A Spark of Light(30)

Where’s the daughter? Hugh texted.

There was a beat. And then: M.I.A.

Hugh raked his hair, frustrated by the fact that the only person he didn’t want to talk to—his sister—refused to leave the site; and that the people he did want to talk to were not communicating: Wren, George Goddard, his missing daughter. Who the hell could negotiate when no one was listening?

What was he missing, now? What could he use that he hadn’t used before?

Hugh picked up the phone and texted Wren again. He dialed the number of the clinic, his secure line. One ring. Two.

Three rings. Four.

There was a click of connection, and then George’s voice. “I’m busy,” he said.

Muscle memory took over. “I won’t take up too much of your time, George,” Hugh replied. “We were talking about your daughter, when we got cut off.”

When you hung up on me.

“What about her?”

Hugh closed his eyes and made a leap into the unknown. “She wants to talk to you.”

—


LOUIE WARD KNEW EXACTLY THE moment that something in the shooter had changed. Even though he could only hear half the conversation, he could see that the man grew very still. Hope could do that to a person, Louie knew. Paralyze you inside and out.

“What about her?” the shooter said.

When he—George, his name was George, according to the television still playing in the waiting room—said that, Louie realized two very important things:

1. This was personal, for him. Someone—a wife, a daughter, a sister—had had an abortion.

2. He wanted that someone’s approval for today’s actions.

Izzy leaned down on the pretense of tightening his tourniquet. “Her,” she murmured.

“Mmm,” Louie said. “So I heard.”

In the handful of times that the phone had rung over the past couple of hours, the people huddled in the waiting room had been able to take a collective breath. George didn’t turn his back when he was on the phone—he wasn’t that stupid—but he also didn’t silence them if they whispered to each other.

“You think it was his wife?” Izzy whispered.

“Daughter.” Louie grunted as he shifted and a streak of pain shot up his leg.

“You have either of those?”

Louie shook his head. “I never wanted to make anyone else a target,” he admitted. “And eligible ladies don’t often celebrate the fact that I spent the day looking into other women’s vaginas.”

Behind him, Janine shifted. “You don’t have to have a personal stake to know that it’s wrong to kill an innocent baby.”

Eighty-eight percent of abortions happened in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, Louie knew, but the antis acted like those fetuses were already eight pounds and holding their own bottles.

Joy’s eyes widened. “You are not defending him,” she said to Janine. “After he knocked you out?”

“I’m just saying—if it wasn’t wrong, then there wouldn’t be psychos like him.”

Izzy stared at her. “That’s the most ass-backward logic I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it? You want to protect children with laws that punish rapists and molesters and murderers. Why is this any different?”

“Because they’re not children yet,” Izzy said. “They’re embryos.”

“They may not be born but they’re still human.”

“Oh my God,” Joy said. “Shut her up before I do it myself.”

Janine folded her arms. “I’m sorry. I know that he’s insane, but you can’t tell me there is ever a valid reason to destroy a child.”

Louie looked at her. “She’s right,” he murmured, and the others all stared at him. “There is never a valid reason to destroy a child.”

He thought of what he had seen over the years: The Syrian teen who needed to terminate after being raped as an act of war, but who couldn’t get consent from her parents, who had been killed in the same war. The sixteen-year-old who had wanted to have an abortion at eight weeks, whose parents stood in her way with their religion, and so her abortion was delayed for six weeks while she figured out how to get a judicial bypass and to raise the money to terminate. The fourteen-year-old who wanted to keep her baby, but was being pushed by her mother to have the abortion.

A few years back, a twelve-year-old girl came in who was sixteen weeks pregnant. Her hysterical mother and stoic father were with her. She was quiet to the point of disengagement, clutching a tattered stuffed rabbit. She had said that a neighborhood boy got her pregnant, but during the intake process when she was alone with the counselor, she slipped up on her lie and revealed that the baby was her father’s. The man was taken off by the police in handcuffs, but that girl, she still needed an abortion.

While Louie performed the procedure he talked to her. He told her, This is not normal, what happened to you. This is not something you’ve done. She didn’t respond. She didn’t act like a twelve-year-old. She never had been allowed to be a twelve-year-old. But he hoped that one day, when she was twice this age, she would remember the kindness of a man who hadn’t hurt her.

Now, Louie turned to Janine. “What we do here,” he said, “what I do. Sometimes it lets children be children.”