Chapter 17
Chapter 17
Eighteen years ago, after twenty-seven and a half hours of labor, Jane took a deep breath, clenched every shaking muscle in her legs and stomach with all her might, and finally— finally —expelled her infant daughter from her womb. When the nurse placed the striped-hospital-blanket bundle in the crook of Jane’s elbow, Jane stared into those brand-new gray eyes, waiting to be overcome with all-consuming love and joy, with the life-changing magic of motherhood she’d read about in so many books. But inside she felt…nothing. Chalking it up to exhaustion and sure the correct feelings would strike her at any second, she affixed her face adoringly. She exclaimed: Greige-blue, like yours, Dan! She rubbed the pad of her thumb gently over the baby’s impossibly soft and delicate cheek. But Jane remained as hollow as her belly now felt. Carved out. And all her latent fears were confirmed: Jane was a bad mother. Or worse, she wasn’t a mother at all. She was an impostor. A fake.
Dan smiled over her shoulder, already the patient and loving father, buying Jane’s act, but she thought this new baby, whom they had dubbed Sarah (Did she look like a Sarah? Who was she to give someone a name they would have for the rest of their life? Who was she to say who someone was when Jane suddenly didn’t even know who she herself was?), and her all-knowing eyes could see right through it. Her eyes seemed to say: You? You’re who they stuck me with? Where’s my real mother? And then Jane did feel something—sympathy for this poor child who was unlucky enough to acquire Jane as her mother.
For days, and then weeks, Jane went through the motions of new motherhood: feeding, holding, rocking, singing off-key pop songs in a gentle voice because she couldn’t remember more than the first verse of popular nursery rhymes (See? An impostor!). And the only emotion that grew greater than her sympathy for this helpless creature was resentment for how this tiny human, with all her needs and inability to communicate in anything but cries, had so thoroughly upended Jane’s life.
Jane can’t remember when it happened—six weeks? eight? Those first months all swim together in her mind—but one morning she was clipping Sissy’s impossibly tiny fingernails and accidentally caught the skin on the pad of Sissy’s finger in the sharp clipper, cutting it when she pressed down and causing Sissy to scrunch her face tight in pain. But it was the cry—animalistic, raw, a cry that was different from hunger or discomfort from a wet diaper or exhaustion—that struck a chord deep within Jane. She bundled her daughter to her chest, rocking her gently, whispering against her wisps of hair, I’msosorryMommy’ssosorryS’okS’okYou’reOK over and over while tears rained down Jane’s cheeks.
And that’s when something exploded inside of her. Or maybe bloomed is more accurate. Love, yes. So much love. But also guilt for having injured her baby, and fear of all the other unknowable and unpreventable dangers in the world that could cause Sarah harm. Jane would soon come to understand these were the three pillars of motherhood: guilt, anxiety, and love. But in that moment she only knew, without a shadow of a doubt, she would do anything to protect her daughter.
Including, apparently, doing everything in her power to help her escape a hostage situation in which Sissy is on the wrong side of the hostages.
For the second time that evening, Jane finds herself in the hallway walking toward the red landline telephone on the pedestal. The phone! She would have given anything to have unfettered access to it in the first thirty minutes of the evening, but now what good will it do her?
“Did you just text me?” Sissy says. Jane looks up at her daughter, relief coursing through her body—relief she finally has her daughter to herself, away from the immediate danger. And though she has a thousand questions, she is solely focused on getting Sissy even farther away from the terrorists—completely out of the restaurant and somehow home safe in her own bed.
Then she notices the cell in Sissy’s hand. “You have your phone ?”
“Of course.”
“Great,” Jane mumbles, nodding. “Just great. One more piece of evidence putting you at the scene of the crime.” Moments like these make Jane wonder how Sissy got a 1590 on her SAT.
Sissy frowns. “Did you leave your curling iron plugged in?”
Jane stops. “You got that text?” She thinks of her phone, ensconced firmly in Brick’s pocket, and wonders if Tink plugging in the booster allowed her texts to be sent.
It feels like a lifetime ago, that concern—and now Jane has a thousand more pressing ones, namely getting Sissy out. That’s when she remembers the window in the bathroom! Then she immediately frowns, as she realizes it’s likely too small to get Sissy through.
Her eye lands on the two employees only doors. Maybe there’s a bigger window behind one of them. She reaches for the knob on the first door and it opens immediately. She pokes her head in and realizes it’s the chef’s office. No window, though. She grabs the handle of the second door—the one she tried to open earlier—and jiggles it, but it’s still locked.
“So did you leave it on?” Sissy asks.
“What?” Jane says, distracted. “No. Your father says he unplugged it.”
“What are you doing?” Sissy asks.
Jane ignores her. The door handle is standard: a cheap knob with a small hole in the center. The exact kind of door handle she’s had years of experience unlocking in her own house when Sissy barricaded herself in her room, a handwritten keep out sign serving as an ominous warning to anyone (mainly Josh) who’d dare try to enter. She slides a bobby pin out of her hair and pushes it in the doorknob, jiggling it until the knob gives, turning easily in her hand.
“Mom!” Sissy says as Jane pushes the door open, blinking into the pitch-black room beyond. It takes her a second to realize it’s not a room but a staircase, leading down.
“A basement?” she mutters to herself, surprised there would be anything underground on a cliff this high up.
“A wine cellar,” Sissy says. When Jane looks at her questioningly, Sissy drops her gaze. “Brick had the blueprints.”
Jane ignores for now the reminder that Sissy is, in fact, in league with Brick and was plotting this…debacle… with him, and focuses on the fact that most basements have a hatch that opens to the outside for easy loading and unloading—particularly in the case of a restaurant. She gropes on the wall for a light switch, and, finding it, illuminates the stairs, then charges ahead.
“Where are you going?” Sissy demands. Jane doesn’t wait for her daughter or command her to follow, because she knows Sissy won’t have much of a choice. Sure enough, when she reaches the bottom, she hears her daughter’s footsteps pad behind her.
The ceiling is low, the stone-walled room smaller than she expected. It looks like a relic—a leftover remnant from a previous era, and Jane remembers reading somewhere that La Fin du Monde used to be the quarters of a lighthouse keeper in the 1800s. Though the lighthouse itself had long been demolished, this building was repurposed multiple times over the decades. Jane looks around the dim room, each wall covered with bottles and bottles of wine and champagne—some of them so old they’re caked with dust. In front of her are more rows of wine shelving—so many she can’t see to the other side. She takes off around them, her daughter calling after her.
Upon reaching the other side, Jane fills with relief when she finds what she’s looking for—a rickety wooden ladder reaching up to a two-flap cellar door on the ceiling, held together with a thick padlock. Jane climbs the rungs, Sissy’s voice drifting up to her.
Jane yanks on the padlock, but it doesn’t budge. She tries her bobby pin—to no avail. She glances around below her for something—anything that she could use to hit the padlock and knock it loose. A rock, a crowbar. She considers a bottle of wine, but is fairly certain she’ll just have shards of glass to show for her efforts.
“ARGH!” she shouts in frustration as Sissy continues her stream-of-consciousness, one-sided conversation. “And what was Brick talking about out there—is Dad cheating on you?”
This turns Jane’s head. “What? No—” She stops herself. She doesn’t want to lie to her daughter. “That’s not important right now.”
“So that means he is. He’s cheating ? Daddy?”
Jane pinches the bridge of her nose for a beat and then climbs down the ladder and stands eye to eye with her daughter (though Sissy reached Jane’s height during a seventh-grade growth spurt, Jane still finds herself caught off guard at times at her daughter’s stature). “Sissy,” she says. She hears the plaintive pleading in her own voice and does nothing to suppress it. “What are you doing ? What is this?”
Sissy looks away, refusing to meet her mother’s gaze.
“Sissy!”
Her daughter takes a deep breath, as if she knew this was coming. “We’re trying to save the world, OK?”
“Save the world,” Jane repeats, letting out a puff of laughter. What a ridiculous, childish phrase. She studies her daughter and throws her hands up, deciding to bite. “From what ?”
Sissy exhales, and then: “We’re an underground environmental action organization called Force of Nature.”
“What?” Jane stares at her daughter, as if waiting to see if she’s joking. When it’s apparent she’s not, she says: “This is about… climate change ? What, does the restaurant not recycle their cooking oil? Are those barnacle things endangered?” Then she remembers Otto. “What’s that got to do with Otto St. Clair?”
“You’re kidding. You do read the news, don’t you?”
“Of course. He makes electric helicopters! He drives some ridiculously expensive electric sports car! And didn’t he build the world’s biggest solar farm or something?”
“Oh God, Mom, you would believe that.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe that?”
“That’s all a publicity stunt. Optics. You know what he’s really done?”
Jane racks her brain for other headlines and remembers the one Dan mentioned when she was getting ready in the bathroom. “He made his own crypto! Apparently, it’s worth more than Bitcoin now.”
Sissy rolls her eyes. “After publicly committing years ago to using one hundred percent renewable energy, like building wind and solar panel farms, to run SierraX’s massive data centers, he hasn’t. He still uses fossil fuel energy to run them! And then, as if that’s not bad enough, he’s been secretly working with oil and gas companies—getting paid billions to automate their operations and create tech that helps them extract even more oil out of more wells. His company is doing more to single-handedly destroy the earth than they are to help it. He doesn’t actually care about the environment! All he cares about is lining his pockets.”
“Hm,” Jane grunts. None of it really surprises her. She’s old enough to understand the way the world works and that the people in power often do whatever it takes to get more money and more power, no matter the collateral damage. “OK, so Otto’s awful. I get it. But you thought you could just bust into a restaurant guns a-blazing and make him see the light of day? This isn’t like you, Sissy!”
“Isn’t it you who’s always telling me if I don’t like the way things are going I should do something about it?”
Jane’s eyes go wide. She did say that the few times Sissy lamented the state of environmental affairs, crying when she found out that recycling trucks didn’t actually recycle most of the plastic they collected and threw it away instead.
To be fair, Sissy’s always been sensitive and was equally upset about homelessness and LGBTQ+ rights and the ubiquitous use of Roundup that was killing off honeybees in droves. She belonged to so many clubs at her school last year, Jane couldn’t keep them all straight. Nevertheless, it was something she always admired in her daughter—the passion of her convictions. Mostly because Jane couldn’t remember the last time she had been so passionate. She just knew she had been—at one time—like the sun, burning with the ferocity of a thousand opinions, injustices, ready to scorch the earth in the name of what was right. And then, at some point, apathy started to take its place, along with fear and anxiety and the feeling that she would rather shrink back down, not say anything, than stand up for what she believed in. Part of it, Jane knew, was the natural evolution of becoming an adult and realizing you don’t know as much as you think you do. But part of it, Jane feared, was that she’d stopped believing in things. She’d stopped believing in herself.
She stares into her daughter’s eyes, the eyes that began greige-blue at birth but darkened over time into an exact mirror of Jane’s own deep brown. Her daughter, who is still the sun. And Jane thinks of the many restless nights she suffered over the years wondering how to hold Sissy’s flame in her hands just so—that impossible balancing act of reining in her daughter’s fire without extinguishing it.
Now she wonders if she erred too far in the wrong direction. Maybe she should have doused Sissy’s fire completely with a ten-gallon bucket.
“I meant start a composting co-op in the neighborhood!” Jane says. “Or join a Save the Sea Turtles campaign!” And then something else dawns on her. “OH MY GOD—is this the climate-change anxiety support group you’ve been going to every week?”
The chop-chop-chop of helicopter blades growing louder in the distance fills the silence.
“It was a support group at first!” Sissy says, and then lowers her eyes. “That’s where I met Brick.”
Jane’s head goes light at the realization. “You’ve been planning to do this for months .” She’d always been a little judgy of parents whose kids ended up in the hospital after drug overdoses or who ran off with some stranger they met on the Internet. How do you not know what your own children are doing? She suddenly has a flood of empathy for those parents, because apparently she is one.
“And guns, Sissy!” Jane can’t help it; her brain keeps coming back to this salient point. “You hate violence.”
“I know. I know! But mine’s not even loaded!” she says. “None of them were supposed to be. Brick promised they would be blanks.”
“Oh, Sissy.” Jane’s heart squeezes at her trusting, naive, completely idiotic daughter. “Just like he promised the bomb was fake.”
She nods weakly. “I thought we’d be in and out. I didn’t think anyone would get hurt.”
Jane puts her hand on Sissy’s shoulder lightly, but—as Jane anticipated—the girl shrugs her off. Jane sighs and turns to climb the ladder again. “Come on. Help me figure out how to open this. We have to get you out of here.”
Sissy gives her mother a confused look. “What do you mean? I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re joking.”
“No! What do you think I’m going to do—run and hide in the woods?”
Jane didn’t actually think it through past getting her out, but it was as good a plan as any. “Yes! You can hide in the woods. Dad and I will come find you when all this”—she waves her hand—“is over.”
“No, that’s ridiculous. I want to be here. Otto’s almost here. We’re almost done.”
“Done with what ? What’s the plan? Are you trying to convince Otto to stop consorting with fossil fuel companies? Because that’s never going to work.” Jane grabs the padlock again, yanking it one way and then another in the vain hope that it might budge. The helicopter blades are purring so loud now, it swallows the thuds of her ministrations. Jane groans.
“No, that’s not—”
“Then what are you doing?”
Sissy averts her gaze once more, looking at her feet, the walls, anywhere but Jane’s eyes. She mumbles something unintelligible.
“What?”
“I said: We’re setting things right.”
“How?” Jane asks, and then she goes completely still. Her vision blurs, and she thinks this time she really might pass out. “Oh my God. You guys are stealing from Otto St. Clair. That’s what this is all about.” She can’t believe she didn’t put it all together before now. And then she realizes what she’s just said.
“YOU’RE STEALING FROM OTTO ST. CLAIR?!” she roars.
“We’re going to anonymously donate the money to all the grassroots, on-the-ground organizations who really need it. Who can really make a difference in their communities and the environment. Groups that Otto would be giving to himself if he actually cared about making an impact. It’s like…Robin Hood.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God, Sissy.” She steps down from the ladder, putting her feet on the cement ground once again because she really does think she’s going to pass out. “Like Robin Hood,” Jane breathes. “I don’t think that defense actually holds up in court, Sissy.” She sits on the cement floor of the cellar and pulls her knees up to her chest.
And though Jane knows it’s unlikely, that Dan is probably right—she’s the only one who sees it, and it’s all in her head, or worse, some weird ego trip—she has to ask. “Have you read my book?”
Sissy looks at her blankly. “What book?”
“ Tea Is for Terror ! The only book I’ve ever written and had published?”
“Oh, right.” She cocks her head. “Yeah, I did. Why?”
“Wait—you did?”
“Yeah, remember that time I lost my phone for like, three days? I was soooo bored, and so I picked it up.” She grins, proud of herself.
“My book.”
“I mean, part of it, anyway.”
“How much did you read?”
“I don’t know! Like the first…ten pages, or something?”
Jane sends her eyes heavenward and sighs heavily.
“Sorry, Mom. It was reaaaaally boring.”
Jane bobs her head. She really should have expected nothing less. Her own husband didn’t even read the book; why would her child? “You didn’t—I don’t know—give it to Brick or anything, did you?”
“No. Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! Everything is just so similar. I’m worried they’re following it or something. And if they are—if it’s the same—then this is really bad, Sissy. It’s evil . Since when are you OK with hurting people? Killing them?”
Sissy cocks her head. “Why do you keep saying that? Nobody has died and no one is going to. That’s why we put blanks in the guns. Well, obviously Isaac didn’t, but—wait. What happens in your book?”
“All the hostages die , Sissy!” Jane says. “The thieves set off a bomb to blow up the teahouse to cover their tracks!”
Sissy’s jaw drops. “ What?! That’s the ending?”
“Yes!”
“Mom, that’s awful! No wonder the reviews are so terrible. What kind of ending is that?”
Jane’s eyes flash. “It’s a metaphor!” she shouts. To be fair, it was what most of the negative reviews pointed out: What was the point of the book if the bad guys just got away with it? And Jane wanted to scream at them (especially that Stephen with a ph ) that that was the point; it was a metaphor, a social commentary highlighting how the real bad guys—the politicians, the CEOs, the lobbyists—always get away with everything.
Jane can see the wheels of Sissy’s brain turning as she says: “Wait, so you think Brick is going to bomb the restaurant? Kill everyone in it?”
Jane lets out a loud clap of a laugh. “You don’t ?”
“No! He’s not like that, Mom, I swear. We’ve got a plan.”
“A plan. Wasn’t the plan to get in and out? And now you’ve been here for what—ninety minutes? And the police! The only way out of here is down that hill. How are you going to get past the police, Sissy?”
Sissy hesitates, and Jane can see the uncertainty in her eyes. “You think that man—who didn’t even blink when the chef got shot; rigged a van with high-powered explosives, possibly killing whoever set it off down there; and is stealing money from one of the richest men in the world—cares whether those people in there live or die?”
Sissy blinks. “I really don’t think—”
“There are witnesses, Sissy. I’m a witness. Your father is a witness. What choice does Brick have?”
Sissy frowns but doesn’t respond. The whir of helicopter blades is suddenly so loud it sounds as if the machine is in the cellar with them. And then a man appears behind Sissy, and Jane screams. Isaac offers a devilish smile as he briefly takes note of Jane’s fear—and then her strange position sitting at the bottom of the ladder. “What are you doing down here?” he shouts over the din to Sissy, and then shrugs as if he doesn’t actually care. “Come on. He’s here. It’s time.” There’s a light in his eyes, an eagerness that’s unsettling. He grabs a bottle of champagne from a nearby shelf, and Jane has half a mind to grab one herself and knock him over the head with it, but she doesn’t know what good that would do. It’s not like she can get the cellar doors open, and if even she could, she’s not convinced she could force Sissy out of them. The glass bottles begin to vibrate and clink together from the deafening power of the blades, and they all look up to the ceiling as if waiting for the helicopter to burst through at any second. Dust rains down on their faces, and then, silence. Jane’s eyes dart from Isaac to Sissy and then back to Isaac, who wears a sly grin.
Otto has arrived.