Chapter 13
Chapter 13
“Dan!” Jane screams as her husband’s body flops to the floor. She’s not even sure what just happened, except that one minute she was trying to tell Dan for the eight hundredth time to get the password from the chef, and the next her husband yelled “Help!” and tried to stand, then instantly dropped to the ground like a tree felled by Paul Bunyan, slamming his head into the two-top dining table in front of him with a THWACK .
At first, no one moves—including Dan.
“Help him!” Jane screeches, and starts crawling toward her husband, though her bound wrists and ankles make this challenging. Tink rushes over to Dan as he starts to come to, which would be a relief, if not for the line of red blood gushing down the side of his face.
“Oy!” Brick yells, and Jane stops her weird army/worm crawl and looks up at him. “Back to the wall.” He indicates where he wants her to return with the barrel of his gun.
“No!” Jane says. “That’s my husband.”
“The one who’s cheating on you?” Brick smirks.
Someone in the room gasps, but Jane can’t turn to look. She exhales an irritated breath but refuses to move.
Brick rolls his eyes, then walks toward Jane, his army boots thumping on the wood floor. When he reaches her, he holds out one of his meaty paws and she flinches, which sends Brick’s eyes heavenward once more. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m helping you up. Unless you want to crawl the rest of the way there.”
“Oh,” Jane says.
She lifts her bound wrists to him like a damsel in distress (she is in distress!) and he slips his thick, warm hand between hers. She tries not to look directly in his eyes, but fails, and the intensity of his gaze sends a jolt down her spine as he easily lifts her to her feet as though she weighs no more than a child. She grasps his arm for balance as she shuffle-steps with her bound feet over to her husband.
“Dan?” She peers down at him. “Are you OK?”
He blinks at her. “I’m fine,” he says. “Help him.”
“Who, honey?”
“Lars.” He winces. “He needs help.” Jane and Brick both turn to look at the chef, who is pale and very apparently struggling to breathe. Dan tries to sit up. “I think he’s got fluid in his lungs.”
“Shit,” Brick mutters under his breath. “Go get him ice,” he says to Tink, and then releases Jane and steps closer to the chef, hands on his hips. “Lars, you OK? Stay with us, man.” To Dan: “What does he need?”
“He’s having trouble breathing. Maybe a fragment of the bullet lodged in his lung?”
“OK—so what does he need ?” Brick repeats.
“A doctor.”
“I thought you were a doctor!”
Dan sighs heavily. “I’m a podia—”
“I can help,” a deep baritone croaks out from the wall of hostages, cutting Dan off. Jane and Brick turn to see the man who stabbed Tink in the leg with a fork and subsequently got knocked out. He’s still holding a half-melted ice pack to his head.
Brick gestures to Lyle. “Bring him over.” He cuts his eyes back to the man. “But keep him tied up.”
Jane drops to the floor beside Dan and reaches for the cut bleeding profusely at his hairline.
Tink arrives with another bag of ice and a kitchen towel in her hand. “Here,” she says, handing both to Jane. “Can you move?” she asks Dan. When he nods, she says: “Let’s give them some space.”
Dan slowly scoots on his bottom to a spot on the wall Tink has indicated about fifteen feet from Lars. Jane follows, resuming her challenging army crawl. Breathing heavily, she finally reaches Dan and pushes herself up to sitting beside him. Tink has moved on to where Brick and the neurosurgeon are attending Lars. Jane watches as the neurosurgeon assesses the chef and then starts shouting orders.
“I need a knife and a tube—something long and flexible. Both sterilized. And a needle and thread.”
“Oh God, he’s going do a thoracostomy,” Dan says to Jane.
“Is that bad?”
“It’ll either save his life,” Dan says, “or kill him.”
Jane feels her entire body tense—not only because she has never seen anyone die before, but because if the chef dies, she’ll definitely never get the password. And then she remembers the booster. She passed the table it was on when they moved down the wall, and now she’s about ten feet from it. A farther distance than she would like, but the chef is certainly providing a distraction that might enable her to move unnoticed.
“Go,” Brick says to Tink.
“Where am I supposed to get a needle and thread?” Tink asks.
“See what you can find,” says Brick, waving his hand to dismiss her.
“I’ve got a sewing kit in my purse,” one of the older women sitting against the glass window says.
“Which purse is yours?” Brick asks.
“The green one at that table.” She gestures with her bound hands to where she was sitting.
“Caden,” Brick says. “Get the sewing kit. Tink, the knife and tube.”
“Where am I supposed to get a tube?” Tink says.
“There’s one in the kitchen,” a sous chef chimes in. “We use it to infuse food with smoke flavor.”
“Take him with you,” Brick says.
As Tink rushes past them with the sous chef, heading back into the kitchen, Jane gently presses the towel to Dan’s cut. It’s bleeding profusely, as head wounds tend to do, but the cut itself looks small. “Are you really OK?” Jane asks, glancing back at the booster.
He winces again. “A little embarrassed.”
Jane replays in her mind’s eye the ridiculous image of Dan standing and falling, and she exhales a laugh. “What the hell were you doing?”
“I don’t know. I was…I was trying to save you. I was trying to save Sissy!”
“Sissy!” Jane nearly laughs again, but then furrows her brow in concern. Dan clearly hit his head harder than she thought.
“Yes,” Dan sighs. “Sissy.”
Jane stares at her husband. “Do you know where we are? What year it is? Honey, Sissy’s at Jazz’s house watching Yellowjackets .”
“No.” Dan looks Jane directly in the eyes and then says gently: “She’s here. Well, over there”—he points with his bound hands—“at that table.”
“What?” Jane says, still not quite believing what Dan is telling her, but enough to glance wildly around the room until her gaze lands squarely on a girl Dan’s pointing toward, and Jane finds that she can’t stop looking at her. Her black ball cap is pulled over her eyes and the gaiter covers the rest of her face, but her hair—Jane knows that hair, the curly ponytail, sticking out of the back of the cap, that Jane has combed and tamed and conditioned and smoothed for the better part of ten years, before Sissy could care for it herself.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
“What?” Jane croaks, repeating herself, unable to take her eyes off the girl. She doesn’t even know what she’s asking, but her brain is scrambling and her mouth is on autopilot, a broken record, speaking of its own accord. “No,” Jane says, slowly shaking her head. “No! Sissy’s at Jazz’s house watching Yellowjackets .” Not because she believes it anymore, but because she thinks if she says it enough times, she can force it to be true. Though the girl is too far away to hear them, it’s as if she senses she’s being talked about, because at that second, she glances up, locking eyes with Jane, the jolt of recognition sending ice through Jane’s veins. She gapes at her daughter as though she is looking at a complete stranger, and she might as well be, as this person—dressed, like the other terrorists, in a black tank top and camouflage army pants, and clutching a gun in her hands, a gun —is a stranger, completely unknown to Jane.
“What,” she says for the third time, but it’s lost in her exhale of breath. All air has left her lungs. She feels weightless, unmoored. “Sissy?” she whispers. And then, as the pressure from the shock builds and the questions mount on top of each other like blocks in a Jenga game, she hisses it. “Sissy!”
Her daughter shoots her a stern look—as though Jane is the one who has done something wrong!—before dropping her eyes.
Dan squeezes Jane’s arm with his hands. “Jane, no,” he whispers. “Don’t make a scene.”
“Don’t make a— What is she doing here? Have you talked to her?”
“No, but I think she’s with…them.”
“What do you mean with them?” Though Jane knows exactly what he means, considering Sissy is dressed like them and very clearly did not come here as a patron to eat dinner—it’s just that it can’t be true.
“Sissy!” she hisses again, and the two sous chefs tied up nearest them and a few of the other terrorists at the dining table turn their heads from the excitement with the chef toward Jane quizzically, but Sissy doesn’t look up.
“Jane,” Dan says urgently in her ear. “Listen to me. I don’t know what she’s doing, but we can’t draw attention to it. To her .”
“Why not ?”
“Think about it,” Dan whispers, with the annoying patience of someone who’s had time to digest the shocking information that you have just learned. “All of the people in this room are witnesses . When this is over, do you want them to be able to identify her? To the police ? She’ll go to jail, Jane.”
“Oh, jail is the least of her concerns right now,” Jane says. She stares daggers at her daughter, but when she notices Isaac in particular staring at her with intense curiosity, she glances away.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod.” She’s panicking now, spiraling a little bit, and longing for the regular anxiety she felt just an hour earlier when she thought she had left her curling iron plugged in and her house was going to burn to the ground with Sissy in it. “She can’t go to jail, Dan, she’s going to Stanford !”
Tink returns holding a steak knife in one hand and plastic tubing in the other. “I boiled them in hot water,” she says.
As she hands them over to the neurosurgeon, Brick levels the barrel of his gun at the man’s head. “Don’t try anything funny,” he says.
Dan and the rest of the room collectively hold their breath as the surgeon, with shaky hands, begins to press on Lars’s rib cage with his fingers, presumably looking for the right spot to make the incision.
Jane watches, too, but her mind isn’t on the procedure. “What are we going to do , Dan?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But we have to try to remain calm.”
Calm , she thinks, and then she says it out loud: “Calm?!”
“Yes,” he says. “Panicking isn’t going to get us anywhere.” He gestures to his head. “We will figure this out.”
While Jane typically enjoys—and even relies on—Dan’s pragmatism, in this moment she finds it wildly exasperating. “Our daughter is holding a gun, Dan— a gun! —and you think we should remain calm?” Her heartbeat revs again, her fingers tingle.
“Yes,” Dan says.
A loud, mangled scream that’s so animalistic it sends chills down Jane’s spine emanates from the chef, and then silence.
“Is he OK?” Brick asks.
“Passed out from the pain,” Rahul says.
The stillness is somehow even worse than the screaming. Not knowing what else to do with the anxious energy running rampant through her body, Jane growls and then twists her wrists, trying to loosen the zip ties that are chafing her skin and that she can’t stand to be bound by for a second longer. She knows there’s an easy way to pop them off, she just doesn’t know what it is. She scrolled by it on TikTok once—or was it Facebook?—a video teaching people how to break free of them. She regrets not clicking on it now, but it didn’t feel pressing. It was enough to know the information was out there should she need it; something she could and probably would learn eventually, like how to fold a fitted sheet, or create the perfect cat-eye with liner, or season a cast-iron pan.
Giving up, she stills her hands in her lap, leans her head back on the wall behind her, then rolls her head to the left until she can see Vaughn, who has Paisley’s head in her lap and is gently smoothing her daughter’s hair with her bound hands, murmuring soothing nothings every so often. Jane finds herself simultaneously embarrassed at her earlier musings of parental superiority and overcome with rage and jealousy. All Paisley did was date a guy in a terrorist group—she didn’t up and join one! Who’s the bad mother now?
Jane slides her gaze back to Sissy once more. Where did she go wrong? She thinks of the untold number of conversations she has had with her children over the years about not touching firearms— whether they are loaded or not —and wonders if she should have added a don’t-hold-people-hostage lecture into the mix. Parenting is full of your children doing things you never imagine you need to warn them off of—like putting raisins up their noses or trying to open a car door while you’re driving seventy-five miles per hour down a highway—but this, Jane thinks, truly could not have been anticipated—could it? Were there clues she missed? Perhaps she inadvertently scrolled by a BuzzFeed article titled “Ten Signs Your Child Has Joined a Terrorist Group.”
A loud noise—a mix between a yelp and a wheeze—snaps Jane’s head in the direction of the chef. “There he is,” Brick says. “You OK, mate?”
The chef looks at him, bewildered. “Fucking…hurt!” he manages.
Brick offers what could be considered a small sympathetic nod, and then looks at Rahul. “Is he gonna be OK?”
“I’ll stitch the tube in place—”
“Oh God,” Lars breathes, staring at the needle.
“—and he’ll be stable for now. But he really needs a hospital.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Dan mutters.
“Great,” Brick says. “Caden, get the knife. The rest of you—let’s get set up,” he says to no one in particular. “He’ll be here soon.”
A few of the hostage takers stand up at once. Tink grabs her bag from where it was abandoned in a heap and slings it over her shoulder. “Where are you thinking?”
Brick gestures toward the wall next to the kitchen door where a four-top table sits. “Here’s good.”
A couple of the boys push the table out of the way and Brick positions one chair in the center of the wall.
Meanwhile, Tink sets up a laptop and a large ring light on the table across from the chair and then goes back into her book bag. Jane realizes that, between the cell booster, laptop, and ring light, Tink is not only the mother hen but the tech guru of the group. Or at least the tech Sherpa.
“We have to talk to her,” Jane whispers to Dan.
“Jane, I really don’t think—”
“Get her attention.”
Dan sighs. “How? How do we do that without getting everyone’s attention?”
Jane’s not sure, but she feels an urgency to do something, anything, if it could possibly help reach her end goal of talking to Sissy. “God, I always thought it would be Josh, you know? I mean, not that he’d be a terrorist, but… Sissy ?”
“I know,” Dan says. “She’s our good one. I don’t understand.”
“Well,” Jane mumbles. “Maybe if you weren’t the fun dad all the time.” She immediately regrets it, pressing her lips together as if it would create a vacuum to suck the words back in. Why must she say everything she’s thinking out loud?
“What?” Dan asks, but Jane knows he heard because he follows it with: “Are you saying this is my fault?”
Don’t say it , Jane thinks. Nothing good will come of it, and it doesn’t even matter! What’s done is done. “You’re so permissive with her all the time!” she whisper-shouts, years of resentment at being cast in the role of the enforcer, the mean parent, the stick-in-the-mud, bubbling over. “Always trying to be her best friend, never giving her consequences for anything. Of course she thinks she can do whatever she wants.”
“Are you serious right now? If anything, this is your fault. You’re so controlling all the time, always micromanaging her every move—no wonder she rebelled.”
“ Micromanaging? ” Jane hisses.
“Yes! Take Stanford. Does she even want to go? It’s hard to tell with the way you shoehorned her into applying.”
“Of course she wants to go! What kind of a question is that? Everyone wants to go to Stanford. And someone had to be in charge of college applications. Lord knows it wasn’t going to be you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“ARE YOU TWO QUITE FINISHED?” Brick thunders, startling Jane. She slowly rotates her head, taking in first Brick’s murderous glare and then the numerous pairs of eyes trained on her and Dan yet again.
“Um, yes,” she says, wondering exactly how much Brick and everyone else heard. She doesn’t dare look at Sissy, and she notices Brick hasn’t either, which makes her hopeful no one has connected the dots.
“I knew I shouldn’t have let you go over there,” Brick says, mostly to himself. “Alright—you,” he says, pointing to Jane. “Back to the other wall.”
Jane gapes at him, thinking of an excuse to stay right where she is. As infuriating as Dan is, she’d rather be by his side in this whole mess than across the room trying to mouth to him phrases he can’t possibly comprehend, but before she can conjure any words, she notices Brick’s countenance change. He tilts his head, really studying her. Then he takes three long strides, closing the gap between them, and points directly at her breast. Jane freezes; her stomach hollows; all saliva leaves her mouth in an instant as though she were chewing cotton.
“What is that?”
“What?” she squeaks, panic rising like bile in her throat. Or maybe it actually is bile. She tries to swallow it back down, but her mouth is too dry.
“That.” He points directly at her breast. “The square thing that looks like a phone.”
“Oh! This?” Jane says, widening her eyes to feign innocence. “Oh, I forgot that was in there.”
“What. Is. It?” he asks, enunciating each word.
“It’s a…” Jane racks her brain trying to think of what it could be, but the stress is too much and she falters, exhaling the truth in one breath. “It’s my phone, yes.”
Brick holds his hand out. “Give it.”
Jane raises her bound wrists and digs the cell out of her bra, under the entire restaurant’s gaze, and places it in Brick’s upturned palm.
“Did you call anyone?”
“No!” Jane says. “I couldn’t! No service.”
Brick studies her face, as if he has a lie detector processor in his brain and is waiting for the verdict. He grunts, shoves Jane’s phone in the side pocket of his cargo pants.
“Now, back to the—” he says, when a thunderous BOOM of an explosion fills the air, fracturing his sentence, shaking Jane’s vision, and vibrating the dining room so hard, the silverware and the glass beads of the chandeliers rattle, turning Jane’s entire world into a confusion of sound.