My Darling Husband(83)
His lip is curled up on one side, his face red and ugly, splotchy in the high-definition, full-color camera, but it’s not his face I’m looking at.
It’s Beatrix’s.
Over Sebastian’s shoulder I take in my daughter’s cool stare, her clamped down jaw, the look of calm determination. It’s a look anybody else might mistake for boredom, but not me. I know Beatrix too well. This is the expression she gets when she’s steeling herself, gathering up all her courage, right before she walks onto an orchestra stage.
With both hands, she shoves her body to the edge of the oversize chair and pushes to a shaky stand. Feet planted to the carpet in front of her chair. She looks at her mother on the chair next to her. At Sebastian, still spitting mad, screaming into the speaker. At the side table, and a black smudge that looks just like—
“No.”
With helpless horror, I watch my daughter pick up the gun.
T H E I N T E R V I E W
Juanita: In the months since the home invasion, your daughter, Beatrix, has become an internet sensation. That still shot from the nanny cam footage of her sneaking out of the playroom made the cover of the New York Times, and there are Facebook groups and fan pages and hundreds of GIFs and memes dedicated to her bravery and daring. There are Hollywood producers competing to tell her story, even talk of putting her face on a cereal box. That must feel...
Cam: Strange. Surreal. Bizarre. All of the above.
Juanita: I’d imagine it’s also a big invasion of privacy.
Cam: I’ll say. You people are pretty relentless.
Juanita: I agree the media can be tenacious, but that’s because this story is one that holds widespread appeal. A celebrity chef, a brave little girl who also happens to be a violin virtuoso, a masked and armed man who targeted you and your family, a shooting captured on camera—
Cam: A villain who’s only out for money.
Juanita: Are we talking about him or you?
Cam: [shrugs] Up to your viewers to decide, though pretty sure I know which side of the equation they’ll fall on.
Juanita: That moment when Beatrix picked up the gun, you were watching on your cell phone. You saw your daughter pick up a deadly weapon, and there was literally nothing you could do to stop it. I can’t imagine what that must have been like.
Cam: [long pause] My heart, it just...stopped. Like, no pulse, no blood pumping at all. My muscles locked up, and it’s a miracle I didn’t hit a tree because I couldn’t tear my eyes off the phone. I didn’t look at the road. All I could see was my baby on that little screen, holding a gun, waving it around. And I was completely helpless to stop her.
Juanita: Because you were still miles away. Stuck in traffic.
Cam: [wipes eyes] Nothing could have prepared me for that kind of terror. Nothing.
Juanita: So what did you do?
Cam: I drove like hell. I prayed to a God I’ve spent most of my life either ignoring or mocking, a God I have zero business asking any favors. I swore that if He or She would just spare my family, just... [shakes head]
Juanita: Do you need to take a break?
Cam: No. I’m all right.
Juanita: Take all the time you need.
Cam: I swore if God would spare them, keep them alive and in one piece, then I would never ask for anything ever again. And all those things I used to care about, the restaurants and the real estate and the houses and cars, I’d give it all up. Because here’s what happens when your family’s lives are at stake. There’s this...white-light moment of clarity, a lightning-bolt realization that you’re an idiot and all that shit you’ve spent so much time and effort accumulating is worthless. The banks can have everything. I don’t want any of those things anymore. Without Jade and the Bees, it’s worthless. I’m worthless.
Juanita: August 6 was your wake-up call?
Cam: [nods] I’m just sorry it happened too late.
J A D E
6:57 p.m.
I’m so busy watching Sebastian that I don’t notice it at first.
The way Beatrix’s arm reached across the armrest and into my chair just now, like her wrist wasn’t connected to the leather. The object she pressed in my hand.
Long. Hard. Warm from body heat.
Automatically, I close my fingers around it, concealing the thing in a fist.
But I don’t look. And I don’t consider how it could be possible. Not yet.
I’m too distracted by Sebastian’s shouting into the wall speaker, a long tirade about how Cam better get here and get here in a hurry. How he shouldn’t listen to me.
Three minutes until seven, the blink of an eye and an endless eternity at the same time. Sebastian is furious, this situation so volatile. Anything can happen in three minutes.
And then realization hits.
The warm, hard, sticky thing in my palm.
I unfurl my fingers just enough to peek inside.
It’s Cam’s pocketknife, the one he’s had since college, a scratched and beat-up thing that once belonged to his grandfather. Cam keeps it more for sentimental value than for its usefulness, storing it under a stack of wrinkled business cards in an antique box in his study. As far as I know, he’s never showed it to the kids.
But Beatrix knew where to look.
Not only that.
In the middle of a life-or-death emergency, when she had only a few seconds to scout out a hiding place, Beatrix went for a weapon. She found the pocketknife in Cam’s hiding place. This is the reason we don’t have a gun.