Chapter 35
Here we all are now, thinks Sylvie. Here we all are, together. Still.
Once Hope, her guard, and Covey are safely inside the room, the women climb back on their stools with a resignation that makes
their shoulders droop. Hope drifts into the center of their little circle and stays there as she takes in her new surroundings.
Then she goes to each woman, doing the physical version of what she’d done on the phone hours ago, making sure they are okay,
that they have no urgent needs. When she gets to Sylvie, the older woman tells her, “My only urgent need is to get out of
here by suppertime. I have a husband who will be waiting for me.” Sylvie does not add that he is waiting just outside. She’s
betting Hope doesn’t know that.
Hope gives her a thumbs-up sign. “I approve of this plan,” she says and smiles. It might be unorthodox for a negotiator to
go in with the hostages, Sylvie thinks, but having Hope with them makes things just a little bit better. Or maybe it’s the
dog in the room. Dogs make everything better.
Sylvie and Robert always had dogs. When one died, they observed a mourning period but inevitably went out and got a new dog.
Through the years they had big dogs and little dogs, female dogs and male dogs, mixed breeds from the pound and purebreds they paid far too much money for.
Dogs that were afraid of the rain, dogs that barked at anything that moved, dogs that chewed up furniture, dogs that slept with them, dogs that slept with their son.
Each one still holds a place in her heart.
But when their last one died, they did the math. If a dog lives an average of thirteen years, they had reached the ages where
the dog could outlive at least one of them. It was the most depressing calculation she’d ever done. So they did what they
felt was the reasonable thing and remained dogless, yet another insult of old age.
Sylvie looks over at Tommy in the far corner of the room. He is on the floor beside the dog with his arms encircling him,
his face buried in his fur. Seeing him curled around the dog the way he is makes Sylvie think of a Latin phrase: incurvatus in se, which means “curved inward on oneself.” She cannot remember where she heard it. Just one of those tidbits she’s filed away
through the years. As she recalls, it basically means your only concern is yourself.
She thinks of another phrase, not Latin, but applicable: “He who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas.” She bites back a
smile and turns to Hope.
“How long are you going to leave him over there?” Sylvie points at Tommy.
Hope shrugs, then gestures at the officers outside. “I told them to give me some time. I’d like to convince him to surrender
and walk out of here on his own, let it be his decision to let you guys go. But they’re not going to wait forever.”
Sylvie nods her approval as an understanding dawns on her. There is no way this ends without them being released, without
Tommy surrendering. In that way, appeasing Tommy was also ending his siege.
“Gutsy move,” Sylvie says. “Bringing the dog in here yourself.”
Hope shrugs again. “Well, it came down to this being the best way to handle it. And since I’ve been the one talking to him all day, I was the most obvious choice. He at least sorta trusts me.”
“I could only hear half of the conversation, but it seems like you really made a connection with him,” Sylvie says.
Hope pauses before speaking, choosing her words. When she thought about coming in here, she thought about dealing with Tommy.
She hadn’t really given much thought to dealing with the hostages too. Oh well, she thinks, I’m here now. The only way out is through.
“We both lost a parent recently,” Hope says.
Sylvie nods. “I thought that might be it. I heard his side and thought you must’ve been mirroring his feelings.”
Mirroring, Hope thinks. That’s an odd choice of words, a negotiation term. But she doesn’t comment on that. “Well, it actually wasn’t hard, or even intentional. We’ve gone through some things that
are . . . eerily similar. Similar regrets, similar timing.”
Sylvie keeps nodding along as her eyes stray from Hope and toward the windows that face the parking lot. A smile crosses her
face. “Lady luck,” Sylvie says.
“What’d you say?” Hope asks, her heart rate rising as, in her head, she hears Bo’s voice saying the exact same thing.
“Nothing,” says Sylvie, waving her hand. “Just something I heard once.” But her cheeks are bright red.
“Where’d you hear it?” Hope asks. She notices the other three hostages lean forward on their stools.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sylvie says. “Probably on some cop show or something. I watch a lot of Law and Order.”
No, you don’t, Hope thinks. But she doesn’t say it. Instead, she says, “What did you mean by ‘lady luck’?”
Sylvie holds her breath for a moment, then exhales it all out in a whoosh. “It just means that sometimes in life you find common ground in unexpected ways. There’s some similarity that you hit upon with a total stranger that you couldn’t possibly have orchestrated apart from—”
“Lady luck,” Hope finishes. She gives Sylvie a one-sided grin, and Sylvie looks away. “You know, that’s the second time today
that I’ve heard that.” She says this to Sylvie’s profile. She waits a moment, but Sylvie doesn’t respond. “I’ve never heard
it before,” she continues. “And now I’ve heard it twice in one day.” There is a teasing quality to her voice as she adds,
“Do you think that’s also lady luck? A coincidence? Or is there someone out there we both know who has said it to both of
us?” She waits again for Sylvie to respond. When she doesn’t, Hope says, “Bo?”
At the sound of the name, Sylvie turns to face Hope, dispensing with further pretense. “Actually, it’s Robert,” she says.
“Bo was an old nickname from when he was a rookie. He used it so he could be here today without you guys figuring out the
connection.”
Hope shakes her head as she recalls all the moments when, if she’d been paying closer attention, he gave clues. The concern
in his voice whenever he spoke of the hostages, the way he reached out to the station and offered to come over, his constant
walking over to see what was going on inside the post office, his volunteering to deliver the pizzas and even suggesting that
“the old lady” be the one to receive them. He’d said it was because they would be seen as less of a threat, but it was just
because he’d wanted to lay eyes on his wife. A senior citizen has fooled them all.
Good for him, Hope thinks. She gives Sylvie a reassuring smile. Good for them. He came as soon as he heard. He did what he could to look out for his wife. He couldn’t bear to be separated from her, especially
when she needed him.
She thinks of Alex, of how long they’ve been separated, a choice she made apart from him.
Steeped in grief and regret, she’d fled to Sunset Beach, but in doing so, she’d left her husband behind.
Then when he offered to join her, she’d told him to stay behind.
At some point he stopped asking why she doesn’t want him there.
He knows the answer will be the same one she always gives: “I don’t know what I want. ”
An acute longing rushes through her as she misses her husband in a way she hasn’t allowed herself to for months. She hasn’t
allowed herself much of anything since that day—not feelings, not comfort, not joy, not . . . hope. She looks over at Tommy,
curled beside his beloved dog.
“What do you want?” she’d asked him when this all began.
What do you want? she asks herself now.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Blythe asks Sylvie, pulling Hope from her reverie. She looks back to the women.
Sylvie glances nervously in Tommy’s direction and then back at the little ring of them. “I didn’t want him to know,” she says,
lowering her voice. “I didn’t want him to use it as some sort of leverage.”
“When we were in the bathroom you could’ve told us,” Blythe says. She sounds hurt, like she has been lied to.
Sylvie rushes to reassure her. “I didn’t know when we were in the bathroom. I didn’t know till he came in carrying the pizzas.”
“That was him?” Nadine says with surprise in her voice. “He’s way taller than you.”
Sylvie smiles back and nods. “That he is. But we’ve made the height difference work out for almost . . .” Her voice gives
out on her as she thinks of their approaching anniversary, of where things could be by then. “Almost fifty-five years,” she
manages to finish.
“Fifty-five years,” says Nadine, incredulous. “Tommy and I didn’t even make it three.”
They hear the sound of the dog’s collar jingle and all turn to look, expecting Tommy to be rushing over at the mention of his name, but he is still on the floor with his back to them.
The dog’s back and Tommy’s back rise and fall in tandem.
Sylvie wonders if Tommy has fallen asleep again.
Now it doesn’t matter. They will not need to attempt an escape with the negotiator and an officer in their midst.
So she asks Hope the question that’s been on her mind all day. “Has Robert been . . . okay? Today?”
“Okay?” asks Hope. “What do you mean? Is he . . . ill?” She doesn’t want Bo, er, Robert, to be ill.
“He’s been having some problems with . . . forgetting things. It’s reached a level of concern recently.” She frowns. “I wrote
it off as just aging at first, but . . . I can’t anymore.”
Hope’s heart sinks. “You mean like dementia? Alzheimer’s?”
Sylvie looks down at the envelope under her stool. “Something,” she says. “We’ve not gone so far as to see a doctor about
it. Though I know we should, it hasn’t been going on that long and I’ve—” She raises her gaze back to eye level with Hope.
“I’ve been pretending it isn’t happening. Going to the doctor feels like admitting that it is, but then this weekend . . .”
She looks over to Morrow, to Blythe. “You two weren’t the only ones here to mail something that you were uncertain about today.”