A Spark of Light

“She knew that other fifteen-year-old girls romanticized the idea of dying for love, but Wren had read Romeo and Juliet last year in eighth-grade English and didn’t see the magic in waking up in a crypt beside your boyfriend, and then plunging his dagger into your own ribs.”

Wren’s skepticism about Romeo and Juliet reveals important aspects of her character: Though she is young, she is practical and logical. She sees past the romance into the tragedy and wants her own teenage relationship to involve safer practices. Ironically, her search for birth control so that she can responsibly have sex leads her into the crosshairs of George’s crusade.

“Born again. She didn’t think it was any coincidence that the term for letting God back into your heart had, at its core, birth.”

Janine has intense religious convictions that lead her to join the anti-abortion protesters. She sees birth as a central issue both politically and morally and sees the metaphor of salvation as connected to the crusade for birth. Her own trauma around her previous pregnancy and abortion also informs her commitment to this issue.

“If he didn’t interrupt his own journey to help them with theirs, who would? It was the one truly miraculous moment of Dr. Louie Ward’s life.”

Louie decided to become an OB-GYN and specialize in abortion due to a homily in his church that related the story of the Good Samaritan, who interrupted his own journey to help a stranger. Louie sees this epiphany as “truly miraculous” even though the miracle was internal. This passage helps to characterize Louie as a man who sees faith as private convictions expressed in good deeds and compassion toward others.

“Bex closed her eyes again, thinking of the bullet that had exploded through her, and the pierce of the scalpel that had maybe saved her life. This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.”

As an artist, Bex thinks in painterly metaphors, imagining her body as a “canvas” for the scars that attest to her survival. Both the bullet and scalpel leave marks on her skin, but one does so to kill and the other to save. Bex’s own life has contained many traumatic events, but she chooses to look for the beauty and joy in life whenever possible.

“He thought of Lil, hearing that bullshit. He thought of how, when she was little, she would always play the princess and he had to be the prince who saved her from the ogre or the quicksand or the evil queen. She had never seen him as anything but a hero. And now?”

George struggles to think of himself as a person who has worth, and one of his only sources of positive affirmation is his relationship with his daughter, Lil. As a child, Lil saw him as a “prince,” but now he worries that he will be a monster in her eyes. He knows that his act of violence in the clinic has irrevocably changed his life and their relationship.

“[H]er mother had said, You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough. Izzy thought of Dr. Ward, bleeding on the floor, still inside. She let go of the handles of the wheelchair, turned, and ran back to the gaping mouth of the clinic door.”

Izzy has an opportunity to flee the clinic when delivering Bex to the police but chooses to go back inside because of her mother’s wisdom. The clinic’s “gaping mouth” emphasizes the way the safe place has turned into a hungry beast that might devour her. It also echoes the hunger metaphor her mother used, reminding her to feed others when possible.

“She and her father had seen plenty of white stars through the telescope. She wondered which ones from her childhood were gone now, and whether they were actually dead, or if they were just too faint to emit light. Did you have to be missed to exist?”

Stars and light are a recurring motif throughout the novel. Wren and Hugh connect over stargazing, and Wren worries that, like a dying star, she might also be forgotten. However, she knows that her father loves her and that she will be missed by him should she die—this reminds her that her small life matters in the vastness of the universe.

“The Milky Way has four arms, not two. It wasn’t that the silhouette of the galaxy had changed. It was that often you couldn’t see the shape of something when you were stuck inside it. You couldn’t be objective if you were too close.”

Like Wren, Hugh thinks about the stars and universe often. He remembers giving Wren a fact about the Milky Way in her lunchbox but now realizes another truth embedded in it—he is too close to the case to be truly objective. However, he decides to put aside objectivity in favor of his parental love and hopes that love will enable him to save his daughter and the others.

“There were a hundred different paths that led to the corner of Juniper and Montfort—from pregnancies that were unwanted to those that were cherished, but impossible to carry through; from young girls who were trying to do the right thing to the relatives who lied for them. Here was the one thing all these women had in common: they hadn’t asked for this moment in their lives.”

Bex thinks that there are many stories behind the women who come to the Center and that they may not all look like the stories in the news about abortion. She emphasizes that the commonality they all share is a reluctance to be there. None of them have asked for this moment, including the people like Bex caught in the shooting.

“He saw himself bursting through the front door of the Center with his gun raised like Stallone or Willis; he saw a doctor cowering under the heel of his boot; he saw an apocalyptic landscape of destruction left in his wake as he emerged, the vanquisher.”

George imagines himself as a larger-than-life movie hero rampaging through the Center and himself as the heroic “vanquisher.” Instead, he is confronted with blood and terror. He begins to wonder if he is the hero after all.

“Izzy was a pro at fixing problems. When the stove broke, you made a campfire and boiled eggs by holding them up to the steam coming out of a kettle. When there was no milk for cereal, water worked. When you wore through the bottom of your shoe, you made an insole out of cardboard. If growing up poor teaches you anything, it’s ingenuity.”

This passage offers a glimpse into Izzy’s character. Though there was a lot of hardship in her upbringing, she also learned tenacity and “ingenuity.” These traits serve her well during the hostage situation and help her to save Bex’s life.

“If these women burst into tears on Louie’s table because they never imagined themselves there, he did not call them hypocrites. Any of us can rationalize the things we do. But he hoped empathy would spread, an invasive weed of compassion.”

Louie treats all of his patients with respect and doesn’t judge the ones who are also anti-abortion protesters. However, he hopes that his kind treatment of them will affect them positively. He calls compassion an “invasive weed,” emphasizing that it, like a weed, might be unwanted among his opponents, but it also might grow wildly.

“Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines.”

This imagery emphasizes the fragility of children and the ferocity of a parent’s love. Hugh thinks about protecting his child as a nearly impossible task. This fragility and impossibility make the hostage situation all the more poignant for him as he rushes to save his daughter.

“Willie, you can stand on top of Mount Everest and shout that life begins at conception all you want, but if this hospital was burning down and you had to decide between saving a fertilized egg in the IVF lab or a baby in the maternity ward, which would you choose?”

Mandy, Beth’s public defender, angrily confronts the prosecutor on what she considers to be his hypocrisy. To her, there is a clear difference between the “fertilized egg” and the baby, but the prosecutor does not want to make a legal distinction between them. Her exaggerated language (“on top of Mount Everest”) further underscores her anger and exasperation.

“Coming here undercover had been a bad idea. It was as if the Center were Pandora’s box. She’d opened the door, and had released all the evil into the world.”

Janine believes that she is being punished for her prior abortion, and she imagines her situation in mythical terms. In Greek mythology, Pandora opens a forbidden box and releases evil. Janine imagines herself as Pandora and the Center as the box that holds evil.

“There was no denying that he calmed her. When his thumb rubbed over her knuckles, absentmindedly, she could breathe more easily. She let him coax her into the conversation as if it were a frigid pool.”

Though Izzy sees the ways that she and Parker are different and worries that they are incompatible, he is also a source of calm and loving strength for her. When they were at dinner with his parents, he was able to “coax” her into the “frigid pool” of the frightening conversation. His presence and touch are soothing to her.

“Normal. Nothing was normal. The whole world had changed. She had had two hearts, and now she did not. She had been a mother, and now she was not.”

Immediately after her abortion, Joy experiences sorrow and a sense that “nothing [i]s normal.” This passage uses staccato sentences to convey the feeling of shock and loss that Joy experiences, even though she does not fundamentally question the choice she made. The short, declarative sentences allow the complexities and contradictions of her feelings to exist without forcing them into a single narrative.

“About a year ago, Wren and her father had been driving a deserted road near Chunky, Mississippi, when suddenly all the hair stood up on the back of her neck. The next minute, a doe had bolted from the woods and slammed into the car. They had been hit hard enough for the airbags to deploy and for the windshield to shatter. It was the one truly prescient moment of her life.”

Wren’s memory of the crash and the doe being hit by a car connects to the horror and shock of George’s attack on the Center. The doe is a figure of innocence that is helpless to stop the car, just as Wren is helpless to stop the gunman. The shock of the death jars her and her father from their daily life.

“Izzy forced herself to look him in the eye. He was a basilisk; she could be turned to stone. But he was also a gunman in an abortion clinic; presumably he was pro-life.”

Izzy is terrified when confronting George and thinks of him as a snakelike creature from mythology whose gaze turns people to stone when they meet his eyes. Despite the mythical dimensions of her terror, she still looks at George and puts herself between him and Louie. This comparison to a monster emphasizes Izzy’s fear as well as her courage.

“‘It’s like winning the lottery,’ Olive replied. ‘But Shirley Jackson’s kind.’”

Even when confronted with her fatal cancer diagnosis, Olive keeps her sense of humor. She alludes to Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” where winners of the town’s drawing are stoned to death every year. This passage exhibits Olive’s wit and courage as well as her depth of knowledge from her life as an academic.

“If only she’d kept the baby. The thought crawled into her mind like a spider. She would still have faced her father’s anger. She would still have been a whore, in his eyes. For all she knew, he would have thrown her out.”

Beth regrets her decision and wonders if her father would have treated her differently if she’d kept the baby. This regret is a “spider” crawling horribly through her mind, a grotesque image that represents her terror and loathing. Her deepest fear is that her pregnancy and abortion have permanently altered her father’s love for her.

“The suction was a choke, a throttle, a throat clearing. Little vacuum, Joy thought. Cleaning up her mess.”

During her abortion, Joy experiences regret and sorrow, though she believes that she is making the right decision. She figures the suction as a “little vacuum” “cleaning up her mess,” emphasizing the blame she places on herself for making mistakes. The vacuum is also evocative of homes and housewives, roles that Joy is rejecting.

“Joy blinked at it. ‘That doesn’t belong to me,’ she said, and she kept going.”

Throughout her pregnancy, Joy dreams about a baby in a blue blanket. En route to the Center, the driver of her rideshare tries to give her a blue blanket that he found in the car. Joy tells him that it “doesn’t belong” to her, emphasizing her final choice to end her pregnancy, and leaves. She “ke[eps] going” not just to the Center but in her life in general—even though terminating her pregnancy is a difficult choice, she knows that she will survive it.