The Itch by JJ Hanestad
A cash-strapped father of two finds a supernatural button that offers him a new kind of life, but at what cost?
I have been writing in this journal on suggestion from my therapist for just over six months now, and I must say that it has worked far better than I imagined it would. My mind is clearer. I have been sleeping better (though I may have the Trazadone to thank for that). I still cry, but less frequently. I think I'm ready to write the entry I've been dreading since she handed me this notebook.
I'm ready to tell the truth about what happened.
Everything started on a Saturday, I think it was February 23rd. Maybe it was the 24th. My wife and I slept through our alarm, which was okay because it was the weekend and we'd shared a bottle of wine the night before. I woke up first, and decided to let Laura sleep. That's my wife's name. Laura. Beautiful name. Anyway, I got dressed and went downstairs, and the two kids were already playing in the backyard. I stood by the window for probably ten minutes, watching. They were in a phase where they'd fight for days over nothing, so this was rare. After ten minutes, I decided it was time to make coffee. I went to the kitchen and that's where I saw it. Sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.
A black button.
It was exactly like one of those toy buttons that farted when you pressed it. That's what I thought it was, at first. Something one of the girls got from school or the arcade. I walked over the table and pressed it, and nothing happened.
Then I saw the card it was sitting on. Just a plain white card, no writing on the front of it. But inside of it, in black cursive pen, are words I will never forget: Every time you press the button, $100,000 will be deposited into your bank account, and someone you know will die.
I thought it was a prank. What else would I have thought? Something like that didn't exist. Magic wasn't real. People wouldn't die if the button was pressed, and a hundred grand certainly wouldn't just show up in my bank account.
I forgot about it, and went about the day.
That night, laying in bed, I asked Laura about the button, if she knew which girl played the prank.
"What button?" she said, perfectly serious.
I rolled onto my side to face her, and even though the room was dark, I could see it in her face that she had no idea what I was talking about.
"The big black button on the kitchen table. With the creepy card under it. You didn't see it?"
She hadn't seen it.
I had half a mind to get up and grab the button and card and show them to her, but it was already late and we had church the next morning. I told her I'd show her in the morning, and that was that. We went to sleep.
The next morning we slept through our alarm, which was not okay because we had church, but our oldest woke us up when she saw the clock above the oven said nine and we usually left the house by nine on Sundays. In the mad rush that followed, Laura and I forgot all about the button. The rest of the day was full of soccer practice for both girls, grocery shopping, and getting ready for the week, and I can tell you I didn't think about the button the entire day. I didn't notice it the next morning, either when I got up for work. I set two alarms that morning, just to be sure.
Life was busy. My mind was full, and Laura's was too. I didn't think about that button until Thursday, when I had to skip my lunch break for my yearly check-up at the doctor's.
I got there fifteen minutes early, same as I do for any appointment. In my mind, if you're not early, you're late. Something my father taught me. Anyway, when I got there, the receptionist told me that we were going to need to reschedule. There were tears in her eyes, and her mascara had run down her cheeks. She told me that the doctor had been in a car accident that morning. They weren't sure if she would make it. Obviously I told her that wasn't a problem at all, even though it was a bit of a problem. I'd missed a lunch break for nothing.
Before I could leave, she asked if I wanted to make the payment on the appointment my youngest had a couple weeks before, when she'd had a 104 degree fever. I guess Laura had asked if she could wait to pay until I got my next paycheck. That's one thing I forgot to mention; we're not a wealthy family. We're quite poor, actually. There was probably enough in our bank account to pay for that appointment when it happened, but only barely.
I pulled out my phone to check the balance in our account, just to make sure we had enough, even though I was pretty sure we did because I had gotten paid that last Friday. There was $100,406.37 in our account.
I dropped my phone.
The receptionist asked if I was okay. I told her yes, picked up my phone, and left. I completely forgot to pay for the appointment.
Still, I didn't think of the button. It had left my head entirely.
I drove back to work knowing that there had been a mistake. Someone had accidentally wired the money to the wrong account. I called Laura, even though she was at work too. I told her I wanted to just pretend it hadn't happened and keep it. If someone had been careless enough to not double check the routing numbers on a transfer of a hundred grand, they clearly didn't care very much about the money. You have to understand, I was tired of being poor. Of watching our bank account so closely that we needed to decide whether we could go to the supermarket and get milk when we ran out. This was like a gift from God dropped directly into our wallets.
Laura told me that we had to give it back. She was always the better of us.
So I called the bank on the way home from work and told them what had happened. They thanked me for bringing it to their attention. And they told me that there was nothing they could do. The deposit was untraceable. There was no bank account attached to the other end, is what they said. So I thanked them and hung up, then bawled my eyes out and thanked God for the gift. I told Him I'd use it to pay for the girls' college.
I got home, went inside, and set my keys on the kitchen table. And that is when I remembered the button. My heart dropped when I saw it. I read the card again, those dreadful words, even though there was a hundred thousand dollars in my bank account, and my doctor had been in a car accident, I still managed to convince myself that it was a coincidence. A prank.
When Laura got home that night, I pointed at the table and said "That's the button I was talking about the other night. Do you know which of the girls brought it home?"
I will never forget what she said next. Even now, just thinking about it, I have chills. My heart is racing.
She said, "What button? I don't see a button."
I thought she was joking. Again, I thought she was joking. I turned away from the stovetop and she was looking underneath the table, trying to see if it fell. And it was sitting right there, right in the middle of the table. But she couldn't see it.
I burned the green beans, but I didn't care because I started to think I was going crazy. I picked the button up and held it in front of her face. She said, "Paul, your hands are empty. Are you feeling okay?"
I was not feeling okay. But I laughed and said I was, said I was the one who was joking, hahaha, just a little joke. But I was sweating. My heart was racing, just like it is now.
That night, I snuck out of bed and put the button and the card into a hole underneath a floorboard in our guest bedroom, and told myself I'd forget about it. Did a pretty good job of it too.
Months went by, and eventually I did forget about it. I had transferred most of the money to a separate college savings account so I couldn't see it when I opened the banking app. I didn't tell Laura. She wouldn't have believed me, anyway. Life went pretty much back to normal.
Until my oldest got sick.
It started with the coughing, mostly at night, but it was loud enough (violent is the right word, really) that Laura and I could hear it from our bedroom, with the door closed and a fan on. We took her to the doctor, who gave her antibiotics and told us she'd be good as new in a couple weeks. The couple weeks came and went, and the coughing didn't get better. Arguably, it got worse.
As a family, we liked to go on hikes. My girls loved it, would run ahead on the trail and then yell back, asking Laura and I why we were so slow, telling us to hurry up, that kind of thing. My oldest stopped following her sister when she took off. Then she started complaining about not being able to catch her breath. Her chest would hurt, and she'd have to sit on the side of the trail until she could breathe normally.
So we took her back to the doctor, and they ran some tests, which said everything was normal. They asked if we wanted to have her take a CAT scan, but we didn't have insurance and we definitely didn't have the money, so we said no. I wish we'd said yes. They gave her another round of antibiotics and told us she'd probably be fine in a couple weeks. Those were their words. "She'll probably be fine."
It took another month before she started coughing blood.
We rushed her to the hospital, I sped the entire way there, and I remember praying that we wouldn't pass a cop. They did a CAT scan as soon as we got there, didn't even ask us first. I was pissed about it in the moment, we didn't have that kind of money, but thank God they did it because they found three tumors in her lungs.
The doctors told us we were lucky; the cancer hadn't spread beyond her lungs. There was a really good chance chemo and radiation, and maybe one or two surgeries, would take care of it and she would get better. Wouldn't take two weeks, but she'd be okay.
It took eight months, from the day she was admitted to the day she rung that bell and told the whole unit she was cancer-free. I was so proud of my little girl. So proud of her for fighting. For winning.
The bill came in the mail a week later.
$467,345.24.
I set the piece of paper on the table, went to the backyard, sat against the big oak that's been there longer than I've been alive, and cried. It was a heartbreaking amount of money. Debt that my family would never recover from. Debt that my girls would probably have to inherit. Eventually, Laura joined me under the tree and we cried together.
I drank that night. A lot more than I should have, especially because it was a Sunday and I had work the next day. But I damn near finished an entire bottle of whiskey, and woke up the next morning on the couch, to Laura shaking me. She looked disappointed, but I also think she understood.
I checked our bank account at the gas station that evening and saw more than five hundred thousand dollars in it.
I swear I don't remember pressing the button that night. I hadn't thought about it for months, but I guess that whiskey brought it back to me.
And instead of being happy that we could pay the bills, my skin went ice cold because I knew that five people in my life were now dead. I knew it as well as I knew my own name, and I think that was the first time I fully, completely believed that the button and everything that came with it was real. I prayed so damn hard that it was nobody close to me.
I called Laura, even though I'd be home in a couple of minutes. She didn't answer and I almost fainted. When I got home, she was cooking, and told me she didn't hear her phone ring. My girls were safe too.
A couple days later, I got a call from the wife of a buddy I had back in college. She told me he'd had a heart attack in the bathtub, and she just wanted to let me know. To this day I have no idea who the other four people were. But I'm sorry, Tommy. I really am.
I didn't know how to tell Laura about the money, so I didn't. I moved it quickly, into the same savings account with the college money, and paid off the hospital bill in one lump sum. Then I lied to her and said that I'd called the hospital and begged for them to lower the charge. I said I told them about our financial situation, how that much debt would carry over into our children's lives, and then I said that the hospital decided to cover the whole expense for us. God, I even made up this thing about how the hospital chooses one family every year to cover all of their medical expenses, how they do it as a sort of charity. I felt terrible, but she was so happy. And that made me happy. Our lives went back to normal, my girl's hair grew all the way back, and I tried to forget about the button once again.
But there was this itch. I can't really explain it. I started dreaming about the button. I'd wake up in the morning thinking about it, imagining our bank account stuffed with millions. Ten taps, that's all it would take. Ten taps to be millionaires, maybe fifty taps to never have to worry about money for the rest of our lives.
I feel disgusting writing this. I prided myself on being a man of God, and yet I remember counting how many people were in church every Sunday. After all, technically I knew all of these people. Which ones were worth a hundred thousand dollars? I knew I couldn't choose who would die, but I fantasized that I could. In my head, my church was worth seven point four million dollars.
I'd been alive nearly fifty years; how many people had I met in that time? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? The odds were so small that someone I actually cared about would die.
Even still, I didn't press the button for nearly a year. I thought about it though. God, did I think about it. But I didn't press it, and our lives were pretty normal.
Our oldest turned sixteen, so Laura and I found a cheap, used car that someone was selling for a couple grand and we gave it to her for her birthday. I did not press the button. Laura's mom died. That was heartbreaking, watching my love go through that kind of grief. She was so strong, and I did as much as I could to support her. It was a rough few months, and bills got tighter because she stopped working for a while. Still, I did not press the button, though my fingers twitched toward the guest room and I found myself walking through that part of the house more and more frequently.
It was a stupid car that finally made me do it. A red Ferrari, priced at only a hundred grand, a deal I couldn't afford to pass up. I pressed the button so I could buy a fucking car. I imagined it would be this old lady in my church when I did it, the one in the choir who sings so loud that it hurts my ears. I pictured her face when I pressed it. I didn't picture the money, or the car. I pictured her.
And you know what, it was someone from my church. What are the odds of that? It was my Pastor, Pastor Frank. He died when he slipped on a piece of ice and hit his head against the corner of the countertop on the way down. A freak accident, haha! Laura cried for me, and I rubbed her back while she did. Not a single tear fell from my eyes.
She questioned the car, of course. I told her I'd won it in a lottery at work, and I don't think she believed me, but she didn't ask any more questions.
I scratched the itch, and boy did it only get deeper.
Over the course of the next two months, I pressed the button nineteen times. One point nine million dollars. It was more money than I'd ever seen in my life, and it wasn't even close. I bought a new house, a bigger one, and I quit my job. I told Laura I'd gotten an inheritance from a rich aunt I'd never met, and we were set for life. I think she wanted to believe me so bad that she convinced herself she did.
I bought another car, and a watch I'd been eyeing for years. Of the nineteen people who died, I know of thirteen of them. At the time, it felt like long odds that I'd currently know thirteen of the nineteen people that died. God, I wish I knew what I did now.
I took a break from the button after that. We went on a few vacations, hiked a lot, and I took Laura to get a new wedding ring. The girls switched into the best private school in the state, and I bought my mom a house on the beach. I was living like someone I had only ever been able to dream about. We'd gone from half a million dollars in debt to being millionaires, and all it took was tapping a button. I felt like I'd finally won.
People won't tell you this, but two million dollars is not a lot of money. It goes quickly, if you're not careful. And I was not careful. I watched the balance in our bank account drop, not all at once but consistently, until it got to a level that I wasn't comfortable with. We had a new life, an expensive life, and I wasn't going to let my family go back to the way things were before.
So I pressed the button every night before I went to sleep. Only once. I figured that by not pressing it more than once a day, the odds of someone truly close to me dying were smaller. What kind of stupid shit is that? I think the money was eating away at my ability to think.
After thirty-two days (three point two million dollars), the receptionist at the doctor's office, another close friend from college, and two people I worked with were dead. Each one was a "freak accident" of some kind or another. But I was happy, because that was only four out of thirty-two. I could handle those odds. So I kept tapping that black button once every night. I fell asleep to the weight of a hundred thousand more dollars in our bank account. Just imagine how much better that made me sleep. I didn't even think about the people I was killing.
Fourteen days later (one point four million dollars), I woke up to my cell phone vibrating on the night stand. It was a call from a number I didn't recognize. I almost declined it and went back to sleep, it was past three in the morning after all, but I answered it.
I'll never forget the voice on the other end. It was the sheriff from the town my mom lived in. She'd been hit and killed by a drunk driver. It took them six hours to find her wallet, to figure out who she was, because her body was unrecognizable.
I was silent on the phone for so long that the sheriff hung up. I'm sure he thought our connection dropped or something. But I was so shocked, so numb, that I had nothing to say. I didn't cry. I didn't go back to sleep either. I sat in that position, on the edge of the bed, until Laura woke up in the morning and asked me what was wrong.
"My mom died."
Uttering those words was like taking rusty claws and scraping them up and down my body until I was shredded into bloody strips of meat. I didn't understand the kind of pain that Laura felt when her mom died until that moment. And God, it is a different kind of hurt. But I didn't cry.
I told Laura I was going to stretch.
I went to the guestroom and closed the door behind me. I locked it. Then I pressed the button. And I felt a little better. So I pressed it again, and again, I didn't count how many times but it must have been more than a hundred, and I left that room praying to find my wife and my children alive at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. And they were.
We were the richest people at the funeral by a long shot. I wore a fifty-thousand-dollar suit. My wife wore a dress that had been owned by Donatella Versace herself. Only the best for my mom.
And the whole time we were standing there, watching her coffin being lowered into the ground, listening to the pastor give his sermon, I itched. God, I itched so damn bad. My right pointer finger, the one I used to tap the button, was tapping my leg incessantly. Laura thought it was a nervous tic and put her hand over mine to stop it. That just made my other finger go.
We went to eight funerals in the coming month, every single one of them because of my morning of tapping that button. I won't go through all eight, but all of them were people I knew well. Most of them were people I really liked. But all I could think about was that button. And only eight out of at least a hundred? Those were not bad odds, not bad odds at all.
So I kept pressing. Once a night.
A part of me knew that I was going to wake up one morning and find Laura cold next to me. But a bigger part of me didn't truly believe that. I knew thousands of people. The odds that one of the unlucky ones would be her were so, so small to me.
There was one night when Laura followed me to the guestroom. I guess she had some question to ask that couldn't wait until I joined her in bed, and she found me sitting on the floor of the guestroom, my finger hovering over my palm, with a floorboard pulled up next to me. I froze as soon as the door opened, and she asked me what I was doing. I said it was a meditation technique I'd seen on YouTube. Then I turned around and she screamed. She said something about my face... About my face not being my own. She ran back to our bedroom and I heard the door slam, and then lock. It took a moment before I realized I was grinning. I slept on the couch that night, and she never looked at me the same again.
And so the days went. I golfed almost every day, dreaming and thinking and itching about the button. I don't know what Laura did, but she came home late and went to bed early. We almost never talked. The girls knew something was off between us, but they never asked, and even if they had I wouldn't have known what to tell them. Not the truth, definitely not the truth.
One day, when I was out on the golf course with a beer in my hand and the fucking itch was hitting me hard, Laura called me. And I knew something was very, very wrong because she didn't talk on the other end of the line.
She only screamed.
She screamed and she cried for ten, maybe twenty minutes before the words finally tumbled out of her mouth.
There'd been a shooting at the school.
The girls weren't answering their phones.
I took the golf cart and drove it as fast as it would go back to my car, then drove to the school as fast as I could go without crashing. I'd brought the button with me that day. I was tapping the button the entire way there, one tap every minute, I was watching the clock and every time it clicked up, my finger went down.
When I got to the school, there had to have been twenty ambulances, and I watched them roll out stretchers with little bodies covered by white sheets. There were dead kids under those sheets. And instead of hoping and praying that both girls were safe, I hoped and I prayed that at least one of them was. Because I knew, I just knew the way you know you have to shit, that one of them was gone.
It was our oldest.
She'd been shot in the chest, the thigh, and then a bullet had blown the top of her head clean off. God, what a bad fucking life she'd had. Cancer, and then killed in a shooting when she was trying to learn math. She was just a kid. God, she was just a kid.
The cops wouldn't let us see her body. Her wallet was in her jeans, so they knew this mutilated body was our daughter, there was no need for us to identify her.
Our youngest was completely shattered. I drove her home. She sat in my back seat, her eyes wide and her eyebrows raised, her lower lip quivering. She was a ghost of herself. I tapped the button the entire way home, and she didn't notice a single time.
That night, I slept on the couch again. Laura didn't want anything to do with me. I say I slept, but I didn't actually sleep. I laid awake, thinking.
About our bank account.
About how large it was, how full, about all the things we could buy with twenty-seven million dollars. I didn't think about half of my daughter's head splattered on the classroom wall.
I didn't think about that even a single time.
Laura killed herself a week after our oldest died. Took an entire bottle of sleeping pills and passed out on the bathroom floor. Then she choked on her own vomit.
I don't know if I killed her. I don't think I did, because I didn't tap the button the night she died. But maybe there had been so many taps that the button had to catch up.
I found her body, thank God for that. If my youngest had found her, I think I would have lost her completely.
Even so, I didn't eat for a month. I slept as much as I could, and I cried enough tears to fill up a swimming pool. I was broken. Entirely and completely broken. And yet I itched.
But I didn't press the button. I put it back in the hole underneath the floorboard and I glued the board down. I stood on it for thirty minutes, until I was sure it was stuck. I did good, I did so good. I itched but I did so good.
I started therapy a month after Laura died. Went to the best in the state. Had plenty of money to pay for it. I started my youngest at the same therapist, and we've both made a lot of progress.
It's been about a year since then, even though it feels like yesterday. My bank account is still swollen with money, more than I know what to do with. My youngest seems happy. As happy as one can be after... well, you know what happened. We golf together now, on the weekends. She's becoming a really talented young player.
There's this pressure that I feel now, more than ever. The pressure to be a good dad. To take care of my daughter, to provide for her and give her the best life I can. When Laura was alive, it didn't feel like this. It didn't itch, not like this.
I need to give her the best life. The life I didn't have growing up. That's why I'm tapping this button. It's right next to me, sitting on the kitchen table, as I write. Every time I end a paragraph, I tap it once. To give her a better life.
A hundred thousand dollars.
That counts as a paragraph. So does this.
God, what a fucking itch.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
I'm ready to tell the truth about what happened.
Everything started on a Saturday, I think it was February 23rd. Maybe it was the 24th. My wife and I slept through our alarm, which was okay because it was the weekend and we'd shared a bottle of wine the night before. I woke up first, and decided to let Laura sleep. That's my wife's name. Laura. Beautiful name. Anyway, I got dressed and went downstairs, and the two kids were already playing in the backyard. I stood by the window for probably ten minutes, watching. They were in a phase where they'd fight for days over nothing, so this was rare. After ten minutes, I decided it was time to make coffee. I went to the kitchen and that's where I saw it. Sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.
A black button.
It was exactly like one of those toy buttons that farted when you pressed it. That's what I thought it was, at first. Something one of the girls got from school or the arcade. I walked over the table and pressed it, and nothing happened.
Then I saw the card it was sitting on. Just a plain white card, no writing on the front of it. But inside of it, in black cursive pen, are words I will never forget: Every time you press the button, $100,000 will be deposited into your bank account, and someone you know will die.
I thought it was a prank. What else would I have thought? Something like that didn't exist. Magic wasn't real. People wouldn't die if the button was pressed, and a hundred grand certainly wouldn't just show up in my bank account.
I forgot about it, and went about the day.
That night, laying in bed, I asked Laura about the button, if she knew which girl played the prank.
"What button?" she said, perfectly serious.
I rolled onto my side to face her, and even though the room was dark, I could see it in her face that she had no idea what I was talking about.
"The big black button on the kitchen table. With the creepy card under it. You didn't see it?"
She hadn't seen it.
I had half a mind to get up and grab the button and card and show them to her, but it was already late and we had church the next morning. I told her I'd show her in the morning, and that was that. We went to sleep.
The next morning we slept through our alarm, which was not okay because we had church, but our oldest woke us up when she saw the clock above the oven said nine and we usually left the house by nine on Sundays. In the mad rush that followed, Laura and I forgot all about the button. The rest of the day was full of soccer practice for both girls, grocery shopping, and getting ready for the week, and I can tell you I didn't think about the button the entire day. I didn't notice it the next morning, either when I got up for work. I set two alarms that morning, just to be sure.
Life was busy. My mind was full, and Laura's was too. I didn't think about that button until Thursday, when I had to skip my lunch break for my yearly check-up at the doctor's.
I got there fifteen minutes early, same as I do for any appointment. In my mind, if you're not early, you're late. Something my father taught me. Anyway, when I got there, the receptionist told me that we were going to need to reschedule. There were tears in her eyes, and her mascara had run down her cheeks. She told me that the doctor had been in a car accident that morning. They weren't sure if she would make it. Obviously I told her that wasn't a problem at all, even though it was a bit of a problem. I'd missed a lunch break for nothing.
Before I could leave, she asked if I wanted to make the payment on the appointment my youngest had a couple weeks before, when she'd had a 104 degree fever. I guess Laura had asked if she could wait to pay until I got my next paycheck. That's one thing I forgot to mention; we're not a wealthy family. We're quite poor, actually. There was probably enough in our bank account to pay for that appointment when it happened, but only barely.
I pulled out my phone to check the balance in our account, just to make sure we had enough, even though I was pretty sure we did because I had gotten paid that last Friday. There was $100,406.37 in our account.
I dropped my phone.
The receptionist asked if I was okay. I told her yes, picked up my phone, and left. I completely forgot to pay for the appointment.
Still, I didn't think of the button. It had left my head entirely.
I drove back to work knowing that there had been a mistake. Someone had accidentally wired the money to the wrong account. I called Laura, even though she was at work too. I told her I wanted to just pretend it hadn't happened and keep it. If someone had been careless enough to not double check the routing numbers on a transfer of a hundred grand, they clearly didn't care very much about the money. You have to understand, I was tired of being poor. Of watching our bank account so closely that we needed to decide whether we could go to the supermarket and get milk when we ran out. This was like a gift from God dropped directly into our wallets.
Laura told me that we had to give it back. She was always the better of us.
So I called the bank on the way home from work and told them what had happened. They thanked me for bringing it to their attention. And they told me that there was nothing they could do. The deposit was untraceable. There was no bank account attached to the other end, is what they said. So I thanked them and hung up, then bawled my eyes out and thanked God for the gift. I told Him I'd use it to pay for the girls' college.
I got home, went inside, and set my keys on the kitchen table. And that is when I remembered the button. My heart dropped when I saw it. I read the card again, those dreadful words, even though there was a hundred thousand dollars in my bank account, and my doctor had been in a car accident, I still managed to convince myself that it was a coincidence. A prank.
When Laura got home that night, I pointed at the table and said "That's the button I was talking about the other night. Do you know which of the girls brought it home?"
I will never forget what she said next. Even now, just thinking about it, I have chills. My heart is racing.
She said, "What button? I don't see a button."
I thought she was joking. Again, I thought she was joking. I turned away from the stovetop and she was looking underneath the table, trying to see if it fell. And it was sitting right there, right in the middle of the table. But she couldn't see it.
I burned the green beans, but I didn't care because I started to think I was going crazy. I picked the button up and held it in front of her face. She said, "Paul, your hands are empty. Are you feeling okay?"
I was not feeling okay. But I laughed and said I was, said I was the one who was joking, hahaha, just a little joke. But I was sweating. My heart was racing, just like it is now.
That night, I snuck out of bed and put the button and the card into a hole underneath a floorboard in our guest bedroom, and told myself I'd forget about it. Did a pretty good job of it too.
Months went by, and eventually I did forget about it. I had transferred most of the money to a separate college savings account so I couldn't see it when I opened the banking app. I didn't tell Laura. She wouldn't have believed me, anyway. Life went pretty much back to normal.
Until my oldest got sick.
It started with the coughing, mostly at night, but it was loud enough (violent is the right word, really) that Laura and I could hear it from our bedroom, with the door closed and a fan on. We took her to the doctor, who gave her antibiotics and told us she'd be good as new in a couple weeks. The couple weeks came and went, and the coughing didn't get better. Arguably, it got worse.
As a family, we liked to go on hikes. My girls loved it, would run ahead on the trail and then yell back, asking Laura and I why we were so slow, telling us to hurry up, that kind of thing. My oldest stopped following her sister when she took off. Then she started complaining about not being able to catch her breath. Her chest would hurt, and she'd have to sit on the side of the trail until she could breathe normally.
So we took her back to the doctor, and they ran some tests, which said everything was normal. They asked if we wanted to have her take a CAT scan, but we didn't have insurance and we definitely didn't have the money, so we said no. I wish we'd said yes. They gave her another round of antibiotics and told us she'd probably be fine in a couple weeks. Those were their words. "She'll probably be fine."
It took another month before she started coughing blood.
We rushed her to the hospital, I sped the entire way there, and I remember praying that we wouldn't pass a cop. They did a CAT scan as soon as we got there, didn't even ask us first. I was pissed about it in the moment, we didn't have that kind of money, but thank God they did it because they found three tumors in her lungs.
The doctors told us we were lucky; the cancer hadn't spread beyond her lungs. There was a really good chance chemo and radiation, and maybe one or two surgeries, would take care of it and she would get better. Wouldn't take two weeks, but she'd be okay.
It took eight months, from the day she was admitted to the day she rung that bell and told the whole unit she was cancer-free. I was so proud of my little girl. So proud of her for fighting. For winning.
The bill came in the mail a week later.
$467,345.24.
I set the piece of paper on the table, went to the backyard, sat against the big oak that's been there longer than I've been alive, and cried. It was a heartbreaking amount of money. Debt that my family would never recover from. Debt that my girls would probably have to inherit. Eventually, Laura joined me under the tree and we cried together.
I drank that night. A lot more than I should have, especially because it was a Sunday and I had work the next day. But I damn near finished an entire bottle of whiskey, and woke up the next morning on the couch, to Laura shaking me. She looked disappointed, but I also think she understood.
I checked our bank account at the gas station that evening and saw more than five hundred thousand dollars in it.
I swear I don't remember pressing the button that night. I hadn't thought about it for months, but I guess that whiskey brought it back to me.
And instead of being happy that we could pay the bills, my skin went ice cold because I knew that five people in my life were now dead. I knew it as well as I knew my own name, and I think that was the first time I fully, completely believed that the button and everything that came with it was real. I prayed so damn hard that it was nobody close to me.
I called Laura, even though I'd be home in a couple of minutes. She didn't answer and I almost fainted. When I got home, she was cooking, and told me she didn't hear her phone ring. My girls were safe too.
A couple days later, I got a call from the wife of a buddy I had back in college. She told me he'd had a heart attack in the bathtub, and she just wanted to let me know. To this day I have no idea who the other four people were. But I'm sorry, Tommy. I really am.
I didn't know how to tell Laura about the money, so I didn't. I moved it quickly, into the same savings account with the college money, and paid off the hospital bill in one lump sum. Then I lied to her and said that I'd called the hospital and begged for them to lower the charge. I said I told them about our financial situation, how that much debt would carry over into our children's lives, and then I said that the hospital decided to cover the whole expense for us. God, I even made up this thing about how the hospital chooses one family every year to cover all of their medical expenses, how they do it as a sort of charity. I felt terrible, but she was so happy. And that made me happy. Our lives went back to normal, my girl's hair grew all the way back, and I tried to forget about the button once again.
But there was this itch. I can't really explain it. I started dreaming about the button. I'd wake up in the morning thinking about it, imagining our bank account stuffed with millions. Ten taps, that's all it would take. Ten taps to be millionaires, maybe fifty taps to never have to worry about money for the rest of our lives.
I feel disgusting writing this. I prided myself on being a man of God, and yet I remember counting how many people were in church every Sunday. After all, technically I knew all of these people. Which ones were worth a hundred thousand dollars? I knew I couldn't choose who would die, but I fantasized that I could. In my head, my church was worth seven point four million dollars.
I'd been alive nearly fifty years; how many people had I met in that time? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? The odds were so small that someone I actually cared about would die.
Even still, I didn't press the button for nearly a year. I thought about it though. God, did I think about it. But I didn't press it, and our lives were pretty normal.
Our oldest turned sixteen, so Laura and I found a cheap, used car that someone was selling for a couple grand and we gave it to her for her birthday. I did not press the button. Laura's mom died. That was heartbreaking, watching my love go through that kind of grief. She was so strong, and I did as much as I could to support her. It was a rough few months, and bills got tighter because she stopped working for a while. Still, I did not press the button, though my fingers twitched toward the guest room and I found myself walking through that part of the house more and more frequently.
It was a stupid car that finally made me do it. A red Ferrari, priced at only a hundred grand, a deal I couldn't afford to pass up. I pressed the button so I could buy a fucking car. I imagined it would be this old lady in my church when I did it, the one in the choir who sings so loud that it hurts my ears. I pictured her face when I pressed it. I didn't picture the money, or the car. I pictured her.
And you know what, it was someone from my church. What are the odds of that? It was my Pastor, Pastor Frank. He died when he slipped on a piece of ice and hit his head against the corner of the countertop on the way down. A freak accident, haha! Laura cried for me, and I rubbed her back while she did. Not a single tear fell from my eyes.
She questioned the car, of course. I told her I'd won it in a lottery at work, and I don't think she believed me, but she didn't ask any more questions.
I scratched the itch, and boy did it only get deeper.
Over the course of the next two months, I pressed the button nineteen times. One point nine million dollars. It was more money than I'd ever seen in my life, and it wasn't even close. I bought a new house, a bigger one, and I quit my job. I told Laura I'd gotten an inheritance from a rich aunt I'd never met, and we were set for life. I think she wanted to believe me so bad that she convinced herself she did.
I bought another car, and a watch I'd been eyeing for years. Of the nineteen people who died, I know of thirteen of them. At the time, it felt like long odds that I'd currently know thirteen of the nineteen people that died. God, I wish I knew what I did now.
I took a break from the button after that. We went on a few vacations, hiked a lot, and I took Laura to get a new wedding ring. The girls switched into the best private school in the state, and I bought my mom a house on the beach. I was living like someone I had only ever been able to dream about. We'd gone from half a million dollars in debt to being millionaires, and all it took was tapping a button. I felt like I'd finally won.
People won't tell you this, but two million dollars is not a lot of money. It goes quickly, if you're not careful. And I was not careful. I watched the balance in our bank account drop, not all at once but consistently, until it got to a level that I wasn't comfortable with. We had a new life, an expensive life, and I wasn't going to let my family go back to the way things were before.
So I pressed the button every night before I went to sleep. Only once. I figured that by not pressing it more than once a day, the odds of someone truly close to me dying were smaller. What kind of stupid shit is that? I think the money was eating away at my ability to think.
After thirty-two days (three point two million dollars), the receptionist at the doctor's office, another close friend from college, and two people I worked with were dead. Each one was a "freak accident" of some kind or another. But I was happy, because that was only four out of thirty-two. I could handle those odds. So I kept tapping that black button once every night. I fell asleep to the weight of a hundred thousand more dollars in our bank account. Just imagine how much better that made me sleep. I didn't even think about the people I was killing.
Fourteen days later (one point four million dollars), I woke up to my cell phone vibrating on the night stand. It was a call from a number I didn't recognize. I almost declined it and went back to sleep, it was past three in the morning after all, but I answered it.
I'll never forget the voice on the other end. It was the sheriff from the town my mom lived in. She'd been hit and killed by a drunk driver. It took them six hours to find her wallet, to figure out who she was, because her body was unrecognizable.
I was silent on the phone for so long that the sheriff hung up. I'm sure he thought our connection dropped or something. But I was so shocked, so numb, that I had nothing to say. I didn't cry. I didn't go back to sleep either. I sat in that position, on the edge of the bed, until Laura woke up in the morning and asked me what was wrong.
"My mom died."
Uttering those words was like taking rusty claws and scraping them up and down my body until I was shredded into bloody strips of meat. I didn't understand the kind of pain that Laura felt when her mom died until that moment. And God, it is a different kind of hurt. But I didn't cry.
I told Laura I was going to stretch.
I went to the guestroom and closed the door behind me. I locked it. Then I pressed the button. And I felt a little better. So I pressed it again, and again, I didn't count how many times but it must have been more than a hundred, and I left that room praying to find my wife and my children alive at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. And they were.
We were the richest people at the funeral by a long shot. I wore a fifty-thousand-dollar suit. My wife wore a dress that had been owned by Donatella Versace herself. Only the best for my mom.
And the whole time we were standing there, watching her coffin being lowered into the ground, listening to the pastor give his sermon, I itched. God, I itched so damn bad. My right pointer finger, the one I used to tap the button, was tapping my leg incessantly. Laura thought it was a nervous tic and put her hand over mine to stop it. That just made my other finger go.
We went to eight funerals in the coming month, every single one of them because of my morning of tapping that button. I won't go through all eight, but all of them were people I knew well. Most of them were people I really liked. But all I could think about was that button. And only eight out of at least a hundred? Those were not bad odds, not bad odds at all.
So I kept pressing. Once a night.
A part of me knew that I was going to wake up one morning and find Laura cold next to me. But a bigger part of me didn't truly believe that. I knew thousands of people. The odds that one of the unlucky ones would be her were so, so small to me.
There was one night when Laura followed me to the guestroom. I guess she had some question to ask that couldn't wait until I joined her in bed, and she found me sitting on the floor of the guestroom, my finger hovering over my palm, with a floorboard pulled up next to me. I froze as soon as the door opened, and she asked me what I was doing. I said it was a meditation technique I'd seen on YouTube. Then I turned around and she screamed. She said something about my face... About my face not being my own. She ran back to our bedroom and I heard the door slam, and then lock. It took a moment before I realized I was grinning. I slept on the couch that night, and she never looked at me the same again.
And so the days went. I golfed almost every day, dreaming and thinking and itching about the button. I don't know what Laura did, but she came home late and went to bed early. We almost never talked. The girls knew something was off between us, but they never asked, and even if they had I wouldn't have known what to tell them. Not the truth, definitely not the truth.
One day, when I was out on the golf course with a beer in my hand and the fucking itch was hitting me hard, Laura called me. And I knew something was very, very wrong because she didn't talk on the other end of the line.
She only screamed.
She screamed and she cried for ten, maybe twenty minutes before the words finally tumbled out of her mouth.
There'd been a shooting at the school.
The girls weren't answering their phones.
I took the golf cart and drove it as fast as it would go back to my car, then drove to the school as fast as I could go without crashing. I'd brought the button with me that day. I was tapping the button the entire way there, one tap every minute, I was watching the clock and every time it clicked up, my finger went down.
When I got to the school, there had to have been twenty ambulances, and I watched them roll out stretchers with little bodies covered by white sheets. There were dead kids under those sheets. And instead of hoping and praying that both girls were safe, I hoped and I prayed that at least one of them was. Because I knew, I just knew the way you know you have to shit, that one of them was gone.
It was our oldest.
She'd been shot in the chest, the thigh, and then a bullet had blown the top of her head clean off. God, what a bad fucking life she'd had. Cancer, and then killed in a shooting when she was trying to learn math. She was just a kid. God, she was just a kid.
The cops wouldn't let us see her body. Her wallet was in her jeans, so they knew this mutilated body was our daughter, there was no need for us to identify her.
Our youngest was completely shattered. I drove her home. She sat in my back seat, her eyes wide and her eyebrows raised, her lower lip quivering. She was a ghost of herself. I tapped the button the entire way home, and she didn't notice a single time.
That night, I slept on the couch again. Laura didn't want anything to do with me. I say I slept, but I didn't actually sleep. I laid awake, thinking.
About our bank account.
About how large it was, how full, about all the things we could buy with twenty-seven million dollars. I didn't think about half of my daughter's head splattered on the classroom wall.
I didn't think about that even a single time.
Laura killed herself a week after our oldest died. Took an entire bottle of sleeping pills and passed out on the bathroom floor. Then she choked on her own vomit.
I don't know if I killed her. I don't think I did, because I didn't tap the button the night she died. But maybe there had been so many taps that the button had to catch up.
I found her body, thank God for that. If my youngest had found her, I think I would have lost her completely.
Even so, I didn't eat for a month. I slept as much as I could, and I cried enough tears to fill up a swimming pool. I was broken. Entirely and completely broken. And yet I itched.
But I didn't press the button. I put it back in the hole underneath the floorboard and I glued the board down. I stood on it for thirty minutes, until I was sure it was stuck. I did good, I did so good. I itched but I did so good.
I started therapy a month after Laura died. Went to the best in the state. Had plenty of money to pay for it. I started my youngest at the same therapist, and we've both made a lot of progress.
It's been about a year since then, even though it feels like yesterday. My bank account is still swollen with money, more than I know what to do with. My youngest seems happy. As happy as one can be after... well, you know what happened. We golf together now, on the weekends. She's becoming a really talented young player.
There's this pressure that I feel now, more than ever. The pressure to be a good dad. To take care of my daughter, to provide for her and give her the best life I can. When Laura was alive, it didn't feel like this. It didn't itch, not like this.
I need to give her the best life. The life I didn't have growing up. That's why I'm tapping this button. It's right next to me, sitting on the kitchen table, as I write. Every time I end a paragraph, I tap it once. To give her a better life.
A hundred thousand dollars.
That counts as a paragraph. So does this.
God, what a fucking itch.
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