Chapter 18
The time passes. No one speaks.
The post office line rings again, the same obnoxious ring as before. This time Sylvie speaks up when the ringing starts. “They’re
going to keep calling until you answer that,” she tells Tommy, who, since he’s decided to stay away from the windows, has
taken to lapping their circle of stools like a deranged game of “Ring Around the Rosie.”
He doesn’t respond to the ringing, but he does stop circling to try to peer out the windows, pacing back and forth from window
to window, surely not really seeing anything from the distance. He only stops moving when the phone stops ringing.
“If they can’t make contact with you, they’ll resort to other kinds of attempts,” Sylvie tells him.
He stops, glares at her. “Oh yeah? How do you know that?”
She considers her response. “I’m a retiree. I’ve got a lot of time to watch cop shows.”
He chuckles at that, shakes his head. “That sure don’t make you an expert.”
She shrugs. She doesn’t care about his opinion. “Time will tell,” she retorts.
She turns to see the other women looking at her expectantly.
But she’s got no real answers for them. Urging Tommy to communicate with whoever is on the other side of that barricade is their best hope.
And until he does, they are stuck. She will do her best to keep up morale, but the boredom and stress are taking their toll.
When the phone starts up again, Tommy claps his hands to his ears, exaggerating like a child would. “Make them stop that,”
he says, looking at her like she can.
Sylvie crosses her arms, eyes him. “You’re the only one who can make it stop,” she tells him. Then she thinks about him forcing
them to stand in the windows with signs. She does not want a repeat of that. “Would you like me to answer it and tell them
to stop calling?” she asks.
He thinks about this, blinking slowly as he does. He is no longer as drunk as he was, but he is not what someone would call
sober. He nods, looking down. She gets up and goes to the phone, ending the shrill ringing by raising the receiver to her
ear.
“Hello?” she asks, just like she would answer any other call.
“Who am I speaking with?” a female voice—female!—says on the other end. What a surprise!
“This is Sylvie,” says Sylvie. She does not give her last name. She’d prefer that Tommy not know it.
“Okay, Sylvie,” says the voice. “I’m Hope.”
Hope, Sylvie thinks. That’s just what we need.
She listens for a moment to Hope’s instructions before hanging up and looking at Tommy, who is still trying to see out the
windows yet keep his distance, a hangdog expression on his face. “What’d he say?” he asks her, his voice sullen.
“She said that they’d like to know what you want.”
“What I want?” Tommy asks. “What does that mean?”
“It means that when someone takes hostages, they usually have demands to go with it. Things they want in exchange for the
hostages’ release,” Sylvie explains.
“You learn that from your cop shows?” Tommy sneers at her.
Blythe watches Sylvie’s shoulders tense, then release. “The nice lady on the other end just told me so,” she replies. Blythe sees her manage a smile for Tommy. “She’s going to call back in a little bit. So you should probably be thinking about what you’re going to ask for.”
Tommy makes a show of shrugging his shoulders. “How do I know?” he says, his voice like a wail. He points at the windows.
“I want to be out there,” he says. “Free.” He cocks his head at Sylvie. “Think you can negotiate that deal?”
“I’m not a negotiator,” Sylvie says. There is something, Blythe notes, in the way she says it.
“Then what are you?” Tommy asks.
Sylvie straightens up to her full five-two height before replying, “I’m your hostage, trying to help you get us all out of
here safely.”
Tommy looks away, stares at the ground for a moment, chastened. No one says anything as he studies the floor for a long time.
Finally, he lifts his head. “I don’t know what I want.” And for the first time since this all began, Blythe feels a flicker
of sympathy for Tommy. She hates him for keeping them all here, but she also understands what he means. It is harder than
it looks to decide what you want. Harder still to ask for it.
And so, they wait. They wait for Tommy to think about what he wants and for the phone to ring again. From her vantage point
in the circle of stools, Morrow can see out one of the windows that looks out onto the parking lot. It is not a full vantage
point but enough to see movement, to see the life happening outside of this room. People come and go, vehicles drive past.
Her car, and the others’ cars, are all still parked in the spots where they left them. She supposes they are evidence now.
But of what? How good they had it this morning, walking around of their own free will? Able to come and go as they pleased?
She’d been so burdened by that little package as she got out of the car, her tote had actually felt heavier on her shoulder.
Now she would happily send that package off if she could, happily hug her daughter and tell her what she did this morning, then watch as her daughter gave her that smile that told her she’d done the right thing, that their relationship has been salvaged once again.
Morrow notices the press has started to gather. People with microphones and cameras draw as close to the building as the police
will allow. Morrow looks away. She cannot watch the goings-on outside the window for too long; the longing it stirs up inside
her is too painful to bear.
Once she was on a plane, sitting in the first row behind first class on a cross-country flight. When they dropped the sheer
curtain that separated first class from the plebeians behind them, she could still see everything that was happening. She
recalls watching as the first-class patrons were served a real lunch with napkins and hot cloths to clean their hands while
she made do with cookies as dry as sawdust and water to wash them down. This, she thinks now, is like that. I can see it. But I cannot have it.
Maya, she thinks. She looks at the watch she wears, her mother’s. Morrow inherited it years ago and wears it still, even as so
many people strap technological miracles to their wrists to count steps and heart rates and calories, keeping track of every
aspect of themselves. But Morrow continues to wear this most basic timepiece, consistently good at doing what she needs it
to do: tell time.
Her watch tells her it is 3:10. By now Maya is out of school.
She wonders if the police have figured out it’s her car parked there.
She wonders if her family has been notified that she is in this post office, trapped.
She thinks of Maya learning this and wonders if she will worry or if she will toss her hair and decide that in this situation, as in everything else, Morrow will find a way to work things out.
When Morrow was a few years younger than Maya, she learned that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. She can’t remember
if she was seized with worry immediately or if it took a while for her to realize how serious the diagnosis was. She wonders
if Maya will appreciate the seriousness of what is happening today. She wonders if Maya will replay their fight this morning
on a loop like Morrow herself has done. Though it is probably wrong to think this way, Morrow hopes so.
When Nadine speaks up, they swivel their heads in her direction. She has said little beyond her barbs at Tommy, quiet with
the shame of what her actions have brought on others. Even if they insist that’s not the case, she can’t help but feel it
is. But now she lifts her head in a defiant sort of way. She thinks of her mother’s words to her as she speaks. “You’re a smart girl, honey. You’ll figure it out.”
“If you don’t know what you want, Tommy,” Nadine says, “then I know something I want.” She points toward the vestibule. “There’s
a bathroom out there. I think we should all be allowed a bathroom break.”
Tommy points at his barricade in front of the doors, blocking them in. “How do you think we can go out to the bathroom when
all that stuff is in the way?” He says this to Nadine like she is the dumb one now.
“You’ll take it down,” Nadine says.
“I ain’t taking all of that down and then putting it all back up again.”
“You won’t have to,” Nadine says. She smiles at Tommy. It is her “I am so much smarter than you” smile.
“I’ll give you the keys to the doors,” she says to him. “Then you can lock us in once we get back from the bathroom. You’ll have the keys, so you won’t need the barricade anymore.”
He looks at her skeptically. “Without that barricade they might just bust in here.”
Nadine gives the barricade the side-eye. “It’s not like that barricade was ever going to stop them from entering. It’s a few
pieces of furniture. Not that hard to get past.”
Tommy thinks about this. “Yeah, I guess,” he says. He gestures at his gun. “This is what’s keeping them out more than anything.”
“Right,” says Nadine. She goes over to the counter and picks up the keys they keep on a little hook underneath. She returns
and drops them into his palm. Quickly, as if she will have second thoughts and take them back, he shoves them into his pocket.
Tommy looks at her like he thinks she is helping him, like she is coming around to his side. Nadine lets him think whatever
he wants. She keeps her seat as he tells Morrow and Blythe to come and help him remove the barricade. They slide off their
stools and help him push the cabinet and the display rack back to where they were before. The tourist pamphlets are still
askew, and the other things have been jostled in all the shifting around. She makes a mental note to fix them later. Her mama
always taught her to leave a place better than you found it.