A Spark of Light(53)

She scurried off, and Hugh sank down on the folding chair behind him. He buried his face in his hands. He might already be too late to help his sister. He could not afford to make a mistake. It wasn’t just his professional reputation on the line, this time.

The Milky Way has four arms, not two.

It wasn’t that the silhouette of the galaxy had changed. It was that often, you couldn’t see the shape of something when you were stuck inside it. You couldn’t be objective, if you were too close.

It was why doctors did not operate on relatives and judges recused themselves from matters that involved them and hostage negotiators stepped back from situations where they had a vested, personal interest.

Well, Hugh thought. Fuck that.

—


BEX LAY ON HER BACK, feeling the soup of her breathing, drowning even on dry land. Everything hurt: inhaling, exhaling, blinking. She was dizzy and faint and felt as if a pike had been driven through her chest.

At least Wren was safe, still. If Bex had to die to keep it that way, she would do it.

She should have told Hugh. She could have told him what Wren had asked her to do, and made him swear not to tell Wren that she had said anything. Then he would have known they were going to the clinic, at least.

He would know she was in there.

But Bex knew from personal experience that the minute a father realized his baby girl wasn’t a baby anymore, something infinitesimal changed in the relationship. Even if it seemed outwardly solid and unaltered, you could still sense it, like the broken bone that never properly healed, or the hairline crack in the vase to which your eye was unerringly drawn. And so, she had kept Wren’s secret.

She was good at that.

She felt herself starting to shiver. Did that mean she was in shock? That she had lost too much blood?

Everyone in this room, she realized, had a story that ended within these walls. If today hadn’t happened, many of those stories would have gone untold. There were a hundred different paths that led to the corner of Juniper and Montfort—from pregnancies that were unwanted to those that were cherished, but impossible to carry through; from young girls who were trying to do the right thing to the relatives who lied for them. Here was the one thing all these women had in common: they hadn’t asked for this moment in their lives.

It was getting harder to breathe. Bex tried to turn her head toward the closet, just in case Wren could miraculously see her through the slats. It hurt so much that the edges of her vision went a hot, searing white.

Bex made a promise to herself: if she got out of here—if she survived—she would tell Hugh the truth.

All of it.

—


GEORGE STARED DOWN AT THE gun in his hand. Now what?

He had imagined his vengeance as if it were a movie he had seen long ago, where someone wronged took justice into his own hands. He saw himself bursting through the front door of the Center with his gun raised like Stallone or Willis; he saw a doctor cowering under the heel of his boot; he saw an apocalyptic landscape of destruction left in his wake as he emerged, the vanquisher.

Here is what had not been part of his vision: the ringing in his ears when the gun fired, the spray of people’s blood, the way they begged for mercy.

George glanced at the group of people huddled in the waiting room. The doctor, injured. The nurse who was hovering near him. The blond girl who kept tugging at her hair. The one who had just killed her baby. The lady who was struggling to breathe. He had done that to her. It made George feel sick, watching her suffer. In the abstract, eliminating everyone who was tied to the Center had seemed masterful, necessary. In truth, it was messy.

These people were puppets and their strings were made of terror. Their whispers died the minute he looked at them. I’m not who you think I am, George wanted to say, but that was no longer true. He was exactly who these people thought he was.

His frustration and fury had been a live grenade, dropped into his hands. What was he supposed to do with it? Let it tear him to pieces? Instead, he had run. Far and fast, behind enemy lines. And then he had thrown it right back at them.

They huddled together in the waiting room, leaving as large a gap between themselves and George as they could. They seemed be waiting for something from him—a demand, a tantrum, an explanation.

They had all heard him talking to the cop. They knew there was someone out there who wanted to rescue them. Hope was a pretty damn good weapon.

On the other hand, George had this pistol. When he waved it they jumped, they cried, they shivered. They listened to him.

He just had no idea what to say.

He started to pace. He had come here with intention, but not with a plan. Somehow he hadn’t imagined that there would be people left, when he finished teaching his lesson of retribution. He knew how these things ended. In a standoff, with him and a bunch of cops in flak jackets.

But then, he had more leverage than just the gun.

He had hostages.

—


WREN HUGGED HER KNEES TO her chest in the closet and cursed herself for being conscientious. Who knew that trying to be responsible was deadly?

She could have been like most teenagers on the planet and just waited until things got so intense between her and Ryan that it was too late to plan ahead. She could have brought a pack of condoms to the register at the Rite Aid, or she could have told Ryan that it was his problem. But there had been a girl in her homeroom last year who’d gotten pregnant and had stayed in school until her water broke during gym class. Wren had sat on the bleachers with her till the ambulance arrived, holding her hand while the girl’s fingernails squeezed little half-moons of pain into her skin. Is there anything I can do? Wren had asked, and the girl had turned to her, panting, and said, Yeah. Use anything but Trojans.