Or homegrown terrorist, Olive thought. Either would fit.
If you could see me, Peg, she thought. Olive was the one who peeked from between her fingers during scary movies, who still sometimes had to check the closet before going to bed to make sure there was nothing lurking inside (and goodness, after this episode, she would be doing that all the time). But here she was calmly playing the old lady for all it was worth, the only postmenopausal one in the bunch.
Surely he knew she hadn’t come here to get an abortion.
Did it even matter?
The girl beside her burst into tears. Olive wrapped her arms around Wren, trying to will her strength.
The man knelt down, his eyes clouding for a second. “Don’t cry,” he said to Wren, his voice catching. “Please don’t cry …” He reached out to her with his free hand.
There was something in the way he was looking at Wren, but wasn’t seeing her, thought Olive. In his mind’s eye, this was someone else, maybe someone about her age, who had come to this clinic against his wishes. After all, what else would have set him off?
If Olive was right, and she usually was, what had happened to that other girl?
She and Peg used to sit at the airport, waiting for their flight, and eavesdrop on conversations between men and women, mothers and children, colleagues. They would take turns making up backstories for them. He grew up in a cult and hasn’t learned how to bond with someone in a healthy way. She’s adopted that five-year-old, who has oppositional defiant disorder. That guy’s a sex addict, cheating with his boss’s wife.
“Don’t touch me,” Wren shrieked, as the man reached out to her. She kicked reflexively, connecting with his knee, and he winced and backed away. “Goddammit,” he growled, and he started toward her, but Wren let out a piercing scream. George covered his hands with his ears, his eyes screwed shut.
Wren let a loud wail loose again. And another. Maybe she had figured out that her aunt was dead, and she was inconsolable. Olive squeezed her arm. Clearly every time Wren opened her mouth, it set the gunman on edge. She had to see that, even if she was young. Didn’t she?
Her weeping was almost rhythmic.
And … was Wren’s foot buzzing?
Wren turned to Olive, and Olive realized that in spite of her cries, not a single tear streaked down her cheeks. Her chin nodded imperceptibly to her sock, where a phone screen glowed beneath and vibrated with a text. She was covering up the sounds with her sobs.
Olive waited until George paced past them, and then she covered Wren’s ankle with her palm. She slipped her fingers beneath the elastic and felt around for the power button, turning it off.
Wren sagged with relief, resting her head against Olive’s shoulder. The movement made George spin around, the gun trained on her.
Peg, I didn’t even jump, she would say, when this was all over.
Olive pasted a wide smile on her face. “George,” she said, “I remember some Goddards from Biloxi. They were in the brick business, family-run. You wouldn’t be related now, would you? I do believe they moved to Birmingham. Or was it Mobile?”
“Shut up,” he growled. “I should have left you in the goddamn closet. I can’t think when you’re yapping.”
Olive quieted dutifully, and then she winked at Wren. Because as George was busy silencing her, he had tucked the gun back into the waistband of his jeans.
—
IN THE AMBULANCE, BEX TRIED to speak. “My … niece …” she rasped, clawing at the shirt of the EMT.
“Don’t try to talk,” the young man said. He had soft eyes and softer hands, and his teeth were a beacon against his dark skin. “We’re gonna take care of you now. We’re almost at the hospital.”
“Wren …”
“When?” he said, mishearing her. “Soon. Real soon.” He smiled down at her. “You got the devil’s own luck.”
What Bex knew was that this was not luck, but karma. If Wren did not get out of that clinic, Bex would never forgive herself. She should have known better than to go behind Hugh’s back to the clinic. But Wren had come to her last week after school, riding her bike to Bex’s studio; she had been finishing a new commission—a mural going into a skyscraper lobby in Orlando, to commemorate the Pulse shooting. It was a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot profile of two men kissing. The pixels were made not of Post-its, as usual, but of photos of people who had died during the AIDS crisis.
“Cool,” Wren had said. “What’s it going to be?”
Bex had explained it. “Want to help?”
She gave Wren hundreds of tiny squares of tinted celluloid. Showing her how to affix them to each photo with glue, Bex instructed her to start at the bottom and screen the last ten rows of photographs in shades of violet celluloid. The next ten rows above them would be blue, then green, then yellow, and so on. Standing far enough away, you would see the kiss, but you would also see a rainbow. Standing close, you’d see all the individual shoulders those two men had to stand on in order to embrace each other openly.
“This isn’t even a thing for kids your age, is it?” Bex mused as they worked beside each other.
“What thing?”
“Being gay.”
“It’s queer, FYI. And I mean, yeah. It still is, I think, if you’re the one who happens to be that way. People assume you’re cis and straight, so if you’re not, you’re different. But who says there’s only one way to be normal?”
Bex stopped working, her hands stilling over the lips of one of the models. “When did you get to be so smart?”
Wren grinned. “What took you so long to notice?” They worked in silence for a while, and then Wren asked, “Does this piece have a name yet?”
“I was thinking maybe Love.”
“That’s perfect,” Wren said. “But not just the word. The whole sentence. Exactly the way you said it.” She brushed a line of glue around a violet celluloid. “Aunt Bex? Can I ask you something? Do you believe that you can fall in love when you’re fifteen?”
Bex’s hands stilled. She lifted the magnifying glasses she wore when she worked so that she could look Wren in the eye. “You bet I do,” she said firmly. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
And oh, it had been delicious—the way Wren’s cheeks had gone pink when she held his name in her mouth; how she talked about him as if there had never been another boy on earth. What love looked like was this: fledgling and unsteady, fierce and soft-shelled at the same time.
Wren didn’t have a mother around to talk to her frankly about sex. Hugh would have probably rather carved out his liver with a teaspoon than have that conversation with his daughter. So Bex asked her niece the questions no one else would: Have you kissed him? Have you done more than that? Have you talked about protection?
No judgment, no finger wagging. Just pragmatism. Once the rocket had left the launchpad, you couldn’t bring it back.
Wren was fifteen; she was writing his name on the leg of her jeans; she was stealing his sweatshirts so that she could sleep in the ghost of his scent. But she’d also been thinking of birth control. “Aunt Bex,” Wren had asked shyly, “will you help me?”
And so it was with the best of intentions that—once again—Bex had done something inexcusable.
She heard a machine somewhere behind her start to beep. The EMT leaned closer. He smelled like wintergreen. “Ma’am,” he said, “try to relax.”
Bex closed her eyes again, thinking of the bullet that had exploded through her, and the pierce of the scalpel that had maybe saved her life.
This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.
—