“I’m entering the premises! Come out with your hands in the air!” He steps carefully into the foyer, service weapon outstretched, bits of dislodged oak from the door crunching under his shoes. Standard protocol at this point would be to call for backup—anyone who’s seen an episode of Law & Order knows that much. Thing is, there’s still the question of the contents of his trunk, which he would very much prefer to sort out before bringing any other parties into the situation.
He rounds a corner and comes into their big-ass f’ing living room—a ‘great room’ is what you’d call it. He looks around, taking it all in—the graffiti-covered paintings, the defaced speakers pumping out rock music, the series of little waterfalls running down the stairs.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, reacting both to the mayhem that’s taken place and to the sheer size of the chamber (the room is bigger than his whole house).
“Come out with your hands up!” he shouts.
A sound comes from above. A shadow passes over the wall at the top of the stairs.
Hugging the front wall, Damien advances deeper into the room, giving himself a better angle on the upstairs hallway.
The shadow appears again, pushing out further into the opening at the top of the stairs. They’re coming closer. Damien raises his weapon and takes aim. As the form comes into view, he squeezes the trigger.
“You gonna tell him?” Dresden says, eyes reeling, saliva dripping from his chin.
“Tell me what?” John asks. He and Val are rocking from side to side on the floor, inching towards one another. In his hand are the nail clippers, which he retrieved from the toilet before Stanley came back for him. “Tell me what?” he repeats.
“It’s nothing,” says Val. “He’s got a concussion, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“We had a deal,” Dresden bellows.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“If you don’t tell him, I will.”
“We’re not making any deals with you,” says Val. “We’re getting out of here, and if you’re lucky enough to make it out alive, you’re going to jail for a very long time.”
They’re only a couple of feet apart now. The skin of John’s belly and chest burns from rubbing against the carpet, adding to the menu of pain he’s been sampling this evening. Dresden begins to whistle an out-of-tune country melody. John grits his teeth and keeps going.
At last, he feels Val’s shoulder brushing against his. “Okay,” he says, “now roll over so we’re back-to-back, and I should be able to cut the tape on your wrists.”
They roll against one another, reminding John of a couple’s yoga retreat they took a few years ago, where they’d learned to manipulate their bodies in tandem permutations that would have been impossible alone. The whole thing was surprisingly unsexy, highlighting the mechanics of their physical forms as unromantically as his anatomy classes back in med school. Now, amidst the pain and fatigue of the night’s struggles, it’s hard to imagine their bodies’ energies being put toward any cause but sheer survival. The idea of making love after all this seems crazy.
He feels her hands, their delicate skin grown slick and swollen. “Stay still,” he says. He works the nail clippers into position, their teeth flanking the edge of the duct tape. He presses the lever down with all his strength. Then he jerks his hand away as swiftly as he can.
“Did you get it?”
“Hang on…” He fingers the edge of the tape and finds, just beneath Val’s left thumb, a half-inch incision cut into the tape. “Honey… I don’t want to jinx it—”
“Then don’t.”
“Okay.” He chuckles a little. “Let me just try to open this up a bit more.” He claws at the rift he’s created in the tape, widening it.
“I can feel it coming loose,” says Val.
John tears at the rupture with his fingernails as Val twists her hands and wrists furiously. The knuckles of her left hand pull past the threshold.
Her hand slips lose. She moans ecstatically.
“Holy shit,” she says.
“Yeah,” John agrees.
“It was good for me too,” says Dresden.
Val rolls onto her back and sits up, yanking the wrecked loop of duct tape from her other wrist before taking the nail clippers from John and going to work on the tape binding her legs.
A minute later, she’s on her hands and knees, crawling over to the closet. Coming up onto one knee, Val reaches up and drags an upholstered box from a shelf, letting it fall. Spools of yarn and knitting needles tumble to the floor. Val sweeps her hands through them. Her hand lands on a small pair of scissors. She holds them up triumphantly.
John gives her a smile through the pain.
“Well,” says Dresden, “congratu-fucking-lations.” He laughs bitterly and spits on the floor. “Too bad you didn’t think of getting those before. You coulda stabbed me and still had the gun to take Stanley out.” He laughs again, then adds, “Hey, Doc… when you get out of here, be sure to have your wife tell you about her trip to Paris.”
When he’s free of the zip ties, John goes to the door and peeks out into the hallway. The music is back on downstairs. He listens. Beneath the rumbling bass and the tinny roar of the water still spewing from the tub, he can make out voices. A door slams.
There’s a loud bang, like something ramming into wood. Then a gun shot, clear as day, ringing out over the other sounds.
John turns to Val. “Did that sound like a rifle to you?”
She shakes her head. “Pistol.”
He waits, listens. Several more shots come, along with some pounding and yelling.
“Someone’s trying to get through the front door,” Val whispers.
The noises stop. Then a voice barks out something sounding like an order.
“There’s someone else in here,” John tells Val. “I think it’s a cop.”
He opens the door wider.
“Be careful,” Val says.
John steps out into the hallway, leaving the door ajar, ready to retreat back into the guest room and make his stand there if need be. He creeps toward the top of the staircase. He hears the voice call out below, telling someone to keep their hands up. Looking down the hallway, John sees that the light from the guest room is casting his shadow against the wall.
He wants to call out, tell him not to shoot, but he doesn’t want to let Stanley know that he’s gotten free. And if John distracts the cop, it might let Stanley get the drop on him. It might be best to stay put, let the cop do his job.
He’s about retreat into the guest room when he sees a short, shadowy figure emerge from around the corner at the far end of the hallway.
Good God… it’s the kid in the costume. He’s still holding the lacrosse stick as if it might—no. It’s not the lacrosse stick. He’s holding a gun. A single-barrel Winchester shotgun. Just like the one Val’s dad gave John.
The kid starts down the hallway toward the top of the staircase. John holds up his hands and shakes his head madly, trying to get the kid to stop, but he just keeps coming. He’s only a few feet from the stairs now. If the cop sees him with the gun, the kid is dead—no doubt about it.
John lunges forward.
A shot rings out. He reels back, chunks of drywall pelting him, dusting his face and hands with white powder.
There’s a new pain and blood dripping to the floor. Jesus. The bullet grazed the butt of his hand, just missing his fifth metacarpal.
He looks up. The kid has taken off back down the hallway. He disappears around the corner.
“Don’t shoot!” John shouts, pasting himself to the wall.
“Come out with your hands up!” the cop hollers from downstairs.
“I was trying to. Please. I’m unarmed. I’m one of the hostages, I’m not—”
“Come out with your hands up!”
“I’m going to show you my hands, and then I’m going to come out.”
No answer.
; “John!” Val whispers plaintively. He looks back to the guest room. Val is standing on one foot in the doorway, shaking her head and urging him to come back. “Don’t do it,” she mouths.
He swallows then calls out, “Okay, I’m putting my hands out now.”
Val shakes her head furiously. He turns away from her.
Taking a deep breath, bracing for more pain, he ventures one hand out beyond the edge of the wall, fingers splayed widely, blood dripping onto the railing. Then he reaches out the other hand. He waits a few seconds. “Okay, you see that I’m unarmed… I’m coming out now.”
He takes a couple of small, uneven steps—the soles of his feet cut and bruised from his sprint through the woods—and looks out over the railing down to the great room.
Standing by one of the front windows is a slight, boyish-looking police officer. His skin is sallow and sweaty, and even from this distance John can see the pink, puffy eyes of the chronically sleepless. This guy is in no shape to be driving, much less making life-and-death decisions.
The young cop looks John up and down, keeping his pistol trained on him. “Stay where you are.”
“My name is Jonathan Lavando.”
“Stay where you are!”
“My wife and I were taken captive by two intruders earlier this evening.”
“Is there anyone else up there with you?”
“Yes, my wife and one of the intruders. He’s subdued.”
“Are any of you armed?”
“No.”
The cop is shifting his weight from foot to foot, like he’s itching to make a move. “Did you see where he went? The big guy in the work clothes?”
“No. He went to answer the door, and that’s the last I saw him.”
“Come out!” the cop screams, scanning the various passages out of the great room. His cheeks flush. Thick purple veins throb in his neck. “I swear to God I’ll end these people if you don’t show your face, you fucker!”
The words take a moment to register in John’s brain. But when they do, the reality of the situation appears to him as clear as day: this young man is not here to help them. He may have been brought here by the panic alarm, but he’s got something else in mind now, an agenda of his own rattling around in his addled head, to which John and Val are only ancillary considerations.
John hesitates only a moment longer before taking off down the hall, past the staircase, in the direction the kid in the costume went. He’s leaving Val helpless in the guest room—he knows that—but they’ll all be sitting ducks if he doesn’t get his hands on that shotgun.
“Stay right there!” the cop shouts. He fires another two rounds up the stairs. But John is around the corner already, hauling his half-broken body toward the back staircase. For better or worse, he’s bringing this ordeal to an end.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Home
3:51 a.m.
Clara gazes out the passenger window, her eyes tracing the narrow portion of the Androscoggin River that runs alongside Route 2, until the road bends sharply to the left, leaving the water behind. She looks around at the hills and scattered houses, the convenient store with a big copper star up on the side, the unmarked gravel roads branching off from the two-lane highway.
“What town is this?” she says.
“Not sure,” says Jacob. “I didn’t see the sign. The towns out here are so small, you could probably make this trip a dozen times and still miss like a bunch of them.”
“Makes Great Falls seem like a booming metropolis.”
Jacob laughs. “You gotta get out and see the world, C.” He continues to laugh. She laughs too, then stifles it when she feels the stabbing pain again in her chest. “You all right?” Jacob asks.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little banged up, you know?”
“You sure you should have left the hospital?”
“You’re the one with the black eye.”
“Fair enough.”
“How’d that happen, anyway?”
“I called a guy a cunt.”
Clara gasps. “Are you serious.”
“Yeah,” says Jacob. “Perhaps he’s a feminist, and he took exception to the term.”
“Took exception?”
“Yeah, it means like he was offended by it, or he disapproved.”
“I know what it means, J., but who says that?”
“People,” says Jacob.
“What people?”
“Educated people.”
She scans his face, trying to tell if he’s serious. He glances at her. “What?”
“Nothing. You just sound like Dad.” She shakes her head and looks away. She waits a moment, then says, “I’ve got this feeling like we’re approaching this moment—as a family, I mean—where we’re gonna have to reassess who we are and where we all fit in.”
“Is this about me being… you know.”
“No, that’s… I mean, that’s part of it, but—”
“Because you made it sound like everybody knew already.”
“I’m talking about all of us,” she says. “Like Matthew’s on his big pilgrimage—”
“Please,” says Jacob, “Matthew is seeing how many countries he can get black-out drunk in before he’s on his way to Wall Street. And what about you? What kind of conversion are you undergoing, apart from a little late-night reckless driving?”
“I was not driving recklessly! That deer came out of nowhere!”
“I know, I know. I’m just fucking with you. But seriously, though, are you going through some stuff?”
“Yeah, sort of,” she says. “Maybe. I was thinking that I would make a really good lesbian.”
“Come on, C., being gay is not a choice.”
“Not for you, maybe, but I was reading that women tend to be a lot more fluid in terms of their sexual orientation. So maybe if I—”
“Stop. Seriously, stop.”
“Sorry.”
They come over a hill, the pre-dawn sky a palette of star-pocked lavender, lilac, and coral. The air feels heavy between them. In the silence, Clara senses that Jacob has come to acknowledge the point she is making, however tenuous and inchoate it may be.
“Well,” he says after a while, “whatever’s happening with the three of us, at least we’ve got Mom and Dad. ‘Cause you know that nothing is ever gonna change the two of them.”
“Yeah,” she says, “they’re about as stable as stable gets.” Her hand drifts up to her ribs. “How much longer is it?”
He glances at his phone, which sits in the consul beneath the stereo. “Monsieur Googlé tells me 20 minutes.”
She looks at him. “I like your hoodie, by the way,” she says. “Is that new?”
Jacob gives her a wry look, but says nothing. He picks at the steering wheel with a calloused fingertip.
Tess’s fingers trace a loose sine wave up Matthew’s naked belly. A lock of her hair tickles his nose. He smells something minty or herbal. The scent is scintillatingly familiar. He breathes in deeply, trying to place it.
She turns her head to look up at him. “Are you sniffing me?”
“Is there something wrong with that?” he says.
She narrows her eyes, then lowers her nose to his armpit and begins rooting around, yipping like a small dog. He laughs and wriggles. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you a taste of your own medicine,” she says.
“Uh… not exactly the same thing.”
“Turn over,” she says, “I want to sniff your butt.” She gets on her hands and knees and pushes at his ribs with her forehead.
“Stop it!” he says. “You do not want to sniff my butt right now. I haven’t showered since I left Spain. Besides, I wasn’t sniffing you. I was… breathing you in.”
She sits back on her heels, blushing. “Well, I guess that’s okay.” She looks at her phone on the nightstand. “Weren’t you supposed to be home by now?”
He looks at his phone. It’s almost 4am. “Shit… yeah.”
“I guess you should ge
t going.”
“I guess so.”
Neither of them moves. Tess puts a hand on his arm and begins to make little figure eights with her middle finger. “Then again,” she says, “they don’t even know you’re coming. So it’s not like anyone’s sitting by the window, waiting for you.”
“This is true.”
“So you could hang out here for a while, if you wanted. You could get a little sleep, and then we could get some pancakes or something. I could show you all the local attractions.”
“That sounds fun,” he says. “It’s just… I really did want to get home as soon as I can. I’ve got to talk to my folks, and I’m afraid if I put it off…”
“Right.” Her finger stops moving. Her eyes turn downward. “I gotcha.”
Matthew thinks. There’s got to be a way to get that finger moving again. “You could maybe… come with me, though,” he says.
“Mmmmm, I don’t know. I’ve missed way too much class as it is.”
“Right.” Matthew stands up and begins to get dressed. Tess gazes at him from the bed, bouncing slightly, her lips seeming to wrestle with each other in consideration.
“Then again,” she says, “what’s a couple more days?”
“I can drive you back on Tuesday,” he says.
“Really?”
“I’ve got nothing else going on right now. I can even help you study, get back on track. I’m pretty good at the whole school thing.”
“Don’t I know it,” she says, reaching down and picking up his Swarthmore sweatshirt. She makes to throw it at him, then stops and brings it to her nose, breathing in deeply.
He laughs and climbs back onto the bed.
“I thought you were eager to get going,” she says.
“What’s another 10 minutes?”
“Ten minutes?” she says. “Is that all I get?”
He yanks his t-shirt off and takes her in his arms. And as they kiss, it occurs to him—her hair. It has the sweet, piney scent of wild blueberries. The kind they used to pick at the edge of the forest in their backyard. This girl, she literally smells like home.
Jacob glances over at the passenger seat. Clara is asleep now. Her knuckles rest against the side of her eye socket, the way they used to when she was little, falling asleep on trips to the beach house. The same way he’s seen their dad nap on occasion. Must be in the blood. Unavailable to him.
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