Telephone

Zach Wells, a geologist and paleobiologist, lives a comfortable but unfulfilling life in Altadena, California, with his wife, Meg, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah. Despite a deep love for his daughter, Zach is plagued by a quiet melancholy and occasional suicidal thoughts. His world begins to unravel when Sarah, an excellent chess player, makes an uncharacteristic and obvious mistake during a game. Soon after, she complains of vision problems. An optometrist is baffled, unable to determine a prescription, and refers her to a specialist. Around the same time, Zach finds a small slip of paper in the pocket of a used jacket he purchased online. It reads, “Ayuadame,” Spanish for “Help me.”

Sarah’s pediatrician, Dr. Terence, notes her severely limited peripheral vision and refers her to Dr. Peterson, a pediatric ophthalmologist. Meanwhile, Zach chaperones a geology field trip to the desert with a younger colleague, Hilary Gill, who is struggling to achieve tenure. During the trip, a student named Rachel Charles develops an intense and unwelcome romantic interest in Zach. He harshly rejects her advances, telling her he has no interest in her, and is later ashamed of his cruelty.

At Sarah’s appointment with Dr. Peterson, she suffers a seizure. Alarmed, the doctor refers her to a pediatric neurologist, Dr. Gurewich. As the family awaits the new appointment, Zach receives another used shirt from the same online vendor and finds a second note pinned inside the collar: “Please Help to Us.” After a series of tests, Dr. Gurewich delivers a devastating diagnosis. Sarah has Batten disease, a rare, untreatable, and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Gurewich explains that it is a recessive genetic condition inherited from both Zach and Meg. Unwilling to tell Sarah the truth, her parents lie and say she has a form of epilepsy that can be managed with medication. Overwhelmed by grief, Zach goes to a downtown Los Angeles bar, where he gets into a fight and uses his old Marine training to subdue two men. A conversation with a colleague, Finley Huckster, gives him the idea to take the family to Paris. Before they leave, Zach mails a shirt back to the vendor for an exchange, hiding a note inside that reads, “¿Que puedo nacer para ayudar?” (“What can I be born to help?”), a grammatical error for “What can I do to help?”

In Paris, Sarah’s condition deteriorates. At passport control, she has a long, vacant pause when asked her name. She becomes fascinated with the religious art at the Louvre, insisting they visit multiple times. One day, she asks to return to the museum, forgetting they have already been there. She also suffers an episode of incontinence. The trip reaches a crisis point when Sarah wanders away from Zach in the Jardin des Tuileries. During a frantic search, they find her near a right-wing protest where a man is waving a pistol. Believing the man is targeting his daughter because of her dark skin, Zach impulsively tackles him. He is briefly handcuffed by police before being questioned and released.

Back home, Zach travels to Bingham, New Mexico, the return address for the online vendor. Posing as a petroleum geologist, he stakes out the post office and identifies two men, Jeff and Roger, who run the business. A local waitress, DeLois, tells him the men are suspicious and that they transport a group of women in an old school bus every Thursday. Using his cover story, Zach gains access to their compound and discovers a warehouse where a dozen women are being held as forced labor, sorting and packing clothes. He makes eye contact with one woman. Later, at a grocery store, he sees the women on a supervised trip and manages to speak to the same woman. She whispers that her name is Rosalita Gonzalez and that she is from Ciudad Juárez. Zach then travels to Juárez and meets with a federal police lieutenant, Deocampo, who confirms a woman by that name was reported missing three years earlier but states he has no jurisdiction in the United States.

Zach returns home to find Sarah has declined significantly. A third note arrives from the vendor: “Por favor ayudenos. No nos dejan ir” (“Please help us. They will not let us go”). Sarah’s seizures are more frequent, and her dementia has progressed. She becomes paranoid and no longer recognizes Meg. She begins calling Zach “Daniel,” the name of a fictional friend from stories he told her as a child. During one paranoid episode, she grabs a carving knife and severely cuts her hand. After surgery, she is placed in a full-time care facility. In the midst of this, Zach learns that his colleague Hilary Gill, whose tenure case he had championed, has committed suicide after the dean ultimately denied her promotion.

At the care facility, managed by a compassionate woman named May who lost her own young daughter to cancer, Zach and Meg visit Sarah separately, their shared grief driving them apart. One afternoon, Zach sees a bear outside Sarah’s window, an animal she had always longed to see. He rushes to show her, but her eyes are vacant. Realizing his daughter is gone, Zach smothers her with her bedding. As he leaves, May gives him a gentle, knowing smile.

After Sarah’s death, Zach returns to New Mexico. DeLois introduces him to her poetry workshop friends, who insist on helping him rescue the women. On the following Thursday, the group stages a distraction at the grocery store. Zach leads eleven women out the back and onto their school bus, which one of the poets has hot-wired. As they escape, one of their captors fires a pistol at the bus, wounding a woman named Maribel in the arm. Zach drives south toward the border, but the bus stalls at a rest stop. A helpful stranger, a fellow former Marine, restarts it for him. The bus runs out of gas in El Paso, just short of the border bridge. The group proceeds on foot, but Maribel’s condition worsens, forcing them to stop at an urgent care clinic. When the receptionist asks for Maribel’s occupation, Zach replies, “Slave.”