Chapter 12
Chapter 12
Exasperated, Dan presses his head back into the wall behind him.
To be fair, he couldn’t understand what Jane was trying to tell him either. Reading lips has never been a strength of his, nor reading Jane’s expressions. He can’t count the number of dinners and work parties they’ve been to where Jane’s given him a look or mouthed something and he’s misinterpreted it. Often their conversations on the way home consist of some version of: How was I to know that look meant you didn’t want to talk to Bob about his model train collection anymore? I thought you wanted another glass of champagne! He suddenly understands Jane’s frustration at being misinterpreted—or not understood at all.
Now Jane’s attention is on Vaughn and Paisley, and he’s no closer to letting her know that Sissy is right in front of her. Holding a gun! He glances over at where Sissy is sitting at a table with her other… friends ? Is that what they are? And though she’s pulled the ball cap lower over her eyes and the mask is covering the rest of her face, it’s so clearly Sissy, he can’t believe Jane can’t see it. It’s like one of those magic eye three-dimensional pictures—it took Dan a minute to recognize Sissy in the kitchen, but once he finally did, now he can’t unsee her.
He sighs. He doesn’t know what good it will do, once Jane does realize it’s her. He just knows it’s information he doesn’t want to be privy to alone, like when he had the weird mole on his back and felt compelled to show her. Jane’s not a dermatologist—it’s not like she could analyze it or remove it—but it felt better for her to know about it, too, so Dan didn’t worry about it alone. And though he often complained and made fun of her for her myriad anxieties, the truth was—if Dan ever thought deeply enough about it—that Jane worrying about so many things took the burden off Dan. He didn’t have to worry, because he knew she would worry enough for the both of them.
Dan glances back at Jane, who’s still enthralled with a conversation between Vaughn and Paisley, so he turns his attention to the chef, diligently checking the wound, pressing Lars’s fingernail and counting the pulse at his wrist.
“How am I doing, Doc?”
“Good,” Dan says. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been shot in the shoulder.”
Dan offers a sympathetic grin.
“I can’t die, though.”
“You won’t,” Dan says, an automatic kindness—he has no idea if anyone is going to make it out alive, and it stands to reason that the person who has a bullet wound certainly has the least chance, statistically speaking.
“Good, because I yelled at my wife this morning and that can’t be the last thing I say to her.”
“What’d you yell at her for?” he asks, less because he’s curious and more because the answers to the questions he really wants to ask— What do these people want? What is my daughter doing with them? When is Jane going to recognize Sissy? How am I going to get us all out of this? —are not forthcoming, and certainly not held by the chef.
“It was dumb. Two days ago she parked too close to my Bentley Bentayga in the garage, and when she opened her car door, she dinged my passenger door. I just got it wrapped and I found out this morning it’s going to cost twelve hundred dollars to fix.”
Dan isn’t sure he knows what a Bentley Bentayga is, except for a car he won’t ever be able to afford, and he thought wrapping a car was something only professional athletes and rappers did. Still, he murmurs nonsense words to let Lars know he’s listening.
“God, I never used to be this way. Who cares? It’s just a car. But it’s from working here. Serving these… people . I’m becoming one of them. Insufferable.”
Dan raises his brow. In his experience, men who spend a lot of time and money on expensive sports cars (mostly plastic surgeons in Dan’s orbit) are often not aware of how insufferable they are.
Lars clocks his reaction and mistakes the reason for it. “Oh, I don’t mean you. You’re obviously not…one of them.”
This only causes Dan to be more surprised. “How could you tell?” He’s not sure whether to be offended.
“The way you carry yourself. It’s not pretentious.”
Dan opens his mouth to say thank you, but Lars isn’t done.
“And your suit. Looks like something you’d get at Men’s Wearhouse.”
Dan closes his mouth. He looks down at his white shirt (now covered in dried blood) and gray pants. He probably did get them at Men’s Wearhouse. He realizes he left his suit coat in the kitchen and wonders if he’ll get it back.
He glances at Jane again, then over to his daughter. Someone has brought dishes out from the kitchen and a few of the hostage takers are sitting around digging in, careful to slip forkfuls beneath their gaiters lest anyone see their full faces. Instead of eating, Sissy simply looks on, keeping her head tilted down, and Dan feels sure she’s doing what she can to make sure Jane doesn’t notice her. He wonders, not for the first time, what she’s thinking. What could she possibly be thinking?
Dan also wonders what they’re eating, and his stomach rumbles. Is it the barnacles? Or another delicious course they had yet to get to? If he was a different kind of person, he might stand up and ask for a plate. Demand that everyone else in the restaurant be fed as well.
But Dan is not that kind of person. He will not stand, mostly because his wrists and ankles are re-bound. He will not make any demands. He has already run through the risk-benefit analysis of tackling a terrorist or trying to steal a gun or thwart what’s happening in any way. And he’s determined that one man has already been shot and he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if his actions caused anyone else the same fate. Especially his own daughter. Or his wife.
He sighs again.
“What’s your wife’s name?” he asks Lars. And this is the instigating question that prompts a waterfall of information wherein Dan learns more about Lars, the head chef of La Fin du Monde, than he imagined he would ever know. Lars is a new father to a three-month-old boy. Finn. His wife, Amhara, is Ethiopian. They had two weddings, a small ceremony on the cliff outside this very restaurant and a large three-day affair in Addis Ababa. A talented prima ballerina, she was a principal in the L.A. Ballet for three years before a severe tibial stress fracture ended her career. Amhara now teaches dance for a local nonprofit dedicated to bringing the arts to underprivileged youth. She is a terrible chef but an excellent gardener, and when she was pregnant, her ankles and toes swelled so much they lovingly called them her Flintstone feet. He wishes he hadn’t overreacted about the Bentley Bentayga. He has a problem with overreacting. Finn smiled at Lars within hours after he was born—a big toothless grin that the nurse said was gas, but Lars knew it was because he recognized his papa. Lars thinks vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream (pure, simple). Lavender does not belong in dessert. Cream cheese absolutely does not belong in sushi, and the fear of cultural appropriation is killing culinary inventiveness.
It’s a mishmash of information, due to both the random nature of Dan’s questions to keep Lars talking and the rambling and sometimes incoherent thoughts of a man who both is in shock from unfolded events and also very much likes to hear himself talk.
Dan looks past Jane and Vaughn and Paisley at the ten other diners turned hostages. The neurosurgeon is now sitting up next to his wife, holding an ice pack to his head. The two elderly women are leaning on each other, but they’re both stiff and appear as uncomfortable as Jane. The one four-top group—a graying older couple, their adult son, and his blond wife or girlfriend—is whispering among themselves, not urgently, just a few words here and there. And while Dan knows they’re likely benign phrases— I’m hungry. Is the zip tie digging into your ankle? Here, have my water —he secretly hopes they’re coming up with a plan to help them all escape, since he can’t seem to come up with anything himself. Javier and Monica sit next to each other in silence, both staring off into space.
Enough time has elapsed that people are settling in for the long haul, like when a flight is canceled and would-be passengers start making themselves comfortable at the gate—stretching out on dingy carpet or propping feet up on suitcase ends. Like Jane, most of the women have removed their shoes; men—even with bound hands—have managed to loosen their ties or ditch them altogether. Everyone seems to be making themselves at home, as it were. The hostages, while not completely relaxed, are no longer on a knife’s edge, likely because the captors themselves have become lackadaisical in their…captor-ing.
Lyle and Caden, finished with their meal, are playing some kind of game involving forks and a glass. Dan can’t tell what the end goal is or what the rules are, but there are a lot of forks falling, clattering onto the table, causing the boys to guffaw, gently shove each other with taunts, and it’s incongruous, the scene. Boys with guns slung across their chests or stuffed into the backs of their army cargo pants, behaving like children at a party.
“Are they eating the ravioli al uovo?” Lars asks at one point, his gaze looking past Dan at the few terrorists still sitting at the table, Sissy included.
“The what?”
“It’s ravioli with an egg yolk center. I top it with Grana Padano and shaved Alba truffles.”
Dan turns and cranes his neck, wishing, too, that he knew what they were eating. “Looks like…rolls?”
“Good. Those fuckers don’t deserve my truffles.”
Dan feels someone standing over him and looks up to find Caden looming. “Brick sent me over to check on…him,” he says, gesturing to the chef.
“His name’s Lars,” Dan says.
Caden nods. “Does he need anything?”
“A hospital,” Dan says.
“Oh, I mean, anything I can get him right now?”
“Do you need anything?” Dan says to Lars.
“I need to not be shot in the shoulder,” he says dryly.
Dan turns back to Caden. “Nope.” As Caden steps to leave, Dan says: “Hey, wait a minute.” There are so many questions he wants to ask, namely: What is my daughter doing here? , but instead he says: “What were you doing over there? With the forks.”
“Oh, that?” Caden says, glancing at the area where he was standing with Lyle. “Some magic trick Brick tried to teach us once. We still can’t do it.”
“Brick’s a…magician?”
“I mean, I think it’s just a hobby. Card tricks, the whole bit.” Caden pauses. “He may have used to do kids’ birthday parties, now that I think about it.”
Dan gapes at the kid, at the incongruency of the Brick he knows—a menacing man with an AK-47—and one that knows fun card tricks and entertained children with them. He furrows his brow, confused at the entire exchange. “Are you supposed to be telling me this?”
Caden’s eyes widen, like he forgot for a minute he took people hostage until Dan reminded him, and then, without another word, he trots off, heading back to the table with Sissy, leaving Dan to shake his head in disbelief over the events of the evening.
“Hey, keep talking to me,” Lars says. “It’s keeping my mind off the pain.”
Dan doesn’t point out that of the two of them, it’s Lars who’s done the majority of the talking. Instead, he thinks for a beat and then asks the next question that pops into his mind. “What’s with the cell phone thing?”
“You mean why I ban them?”
Dan nods.
Lars sighs, as if it were perfectly obvious. “You don’t take pictures of the Sistine Chapel, do you? The David ?”
Dan inwardly rolls his eyes at the frankly egomaniacal suggestion that the chef’s food is on par with the greatest works of art in the world, but is simultaneously impressed with the endless bounds of the man’s arrogance. Dan can’t remember a time he ever felt so sure of himself. Maybe in the beginning with Jane. The way she looked at him. “Everyone takes pictures of the David , actually. I know I did,” Dan says, thinking back to when he studied abroad in Florence in college and he and his friends took turns taking photos at such an angle that it looked like David ’s twig and berries sat directly in the palm of their hands.
“OK, but you didn’t capture the magnificence of it.”
That much, at least, is true. Dan remembers looking through his photos, after getting his rolls of film developed once he got home, and thinking that they didn’t do any of what he saw in person justice—including Lina, the Italian girl who was the best and most unexpected surprise of his trip. His gut twists with guilt, thinking of this girl from twenty-plus years ago. He and Jane had just started dating before he left for study abroad, and while they weren’t exclusive, he’d still felt like he had cheated, and he never told Jane the truth, even when they were going through his pictures when he got home, for fear she would leave him. “Who’s this?” Jane asked, stopping at a smiling Lina posing at the Basilica of San Miniato in front of a panoramic view of Florence. “I don’t know,” Dan said lamely. “Just some girl.” He could tell Jane knew, but to her credit, she let it go.
He swallows past the lump in his throat, reminding him he’s been lying to Jane once again and she doesn’t deserve it. He glances at her only to see she’s staring at him, as if impatiently waiting for him to look her way, when she was the one who tuned out in the first place. She’s mouthing words to him again, and he squints, determined to understand this time.
She repeats her phrase two more times and Dan focuses, really trying to concentrate on what she’s saying, as she gestures to the chef. It looks like: Get the fast food . Which obviously can’t be right, but maybe it’s close.
Are you hungry? he mouths back, and Jane’s face turns into yet another silent scream and he knows that’s not it. He shakes his head and opens his mouth to once again try and tell her that Sissy is there—certainly more important than whatever Jane is trying to tell him—but she shakes her head, and her lips move again in slow, exaggerated words: Hit the bathroom.
He squints. That can’t be right.
“The truth is, people are so distracted all the time,” Lars says, and Dan is only half listening. “They’re spending hundreds of dollars to come eat my food—” Lars pauses, trying to get a breath. His words are growing wispy, like those thin clouds that eventually float apart. “Shouldn’t they surrender fully to the experience?”
“Shit.” Dan snaps to attention, sitting up and pinching Lars’s nail bed again. The nail turns white, but when he lets go, the red doesn’t come back nearly as quickly.
“ Dammit . Lars, how you feeling, man? You doing OK?” he says as he removes the towel from Lars’s shoulder to check the wound again. His shoulder is swollen, round and purple, which means even if the blood isn’t coming out, it’s going somewhere.
“I’m a…little…tired, actually,” Lars says.
This is what finally springs Dan into action. “Help!” he yells, but it comes out quieter than he intended, so he shouts “HELP!” once more, louder. The restaurant falls silent and multiple guns are swung in his direction, but in his heightened state of panic, he can’t be bothered to care. His gaze locks on his daughter, who’s staring at him with wide eyes, and he has the sudden urge to rush to her, grab her and then Jane, and run clean out of the restaurant with them both. He jumps to his feet with no plan; he knows only that he needs to do something—except he’s forgotten about his bound ankles, and standing throws him completely off-kilter. The next thing he knows, he’s falling and has time to think Oh shit , but cannot catch himself (his wrists are bound!) before his head slams into a table.
And then everything goes black.