“But seriously, Wren. There could be a biker.”
“Okay.”
“And maybe there’s not a bike lane, so you turn the corner, and you clip him and he goes flying off his bike and smacks his head on the pavement and then you get out and call 911 and follow him to the hospital and you find out that he’s dead and you have to tell his family you’re the reason why.”
She glanced at him. “Dad.”
“Eyes on the road!”
“This isn’t even a road!”
He put up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. Turn left.”
She put on her blinker and rotated the steering wheel.
“You know that you don’t have the right of way.”
“There aren’t any other cars.”
“But if you jump out in front of someone who’s going straight, and they T-bone you, it will probably take the Jaws of Life to get you out of the wreckage. And by then, your ribs could be broken and penetrating your heart and you could slowly bleed to death—”
“Dad.”
“Sorry. It’s just that there are a million drivers I don’t know and don’t trust…and there’s only oneyou.”
Wren put the car into park. “I’m not going to die in a car wreck,” she vowed.
Her father looked out the window, eyes straight ahead. Then he smiled, the same kind of half smile she had seen on his face when she told him that she could read to herself at night now; the same kind of smile he’d had when she crossed the auditorium in fifth grade to get a silly graduation certificate; the same kind of smile as when she came downstairs for the first time wearing mascara and lip gloss. “I’m gonna hold you to that,” he said softly.
—
THE SHOOTER HAD HERDED THEfive of them into the waiting room. The front desk was littered with glass. There were pamphlets scattered all over the place and smears of blood on the carpet. Furniture had been piled against the front door as a barricade—a coffee table, a file cabinet, a couch. The television overhead was playingThe Chew.
Joy had left her purse and her phone in the recovery room when she ran away from the shooter. His name was George. She had heard him say it, on the telephone. He looked like any of the male protesters who had been standing outside yelling at her as she ran into the clinic. She didn’t listen to a single word they said. But she remembered a man holding a baby doll upside down by the foot, with a knife sticking out of its belly.
To be here today, she had switched shifts at the bar and said she was going to Arkansas to visit her family. If anyone else were going to be a casualty of a pro-life shooter, he’d pick the woman who’d just had an abortion. Was this the karmic price she had to pay? A life for a life?
Would anyone even miss her?
“Hey.” Dr. Ward’s voice floated toward her. “You all right?”
She nodded. “Areyou?”
“I’ll live. Maybe.” He grinned faintly at his own joke. “It’s Joy, right? It’s gonna be okay.”
She didn’t know how he could say that with such authority, but she appreciated it, the same way she appreciated his kindness during the procedure.
If she died today, she’d be a footnote in a newspaper.
She wouldn’t finish her associate’s degree.
She wouldn’t know what it was like to fall in love.
She wouldn’t have a chance to be the kind of parent she never had.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. She was a hostage, at the mercy of a lunatic with a gun. The soles of her feet were literally soaked with the blood of others. She had stepped over a dead woman to get where she was sitting, and she might very well watch more people die before her eyes. She might even be one of them.
But at least she wasn’t pregnant.
