Chapter 8
The women make their way back to the front of the post office where it all started. They move much slower, their shoulders
slumped, defeated as they come to a stop just inside the room, uncertain what to do next. Morrow doesn’t suppose she will
be mailing her package today after all.
Maya. Her daughter’s name comes to mind as she watches Tommy step into the room and pass his outstretched gun in front of each
one of them, a warning. It is Maya she thinks of as she watches the barrel of the gun go past her, how like a gun her daughter
had been this morning: loaded, aimed in her direction, with the potential to blow things apart. It was that threat and Morrow’s
need to do something in response that brought her here, to this moment in this room.
They’d been continuing a conversation that bordered on an argument from the night before. Maya wanted a tattoo because, using
the timeworn argument, all her friends were getting one. Her latest strategy had been to convince Morrow to get a matching
tattoo with her. Though it was an obvious ploy, she had to hand it to the kid. Her tactic was clever, and insightful. Much
of Morrow’s time was spent trying to do things with her daughter.
“Want to watch TV?” “No.”
“Want to go out for dinner?” “No.”
“Want to take a walk on the beach?” “No.”
“How about we go shopping?” “No.”
Nothing worked. There’d once been a time when spending time together had been Maya’s favorite thing to do. Morrow remembers
longing to go to the grocery store by herself, a rare treat. Maya had been her “mostly companion,” a phrase they picked up
from reading the Eloise books, a favorite of Maya’s. Morrow had thought it would always be that way, a string of days consisting
of mother-daughter outings that stretched into the distant future.
But then that changed. One day Maya began pulling away, at first barely perceptibly, then gradually more obviously. Her friends
became her “mostly companions,” leaving Morrow always on the outside, trying to find a way back in. Oh, she’s read the books;
she understands the psychology behind it all, how teenagers have to pull away so they can leave the nest, how it is the order
of things. But that doesn’t make it feel better.
Now she wonders what would’ve happened if she’d chosen to see Maya’s tattoo offer as a sort of olive branch, the beginning
of a way back to each other instead of just another one of her schemes. What would it have hurt if she’d just responded, “Yes,
I will get a matching tattoo with you. Let’s talk about it when you get home this afternoon”?
Instead, she’d said, “You don’t put a bumper sticker on a BMW,” which is something Morrow wholeheartedly believes but was,
in hindsight, the wrong thing to say at that moment. She does not understand the obsession with tattoos that has become all
the rage for the younger generation. She can’t think of a single thing she’d want inked on her skin forever. She would never
do it, and she feels that it’s her job to keep her daughter from doing so, even if it’s only long enough for her frontal lobe
to develop a little more.
But her quip had been enough to incense Maya.
If she could have a sense of humor about it—and maybe she will one day—Maya would laugh at her own senseless dramatics.
The crying, the shrieking, the accusations: Morrow didn’t love her enough to get a matching tattoo; she was the meanest mother in the world; and then the final one, the one that stung the most. The one Morrow doesn’t like thinking about.
But since this morning, she has thought of nothing else.
With that Maya had stormed out of the house, gunning the engine of her car as she drove off to one of her last days of high
school. Morrow had waited till she was gone, then slowly, resignedly climbed the stairs to her daughter’s room. Though the
test had since been tossed in the trash, it was there nonetheless.
If not for Maya, if not for the blowup this morning, Morrow would not be here now. But she does not blame Maya. This is Morrow’s
own fault, her own harebrained idea that got her here. She has brought this on herself with her need to fix things, her compulsion
to set things right. “Let it go,” her husband, Kevin, is always saying to her. “Just let it go.” But Morrow cannot. So here
she is.
The women stay clustered together, casting serious glances back and forth, unsure where to stand or what to do. When Tommy
goes to the bank of windows that line the front wall to peer out at the parking lot, Morrow steps away from the group and
sidles back over to her tote bag, which she’d left behind when they tried to escape.
She picks it up and peeks inside, taking inventory of the contents once more: umbrella (there was rain in the forecast, but so far not a drop has fallen), wallet, phone, makeup, pain reliever, lip balm, the little deck of cards that looks like playing cards but isn’t, a notebook and pen, and then the package, right there in the mix of her normal, everyday things.
If things had gone as Morrow intended and Nadine had gotten the chance to take it from her, it would be gone already.
But it is still nestled right there where she tucked it, looking benign when it is anything but.
Maya, she thinks again. She wonders what her daughter is doing at this very moment, if she senses that her mother is in danger.
Is she in danger? Morrow looks over at Tommy, who is pacing in front of the windows, talking to no one in particular.
“I bet they’re on their way right now,” he is saying to himself over and over. He doesn’t say who “they” are, but he doesn’t
have to. He means the cops, and the women all hope he’s right.
With Tommy’s attention diverted, Morrow reaches inside her tote and feels for her phone, extracting it in one smooth motion.
She could try to call the police, but she probably only has enough time to do one thing before Tommy catches her with it.
As Tommy already pointed out, there’s a high probability that the woman with the basket called the police as soon as she ran
out. Or the one who was on the phone has already used that very same phone to dial 911, probably while she was still running
from the building. So Morrow makes her choice.
Holding the phone just inside the bag so Tommy won’t see, she glances down long enough to find her daughter’s last text. She
has, she knows, a mere moment before he turns around again and sees what she’s doing. She can’t risk him seeing her with it
and taking it from her. Her phone is her link to her family, the only link she has now, thanks to him.
If this situation goes badly, if something were to happen to her, she cannot leave things with Maya the way she left them
this morning. She can still hear the slamming of the door as Maya left. She can see herself rinsing her coffee mug in the
sink, keeping her back turned until Maya was really and fully gone. In the silent house, residual anger still crackled in
the air around her head, as charged as electricity.
I did let it go, she tells Kevin in her head. And look what happened. She’d let Maya leave without another word, thinking she’d have a chance later to fix things between them. But what if she
doesn’t get that chance? She cannot leave her daughter thinking that she does not care, that the rift they left between them
is not a rift to her core.
Keeping her eyes on Tommy, she holds the phone down and texts eight letters and two spaces without looking at the screen,
trusting her fingers to find the right buttons. Then she looks away from him long enough to check her spelling, to make sure
her daughter can read the three words she has written:
I love you
There are some things, she thinks, you can’t let go. Morrow presses Send, then drops the phone back into the tote, leaving it behind as she joins the cluster of her fellow hostages
once more.
From a few feet away, Blythe looks at each of the women around her and wonders how long they will all be here. Other than
Nadine, she doesn’t even know their names. She would feel silly asking. This is not a social gathering. It’s a hostage situation.
The two words strung together, hostage and situation, fall on her, heavy and dark. Does this mean she is a hostage? Like in the movies? Blythe can’t process that this is really
happening. To her.
At the windows, Tommy is clearly drunk, now pacing and muttering, with no plan—at least that Blythe can see—in place. She
doubts this outcome was his goal. She doubts he had a goal at all beyond convincing Nadine to tear up those papers. The situation
just got out of hand. Blythe can sort of understand this. She understands better than most how things can get out of hand.
But that is no reason to pull a gun on people and make things worse.
She decides she should probably do what Morrow just did while Tommy’s not watching.
She plucks her phone from her back pocket.
The first thing she does is hit the single button on the side five times, sending a silent alert to authorities.
She doubts the older women know how to do this, so she figures she should.
Unless he spots her with her phone, Tommy won’t be the wiser, and she can’t take the risk that the women who got away didn’t call the police.
At least now she has the assurance that comes with doing something, anything to help herself. And isn’t that what she was
here to do in the first place? To help herself? With that thought she goes to her most recent text. She glances to make sure
Tommy is still preoccupied before she reads the words in the little speech bubbles.
First she scans the ones exchanged between her and her mom as she stood in line, waiting her turn. There are her words of
doubt, her mother’s words of assurance. The last text from her mom says simply:
What can it hurt?
She checks to make sure Tommy’s back is still turned before looking at her last text, sent moments before everything happened.
Her: I’m at the post office. I’m sending it now.
Him: Thank you. That means a lot.
Now she writes, Still in the post office. I mailed it. But now I think I’m in a hostage situation. She wants to add a joke, make light of it. Like, So if I die it’s all your fault. But she doesn’t. Because this isn’t something to joke about.
She watches to see if the ellipsis that tells her he is writing back appears on the screen, hoping he’ll respond before Tommy
spies what she’s doing. But no dots appear. She decides it’s too risky to keep her phone out any longer, so she sticks it
back into her pocket just as Tommy turns back to his captives. His face looks like he is surprised they are all there.
“What?” he asks the room. He huffs and stomps over to the counter where he left the bourbon just before the woman with the
basket walked in. He goes to reach for it at the same time that he realizes it’s not there. Blythe looks at Nadine, who is
looking at Tommy, her eyes wide, her mouth a straight line.
“Gimme my bottle,” he says to her.
“I didn’t touch your bottle,” says Nadine.
“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” he says. “Where’d you hide it?”
“I didn’t, Tommy,” she says and sighs heavily. “Doesn’t matter to me if you drink the whole bottle. You can drink yourself
to death for all I care.” She shrugs. If she is frightened, she’s doing a good job of hiding it. Nadine points to the shipping
area where Tommy fired the gun. “We were back there, and then we came in here. I didn’t have time to touch your precious bottle.”
Nadine might not be scared. But Blythe is. Tommy is unhinged and armed. Anything could happen.
And to think last night she’d spent the evening believing her engagement dinner was as bad as her life could get. Now she
would happily return to Aaron’s family home and the cringefest that was supposed to be a special celebration. In her own defense,
she wasn’t the one who’d invited her mother.
She was going to tell Rosie, her future mother-in-law, that her mother had to work, which wouldn’t have been a big leap.
Her mother works all the time. This would not have been the first significant event she’d missed.
But Rosie had intervened, going so far as to friend her mother on Facebook and inviting her before Blythe could offer the excuse.
To Rosie, known for the from-scratch cakes for every special occasion, slow-cooked pot roasts for Sunday dinner, and family photos placed everywhere because, as she always says, “Memories are what make a family,” there was no question her mother would make the nearly three-hour drive to Sunset Beach to celebrate her only child’s engagement.
And so, thanks to Rosie’s insistence, Blythe’s mother had showed up at Aaron’s parents’ house, registered its quaint modesty,
and shifted her countenance to permanent “resting disapproval face” for the night. Blythe had clocked it from the moment she
entered the room, her stomach twisting at the sight, taking the joy right out of the joyful celebration.
It is because of her mother that she is here. Her mother, plus unwisely opening a bottle of wine back at her house after the
party, topped off with Blythe’s relentless inability to stop vying for her mother’s approval. She looks at the place on the
counter where Tommy’s bottle was before it disappeared and thinks about the place behind the counter where Nadine dropped
her package. She wonders if Nadine would allow her to take her package back now. Does she want to take it back?
Before she can ponder the answer to that question, her phone vibrates in her back pocket. She wants to see if he has answered
the text she just sent, to see how he will respond, which will tell her a lot. Maybe all she needs to know. But first she needs to divert Tommy, who is searching
for his bottle all around the room. Blythe musters up her courage and tells a lie. It isn’t the first she’s told today. The
other one she feels bad about, but this one she doesn’t.
“I think that lady who ran out the back had it with her,” she says, ignoring her pounding heart. “Pretty sure I saw a bottle
in her hand.”
Tommy looks from Nadine to Blythe, then back again. He shakes his head and makes a pssst sound, then goes to the windows to resume his pacing and muttering, giving up his search. Nadine mouths, “Thank you,” to
her, and Blythe nods, then retrieves her phone from her back pocket, sure it is him. Maybe he will say something that will
make her feel like she has come here and done the right thing. But it is just a text from the dentist’s office, reminding
her she has an appointment tomorrow, an appointment she’s starting to wonder if she will make.