“Lauren, what are you doing here?” He seemed almost angry at her, or angry at the unseen conspiracy that had dropped her on his porch.
“Um,” she said. She ducked her head and scratched the sole of her shoe on his front step. “I just—I need—I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just—come in—but wait—are you okay? Shouldn’t you be at home?”
“I don’t want to go home,” Lauren said, her eyes filling with tears. “I want to be here. I want to be with you.” She pushed through the doorway and into Mr. Smith’s chest, hands on his shoulders. The door tapped shut behind her, and he wrapped his arms around her.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“Can I stay here for a while?” she asked.
“Lauren—you aren’t—are you all alone?”
She nodded and sniffed into his shirt. His arms tightened around her.
She had known that what happened next was a possibility. She didn’t expect it, exactly. It wasn’t what she said she wanted. But she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t pictured it. Of course she had. She thought about it all the time. She made herself come with it. And she wasn’t stupid. She had friends who were seniors. She still decided. Her decision belonged to her.
It was like he was trying to get something over with. Her dad used to watch boxing on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and she remembered a fight where one of the boxers obviously had the upper hand, but he was holding back, round after round, maybe waiting to tire out his outmatched opponent. Maybe he was trying to be benevolent. But then in the eighth or ninth round, the guy who was winning just went nuts—combination after combination, blow after blow to the kidneys, on the ropes. A controlled frenzy. Like he’d gotten bored, like he wanted to finish the other guy off, get it over with. But he couldn’t and he couldn’t. The other guy just stood there and took it.
She just took it. She decided to. She came here on her own. It was on his couch in his living room, ten feet from his front door. Every image sharp and discrete: the last light almost violet through the half-drawn shade, the Stranger Than Paradise movie poster tacked to the particleboard paneling, the nubby seams of couch cushions bearing into her lower back, the twelve-inch television set on the egg crate topped with worn, softened paperbacks. The pictures cycle through relentlessly, like an automated slideshow, shuffle and click, shuffle and click, a crunching snap as each image turned, like the same photograph taking itself over and over for the rest of her life, and the clearest picture was not something she could see or feel but rather the presumption, the unspoken assertion that this would be the thing that they would be doing now. That a person could jam himself inside another person, without consulting her first, should not have seemed so remarkable to her. She should have taken it for granted. He had a lot of trouble getting inside, which made him more frustrated and more excited. There was no more room and no more room and then he found it and he was all the way in. The stretching and straining and pulling became all at once a burning pain, like a pop of sizzling grease, and it was funny and it hurt and she cried out and he clamped his hand over her mouth, only for a second, like he was afraid someone could hear them but there was nobody there.
He’s already been inside me
Was her body her own, just then? That’s the thing she would always wonder. Who did she belong to? To herself? To her parents? To him? Did he take her, or did she give herself away?
She decided to.
“Lauren says things just for effect,” Mom would say. “She does things for effect.”
Here, then, was the effect.
She remembered afterward wanting to comport herself with a dignity bordering on primness. She cantilevered herself upright. She willed herself to look fluid, casual, offhand, like she was strolling out of Grease auditions. She walked around his couch into his bathroom and closed the door. She sat to pee, and observed the pink jellyfish-like consistency of what was on the toilet paper before she dropped it into the bowl. She wasn’t sure if this was her period or something else. Her period wasn’t regular enough to keep track yet. She observed the pinkness of the water in the toilet before she flushed it. On the tile she saw the end point of a trail of blood dotting the fifteen-foot path she’d taken. She stepped outside the bathroom door to see him slumped in a reclining chair, his body evacuated. Yet it was her body all over the floor, clotted and textured in spots. She put on her underwear and jeans, went into the kitchen to find paper towels and liquid soap, returned to the living room to wipe up the mess. There was blood on the couch, and she went to work on the stain.
“You don’t have to—it’s all right—” He didn’t move.
“I’m almost done,” she said.
When she was finished, she sat down on the floor by the front door and put on her shoes. “Lauren,” he said from the reclining chair, “this is our secret. There would be trouble if anyone found out about this. No one—they wouldn’t understand.”
“I know,” Lauren said as she tied her laces.
“Lauren, I’m serious.”
Lauren looked up at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I know,” she repeated. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry about anything.”
She decided to. She was still deciding.
She left his house through the back door, took the usual route back to her house. Her legs, dumb as lumber, moved her through the yards and her head, a balloon, floated slightly above her. She didn’t know what she expected. An announcement. A card or certificate, some kind of witness, her mom ordering pizza and wings. When she got home, she remembered dully the chaos in the kitchen. She went straight upstairs without saying hello to anyone.
“Lauren?” Dad calling from their living room. “Your friend Stitch-’em-up called.”
She closed and locked the bathroom door. She had to pee again. It stung, and there were rusty stains in her underwear. She stared at the stains. This was the witness. More soap and water was all.
She reached into the pocket of her jeans, in a lump on the floor. She’d been wearing this same pair of jeans every day for weeks. She used to think that was gross, but Abby and Deepa and Stitch all did it with their jeans, too. The single, tiny pill was still in the pocket.
She took a shower, turning the handle hotter and hotter until she could barely stand it, got used to it, then hotter. Whenever she ran the water now, she thought she could hear Mirela screaming beneath it. She could turn it off, stand dripping in the silence, turn it on again and then she’d be sure this time, she’d be absolutely sure she could hear the screaming. Off, nothing, on, off, nothing. She watched herself melting down the drain. She dried herself. Avoiding the mirror. Wrapped in only the towel, she climbed under her bedcovers. She remembered stupidly that she had unfinished homework. Knees drawn to her chest, her hair burrowing a warm damp patch in her pillow, she saw her mother in the spotted darkness of the dragon wagon, her profile backlit by the streetlamps, before the other pictures began cycling through again, shuffle click crunch, and she lay in the dark with her eyes wide open for a long time, enough time for the slideshow to go around once, twice, again, each thick click like the smacking of lips, but when her eyes did close she slept within seconds.
Jane
Jane’s children had accustomed her to the arbitrariness of time. The hourless blur of cluster-feeding a newborn, the dilating minutes and hours of a rainy afternoon confined indoors with toddlers, when the stutter-stop ticking of the clock became the clenching of a diseased and faltering heart. She remembered the shattering seasick disorientation of looking at the clock and knowing that whatever time it really was, it could not possibly be the time shown on the clock, that surely someone in charge would be here soon to work this all out, and quite frankly it was unacceptable that it hadn’t been worked out already, before all this time had passed.
On this third day of the Spring of Life, three days after Easter, Mr. Glover pulled up to the redbrick WellWomen clinic on Main Street—Jane in the passenger seat and the Huebler twins in the back,
Betty and Phil in Phil’s car just behind them, the vans of out-of-towners, the Operation Rescue types, descending all around as planned—the clock in Mr. Glover’s Datsun said 5:58 a.m., and Jane’s wristwatch said 5:58 a.m., but it was not 5:58 a.m., it could not be, because they were supposed to be first, and they were last.
“These aren’t our people,” Mr. Glover said, peering out the window.
The other side was already there, waiting for them. The other side had sneaked into their homes, turned back their clocks, unplugged their phones, they had papered over their windows and blocked out the rising sun, they had stolen time itself and used that time to conspire with local authorities to install yellow tape and wooden barricades all around WellWomen.
“Crime-scene tape around an abortion clinic—how appropriate,” Mr. Glover said. “Well, here we are. You people get out here and I’ll find someplace to park.”
The other side milling around behind the barricades nodded at one another as Jane and her friends approached. The cops in their matching ponchos and squirrel-brown mustaches milled in their own small groups.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” A thirtysomething woman with a squinty, ironical smile, her skin like tallow, waved at them from behind the barricades. She opened her arms in welcome, rather grandly, as if WellWomen were her estate and the cops her uniformed waitstaff. She wore galoshes and baggy jeans and a big puffy drawstring coat like the one Jane wore through her pregnancies, like she was ready for a long hike through inclement weather. No one could be this persuasively upbeat at six in the morning.
“My name is Bridie. I’m with the Choice Action Network.” Her hands, in Gore-Tex gloves, gripped and patted the barricade like it was her trusty steed. “I would be doing you folks a disservice if I didn’t tell you that you’re going to want to keep across the other side of Main Street today.”
“Tell it to the First Amendment,” Charity Huebler said.
Another woman, slightly older, scarecrow-thin, came scowling up behind Bridie’s shoulder. She wore a blue vest that read escort. “We know you folks made it onto Good Morning America just for praying and singing your little songs—” she started.
“All three of the morning shows, actually,” Summer interrupted. “National news.”
“But you won’t be happy with that, will you?” the scarecrow-woman asked. “You need more attention?”
“What my friend Jill here means to say by that,” Bridie continued, “is that we know that you folks are escalating today. Attempting a full-on clinic blockade.”
Jane looked around at the other Respect Life members, who looked as surprised as she felt. “Hello, my name is Jane,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet you. I’m being honest with you when I say that we haven’t heard anything about any kind of blockade. We’re here peacefully. Just as we were on Monday and Tuesday.”
“We’re not all that creative,” Phil said with a chuckle, and the Hueblers glared at him.
“Is there any coffee?” a pale skinny girl in all black called out behind the barricades.
“Coffee is a diuretic,” Bridie said mildly over her shoulder. “You don’t want to find yourself in a scuffle with an anti and have to take a piss.” Bridie folded her hands and rested them on the battered wooden beam. “Pleased to meet you, Jane. Thank you for your honesty. I don’t want any of you folks to take this personally. But you will need, eventually, to move to the other side of Main Street, if you don’t want the police to be involved.”
Fragments from twenty minutes earlier, and from days gone past, began to assemble themselves. At the meetup at Saint Benedict’s that morning, Jane looked across the front lawn laid with thirty gravestones, to mark the thirty million dead babies. Past the graves, she could see a maroon Oldsmobile parked at the outer edge of the lot—a car she hadn’t seen there before. Yesterday, driving past the Rosens’ house, she saw cars filling the driveway and the street in front, and people—all women, she thought—assembled on the stoop. Jane assumed it was a “house call,” the kind of aggressive, in-your-face action that Respect Life avoided but that might appeal to plenty of Oh-Rs who’d shown up over the weekend; now she wasn’t so sure. Nor was she sure she had really seen a maroon Oldsmobile in Mr. Glover’s rearview. Maybe her memory had maneuvered the car into view after the fact, in order to explain the irrational scene laid in front of them now at WellWomen, this mocking party at which they were the guests of honor.
The first patients started arriving around eight thirty. The Oh-Rs called the other side the “pro-aborts,” pronouncing it probort. Probort sounded like the name of a humanoid blob from the arcade games the boys used to play at Darien Lake: a colleague of Q*Bert, Dig Dug, Evil Otto. The proborts worked in formation, looping themselves around a patient’s car as it arrived, as many as five or six of them at a time, and then encircling the patient herself, guiding her and whoever was with her—a mother, a friend, once in a while a father of the doomed child, or so one presumed—through the crowds. Summer and Charity yelled, “Deathscorts!” at the escorts in their blue vests. Jane was sure that they’d picked that up from the Oh-Rs. Father Steve, when he finally arrived, wouldn’t approve of it, surely.
Looking back and forth on Main Street, Jane saw Choice Action Network sentinels in position for patients who arrived on foot. They wore neon-yellow vests that said peacekeeper. They had headsets and talked into their hands and crackled when they walked, like cops. They could radio ahead and form protective circles blocks ahead of WellWomen. They closed into a phalanx as they came closer to the redbrick building.
A few Oh-Rs were unfurling a hand-lettered banner that said dr. rosen kills children. Jane came closer to them. She held her own abortion kills children sign across her chest to show she was one of them. The Oh-Rs wanted to hang their banner between two stakes plunged into the front lawn of WellWomen, like laundry on a line. They argued with some cops about it for a while, yelled about freedom of assembly and their First Amendment rights, but not one of them was getting through the barriers and yellow tape.
“Excuse me,” Jane was saying. “May I ask you about your sign?”
They weren’t listening. Now they had a notion that they could climb onto the roof of the Pancake Palace down the street and drape the sign over the restaurant’s awning. Dr. Rosen ate his lunch at the Pancake Palace most days. The cloth banner, strung on dowels, drooped and accordioned between them as they debated, soaking up dew from the grass.
Jane came a few steps closer, tried again. “How do you know about Dr. Rosen?” she asked.
She heard shouting, not just an argument but something violent. A half block west, some Oh-Rs were scuffling with proborts. Jane turned toward the commotion, and in front of her stood an out-of-towner, maybe an Oh-R, a large, tuberous man in a dark fleece and a fisherman’s hat, holding a sign twice as wide as he was. It was pasted with side-by-side photographs of Dr. Rosen and a bloody fetus. Under Dr. Rosen’s photo, it listed his name, home address, and telephone number in block letters, easy to read from a distance. The words printed over the top of both pictures were which one of these is human garbage?
Jane rehearsed a quick speech in her head, like the first time she stood outside the Respect Life classroom. She opened her mouth and balked, lifted her foot and put it down again. She would tell him that she is Dr. Rosen’s neighbor. That her daughter is friends with Dr. Rosen’s son. That we hate the sin and love the sinner. That this is a community, and yes, we have our differences, and we all want what’s best for women and babies, but even if Dr. Rosen has lost his way, there’s a better path to—
“Just so’s you know, Rosen has a practice of his own, three blocks east of here,” Mr. Glover was saying to the man in the dark fleece.
“Three blocks from this place?” the man replied, incredulous. “Y’all got more abortion mills than gas stations around here. You walk out your house any direction and somebody’s killin’ a baby. Buffalo has gotta get its house in order.”
Jane opened her mout
h and closed it again. Mr. Glover’s mustache twitched. “We love our city,” he said. “We hope you do, too. Anyway, a house is what you’re looking for—big brick entryway tacked on the front—can’t miss it. He should be able to see your sign. It would do him good to see it.”
Jane looked at her watch. It was time to meet Pat in the 7-Eleven parking lot, just past the Pancake Palace, where he would hand off Mirela so she could attend the protest with Jane for a couple of hours.
“It’s not too late!” the Oh-Rs were yelling at a cordon of escorts concealing a patient as they approached the barricades around the WellWomen building. “You don’t have to go through this! Who’s making you do this? Who’s gotten into your head? Come talk to us! You’re going to be okay, just don’t go through that door!”
Jane walked west on Main Street toward the 7-Eleven, past the proborts chanting, “Pray! You’ll need it! Your cause has been defeated!” There were so many of them, skies and rivers and glaciers of them, beneath the low dirty clouds. Or they moved as one body, one endocrine system, heeding orders from the same glands, activated by the same secretions. Receptors and plasma membranes. Instincts but no intentions. Some of them didn’t live anywhere near western New York. Others were students from UB or Buff State—they didn’t grow up here, or they wanted to pretend like they hadn’t. Sometimes, though, Jane could hear the flat hoof of the accent stomping in the chant. Yer kaaz. Gunna stap.
An Oh-R leapt toward a barricade and clapped a sign over the head of a probort who had unlocked arms with his comrade for a thoughtless instant. Culling the herd. The moan of a fallen beast. The sign buckled in half and a cop tackled the Oh-R. The sign read abortion kills a baby but not her memory.
The protesters thinned out as Jane approached the intersection with Harlem Road. Bridal shop, knitting supply store, bakery. When she reached the Pancake Palace, she turned around to watch the scene of the protest from a distance, scanning it for the heroic detail, the single black-and-white freeze-frame that could run on all the front pages—the moment of the water cannon’s impact, the protester confronting a bayonet with a chrysanthemum. But this was just people yelling at each other while other people stood around and watched. Father Steve was right—it had the busy idleness of a tailgate, one where too many people had started drinking too early in the day.
The Fourth Child Page 23