It’s been a year since my wife tried to kill me in France. I do not, in all honesty, believe that she was actually trying to kill me, but while I am not unnerved by spiders or snakes, because they aggressively consume things for which I have active aversion, such as mosquitos and rats, I have a deathly fear of heights. So when she suggested, or encouraged, nay, insisted that because we were traveling in the French Alps we should go paragliding, it certainly felt like a death threat.

            “You mean,” I said, “jump off the side of a high, steep mountain?”

            “It’s perfectly safe,” Annie said.

            “Lying in bed is perfectly safe,” I countered.

            “How often do you hear of people dying in paragliding accidents?” she asked.

            “I have no idea,” I said. “How often do you hear about anyone dying falling out of bed?”

            “They do, however, die from lying in bed all day long,” she pointed out.

            “Touché,” I said.

 

            How we arrived there is a story of some greater joy, starting, as all joyous stories do, in some temporary despair. Long before we’d gotten married we’d talked about family, and kids, of which I wanted two and she wanted three, but after years of not trying but not not trying, and then two years of actual effort, we got some tests done and were told our options were expensive, and still unlikely. After a few days of moping around, though, Annie announced she wanted a dog, instead, which seemed to me like a simple enough if incomplete substitution, so that weekend, off we went.

 

            Long story short, she had three finalists, and could not bear to leave two behind, so she thought about taking two, but that left a real orphan, so she gathered all of them onto her lap and looked forlorn, genuinely forlorn, she wanted kids even more than I did, and it was technically my fault that we couldn’t have them, though I hadn’t done anything wrong. My general fitness was not influencing the stamina and energy levels of my little swimmers. In short, she looked sad, I felt bad, and sad for her, so I said, casually, “Well, why don’t you just take them all?”

            “All three?” Annie asked. “Really?”

            "Really," I assured her.

            “No catches?”

            “None,” I told her. “If I could, I would like to name them, though.”

            “Sure, sure,” she said. She should have known better, but enthusiasm overran her judgement. The three puppies tumbled around, clambering over each other to try and lick her face. She looked happy and content, and in truth, this is all I ever really care about. “Name them whatever you like,” she said.

 

            Old, Ball, and Chain became fast friends, and allowed me to say, whenever my lovely wife arrived, her dogs in tow, “There’s the Old Ball and Chain.”

 

            Then, of course, as things happen, we were blessed with one child, who we named Helene, after her grandmother, and only a little over a year later, boom, a second, a boy, who we named Francis, after my dad. Suddenly my worries snapped from lack of motility to excessive virility. Four years earlier there’d been two of us, now we were seven, and I believed if we got to eight that the scale balancing happiness with poop cleanup would spill in the wrong direction. Snip snip, several bags of ice later, and we’d locked seven in for the duration.

 

            The kids were seven and eight when my company offered me a raise and the chance to go live in France for two years. We talked about it for less time, I realize now, than it takes to glide down from a high mountain. We were on our way. On y va, as they say, in France, where we would soon be going.

 

            France, land of Grey Poupon, which American fat cats used to pass from limousine to limousine, the Eiffel Tower, which appeared graceful from afar and awfully rickety beneath my feet, and of course, a societal willingness to allow dogs into most restaurants, which should at a very minimum tarnish its mostly deserved reputation for elegance and sophistication.

 

            We discussed the dogs, of course, now in their fifties, in dog years, and decided we couldn’t leave them behind, since if they died in our absence we’d regret it, and besides, the kids needed some constancy as they moved to a new country and city and school.

 

            So I found myself with three dog cages stacked one atop the other, in the utilitarian bowels of the international airport, using my limited French to engage with the appropriate authorities. The office used the French word frontier, which sounds significantly more interesting than “border,” like I was heading off into somewhere wild and exotic instead of a city that a million Americans visit every July. I handed over my forms, in triplicate, or (nonuplicate, a word I had to go look up) since they required three copies of each form for each of the three dogs, individuality being a post-revolutionary ideal. He smiled and asked me their names.

            “Boules aux chien?” he repeated. “Et les deux autres?” I immediately recognized his confusion, and furthermore, reveled in it. He’d misunderstood me to say one of the dogs had balls, which was true. I felt lucky that Annie had remained upstairs with the kids. Do you remember all those television shows when we were kids where people were consumed by quicksand? It turns out that they’re symbolic not of physical threat, but of French bureaucracy. My wife would have felt the need to apologize, which would have led to excessive discussion, further confusion, and undoubtedly more paperwork. I, however, was content to play dumb and clarified that the three dogs were actually named Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, which pleased him greatly, and made me hungry for a candy bar.

 

            Retrieving the dogs once their quarantine had ended was nightmarish, more paperwork, more fees, hours and hours just to get our own totally healthy animals off their proverbial dime and back onto ours. When we finally got them I resolved to avoid any further encounters with government agencies. The Three Musketeers themselves exhibited justifiable, to my mind, reticence upon seeing us. After all, we had confined them in an unknown space for the equivalent of years of their short lives, though, like nearly all dogs, they came around soon enough once the kids stuffed them with treats, and all was well again.

 

            Winter arrived, and our kids were given a luxurious two-week vacation, to which I was also entitled. We’d dragged them to thirty gazillion churches and museums already so when they announced they wanted to go skiing, we went for it. We stayed in the city where the 1924 Winter Olympics had been held.

            “It’s called Chamonix,” I told them, on the drive down. “It’s where we get the term chamois cloth.” In all honestly, I had no idea if this was true, but it sounded nice, and would give them something to look up. If I were right it would add to my allure, and if I were wrong, I could play it off as a joke. As luck would have it, I had guessed correctly, or correctly enough. A chamois is a species of goat-antelope, a designation I did not previously know existed, and its Latin name, my son announced, was Rupicapra rupicapra, which made me think of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and I while grinned to myself I didn’t say anything aloud, since I wasn’t sure if that revealed some kind of subconscious, subliminal racist thought pattern best left, for the moment anyway, unexplored.

            “It says their leather is super soft,” Francis said.

            “Wait, leather is animal skin?” my daughter asked. “That’s gross.” I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. It got all tight, like a miniature version of her mother’s when she’s upset. “We shouldn’t ever buy anything leather ever again,” she decided, and relaxed. I glanced down at my wife’s newish Longchamps bag and nodded, sagely, and received, in return, an expression that suggested that my silence and my continued wellbeing were closely correlated. I kept driving.

 

            We rented an enormous room in an old chalet, the kids had a bunkbed tucked in a nook while we enjoyed a somewhat removed king-sized bed. We skied for three days, our kids underimpressed with the fact that these were the actual Alps, and not just some random snowy hill back home. On our last morning we pursued our usual routine of checking on, in, and under every item of furniture to ensure we would leave nothing of monetary nor sentimental value behind.

            Annie was busy repacking the kids’ bags when I looked under their bunk bed and noticed a thick manila envelope pinched between the box spring and the wood slats of the bed. I wrestled it free. I unfastened the little metal clasp and saw an unfathomable amount of money, cash euros, jammed inside. The kids were distracted. I dumped it onto the unmade bed. No note, nothing to identify the owner, within or outside the envelope. Annie came over to see what I was doing and I shook my head and waved her back, but she spotted enough that she sent the kids down with the first load of bags.

            “Where did you find that?”

            “Under the bed,” I said. “It’s been there a while – look, they’re rust stains on it from the staples in the box spring.”

            “How much is it?”

            “I haven’t counted. Forty, fifty thousand euros?”

            “We need to take it to the front desk.”

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. I started rolling all the bills together.

            “You’re not going to keep it. We can’t keep it.”

            “Why not?”

            “It’s not ours.”

            “I know,” I said. “I’m not actually thinking we keep it. I just don’t want to do anything hasty.”

            “We need to alert the authorities,” she said.

            “The authorities?” I asked. “We’ll be stuck here for a week. It took three hours to get the dogs back, if you’ll remember. How many days will this take to resolve?”

            “This is different. It’s important.”

            “Listen,” I said. “How about this. I promise that we won’t keep it. I’ll find a way to make it right. Let’s go do our death jump and deal with it later.”

            “I mean, seriously, it’s probably from some drug dealer. We don’t need him hunting us down.”

            “A pretty dumb drug dealer,” I said. “I had better hiding spots when I was nine years old. And besides, are there even violent drug dealers in France?”

            “Did you, or did you not, make me watch both French Connection movies?”

            “Well, your honor, I did.”

            The kids returned then and saved me. I’d rolled all the bills into one sizeable mini-log, which I shoved into the jacket pocket that I assume was designed for some kind of music device, or easy access to a pacemaker, whichever, right over my heart.

 

            We finished emptying the room, I threw the empty envelope in the lobby garbage can – the poubelle – a much nicer word in French. Then we started the drive to town, to the parking lot closest to the gondola we would be taking to our collective doom.

            “Oh my God there’s a spider,” Helene said, from the back seat.

            “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” my wife said. “Just squash it and be done with it.”

            “No way,” I said. “It’ll go back into hiding and we’ll never see it again.”

            “And if she gets a spider bite?”

            “I’m not particularly worried about a French spider.”

            “Really,” she said.

            “It’s going under the seat,” my daughter announced.

            “Really,” I confirmed, and I spoke louder. “If it were Australian, for sure. You ever see anything about deadly French spiders on the Discovery Channel? Of course not. French spiders are both subtle and disdainful of Americans.”

            “More people die from being murdered than by spiders every year,” my son announced. I thought quickly. This seemed plausible, and like one of those random facts kids retain from heaven knows where, but it also wasn’t a subject I wanted to dwell on, for several obvious reasons.

            “You know what the French word for spider is?” I asked, in redirection. “It’s araignée.” As an aside, I probably pronounced this incorrectly, or with a Belgian accent, which was often where French people thought I came from. I have no issue with the Belgians, I know little about them, beyond the peeing statue in Brussels and maybe a fact or two about Flanders field, but I’ve also never been there, nor do I have any Belgian heritage. Though at least the French don’t think I’m, I don’t know, Prussian. “Which is super cool,” I continued, “because it comes from the Greek myth about Arachne, who was a weaver. Spider’s kind of a stupid word, compared to that.”

            My wife shook her head. “You remember the weirdest things,” she said.

            “Meh,” I said. “We all have our idiosyncrasies.”

            “You can say that again,” she said. “Honey,” she called back. “Where’s the spider now?”

            “Under dad’s seat,” she said.

            My wife gave me her raised-eye how-about-that? look, but I shrugged. I had on long underwear, snow pants, two pairs of socks, and boots. In my estimation, any French spider that gnawed through that deserved to eat me, and besides, I have ample life insurance and, now, access to socialized medicine.

 

            My organized wife had printed the bilingual instructions to meet our guides, who appeared comfortable with heights and nonchalant about death. There were no forms to fill out, no waivers, we were to pay in cash, our only reassurance was that we would be literally strapped to them, so if we went down, they went down, though I do admit to wondering how easily, in the event of an emergency, they could unclip the excess weight, that is, one of us, to save themselves. They also made us wear helmets, thinner and lighter than bicycle helmets, that made our heads look like eggs. I refrained from any comments about the obvious uselessness helmets would have in the event of a Toonces-style impact with the rocks below, or how they offered no protection from tree limbs stabbing our eyes. I try to maintain a semblance of confidence and authority with my kids, at least until they turn thirteen and begin to see all the way through me.

            They told us how we’d run off the mountain, how we’d have to wait for an updraft, which should happen soon, given the angle of the sun on the mountainside. Our role as passengers was basically the same as an infant clasped to its mother’s chest in one of those hippy-dippy Scandinavian baby holsters that allows them to face forward, arms and legs free to gyrate like a beetle trapped on its back. Only we would be, obviously, completely airborne.

            “You know what these guys have figured out?” I asked Annie, when we had a moment.

            “What?”

            “How to avoid paperwork. Can you believe it?”

            She walked away from me.

            They were indirect and nice about it, but basically I was to go last because I weighed the most, and, obviously, when jumping off a mountain gravity has some influence. I took little videos of the three of them running into the air, felt pleased than none of them screamed and relieved that none plummeted to an immediate death. I handed a roll of money to my guy, two thousand euros, in cash, or five times the stated price. We had a brief, inarticulate discussion about it which concluded with him offering a Gallic shrug of acquiescence before he shoved the money into an interior pocket and we ran after them.

            I kept my eyes closed for a good fifteen seconds. The curiosity did what it does. And what I saw was truly awesome, in the old school, nearly Biblical use of the word, seeing the trees from above, the delicate, beautiful ways in which snow layered upon them, seeing eagles fly below us, keeping our eyes peeled for a chamois, and then drifting over the town below, the river running bright and sparkling beneath the clear sky, people gathered in the streets, drinking coffee, enjoying themselves, and even our rental car in its slot, in which Old, Ball, and Chain happily lounged all over each other, relieved to be free from quarantine and anxious, in their languid dog way, about our return.

 

            We drifted far out over the little city, I could see the railroad tracks, the ski slope on the opposite side of the valley, the little church. I had to wriggle a bit to get into my pocket to grab the thick roll, and then I surreptitiously began to release the bills, allowing them to flutter into the wind. I hadn’t thought of two things, neither of which slowed my dispersal process, one, that many of these would end up on rooftops or the river; I had imagined them all magically drifting down onto the streets, delighting old and young alike. And two, that our descent would be faster than those of the light bills, so they began to rise around us, like in one of those old game shows where they locked people in plexiglass closets and blew money into them.

            My, our, parachute lurched as my guide let go of a handle to grasp for a floating five hundred, then lurched back as he steered us after another. I kept pulling and releasing the bills, anyway, amazed at our lateral speed, no sooner did I let one free than we coasted alongside and then past it. I had nearly finished before she finally realized what I had been doing. Even from half a windy mile away, or a kilometer, given that this did not happen in the United States, I heard her voice, and it appeared she was attempting to swim her way closer to me. But on I drifted, safely out of reach, my hands empty, beneath her, enjoying all aspects of the view, not least of which the gentle flurry of money bright in the beautiful sunlight, fluttering down elsewhere, onto the town, and not onto the field in which we landed.

 

            It’s all weight, as he said, so I landed well before she did, and in time to film her graceful descent. She revealed chameleonic powers I had not previously encountered, since the color of her face was indistinguishable from her red coat. She shucked off the clips like some kind of Navy SEAL and ran towards me with the agility and determination of a hungry Siberian husky.

            “That was terrific,” I said. “Honestly.”

            “Did you just do what I think you did?”

            “Probably.”

            “You just, just, threw it all away?”

            “We were in agreement that it would be good to have to gone, right?”

            “Seriously? That’s how you got rid of it?”

            “Untraceable,” I said. “Let’s talk about this in a moment. First we need to watch the kids come down.”

            We filmed them, my guide came over and asked for our contact information for referrals, so I provided him with an email address and the phone number of my junior high school crush, which I remembered because back then meant dialing it, which took forever, and often repeatedly dialing all but the last digit before hanging up, if you were shy, which I had been. Annie stood, arms crossed, while the kids threw snowballs at each other. I held it up for her to see. Her face did not change.

            Au revoir, au revoir, we all said, and the four of us started down the hill to our car.

            “That’s the email you gave?” she whispered.

            “Sure,” I said.

            “You don’t look a thing like him. Not a thing.”

            “Lemme ask you something,” I said. “Who’s going to remember my face? I gave that guy two thousand euros in cash. He’s so juiced on serotonin he’s going to remember what he wants to remember. I have a hat on, sunglasses, and seven layers of clothes. In twenty minutes, in our car, when I’m back to regular pants, a sweatshirt, and a ballcap, I might as well be someone else.”

            “Did you think this through before we got here?”

            “Kind of?” I admitted.

 

            We waddled down the steep slope, past dozens of smiling people. The sun shone, a beautiful cloud swelled around Mont Blanc. My kids babbled excitedly about birds and parachutes and moving to Chamonix to be mountain guides and how jealous their friends would be and how it was too bad we didn’t let them have their own phones so they could have videoed the entire experience. We’d almost reached the car when my wife reached out her hand.

            “Whatever happens, I love you.”

            “I love you, too. Nothing’s going to happen except we’re going to get the Three Musketeers some water, get out of our winter clothes, and start driving home. And on the bright side, think how many people we made happy.”

            “We,” she sighed. She glanced back up the hill. I couldn’t see our guides anymore, they were hidden behind chalets and condominiums, thrilled, I hoped, with their enormous tip, just as all the tourists and shopkeepers and residents below were surely thrilled to see free money fluttering down from the skies above.

            I had one necessary regret, too, that they might soon feel a little less hate for our nation’s foremost crime family, since the email address I’d given him to contact us was for Donald Trump, Jr. But if anything bad were to happen as a result of this, karma surely owes him more than it does me. I took my first and only wife, who I love, my two kids, who I love, our dogs, who I love, and we drove off into the sunset, happy, free, and, despite my early fears, wonderfully alive.