Chapter 32
Inside the post office, it falls to Sylvie to try to restore order. She almost feels sorry for Tommy, who, in the crosshairs
of Nadine’s outrage, is backed up against a wall as Nadine unleashes months of her pent-up anger. Sylvie doesn’t understand
much of what Nadine is saying and doubts anyone else does either. The last thing she fully understood was “Is this why? Is
this why?” But Nadine didn’t wait for an answer from Tommy before she ranted some more.
Tommy winces about every fourth word but doesn’t defend himself. He looks around for an escape route, but there is nowhere
he can go to get away, as she will surely follow him around the room until she either wears herself out or runs out of words.
Tommy is as trapped as they are.
Unless, thinks Sylvie, I offer him an out.
“You could let us go.” She has to raise her voice to have any hope of him hearing her over Nadine. He doesn’t respond, so
she says it again, changing one word. “You should let us go.”
“I always start off by simply asking them to let the hostages go,” she remembers Robert saying.
All those years that he was a cop, she was a teacher.
He had the more exciting job, so his stories shared over the dinner table, riding in the car, or sitting on the beach just a few miles away from here were usually better than hers.
She’d listened closely to all of his stories, many more than once.
Though she never thought she’d have to, today she is putting some of what she’d gleaned to use.
Tommy’s eyes meet her own, and for a moment, Sylvie sees him consider her suggestion. But then he shakes his head no. Still,
there was a moment he wanted to let them go. That moment means something. He is getting closer to giving up. She needs to
de-escalate the situation, restore calm, and give Tommy the chance to mull over her request a little more. Perhaps Tommy will,
with a little more time, reach the right conclusion, do the right thing, and surrender.
She moves closer to Nadine, places her hand gently on her arm. The sensation startles her, and she whips her head around,
wild-eyed, until she sees that it is just Sylvie. “Honey,” Sylvie says to her. “I think that’s enough for now.” Sometimes, Sylvie thinks, it pays to be the old lady.
Nadine’s face goes slack as she takes a step back from Tommy, who uses the moment to slide away from where she had him pinned.
Nadine tenses, but Sylvie takes her hand and leads her away, back toward the stools. “Why don’t we all just have a seat?”
she says.
She poses it as a question, but it is really a command. Sylvie uses her teacher voice, calm but firm. In some ways, she used
to tease Robert, their jobs weren’t that far apart. Every day teaching middle schoolers was a protracted negotiation, the
siege lasting the length of a school year. Robert liked to joke that he didn’t know which of their jobs was more dangerous.
Sylvie is pleased that Blythe, Morrow, and even Nadine yield to her suggestion. Except for Tommy, everyone moves back toward
the stools, the heightened energy in the room dissipating some with the change of location. Once they are perched on their
stools again, Sylvie says, “Why don’t we have a nice conversation. Maybe get to know one another a bit better?”
Blythe and Morrow nod agreeably, but Nadine looks unconvinced.
She glances over her shoulder at Tommy, who has moved as far away from them as he can get without leaving the room.
He has turned his back to them as well. Good, Sylvie thinks.
Give him time with his thoughts, time to hopefully form a plan to end this.
Morrow fumbles around in her bag for a moment before extracting a small box from it. She holds it up. “I have these cards
we could use,” she says. “They’re conversation cards.” She pulls a face. “They were meant for my daughter. An attempt to get
her to talk to me. She’s a teenager, so . . .” Her voice trails off as she looks down at the box. “Anyway, she took one look
at the box and said it was a lame idea.” Morrow turns the box over and studies the back of it. She shrugs and looks up. “They’ve
never even been opened.”
“But she came here,” Blythe says. “She came to the window.” Blythe thinks of her mother, wondering if she stayed or left after
Blythe never came back from the post office, if she even knows what’s happening. She wishes her mother had come to the post
office window and pounded on it, had called her name.
“That’s true,” says Morrow. “She did. It surprised me, her coming here.” She looks toward the window. “I wonder if she’s still
out there or if they made her leave.”
The other women shrug. No one in the room knows what is going on out there. As the day has dragged on, they’ve looked out
the windows less and less. Seeing the free world is its own kind of torture. Blythe lets herself imagine walking out of here.
She might just fall to her knees and kiss the parking lot asphalt when she does.
“She looks like you,” Nadine speaks up. Her voice is ragged and hoarse from all her yelling.
“Oh,” says Morrow, sitting up a little taller. “You think so?”
“Yeah, I mean, what I saw of her, she did.”
Morrow gives them an odd smile. “Well, that’s nice to hear, considering she’s adopted.”
“Oh, I had no idea,” says Nadine. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” says Morrow. The odd smile on her face is replaced by a genuine one. “I like hearing it, actually. There’ve
been so many times I’ve studied her face, trying to find something of me in there, even though I know it’s genetically impossible.”
She pauses. “Genetics,” she says, wistful. “That’s actually the reason I came in here today.”
“Genetics?” asks Blythe.
Morrow runs her hand halfway down her ponytail, then stops and rummages in her tote. She produces the package she’s checked
on numerous times since she entered the post office. “This,” she says, as if that is an explanation. She chuckles at the blank
stares looking back at her. “Sorry. I’m not making any sense.” She gives the padded envelope a little shake. “It’s a DNA test.
My daughter’s DNA test. She wants to find her biological mother. Or, as she says, her ‘real’ mom. Her real mom who will, no
doubt, let her get a tattoo.”
“A . . . tattoo?” asks Blythe.
Morrow makes a scoffing noise. “My husband and I made a rule a long time ago. We had a friend who got a tattoo as a teenager,
and later in life she regretted it, thought it looked childish and unprofessional. We watched her go through a pretty long,
pretty painful process to have it removed. It led us to make the rule that our kids weren’t allowed to get a tattoo till they
have graduated from college to, you know, have more time for their brains to develop.”
Morrow thinks about this before she adds, “We made the stakes pretty high. If they get a tattoo before they graduate from college, we stop paying for college.” She shrugs, then continues.
“Our son never questioned it. Even now that he’s an adult, he’s said he’s glad we made him really think about the permanence of the decision the way we did. ”
She shakes her head. “And then our daughter comes along, and getting a tattoo is the only thing she seems to want in life.
She brings it up all the time, thinks we’re so backward and uptight. All her friends are doing it, and why can’t she? She
doesn’t get the part where we are just trying to think about her, for her own good.”
She looks down at the envelope she is holding, squinting at the address printed on the front. “We’ve been fighting about it
a lot lately. We fought about it last night. And later, when I went up to check on her before bed, I found her with the DNA
test. She freaked out and chased me out of the room, and, well, we haven’t really talked about it since. I tried to get her
to talk to me this morning, but she just stormed out of the house and left for school.”
“And you’re sure she was taking the DNA test so she can find her biological mother?” Sylvie asks the question gently, her
voice softer than usual.
Morrow purses her lips. “Maybe not her mom specifically. We have talked about it in the past, submitting her DNA to one of
those genealogical sites. You know, just to see if she has any blood relatives out there. I understand the curiosity, the
wanting to know where she came from. I never stood in the way of that. But I thought it was something we’d do together, that
we’d talk about it before she did it, at least.”
“I know where I came from,” Blythe quips. “And that doesn’t necessarily make things better.” The others chuckle and nod their
agreement.
Morrow looks down at her lap, rubs her palms along her thighs.
“But this whole thing with her desperately wanting a tattoo and me holding out has driven us apart. We used to be so close. We joked that she was my broke best friend. But then we moved here and she just withdrew. I thought she’d come around eventually.
But it’s her senior year. In the fall she goes to college and .
. .” She drops the envelope back inside the tote.
“I fear I’m losing her. And then I saw her with that test last night, and it was like confirmation that she’d rather have any other mother than me. ”
Nadine speaks up with confusion in her voice. “But then you were going to mail the test?”
Morrow nods. “After she left for school this morning, I thought about it—about what I could do to make things right. So I
went up to her room and found the test. She’d thrown it in the trash, but I was able to pull everything together and get it
ready to send off. I sat around all morning debating about whether I could go through with it. I mean, this is a Pandora’s
box I can’t close once it’s opened. Who knows what will come from it? Maybe she will find her bio mom. Maybe she will love
her more and I will lose her for real. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that—it’s kind of like the tattoo—denying
her this only makes it more enticing. And so, before I could change my mind, I got dressed and came here.” Morrow thinks about
being pulled over on the way there, but she leaves that part out. Still, the word invalid hovers in her mind.
Sylvie’s head is nodding in approval. “I think you’re doing the right thing,” she says. Blythe and Nadine make affirming noises.
“I think it’s a good way to tell her you’re there for her, no matter what.”
“I hope so,” says Morrow.
“I mean, she came here. She’s clearly worried about you. She snuck past the cops and took a big risk to try to get to you.
I don’t think that’s someone you’re in danger of losing,” says Blythe.
“I think it’s just a kid trying to find her own way,” Nadine adds. She looks around the room before looking back at the other women. “It’s hard enough to find your way as an adult.”
They all nod in solidarity, then silence falls for a moment until Sylvie says, “I almost got a tattoo when I turned fifty.
My husband called it my midlife almost crisis.”
“He didn’t want you to do it?”
Sylvie thinks about her answer before speaking. “He wouldn’t have forbidden it if I’d pushed to do it, but no, he preferred
I didn’t.” She pauses again, then adds, “I still kind of wish I had. ?Course I’m too old now.”
“Aw, you’re not too old,” says Nadine.
Sylvie shakes her head but says nothing. Her skin is thinner now than it was then. She has age spots and bruises easily. She’s
not sure putting needles and dye in the mix would be the best thing at this point in her life. But if she could go back and
do it over, she would.
“What were you going to get?” asks Blythe. “If you’d gotten one?”
Sylvie pauses, her eyes moving as she thinks about her answer before they widen with a look of surprise. She looks from woman
to woman. “I can’t remember!” They all crack up laughing, less because it’s that funny and more because, for a moment, it
is a relief just to laugh. But then the ringing phone cuts through the sound of their laughter.