They would need that money.  And besides, Peter knew what would happen if he bought anything tomorrow – the other kids would see it, and destroy it, enraged that he thought he was somehow better than they were, enraged that he had money to spend on something besides survival, had been stupid enough to try and get a souvenir of the one, probably the only, day away from all this he’d get for years. 

The worst part of poverty for Peter wasn’t the hunger.  Wasn’t the fear.  It was the noise.  The screaming, screaming, screaming of kids who grew up in homes where people screamed at each other all the time, turned up the TV to cover the screaming from next door, then screamed over that.  People who watched reality shows full of people screaming at each other, because it was their own lives they were seeing, every insane outburst on TV a perfectly normal scene to them.

On field trip day, the bus was full of kids who’d never had an indoor voice.  It wasn’t the excited chatter of happy kids, but the never-ending rage of kids who’d demanded attention and been neglected and had only received a shout and a slap when they caused enough of a commotion, and so that was the only way they knew.

Peter sat in the front of the bus next to the chaperone, who was engrossed in some trashy novel.  Which was great, because it meant that kids who threw shit at him might hit her, breaking her concentration on the pages of “Love’s Rapturous Flammability” and sending her into a rage.  So he was able to snatch a moment’s peace, look out the window, watch the landscape go by. 

Living in Jersey, you’d think that Manhattan would be a part of his life.  But that couldn’t be, with no disposable income to pay museum admissions or buy train tickets, or anything else.  Manhattan was as far from him, a half hour’s train ride from home, as if he lived a thousand miles away.

The theater intimidated the kids, the inside of it dark and majestic and nothing like the tattered $1 second run multiplex they were used to.  They giggled nervously in their seats, and smacked each other a little as they squirmed, but there was something at work here they didn’t understand, that…awed them.

And when the lights went down, the actors came down the aisles, no,
the animals came down the aisles,
the actors disappearing so completely into the fantastic costumes, the elaborate devices.  And it wasn’t like a movie, or even a play, on a stage or a screen and on the other side of an invisible curtain that said, our world here, your world there.  Because the whole thing was around him, it was
everywhere,
he was in Africa!  It was real!  Whatever was going on here,
he was part of it.

Afterward, he was in shock.  “Theater” had meant school plays, revivals of vanilla pabulum that no holy rolling school board member could ever object to.  “Theater” had meant old broads beltin’ out tunes from “Gypsy” on TV.  “Theater” had never had anything to do with Peter.

From that day on, other than work and taking care of mom, little else existed.  He brought home piles of books from the library, plays, pictorial encyclopedias on musicals, all the DVDs of their movie versions that the library had on offer.  The greatest day of his life so far was the day he discovered inter-library loan, the stunning realization that there wasn’t a single book about Broadway anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard that he couldn’t read.  Even being chased home meant nothing anymore; he was racing home anyway, to get back to his books.

The librarians were kind.  They loved him more than he’d ever know.  They saw the bruises, and knew too well how to distinguish child abuse marks from those of peer abuse – the look in the face and eyes told the difference.  He brought books back battered and torn sometimes, and apologized, but they knew it wasn’t his mishandling that had caused it.

“You should join the theater group at Flatland High,” one of them said finally one day, when he was checking out an Ethan Mordden title for the third time. 

“I can’t,” he said automatically.  “My mom’s sick, she needs my help, I have to work, I don’t have time.”

“Hmm.”  She looked at one of the other librarians, who looked back meaningfully.

When the doorbell rang two nights later, Peter naturally took his time answering it.  It was almost always Jesus Calling; there weren’t any other visitors, no family around here, no former coworkers coming around anymore after a certain number of awkward bedside visits.  His aunt had made it clear that she “weren’t comin’ round on mah day off to take on any more damn work” to help the sister she’d never liked anyway.