A Spark of Light(43)
It took him a while to work up the courage to follow Wargeddon inside.
The first thing he noticed was that Wargeddon had a tattoo on his right shoulder blade, a scorpion. The second thing he noticed was the music playing softly from the clock radio beside the bed. He looked at Annabelle. “Since when,” he said, “do you like Carrie Underwood?”
There had been times since Annabelle left that he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t tracked down proof of her infidelity. Would he ever have known? Would she have tired of Cliff, instead of moving with the boy-man to Paris, where he studied the art of baguettes and she took up smoking and worked on a novel he never even knew she had wanted to write? Would Wren have been better having a flawed mother, rather than no mother at all?
Sometimes, in the broken breath of night, Hugh wondered if it was better to leave some things hidden.
He wondered if George Goddard had gone after his runaway wife.
He wondered if, against all odds, he had yet another thing in common with that man after all.
—
JANINE’S HEAD WAS THROBBING. SHE tried to sit up, but winced when she felt the sharp stab of pain in her jaw and temple. “Ssh,” she heard, a whisper like cotton batting. “Let me help you.”
She felt an arm slide beneath her shoulders to elevate her to a sitting position. Slowly, she cracked open one eye, then the other.
She was still in hell.
The shooter was pacing, muttering to himself. The nurse was re-dressing the bandage on the doctor’s thigh. She peeled back the soaked gauze from the wound, and Janine turned away so she wouldn’t have to see any more.
Her cheek fell into a cupped hand. Janine found herself staring at Joy.
Suddenly it all came flooding back—what she had said, what had happened. She looked at her wig, lying like roadkill a few feet away. She felt her face flame with embarrassment. “Why would you take care of me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Joy replied.
They both knew the answer to that.
Janine scrutinized Joy. “You must hate me,” she murmured. “All of you. Oh my God.”
Joy gingerly touched a spot on Janine’s cheekbone. “You’re gonna have a hell of a bruise,” she said. She hesitated, and then looked Janine in the eye. “So you didn’t just say that stuff to get out of here? You’re really anti-choice?”
“Pro-life,” Janine automatically corrected. In this war, labels meant everything. She had heard so many on the other side take umbrage when they were called pro-abortion. It’s pro-choice, they always said, as if there was something wrong with being pro-abortion. And wasn’t that exactly the point?
Joy stared at her. “So … you didn’t even have to be here.”
Janine met her gaze. “Neither did you.”
Joy didn’t move away from her, but Janine could feel the line between them solidify. “I came to get … evidence,” she explained. “Audio. Proof of people being forced into … you know.”
“I wasn’t forced,” Joy said. “It was necessary.”
“That’s not how your baby felt.”
“My baby felt nothing. It wasn’t even a baby.”
Janine knew that there wasn’t a moral difference between the embryo you used to be and the person you were today. So the unborn were smaller than toddlers—did that mean adults deserved more human rights than children? That men were due more privileges than women?
So the unborn weren’t fully mentally aware—did that preclude people with Alzheimer’s or cognitive deficits, or those in comas, or those sleeping from having rights?
So the unborn were hosted in the bodies of their mothers. But who you are is not determined by where you are. You are no less human if you cross state lines or move from your living room to your bathroom. Why would a trip from womb to delivery room—a voyage of less than a foot—change your status from nonhuman to human?
The answer was because the unborn were human. And Janine, for the life of her, could not understand how people like Joy—like all the others in this clinic—couldn’t see what was so clear.
But somehow, it didn’t seem like the time or place to have this fight. Especially with someone who was resting your aching head in her lap, and gently stroking your hair.
Unbidden, the thought came into Janine’s mind: Joy would probably have been a good mother.
“Would you have tried to stop me?” Joy asked. “If you had been outside?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Again, all the arguments against abortion in which Janine had been tutored floated to the tip of her tongue, but instead, she looked at Joy and spoke from the heart. “You might not have given birth to the next Einstein or Picasso or Gandhi,” she said. “But I bet whoever he was, he would have been amazing.”
Tears welled in Joy’s eyes. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Then … there must have been another way. There’s always another way.”
Joy shook her head. “Do you think I wanted this? Do you think anyone wakes up and says, I think I’ll go get an abortion this morning? This is the last stop. This is the place you go when you run through all the scenarios and you realize that the only people who say there’s another way are the ones who aren’t standing there with a positive pregnancy test in their hand. I did it. I don’t regret it. But that doesn’t mean I won’t think about it every day of my life.”