“I’m afraid,” she said, and she seemed to shrink just for having said it.
“Don’t be silly,” he said, and he put out his hand.
“I’m afraid of you,” she said, and she whacked it with the flashlight before retreating into the gut of the pot. Whacked it so hard, he was sure she’d fractured a bone.
He leapt out of the cistern and wedged between his thighs what had instantly come to feel like the omnibus of every pain he had ever had.
So now he, too, was afraid. But also hurt. What had he ever done to Marie? He’d been putting her through school. What sort of thanks was this? His intentions were good. They had always been good! His knuckles looked like popcorn. He had to find ice.
It had been more than two days since the Helix had taken the hostages. Thurlow had not provided a ransom tape or issued any demands, so when he found Norman on the phone, hashing it out with the FBI negotiator, he could well imagine the impatience with which Norman’s parries were met. The pain in his hand was blunt but durable. He could not move his fingers. Still, there was nothing like pain to make appreciable the rapport between crime and punishment. Suffering always feels punitive, even when it’s not. Why should his hand be any different? And when ATF ignited the house and his skin took on the hue and texture of boiled toffee, why should that be any different, either?
Norman put the negotiator on speakerphone. Thurlow listened for a carrot-stick routine and got a version thereof, something like: Come out and get shot; stay in and be gassed. He looked at the fireplace. There was a Duraflame in the grate and a bellows on the hearth. A fire might be nice. The candent logs, crackle of wood. He was about to light up when Norman flipped closed his phone and swatted the matches out of his hand. Fire at a time like this? Need Norman mention the FBI wanted to gas them? That this gas was pyrotechnic?
Thurlow’s phone rang, and for a second, his heart was conned — It’s her! It’s her! — only it wasn’t Esme, just his father telling him to look outside.
He crawled over to the window on his stomach. He parted the blinds. He saw police cars and tanks, the Mount Carmel brigade, a few ambulances, a festival of lights, and several men in BDUs aiming firearms at the front of the property, likely the rear and sides also. And there, in the middle of this half-moon formation, was his father, sided with the enemy.
Thurlow’s mouth fell open. He was not quick to anger, and when he did anger, he did it poorly. So, fine, he could not break things. What he could do was hurt people, so he left off from the window and ran to his father’s quarters. His phone started ringing again, again and again, and he could hear Wayne yelling for help.
He punched for the elevator, and when it did not come fast enough, he headed for the stairs. At last, the house alarm went off in its minor key. And it was so sad, it wrung his heart of just enough rage that instead of taking the stairs three at a time, he took them by twos and allowed his father to beat him to his bird, Tyrone.
Wayne was barring access to the bathroom, though by now Thurlow didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything.
He could hear his father breathing hard; he was doing the same. He sat at the table. Flicked at the ashtray so that it skidded overboard. A cigarette butt rimmed with lipstick fell into his lap.
“So,” he said, “father mine. Father dearest. How long? A month? A year?”
“Just today.” His father unwrapped his turban bandage to disclose the smallest camera Thurlow had ever seen at the tip of a snake wire. “I’m sorry, son.”
“Impressive,” he said.
“Wireless broadcast. Good quality, too. Technology is a marvel.”
Thurlow shook his head. “Jesus, Dad. How did they get to you? And what about the seizure?”
Wayne grinned. “Fake. You’d think for how many I’ve had, I’d have a clue what they looked like. But I had to study. Ask Deborah. She had to watch me flailing on the floor all morning.”
“And your marriage?”
“Solid. The feds thought maybe they could get one of their own in here as a fake counselor or something. But, son, enough of all this craziness, okay?”
“Don’t you care if I go to jail?”
Wayne had begun to pack up Tyrone’s things. “Of course I care. But I’d rather you in jail than dead or carrying on like this. Now go tell those four people to come out. I swear. Sometimes I think you have totally lost your mind.”
“I am not letting them go. They are all I have now to get Esme back. Her and Ida. Dad, she’s ten years old next week!”
“Ida? Esme? Is that what this is about? You really have gone insane. All this for a woman? That witch. There is no more destructive thing on earth than a woman!” He pounded his fist on the table, upsetting an empty can of root beer.
“You weren’t so sympathetic when it mattered,” he said. “Too little, too late.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. If you tell the press your neglecting dad is to blame for this stupid thing you’ve done, I will kill you myself.”
“Fine, Dad. If you can just wait five minutes, I want to give you a videotape I made for Ida. Then you and the bird can get out of here.”
His father stopped his labors and came to sit opposite him. “Son, if you really want them back, how did you think this would help? Were you planning on ransoming — oh, good God. You were.”
Thurlow frowned. “But I didn’t. I was afraid they still wouldn’t come, so I didn’t.”
“Right, and to hell with all the people who apparently believe in what you’re doing.” And when Thurlow seemed taken aback, Wayne said, “Do I look brain dead to you, son? The whole world knows about the Helix.”
Thurlow put his forehead on the table and spoke into his lap. He said, “I have no hope of ever seeing my family again. I wish I were dead.”
Wayne stood up. “But I don’t. So let’s go.”
“Can’t you wait a few minutes? Let me just give you this present for Ida. Just do this one thing.”
Wayne said no and asked again if Thurlow would come. “Do you really want to change people’s lives? You can. Every news station in town is here. Everyone is watching. I’m going to tell them that you are coming out and releasing the hostages and to hold their fire.”
Thurlow put out his hand, and when Wayne shook it, Thurlow was surprised to feel the adamance of his father’s grip and his own reluctance to let his father go.
Norman was dumped on a couch. The despair was coming off him in whorls.
Thurlow said, “How many of us are still here?”
Norman and him, the hostages, some midlevels.
“Deborah?”
No idea.
“Charlotte?”
“Split.”
“The rest?”
“Split.”
“This captain-goes-down-with-the-ship thing has its virtues.”
Norman said, “Do you have to see everything as though it’s not actually happening to you? There’s a reality here. We need to deal with it and consider an exit strategy.”
Thurlow held up his hand, which was red and thick like a beet. “The dietician,” he said. “With her flashlight.”
“That’s absurd,” Norman said, and began to laugh. “Of all the ways to get hurt on a day like this.”
“Don’t laugh.”
Norman stopped, and the look on his face was awful.
Thurlow squinted and puckered the skin between his eyebrows, which he pinched until it hurt. “You know I didn’t mean for it to get to this.”
Norman knew.
Thurlow unwrapped his hand because he could not feel blood touring the digits.