A Spark of Light(71)

Why is your aunt with you?

Why didn’t you tell me?

Her earliest memory was when she was four years old, when she still had a mother and a normal nuclear family. She was at nursery school, and a boy on the playground kissed her smack on the lips underneath the jungle gym that looked like a pirate ship and announced that he wanted to make babies with her. Wren had drawn back her fist and punched him right in the mouth.

Her parents were called to school. Her mother was mortified and kept saying that Wren didn’t have a violent bone in her body, which made her wonder if other people had violent bones, and if they were tucked in among the ribs or pressed down under the foot when you stamped it. “Wren,” her mother said, “what did you do?”

“I did what Daddy told me to,” she answered. Her father laughed so hard he couldn’t stop, and her mother told him to go stand outside, like he was the one in trouble.

Her mother wanted to punish her. Her father took her out for the biggest ice cream sundae, instead.

Dad, she texted, are you still there?

. . .

. . .

. . .

Always, he wrote, and she exhaled.

—


THE SHOOTER HAD TAKEN EVERYONE’S cellphones and thrown them into the trash. He barricaded the front door with the couch and seats and coffee tables. Breathing hard, he turned around, leveling the gun at the others. “Do what I say,” he muttered, “and no one will get hurt.”

“No one else,” Izzy corrected under her breath.

She knew that he was watching her; his eyes felt like lasers. But Izzy didn’t care. She had kept up her end of the bargain, and there were people here who were hurt. She’d be damned if she sat back and let them suffer.

Janine still had her hands pressed on Bex’s chest. Izzy bent down, trying to see how much the wound was still bleeding. The woman’s whisper fell into her ear. “My niece. Closet.”

Izzy thought of the two faces, pinched and terrified, that had been staring up at her when she opened those doors at the gunman’s directive. She leaned over farther on the pretense of listening to Bex’s labored breath. “She’s okay,” Izzy murmured.

Bex’s eyes fluttered closed. “Need to tell Hugh.”

“Tell me what?”

Bex coughed, and then cried out from the pain that must have shot through her lungs and ribs. Izzy tried to distract her, because there was damn little else she could do but keep the woman comfortable. “What do you do, Bex?”

“Artist,” the woman whimpered. “Hurts.”

“I know,” Izzy soothed. “The less you can move, the better.” She glanced at Janine, and silently directed her to maintain her position. “I’m going to tend to someone else,” Izzy said, “but I promise I’ll be back.”

She inched across the carpet to Dr. Ward. The tourniquet that Joy had tied needed to be tighter and more durable.

“Vonita,” he said softly. “She’s gone?”

Izzy nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” he murmured. “So am I.” He looked over his shoulder, as if he could see past the barrier of the front desk, where the body lay. “These women, they were all the daughters Vonita never had. Drove her husband crazy, how hard she worked at this place. He used to say they’d carry her out of here in a coffin.” His voice broke on the last word. “She would hate knowing that he turned out to be right.”

Izzy rolled the fabric from Dr. Ward’s pants leg around his thigh and tied it just above the wound. “Hold still, Doctor,” she said.

He raised a brow. “You just ripped my scrubs off. I think you can call me Louie, don’t you?”

Izzy placed a Sharpie she’d found under the couch at the center of the knot, then tied the fabric again. She began to twist the Sharpie, which wound the cotton around, tightening the new tourniquet. The blood flow trickled, stopped. “There,” she said. “That’s more like it.” She grabbed a roll of tape, awkwardly tugging it with her teeth so that she could secure the tourniquet in place. Then she looked at her wrist. It was just after twelve-thirty. Now, the countdown began: she had stopped Dr. Ward from bleeding out, but without arterial flow, there would eventually be ischemic damage to the tissue. If that binding stayed in place longer than two hours, there could be muscle or nerve injury. Six hours, and he would have to have his leg amputated.

Maybe by then they’d be rescued.

Dr. Ward patted her hand as she finished taping the tourniquet. “We make a good team,” he said. “Thank you.” He lifted his leg onto a chair so that it would be elevated above his heart.

She looked at Bex, still lying on the floor, deathly pale but stable.

Now that Izzy didn’t have a medical emergency to occupy her hands, they started shaking. She grabbed her right with her left.

“I haven’t seen you here before, have I?” Dr. Ward murmured.

Izzy shook her head. She started to answer, but then hesitated as the shooter passed by, talking to himself under his breath.

When he was on the other side of the room, the doctor spoke again. “You got a husband out there worrying about you?”

He was speaking quietly, creating a bubble of conversation just big enough for the two of them. “No,” she said. “Just a boyfriend.”