A Spark of Light(19)

Had employed. Past tense.

He closed his eyes, fighting the feelings that rose in him.

She hadn’t been the only casualty. Izzy had tried—desperately and fruitlessly—to save the life of Olive, the older woman. This was true collateral damage: clearly a woman in her late sixties wasn’t at the clinic to terminate a pregnancy, but she had still been on the receiving end of the shooter’s rage. Izzy now drew a cotton drape over the body. At Louie’s moan of pain she turned to check the binding around his thigh. “I’m all right,” he said, trying to get her to stop fussing, when to his surprise she did. She bolted a few feet to the left and threw up in a trash can.

One of the other women—his last patient, Joy (formerly fifteen weeks along and now, Louie thought with satisfaction, un-pregnant) handed Izzy a tissue from a box on a table in the waiting room. The shooter looked at Izzy in disgust, but didn’t speak. He was too busy tending to his own injury. Izzy wiped her mouth and then returned her attention to Louie’s thigh. “I’m that bad off, huh?” he said wryly.

She looked up at him, her cheeks flushed. “No, sir. I don’t think he caused any major damage when he kicked you. Any additional major damage,” she amended.

Louie looked down at her hands, pressing gently around the wound. It hurt like hell. “How far along are you?” he asked.

He waited until she looked up at him. “How did you know?”

Louie raised an eyebrow.

“Twelve weeks,” Izzy said.

He watched her hand steal to her abdomen, her palm a shield.

“You’re gonna get out of here,” he promised. “You and your partner are going to have a beautiful bouncing baby.”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

Louie thought of all the times he’d administered what he called “verbicaine”—just chatting to ease the women who were so tense about what was going to happen. He would ask if a woman made her grits sweet or savory. If she’d listened to Beyoncé’s latest album. What sorority she belonged to. He prided himself on being able to get any woman relaxed, while he calmly and professionally performed the procedure. What he heard most often from his patients was “You mean you’re already finished?”

But his reassurance had not worked on Izzy.

Izzy didn’t believe him when he said she was going to get out of here.

Because, frankly, neither did he.

—


JOY HAD TOLD ONLY ONE person about her pregnancy—her best friend, a waitress at the Departure Lounge, a martini bar in the Jackson airport. Rosie had been the one who stood beside her in the ladies’ room, counting down a timer on her phone, while they watched the little plus sign appear on the stick. “What are you going to do?” Rosie had asked, and Joy hadn’t answered.

A week later, she made an appointment at the Center. That same day she told Rosie she had miscarried. The way Joy figured, this was just one minor inaccuracy, a small erroneous footnote. The outcome would be the same.

Even though she knew Rosie would have driven her for her procedure, Joy wanted and needed to do it alone. She had been stupid enough to get herself into this mess; she would be smart enough to get herself out.

The first night that he came into the bar, Joy had noticed him right away. He’d been tall, lean, and wearing a suit that fit beautifully; his hair was gray at the temples. Joy had looked at his hands—you could tell a lot about a person from their hands—and his were long-fingered, strong. He looked a little bit like President Obama, if President Obama had been so sad that he sought refuge in the bottom of a bucket of gin martinis.

When Joy came on duty, it was the late shift, and she was the only staff in the lounge—it was cheaper to train the waitresses to mix drinks and lock up for the night than to pay additional employees. She refilled the nuts for a gay couple drinking Negronis and printed out the tab for a woman whose flight was being called. Then she went over to the man, whose eyes were closed. “Can I get you a refill?”

When he glanced up at her, it was like looking into a mirror.

Only someone who has been there—trapped in an invisible prison, desperate to escape—can recognize that expression in another. When he nodded, Joy brought him another drink. And another. Three more customers came and went, while she kept an eye on the man at the high-top. She knew he wasn’t in the mood to talk; she had been a cocktail waitress long enough to read those clues. There were some people who wanted to pour out their troubles as you poured their spirits. There were some who texted furiously on their phones, avoiding eye contact. There were the handsy ones, who grabbed her ass as she walked by and pretended it was an accident. But this man only wanted to lose himself.

When he had been there for three hours she stood beside his table. “I don’t mean to bother you,” Joy said, “but when’s your flight?”

He knocked back his drink past the fence of his teeth. “It landed. Four hours ago.”

She wondered if Mississippi was his starting point or his destination. Either way, there was something outside this building that he couldn’t face.

When it came time to close up, he paid with cash and gave her a tip equal to the amount of the bill. “Can I get you a cab?” she asked.

“Can’t I stay here?”

“Nope.” Joy shook her head. “What’s your name?”