A Spark of Light(29)
Olive pasted a wide smile on her face. “George,” she said, “I remember some Goddards from Biloxi. They were in the brick business, family-run. You wouldn’t be related now, would you? I do believe they moved to Birmingham. Or was it Mobile?”
“Shut up,” he growled. “I should have left you in the goddamn closet. I can’t think when you’re yapping.”
Olive quieted dutifully, and then she winked at Wren. Because as George was busy silencing her, he had tucked the gun back into the waistband of his jeans.
—
IN THE AMBULANCE, BEX TRIED to speak. “My … niece …” she rasped, clawing at the shirt of the EMT.
“Don’t try to talk,” the young man said. He had soft eyes and softer hands, and his teeth were a beacon against his dark skin. “We’re gonna take care of you now. We’re almost at the hospital.”
“Wren …”
“When?” he said, mishearing her. “Soon. Real soon.” He smiled down at her. “You got the devil’s own luck.”
What Bex knew was that this was not luck, but karma. If Wren did not get out of that clinic, Bex would never forgive herself. She should have known better than to go behind Hugh’s back to the clinic. But Wren had come to her last week after school, riding her bike to Bex’s studio; she had been finishing a new commission—a mural going into a skyscraper lobby in Orlando, to commemorate the Pulse shooting. It was a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot profile of two men kissing. The pixels were made not of Post-its, as usual, but of photos of people who had died during the AIDS crisis.
“Cool,” Wren had said. “What’s it going to be?”
Bex had explained it. “Want to help?”
She gave Wren hundreds of tiny squares of tinted celluloid. Showing her how to affix them to each photo with glue, Bex instructed her to start at the bottom and screen the last ten rows of photographs in shades of violet celluloid. The next ten rows above them would be blue, then green, then yellow, and so on. Standing far enough away, you would see the kiss, but you would also see a rainbow. Standing close, you’d see all the individual shoulders those two men had to stand on in order to embrace each other openly.
“This isn’t even a thing for kids your age, is it?” Bex mused as they worked beside each other.
“What thing?”
“Being gay.”
“It’s queer, FYI. And I mean, yeah. It still is, I think, if you’re the one who happens to be that way. People assume you’re cis and straight, so if you’re not, you’re different. But who says there’s only one way to be normal?”
Bex stopped working, her hands stilling over the lips of one of the models. “When did you get to be so smart?”
Wren grinned. “What took you so long to notice?” They worked in silence for a while, and then Wren asked, “Does this piece have a name yet?”
“I was thinking maybe Love.”
“That’s perfect,” Wren said. “But not just the word. The whole sentence. Exactly the way you said it.” She brushed a line of glue around a violet celluloid. “Aunt Bex? Can I ask you something? Do you believe that you can fall in love when you’re fifteen?”
Bex’s hands stilled. She lifted the magnifying glasses she wore when she worked so that she could look Wren in the eye. “You bet I do,” she said firmly. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
And oh, it had been delicious—the way Wren’s cheeks had gone pink when she held his name in her mouth; how she talked about him as if there had never been another boy on earth. What love looked like was this: fledgling and unsteady, fierce and soft-shelled at the same time.
Wren didn’t have a mother around to talk to her frankly about sex. Hugh would have probably rather carved out his liver with a teaspoon than have that conversation with his daughter. So Bex asked her niece the questions no one else would: Have you kissed him? Have you done more than that? Have you talked about protection?
No judgment, no finger wagging. Just pragmatism. Once the rocket had left the launchpad, you couldn’t bring it back.
Wren was fifteen; she was writing his name on the leg of her jeans; she was stealing his sweatshirts so that she could sleep in the ghost of his scent. But she’d also been thinking of birth control. “Aunt Bex,” Wren had asked shyly, “will you help me?”
And so it was with the best of intentions that—once again—Bex had done something inexcusable.
She heard a machine somewhere behind her start to beep. The EMT leaned closer. He smelled like wintergreen. “Ma’am,” he said, “try to relax.”
Bex closed her eyes again, thinking of the bullet that had exploded through her, and the pierce of the scalpel that had maybe saved her life.
This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.
—
WHEN HUGH’S PHONE FINALLY DINGED, he lunged for it. But the text wasn’t from Wren—it was from a guy named Dick, a state trooper who had been in his hostage negotiation training sessions. Two hours ago, when George Goddard’s license plate was run, Hugh had reached out to Dick, who got a search warrant from a local judge and let himself into the empty house in Denmark, Mississippi. Now Hugh had the results of Dick’s search: a blurry photo of a handout about medication abortions that had the name and logo of the women’s center on it. It was enough for Hugh to connect the dots from George to this clinic.