Under Threat (4 page)

“It’s the middle of the night,” I say.

“I know. But he gave us his home number…and I don’t like the idea of you being there
on your own.”

Nor do I. “I’m going to come to the hospital,” I say. “Are you in emerg?”

“In my office,” she says. “Quieter place to wait. Perks of being on staff, right?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I say. “Maybe fifteen.”

“You’ve got school in the morning,” she protests. “You can’t be up all night.”

“Believe
me,” I say, “I’m more likely to sleep there than I am here.”

Chapter Seven

But when I get to my mom’s office, she’s not there. I go inside, sit on her desk
chair and wait. I’ve never in my whole life felt so completely exhausted.

I’m almost asleep, my head on my arms, when she comes back.

“Franny.” She touches my shoulder lightly. “We should find you an empty bed.”

I shake off the sleepiness. “Where were you? Were you with Dad? Is he out of surgery?”
I notice the dark circles under her eyes. “You look worse than I feel.”

“It’s been a hell of a day,” she says.

“Is Dad okay?”

“Fine. Doped to the gills but fine.” She hesitates.

“What?”

“The call you got. Was it right before you called me?”

“Yeah. Like, literally just a few seconds before. Why?”

“Because right after I got off the phone with you, I got a page from security. The
hospital received a threat and—” She breaks off at a knock on the door. “Come in.”

Two cops enter. One is a man, young, black, heavyset. The other is female and about
Mom’s age, with short
gray-blond hair and wire-framed glasses. “Dr. Green?” she says.

“Yes.” My mom beckons them to take a seat. “And this is my daughter, Franny. She
answered the call at our house”—she glances at her watch—“almost an hour ago.”

The female cop nods, introduces herself and her partner and asks me to repeat word
for word what the caller said.

I do my best.
Baby killer. You’ll burn in hell. Lethal force.
The female cop, whose
name I’ve instantly forgotten, writes it down, but it all sounds silly and melodramatic—like
something on a true-crime special. But when I get to the part where he said,
There’s
a target on your back, Heather Green
, I break down and start crying again.

“Very upsetting,” the male cop—Barnwell? Bromwell? Browning?—says. He says it kind
of tersely, though,
like he really just wants me to toughen up and get on with it.

He’s right too. I take a deep breath, clench my fists and get on with it. “He said
maybe they should kill my kid—I mean, my mother’s kid. He thought I was her—and they
knew my name—”

“Did he say your name? Or just claim to know it?” he asks.

“He said it. He said,
It’s Franny, right?
”

My mom looks pale, and her lips are pressed together so tightly they’ve almost disappeared.
She squeezes my shoulder but says nothing.

“And Franny, did he say
they
? Or
I
?”

“What?” I don’t understand.

The female cop leans forward. “He means, did the caller refer to himself as a single
person? Did he say
we should kill your kid
, or
I should kill your kid
? Try to remember.
It could be important.”

It’s like some bizarre sentence-diagramming exercise: pronouns and verbs. The pronoun
seems rather unimportant, compared with the verb
kill
and the object
me
. But I think
back, trying to recall his exact words. “I think he said
we
,” I say slowly. “But
I’m not 100 percent sure.” I meet her eyes, which are pale and blond-lashed behind
the glasses. “Does it matter? I mean, couldn’t he just be lying anyway? Trying to
make us think he’s part of a group when he’s just some lone nutcase?”

“It’s possible,” she says. “But at this point, we want to get as much information
as possible. Tell us about his voice. How did it sound? High-pitched? Low? Did he
speak slowly or fast? Did he have an accent?”

“Low,” I say. “Well, lowish. A man, for sure. And not fast or slow. No accent—at
least, not that I noticed.
His voice was kind of muffled, like he was trying to disguise
it. Speaking with something over his mouth, maybe.” I try to imitate him, putting
my hand over my mouth and speaking in a deep voice. “Like this.” I take my hand away.
“Only he didn’t sound like that. Obviously.”

“That’s helpful, Franny,” she says, making a note. “Thank you.”

“What was the threat to the hospital?” I ask. “Was it a phone call?”

“Yes.” She exchanges glances with the other cop, who nods, and then looks at my mother.

“You can tell her,” my mom says.

“The phone call was made by a male caller.” The cop leans forward, elbows on her
knees. “He told us he’d left a package in one of the third-floor restrooms near the
women’s clinic.
A warning package
, he said.” She shook her head. “We would have treated
it like a bomb threat, but someone had actually
found the package right before he
called and opened it—stupid thing to do—”

“They
opened
it? Not staff, then,” I say. “They’d know better.”

“No, no. A fourteen-year-old girl who was supposed to be in bed in the pediatric
ward but was in fact pissing around the hallways with her boyfriend.”

I laugh, but stop quickly. It could have been very unfunny. “And it was nothing?”

“Just a box wrapped up like a gift. Inside, a doll with its arms and legs pulled
off. And a note saying the next one will be a bomb.” She shakes her head. “At least
the kids had the sense to report it.”

“You think it’s the same person? The guy who called our house?”

She nods. “It seems likely. The phone call to the hospital came right around the
same time as the call to your house. Right after, we think.”

“So he made one phone call and then the other…” I break off. “But he must have come
here first. To leave the box. So maybe someone saw him?”

“We’re going to go public with this,” she said. “Ask for people who were at the hospital
this evening to come forward if they saw anything. Someone carrying a wrapped gift
in a hospital—you wouldn’t think anything of it. But if we’re lucky, someone will
remember and we’ll get a description. If he’s working alone, maybe someone saw a
man going into the women’s restroom.”

Given the fact that I’ve had people freak out in women’s restrooms more than once
because they think I’m a guy, this seems likely. I don’t even look like a guy. I’m
just not as girly as most girls. As Leah—

“Wait,” I say. “This’ll be on the news?”

“In the morning. Yes.”

“Will our names be used?” I ask.

“I made a statement,” Mom says. “As department head, I thought it was important.
So my name will be, at least. And I suspect the media will make the link back to
the threats in the past… Jennifer Lee resigning…”

She’s still talking, but I’ve stopped listening. All I can think about is that Diane
Gibson is going to find out what my parents do after all.

I’ve always been so proud of my parents’ work, and I
know
how important it is—but
right now I wish they did almost anything else.

And I hate myself for feeling that way.

Chapter Eight

It’s almost morning by the time Mom, Dad and I get home. Dad’s cranky and sore, despite
being medicated, and Mom’s stressed, and none of us gets more than a couple of hours’
sleep.

Mom says she’ll write me a note if I want to stay home, but I decide to go to school.
It’s Friday, and I just want things
to feel normal. As normal as possible anyway.

I shower, dress, force down some toast and send Leah a text:
Call me. We need to
talk.

Leah texts back almost immediately.
On school bus. What’s up?

I chew on my bottom lip.
Threats at hospital last night. Will be in news. Including
my mom’s name.

You okay?

Am I okay?
Good question. Not so much.
Tired. Worried about your mom seeing news.

There’s a long pause while I wait for Leah to respond. I wish I was actually talking
to her. I want to hear her voice.

Finally her reply appears on the screen.
Come over after school. Better if you tell
her yourself.

I text a sad face.
Hope she doesn’t freak out.

Me too.

Love you,
I type.
XO

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO back at you.

Hugs and kisses
. I touch the screen with my finger as if I can scoop them up and
hold on to them to get me through the seven hours until I see her.

School is a blur of hallway chatter and locker doors slamming and teachers’ voices
droning. I have to fight to stay awake. I actually doze off in my afternoon math
class, head on my desk, and wake up with my cheek in a puddle of drool. Charming.

Three o’clock can’t come fast enough.

Finally the bell rings and I’m free, in my car and driving to the Gibsons’, windows
open to let in the cold, fresh air, radio blasting. By the time I pull in
to their
long driveway, I’m feeling oddly optimistic.

Maybe this is a good thing, having it all come out. After all, a few days ago I was
arguing that we should tell Diane. Having secrets sucks.

Besides, if Leah and I are going to stay together, eventually our parents will want
to meet one another. Sooner or later we’ll have to deal with this. And the more time
that goes by, the harder it will be. I don’t want Leah’s mom to feel like I’ve lied
to her.

I park by the barn and glance at the time on my phone. Three thirty. Leah won’t get
here for another fifteen minutes at least, and Diane’s rarely home before four, so
I head in to see Buddy. He lifts his head and whickers a greeting—or more likely
a request for a treat. I keep a bag of carrots in my tack box in front of his stall
door, and he knows it. It’s the main reason
he loves me, but I don’t mind. I snap
a carrot in half and hold it out to him, enjoying the warmth of his breath and the
velvet softness of his lips against my palm.

“Buddy, Buddy, Buddy,” I say, leaning my forehead against his and kissing his white
star. “What would I do without you?”

A noise startles me—a metallic clatter—and I turn to see Jake leaning his pitchfork
against the wall. He must have been mucking out stalls at the other end of the barn,
but I didn’t even hear him approach. He’s wearing baggy coveralls and a wool hat
jammed over his short blond hair.

“Hi,” I say.

Jake grabs the handles of his wheelbarrow—it’s full of wet wood shavings and horse
manure—and walks away without a word.

“Right,” I say. “Good to see you too.”

Even for Jake, that was rude.

Leah comes flying into the barn a few minutes later. She’s wearing a navy duffle
coat and a white wool hat over her long hair, and her cheeks are pink from the cold.

I slip out of Buddy’s stall and hold my arms wide, and she throws herself into them
as if we haven’t seen each other for days. I hold her tightly and wish we could just
stay here forever.

“Leah, Leah, Leah,” I murmur.

She laughs, pulls away and unbuttons her coat so that I can slip my arms around her
inside it. She’s wearing her school uniform—a plaid kilt, which is sexy as hell on
her. It kills me that private schools still make their students
dress in a uniform
that is total porn-fantasy material. I mean, do they not know?

Leah kisses me, and I kiss her back, sliding my hand under her shirt to feel the
warm silky skin of her lower back.

“Mmmm,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”

“Me too.” There’s a noise outside, and I’m so on edge that I actually startle, jumping
back like a spooked horse.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

“I don’t know. Nervous,” I say. “But we shouldn’t start making out here anyway. Jake’s
around. He was mucking out stalls, but he didn’t even say hi. Totally ignored me.”

She makes a face. “Let’s go up to my room. He won’t bug us there.”

At the sound of Diane’s car door shutting and the beep of her alarm,
we leap off Leah’s bed, straighten out our clothes and rush down to the living room
so that when she walks in, we’re sitting on the couch like we’ve been there the whole
time.

I don’t know if she’s fooled at all, but from the way she greets me—relaxed, friendly,
normal—I guess she hasn’t heard about my parents. Which is good. I’d rather she heard
it from me.

“Can you stay for dinner, Franny?” she asks me. “You’re very welcome.”

“Thanks,” I say. “If it’s no trouble. I feel like you’re always feeding me.”

She smiles. “I like feeding people. And I’m used to having lots of hungry mouths
to feed. With Esther and Hannah gone, the house feels so quiet and empty.”

“You should see my house sometime,” I say. “Quiet and empty is normal for me. But
thanks. Can I help?”

“You and Leah can make a salad,” she says. “I’m just reheating some soup
from the
freezer, and there’s some corn bread a friend made.”

“Perfect,” I say. The first few times I ate dinner here, Diane made a big fuss—cooking
up these complicated meals. Leah said it was her mom’s way of letting me know she
was okay with Leah and me being together, but I’m glad she’s relaxed enough now to
feed me reheated soup. It makes me feel more like part of the family.

Leah pulls lettuce and assorted vegetables out of the fridge, and I start washing
and chopping while I wonder how on earth I am going to bring up the subject of my
parents. I can’t just blurt it out—
oh, by the way, my parents are abortion providers
—but
there’s no obvious way to lead into the subject. I look sideways at Leah, who is
dicing avocado, and mouth,
Now what
?

She just gives me a deer-in-the-headlights stare and shrugs helplessly.