“Well, George,” she said evenly, as if they were sitting down to lemonade. “Lovely to make your acquaintance.”
He may have been unhinged, but he was from the South, where even the unhinged had mothers and grandmothers who drilled decades of manners into them. Olive did not believe in using her age except for discount prices on movie tickets and to get 10 percent off at Kroger the second Tuesday of the month. And now, apparently, in a hostage situation.
George Goddard was sweating profusely, running his free hand over his brow and wiping it on his pants leg. Olive had a neuroscience background, but she could do armchair diagnosis with the best of them. Grandiose claims about the self. A sense of entitlement. Lack of empathy. A tendency to lash out, when they feel like they’re not being respected.
Narcissistic personality disorder.
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 thatall 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’tseeingher, 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?”
“Shutup,” 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 TRIEDto 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.
