There was nothing her father wouldn’t do for her. But there were also things her fathercouldn’tdo for her. When she had gotten her period two years ago, the cramps had been so bad she’d told her dad she was sick and couldn’t go to school. He held his hand to her forehead, dubious, because she didn’t have a fever. “I have cramps,” she told him flatly, and he went bright red and stumbled out of her room. He returned an hour later with two bags from CVS—Gatorade, Advil, a Matchbox car, a Rubik’s Cube, a pack of Bazooka gum, a little puzzle with a picture of a kitten. He set them on the foot of her bed, as if he couldn’t bring himself to get too close to her. “For your…um…lady-stomach,” he murmured.
Seriously, how could she ask a man who couldn’t even say the wordcrampsto bring her somewhere to get birth control?
She had turned to her aunt for help, and it had almost cost Bex her life. Itstillmight.
In her sneaker, her cellphone vibrated. She crossed her ankles, wondering if anyone else had heard the buzz, knowing it was probably her dad.
He would not let anything bad happen to her. Even if she could not reach her phone and tell him she was all right.
Sometimes when her father came home from work and was particularly quiet, Wren knew that he’d had a really shitty day. He once told her that being a detective meant you had to peel back the pretty of a town, and see its festering wounds: who was an addict, who was beating his wife, who was drowning in debt, who was suicidal. But he never told her details. She had accused him once of treating her like a baby.It’s not that I want to hide anything from you,he’d told her.It’s that if I tell you, you’ll never look at people the same way.
Wren turned back to the nurse, and then to each of the other women. “I’m Wren,” she whispered.
“Izzy,” said the nurse softly. “And this is Dr. Ward.”
The man lifted a hand, but that was all he could manage.
The woman with a bruise on her forehead met her gaze. “Janine,” she mouthed.
“Joy,” whispered the woman in sweats.
“What’s he gonna—”
“Ssh,” Izzy hushed, as the man returned, dragging Olive from the closet and unceremoniously shoving her into the space beside Wren.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the shooter said to Olive.
And then he pointed the gun at Wren’s face.
—
IT WAS THE SECOND TIMEOlive had come out of the closet, and it was equally traumatic. Now, she glanced around the room. Wren was shaking like a leaf, her wrists bound. There were red marks on her skin where the gunman had yanked her out of their hiding spot. It was a wonder he hadn’t dislocated the girl’s arm.
Seeing his roughness, Olive had been the most docile, subservient hostage imaginable as he hauled her out of the utility closet, too. She pleaded with him—what could a sixty-eight-year-old woman do to him, after all? And it had worked. Like most men, he saw only her petite frame, and not the strength of her mind. He pushed her into a couch next to Wren, but he said,Sorry ma’am. And he didn’t restrain her as he had Wren. Now her brain—her celebrated retired-professor brain—was working in triple time to find a way out of this situation.
He started waving the gun at Olive and Wren. It bounced between them with each syllable, like the little ball on the screen at a sing-along. “Did you think you could hide from me? Did you?”
Olive was trying to be strong, really she was. Peg, her wife, was always the first to tell her she often worried herself into a panic about things that didn’t come to pass. Like, for example, a mark on her shoulder that she was certain was a tick bite heralding the onset of Lyme disease. (It wasn’t.) A news report about another missile fired off by North Korea, which Olive thought would start World War III. (It hadn’t.) “Eeyore,” Peg would call her, and in this moment of all moments, the thought made Olive smile.
Well, Peg, I’m in a room with a crazy guy waving a gun and five other hostages. Is it all right to panic now?
“You lied to me!” He turned, the force of his anger bending over the woman who was wearing scrubs. A nurse? “You told me that closet was empty!”
The woman cowered, her arms shielding her face. “I didn’t—”
“Shut up! Shut your goddamn mouth!” he yelled.
In addition to Olive and Wren, there were three other women. There was a young woman in sweatpants, and another one with a big bruise on her temple. There was the nurse, whose name must have been Izzy, because the man she was tending to kept calling her that. The doctor, maybe? He was in scrubs, like her. He was big enough to take down the gunman, if not for the fact that his leg looked like hamburger below the thigh, and he was in obvious pain.
Wren’s aunt was nowhere to be seen.
And then there was the gunman. He was middle-aged—maybe forty, maybe forty-five. He was wiry, but strong. Strong enough to haul a fighting teenager out of hiding. A silver stubble of beard rubbed along the coastline of his jaw. There was nothing about him that would have made Olive look twice at him on the street, unless their eyes had met. Then, she might have just stopped and stared. His eyes were almost colorless. His gaze felt like a sucking wound.
“I’m sorry,” Olive said, in her thickest Elderly Southern Lady accent. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Miz Olive.”
“I don’t care who you are,” he said.
One of the other women caught her eye and glanced at the television overhead, where the news was streaming in a weird metaphysical mirror, a reporter with this very clinic over his shoulder.GUNMAN IDENTIFIED AS GEORGE GODDARD,a caption below read.
