The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(35)

“You do not need another toy,” his father would say. “Someday, there will be something worthwhile to spend this money on. You’ll see.” And his mother would take it downstairs to the safe.

Now Dave opened the door to the unfinished basement and ducked inside. He crept downstairs in the dark, breathing air gritted with dust. As he flipped on the overhead bulb, the dust settled on his white sneakers. This worried him briefly—when his mother came home she would see it—but he pushed on.

The dim room was piled with storage boxes, each filled with artifacts and sealed and labeled in his mother’s elegant print. The safe sat in the corner, behind a box called DAVID Classwork & Report Cards, K–3. He pushed the box aside, cardboard scraping the concrete floor, and silky cobwebs stuck to his fingers. The safe, revealed, reflected yellow light.

He grasped its metal dial. Recalled the numbers his mother had made him memorize when he was eight. “In case, unexpectedly, we die,” she’d explained at the time, turning the dial in the series her fingers had seemed to know by heart. “In this safe, we keep the deed to the house, the security passwords, the bank account numbers, keys.” The safe had swung open and she’d removed each item, displaying it like one of the Price Is Right ladies on TV. “This is my mother’s jewelry box with the diamond for when you propose,” she’d said. (Propose what? eight-year-old Dave had thought.) “This book has the phone number of our attorney, our accountant, all the important people. See this paper? These are the terms of the living trust. This is what says that everything belongs to all of us, and that after your father and I are gone, everything will just belong to you. It helps with the taxes. Do you understand?”

Eight-year-old Dave had nodded. He’d known that he was supposed to pay attention to these details, to remember—diamond, living trust, taxes—but as his mother had busily arranged the contents of the safe, one phrase returned and echoed in his brain: In case unexpectedly we die. What had his mother meant by this? Were his parents going to die? When? And what was going to kill them—a sickness, an earthquake, a man with a gun? And would Dave survive this disaster if he remembered the numbers that opened the safe? If he forgot the numbers, what then? Would he have nothing? Would he have to find some other parents to take care of him?

His mother had not finished. “David?” she’d said, jostling his arm. “Are you listening to me? Look, this is where all your money will be safe until we can trust you to do the right thing.” The manila envelope had crinkled in her hand. It was flat at the ends but bloated in the middle, like a snake that had swallowed a mouse. In black marker it was labeled DAVID. It did not look like much; Dave imagined with tender longing all the superhero figurines and soccer jerseys and vanilla ice cream cones he could have bought with all those birthdays.

He had not visited the safe in the eight years since his mother had revealed its contents, but he’d memorized the numbers. Now he clicked the wheel right to the first number, back to the second, then forward again, and so on, just as his mother had, until he felt the final click and release. The safe swung open. It was not like safes in movies. There were no thick gold bars or winking piles of coins. Only a stack of papers, five black velvet jewelry boxes, and a ring of keys. He held his breath like he was going underwater. Reached in, and shuffled the papers until he found what he was searching for. This part did feel like a movie. Blood drummed his ears. His hand shook. Over the years, the envelope’s belly had distended. Crouching in the gloom, he flipped the envelope, pried up the clasp’s metal wings, and unfolded the flap. He reached in slowly, imagining the fat black widow spider that would tiptoe up to bite him for his crimes.

But there was no spider, just the stack of bills his mother had for sixteen years collected in his name.

Slowly, carefully, he counted it.

One hundred dollars per birthday for sixteen birthdays.

Twenty dollars per Christmas for sixteen Christmases.

Ten dollars per Easter for sixteen Easters.

Five-and ten-dollar bills, assorted, from his grandparents and from aunts and uncles he hardly remembered or hadn’t met.

In total, there was $2,525 in the envelope marked DAVID. He’d always known it, yet he couldn’t believe it. He was rich.

But he couldn’t take it all. He didn’t want to. The money scared him, the bills so vulnerable. They could be torn, they could be cut with scissors. They could fly out the window and flap away on the breeze. He could lose the money, or be seized by the sudden, irrepressible urge to find out what it smelled like when it burned. Such things—carelessness, destructiveness—were not in his nature, yet he could not trust himself. He was a teenage boy, as his parents had reminded him so many times—left to his own devices there was no way of knowing what damage he might do.

Dave exhaled. Unlicked eight hundred dollars from the stack. Seven hundred and fifty dollars was for Nick Brickston. The other fifty was half a birthday, just for him.

—

On May 4, a Saturday, Dave’s father woke him at 6:00 a.m. Dave threw off the covers and stumbled to the bathroom, showered and toweled off, combed his shock of hair until it shone. He brushed and flossed his teeth. He examined himself in the mirror, zooming in closer and closer until his face abstracted and his eyes were black tunnels shifting in his skin.

He dressed. Nothing special. Blue polo shirt and chinos, white-soled shoes. Then he loaded his backpack with supplies: one admission ticket, printed from the Internet; one plastic card that identified him as the one and only David Alexander Chu, Student, Valley High School; two number-2 pencils, sharpened, and one soft eraser; one graphing calculator; two extra calculator batteries, just in case; one watch without audible alarm; two peanut butter granola bars; one ripe banana; one canteen of filtered water. And in his front pocket, folded and tucked against his thigh, eight hundred dollars in cash.