Virginia Woolf’s wan smile brought her to a halt. You don’t have to do this, it seemed to say. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head.
The door was ajar. Rose took the last few steps and knocked. “Hello?” She nudged the door wider.
It was like pulling the trigger and getting a click. It was like a blinding camera flash, her disbelief that Harriet wasn’t there, her inability to see it. Out of the fading splotches before her eyes, the windows and desk and bookcases from her first episode emerged. She told herself that Harriet must have gone out for a minute, but nothing like a newspaper or a coffee cup or any sort of disorder indicated recent habitation. She went to the front of the desk and opened the bottom drawer.
“May I help you?”
A man stood in the doorway. He had a lime-green bow tie and a meringue of blond hair.
“I’m looking for a pen,” Rose said, staying calm. The drawer—it contained only hanging files—she shut with her knee.
“Editors never have pens,” the man said. He patted the two ballpoints clipped to his shirt pocket. “Or pencils. They absolutely never have red pencils.”
Rose moved away from the desk. “I’m supposed to be meeting Harriet. I thought I’d write her a note.”
“She’s in an editorial scrum. Would you like me to extract her?”
“Could you?” I apologize for being devious, she rehearsed.
“Who shall I say is going through her drawers?”
Rose smiled—she hoped she smiled. “Rose from the Regal Theater.”
He raised his index finger. “Let me see what I can do.”
She made as though to sit, but when she heard his voice down the hall, she went back to the desk and opened the top drawer. Pens and pencils, a red pencil, paperclips, rubber bands, scissors, a staple remover, all neatly arranged in a tray. She lifted the tray. Hand lotion, a travel-sized bottle of Listerine, a bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength. The next drawer had envelopes and letterhead. She looked around the room. There were manuscripts in tidy piles on the window ledge and credenza. On the bookshelves were photographs of the cats. Otherwise, the office was as impersonal as an Ikea office.
The clouds appeared to be darkening, but the windows were tinted, so it could have been an illusion. Rose sat in one of the guest chairs. She shut her eyes. Last night she’d slept two hours. Her right leg had a tremor, and she got out the manuscript and planted it on her knee. She opened the manuscript to a middle page. “Following the pony act,” she read, “Heinrich would return to his dressing room and consult his crystal ball for the benefit of any stagehand or performer willing to pay the ten-cent fee. With few exceptions his prophecies were a variation on the theme that there are obstacles and afflictions on the road ahead, but there are also stretches of peace and contentment. This being a truth applicable to nearly every life ever lived, every story ever told, every movie ever made, Heinrich gained a reputation in the theatrical community for mystical accuracy”—
“Well,” drawled the bow-tied man, suddenly at the door. “It seems that Harriet has come and gone.”
“What?” She closed the manuscript. “Already?”
“People come and go so quickly here,” he said in a stagey voice. She stared at him. He reverted to brisk concern. “Would you like to speak to her executive assistant?”
How had Rose missed her? “Is she coming back?”
“Possibly. I could have the receptionist call her if you like.”
“I can call her, if you give me the number.”
“My dear, it’s a hanging offense to give out an editor’s number.”
Rose put the manuscript in her briefcase. She stood. She had the disquieting impression of being duped: David and Marsh, this character, they were all on to her. “Thanks for your help,” she said.
“Is there anything—” A loud thunderclap startled them both. “Oh, my sainted aunt,” he said.
She walked away, the wrong way, she discovered, upon turning a corner and finding herself in a storage area of desks and tables and unassembled shelving. The shelving brackets glowed. The flecks appeared and began their nauseating choreography. She crouched under a desk, and then she lay down.
She was urinating into a plastic cup, skirt bunched in her free hand, the mauve shoulder bag, with an umbrella sticking out of it, hanging on the back of the door. Above the toilet paper dispenser a framed sign said, PLEASE NOTIFY FRONT DESK IF TOILET BLOCKS.
Increase the water pressure, thought Rose, who owned and maintained sixteen toilets and was trying not to believe that these circumstances amounted to anything other than a regular appointment with Harriet’s family doctor or obstetrician.
Harriet’s mood was somber. Washing her hands, she disregarded the mirror and gazed at her murky reflection in the faucet. She wiped the outside of the cup with a wet paper towel and used a dry towel to protect her clean hand when she opened the door. The grandmotherly woman behind the front desk relieved her of the cup and said, “Now, if you’ll take a seat in the waiting room.”
All the seats except one were occupied. To reach it she had to step over the stretched-out legs of a scrawny young guy picking his face and filling out a questionnaire. His girlfriend rubbed her forehead on his shoulder and murmured answers.
Nobody was old. None of the women were obviously pregnant. She sat next to a woman flossing her teeth behind her hand. The windows were too high to see out of, but you could hear the rain. She picked up Cottage Life magazine and glanced at the subscription sticker—Toronto Women’s Health.
Oh, no, Rose thought. Last year she’d attended a fund-raising dinner for Toronto Women’s Health, a two-hundred-dollar-a-plate affair, lots of speeches, and a film about back-street abortions over the closing credits of which she was moved to say to the woman beside her, “I’ve never been so glad I had a hysterectomy,” and the woman, a middle-aged police officer, gave Rose’s arm a congratulatory pat and said, “You’re off the hook.”
Not quite off.
She put the magazine down. She seemed to have two pulses: a slow thud in her chest and a surface flutter in her stomach. How could Harriet bear it? Get out of here, Rose said. The slow heartbeat quickened promisingly, but then it began to pound. Go, go, Rose begged.
Harriet was keeping her turmoil private. She was pushing her hands together, taking short, soft breaths.
“Excuse me, would you happen to have any gum?” said the woman with the dental floss, and Rose was back inside her own body.
She got herself out from under the desk and found the corridor. Behind her the voice of the bow-tied man called, “Are you lost?” She walked more purposefully. She reached a T-junction, spotted an exit sign, and escaped.
She’d had girlhood dreams about this, too: racing down a concrete stairwell, sobbing. The baby wasn’t hers, it wasn’t Ava’s, she knew that. It wasn’t the life that was going to exonerate her for Ava’s death.
But you get attached.
The rear ground-floor exit opened onto an alley. She jogged through light rain to Richmond Street, where a row of taxis waited outside the Hilton.
“Toronto Women’s Health,” she told the driver. “I don’t have the address.”
He wedged into traffic. “It’s up by Humber River Hospital.”
“I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“Fifteen minutes, twenty, depends.”
She listened for thunder, although the rain was letting up. Still, in the unthinkable event that she had an episode, she said, “I might fall asleep.” The driver glanced at her in his mirror. Did he know what went on at Toronto Women’s Health? She looked out her window.
Her vague strategy of hanging around on the sidewalk and following Harriet to her car crumbled as it dawned on her that you don’t drive to your own abortion, you get driven in a taxi or by a friend. And you leave the same way. She considered Marsh, but only for a second. He didn’t know about this, or else he’d have been in the waiting room. That was where Rose needed to get herself. If Harriet was alread
y with the doctor, then Rose would linger over the questionnaire. She would vacillate, balk at the ultrasound, keep delaying until Harriet reappeared. She couldn’t stop the abortion, it was too late for that, but she could at least see Harriet and attempt—psychically, at close range—to comfort her.
“Thirteen fifty,” said the driver. He had pulled over next to a yellow-brick building with frosted first-floor windows and the high, square upper-floor windows from Rose’s episode. “Smile, you’re on TV,” he said, making change, and she saw two cameras, one pointed straight down, one angled toward the road.
She saw a cloudbank tracking north. It might miss this part of town. Or it might not, and she would have an episode and stand every chance of entering Harriet during the abortion. She pictured her body drooped in a chair while, in Harriet’s body, the commotion of people trying to revive her was audible. Could she be revived? She swayed through a backwash of dread. But she got out of the taxi and approached the clinic door. She pressed the buzzer.
“Yes?” said a female voice over the intercom.
“I’d like to speak to a counselor.”
The door clicked open.
She expected a security guard and a search of her briefcase. But she was met by a short woman in a sari, a gray-haired South Asian woman who said only, “Follow me, please.”
They passed shut doors and their silent interiors. Rose looked at the ceiling. Acoustic tiles. On top of those, plywood and insulation and mold-proofing—modern building strata unknown to her—and then a subfloor and then the carpet: a tan sisal that had felt rubbery beneath Harriet’s feet.
The carpet down here was an Oriental runner. It led to a back office and a woman with white cotton hair behind a reception desk. This second woman detached herself from a computer screen. Marion was embroidered in cursive on her shirt pocket. Her blue eyes were kind. “Hello,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, I’m here for the obvious reason,” Rose said.
The woman in the sari folded her arms and leaned against the wall. A third woman, also up there in age, sat at a little round table and talked on the phone. Three old ladies—make that four, counting the one Harriet had given her urine sample to—intended, Rose presumed, to convey wisdom and hominess. Like midwives, except the opposite.
“When was your last period?” Marion asked.
“Eight weeks,” Rose said, keeping it in the first trimester. She looked down. It was hard to lie to this person.
“Have you had a pregnancy test?”
“Yes.”
Marion clasped her hands on the edge of her computer. “I’m obligated to tell you there are other options,” she said.
“Not for me there aren’t,” Rose said. Her throat roughened, as if she spoke the truth.
“That’s fine,” Marion said gently. “Would you like to sit?”
“I’m okay.”
“Our website, have you been to it?”
“Yes.”
“So you know that past seven weeks it’s a surgical procedure.”
Rose didn’t know. How pregnant was Harriet? Surely not seven weeks. “Yes,” she said.
But she must have sounded doubtful because Marion said, “Before seven weeks, it’s a medical procedure, meaning you take a pill, one here in the presence of the doctor and one a few days later on your own.”
Rose nodded. At least Harriet wouldn’t be sliced open. Or no, they used suction, didn’t they? “Do you accept credit cards?” she asked.
“You don’t pay,” Marion smiled, happy, it seemed, to impart such unambiguously good news. “It’s covered by Ontario health insurance.”
“Not including any medication you may need afterward,” cautioned the woman in the sari.
“On the day of your appointment, be sure to bring your health card,” Marion said.
“No. No, I want it today. Now, actually.”
“We don’t do same-days,” said the woman in the sari.
Marion peered at her screen. “I can get you in tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.”
“I can’t come tomorrow.” Rose thumped her briefcase on the chair, staking her claim. “I have to have it now.”
“Eight weeks,” said the woman in the sari. She shrugged. “A day or two won’t make a difference.”
“I took the morning off work.”
“We’re here on Saturdays from ten until six, and Sundays from noon until six,” said Marion in the patient tone of a person who imparted this information regularly.
“I work every day, I work all the time,” Rose said. Her bottom lip trembled. She did work every day and all the time.
“Other places do same-days,” said the woman in the sari. She flicked her hand at these other places. “Not us.”
Marion pushed a box of tissues closer to Rose. “You don’t have to decide this very minute.”
The woman in the sari led her back down the hall. Where were the stairs, behind which door? If Rose began opening doors, what was this old lady going to do about it?
But Rose did not open any doors.
The cameras—and a notion that hanging around abortion clinics was illegal—persuaded Rose to wait on the bench in front of the coffee shop across the street. She stepped off the curb, and a truck sped by and splashed her. It seemed deliberate. She thought that one of the ladies might rush out with towels. She even turned and looked into the camera lens. When nobody came, she made her way to the bench and wiped her arms and her Rolex with the soggy tissue she still clutched. The time was ten after ten. She should have asked Marion how long the whole procedure lasted, start to finish.
Wind shook the canopy above her and loosened streams of water onto the pavement. The cloudbank, visible over second-story rooftops, seemed stalled. She urged it closer. Now she wanted to be in Harriet when Harriet had the abortion, when she swallowed the pill. She wanted to apologize for her earlier panic and tell her she wasn’t alone.
She told her anyway. She said, You’re a good person, and You have a right to be happy, and other consoling, absolving things she had never believed when they’d been said to her but as she said them to Harriet she believed evangelically.
At twenty after ten a fat woman wearing pink jogging pants and a hoodie was let in. There followed a spate of activity: the dental floss woman leaving, the old lady from the waiting room hurrying off (on her break?), a girl in a private school uniform arriving, spotting the cameras, and hiking her jacket over her head.
At ten thirty a man lurched over and dropped down next to Rose. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” he said. His face was a catastrophe of dents and open sores. Something yellow foamed out of the corner of his mouth. What was it about her lately that attracted these guys? She gave him a cigarette without any desire to smoke one herself. She sparked the lighter, and his hand came up expertly to cancel the wind. “Thank you kindly,” he said.
Before the interruption she’d been speaking more intimately with Harriet, saying she knew about the suicide attempt. Now she admitted to having had a few suicidal thoughts of her own after Ava died, wishing it had been her instead of her sister. But here I am, still in the world, she said. Glad I hung around. Was she? Were her spells of gladness as authentic and satisfying as other people’s? I’m not saying I don’t have my dark days. Life can be hard. This last sentence she might have said out loud because the guy next to her, as if in passionate agreement, said, “Oh, man!”
He sank against her arm. She lifted the arm, and he sank onto her chest. “Sorry about that,” he muttered, cigarette clamped between his lips. She shoved at the dead weight of him. He flailed and tried to wheel himself up.
Over his back she saw the shoulder bag before she saw the woman. “Move,” she grunted desperately. Harriet was crossing the road.
He flailed again and knocked her glasses off. “I got ’em,” he said. He had jerked himself into a sitting position and was dangling the glasses by one arm. She jumped to her feet. “Here you go,” he said with
a debonair wave of his wrist as the blur that was Harriet entered the coffee shop.
Where was the briefcase? Beneath his thigh. “Whoa, Nellie,” he objected when she yanked it out from under him. “Hey, what are you . . .”
Harriet was at the counter, studying the pastries. Rose walked past, and that whole side of her tingled. She detoured to the condiment stand and wet some napkins and cleaned the mud off her legs. At this distance Harriet didn’t seem as sharply pretty as she did in mirrors. She looked haggard, preoccupied. A server said, “Who’s next?” and Harriet spoke, but Rose’s pulse was deafening, and she heard only the server’s “Blueberry?” He slapped a tray on the counter. On the tray he put a plate, and on the plate a muffin.
Rose searched for a table and managed to grab the only empty one before the couple ahead of Harriet got to it. Harriet went to the stand and poured milk into her coffee mug. Other single patrons were discouraging company with their backpacks and computers and impoverishment, one raggedy woman sound asleep and snoring. Rose put her briefcase on the table until the couple found seats. She got out the manuscript and opened it on her lap.
She turned a page, eyes lowered.
“Excuse me, is this chair taken?” That wonderful voice.
“No,” Rose said. She glanced as high as Harriet’s bitten nails. “No, it’s free.”
Harriet settled herself. She drank her coffee and took items from her purse. When Rose risked another glance, she was smoothing a newspaper folded to the crossword puzzle. The eyes, even downcast, were Ava’s.
Don’t cry, Rose ordered herself. If she started crying, she would never stop. She shifted her attention to the fingers as they went about their business, pulling apart the muffin, bringing chunks to the mouth, picking up the pen.
There must have been thunder. The lightning Rose confused with a perceptual short circuit that was twinkling Harriet in and out of focus, so that the flecks were also disguised. The manuscript fell off her lap.
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