The Risk Pool

nothing inside.”
    “You should talk to my father about him someday. They were together a lot in the war. Anyway,” I said, “I doubt he was empty. There was something that kept those guys going, the ones who made it all the way to Berlin.”
    “Sometimes,” Tria said, rolling over onto her back again and staring up at the ceiling, “I think that Mother is right about him being empty because I feel so empty myself.” She looked over at me in the semidark with the same scared look she’d had as a girl learning to drive. “Do you ever feel like you’re nobody at all?”
    “No,” I admitted. “There are times when I feel like I’m somebody I don’t like very much.”
    “But always somebody,” she said sadly, then added, “I never dislike myself. When I was younger and first began to understand that my father was doing something behind Mother’s back, I thought that if I could make him love me more, he’d love her too. I even told her that once, and she smiled at me like I didn’t understand a thing in the whole wide world. You don’t count, was what she said. Later that night when she heard me crying, she came in and explained what she’d meant. That Daddy was an adult, and that even though he loved me as a little girl, I didn’t count as a big girl because I wasn’t one. But it was too late. I’d already understood it the other way, and it had made the whole world make sense. All I had to do was understand that I didn’t count and then everything fell into place. When he died, that’s all I could think of.”
    It had stopped raining out, and somewhere below, on the highway, we heard a hot rod downshifting gears.
    “I was here that night, with my father,” I heard myself tell her. “The night half the town came out. I never felt so sorry for anybody. I couldn’t face you I felt so bad.”
    She covered her face with both hands, remembering. “It was awful. I’ll never forget it. All those people. They wouldn’t go home. My mother was glad they were there, so she could say look, he’s done it for the last time. How I hated her that night. How I hated everybody.”
    “Me too,” I said, remembering the woman who’d stolen the book from the Ward library.
    For some reason, I told Tria about it, though it did not surprise her. “All sorts of things disappeared that night. You wouldn’t believe the things they took.”
    “Yes I would,” I said, thinking that it hadn’t been just DrewLittler who resented the Money People. Most people who stole weren’t taking what they believed to be others’ property. They were taking what they themselves deserved, all the things they’d been cheated out of. That, now that I thought about it, was why I’d raided Klein’s. It had been an act of revenge, not avarice.
    “The car was the one that got us,” she said.
    I blinked. “What?”
    “Somebody swiped Daddy’s Lincoln,” she said. “That afternoon. When we got back from the funeral home it was gone.”
    She was looking at me so strangely—as if she thought it might be within my power to explain such maliciousness—that I felt a sudden, inexplicable wave of guilt so powerful that I imagined for a brief moment that maybe I
had
stolen the Lincoln and willed myself to forget the deed. This bizarre conviction was so real that I had to force myself to reason it out, that it could not be true. I’d been thirteen when Jack Ward died. I hadn’t taken driver ed until two years later in Mohawk High.
    The more I tried to shake the feeling of responsibility, the more guilty I felt about my present posture. Was I not at this moment a thief in the Ward house? Hadn’t I insinuated my way into their midst, misrepresented myself, stolen into Tria’s bedroom, taken … what? Nothing that hadn’t been freely given, surely. And maybe it had done some good. Maybe confiding in me about that horrible day was something Tria needed to do. I realized that her breathing had become regular and that she was asleep. I stayed awake watching the patterns made on her bedroom wall by the sliver of moon darting in and out of the clouds outside. At one point, what my imagination took to be a human form passed outside the window, but I did not dare disturb Tria, whose head lay on my shoulder, her gentle breathing providing a rhythm that I tried, without much success, to match.
    Tria woke me early. Her bedside clock said it was a few minutes before six and the clear sky outside the bedroom window was not quite blue