Chapter 28
Chapter 28
Jane claws at her throat as it closes up, the hard rubber of the van’s tire digging into her back, her chest so tight, she can’t breathe. It’s just a panic attack , she tells herself. You’re not dying . But it feels like she is. She squeezes her eyes shut and thinks again of snorkeling in the Pacific, the blind terror she felt, and then the hand on her arm—which at first she was 100 percent positive was the tentacle of a giant octopus (the Kraken! Risen from the depths!) clamping on to her limb to drag her to the bottom of the ocean. But of course, it wasn’t.
It was Dan.
“Breathe, Jane!” he demanded. She tore at her life vest. It was too constrictive, the reason she couldn’t inhale. “Look. At. Me.” Jane stilled her hands and opened her eyes, but through her foggy goggles she could see only the suggestion of Dan’s face, like a Gerhard Richter painting. She gasped for air, creating a strangled, squeaking goose honk. And then Dan ripped off her goggles and grabbed her face in between his hands, and she stared at his now-distinct greige-blue eyes while following his calm instructions to breathe in for one-two-three-four-five and then breathe out for one-two-three-four-five .
And she does it now. She pictures Dan’s face, his tranquil, soothing eyes, and she breathes in and out for the next five minutes, maybe ten, until her rigid fists uncurl, her muscles relax, her heartbeat slows to normal.
Then she stares at the door to the kitchen where Dan disappeared. She turns and looks down the gravel driveway, where it ends before the forest. Where she is supposed to be running for the police, because Dan has a plan. Dan said to trust him. And she does! She always has trusted Dan, to be honest. Even when she saw the text messages, she knew in her gut he wasn’t cheating. She just wanted an excuse to leave. To shake up her boring life. To do something different. To be someone different.
But she’s not someone different. She’s Jane. She’s a failed author. She’s the mother of Sissy and Josh. And she’s been the wife of Dan for the past nineteen years—which is how she knows he didn’t really have a plan. And he needs her now.
She stands up and runs back across the sharp gravel in her bare feet and through the back door of the kitchen, easing it closed behind her. She spies the pressure cooker first and sighs—Dan had one job! Well, two. But getting rid of the pressure cooker was the easiest and he failed to do it. She tiptoes over to grab the pot, thinking the best thing to do is take it out the back and throw it over the cliff, when she hears the high-pitched shrieks.
Her heartbeat revs as she quickly moves to the swinging door and puts her ear to it. Though the kitchen is eerily still, she can hear only every third word or so espoused by that maniac Isaac, but what’s clear is Brick is no longer in charge. She stands, listening, unsure what to do, until she hears her daughter’s voice—and it awakens something primal in her.
She pushes the swinging door open with all her might in time to see Isaac training his gun directly on her Sissy. She growls and charges him. At the noise, he turns, swinging the gun in her direction, and Jane stops short and flinches, realizing too late the error of her rash action. She braces herself for the bullet she’s sure will hit her at any second, but suddenly a plate comes whistling through the air, hitting Isaac’s temple with a sickening thud. He crumples to the ground. No one moves. “Oh my God,” Jane breathes. She looks over to Dan, who’s standing with his hand out, as though he’s a still portrait caught in the middle of throwing a frisbee. “Did you do that?”
Dan nods.
Jane squints, still not believing. “You did?”
Dan nods again. And Jane looks back at Isaac’s body, prostrate on the floor. “Oh God,” she repeats. “Did you kill him?”
“No,” Brick says, already at Isaac’s side, picking up the gun. The boy groans, putting his hand up to his head. “He’ll be OK.”
“Jane,” Dan says levelly. “Don’t move.”
“What?”
“You’re right next to the bomb.”
“What?” Jane repeats, confused. “No, the pressure cooker is in the kitchen.”
“Yes, but the C-4 is on the table next to you.”
Jane glances down to see two bricks with wires coming out of them, connected to a timer that reads 6:27. She lets out a strangled scream and then looks at Brick. “Please don’t do this,” she begs. “I know sometimes it seems like blowing everything up is the only solution, that it will fix everything, but it won’t. It never does.” She stares at Dan as she keeps talking. “It’s the easy way out. You can’t run away from your problems, from real life. Life is about staying. Putting in the work. Even when it’s hard.”
“Lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Brick says. “But we’ve got about five minutes to get everyone out of here.”
Jane blinks and looks back at Brick. “You’re letting everyone go?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” Jane says.
“I really did like your book. Such a brilliant metaphor for the evils of capitalism and how the powerful and wealthy and corrupt can act solely in their best interest with impunity from consequence.” He cuts his gaze to Otto.
“Yes,” Jane says. “Yes! That’s exactly…that’s exactly…” She stammers again, her ability to form words suddenly failing. Earlier she might have said there was nothing more attractive than a rebel with bulging biceps—but a rebel with bulging biceps who understands what she was trying to achieve with her work ? She thinks of Patty Hearst and swallows.
“I hope you don’t mind that I changed the ending a bit.” He grins and Jane feels woozy. Have her knees always been this weak?
“I don’t mind,” she says.
“Simply because I don’t think I’m the bad guy here.”
“You’re not.”
Dan clears his throat, and Jane slowly turns to him. When greeted with his hard stare, she snaps out of her reverie.
“Jeremy?” Brick says. At the prompt, Jeremy opens the front door, the hostages rushing toward it like horses out of the starting gate at the Kentucky Derby, while Tink and Caden snip the zip ties of the sous chefs and Javier and Monica, who pop up and follow the crowd.
Brick saunters over to Otto, the final hostage, and stands in front of him while Otto shifts his gaze back and forth between the timer (5:13) and Brick.
“I really should leave you here.”
“But you won’t. You’re not like that boy,” Otto says, trying to stare defiantly at Brick, but the quaver of his voice belies his fear. “For all your faults, you’re not a killer.”
Brick beckons Caden with a wiggle of his forefinger, and Caden steps forward to cut Otto’s wrist and ankle ties. Otto stands on wobbly legs, looking up at Brick. “I look forward to seeing you in court the day they put you away for this.”
Brick tenses his muscles and fake-jumps at Otto, who lets out a small screech and runs to the door without a backward glance.
“Jane,” Dan hisses.
“What?”
“The bomb.”
Jane glances at it warily (4:06). “I see the bomb, Dan!”
“Well, fix it!”
“What? How?”
“Cut a wire!”
“What wire?
“Like they do in the movies! The blue one or the green one or the red one!”
“How do I know which one it is?”
“Like you knew everything else! Book research!”
“I don’t know how to disarm a bomb, Dan. I’m not MacGyver!”
Brick steps directly between them and reaches out to push a button on the digital watch, and the clock stops.
“Oh, thank God.” Jane exhales. She had no idea it was just that easy—the movies always made it look so hard.
“What are you two still doing here?” Brick asks.
Jane glances at Sissy. “We can’t leave yet.”
Sissy steps forward. “They’re my parents,” she says, lowering her gaiter now that the hostages are all gone.
And Brick’s jaw drops an inch, befuddled for maybe the first time that evening. “Huh,” he says, gaping at her and then Jane. “I can see the resemblance. Wait, did you know they were going to be here?”
“No! I couldn’t believe it! Did you really use her book?”
“Yeah, Kyle gave it to me.”
“Apparently he’s the one that invited us here,” Dan says.
“And then he jumped off the cliff!” Jane screeches.
Brick doesn’t bat an eye. “Speaking of, it’s time for us to go.”
“You can’t!” Jane says, remembering all the sirens. “The police are here! They’ve probably got us surrounded by now.”
“Not completely surrounded.” He winks.
They all turn and look at the expansive window just steps from the cliff’s edge.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Brick says, striding to the large panel he tossed the cell phone out of and pushing it open. Caden’s the first to step through it, followed by Tink and then Jeremy. Brick walks over to Isaac. “You good, man? We gotta roll.”
Isaac nods and stands, stumbling a bit, and Brick puts an arm out to steady him.
“You did great, by the way. You may have a future in Hollywood after all.”
Isaac grins, and Jane can see he’s just a boy after all. Not evil, not menacing. His mom probably thinks he’s at a friend’s house watching a show.
“Wait,” Jane says. “None of that was real? What is happening?”
Brick grins. “All part of the plan. Granted, I was supposed to tackle him and take him out, but your husband’s frisbee trick worked just as well.”
“But why?”
“As a novelist, don’t you know?” He grins. “Every great heist has a wild card. Ours was Isaac.”
Confused, Jane watches as Isaac follows the others out the window. “Where are they going?”
“Over the cliff. We’re BASE jumping.” Sissy smiles. “We practiced it. I told you Brick had a plan.”
“What?” Jane breathes as horror wraps itself like a vine around her lungs, her stomach.
“Come on, Goldie, not much time left.”
“What?” Jane repeats, grabbing her daughter’s arm. “No. No! You are absolutely not going over that cliff.”
It reminds her of the platitude she repeated ad nauseam to Sissy and Josh over the years when they wanted the name-brand shoes or the brand-new edition of the video game console they already had or to be on WhatsApp in the fourth grade and whined All my friends are doing it . Jane inevitably replied: If all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you do that, too? She was parroting what her own mother had said to her and likely what Jane’s mother’s mother had said to her. It was part of the canon of parenting, along with There are children starving in third-world countries! and Because I said so! Jane never in a million years thought her child would actually be in the position to decide whether or not to follow her friends off a literal cliff.
Yet here they were.
“Mom, I have to! Otherwise I’ll get caught.”
“She’s right, Jane. Everyone that was here knows she was one of them,” Dan says.
“No! It’s too high up. It’s not safe!” Jane’s brain buzzes as she tries to think of alternatives. “Change clothes with me.”
“What?”
“Change clothes with me. I’ll go over the cliff. You can say you were at the restaurant with Dad.”
“It won’t work! Besides”—her face screws up in disgust—“I would never wear that.”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Mom, c’mon, you’re terrified of heights. You would die midair of a heart attack.”
That’s probably true, but doesn’t Sissy understand by now? Jane would do anything for her daughter.
They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes, but Jane wonders if, when you’re viscerally afraid your child is going to die, their life flashes before you. All at once she sees Sissy the infant, her baby face squawking, her mouth a cavernous hole of noise and pain. Sissy at two, wobbly on her chubby legs, giggling at the ridiculous faces Jane made to entertain her.
At six, Sissy went through a phase (though Jane didn’t know it was a phase, because when you’re a first-time parent, every new behavior feels like it’s a defining character trait and that this is who your child now is and will be in perpetuity) where she couldn’t go into any room of their house alone. If she needed shoes from the mudroom, Jane would follow. If she wanted a snack from the pantry, Jane would follow. Jane became a shadow more than a mother and she was sure it was her fault—she had passed her anxiety on to her daughter, which was her biggest fear. Her greatest parental failure.
And that’s when she realizes what she wants for her daughter—more than going to Stanford or happiness or any of the other clichés that parents want for their children—she wants her to not be terrified of every goddamn thing, the way Jane has been ever since she became a mother. Maybe even before then, too.
She wants Sissy to march out into the world and grab her life with both hands. To experience it all—heartbreak and pain and anger and the raw, throbbing joy of loving someone so much your skin is on fire. She wants Sissy to live . She doesn’t want Sissy to jump off a cliff, not knowing if she’s going to make it to the bottom. But deep down, Jane knows that living is sometimes jumping off a cliff, not knowing if you’re going to make it to the bottom.
It’s time to let Sissy go.
It’s time to let Sissy live.
“OK, OK,” she says, her voice shaking. “You’re right.”
“I am?” Sissy asks.
“She is?” Dan echoes, bewildered. “What? No.”
Jane looks at Dan, wild-eyed. “ You said I had to let her go.”
“Yes, but only because I didn’t think you were actually going to let her go! It’s a cliff, Jane.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jane mutters. She stares at her daughter’s eyes. “You can do this?”
“I can do it.”
“How do you know?”
“I learned from the best—you.”
“How to BASE jump ?”
“No.” She cocks her head. “How to believe in myself.”
“What?” Jane breathes. She shakes her head no. “No. I’ve never believed in myself a day in my life.” When Jane says it out loud, she realizes it’s true. She’s questioned everything as a mother: Did she breastfeed long enough? Are there BPAs in that sippy cup? Did I read to her enough? Feed her enough organic foods? Is her car seat secure? Is she getting enough fresh air? Too much screen time? Is she sitting alone at recess? Does she have enough friends? Did she turn in her science project? Did I help too much? Was I too easy on her? Too hard? Did I yell too loud? Does she know how much she’s loved? Does she know she’s the goddamn air that I breathe?
“Yes, Mom,” Sissy says. “I believe in myself because you always believed in me.”
“Oh,” Jane breathes. “I have. I have always believed in you. I do believe in you.”
“I know.”
Jane nods once. “And you’re sure? You’ve practiced.”
Sissy nods back.
“OK,” Jane says. “Go do it.”
Sissy turns and Jane reaches out for her. “Wait!” She pulls Sissy to her and wraps her arms around her as if it’s the last time she may hold her daughter. The world is harsh and desolate and brutal, but Jane can’t protect her from it any more than this Force of Nature group can stop corporate America from continuing to make billions of dollars on oil and plastic and destroying the earth. She can’t hold Sissy’s flame in her hands anymore. It doesn’t belong to her any more than the stars belong to the moon.
She grabs Sissy’s face in both her hands. Jane’s nose is nearly touching Sissy’s nose, and she stares into Sissy’s dark brown eyes and thinks of the first time she stared into them, before she loved Sissy with all her heart, before she was a real mother. And she wishes she could go back to that time and say all the things she feels now. She would say:
Welcome to the world, my girl.
It’s a cruel, horrible place and I’m so terrified for you to be here.
It’s a wonderful, beautiful place and I’m so glad you’re here.
What Jane says: “You are already something.” Tears are flowing down her cheeks in earnest now.
“I know,” Sissy says. She smiles then—a sight as rare and beautiful as seeing the sunset when dining at La Fin du Monde—and she’s nine and two and four and thirteen all at once. And then she squeezes her mom’s hand once, turns, and steps through the open window, and it feels like Jane’s heart has exploded from her chest and is now running away from her and there’s nothing Jane can do to stop it or protect it or get it back.
It feels like her skin is on fire.
It feels like motherhood.
She stares at Sissy’s back, her ponytail swishing as she runs at full speed toward the edge, and then Sissy is gone, off the cliff, like an offering to the wind, to the world.
“Dan!” Jane says, turning and throwing herself in his arms. He holds her. “Oh, Dan. I think…I think we were really good parents,” she wails.
“We were. We are,” he says, gently smoothing her hair.
A beep drags their attention to Brick, who’s standing next to the bomb, the numbers once again rolling down: 2:59, 2:58, 2:57…
Jane’s blood runs cold. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve gotta run. And I suggest you do, too.”
“You’re still blowing up the restaurant?”
“Yeah.” He makes a clicking noise with his cheek. “A necessary distraction for our getaway, I’m afraid. That’s the most important part of any heist, don’t you think?” He grins. “Misdirection. Anyway, nice meeting you, Jane. Again, I’m a big fan,” he says, and then he turns to take off out the window.
“Wait!” Jane yells, and he stills, looks at her. “Can I have my cell phone back?”
“Sorry.” He grins. “I don’t have it.”
Jane frowns, confused, and then Brick jumps out the window, straightens his backpack, and is gone, leaving Jane and Dan the sole two people left standing in La Fin du Monde, minutes before it explodes.