Bex still got to watch Hugh grow up, have a baby of his own. So did the labels really matter?
It had taken her forty years of careful practice, but she allowed herself regrets only one day a year—this one, Hugh’s birthday. She took out this shoe box, and she pictured the parallel universes of her life. In one, she was Hugh’s mother, Wren’s grandmother. In another, she had fallen in love again, married, and had a child she could gather into her arms any time she wished. In a third, she went to art school and moved to Florence and became a sculptor, instead of staying in Mississippi to watch over Hugh after her father had died and her mom became an alcoholic.
Bex, who had not terminated her pregnancy, had still lost a potential life that day—her own. But when she started to grieve for what she had missed, she redirected her attention to the lives that had been saved, literally, by her son—the battered wives, the suicide jumpers. The teenager Hugh had pulled from the freezing river last year. Wren.
No. She would not have changed a thing. Or this is what she told herself, anyway, when she let the question rise high in her throat, when she felt like she was choking.
Bex carefully put the photo in the bottom of the shoe box and placed the bracelet and the hat inside. She carried it back to the closet and slipped it into its hiding place. Then she pulled the trapdoor into place again, sealing the crypt of this memory.
Occasionally she wondered if, after she died, someone would find the shoe box. Maybe whoever bought her house. She wondered if they would create a mythology around the artifacts, if it would be a tragedy or a love story. It could, Bex knew, be both at once.
She shut the closet and then opened the curtains in her studio. Sunshine spilled onto the wooden floor, like golden grain from a silo. The sky was clear, as blue as her son’s eyes. It was why she had named him as she did—her only hint. Even at fourteen, Bex had already pictured the world as an artist did, cast in shadows and light. Even then, what mattered most was hue.
Hugh.
Bex smiled, reaching for the stretcher bars and unprimed canvas. Today, she thought, is a good day to be born.
Epilogue
Six p.m.
NONE OF US CHOOSE OUR PARENTS. BUT SOME OF US GET LUCKY.
One minute Wren felt her father’s arm close around her. She could smell him—bay rum aftershave and starch. “It’s okay,” he whispered, his breath moving the hair at her temple. “Everything is okay now.”
She believed him. She always had. She believed him when he swore to her that there was no reason to be afraid of the dark, and taught her how to read the stars, so she would never feel lost in it. She believed him when he printed out articles about Internet predators and catfishing and left them taped to her bathroom mirror. She believed him when he ate a spider to prove that it wasn’t so scary after all.
He gently pushed her back, his eyes catching on their clasped hands. “Wren, go on now,” he said.
She couldn’t make herself step away. Wren, who had gotten herself into this mess because she couldn’t wait to grow up, wanted nothing more than for her father to rock her on his lap and never let her go.
“Let me finish this,” he murmured.
She took an unsteady step toward the white canopy of the tent. There were cops there, motioning to her, but no one came forward to grab her.
Once, there had been a tornado in Jackson. Wren remembered how the sky turned the yellow of a jaundiced eye, and how the atmosphere felt pregnant. The moments before the wind slammed into the city, the air had gone so still that Wren thought the world had stopped spinning, that time had started to move backward. That’s how it felt just then, and it was why Wren turned around halfway to the command tent.
She heard her father’s voice, as he spoke to George Goddard. “Think of your daughter.”
“She’ll never look at me the same after this. You don’t get it.”
“Then make me understand.”
Wren was staring at the shooter when he pulled the trigger.
—
WREN’S FATHER USED TO TELL her a story about how he’d been her hero from the moment she was born. She was in the hospital, and the nurses were doing whatever tests they had to do before a baby could be discharged. One of them was called the Guthrie test, which required the newborn’s foot to be pricked and several drops of blood to be dripped onto a diagnostic card. It was sent to the lab to test for PKU.
The nurse that day was inexperienced, and when she pricked Wren’s foot, the baby started to wail. It didn’t bleed enough, so she had to prick Wren a second time. She squeezed the baby’s foot, trying to manually extract blood. By now, Wren was howling.
Her father stood up and grabbed his daughter away from the nurse. He wrapped Wren in a blanket and announced that they were going home. The nurse said this wasn’t possible, that she had to finish the test by law.
I am the fucking law, her father said.
He still wasn’t allowed in that hospital.
—
HEROES, WREN KNEW, DID NOT always swoop in to rescue. They made questionable calls. They lived with doubts. They replayed and edited and imagined different outcomes. They killed, sometimes, to save.
Wren was wrapped in a space blanket, shivering, even though it was still hot outside. Her ribs hurt from where she had been tackled by a member of the SWAT team. Would the gunman actually have shot Wren? No one knew, because instead her father had scooped up his weapon and fired three shots into George Goddard.
On live television.
There had been a lot of activity—her father being pulled away by the SWAT team; paramedics loading the body into an ambulance, because a doctor had to pronounce the shooter dead.
The shooter.
Wren realized, with a little start, that title applied to both men.
She was sitting on the flatbed of a police truck when her father approached. His arm had gauze wrapped around it. Goddard’s wayward shot, the one meant for her, had struck him.
She had come to the clinic because she didn’t want to be a little girl anymore. But it wasn’t having sex that made you a woman. It was having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children were told what to do. Adults made up their own minds, even when the options tore them apart.
Her father followed her gaze to the Center. Bathed in the last throes of sunset, the orange walls looked like they were on fire. “What’s going to happen to it?” Wren asked.
“I don’t know.”
She found herself thinking about Dr. Ward and Izzy and Joy and Janine. About poor Vonita. About the nameless women who had been in the Center before Wren got there, and the women who would show up tomorrow for an appointment and trample over the police tape if they had to.
“Aunt Bex is waiting for us,” her father said. He held out his arms, as if Wren were still little, and swung her down from the flatbed. Wren saw him wince because of his injury.
When she was tiny, she used to play a game with him by tightening her arms and legs and straightening her backbone to be as rigid as possible. I’m making myself extra heavy, she would tell him, and he would laugh.
I’ll always be able to carry you.
The night sky rippled, blue stars rising and red ones fading. They were surrounded by life and death. They moved past the chain-link fence that ran along the perimeter of the Center. On it, the protesters had hung a long curl of butcher paper: IT’S A CHILD NOT A CHOICE. Wren had walked past the sign this morning, and remarkably, it was still intact.
A few feet past the Center, Wren stopped. “You all right?” her father asked.
“Just a second.”
Wren ran back to the fence. She ripped the banner off, crumpled a long piece, and threw it on the ground. What remained she speared on the top of the chain link to secure it.
CHOICE.