The manila envelope was about the same size as the money it held, and I counted it but didn’t really count it, because the whole time I was saying, “There’s supposed to be nothing here.” I began again, and I only made it to four hundred and twenty dollars when a car door slammed shut. I shoved everything back into the safe, including the money, all of it, whose envelope I saw had my name written on it in that blue penmanship of hers. I would take no money right then, not because I couldn’t and not because I convinced myself there was no money to take, but because the memory has always been that I left everything as it was.

I shut and locked the safe, and pushed it back under the bed as it had been. The front door opened and I opened the closet, and when the front door shut I shut the closet.

The bedroom light came on. Huddled between my grandmother’s hanging clothes, lines of light crossing my face, I watched my mother cross the small room to the side of the bed I’d just left. She got on the floor and was out of my vision, but it was like I could still see, could still see what she was doing. She pulled out the safe.

She said something I couldn’t hear. She sat up on her knees, looking.

She started in the dresser drawers, moving stuff around, and then she went to the nightstand closest to the safe, pulled open drawers, and she left them open when she went to the other side of the bed, the other nightstand, passed so close by me in the closet that I could smell her sharp perfume. I did not blink. She left those drawers open too, and she went back to the safe, got back on the ground and out of my sight. Everything she pulled out from under the bed she set on the bed until everything that was under there was on top: old VCRs and unpainted shelves for knickknacks and a basket full of rogue cables and wires and a small plastic tote filled with buttons and sewing string and another empty carton of Mistys.

“Where is it?” my mother said.

Her eyes set on the closet, and she came for it. In my fear I tensed and squeezed each of my hands so tightly shut that I finally felt it.

My gasp made my mother jump back. “Who’s there?” she said, and then perhaps to frighten the person behind those closed closet doors my mother declared she had a weapon. “I’ll use it,” she said.

I stared at the key in my hand.

How did we get here? and How do we get out of here? sometimes have the same answer.

“Don’t you open that door!” my mother yelled. “You stay right there!”