Someone Else's Love Story (6 page)

But he can feel the presence of the child sheltered behind him. He doesn’t want this boy, who, in a different universe might have gone to school with Twyla, might have been her friend, to be shot if William is not fast enough. He stays where he is.

“Open the safe, you old piece a shit,” the gunman says, jerking the gun at the old man.

“It’s on a timer!” the old man says.

The robber uses his free hand to wipe at his damp nose. “You think I’m stupid? I been watching you, weeks now. You think I don’t know about when the safe’s timer goes off? I’mma start shooting all these people if you don’t get a bag and fill it up for me. And you”—now the guy is talking to William—“you can lay all the way down flat on your stomach on your own, or you can lay down flat because I’ve put one in your brain pan.”

If William complies, he will lose some options. Still, the child is directly behind William. If William stands and the man fires toward him, the bullets will be moving in the direction of the child. William lies flat on his belly.

He makes his arms into a pillow and rests his cheek on it. His face is now pointed directly at the dark-haired girl in the poppy dress. She stares intently at William, communicating urgency, and then her gaze slides past him to the child. So they are a set, too, like the old couple is a set.

He hears a scuffling sound behind him, then feels a small weight pressing into his side. The child has scooted along the floor to him, and now he fists his hands in William’s shirt. He is panting into William’s armpit.

William scans the room. The old lady is looking at him. The clerk, down on the ground, glances his way, too. Even the old man shifts his gaze to William as he goes behind the counter with the gunman to empty the safe. The herd is following his lead, so he lies still and quiet and waits for it to be over.

Now the gunman has the bag. He says, “That’s all?”

The old man says, “We don’t keep much cash. Everyone has a bank card these days.” He sounds both defensive and apologetic.

The gunman empties the register drawer, too, and directs the old man to lie down with the rest of them. He grabs two cartons of cigarettes, stuffs them into his plastic grocery bag on top of the money, then swings the gun around back and forth, sweeping his gaze across all of them in turn.

“No one move for ten minutes, or I will surely come back here and shoot you,” he says, which is truly the stupidest threat William has ever heard.

The gunman starts to turn away. In thirty seconds he will be gone. It seems the decision to lie quietly down will pay off.

Then William hears the Christmas bells, chiming again.

He thinks three words:
Here we go.

It’s a cop. A female state cop in her uniform, swinging cheerfully through the door with an environmentally sound travel mug for coffee in her hand.

The gunman and the state cop see each other, both reacting with a whole-body shock that reverberates through them and opens their faces up into circles, eyes and mouths widening at the same time. She halts directly in the doorway.

She drops her mug and reaches for the gun at her hip, but the door swings shut and bangs her in the back. She fumbles it. William is faster than she is. He should have moved when he had the chance. Now he is flat on his belly with a little boy clutching his shirt. He can’t stand up and run toward gunplay with a child clinging and dangling down his side.

The gunman pulls the trigger, and it seems to William that he smells the sulphur before he hears the bang. This isn’t possible, but this is how he experiences it, in spite of science. He barely clocks the blood that appears in a wash on the shoulder of her blue uniform shirt; he is noticing instead her face, how it stretches and thins, as if the entry of a bullet into the closed system of her body is fundamentally changing her already. The late-coming sound feels loud in the small market. It starts a ringing in his ears. The child makes a noise and pushes his face into William. The face feels wet, and the wetness is absorbed by William’s shirt, coming through the cloth to touch his skin.

The bullet shoves the state cop backward, against the door, which opens. It spills her onto the ground outside. She is already rolling to the side as the door swings shut behind her in a cheery jangle of bells.

The clerk on the floor says, “Oh no. Oh no, no, no,” in a soft, conversational tone.

William’s body has more adrenaline after all. It is dumping into his bloodstream, and he can feel his heartbeat pounding through all his limbs and in his spine, even in his eyes. He closes them against the rhythm, knowing now that the gun in the room is real and powerful. It can change and end things in an instant. William, of all people, should have understood this. An unaccountable longing rises up inside him, and what he feels for the cop in that moment is both beautiful and terrible. He has no name for it.

He hears the gunman yelling, “Holy shit! Holy shit!”

When he opens his eyes, he sees the gunman has his back to them all, scrabbling to lock the door, then wheeling back around to face them, all lying still and obedient on the ground.

“This is not the plan,” the gunman says helplessly to the old couple, and William sees how young he is now, too. His nose is running; his upper lip shines with sweat and mucus. The clerk is young. The girl in the poppy-covered dress is young. The room is full of children, and one of them has a gun. He brings his gun now to bear on William, then the dark-haired girl, then the old couple. He swings it back and forth like this is still pretend, a television show. It isn’t. It is real.

The gunman says it again, this time to the clerk. “This is not the fucking plan.”

You are angry,
William thinks at the gunman. The thought comes in the voice of a young Bridget, her high school voice.
You are angry because your robbery has been thwarted.
The gunshot, the real gun in the room, has banged her banished voice back into his aching head. He doesn’t know how he will ever shove it out again.

“How can I get out of here?” the gunman asks.

The old man opens his mouth and closes it, like a fish gulping its way through an air drowning.

“Got’damn tell me!” the gunman hollers.

It is the clerk who finally answers. “Go out the back. It’s not locked from inside, but can’t no one come in thattaway.”

The
th
sound comes out airy and too soft as her tongue pushes against the empty place where most of her front teeth should be. William feels his tongue make an inadvertent checking gesture, running across his own front teeth, intact.

Out in the lot, there is a shot cop. William wonders if there is anyone to help her, or if she is conscious and using her radio. Maybe she has her own gun out now, pointed at the door, waiting for the gunman to step through.

The gunman must also be wondering all these things, only slower, through the cloud of drugs that have made him so glossy-eyed and frantic.

“She’s out there right by my damn car,” he says accusingly, to the old man. “I’m screwed! I’m screwed!”

The old man says nothing, and the gunman stamps his feet, making a terrible, inarticulate gargling noise. The little boy still presses his wet face into William’s side, and William threads his other arm beneath himself to pat at the boy, awkwardly, as best he can while lying on his stomach.

The gunman should leave. Most likely the cop is too busy bleeding into the gravel to stop him if he is fast. She might be dying.

William does not want her to be dying, and this is the right thing to want. He is having a good and human reaction. No one would want that for her. But the voice of Bridget, loose inside his head, won’t let him stop there. She is naming it. She is naming the terrible, beautiful thing.

You are envious. You are envious of that cop because for her, everything will go dark and be quiet and stop.

William’s gaze finds the gun. It is a .32 revolver, probably a six-shooter. That means there are five more bullets in it.

And then, for the second time in his life, he finds himself at the center of a huge reverberating truth. He recognizes destiny, this shorthand word that means nothing beyond the strength of his own will, in a way he has not since he saw Bridget, whole and beautiful in pink high-tops, her jaw set, saving Shit Park.

This is what he knows: Five bullets left, and he owns one. At least one is for him.

He recognizes the feeling that rises at this certainty. He can name this blend of chemicals, though it has been a while since it washed along his blood. It is what Bridget always called “the thing with feathers.” It is hope.

His moment will come. He only needs to watch for it. He only needs to take it. He stares with new eyes at the loaded gun. He waits.

Chapter 3

H
e shot that lady cop. In front of Natty. Natty had already wiggle-wormed over to the big blond guy, and now it looked like he was trying to burrow into the guy’s side. I found myself hoping to someone’s God or other that Natty was reacting to the noise, that he hadn’t seen the blood opening up in the shape of a fast-blooming flower on her blue top.

Then the gunman twisted around and turned the deadbolt, fast, trapping Natty and me and everyone in with him and the gun and the stink of copper and sulphur.

He also locked Walcott out, and I fell into a pure, almost holy terror. I don’t know what I expected Walcott to do. Burst in and save us with the power of T. S. Eliot? It didn’t matter. What mattered was, Natty and I were stuck without Walcott in a room where the air still rang with the residue of gun sound. I felt white inside and out, eaten up by bad light like a roadside animal.

Then the gunman paused, half turned again, and flipped the door sign over so the word
CLOSED
faced out. Did he truly think someone might step over the bleeding policewoman and try to pop in for a pack of Camels?

He started yelling at us to move, to crawl back away from the plate-glass front; I found myself nodding. Moving was a thing to do, and doing felt better than lying still and helpless. Also, it was a smart thing for him to pick. It was a small relief, that he would think of a smart thing. I’d lost faith in him when he paused to flip that sign.

I followed his instructions, got to my trembling hands and knees and crawled along the floor toward the freezer cases. I tried to stay between Natty and where I thought the gun might be. I could feel the air on my thighs as my skirt tangled in my knees and hiked up in the back. I reached with one hand to yank it down as far as it would go.

I was wishing I’d worn ugly panties, and that made me realize I was a scant six inches from hysterical. I made myself breathe deep and slow. I crawled and tried not to think of the gun’s black-hole eye looking at Natty. All the while, the bare backs of my thighs buzzed and clenched like the gunman’s gaze was dirty beetles walking on my legs. Surely he wasn’t watching me crawl. Surely he had other things on his mind just now. But I wished my dress was longer.

The big blond guy was in front of us, lifting one hand to open the door with the Employees Only sign. I felt a praying feeling, and it was aimed at him. Crazy. He might look like a Norse deity, and he had put himself between my kid and danger, but that didn’t mean he was going to whip out a thunder hammer and smite the gun and save us.

It was up to Walcott, locked outside so far away from us and, oh please, calling 911.

Natty shadowed Thor through the doorway. I crawled faster, getting close, so Natty could feel me behind him.

The gunman, still using a fake, growly voice, said, “Don’t even try to let that door swing shut between us. Push it all the way open, to the wall.”

I said to Natty, softly, “Gonna be okay, baby.” I was surprised at how true it sounded, how steady my voice was. Motherhood and a gunshot had insta-morphed me into an excellent liar. Mostly I got red and blinked too much. Natty paused and peered at me over his shoulder, eyebrows pressed into a worried crinkle. “Keep going!” I smiled at him, very bright-eyed and glorious, like I was encouraging him to jump off the side of some fancy hotel pool near Disneyland. “Gonna be fine!” I sounded so firm and steady that I almost believed me.

Then the gunman ruined it, dropping the yelling rasp and saying to us all, “Aw, hell. I’m Stevie, by the way,” in this insanely friendly tone, like he was about to tell us he would be our hostage taker today. Like he might next ask what he could do to make crawling along the filthy linoleum with the gun’s black gaze skittering back and forth across my naked legs more pleasant. It struck me as wildly unprofessional.

We crawled single file down a hall that dumped us into a long, thin office. It ran the whole width of the store, and the two outside walls were exposed brick. On the longest brick wall, light spilled through a row of narrow windows in a horizontal line right up by the ceiling.

Stevie had us sit on our bottoms in a row against the long inside wall, like Natty’s preschool class waiting to go to recess. Thor had gone in first, so he was all the way at the far end of the room, right by a desk that stood longways to him. Natty sat beside him, squeezed between us. I leaned in and Thor leaned in, too, as if he felt me willing him to help me make a tent over my son, to press in toward each other, to make Natty be the narrowest, most tiny slice of target.