Chapter 25
Chapter 25
“Sissy!” Jane says, struggling to sit up while hoping Dan’s erection isn’t pitching a tent in his pants. Even in a hostage situation, she doesn’t want to traumatize her daughter by reminding her that her parents are sexual beings. Though, to be honest, Jane herself nearly forgot. What was that? She hasn’t been that turned on by Dan in years. Breathing heavily, she rolls onto her knees and awkwardly shifts forward toward the back of the van door. “What are you doing?”
With a butter knife in her right hand, Sissy bangs on the glass again, panic in her eyes. “I think you’re right! I think Brick’s going to bomb the restaurant,” she says. “I came to get you out.” Her voice is a bit muffled by the glass, and Jane fills with relief, not because Sissy is rescuing them as much as because Sissy wants to rescue them. Her sweet, kind daughter isn’t completely gone.
“With a butter knife?” Dan says.
“Yeah, to pick the lock.”
“Honey, I don’t think that’s going to work,” Jane shouts at Sissy through the glass, wondering again how a girl who can calculate quadratic equations and write binary code in her sleep can lack so much common sense. As if reading her mind, Dan lowers his voice to Jane. “You were right. We should have sent her to private school.”
They can hear the clank-clunks as Sissy is already fumbling with the knife and the latch, cursing a blue streak. Jane and Dan both manage to scoot to the back of the van and maneuver to their knees, pressing their faces against the windows to try and gauge Sissy’s progress.
Sissy looks up at them, helpless.
“Have you tried the front door?”
“What?”
“The front door.”
Sissy gets a bright look in her eyes and then rushes off. Seconds later, she’s back. “Locked!” she says, her face crumpling in distress.
“Get a rock,” Dan says.
“What?”
“A rock,” Dan yells. “Bust out the window.”
Sissy looks around and, not seeing anything in the near vicinity, disappears from view. Seconds later, she reappears, her hands empty. “There’s nothing! Just tiny pieces of gravel.”
“Shit,” Dan mutters. Jane can tell he’s thinking but coming up as empty as Sissy’s hands.
“Where’s your gun?” Jane asks, and Sissy stares at her for a beat before reaching into the back of her waistband and brandishing her pistol. “Shoot out the front door window,” Jane says.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” Jane’s only about 10 percent confident it will be fine, but what choice do they have?
“No, I mean I can’t . I don’t have any bullets.”
“I know, but you said you have blanks, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That will still work!”
“It will?”
“Yes! Blanks are shell casings loaded with gunpowder, they just don’t have the bullet. At close range, they can shatter glass easily.”
“What?” Sissy asks, leaning closer to the window, and Jane realizes she couldn’t hear her.
“Hold it up close to the glass and shoot the window!” she shouts.
Dan is staring at her, mouth agape. “How do you know that, about blanks?”
“Book research,” Jane says. “Let’s hope it works better than that Cops handcuff trick.” Sissy disappears once again.
“What’s the plan here?” Dan asks.
“We get out of this van, get into our car, and get the hell out of here.”
“But the police!”
“We’ll tell them we escaped, which is true.”
“And Sissy?”
“We’ll say she was eating with us. A family dinner. To celebrate Stanford or something.”
“Look at what she’s wearing.”
“All teenagers dress weird. They won’t even notice.” Jane isn’t sure if she’s trying to convince Dan or herself, but really, what other choice do they have?
Dan nods once emphatically, and then startles as the BANG of the gun is followed by shattering glass. Jane closes her eyes and hopes that no one, namely Isaac, heard a gun blast and comes outside to play detective. The door locks click and Sissy reappears at the back window. “Hurry!” she says, opening the door. “We have to get those zip ties off you.”
Jane offers her bound hands to Sissy, who manages to snap through them with the pressure of the blade. As Jane rips the duct tape off her ankles, Sissy cuts through Dan’s ties, and then they’re free, Jane and Dan jumping to their feet out of the van.
“Let’s go!” Dan says, shoving his hand in his pocket and, finding nothing, pulling it out and starting to pat his other pocket and his chest. “Dang it,” he says.
“What?” Jane asks, but she already knows.
“I can’t find my keys.”
Jane stares at him a beat, a jumble of emotions running through her at once. Rage wins. “GOD DAMMIT, DAN!”
“Sorry!” he shouts back. “They’re in my jacket pocket. I think.”
The wheels in Jane’s brain turn faster. “We’ll just run for it. Hide in the woods or something until this is all over.” It’s not a great plan, admittedly, but Jane unwittingly planned the entire fiasco that has unfolded this evening and she’s all out of great plans for the moment. “Come on.” She starts off in the direction of the woods, but Sissy doesn’t move.
“I’m not coming with you,” she says.
“Not this again, Sissy. We don’t have time. Let’s go.”
“No. I know them, Mom. I know them. I can fix this. You have to trust me.”
“ Trust you? Oh, I think that ship has sailed, Sissy.”
“Mom—”
“Sissy, ENOUGH!” Jane roars. “He lied to you. Brick lied. This has nothing to do with climate change or saving the world or whatever you thought you were doing. It’s clearly some personal vendetta. He used you. He used all of you to get to Otto. And it’s OK! You made a mistake. You didn’t know. But now you do. And you owe him nothing.”
Sissy drops her gaze to the ground.
“Sissy.” Jane studies her. “Sissy, you didn’t know, did you?”
“Mom, if you knew what Otto did to Brick…”
“What?”
“He stole his invention! Years of grad school research in nanotechnology to create the most efficient surfactant to clean up oil spills. It was ingenious, truly. World-changing. It could have made environmental disasters like the Exxon Valdez if not a thing of the past, at least exponentially less harmful when they happened. Brick entered it in Otto’s environmental competition, knowing someone like Otto had the capability to manufacture it and get it to where it was needed most all over the world. As it turns out, the technology that works so well to clean up oil spills also works like a charm to more efficiently extract oil from the ground. Otto patented the invention, renamed it the Ottomatic Oilpump, and sold it to all the huge oil corporations, becoming a billionaire in the process—and thanks to an NDA he made Brick sign, Brick’s never been able to tell the truth about what happened. Not that anyone would care.”
Jane frowns. Then tilts her head and listens. She can’t tell if she’s imagining it or if she can hear a faint chop-chop-chop in the air.
“Mom, did you hear me? He’s destroying the environment with the very thing Brick invented to help restore it.”
“Yes, I heard you,” Jane says. She heard words, anyway. Surfactants. Nanotechnology. This is how Jane often feels when Sissy talks—about binary code or cryptocurrency or anything else that flies just above Jane’s breadth of knowledge. But regardless of Brick and Otto’s beef, this has nothing to do with Sissy, and she somehow needs to make her daughter understand the severity of the consequences. “If you stay here and the police catch you—and they will catch you—you can kiss Stanford goodbye.”
“I’m not going to Stanford,” Sissy says.
“What?”
“I’m not going to Stanford.” Her eyes are hard. Defiant. Full of fire.
Jane looks from Sissy to Dan. “Are you hearing this?”
“Yeah. It sounds like a helicopter,” Dan says. He peers out into the night.
Jane groans and turns her attention back on her daughter. “Yes. You are.”
“No. I never wanted to go there!”
Jane can feel Dan’s eyes on her, but this time won’t meet his gaze. She won’t give him the satisfaction of being right. “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone wants to go to Stanford!”
“No, Mom. You want me to go to Stanford.”
“Why would I care if you go to Stanford?”
“Guys, I think—” Dan interjects, but they both ignore him.
“I don’t know—so you can brag about it to your friends? So you can feel accomplished in your duty as a mother? So you can live vicariously through me, since your life is so boring?”
Jane closes her eyes, stung as though she’s been slapped. Her life is boring, yes, but that’s not what wounds her. Jane did view helping Sissy get into Stanford as her motherly duty. Not to brag about it (although she has to admit, she does wear it as a badge of honor), but because what else is her job as a mother if not to make sure Sissy has more opportunities than Jane had, to be more? Sissy is so smart, so much smarter than Jane ever was. By the time she was seven, she was reading at least five books a week—on a high school level. At nine, she was patiently explaining to Jane how binary code worked, something Jane didn’t understand in college, much less when Sissy tried to explain it to her. That kind of intelligence needed to be harnessed, developed, given direction in the way a college like Stanford could do, so Sissy could reach her full potential. But Jane doesn’t know how to explain all of that to Sissy.
“It’s not for me, Sissy!” she says lamely. “It’s for you. You have to go to Stanford so you can make something of yourself.”
At that, the fire in Sissy’s eyes blazes to a full inferno, and she roars: “I ALREADY AM SOMETHING.”
Jane and Sissy stare at each other like boxers squared off in the ring, the now-loud staccato filling the air and impossible to ignore. All three of them look up at the night sky to see the lights of a large helicopter approaching the cliff, the beam of its spotlight focused on the restaurant, leaving them in the shadows.
“What is that?” Jane asks.
“I think it’s a helicopter,” Dan says.
“I know it’s a helicopter, Dan. I mean who do you think it is?”
Suddenly, the spotlight from the helicopter swings over and shines directly on them, as though they’re center stage at a Broadway performance.
Jane holds up her hand against the glare, looking into the bright light, and gets a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Let’s go,” she says, at the same time that a voice on a loudspeaker shouts at them from the helicopter, but she can’t see anything or make out what they’re saying.
“Did you understand that?” she says to Sissy and Dan.
The voice warbles loudly—and nonsensically—again.
“Something about a gun?” Dan says.
They all look at Sissy’s hand. “Oh my God! Sissy, drop the gun!” The words are no sooner out of Jane’s mouth when the unmistakable sound of a machine gun firing rips into the night air around them.
“Run!” Dan says. Jane takes off around the van, not even feeling the gravel pinch her soles. She dives behind the front bumper, the ping of bullets ricocheting off the metal sides of it, causing her to flinch every second. Dan, right behind her, throws his arm around her, and they slide down to sitting, both hoping they’ll be safe from the barrage. It takes Jane only a second to realize Sissy is not with them.
“Where’s Sissy?” Jane yells. “I thought she was right beside you!”
“She ran back into the restaurant.”
“NO!” Jane shouts. “Is she OK?”
“I don’t know. I think so.” Dan tries to peer around the edge of the front bumper and a bullet goes whizzing past his head. “Jesus!” he says, jerking back.
“Why are they shooting at us ?” Jane yells. “Is that more Force of Nature people?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the police. I think they think Sissy’s one of the bad guys.”
“SHE IS ONE OF THE BAD GUYS!” Jane covers her face with her hands. “What do we do, Dan? What do we do ?”
She remembers hearing once—maybe a friend said it to her, or maybe she just saw it on Instagram—an adage about parenting, and it lights in her mind now, unbidden: Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems. She thinks now perhaps she underestimated how big the “big” problems were going to be.
The barrage of bullets suddenly stops, and Dan goes to peer around the van—more cautiously this time.
“Is it still there?” Jane asks, which is a dumb question because she can clearly hear the loud staccato of helicopter blades, but it’s almost as if her question prompts it to leave—slowly the din starts to fade.
“They’re leaving!” Dan says. “I think they’re leaving.”
Sure enough, the chop-chop-chop grows dimmer and dimmer until it’s just silence ringing in Jane’s ears.
“Let’s go!” Jane says, jumping to her feet. “We have to go back in. We have to get her. And all those people! Oh God, they’re all going to die!”
“No,” Dan says.
“What do you mean no ? Yes, they are, Dan!”
“JANE,” Dan roars, grabbing her wrist and yanking it hard. “Sit. Down.”
Jane freezes, staring at Dan. Her levelheaded husband who—though he gets irritated and annoyed and sometimes even says mean things—rarely raises his voice.
Jane sits.
“Thank you,” Dan says. “Now. Can we please just think about this for a minute?”
Jane turns to him, half-incredulous and half-furious. “Are you joking? All I’ve been doing all night long is thinking about what to do.”
“No—you’ve been acting . It’s what you always do. You just go off half-cocked with no plan, consequences be damned.”
“At least I do something!”
“You haven’t given me a chance!”
Jane glares at him, fire in her eyes, but then relents. “OK, fine. What do you suggest?”
Dan sticks his tongue in his cheek, thinking, and Jane has to resist throwing her arms in the air in impatience. Finally, Dan says, “Tell me exactly what they do in your book. Where’s the bomb?”
“They use a pressure cooker. And I saw one—in the kitchen.”
“OK, good. And then how do they escape?”
“I don’t know! In my book, the terrorists put the bomb on a timer, then used the network of sewers beneath the London teahouse to escape. But up here?”
“No underground tunnels,” says Dan. “That we know of.”
“Right.”
“OK, well, maybe it doesn’t matter. We get rid of the pressure cooker, so no hostages die. Then all we have to do is get Sissy out and let the police handle the rest.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“I have a plan. Just trust me! You run down to the police.”
“The police that just opened fire on us? Those police?”
“Yes—and tell them she was having dinner with us.”
Jane frowns. “OK, but what about the people who have seen her? Who know she was one of them ?”
“I don’t know. It’s our word against theirs?”
“We can’t take that chance.” Jane shakes her head. “I’m going in. I can’t not be with her.”
“No! Absolutely not,” Dan says. And as if to underline his sentiment, he abruptly stands up and runs to the door. She stares after him, open-mouthed. If she were given a multiple-choice question about what methodical, stick-to-the-plan Dan would do in this scenario, the last option she’d pick would be “jump up and run back into the restaurant, without so much as a backward glance.”
She’s felt this way before, of course. No matter how long you’ve lived with someone, how well you think you know them, there are always times when you look at them and think Who are you? Sometimes due to little revelations, like when she learned he kept a toothbrush and floss at work and brushed his teeth every day after lunch like a Boy Scout. Or like when she discovered Becca’s text messages. Or when she learned that his clandestine affair was merely an affair with ultimate frisbee.
But it was other times, too—a vague feeling when lying beside him at night, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest as he slept. How well can you really know anybody? Even the person you’ve lived with—slept beside each night—for nearly half your life.
“Dan!” Jane hisses, even though the door has shut behind him and he is securely in the restaurant. “Shit.” She clenches her teeth and stares at the closed back door of the restaurant.
And that’s when she feels it: the weight of an elephant on her chest; the sudden loss of blood in her hands, making her fingers go numb; a dizziness so acute, her vision blurs. A full-blown panic attack. She’s only had one once before—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when she was snorkeling on a family vacation in Maui. Her goggles fogged up and Jane couldn’t see a thing—and without the advantage of sight, her thoughts turned on her. She was out in the middle of the ocean! Where there were sharks! And jellyfish! And where were her children ? Every blob she could barely make out was some deadly being hunting her loved ones. Jane broke the surface of the water frantically flailing her arms in horror, unable to breathe or think—aside from the acute memory that flailing in water attracted sharks, which only amped her panic. And while having a panic attack on land is certainly preferable to one in the middle of the ocean, she still feels like she’s going to die. Worse, she’s afraid Sissy and Dan are going to die, too—and just like her panic attack, there’s nothing she can do to stop it.