Chapter 7
Chapter 7
Pull yourself together, Jane.
The second Dan left, the fear that gripped Jane when she heard the gunshots grew exponentially, like a pot of water swelling from a simmer to a rapid boil. They actually shot someone! Which means they’d do it again. And any one of them could be next. If Jane wasn’t so terrified, she might question the parallel to her book once more, but for now there are more pressing matters. Dan went toward the gunshots! She’s scared for him, of course, but she’s also scared for herself without him. It’s the same as how she can never sleep by herself anymore—when Dan’s gone on a work trip or she’s in a hotel room alone. Every little creak of the house settling wakes her and she’s sure a robber is seconds away from bursting into her room. When did she become this woman? She used to be independent. Confident. She used to relish sleeping alone.
Codependency , that was what all her self-help books called it, which made Jane laugh. How is it possible to be married to someone for half your life and not be codependent? The same way Dan is her arm but not her lungs, he’s also a comfort, like a weighted blanket. The weighted blanket can’t actually do anything—like protect her from a bullet, for instance—but it still feels better to have it on.
And isn’t that partly why she needs to leave him? She doesn’t remember who she is without Dan. It doesn’t help that all those Christian mommy bloggers turned self-help gurus only found themselves after getting divorced. Jane’s listened to their podcasts. They sound…happy. As if divorce was the best thing to ever happen to them.
Or maybe it’s realizing you’re a lesbian. That one sounds the happiest, to be honest.
Jane’s often thought how much easier life would be if she were married to a woman. Especially in the middle of the night when she sits on top of the cold, hard toilet seat that Dan has left down. Or—God help her—every time Dan answers a question with the punch line to his very favorite dad joke for the seven thousandth time: “Very carefully.” (As in when Jane seriously inquires something like: How are you going to grill the steaks for dinner if we’re out of charcoal? and he grins and says: Very carefully. )
Anyway, she isn’t naive enough to think it’s all so easy. Take this pill! Get divorced! Find yourself! But she’d be lying if she said a little part of her didn’t hope that it was. (Just like a little part of her hopes that she is secretly a lesbian, even though the only woman she’s ever been seriously attracted to is Abby Wambach, and honestly, who isn’t attracted to her?)
Now blanketless—or Dan-less, to be more accurate—Jane starts to a tremble a bit.
Get it together , she chastises herself once again. She straightens her spine and gives her head a shake, taking stock of her situation. She looks down the line at her fellow diners, who all seem as shell-shocked as she is. But they can’t just sit there like lambs for the slaughter. They need to do something! They’re being held hostage! They need to…call the police! Jane’s gaze lands helplessly on the stainless steel bucket of cell phones, not that having hers would help her, since there’s no service. She glances wildly around the room, and that’s when she spies the camera in the far-right corner of the ceiling. Her breath catches.
She looks left and right to see if any of her fellow diners have noticed, and when it’s clear they have not, she dips her head to the person closest to her—Ayanna, the food influencer who’s holding her husband’s head gently in her lap—and whispers, “There’s a security camera up there.”
Ayanna blinks slowly, as if in a daze, and Jane uses her eyes to direct Ayanna’s gaze to the camera.
Ayanna glances at it and then back at Jane. “And?”
“Maybe someone’s monitoring it? We could…I don’t know, write a note that says help or something.”
Ayanna raises one brow in the universal way that indicates she thinks Jane’s an idiot. It’s a look Jane is familiar with because she sees it so often from Sissy. “If someone is monitoring it, don’t you think it’s pretty clear at this point that we could use some help?”
“Oh,” Jane says. “Right.”
“It’s likely closed circuit—surveillance for after-hours security to help prevent break-ins.”
“Well, what should we do?” Jane asks. “We can’t just sit here.”
“What can we do?” Ayanna whispers, holding up her wrists. “You saw what they did to Rahul—” She glances down at her husband, gently putting a hand to his face. He winces. “And now they’re shooting people? I vote for sitting here.”
“Oy!” Brick shouts, and Jane jumps, jerking her head toward him and bracing for his ire. But he’s not looking at her. He’s looking at the opening from the dining room to the hallway.
“Where have you been?”
One of the captors, who Jane thinks is named Lyle, pauses under the doorjamb. Jane hadn’t even noticed he was gone. “Bathroom,” he says. “I had to go.”
And like Pavlov’s dog, by just hearing the word, Jane realizes she needs to pee. Dan always says she has to go at the most inopportune times, which really means at the times that are most inconvenient for him. She used to apologize for it. Every time they drove somewhere on vacation and she needed to pull over less than an hour into the road trip, or at a concert or show when they were inevitably seated in the middle of a row and she had to ask the surrounding strangers to stand in the middle of the performance so she could shuffle past them, Dan would sigh. Can you just hold it? No, I can’t, Dan , she’d reply, irritation matching her embarrassment at her body’s weakness. But honestly, it’s just part of the series of mortifications mothers endure. She’s birthed two children, and despite the pelvic-floor therapy and the Kegels, she still pees a little when she sneezes or laughs or coughs.
All of that to say, she thinks Dan may be right this time. Her bladder is fit to burst and it is wildly inconvenient.
“Psst.”
Jane looks to her right, directly into the eyes of Javier, her waiter, who, less than thirty minutes ago, was telling Jane to Let us know if there is anything we can do to make your experience more enjoyable . Now that is ironic. She wishes Dan was here so she could tell him.
“You want to do something?” he whispers.
Jane nods.
“There’s a silent alarm in the chef’s office right under his desk, down the hallway. It alerts the police. We need to get to it.”
Jane feels her heartbeat pick up speed. “Yes, OK! Good, good. How?”
Javier looks helplessly at his bound wrists and feet and then at Jane’s and shrugs.
Monica pokes her head over Javier’s shoulder and whispers: “What if one of us says we need to use the bathroom—they’ll have to let us, right? And maybe we can manage to slip into the office?”
As far as plans go, it’s not great. But Jane does need to use the bathroom, and she doesn’t have a better idea. She looks at Ayanna.
“Don’t look at me! I told you, I’m not messing with them.”
She looks back at Javier. “I’ll do it,” she says. She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth. “Excuse me,” she squeaks, looking at Brick, who doesn’t appear to hear her, as his head remains bent in conversation with Lyle.
“Hey!” Jane shouts.
This time, nearly every head swivels in her direction, including Brick’s.
“Yes?” he says in his deep voice.
“I need to…use the restroom.”
He looks at her, half-curious, half-irritated, as if he hadn’t planned for this interruption either. Slowly he nods.
“Anyone else?”
“I do, too,” Paisley says, her voice barely audible, and Vaughn immediately raises her cuffed hands as one. “Me, too,” she says, even though it’s clear to Jane she simply wants to be wherever her daughter is. Who can blame her? It reminds Jane of that children’s book she used to read to Sissy and Josh when they were little: If you run away, I will run after you, for you are my little bunny. Her heart squeezes.
Brick nods once, as if he’s made a decision. “Stand up,” he says to Jane, and he watches as she struggles to her feet, her balance off-kilter due to her wrists and ankles being zip-tied together, coupled with her ingrained desire to remain modest and not flash anyone. Finally, she is upright, on two feet. Brick nods to Lyle, who comes over, drops to a knee at her feet, and slices her ankle ties in two.
“Couldn’t have done that before I stood up?” Jane mutters.
“Let’s go,” Brick says, gesturing for her to join Vaughn and Paisley and then walk ahead.
“Brick!” the same pixie-blond woman who mentioned leaving earlier shouts, and Jane stops and turns along with Vaughn, Paisley, and their captor. “What is the plan here?”
“I am escorting them to the toilet.”
“And after that?”
“We will wait for our guest of honor.”
“How long are we going to wait? We’ve been here nineteen minutes already,” she says. “We need to go.”
Brick pauses, and the silence is so pure and tension-filled, Jane’s reminded of that one time in Vegas, pre-kids, when Dan had too many mai tais and put two hundred dollars they couldn’t afford on black at the roulette table and she nearly passed out waiting for the ball to drop. “As long as it takes,” he says. “We’ve come this far.”
Shit , Jane thinks. Red . Just like in Vegas.
Then he looks dead at Jane and says “Walk,” his intonation so deep, she cannot distinguish if it’s a flutter of fear she feels in her chest or the vibrato of his voice. Vaughn and Paisley lead, and Jane follows with Brick close behind, through the doorway opposite the kitchen.
The hallway they enter is narrow, dark compared to the light airiness of the dining room, thanks to the black paisley print covering the walls, peppered with an eclectic mix of framed paintings and drawings. At the end of the hallway sits a red landline telephone with a spiral cord and push-button numbers on a narrow, waist-high table. It looks like an art installation. A relic, Jane thinks, even though she had a pink one just like it in her bedroom growing up, and she stares at it desperately. She regrets not using the phone earlier to call Sissy. What if that was her last chance to hear her daughter’s voice? Morbidly, she tries to remember the last thing she said to her, to Josh, and thinks it was probably something rote and banal as they both headed out the door into the night, like Make good choices!
Doors on either side of the phone stand guard like sentries, each with small matching gold placards declaring: gender neutral . But Jane’s gaze falls to the only two other doors in the hallway, to the right of her. They both bear signs that say: employees only .
Which one is the chef’s office? Jane panics as they pass the first one, missing her opportunity to open it, even as she’s terrified to try. This is her only chance! If she can just get in and remain a step ahead of Brick, she can press the button. She hears Ayanna’s voice in her head— And now they’re shooting people? —and tries to tamp it down. As she passes the second door, she takes a deep breath and—her heart beating so hard in her throat it feels like she swallowed a baby bird trying desperately to fly—grasps the knob with her bound hands and tries to turn it, throwing her body into the door at the same time. Neither the knob nor the door budges.
“Oy,” Brick shouts. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” Jane says, straightening her body. “I tripped.”
Brick raises his brow at her once again. “Move,” he says.
When they reach the phone table and bathroom doors, Jane and Vaughn and Paisley stop and look at one another, not sure what to do next.
“Well, go on,” Brick says.
Vaughn holds up her cuffed wrists again to Brick. “A little help?”
Brick looks from Vaughn’s bound hands to Jane’s as if it’s just occurred to him that they are restrained, and then says: “You can help each other.”
Jane momentarily forgets her need to pee as it dawns on her that he means for all three of them to pee together.
To her credit, this doesn’t seem to faze Vaughn. “Fine,” she says, pushing the bathroom door to the right of the phone open with her shoulder, holding it open for Paisley. Jane follows her in and is surprised at how simple the room is: white walls, marble floor, charcoal-slate farmer’s sink next to the toilet.
Jane nearly wets herself in relief.
“Go on,” Vaughn says to Paisley, and Jane clenches her thigh muscles and her mouth. Of course they need to let the child go first. Though with her pouty lips and abundant cleavage, there isn’t much that’s childlike left about her.
When Jane hears the familiar sound of urine streaming into the bowl, she clenches her own pelvic floor even tighter. To take her mind off it, she whispers: “That didn’t go well.”
“What were you doing?”
“Trying to get into the chef’s office. There’s a silent alarm under the desk.”
Vaughn eyes her. “And you thought you could reach it without him noticing?”
At least I was doing something, Jane thinks, but bites back her retort.
When she’s finished, Paisley shimmies her pants back up and then steps toward the sink to wash her hands, and Jane wastes no time moving into her place. She knows she should offer that Vaughn go next, but her bladder won’t allow her to waste time on pretending to be polite.
She’s already anticipating the relief before quickly realizing she can’t both hold her dress up and pull down her underwear with hands tied together. She abhors asking for help but sees no other choice.
“Um, can you hold up my dress?”
“Sure, let me just…” Vaughn closes the gap between the two women and grasps the back of Jane’s dress, looking at the wall to give her privacy.
When Jane is finally seated and her most pressing problem is being solved, she turns her attention to the next. “Should we try something else?” she whispers.
Vaughn jerks her head back toward Jane’s, locking eyes with her, and Jane has a flash that this is it—some female synergistic moment like a movie scene—and the two of them are going to come up with a plan to save not only their lives, but the entire restaurant.
“Like what?”
Jane considers this, hoping something— anything —will come to her. She imagines barging out of the bathroom, the two of them attempting to overpower Brick, whose name is an apt descriptor for his body—sturdy, strong, impenetrable. It’s an absurd image—like two flies trying to pass through a pane of glass. Futile.
“I don’t know,” Jane admits. She glances around the small bathroom and her eyes light on the long rectangular window above the toilet. It’s frosted glass and doesn’t appear to have a latch or any way to open it, but Jane thinks if they could break it, perhaps they could squeeze Paisley through it. Vaughn also glances at the window, then pops an eyebrow in skepticism, and without any words, Jane knows they agree it’s a fool’s errand, and the sliver of hope that they might be able to escape is gone.
“What do you think they want?” Jane whispers.
Vaughn shrugs and sighs. “Otto has nutters threatening him all the time.” And then she mutters, more to herself than to Jane: “He’s going to kill me for giving security the night off.”
“You have a security team?”
Vaughn nods.
“Like the Secret Service?”
“I think that’s just for presidents, but yes. Otto doesn’t like us to go anywhere without them. But, I mean, I thought this of all places…”
“Mom.” Paisley’s voice cracks behind Vaughn. She’s barely talking above a whisper, but it startles them both. They turn to look at her, and Jane sees her face crumple like an accordion. “I’m so sorry.”
“Paisley-girl,” Vaughn croons. “What for? It’s not your fault.”
“It is. It is my fault.” Tears are streaming down her face and she’s working to get the words out.
“What? No. Why do you think that?”
“We’re only here for my birthday.”
That’s what they’re doing here? They came to the most expensive restaurant possibly on the whole of the earth, and most definitely the most expensive one Jane has been to in her forty-six years of life, for a child’s birthday? Jane tries to remember what restaurant they went to for Sissy’s last birthday. Maybe P.F. Chang’s? It’s quite possible they simply ordered pizza.
“You didn’t make us. We wanted to come here. And your dad wants to be here, too.”
At that, Paisley’s crying turns into downright sobbing. She’s snotting everywhere, unable to get it together. Jane might think it dramatic if she did not also have a teenage daughter who wore her emotions so close to the surface. And, Jane reasons, they are being held hostage by gun-wielding bad guys, so maybe it’s the exact right emotional reaction to have. Maybe Jane is the one who’s behaving peculiarly.
Vaughn, as though reading Jane’s mind, says: “It’s been a week. She just broke up with her boyfriend.”
“We didn’t break up,” Paisley says. “He ghosted me.”
Vaughn looks at Jane and shrugs. Jane tries to approximate a look of empathy in return.
As Jane is finishing up, Vaughn—still holding the hem of Jane’s dress up so it doesn’t slip into the bowl—accidentally brushes Jane’s arm with her own, and the cool, sleek feel of Vaughn’s blouse on her skin reminds Jane of the question she had earlier. “What’s mulberry silk?” she asks as she stands upright.
If she’s surprised by this turn in questioning, Vaughn doesn’t show it. Without missing a beat, she says: “It’s silk made from the larvae cocoons of the Bombyx mori moth, which are grown in captivity in China and fed a diet exclusively of Morus alba leaves—Latin for ‘white mulberry.’?”
Jane lets out a sharp “Ha!” She didn’t expect Vaughn to be funny. It reminds her of those memes spoofing Ina Garten: If you can’t get butter infused with the tears of Dutch milkmaids, any good quality sweet cream butter will do.
She looks at Vaughn’s face and realizes she isn’t laughing with her. “Oh my God,” she puffs. “You’re serious.”
“Yes. It’s the highest-quality silk in the world.”
This only sets Jane off harder. In high-stress situations, Jane often has trouble regulating her emotions—or expressing the appropriate one. Or, to be more accurate, her entire body is racked with fear disguised as laughter. Vaughn stares at her with a stern curiosity.
The door rattles from a fist banging on it, and Paisley lets out a small scream. “Hey,” Brick intones through the door. “Time’s up.”
Still trying to control her waves of giggles, Jane hurriedly scrubs her hands at the sink. She dries them on a fresh hand towel, and then Vaughn opens the door and they reenter the hallway single file and stand in front of Brick, Vaughn standing protectively close to her still-shaken daughter, waiting to be told they can return to the dining room.
But Brick doesn’t move. “Call him,” he says, nodding to the phone.
“Otto?” Vaughn asks, as if there could be another him Brick would want her to call.
“Yes.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“We’re going to make sure he’s coming.”
“But he is coming. He said he was, so he will.”
Brick pauses, studying her. And then: “Find out when.”
“OK.” Vaughn lifts the receiver on the phone with both hands, cradling it between her ear and shoulder, and hesitates a moment before deliberately pressing a succession of numbers with her right pointer finger, her left hand just along for the ride. Though Brick is staring at the keypad, Jane hopes Vaughn is secretly calling the cops, or her security team. Jane can hear the faint ringing, and they all wait for Otto to pick up.
“He doesn’t know this number, he’s not going to—”
A voice comes through the line and Jane leans forward without knowing it. Brick does the same.
“It’s his voicemail.”
“Leave a message,” Brick growls. “Tell him it’s an emergency.” He says this as if that would be a lie and Jane nearly laughs again. Since when is being held at gunpoint not an emergency?
“Hey, it’s me,” Vaughn says, light at first, but Jane can detect the tremble in her voice. “Please call me back at this number. At the restaurant.” She pauses, glancing at Brick, and then adds: “It’s an emergency .”