“Happy to help,” Morrow replies. And it is true. She’s been thinking lately about what she can do next year when Maya is off at college and her nest is empty. She will need something to fill her days. Perhaps she could do something with the elderly.
Nadine, also wanting to do what she can, goes behind the partition and gets three more stools, ignoring Tommy’s hollering that she can’t go back there as she drags them across the floor one by one, creating a little circle for them all to be able to sit.
“Where’s mine?” Tommy asks when she is done.
Nadine gives him a look. “This is all we’ve got,” she says. She bites back a smile at the look on Tommy’s face when he doesn’t get a seat. But he doesn’t protest as the three women tuck their belongings under their stools like Sylvie’s and settle into their places.
They sit silently as Sylvie sips Morrow’s water and the clock on the walltick, tick, ticks away the time. It is the only noise in the room until the post office phone rings again, startling them a second time. It is not a normal ring, so loud and shrill it makes a person want to answer it just to make it stop.
“That’ll be the police,” Sylvie says to Tommy. Her voice is stronger, and the color has come back to her face, thanks to the food. Blythe thinks of the woman who carried that fruit basket into the post office and the fear on her face as she dropped it and ran from Tommy and his gun. And yet it was good for Sylvie that she had left that fruit basket behind. Her gran used to say that everything works out for a reason, and in this case, it is true.
Tommy doesn’t answer the phone, which doesn’t surprise Blythe at all. Instead, he looks at the four of them, as if the obnoxious ringing noise is their fault. The phone rings again, then again, the shrill burst of sound sandpapering Blythe’s frayed nerves.
Mercifully, the phone stops ringing and Blythe sees her fellow captives’ shoulders relax in tandem with her own, hears the rush as they exhale breath they were all holding. No one says anything as they sit in the silence. Blythe thinks about her dog, Murphy, a Lab mix who passed away just six weeks ago. Blythe misses him all the time, is still surprised when he’s not there to greet her at the door when she comes home. He was a wonderful dog, the best. Except for when the phone rang. He would bark and bark and run around in circles till she answered it. Murphy would really lose it if he heardthatring. She smiles despite the lump in her throat.
Just then, Blythe’s phone goes off. She pulls it out of her pocket and places it in on her lap, but she doesn’t dare answer. She doesn’t move. She just waits for the ringing to end. They all look to Tommy as Sylvie’s phone goes off next, then Morrow’s after that, then Nadine’s, a sequence of buzzes and beeps and song. Tommy raises the gun again. Blythe wonders if the more he does that, the less it will impact her. For now, the action still resounds, her heart picking up speed at the sight of the barrel’s hole pointed in her direction.
“Not a one of you’d better answer,” Tommy says to them through clenched teeth.
Blythe holds up her hands, an expression of surrender. Tommy passes the gun by them all, going counterclockwise around their little circle. “No one’s talking to the cops,” he says. He seems to ponder this, then adds, “If anyone’s going to talk to them, it’ll be me.”
He lifts his gaze toward the ceiling, then looks back at them and holds out his free hand. “In fact, give me your phones.” When they don’t move at his command, he makes a grabbing motion. “Hand 'em over,” he tells them, impatient. They look at one another, conferring with their eyes as they grip their phones.
Should we give him our phones?their eyes say.
What will he do if we refuse—shoot us all?
That’s a bit extreme.
Blythe can read the whole conversation just from their expressions. She looks to Sylvie to see what she will do. Sylvie simply stares Tommy down, stone-faced, not surrendering her phone. Blythe’s gaze travels from Tommy to Sylvie and back again. She can see Tommy begin to waffle on his demand, realizing that, beyond shooting them, he has no recourse if they refuse to give him their phones.This is good, Blythe thinks. They are standing their ground together.
But the spell is broken as, one by one, Tommy simply goes around the ring of stools and takes the phones from their hands. They do not fight him, releasing the phones along with whatever power they may have momentarily reached for. Blythe feels a sense of defeat that goes beyond the loss of her means of communication as Tommy walks away with her phone. They should’ve stood up to him. They should’ve fought back like Morrow did. But Blythe will not fight back alone, and everyone else has given in. So she does as well.
Blythe watches Tommy try to balance all of the phones, plus his gun, as he goes behind the counter and deposits the phones into the same box where Nadine dropped her package hours ago. Again she thinks of asking to retrieve it. Again she keeps silent.
She looks away from Tommy and wonders if she will get out of here. And if she does, if she will be able to take that package with her. She made a mistake in mailing it, repeating an old pattern of appeasing her mother. The one good thing in all of this, she thinks, is that perhaps her mistake can be rectified. There is still time, she hopes, to undo what’s been done, still time for everything to work out for a reason.
Chapter 18
The time passes. No one speaks.
The post office line rings again, the same obnoxious ring as before. This time Sylvie speaks up when the ringing starts. “They’re going to keep calling until you answer that,” she tells Tommy, who, since he’s decided to stay away from the windows, has taken to lapping their circle of stools like a deranged game of “Ring Around the Rosie.”
He doesn’t respond to the ringing, but he does stop circling to try to peer out the windows, pacing back and forth from window to window, surely not really seeing anything from the distance. He only stops moving when the phone stops ringing.
“If they can’t make contact with you, they’ll resort to other kinds of attempts,” Sylvie tells him.
He stops, glares at her. “Oh yeah? How do you know that?”
She considers her response. “I’m a retiree. I’ve got a lot of time to watch cop shows.”
He chuckles at that, shakes his head. “That sure don’t make you an expert.”
She shrugs. She doesn’t care about his opinion. “Time will tell,” she retorts.
She turns to see the other women looking at her expectantly. But she’s got no real answers for them. Urging Tommy to communicate with whoever is on the other side of that barricade istheir best hope. And until he does, they are stuck. She will do her best to keep up morale, but the boredom and stress are taking their toll.
When the phone starts up again, Tommy claps his hands to his ears, exaggerating like a child would. “Make them stop that,” he says, looking at her like she can.
