“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 TELLher 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.
Iamthe fucking law,her father said.
He still wasn’t allowed in that hospital.
—
HEROES,WREN KNEW, DID NOTalways 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.
She surveyed her work.There,Wren thought.
Many years later, when Wren told this story, she didn’t remember amending the sign. She didn’t remember whether the fence outside the Center was plaster or metal, how small the closet had been, or if her aunt’s blood had spilled on tile or carpet. What she remembered was that, as she left with her father, it was the first time she heldhishand, instead of the other way around.
