Chapter 8
Chapter 8
Dan’s head goes light, and in his crouched position, he rocks back on his heels, sitting down hard on his bottom.
“You OK, man?” Zay asks.
Dan is absolutely not OK, but he can’t find the words or the breath with which to respond. His thoughts are a tangled jumble and he can’t take his eyes off his daughter. His daughter, Sissy. Who is supposed to be at a friend’s house watching some show—isn’t that what Jane said?—and making up dances on TikTok or whatever it is they do, yet is somehow standing across the room from him, wearing a black gaiter across her nose and mouth and a baseball cap on her head and holding a gun , which, if he had to rate the level of astonishment for each revelation, might be the most shocking piece of information of all. The image is so absurd, in fact—like a chicken wearing pants or those AI-generated pictures that give humans four hands instead of two—he thinks he must be hallucinating.
“Wait, who’s Sissy?” Glasses says. “Goldie, you know this dude?”
Her eyes, locked with Dan’s, go wide, and she gives her head a small, nearly imperceptible shake.
Why are you calling her Goldie ? Dan wants to shout. Sissy’s real name is Sarah, but when Josh was born, Jane jokingly started calling her Sissy, making fun of how obnoxious it was when other families did that—and it stuck, and they became the obnoxious family. Sissy’s friends have given her their own various nicknames over the years—Brooksy (for her last name), S.B., and Rah-rah, for starters—but Dan is certain that Goldie is not one of them. She doesn’t even have blond hair!
“Of course not,” Sissy says, breaking her gaze with Dan and looking at Glasses pointedly, but Dan can hear the tremble in her voice. “I must look like someone he knows.”
Dan wants to object: Sissy, it’s me ! Your dad !
He wants to shout:
What is happening ?
Are you OK?
WHY DO YOU HAVE A GUN?
But the way she’s staring at him now, it reminds him of when she was three or four and had those night terrors. Dan and Jane would go running into her room, and her eyes would be wide open, her body stiff as a board, the most awful screams emanating from her mouth. Dan would turn on the light, stand her straight up, holding her tight. “You’re not supposed to startle her!” Jane shouted the first time, no doubt having read about night terrors in one of her many parenting books. But Dan didn’t know what was happening; he knew only that he needed it to stop immediately, and it worked. She always woke up, confused as to why her parents were there, why the light was on, why she was standing up and not sleeping in her bed.
He feels the same way now. Confused. Maybe he’s the one having a night terror.
But Sissy’s the one who looks scared, and it occurs to him that she must not be here of her own free will. Obviously. He nearly laughs with relief. She would never choose to do this. She makes straight As. She’s in the National Honor Society. She got accepted to Stanford, for Chrissake. She didn’t even cut school on Senior Skip Day. They—whoever they are—are making her do this. She hates guns. She abhors violence of all kinds! She once cried at a National Geographic special when a cheetah caught a rabbit for dinner. He remembers her tearstained baby-fat cheeks, her hair in two braids. Her sticky fingers squeezing Dan’s. Dan knows it was years ago, but it feels like only months. How do they grow so quickly? One day they have trouble pronouncing spaghetti ( pasketti! ) and they grasp one of your fingers with their entire chubby hand as they cross the street, the next they’re holding you hostage—at gunpoint —in a restaurant.
Dan looks at his daughter again, wanting to let her know he understands she is being made to do this against her will, that he will help her out of this, but she’s purposefully not meeting his gaze.
The kitchen door swings open and the woman with the blond crew cut walks in. She scans the room, her eyes landing on Dan and the supine head chef.
“Isaac, what the fuck?” she says, addressing Neck Tat.
“I didn’t mean to!” Neck Tat, whose name is apparently Isaac, says.
The crew-cut woman just glares at him.
“Did Brick do it?” Glasses asks Crewcut as she walks toward Dan, favoring her left leg. “Are we done?”
Crewcut gives her head a firm shake. “Otto’s not here.”
“What do you mean he’s not here?”
“He’s not here. Wife and daughter are alone.”
“But the girl said he’d be here.”
“Brick’s taking care of it.”
“Taking care of it how?” Sissy pipes up. “If he’s not here, what are we still doing here?” Eyes wide, Dan swivels his head to his daughter and the way she said we , like she is a part of this group. Voluntarily. And not being held against her will. Is she on drugs ? he wonders now. He’s never felt so bewildered staring at his daughter—counting the time he took her to see Taylor Swift at SoFi and she screamed so hard and for so long, he thought she was having some kind of manic episode and worried for her health.
“He’s taking care of it,” Crewcut says, louder.
Glasses nods, as if this is enough for him, and then he notices Crewcut’s slight limp. “Are you bleeding ?”
“Oh. Yeah. Some Bruce Willis wannabe stuck me with a fork.”
“Ouch.”
The woman nods. “Glad he didn’t have a steak knife.”
Dan, tuning back in to this exchange, has a thousand questions on the tip of his tongue, but the woman comes to a stop in front of him and asks her question first.
“How’s he holding up?”
In a fog, Dan takes a beat to realize she’s speaking to him. He blinks and then turns to the patient in question, looking to where Zay has dutifully been holding a fresh towel to the chef’s— Lars’s —shoulder. Dan gently takes over and pulls the towel back from the wound, expecting another small gush of blood, but nothing comes out.
“Huh. Well, that’s weird.” He checks Lars’s nail bed again. The color is still good and Lars is surprisingly alert.
“What?” the woman asks.
“What?” the chef repeats, except the word is decidedly louder and more panicked coming from him.
“The bleeding has slowed significantly,” Dan says.
“That’s a good thing, right?” the woman says.
“Yeah, I mean…the bullet obviously missed the subclavian artery,” Dan muses, mostly to himself. “Or he’d be dead by now. Those things bleed out in a matter of minutes.”
“ Minutes? ” Lars says.
“I wonder if the bullet is somehow stemming the blood flow,” Dan continues. Granted, he doesn’t have a lot of experience with gunshot wounds. In podiatry school, he did one rotation in the ER, and the first night, after he nearly passed out tending a man who lost half his face to the gravel in a motorcycle accident, and an angelic child of a patient projectile-vomited the pot roast she’d eaten for dinner on him, he knew trauma (or pot roast) was not for him. He also had been around enough ER doctors to know that inexplicable medical miracles happened all the time—a bullet that stops mere millimeters from the heart, a man with a traumatic brain injury waking from a coma and walking out of the hospital mere days after doctors assured the family they’d likely be planning his funeral. Maybe Dan is witnessing his own medical miracle.
“So he’s going to be OK.”
“Well, the bleeding seems to be under control, which is good, but he still needs medical attention. If you wait too long, infection can take hold. And it’s hard to say what’s happening internally without an X-ray.” He waves in the vicinity of Lars’s shoulder. “If the bullet’s lodged in the brachial plexus—”
“English, please.”
“He could lose the use of his arm and/or hand.”
“My hand!” Lars shrieks. “I can’t lose my hand. How am I supposed to cook?”
“That’s worst-case scenario,” Dan says, hoping to reassure him, and then realizes his error. “Well, dying is worst-case scenario, I suppose.”
“God dammit, man!” the chef shouts, looking at Isaac. “My shoulder? Really? ”
Dan looks from the chef to Isaac. He thinks it’s bold of the chef to yell at the man (well, kid) who shot him. The same kid who still has a gun trained on both of them. But then again, Dan has never been shot, and from the looks of it, it’s quite painful. Lars probably isn’t completely in his right mind.
“It was an accident.” Isaac repeats his earlier denial, but Dan doesn’t see an ounce of regret in his face. In fact, from the way he’s glaring at Lars, if Isaac could do it all over again, it looks as though he would.
“OK, I’ll let Brick know.”
I thought you were leaderless , Dan wants to say, but he manages to hold in his snide comment.
“You. Stay with him,” Crewcut says to Dan. “Let me know immediately if there are any changes.”
“I will,” Dan says, and is comforted by the concern in her voice. She clearly doesn’t want the chef to die. Dan’s reminded of what Jane said: I don’t think they want to hurt us. And—aside from Isaac, whose wild eyes make him look like he not only wants to hurt somebody but would enjoy it—Dan thinks she might be right. Much to Dan’s consternation, Jane often is—with the exception of when her anxiety gets the best of her.
Like the time she was worried about Sissy going to public high school because she might join a gang.
“A gang?” he said to Jane back then, laughing. “Like the Bloods and the Crips?”
“It’s not funny, Dan! Being a teen is completely different now than when we were kids.”
“OK. But seriously, this is Sissy we’re talking about. And secondly, we live in the suburbs.”
“Dan, do you even read the news? They arrested six teens at the mall last week for stealing sneakers at knifepoint.”
“Really? Well, those Converse she wears couldn’t have cost more than forty-five dollars, so I don’t think she’s going to be in any danger there.”
“Dan.”
“Look, there are plenty of things to worry about in high school,” he conceded. “But Sissy being in a gang is not one of them.”
Dan’s eyes go wide as he takes in his daughter once more. In a gang . He swallows. He really does hate it that Jane is always right.