A Spark of Light(46)
Olive grinned. “If I survive,” she replied, “it’s all I’m going to do.”
—
GEORGE ANSWERED THE PHONE ON the second ring. “You know,” Hugh began, as if George had not hung up on him before, “I used to go to church with my kid. Not every week—I wasn’t as good a Christian as I could have been. But always Easter services and Christmas Eve.”
George snorted. “That’s like putting gravy on Skittles and saying you made Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Yeah, I know. It was my fault. I have a hard time sitting still. And I couldn’t handle the holier-than-thous. You know, the guys who sit right up front in the pews and act like they’ve got some special VIP pass to God?”
“It don’t work that way,” George said.
“Hell, no,” Hugh said. “Anyway, it must drive you crazy when you see people acting like that, too. People taking liberties that belong to a greater power.”
“I don’t follow.”
Hugh looked down at the slip of paper one of the detectives had given him. “The Lord brings death and makes alive.”
“Samuel 2:6,” George said.
“Is that why you came here today? Because you felt people in this clinic didn’t have the right to end a life?”
There was silence on the line.
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” Hugh said softly. “Not yours. The Lord’s.”
“That’s not why I came,” George said. “It’s why you came.”
“I came to talk to you—”
“You came,” George interrupted, “to decide who lives today, and who dies. So, tell me … which one of us is playing God?”
—
GEORGE WAS SIX YEARS OLD when he learned how fine the line was between life and death. It had been one of those beautiful fall days in Mississippi. The colors had peaked, and the trees were a jeweled necklace wrapped around the lake. He was walking through the woods, liking the crunch of the red maple and hickory and bur oak leaves under his sneakers. He was kicking an acorn when he found the bird.
It was not a baby, but some kind of sparrow that had broken its wing. It hopped in small circles on the ground.
He picked it up as if it were made of glass and carried it all the way back to his home. There, he found a cigar box and lined it with Kleenex. For three days, he hid the little bird under his bed, trying to give it water, and bringing it leaves and grubs and anything else he thought might be appetizing.
The bird did not improve. It barely moved. He could hardly see the rise and fall of its breast.
He needed help, so he went to his father.
What he hadn’t known, at the time, was that his daddy was in one of his moods, sleeping off last night’s excesses.
It’s not getting any better, he explained. Can you fix it?
You bet. His father lifted the bird with the gentlest of touches. One long finger stroked from the crown of the bird’s head to its crooked tail. And then he snapped its neck.
You killed it! George cried.
His father pushed the limp creature back and corrected him. I put it out of its misery.
George couldn’t stop sobbing; he hadn’t stopped, not when he buried the cigar box in his mother’s melon patch; not when she made him catfish for dinner; not when he lay down in his pajamas after saying his prayers for the departed soul of the bird. He could hear his parents arguing in the hall.
What kind of father does that?
Back then he had wondered if his father truly thought he was doing the right thing by ending the bird’s suffering.
Now, George looked around the clinic waiting room at the motley collection of people whose fate he held in his hand.
Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.
—
TEN YEARS EARLIER, HUGH HAD been one of a dozen cops on the ground twenty-two stories below the Regions Plaza. He squinted up at the roof, where a slight guy in a windbreaker wavered on the edge. The chief was talking into a bullhorn. “Step away from the edge,” he said. “Don’t jump.”
It seemed to Hugh that the last thing you wanted to say to someone in this situation was Don’t jump. It was like you were planting the seed more firmly in his head, when what you really needed to do was distract him.
“Chief,” he said, “I’ve got an idea.”
Within minutes, Hugh had climbed a set of stairs from the twenty-second floor to the roof of the building and crept to the edge where the man sat. Except he wasn’t a man. He was a boy, really. Eighteen, if that.
Hugh sat down beside the kid, facing the opposite direction, away from the edge. He turned on the digital recorder in his pocket. “Hey,” Hugh said.
“They sent you?”
“They didn’t do anything. I came up here because I wanted to.”
The boy glanced at him. “And you just happen to be wearing a cop uniform.”
“My name is Hugh. How about you?”
“Alex.”
“Is it okay if I call you that?”
The boy shrugged. The wind ruffled his fine hair.
“You okay?”
“Do I look okay?”
Hugh thought back to when he was a teenager, and such a smart-ass that once, Bex had made dinner and set an extra plate at the table. That’s for your attitude, she had said, and feel free to leave it behind when you’re done eating.