“Are you OK, Kylie?” Pete asks. “Did they hurt you?”
“The man hit me after I hit him and tried to escape. It really hurt,” Kylie says.
“Shit,” Pete says, his fists clenching by his sides.
“You must have been terrified,” Rachel says.
Kylie speaks and Pete and Rachel listen.
She tells them everything.
They let her words spill out. If she wants to talk about it, they’ll let her talk. Kylie isn’t one who clams up, and for this Rachel is grateful. She strokes her daughter’s hair and smiles at her bravery.
She heats the pizza while Pete goes back to the Appenzellers’ to check on Amelia.
Kylie goes up to her bedroom to see all her stuff.
“Mom, can I text with Stuart and all my friends now? Would that be OK?” Kylie asks.
“Yes, but you have to tell him that you had a stomach bug, OK?”
“OK, I guess. And what do I tell Dad?”
“Oh, crap, that’s a whole thing. You have to tell your father that you went to New York,” Rachel says, and she explains the situation with her father and Tammy and her grandmother.
“I need my phone!”
Rachel gets the phone. “I couldn’t fake-text for you because I didn’t know your passcode.”
“It’s so obvious: two-one-nine-four.”
“What’s that?”
“Harry Styles’s birthday! Oh my God, I have a million messages.”
“You have to tell people you were sick.”
“I will. But I want to go to school Monday. What day is it tomorrow?”
“Monday.”
“I wanna go to school.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I want you to get checked out by a doctor.”
“I’m fine. I want to go to school! I want to see everybody.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t want to be cooped up in a house again.”
“Well, no school bus, not anymore. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Hey, where’s my stuffed bunny? Where’s Marshmallow?” Kylie asks.
“I’ll get Marshmallow back for you tonight.”
“He’s not lost?”
“No.”
Kylie sends texts to her friends, who are probably all sleeping. She and Rachel lie in bed and watch her favorite YouTube clips: A-Ha’s “Take On Me” video, the Monty Python fish-slapping dance, half a dozen videos from the rap group Brockhampton, the bit in Duck Soup where Groucho is suspicious of his own reflection.
Kylie showers and asks for some alone time, and when Rachel goes to check on her half an hour later, she is fast asleep. Rachel collapses on the couch and weeps.
Pete comes back at six in the morning and puts a couple of logs on the fire. “Everything OK over there?” Rachel asks.
“Amelia is still asleep.”
Pete makes a pot of coffee and they sit by the fire.
Everything seems back to the way it was before. Fishing boats heading out into the Merrimack. Bernstein on WCRB. The Globe arriving in its plastic wrap in front of the house.
“I can’t believe she’s home,” Rachel says. “There were times when I thought I’d lost her forever.”
They watch the logs whiten and slowly turn to ash. Rachel’s phone rings. Unknown Caller. She answers it on speaker.
It’s the distorted voice. It is The Chain speaking directly to her: “I know what you’re thinking. It’s what everyone thinks when they get their loved ones back. You think you can release your hostage and end this. But the thing is, you can’t fight tradition. Do you know what a tradition is, Rachel?”
“What do you mean?”
“A tradition is a living argument. A living argument for a practice that began a long time ago. And it works for our particular tradition. If you mess with The Chain, it will be sure to get you and your family. Leave the country, go to Saudi Arabia or Japan or wherever. Change your name, change your identity. We’ll always find you.”
“I get it.”
“Do you get it? I hope so. Because it’s not over. It won’t be over until the people you’ve recruited do what they’re supposed to do without screwing up and the ones they’ve recruited do their job without screwing up. We haven’t had a defection in The Chain for a few years now, but they happen. People think they can beat the system. They can’t. No one can, and you’re not going to.”
“The Williams family.”
“There are others who have tried. No one has ever succeeded.”
“I’m going to keep my word.”
“Be sure that you do. We put ten thousand dollars in your bank account this morning—that’s ten percent of the money the Dunleavys paid. We took it out of the same Bitcoin account they put their money into. I don’t know how you would ever explain that to the federal authorities. Even if you somehow escaped our assassins, which no one ever has, we’d release all this information and you’d go to prison. The evidence is all there to reveal you as the genius behind a sophisticated kidnapping ring. You’re smart. You can see the big picture, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Good,” the voice says. “We probably won’t speak again. Goodbye, Rachel, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
“I can’t say the same.”
“It could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse.”
When the call ends, Rachel shudders and Pete puts his arms around her. She’s so pale and thin and fragile, and her heart is beating so fast. Like a wounded bird that you put in a shoe box and nurse back to life, hoping that one day it will be able to fly again.
36
Sunday, 4:00 p.m.
Kylie finally comes down the stairs. She’s got her iPad in one hand, her phone in the other, and Eli over her shoulder.
“I had over a hundred and fifty Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter notifications,” Kylie says, trying to sound upbeat.
Rachel smiles. So much for her idea of going full tinfoil hat and killing social media. Kylie returns her mother’s smile. Both of us faking it for each other, Rachel thinks. “You’re a popular girl,” she says.
“I talked to Stuart. Everybody seems to have bought the whole sickness story. And I texted Grandma too. She’s fine. I even e-mailed Dad.”
“I’m sorry I made you do that.”
Kylie nods and doesn’t say It’s OK because it’s not OK to make your daughter lie to her friends and family.
“You were careful what you said?”
“I was.”
“If you say one thing on social media, the whole world sees.”
“I know, Mom. I can’t ever tell anyone, can I?”
“No…are you OK, my darling?” Rachel asks, stroking Kylie’s face.
“Not really,” Kylie says. “I was so scared down there. There were times when I thought I was going to—I don’t know—disappear? You know that thing where some people think that if other people leave the room, they just don’t exist anymore.”
“Solipsism?”
“That’s what I thought was happening to me down there in the basement. I thought that I was starting not to exist because no one was thinking about me.”