After eighteen rings, he was about to hang up. Then: “Daddy?” Wren said, and he couldn’t help it, his knees just gave out.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, trying to tamp down the emotion in his voice. He remembered when she was a toddler, and she had fallen. If Hugh looked upset, Wren would burst into tears. If he seemed unfazed, she picked herself up and kept going. “Are you all right?”
“Y-yes.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.” A pause. “Is Aunt Bex—”
“She’s going to be fine,” Hugh said, although he did not know this for sure. “I want you to know I love you,” he added, and he could practically hear the panic rise in his daughter.
“Are you saying that because I’m going to die?”
“Not if I have anything to do with it. Would you ask George,” he said, and then he swallowed. “Would you ask him if he’d please speak to me?”
He heard muffled voices, and then George’s voice was on the line. “George,” Hugh said evenly, “I thought we had a deal.”
“We did.”
“You told me you’d release the hostages.”
“I did,” George said.
“Not all of them.”
There was a hitch in the conversation. “You didn’t specify,” George replied.
Hugh curled his body around the phone, like he was whispering to a lover. “You want to tell me what’s really going on, George?” A pause. “You can talk to me. You know that.”
“It’s all a lie.”
“What’s a lie?”
“Once I let your kid go, what happens to me?”
“We’ll talk about that when you come outside. You and me,” Hugh said.
“Bullshit. My life’s over, either way. Either I go to jail and rot there forever or they shoot me.”
“That won’t happen,” Hugh promised. “I won’t let it happen.” He glanced down at the notes he’d scribbled after his last discussion with George. “Remember? You end this, and you get to do the right thing. Your daughter—hell, the whole world—will be watching, George.”
“Sometimes doing the right thing,” George said quietly, “means doing something bad.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Hugh said.
“You don’t get it.” George’s voice was tight, distant. “But you will.”
That was a threat. That definitely sounded like a threat. Hugh glanced at the SWAT team commander. Quandt was staring at him from the corner of the tent. He lifted his arm, pointed to his watch.
“Let Wren go,” Hugh bargained, “and I will make sure you come out of this alive.”
“No. They won’t shoot me as long as I’ve got her.”
What Hugh needed to do was offer a viable alternative, one that did not involve Wren, but let George still believe he was protected.
Just like that, he knew what to do.
Hugh looked at the captain. There was no way Quandt would go for this. It was too risky. Hugh would lose his job—maybe his life—but his daughter would be safe. There was really no choice.
“George,” he suggested, “take me instead.”
—
BEX WAS DEAD. SHE HAD to be dead, because everything was white and there was a bright light, and wasn’t that what everyone said to expect?
She turned her head a fraction to the left and saw the IV pole, the saline dripping into her. The light overhead was fluorescent.
A hospital. She was the very opposite of dead.
Her throat tightened as she thought about Wren and about Hugh. Was her niece all right? She imagined Wren, knee bent, drawing on the white lip of her sneaker. She pictured Hugh leaning over her in the ambulance. That was how Bex saw the world, in images. Had she re-created it in her studio, she would call it Reckoning. She would highlight the cords of tension in Hugh’s neck, the vibration of Wren’s moving hand. The background would be the color of a bruise.
Bex had installations with collectors as far away as Chicago and California. Her works were the size of a wall. If you stood at a distance you might see a feminine hand on a pregnant belly. A baby reaching for a mobile overhead. A woman in the throes of labor. If you stepped closer, you saw that the portrait was made of hundreds of used, multicolored Post-it notes, carefully shellacked into place on a grid.
People talked about the social commentary of Bex’s work. Both her subject—parenthood—and her medium—discarded to -do lists and disposable reminders—were fleeting. But her transformation of that heartbeat, that particular second, rendered it timeless.
She had been famous for a brief moment ten years ago when The New York Times included her in a piece on up-and-coming artists (for the record, she never up and went anywhere, after that). The reporter had asked: since Bex was single and had no kids, had she picked this subject in order to master in art what was so personally elusive?
But Bex had never needed marriage or children. She had Hugh. She had Wren. True, she believed all artists were restless, but they weren’t always running in pursuit of something. Sometimes they were running away from where they had been.
A nurse entered. “Hey there,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
She tried to sit up. “I need to go,” she said.
“You aren’t going anywhere. You’re ten minutes out of surgery.” He frowned. “Is there someone I can get for you?”
Yes, please, Bex thought. But they are both currently in the middle of a hostage standoff.
If only it were that simple to rescue Wren. She couldn’t imagine what Hugh was feeling right now, but she had to believe in him. He’d have a plan. Hugh always had a plan. He was the one she called when the toilets in her house all stopped working at once, like a cosmic plot. He trapped the skunk that had taken up residence under her ancient Mini Cooper. He ran toward the scream of a burglar alarm, when everyone else was fleeing. There was nothing that rattled him, no challenge too daunting.
She suddenly remembered him, fifteen or sixteen, riveted by a comic book and completely ignoring her. Only when Bex grabbed it from him did he look up. Damn, Hugh had said, one syllable with equal parts shock, respect, and sadness. They killed off Superman.
What if she lost him? What if she lost them both?
“Can you turn on the television?” she asked.
The nurse pressed a button on a remote control and then settled it underneath Bex’s palm. On every local channel there was a live report about the Center. Bex stared at the screen, at the orange Creamsicle stucco of the building, the ribbons of police tape blocking it off.
She couldn’t see Hugh.
So she closed her eyes and sketched him in her imagination. He was silhouetted by the sun, and he was larger than life.
Bex could still remember the first time she realized that Hugh was taller than she was. She had been in the kitchen, making dinner, and had dragged a chair toward the cabinet so that she could reach the dried basil on the highest shelf. From behind her, Hugh had just plucked it off its rack.
In that moment, Bex realized everything was different. Hugh had grown up, and somehow she had gone from taking care of him to becoming the one who was being taken care of.
“Well,” she had said. “That’s handy.”
He’d been fourteen. He’d shrugged. “Don’t get used to it,” Hugh had said. “I won’t be here forever.”
Bex had watched him jog up the stairs to his room. And then, soon after, she had watched him go to college, fall in love, move into his own home.
No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier.
—
HUGH HUNG UP THE PHONE. “I’m going in,” he announced. “Alone. He wants a hostage? He can have me.”
“Absolutely not,” Quandt said, turning to a member of his team. “Jones, get your team to—”
Hugh ignored him and started walking. Quandt grabbed Hugh’s arm and spun him around.
“If you storm in there, there will be casualties,” Hugh said. “I am the only one he trusts. If I can get him to walk out with me, it’s a win.”
“And if you can’t?” the commander argued.
“I won’t condone an action that risks my daughter,” Hugh snapped. “So where does that leave us?” His fury was a shimmering curtain, but there were glimpses of what he was hiding behind it.