In Search of Honesty

I shut the door with care, listening for the soft click of the latch. Stepping quietly off the stoop, I crept to the side of the house, tugging my bike from its mess of ivy. I closed the garden gate behind me and set off into the moonlight.

The cobblestones clattered beneath my tires as I pedaled across ancient foot bridges, their rise and fall the only break in the flat Dutch landscape. On my right, the Oudegracht canal glided noiselessly. Smells of recently shuttered bakeries filled the air as I headed downtown.

Celine and Martijn awaited me near the Dom Cathedral. Both first-years at the University of Utrecht, they had approached me in a coffeeshop a few weeks earlier, intrigued by my obvious foreignness. We’d exchanged phone numbers, and I’d joined them every night since.

This evening, like most, featured a sticky wooden tabletop in a dimly lit pub. Celine, pierced lip and black eyeliner, recounted her recent unsuccessful stick-and-poke tattoo over free pretzels and cheap beer. Martijn’s gelled hair, stiff as a porcupine, became more and more fascinating the drunker I became. I hazily recall pressing my open palm to the crown of his head, laughing hysterically at the compressive strength of his needly locks. The evening passed easily.

Five hours later, the moon now hidden behind thick clouds, I stashed my bike back behind the garden gate and stumbled gratefully up the step, faintly aware of the need for stealth but struggling to execute it amidst my disinhibition. The world swayed headily as I grabbed the doorknob.

I torqued the knob harder than necessary, but it wouldn’t turn. My stomach, already sloshing, twisted rudely. I rattled the doorknob and threw my weight against the door. No luck.

In retrospect, sneaking out may not have been necessary at all. The boys’ grandmother, Oma, was home, and my au pair assignment was never meant to extend through the night. Had I not been seventeen, I might have had the sense to simply request a key for my nights out in downtown Utrecht. Unfortunately, at that age, I was strangely reluctant to ask for help, somehow preferring the enormous risk that Oma, a light sleeper in her old age, might wander downstairs one of these nights in search of a water glass and notice the front door unlocked.

So it was, I suppose, that I came to be locked out that night.

I frantically ran through my options. Though my judgment was woefully impaired, adrenaline was rescuing my depressed neurotransmitters. I had an idea: I leapt off the step and dashed past my bike into the back garden, where sliding patio doors looked directly from the garden into the kitchen. Surely, I thought, these doors wouldn’t be locked. It was summer, and Oma tended to her honeysuckles and hydrangeas with a mother’s devotion. The doors were thrown open and shut countless times a day.

I wrenched the long handle of the glass door, but the seal held. Dismayed, I trained my eyes on the inner lock, willing the latch to budge by telekinesis. Unsurprisingly, it did not.

Out of ideas, I stood haplessly in the garden. I thought of the boys sleeping upstairs. Over the past week, I’d started telling them bedtime stories about Mortimer and Sapphire, two dragons of my imagination who had come to occupy the lamplit minutes before sleep each night. Mortimer was, by nature, cautious, while Sapphire was disturbingly reckless, constantly threatening to reveal the secret location of their Pyrrhenese home. I had taken to documenting bits and pieces of these stories in my journal, a small, black notebook that fit easily in my shoulder bag and came everywhere with me.

As I wondered vaguely if the boys might awaken to a rock at their window, I looked up and noticed my own bedroom window, set out vertically from the roof. Warm light flowed through it; I’d left my lamp on. I pondered my next move, noting the tall fence snaking around the yard, a row of solid wood nearly six feet high. I followed the fence to where it met the house, and saw, with interest, that the roof, composed of half-cylinder clay tiles, sloped down far enough that the eaves hung only a foot or two higher than the top of the fence. The angle of the roof appeared gentle enough from the ground. I had no idea if I had locked my window recently, but it was worth a try. Slinging my shoulder bag cross-body, I began to climb.

My black lace-up Doc Martens were hardly the ideal shoe for the job, but I was emboldened by intoxication and desperation. As I clambered from the top of the fence onto the roof, I found the clay tiles slicker than expected, moist from the early morning humidity. Nervously, I edged further up the roof, the previously gentle-seeming slope looking more and more menacing the higher I climbed.

My window was only ten feet away when I froze at the sound of a voice. Somebody was shouting angrily in Dutch, and I looked around wildly, trying to locate the source. I finally found it: a neighbor, leaning out of his upstairs window, appropriately alarmed at the apparent burglary occurring next door. By now, pre-dawn had given way to early morning light, and I had lost the advantage of darkness. Like a politician caught in a lie, I smiled and waved with absurd casualness, conveying in English that I was the babysitter and had gotten locked out. I braced for the worst but, unbelievably, the neighbor accepted this explanation and retired to the warmth of his home.

Thinking back, especially with what I’d later learn about the neighborhood, it was incredible that he didn’t immediately raise the alarm. I suppose there was something distinctly Dutch about his non-interventional approach.

Turning back to my task, I rose from my crouch and nearly lost balance, upending my shoulder bag and spilling my wallet and black notebook in the process. I watched them slide several feet down the roof. Cursing, I began to scrabble down when I spied a small metal box near my left foot, wedged between two clay tiles where one was missing. I kicked at the box, nudging it loose. A second later, it crashed loudly on the ground.

I was suddenly exhausted, certain I couldn’t make up the ground I’d lost. Surrendering, I scuttled over to retrieve my wallet and notebook then slid pathetically to the edge of the roof, awkwardly lowering myself from eaves to fence to earth.

Once back on the ground, I retrieved the fallen box, plunked down at the wrought iron garden table, and set the mysterious box in front of me. There were no locks, and the latches released easily. I lifted the lid with a strange thrill.

Inside were several stacks of five hundred Euro bills. I gaped. What? Unable to process the enormity of my finding, I shut the lid quickly. With a furtive glance behind my shoulder, I stuffed the box into my shoulder bag. The grandfather clock, visible through the patio door, read six o’clock. Somebody, likely Oma, would be down soon; I’d deal with this later. I rested my head in my hands on the table and fell asleep.

I woke with a start to the sound of my name. Wiping drool from the corner of my mouth, I looked up to find Jeffrey, the eleven-year-old and oldest of my charges, peering at me blearily, still wearing his pajamas.

“Emily, what are you doing out here?”

I blessed the gloomy morning for obscuring my muddy shirtsleeves and cut up palms. “I - I went out for a morning run, Jeff, but I got locked out,” I suggested lamely.

He frowned. “Why didn’t you ring the doorbell or something?”

“I didn’t want to bother anyone,” I replied truthfully.

He stared. “Oh, ok.” He turned to head inside, and I followed him. Without another word, I trudged upstairs. My bed, unmade with rumpled sheets, had never looked so inviting. I washed my hands but did little else before falling into dreamless sleep.

Later that day, during lunch, Oma would tell me that the observant neighbor had called the house that morning, as soon as it was decent to do so. Apparently, seeing me had brought back memories from decades before, when a string of robberies shook the neighborhood, engendering a major beef-up in security. That explains the locked patio door, I thought wryly. A lot of things went missing at that time, Oma told me, many of which were never recovered. I’d only been half-listening, lost in embarrassment at the whole affair, but my ears perked up at this detail. Things had gone missing. Maybe the box of Euros - which equaled about twenty thousand American dollars - was a vestige of this troublesome era, the remnant of a theft-gone-awry. This, I recognized, was a perfect chance to mention the box to Oma, but something stopped me. I continued to eat my lunch as Oma told me more about the thefts.

The decidedly fraught morality of my finding tugged at me over the next few days. The boys and I were busy, but my mind nonetheless continually returned to the box. It was uncomfortably likely that the money actually belonged to Oma; after all, she, with her late husband Opa, had lived in the house for over fifty years, I’d been told.

After days of wrestling with the awkwardness of the whole issue - as well as my own selfish impulses - I decided to come clean one evening over tea and crepes. The boys had already gone to to bed. Without much preamble, I began to tell the story, rushing as superficially as possible over the details, quickly arriving at the part about the box. As soon as I mentioned it, recognition dawned on Oma’s face. I paused mid-sentence. It’s hers, I thought.

She asked to see the box. Wordlessly, I handed it to her. If she was surprised at the contents, she hid it well. She casually leafed through the notes, then closed the lid. I was surprised to see a wistful look on her kind, lined face.

“When the robberies started, Opa was beside himself,” she began, referring to her late husband. “He changed the locks, bought a fake security camera system, the whole shebang.” She pronounced this last word “she-bong”, a charming Dutchism that brought a smile to my face in spite of everything.

Oma had stood up in the middle of this last comment and was now busily rooting through a draw in the oak hutch. After a minute or so, she produced a five hundred Euro note and, to my surprise, handed it to me. She then took one of the many notes from the box and put it in my other hand. Even to my untrained senses, the difference was unmistakeable. Flimsy, papery, and textureless, the boxed note was clearly a fake.

“Opa went quite far with the precautions. A box of fake money - bless him. We went away to Flevoland at some point around the time of the robberies. When we came back, the box was gone. We never did know what happened to it; we were just glad nothing else was stolen.” She smiled at me. “I suppose you weren’t the only one who found our rooftop a tempting target.”

I blushed and smiled back. The rest of the evening passed easily in memories of Opa’s eccentricities and the history of the neighborhood. That night, I retired to bed and didn’t go downtown. Though I might not be rich, at least I was figuring out how to be honest.