Chapter 24
Chapter 24
“Owwww!” Jane shrieks for the second time that evening. “GOD DAMMIT, that hurts.”
“Sorry,” Dan says, looking at her over his shoulder, but his duct tape is still in place, so it sounds more like mahr-we . Since their hands are literally tied behind their backs, Dan spent the first few minutes in the van trying to wriggle his arms down below his butt and then pull his legs through so that he could get his hands in front of him—but it was something that looked much easier than it ended up being in real life. With the cramped space in the back of the van and their advanced years making their limbs not quite as limber as they once were, neither was able to accomplish the task. He thought Jane was trying to do the same, but after a few minutes of sitting and struggling, he looked at her to see how she was progressing and she was just staring at him, waiting.
“What?” he said, but it came out as an unintelligible grunt and then she said something in return that was also an unintelligible grunt, so he shrugged his shoulders, and they would have sat there in a complete standoff for much longer if she hadn’t bent at the waist and put her face behind him and directly in his hands. It took him a minute to grasp the edge of the duct tape on her mouth and a little more maneuvering from both of them to get the leverage with which to rip the tape from her mouth, but then finally she was free.
“What the hell were you doing for the first five minutes?” she asks. Dan simply raises his eyebrows.
“Right. Your turn,” she says, and turns around so her hands can reach Dan’s face. Dan turns, too, bends at the waist, and ducks his head down. If anyone were to look in the windows of the van, they’d likely have trouble understanding exactly what was happening inside, but would definitely think—on first glance—that it was something untoward.
“Unh,” Dan bellows once his mouth is free. He wishes he could rub the skin around his mouth to stop the sting. He shakes his face like a wet dog, hoping it will help lessen the throbbing, and then says: “I was trying to bring my arms down and step through them. I saw it on Cops once, a guy slipped right out of his handcuffs, but it’s a lot harder than it looks.” And then the episode comes more clearly back to him. “Actually, I think he dislocated his shoulder doing it, but he was high on meth at the time and didn’t feel it.”
“Dan, focus. What are we going to do?”
“Let’s try the doors,” he says. He inches his way to the back doors and tries both handles, which is awkward in itself considering his wrists are tied behind him, but the handles won’t budge. “Shit, the child locks must be on.”
“It’s a utility van. Surely children aren’t riding in the back of it?”
Dan clears his throat, puts on his best salesman voice. “Are you in the market for your next kidnapping vehicle? This one is not only white and creepy-looking but now equipped with child locks, so your victims absolutely do not have a chance at escape!”
Jane doesn’t laugh.
He steps back and then hurls his body at the door, throwing his shoulder into it. The door still doesn’t budge, and Dan bounces off it and falls clumsily to the floor. He glances to the front seat longingly, where the two sole windows that actually roll down are located—and impossible to get to thanks to a fixed metal grate separating the driver and passenger seats from the rest of the van.
The only two other windows in the van are the back windows. Sitting on the floor, Dan lies back and lifts his legs, and then hits one of the windows with his heels. They land with a soft thud. He can’t get enough leverage to even come close to breaking the glass.
“God, it’s hot,” Jane says, and though Dan is sweating from his exertion and it’s a bit stuffy in the cramped space, Dan knows Jane is overheated not from the actual temperature (it can’t be more than sixty-five degrees outside, and falling), but from her anxiety, and possibly a hormonal hot flash, something that’s been happening with more frequency lately.
He maneuvers and wriggles his body until his back is against the metal van wall, right next to Jane, their arms awkwardly behind them, their knees bent and their legs bound at the ankles.
“What are we going to do?” she whimpers again, and Dan knows this time it’s rhetorical, so he just sits in the silence staring off at the other wall.
“Dan!” Maybe it wasn’t rhetorical.
“What?”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know! I don’t see a way out.”
“We have to get Sissy out of there. All of them! Did you hear Brick? They’re going to blow up the restaurant, Dan. Kill everyone .”
Dan chews his lip. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. That they were using your book.”
Jane sighs. “That’s OK. I wouldn’t have believed me either.” She hangs her head and closes her eyes. “I cannot believe this is happening. It’s all my fault.”
“ Your fault? I’m pretty sure it’s that lunatic Kyle’s fault.”
“Do you think he’s OK?”
“Only if he sprouted wings and can fly.”
Jane’s face falls in worry and Dan wishes he had said something more reassuring, but he also doesn’t know how one can survive a thousand-plus-foot fall off a cliff.
They sit in silence, the floor hard under Dan’s butt, while he tries to think of something to lighten the mood.
“You remember when we were going to buy one of these things?”
Jane turns her head slightly to the left and side-eyes him. “What?”
“On our third date, I think it was. We were lying on the beach. We had just got done surfing, and that group of kids—they were probably our age at the time—pulled up in one of these vans and it was clear they were living in it, and instead of being horrified, we thought it was the greatest idea. And we talked all night about how we were going to get one of these vans and fix it up and live in it. Just travel the world and hike, and you would write and I would…What was I going to do?” Dan trails off, both because he realizes he’s rambling about something inconsequential to fill the space and because he’s unable to remember the rest of the harebrained scheme.
“Give drum lessons,” Jane supplies.
Dan looks at her, momentarily surprised. “That’s right! Oh my God. I had just started to play. I completely forgot that.”
“You were awful,” Jane says.
“I was,” Dan agrees. “What happened to those kids?”
“We got pregnant.”
“Oh. Right.” Dan studies Jane. He wasn’t exactly thrilled when Jane shared the news three months into their relationship. Stunned would be a better adjective. He had four years of podiatry school in front of him! He wasn’t even close to being ready to start a family. But he was also surprised because of what her announcement instantly threw into sharp relief—Jane was it for him. Forever, which had until that moment seemed such a ridiculous, abstract concept. He wanted to get married and have kids and buy a house and save for retirement—he wanted all the things he never was quite sure he wanted, and he wanted it all with her. All the pregnancy did was speed up his timeline.
For Jane, though, it really seemed to rock her world. “I don’t know if I’m ready to be a mother,” she said, more than once. And Dan always wondered if it was more than that. If she wasn’t sure about Dan. He always wondered, if Jane hadn’t gotten pregnant—would she have still married him?
They sit in silence for a few beats more, both lost in their own thoughts.
“It’s not too late for us to buy a van,” Dan says.
“It is,” Jane says. “We’re middle-aged and this is wildly uncomfortable.”
“Well, I think the bondage has something to do with that,” he says, lifting his ankles an inch off the floor of the van in front of him as if to illustrate his point. “I can’t believe some people are into this. I think it’s cutting off my circulation.”
“What do you mean some people? Aren’t you the some person who brought those fuzzy handcuffs to Cabo that time? As I recall, you were quite into it.”
“Hey!” he says, mock-mad. “What happens in Cabo…”
She’s grinning at him, and despite their insane circumstances, Dan feels a tiny buzz—a thrill that his wife, who lately has been so disengaged from him at best, cutting at worst—is displaying a genuine warmth toward him. But then abruptly, like the sun being eclipsed by the moon, her expression morphs into a frown. She clears her throat. “Yes, well. Maybe Becca will be interested in the van life.”
Though he knows Jane saw the text messages, Dan is still caught off guard that she knows the specific name from a part of his life he’s kept so separate from her. Jane mistakes his expression as one of guilt, and to be fair, he does feel guilty, but not for the reason she thinks he does. She smirks. “You really thought I didn’t know.”
He knows it’s time to come clean. Past time, really. It’s ridiculous that he’s been keeping it secret for as long as he has, which is partly why he’s been keeping it secret, because then the fact that he’d been keeping something so benign a secret became the bigger quandary—too difficult to explain.
He takes a deep breath. “It’s ultimate frisbee,” he announces, his voice loud in the enclosed space.
Jane turns to him, confused by the outburst and the seemingly bizarre fork in conversation. “Huh?”
“Where I’ve been going. What I’ve been doing. I’m not cheating on you. I joined an ultimate frisbee team.”
Jane stares at him, mouth agape, and Dan can’t tell if her expression is incredulous in a you-expect-me-to-believe-that? kind of way or a you’ve-allowed-our-entire-marriage-to-crumble-over- ultimate-frisbee ? kind of way. He thinks it’s likely a mix of both, and he can’t blame her. “You hate sports. Your dad always makes that lame joke at Christmas that you have to shop at Walmart because you can’t find the Target.”
Dan inwardly cringes at the reminder that he’s always been a little disappointing to his father. “I don’t hate sports. I’ve just never been very good at any of them. Turns out I kind of have a knack for frisbee.”
She lets out a small puff of air that’s a half chuckle and then frowns again, her brows knitting together the way they do when she’s trying to work those spelling puzzles in the New York Times app. “You’re telling me that for the past six months, when you leave the house and say you’re going for a run or to a meeting or drinks with friends, you’ve actually been going to…play ultimate frisbee.”
“Yes,” he says. “Well, sometimes I do actually go for runs. If ultimate frisbee has taught me anything, it’s that my stamina is shit, and I’ve been trying to get in better shape.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
Jane blinks. “I suppose next you’re going to tell me Becca is someone on the team?”
“She is.”
Jane continues studying him, obviously trying to find the lie, and when she’s satisfied it’s the truth, she leans her head back and lets out a real laugh that’s part relief, part incredulity. “Jesus Christ, Dan,” she breathes. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I did. Well, I mentioned I was thinking about it at that dinner at Tyson and Gina’s house last year, and you laughed like it was the most ridiculous thing you ever heard.”
“I did not!”
“You did. And you said something about grown men desperately trying to hold on to their adolescence.”
“Oh. That does sound like me. But who cares what I think? You still could have told me.”
“I know,” Dan says. He tries to find the words to explain himself. “Have you ever wanted something…I don’t know”—he leans his head back until the crown of it finds the metal wall right next to Jane, their cheeks only inches apart—“that’s just yours ?” It sounds stupid when he says it out loud. A terrible excuse for having lied to his wife for so long, for having wreaked such havoc. Though to be honest, he stupidly believed he wasn’t wreaking havoc, that Jane was none the wiser and he did have this activity, this hobby, this secret , that was his alone and he enjoyed it. These past six months, he was happier than he’d been in years, until Jane announced at dinner that she wanted a divorce because he was cheating, and the reality of his utter obtuseness hit him squarely in the gut.
“Oh my God,” Jane says, and he closes his eyes and braces for the tongue-lashing he deserves for his immaturity, his selfishness, his thoughtlessness. But when he opens his eyes and looks at her, Jane is just staring at him—for the first time in a long time—as though she really sees him. “All the time,” she says.
Warmth radiates from his core into his limbs, and he grins at his wife, feeling more connected to her in this moment than he has in months. “Sometimes I want my own bed to sleep in, especially when you snore,” she adds.
He laughs.
“And I want to go on vacation. All by myself. And wake up when I want and drink coffee in silence and read books and walk the beach and be alone .” She’s on a roll now and Dan just watches her, listening like he hasn’t listened to her in years. Maybe ever.
“Sometimes when I’m driving, after dropping Josh off at lacrosse or going to the dry cleaner’s or home from the grocery for the fifty billionth time that week, I think, what if I just kept driving? What if I passed the exit to our house and pushed the gas and just drove ? Where would I end up? Who would I be?”
The smile slowly seeps from his face like a deflating balloon. “You want to run away—from us ?”
Jane stops short, clearly startled by his question. “What? No. Of course not,” she sighs, and stares at the opposite side of the wall, as if searching for the words. Then she says: “Sometimes.” She takes a deep breath. “I mean, I love the kids, of course I do. They’re my lungs . I couldn’t breathe if anything ever happened to them, and I worry about it all the time, you know? What if something happens to them?”
Dan understands. The kids are his lungs, too, but so is Jane. And it doesn’t go without notice that she didn’t include him.
“But I don’t know,” Jane continues. “Sometimes it feels like I love my family, but I hate my life.”
“You hate it?” Dan says, alarmed. “What do you mean?”
“The monotony of it—it’s exhausting. For eighteen years, I’ve been keeping up with all the things, the schedules and the doctor’s appointments and the practices and the field trips and the permission slips and the friends and grocery shopping and the music lessons and the meals—”
“Hey, I cook some,” Dan interjects.
If she hears him, she ignores it. “It’s all so overwhelming. Literally overwhelming; it overwhelms me to the point that I feel like I’ve lost myself. I am Sissy and Josh’s mother and I’m your wife, but who was I before I was those things? Does it even matter? Who would I be without being those things? Who would I have been if I hadn’t gotten pregnant? And I don’t wish I hadn’t, that’s not what I’m saying. I don’t want to be without the kids. I’m actually scared—terrified, really—for Sissy to go to college. Before you know it, Josh is going to be gone, too, and then who am I? Who will I be? I always thought I would be…I don’t know…successful. I don’t even know what that means, though. A bestselling novelist, maybe? I just thought I would do something that mattered. Something important. Do you know what I mean? But it feels like nothing I do matters.”
Silence overtakes them once again, and Dan feasts on Jane’s words, rolling them over in his mind. How did he not know she felt this way? How does she not know how important she is to them? To him.
“Is she pretty?” Jane says, interrupting his thoughts.
“Who?”
“Becca.”
He almost laughs, but stops himself just in time. Becca is a total smoking-hot sexpot, with her pouty lips and svelte body with its hourglass curves—big curves—but through forty-three years of living, Dan has learned the art of tactful restraint. “I mean, I guess.”
“Are you attracted to her?”
“No.” He’s also learned when it’s imperative to lie. “God, Jane, she’s like, twenty-six. A child. I don’t look at her that way.” Of course he had looked at Becca that way. A blind man would look at Becca that way. But he’s not stupid enough to say that out loud. Right or wrong, he understands the societal hypocrisy that means his wife can ogle Harry Styles or Tom Holland, who are both nearly twenty years her junior, or any of those boys in that high school vampire show that she religiously watches reruns of solely because she finds them so attractive, but if he so much as glances at a woman in her twenties, he’s a creepy old man.
And the truth is, Becca doesn’t hold a candle to Jane. Not because Jane is so objectively beautiful, but because she’s Jane. His Jane. The Jane who once wanted to run away in a van and the Jane who would never live in a van all at once. He’s seen every side of Jane, every part—and while some people think it’s the air of mystery, the unknown, that is alluring in a partner, for Dan it’s always been the knowing. The seeing of Jane, warts and all, and loving her anyway. He’d never lie and say he loved her for her flaws, like some of those poets who are much better linguists and romantics than he is claim—because in all honesty, some of her flaws are downright obnoxious and maddening. But he knows her flaws, and there is a comfort in that that people don’t often talk about. It’s beautiful to Dan, therefore Jane is beautiful. He’d never say that either, though, because Jane would brush it off as a line while simultaneously twisting his words, somehow deciding that he didn’t find her objectively beautiful (a prime example of one of her many maddening traits, the way she can turn anything Dan says into an insult).
“Oh, Dan,” Jane breathes, slowly tilting her head until they’re temple to temple. “How did we get here?”
“Like, abstractly—how did we get to this point in our marriage and our life? Or specifically, how did we get locked in a van when we’re supposed to be enjoying our twentieth anniversary dinner?”
“Nineteenth,” Jane says. “And both?”
Dan isn’t sure if it’s the heat of Jane’s breath or the fact that he has nearly died twice, but he is suddenly, wildly, and inappropriately aware of his half erection. He feels like he remembers reading somewhere about the release of adrenaline from high-risk activities like jumping out of an airplane (which he has never done and would never do), or walking across hot coals correlating with sexual arousal or something, but he’s never experienced it before now. Or maybe it’s just that he thinks he’s going to die, and, like a last meal, Dan’s body wants to have sex one last time before he goes; either way, before he can stop himself, he turns his head one inch to the right to close the gap between his and Jane’s lips. Jane pulls back her head and stares at him in surprise.
Embarrassed at the inappropriateness of his action, Dan opens his mouth to apologize—the saying It’s neither the time nor the place has never been more true—but before he can get the word out, Jane has slammed her face back into his, hungrily thrusting her tongue into his mouth, sucking and exploring and, frankly, kissing him like she’s a dying woman in the middle of a vast, sandy desert and his mouth is the Bellagio fountain.
It’s not like they haven’t kissed in a long time—they kiss nearly every day, Dan thinks. Or maybe they don’t kiss every day, but they’ve kissed so often in their lives that it feels like they’ve kissed every day. But it’s been a long time since they’ve kissed like this , Dan thinks. And then he stops thinking altogether.
He lets the weight of Jane falling toward him topple them both to the floor, where they continue—albeit awkwardly—kissing like their life depends on it. Jane pushes her body up against his, and when she feels his erection on her thigh through his pants, she whispers: “I knew you were into bondage,” and then laughs into his mouth. He laughs and then covers her lips with his once again, kissing her more deeply this time, not only because her quick wit is so attractive, but because he’s always adored how funny she finds herself.
They keep kissing, struggling to get closer, but with their hands and feet bound it’s wildly frustrating and ridiculously hot at the same time—and Dan thinks maybe he really is into bondage after all—until a sudden loud thump at the back of the van turns both their bodies to stone and stops Dan’s heart altogether.
Isaac , he thinks. Back to shoot them both, maybe? Throw their bodies over the cliff? There’s no telling. He breaks away from his wife and sees the fear in her eyes before they both turn toward the window to see the face pressed up against it.
Their daughter, Sissy, who couldn’t look more disgusted if you put an entire platter of smoked salmon in front of her.
“Ewwww, gross. What is wrong with you guys?”