Joan stays perfectly still, studying the girl’s face to decide whether she might be a girlfriend of the shooters, someone sent to play games with the prey. But the girl looks very young and very nervous, and it is hard to suspect her of anything.
‘If you want,’ the girl says, only the back of her head showing as she turns and looks out into the darkness, sounding both uncertain and annoyed.
It is the annoyance that convinces Joan. She wraps one arm around Lincoln and lifts him up, waiting until his feet are under him, and then she pushes herself to her knees, swiping the banana leaves from her face. She pushes her son in front of her, past the Coke machine, shoving, scuttling, his hand twisting in her shirt, everything awkward, her thighs aching, and then they are stepping inside the restaurant and the glass door is closing behind them, too loudly.
Squatting on the balls of her feet, Joan keeps an arm around Lincoln’s waist. There is a long crack in the door, she notices, a silvery line that spreads across the glass in the shape of a chicken’s foot.
The girl is in front of her, motionless, also bent low to the ground. They are next to the lunch counter, with the cash register to their left. There is an entire wall of windows to their right. The ceiling lights are off, but the display cases of the restaurant are lit from within, so there is a fluorescent glow to the room, and the white plastic tables and chairs – she thinks they are white – are now the pale green of deep-sea creatures.
The girl has turned toward them, reaching over their heads, her armpit coming close. She smells pleasantly of powder and bread.
‘The door,’ the girl says, flipping the deadbolt.
Then the girl is bent down again, moving forward, past the food counter, and they follow her. A few tables have the chairs neatly turned over on top of them, legs in the air, but other chairs and even tables are scattered sideways across the floor. There is a red rope strung between two poles, the kind used to tell people where to stand in line, and the poles themselves are turned over so that their round bases are standing up.
‘Back this way,’ the girl is saying, waving them forward, as if they are not already so close that they might step on her feet.
‘Who is that?’ asks Lincoln, his voice warm and damp against Joan’s cheek.
His hand is still wrapped in the hem of her shirt, pulling.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, and she realizes she does not know many things, like why she has decided to close herself in this building with a stranger. The door opened and there was another human being, which seemed like a godsend – although if God were sending anyone, why a teenager? – and maybe this is a terrible mistake. Still, she cannot think of turning around. She feels compelled to move forward, and why is that?
Her brain is spinning off, pell-mell, but her feet are plodding along. Hunchbacked, they pass the empty metal-and-glass cases where food used to be – muffins, she thinks, and apple Danishes. They are keeping below the level of the windows that line the wall. Glancing through those windows, she can see the underside of the thatched roof and the darkness beyond the spotlights. The dark looks total in a way that it did not when she was outside – she sees nothing of the elephants’ domain, nothing of the faraway pine trees or the lighted streets. The straw roof stretches forever, and the world beyond might as well be actual Africa.
She wonders about the reverse view – from outside the restaurant looking in. Just how clearly are they outlined and highlighted? Is there someone outside thinking that her skin looks pale green like a sea animal’s?
She faces forward again. The girl’s hair is dyed a dark red in this light. Streaks of black and rust.
The music outside is a monotone hum.
There is a dead ladybug on the floor. Lincoln does not see it, and the shell crunches under his shoe.
The girl is picking up speed. Joan stays close, with Lincoln wrapped around her but moving by his own power. Her thighs are screaming from this squatted-over walking.
They round the counter and turn into the kitchen area, passing stainless-steel counters and a massive stove with many knobs of all sizes. The tile floor is slightly slick, and she takes care to place her feet carefully and to keep a tight grip on Lincoln’s hand.
‘Nearly there,’ whispers the girl.
The kitchen comes to an end – no more appliances – and the tile floor curves into a short hallway that ends with a stainless-steel door. The girl pushes open the door, and they step into a room with steel counters on both sides and cardboard boxes stacked under the counters. The lights are off, of course, but one square window high on the wall lets in some combination of moonlight and the glare of the outdoor spotlights.
There is a woman sitting on the floor. An older woman, white-haired and pale-skinned, leaning back against a stack of boxes. She is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she nods once, her face shadowed.
‘Come on in,’ says the woman.
‘This way, Lincoln,’ Joan says, steering her son into the room as she nods back at the woman.
The cardboard boxes fill every inch of floor space other than a narrow path down the center of the room. Joan can make out plastic forks and spoons in one box and coffee filters in another, but most of them are taped shut. Above the counters at least a dozen ladles hang along a magnetic strip. There is a block of knives. Farther down, a pool of shining red makes her flinch, but then she sees the ketchup bottles, seven – eight – glass bottles of ketchup in a neat line. The lids have been removed, and in one spot the ketchup has overflowed onto the counter and pooled onto the floor.
‘I was marrying them,’ the girl says, sliding the lock on the steel door.
Joan looks back, and the door is so polished that even in the dim light there is a reflection of the girl, a wraith, mimicking the lift and fall of the girl’s arms. The reflection in the door collapses smoothly to the floor just as the real girl does, limbs folding until she is sitting, cross-legged.
The real girl is wearing a maroon beret, the same color as her braids, and her jeans are loose around her hips. She is bird-boned.
‘I mean the ketchup,’ the girl says. She props an elbow on a cardboard box labeled NON-DAIRY CREAMER. ‘I was marrying the bottles when I heard them come in, and I spilled some, and it seemed dumb to clean it up after, you know?’
‘Ketchup?’ repeats Lincoln, crowding close, his feet tangling up in Joan’s feet as she shoves at a box, trying to make a space.
As Joan sits, she studies the room. Only one door. And the one window is too high, surely, for anyone to see inside. She finds it easier to focus on the space around them – the strengths and weaknesses of it – than to make sense of whatever the girl is saying about condiments.
Other than the girl’s voice, it is quiet in the room. Joan can no longer hear the Halloween music. She is not sure that she likes the silence.
Her feet, she realizes, are almost touching the older woman, who is silent and watching. Joan draws her legs closer to her body, and she situates Lincoln on her thigh. His legs land in the space between her knees.
‘So you were here when the shooters came into the restaurant?’ she whispers to the woman.
‘Not me,’ the woman answers, voice low. ‘I was by the elephants. I had headphones on, so I didn’t even hear the shots at first. But she found me. Like she found you.’
‘They didn’t know,’ the girl says, not whispering. Like she is sitting on a couch somewhere, gossiping over pizza and Dancing with the Stars. ‘The men. They didn’t know that I was here. They didn’t even look hard. That’s the weird thing. Wouldn’t you think they would have checked harder? Like, that they would have been really serious about it? Aren’t you supposed to have a plan for things like this?’
The girl’s questions use up so many words.
‘Should we talk more quietly?’ Joan whispers.
‘Why?’ The girl gives a slight roll of her shoulders. ‘You can’t hear anything in here from outside the door. Trust me, I’ve tried, because when the manager wants to tear a strip off someone she’ll come back here and close the door and there was this one girl who was always eating coffee cake, like a crazy addiction to coffee cake, and all of us wondered, I mean – anyway – I was saying how I was back here when the men came inside. No customers were here, which is a good thing, I mean, because – but after the men walked out again, I opened the door and watched them leave, and from the window I could see a man and a woman going down the path and I heard shots, and then they fell. But maybe they got up later.’
Joan is having to focus very closely on every word the girl is saying. It is like arriving in a country where she thinks she speaks the language, but then some taxi driver or concierge starts speaking at full speed, and she realizes all her practice and CD-listening have not prepared her for it: even though she has the vocabulary, she’s only getting one out of every three or four words.
‘Maybe,’ she says to the girl, and she catches the white-haired woman’s eye.
They study each other for a moment, and she notices that even though the woman is wearing a sweatshirt, she is also wearing silver earrings and a necklace, and her hair is carefully styled – it looks like it would bounce back into place if you touched it. Her nails are manicured. Nothing flashy – some sort of pastel color. Tasteful. Cautious.
Joan suspects this is a woman who never leaves the house without fixing her face.
She regrets following the girl. She does not want to be here.
The girl tilts her hair-heavy head backward, staring up. She is swaying slightly, making her hair swing over her shoulders.
‘Have you ever heard about how if anyone pulls a gun on you and tries to force you into a car,’ the girl says, ‘you’re better off running away from them, because the chance of killing you with a shot from even, like, six feet away is only something like 60 per cent? And if you get ten feet away, it’s like 30 per cent? So they might shoot you, but they probably won’t kill you. And if they were thirty or forty or fifty feet away, it’s not likely at all.’
Joan looks down at Lincoln, who has shifted on her thigh. He seems to be absorbed with what looks like a potato masher – she does not know how it wound up in his hand – but he is often listening more closely than she realizes. She does not want to discuss the ins and outs of gunshot wounds.
‘How old are you?’ she asks the girl.
‘Sixteen.’
The girl sounds proud. Joan has nearly forgotten that feeling – to feel delighted with your age.
‘So what happened?’ she asks again, because the more she knows about the gunmen, the better. ‘When the men came in here?’
The girl leans back farther against her cardboard box. Her jaw works slightly, like she is sucking on a cough drop or chewing gum.
‘At first?’ the girl says. ‘At first I heard a scream outside. But there’s screaming sometimes, you know? Like kids running around – you know that elephant statue that sprays water? And they let them feed the giraffes and sometimes kids freak out at their tongues. Also the music is up loud anyway, and I’m busy with the closer’s list. Then the screaming went away, and then everything was pretty quiet for a while. Did you hear the guns?’
The girl’s voice is still so loud. Joan fights the urge to shake her. We are going to die if you keep talking like this, she wants to say. She understands, logically, a soundproof door, but logic is not asserting itself.
‘We heard them from a distance,’ Joan says calmly. Logically. ‘He and I were in the woods in the children’s area. I didn’t know the sound was gunfire.’
Lincoln drops his potato masher, and he stands up to retrieve it. The older woman hands it to him. He takes it from her cautiously.
The girl is nodding enthusiastically. ‘Me neither. They were far away at first. We were already closed – door locked and everything – and I was back here when I heard somebody at the door.’
‘Shhh,’ Joan says, unable to help herself. ‘A little quieter.’
‘They can’t hear us,’ the girl repeats.
The white-haired woman reaches out a hand, touching the girl’s arm. Not a light touch but a firm one, her manicured hand closing on the arm.
‘Shush,’ says the woman, and there is a surprising authority in her voice. ‘She’s right. Keep your voice down.’
The girl looks surprised, but she nods. The woman pats her arm before she lets it go.
‘Very good,’ says the older woman.
Joan considers her again, reassessing.
‘Anyway,’ says the girl, finally whispering, ‘I was marrying the ketchups – it always gets on my hands, and no matter how hard you try there’s splotches on your arms and wrists, and you don’t notice it until it’s dried – and I heard a knocking, and at first I thought someone maybe needed to use the bathroom.’
The girl stretches her thin legs out straight, then she folds them on top of each other like origami. She is always moving.
Lincoln is watching the girl now, eyes big and attentive. The potato masher is forgotten.
‘No,’ the girl says, chewing again, ‘do you know what I actually thought? Did I say how I used to work at Hawaiian Ice? The lady who runs it goes to my church. Anyway, there was this old woman who came in every Saturday …’
The girl pauses, but she never seems to be looking for a response. The pauses are only part of her rhythm.
‘She always wanted to touch my hair,’ she continues. ‘Ladies do that sometimes, white ladies, no offense, but she just wouldn’t leave until she’d felt my hair, and sometimes she’d run late, and I’d have closed the windows because it was closing time, and she’d bang until I opened.’
This pause seems like an opportunity. Joan is no longer sure the girl can stop herself.
‘But you were telling me about the gunmen?’ she prompts.
‘Yeah. So I cracked open this door’ – the girl nods at the solid door over her shoulder – ‘and I could see the men kick the side door open, and I could see the gun. Like a rifle or something? They came inside and started tossing things, and that was stupid, don’t you think? I mean, I wouldn’t have known they were here if they’d been quiet about it. But when the two of them came in and started wrecking everything, I just locked this door behind me. The lock’s on the inside. Somebody got stuck in here one time, I think. You can unlock it from outside, too, but you need the key, and I have the only one. So it’s safe in here.’
The girl swallows whatever she was chewing.
‘She’s wearing a hat,’ announces Lincoln.
‘You like hats?’ asks the girl, touching her beret.
He nods. It has been years since he would watch the sidewalks, scanning crowds of pedestrians and bikers, and he would point his finger as he named headgear. Hat. Helmet. Hat. Hat. Helmet, he would call out.
‘I still haven’t seen the men myself,’ says the older woman, flexing her leg with a grimace. ‘I would have walked straight into them if Kailynn hadn’t grabbed me. What about you?’
‘We were nearly at the exit when I saw them,’ Joan says. ‘Then I ran up to the old porcupine exhibit.’
The older woman smiles down at Lincoln. It is a nice smile, completely detached from everything going on around them. ‘Did you pretend you were a porcupine? With sharp quills?’ The woman taps one finger against Lincoln’s head and jerks her hand back. ‘Ouch!’
Lincoln laughs. It is a shocking, bubbling sound. The light from the window catches the woman’s face, and her expression is cheerful and focused, and Joan has a suspicion.
‘Are you a teacher?’ she asks.
The woman dips her head, lips curving slightly. ‘Third grade. Thirty-six years. I retired last year.’
‘Which school?’
‘Hamilton Elementary.’
At a cocktail party or a luncheon, Joan would say, ‘Oh, I have a friend who sent both her kids to Hamilton,’ and the two of them would keep going in the universal way of small talk, but the back-and-forth of it feels wrong now. She will not act like everything is normal. And she does not want to know more about these people. There is no need for chatter.
Kailynn, the woman said. The girl’s name is Kailynn.
‘When you saw the men,’ Joan says to Kailynn, ‘did you see any sign of hostages?’
‘Hostages?’ the girl says. ‘Why would they be shooting people if they wanted hostages?’
Joan shakes her head. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe it is a waste of time and energy to even try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.
‘You want to try on my hat?’ Kailynn says to Lincoln.
‘No, thank you,’ he says.
The girl twists around, lifting the flap of a box on her left. With a rustle of cellophane, she pulls out a small bag.
‘You know what I have?’ Kailynn says. ‘Some animal crackers.’
Even in the dim light, Joan can see Lincoln’s teeth flash.