My Darling Husband(32)
“I can’t decide if you’re playing with me,” he says, his words slow, thoughtful, “or if you really don’t know.”
He falls silent, a long, strategic pause as he watches me with dark, observant eyes. He’s waiting for me to engage, to beg him for information, but I don’t respond. If Cam were here, he’d tell me I’m being too proud.
Baxter’s singsong voice carries across the hall, the sound too low for me to pick out his words from the TV soundtrack, and his chatter both soothes and terrifies me. It means Baxter and Beatrix are conscious, that they’re safe—as the man said, for now. Assuming Cam can scrounge up three-quarters of a million dollars and somehow make it home by seven—two colossal assumptions. I just have to keep the kids alive until then, but how am I supposed to do that when I’m stuck in this chair?
The man twists around on the bed, facing the open doorway. “Yo, Bax.”
I try to think of something to stop him, to keep his focus on me, on right here in this room, but my mind is thick as peanut butter.
A stomach-fluttering pause, then a high voice floats across the hall: “Yeah?”
The man glances back, just long enough to flash me a wink. “Everything okay over there?”
This is all for my benefit. This man is manipulating me again, dangling my most precious carrot and daring me not to snap it up. Calling out to the kids now is punishment—for not taking his bait fast enough, for not playing along with his stupid, diabolical game. I’m a rat, trapped in his maze.
The words burst out of me, high and frantic. “If I really don’t know what?”
He lifts a finger to his lips and tilts his head, pointing his ear at the door.
“The commercials are taking forever,” Bax calls out. “But can you come over here? I got a cramp.”
The man puffs a laugh, turning back to me with a look I recognize through the mask. Crazy kids. He doesn’t know that this is classic Baxter, and that “cramp” is an excuse. A word that can mean virtually anything, from help changing the channel to bringing him a snack, getting him a glass of water, reading him another book, giving him your undivided attention. He says it so often, the word has infiltrated the Lasky family lexicon. When the recycling bin needs to be rolled to the curb, I tell Cam I have a garbage cramp. When Cam wants sex, he tells me he has a penis cramp.
And now Baxter is using the word with this man as if he’s here to help us, not hold us hostage. He’s too young to understand what’s really happening here. He’s too trusting to be scared. One stupid magic trick downstairs, and Bax is buddying up to the monster.
“If I really don’t know what?” I say again, red-hot adrenaline thumping in my veins. “Please tell me what you know about Cam’s business. Because if there’s some kind of problem, if he’s hurt you in any way, I can help. Cam listens to me. Please let me help.”
“You want to help.”
It’s not a question, but I nod anyway, a series of frantic and fast bobs of my head.
The man pushes off the bed. “I gotta tell you, Jade, I wasn’t expecting you to be this accommodating, not with that temper of yours. Remember when you lost your shit after the valet couldn’t find the key to your car? You threatened to have him fired.”
Oh, I remember. We were trying out a new sitter, a friend of a friend of a friend’s nanny, a high-strung girl who had just called in a panic after Baxter projectile vomited his spaghetti dinner over the antique Beni Ourain and was running a 102-degree temperature. Cam was in the kitchen, cooking for a CEO roundtable, leaders of Atlanta’s Fortune 500s crammed into the private room, and his truck was in the shop. With my car stuck in the lot, it took me twice as long to get home in an Uber.
But the bigger point is that he remembers, which means he was there. He saw me throw that fit.
A Lasky employee, then? A client?
“Tell you what,” he says when I don’t respond. “Let’s stick a pin in this subject for now. Just until I get back, so...don’t move, okay?” He laughs—another stupid, pathetic joke. “Hang tight while I go check on the kids.”
As soon as he’s gone, I lurch forward at the waist and tug at the rope with my teeth. The guy is smart, positioning the knot on the far side of my wrist, too far for me to reach with my mouth, so my first task is to somehow rotate the rope until the knot is on top. I bite and pull, bite and pull, nudging the rope along with little flicks of my wrist. It drags over the skin of my arm in millimeter increments, painful and excruciatingly slow.
Words float in disconnected fragments across the hall.
...Mommy...talk to her...very important.
Bax again, speaking in Baxter code. The more trifling the request, the more urgently it is delivered. He wants to tell me about a pretty blue bird that’s perched on the windowsill, probably, or an unreachable itch in the center of his back. How long have we been upstairs—twenty minutes at the most? Even with the cartoons blaring, it’s long past the limit for a six-year-old to sit still and be quiet. The question is, how much will the masked man tolerate?
The man’s voice comes in a low murmur, too faint for me to hear.
I work at the ties and do the math. My watch says it’s a few minutes before 4:30—a little more than a half hour until the banks close and two and a half hours before Cam’s deadline. Whoever this man is across the hall, whatever he thinks he knows about my husband, I wonder what he knows about the restaurant business. Three-quarters of a million dollars is a lot to have just lying around, liquid cash Cam could stuff in a bag when his system is geared to cashless transactions, credit cards and Apple Pay and touchless payment apps. Even if Cam raided all the tip jars and valet stands, there’s no way he’d get anywhere close. He’s going to have to make a trip to the bank.