SOON IT WOULD BE GETTING dark. Wren sat on the floor cross-legged, keeping an eye on George as he hunched forward on the couch, elbows balanced on his knees, and the gun held loosely in his right hand. She tore open the last packet of Fig Newtons—all that was left of the basket of snacks taken from the recovery room. Her stomach growled.
She used to be afraid of the dark. She’d make her dad come in with his gun in his holster and check out the whole of her bedroom—beneath the bed, under the mattress, on the high shelves above her dresser. Sometimes she woke up crying in the middle of the night convinced she had seen something fanged and terrible sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her with its yellow eyes.
Now she knew: monsters were real.
Wren swallowed. “Your daughter,” she asked. “What’s her name?”
George glanced up. “Shut your mouth,” he said.
The vehemence of his words made her scoot back a few feet, but as she did, her leg brushed something cold and rigid. She knew right away what it was—who it was—and swallowed her scream. Wren willed herself to inch forward again, curling her arms around her bent knees. “I bet your daughter wants to see you.”
The shooter’s profile looked ragged and inhospitable. “You don’t know anything.”
“I bet she wants to see you,” Wren repeated. I know, she thought, because it’s all I want.
—
SHE LIED.
Janine sat in the police station, across from the detective who was recording her statement, and lied. “What brought you to the Center this morning?” he had asked gently.
“A Pap smear,” Janine had said.
The rest that she had told him was true, and sounded like a horror film: the sound of gunfire, the sudden weight of the clinic employee slamming into her and knocking her to the floor. Janine had changed into a clean T-shirt that the paramedics had given her, but she could still feel the woman’s hot blood (so much blood) seeping into her dress. Even now, looking down at her hands, she expected to see it.
“Then what happened?”
She found she could not remember in sequence. Instead of linked moments, there were only flashes: her body shaking uncontrollably as she ran; her hands pressed against the bullet wound of an injured woman. The shooter jerking his pistol at Janine, while Izzy stood next to him with a heap of supplies in her arms. The phone ringing, as they all froze like mannequins.
Janine felt like she was watching a movie, one she was obligated to sit through even though she had never wanted to see it.
When she got to the part where the shooter smacked her with the gun, she left out why. A lie of omission, that’s what they used to call it when she was a little girl going to confession. It was a sin, too, but of a different degree. Still, sometimes you lied to protect people. Sometimes you lied to protect yourself.
What was one more lie to add to the others?
She was crying as she spoke. She didn’t even realize it until the detective leaned forward with a box of tissues.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“Of course.”
She swallowed. “Do you think that people get what’s coming to them?”
The detective looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t think anyone deserves a day like today,” he said.
Janine nodded. She blew her nose and balled the tissue into her hand.
Suddenly the door opened, and a uniformed officer stuck his head inside. “There’s a gentleman out here who says he knows you … ?”
Behind him, Janine could see Allen—his florid cheeks and broad belly, the one that made him joke that he knew what it was like to be pregnant. Allen was the leader of the local Right to Life group. “Janine!” he cried, and he pushed past the cop so that he could fold her into his arms. “Sweet Jesus,” he sighed. “Honey, we’ve been praying for you.”
She knew they prayed for every woman who walked through the doors of the Center. This, though, was different. Allen would not have been able to make peace with himself if anything had happened to her, because he had been the one to send her inside as a spy.
Maybe God had been listening, because she had been released. But so were Joy, and Izzy, and Dr. Ward. And what about those who didn’t make it out alive? What kind of capricious God would roll the dice like that?
“Let me take you home and get you settled,” Allen said. And to the detective, “I’m sure Miz Deguerre needs a little rest.”
The detective looked directly at Janine, as if to see whether she was okay with Allen calling the shots. And why shouldn’t she be? She had done what he wanted from the moment she arrived in town, intent to serve his mission any way she could. And she knew that he meant well. “We’re more than happy to give you a ride wherever you need to go,” the detective said to her.
He was offering her a choice; and it felt heady and powerful.
“I have to use the restroom,” she blurted, another lie.
“Of course.” The detective gestured down the hallway. “Left at the end, and then third door on the right.”
Janine started walking, still clutching her foil blanket around her shoulders. She just needed space, for a second.
At the end of the hallway was another interrogation room, much like the one she had been in. What had been a mirror on the inside was, from this vantage point, a window. Joy sat at a table with a female detective.
Before she realized what she was doing, Janine was knocking at the window. It must have made a sound, because Joy turned in her direction, even if she couldn’t see Janine’s face. The interrogation room door swung open, and a moment later a female detective looked at her. “Is there a problem?”
Through the open doorway, she met Joy’s gaze.
“We know each other,” Janine said.
After a moment, Joy nodded.
“I just wanted to … I wanted to see …” Janine hesitated. “I thought you might need help.”
The detective folded her arms. “We’ll make sure she gets whatever she needs.”
“I know but—” Janine looked at Joy. “You shouldn’t be alone tonight.”
She felt Joy’s eyes flicker to the bandage at her temple. “Neither should you,” Joy said.
—
IN THE HOSPITAL ROOM, THERE was a piece of tape stuck to one of the slats of the air-conditioning vent overhead. It fluttered like a ribbon, like an improbable celebration, as Izzy lay on her back pretending she didn’t feel the doctor’s hands on her.
“Here we go,” the OB murmured. He moved the wand left, and then right, and then pointed to the fuzzy screen, to the edge of the black amoeba of Izzy’s uterus, where the white peanut of the fetus curled. “Come on … come on …” There was something urgent in his voice. Then they both saw it—the flicker of a heartbeat. Something she had seen multiple times in other women’s ultrasounds.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
The doctor took measurements and recorded them. He wiped the gel off her belly and pulled the drape down to cover her again. “Miz Walsh,” he said, “you are one lucky lady. You’re good to go.”
Izzy struggled onto her elbows. “Wait … so … that’s it?”
“Obviously, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t have any cramping or bleeding in the next few days,” the doctor added, “but given the strength of that heartbeat, I’d say that little guy—or girl—is planning on sticking around. Definitely takes after its mama.”
He said he’d write up some discharge orders and ducked out of the curtain that separated her ER cubicle from the others. Izzy lay back on the gurney and slipped her hands underneath the scratchy blanket. She flattened them on her stomach.
As soon as she had gotten outside the clinic, the EMTs had put her on a stretcher beside Dr. Ward, even as she had tried to tell them she wasn’t hurt. He would have none of it. “She’s pregnant,” he insisted. “She needs medical attention.”
“You need medical attention,” she argued.
“There she goes again,” Dr. Ward said to the young paramedic inspecting his tourniquet. “Won’t give me a moment’s peace.” He caught her eye. “For which,” he said quietly, “I am supremely grateful.”
That was the last she had seen of him. She wondered if he was in surgery; if he would keep the leg. She had a good feeling about it.