A Spark of Light(28)

Well, Peg, I’m in a room with a crazy guy waving a gun and five other hostages. Is it all right to panic now?

“You lied to me!” He turned, the force of his anger bending over the woman who was wearing scrubs. A nurse? “You told me that closet was empty!”

The woman cowered, her arms shielding her face. “I didn’t—”

“Shut up! Shut your goddamn mouth!” he yelled.

In addition to Olive and Wren, there were three other women. There was a young woman in sweatpants, and another one with a big bruise on her temple. There was the nurse, whose name must have been Izzy, because the man she was tending to kept calling her that. The doctor, maybe? He was in scrubs, like her. He was big enough to take down the gunman, if not for the fact that his leg looked like hamburger below the thigh, and he was in obvious pain.

Wren’s aunt was nowhere to be seen.

And then there was the gunman. He was middle-aged—maybe forty, maybe forty-five. He was wiry, but strong. Strong enough to haul a fighting teenager out of hiding. A silver stubble of beard rubbed along the coastline of his jaw. There was nothing about him that would have made Olive look twice at him on the street, unless their eyes had met. Then, she might have just stopped and stared. His eyes were almost colorless. His gaze felt like a sucking wound.

“I’m sorry,” Olive said, in her thickest Elderly Southern Lady accent. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Miz Olive.”

“I don’t care who you are,” he said.

One of the other women caught her eye and glanced at the television overhead, where the news was streaming in a weird metaphysical mirror, a reporter with this very clinic over his shoulder. GUNMAN IDENTIFIED AS GEORGE GODDARD, a caption below read.

“Well, George,” she said evenly, as if they were sitting down to lemonade. “Lovely to make your acquaintance.”

He may have been unhinged, but he was from the South, where even the unhinged had mothers and grandmothers who drilled decades of manners into them. Olive did not believe in using her age except for discount prices on movie tickets and to get 10 percent off at Kroger the second Tuesday of the month. And now, apparently, in a hostage situation.

George Goddard was sweating profusely, running his free hand over his brow and wiping it on his pants leg. Olive had a neuroscience background, but she could do armchair diagnosis with the best of them. Grandiose claims about the self. A sense of entitlement. Lack of empathy. A tendency to lash out, when they feel like they’re not being respected.

Narcissistic personality disorder.

Or homegrown terrorist, Olive thought. Either would fit.

If you could see me, Peg, she thought. Olive was the one who peeked from between her fingers during scary movies, who still sometimes had to check the closet before going to bed to make sure there was nothing lurking inside (and goodness, after this episode, she would be doing that all the time). But here she was calmly playing the old lady for all it was worth, the only postmenopausal one in the bunch.

Surely he knew she hadn’t come here to get an abortion.

Did it even matter?

The girl beside her burst into tears. Olive wrapped her arms around Wren, trying to will her strength.

The man knelt down, his eyes clouding for a second. “Don’t cry,” he said to Wren, his voice catching. “Please don’t cry …” He reached out to her with his free hand.

There was something in the way he was looking at Wren, but wasn’t seeing her, thought Olive. In his mind’s eye, this was someone else, maybe someone about her age, who had come to this clinic against his wishes. After all, what else would have set him off?

If Olive was right, and she usually was, what had happened to that other girl?

She and Peg used to sit at the airport, waiting for their flight, and eavesdrop on conversations between men and women, mothers and children, colleagues. They would take turns making up backstories for them. He grew up in a cult and hasn’t learned how to bond with someone in a healthy way. She’s adopted that five-year-old, who has oppositional defiant disorder. That guy’s a sex addict, cheating with his boss’s wife.

“Don’t touch me,” Wren shrieked, as the man reached out to her. She kicked reflexively, connecting with his knee, and he winced and backed away. “Goddammit,” he growled, and he started toward her, but Wren let out a piercing scream. George covered his hands with his ears, his eyes screwed shut.

Wren let a loud wail loose again. And another. Maybe she had figured out that her aunt was dead, and she was inconsolable. Olive squeezed her arm. Clearly every time Wren opened her mouth, it set the gunman on edge. She had to see that, even if she was young. Didn’t she?

Her weeping was almost rhythmic.

And … was Wren’s foot buzzing?

Wren turned to Olive, and Olive realized that in spite of her cries, not a single tear streaked down her cheeks. Her chin nodded imperceptibly to her sock, where a phone screen glowed beneath and vibrated with a text. She was covering up the sounds with her sobs.

Olive waited until George paced past them, and then she covered Wren’s ankle with her palm. She slipped her fingers beneath the elastic and felt around for the power button, turning it off.

Wren sagged with relief, resting her head against Olive’s shoulder. The movement made George spin around, the gun trained on her.

Peg, I didn’t even jump, she would say, when this was all over.