Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  “Sure,” I said, though what I knew wasn’t much. Whenever they mentioned it on TV, Mom threw a shoe at the dial.

  “We prayed about it at camp a lot,” Carol said. “One night, we were sitting around the fire, praying, and everyone was crying—they cried about everything there, I was going out of my mind. But this one night, one of the older girls stood up and told us she’d done it.”

  “Done it?”

  “Had an abortion. She killed her unborn baby, Robin. Now do you see?” Carol lifted a hand from the wheel and touched her fingertips to the windshield. Her voice was a whisper. “And that’s where they did it. Right. In. There.”

  I followed her gaze, trying to see what I’d missed before. It was the middle of the week, but the doctor’s office looked closed, the curtains pulled tight. The window announced DR. H. WINKELMANN, OB-GYN, in classy gold letters. Winkelmann didn’t sound like the name of somebody who killed unborn babies. It sounded like the name of someone who made balloon animals for a living.

  “I was thinking we’d call ourselves the Crusaders,” Carol said. “Do you think it’s too much?” Carol loved the Crusades. She knew everything there was to know about them the way I used to know everything about the Cassidy brothers. “Or maybe the Guardians. That’s not bad.”

  “What are you guarding?”

  She turned her head. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. “The babies, Robin. All those babies. We’re going to save the unborn.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Not me. Us.”

  “Us?”

  “You’re my best friend. You want me to reach my destiny, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know, Carol.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  I thought of the bloody skirt on my mom’s bedroom floor, the blood on my hands. How many times had I washed them in the days that followed? How many times had I scrubbed under scalding water until they sung with pain? I tucked them under my thighs now.

  “What about the women? The girls?”

  “What about them?”

  “Maybe they don’t have any other options,” I said, sensing a truth under the words that I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to describe. I was worse at English than I was at history.

  Carol blinked at me slowly, like one of those dolls with working eyelids that opened and closed. “Do you know where aborted babies go?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Purgatory?”

  “In the garbage, Robin. They throw them in the garbage, like trash.”

  “They don’t really do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  I shifted in my seat. My thighs made a sickly sucking sound as they peeled off the vinyl. It was hot in that car. It was getting so I could hardly breathe. I’d never seen that skirt again and I was glad for it. I didn’t know what had happened to it and I didn’t want to.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Carol said. “We shouldn’t stop them from killing their babies, we should help them. Hey, I know, we can have an abortion drive at the mall. We can all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

  “I didn’t mean that.” I pulled the neck of my T-shirt away from my chest. I wasn’t sure what I’d meant.

  “Forget it,” Carol said, putting the car in gear. “So what if it’s my destiny? Just forget the whole stupid thing.”

  We drove home in silence. After what felt like hours, the car slammed to a stop. Carol still wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t much want to look at her either. Fat tears rolled down her pink doll cheek, and I thought of her running down that hallway in a towel, her wet feet slapping the floor, soap in her screaming mouth. I put my hand on the door, turning my face away like I had that day.

  “I know you all think I’m a big joke,” she said. “But this really is my destiny. I’m sure of it.”

  “I don’t think you’re a joke, Carol.”

  Carol nodded, but she didn’t say anything else. I got out of the car and shut the door. The Closters’ station wagon was halfway down the block before I realized she hadn’t dropped me anywhere near my house.

  I passed the gas station on the way home. I didn’t need a new lighter. I just felt like one.

  “Bad habit,” the attendant said as I handed him a dollar for a Bic and a pop.

  “Nobody likes a quitter,” I said.

  When I stepped outside again, a yellow Pinto was parked near the air pump. Jamie Finley squatted beside one of the front tires, air hose in one hand. His clothes were coated in a layer of dirt, as if he’d rolled around in a sandbox. When he lifted his arm to shield his eyes from the sun, I could see the sharp line where his tan ended and his T-shirt began.

  “Robin Fisher,” he said and smiled slowly. His cheeks were shadowed with stubble, but the dimple was still there. “What do you think of my new wheels? Pretty sweet, huh?”

  “It’s great,” I said. It was the ugliest car I’d ever seen.

  “It’s butt-ugly, but it was cheap. People keep flagging me down for cab rides. On the upside, I already made twelve bucks.”

  “So it’s paid for itself,” I said, and Jamie laughed.

  I stood in the shade of the pump, drinking my pop while he finished checking his tires. He told me about his job working construction at the new mini-mall across the street where the patio furniture store used to be. “Well, not so much construction as shovelling rocks,” he said. “I move rocks from one pile and put them in another. I figured it was better than working in some mailroom, wearing a tie.”

  “Ants can carry a hundred times their own body weight,” I said.

  “I guess I should be glad I’m not an ant then,” he said. “It’s not so bad, actually. I do a lot of thinking.”

  “About what?”

  Jamie squatted back on his heels and rubbed his chin. “I guess I’m trying to figure out when exactly everything in my life went to shit. You ever think about stuff like that?”

  “Maybe,” I said. What I meant was all the time.

  “Buddhists say you should live in the present, but my brain has a mind of its own.”

  “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” I said.

  Jamie smiled like it hurt to be right about some things. He stood up and went inside the store. I thought about going home but didn’t. He came back out with a bottle of beer, held it to his forehead before he took a drink.

  “So did you?” I said.

  “Did I what?”

  “Figure out when everything went to shit?”

  Jamie turned his beer in his hand, picked at a corner of the label. His fingernails were tipped black with dirt. Mine were bitten. I couldn’t remember when I’d started doing that.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on it.”

  I studied the ground. The concrete was cracked everywhere. My toes were grey with dust. I remembered the time Dad had sprayed for ants. He’d rented the equipment so he could do it himself, sweeping every nook and crevice with cloudy white liquid. I’d told him he looked like an astronaut with that pack on his back, and he’d grinned behind the mask like he’d found a hundred bucks. This was before the moon landing, before I hated Neil and Buzz.

  When I lifted my eyes again, Jamie was staring at me. “What about you?” he said.

  I thought for a minute, but I couldn’t decide. There were too many things I regretted, too many things I wished I’d done or not done. “I’m pretty sure it all started when we landed on the moon,” I said. Jamie nodded, as if he knew just what I meant.

  “So now what?” I said.

  “Now nothing. It’s an exercise in futility, just like the rocks.”

  I drank my pop. Jamie drank his beer. He peeled a strip of label off his beer, then looked at it like he wished he hadn’t.

  “What if you could go back in time?” I said. “What if you could go back to that moment and change what happened?”

  Jamie peeled another strip, then another, bits of label snowing down. “What, like a time ma
chine?”

  “Yeah, exactly. What if you had a time machine?”

  “Then I’d change it, I guess. Fuck yeah, I would. But I don’t have a time machine. Do you have a time machine, Robin Fisher?”

  “No, Jamie. I don’t.”

  “So there you go,” he said. “Rocks.”

  Jamie looked down at the mess he’d made and nodded like it was inevitable too. Maybe it was. Maybe everything was. But I also knew then that I would help Carol, because she was my friend and she needed me. This time I wouldn’t let her down. Time machine or no time machine, that was one thing I could change.

  14

  Carol didn’t have a driver’s licence after all. While Mrs. Closter was visiting family in Colorado and Mr. Closter was at work, Carol “borrowed” the station wagon. She was supposed to be babysitting her little brother. What she did with him instead, she didn’t say. But she did say she might let me drive around the parking lot when we got there. She didn’t think God would mind me practising my parallel parking as long as it didn’t get in the way of saving the unborn.

  This time Carol parked far away from Dr. Winkelmann’s office, near the exit to the street. In case there was trouble, she said.

  “Trouble?” I said. “Are we robbing a bank?”

  Carol frowned. I was trying to lighten the mood, but Carol preferred things heavy.

  I helped her get the signs out of the back. She’d spent the weekend making them. Hers was a montage of grisly images jazzed up with red glitter. Mine had Bible scripture all over it in letters cut out from her Christian magazines. You’d think I wanted to kidnap babies, not save them. I asked her to trade, but Carol said I was being ridiculous, it wasn’t a beauty pageant.

  We stood around getting the feel of them in our hands. We weren’t sure what the procedure was after that. I suggested we walk in a circle the way the war protesters did, but Carol objected to doing anything like the hippies. “They’re worse than communists,” she said. “Or maybe the same.” Anyway, our signs were poster board staple-gunned to broom handles. They flopped around in the slightest breeze. Walking in circles was out of the question.

  “We can’t just stand here like morons,” Carol said. “We should say something. We could sing a hymn, or do a chant?” But the only songs I knew all the words to were by the Carpenters, and I didn’t think “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” was going to fly. Carol suggested we sit in the car and play I spy until a better idea struck us, so that’s what we did. She said the car would give us the element of surprise, but really, I spy was one of her favourite games.

  The curtains in the windows were closed though the hours on the glass said the doctor’s office was open. A lot of people went through the door, mostly middle-aged women in pastel pantsuits and tired young mothers towing small children. Every hour or so a hairdresser from next door came outside to smoke. She had shoulder-length hair the colour of new pennies. Once in a while, someone with a dog would walk up to the pet shop and stare in the window. One golden retriever had a plastic cone around its head, though I couldn’t see anything else wrong with it. His owner stared at the closed door like he could will it open.

  “I spy a dog.”

  “You’re not even trying,” Carol said.

  We took a lunch break. All that sitting around really tuckered us out. Carol had made Mrs. Maxwell’s egg salad sandwiches. Just the smell of them made me burp. I told her I was too hot to eat, which was partly true. While Carol ate her sandwich, I curled up in the back seat and tried to nap.

  Carol nudged my leg.

  “I spy a cat,” I mumbled, eyes firmly closed.

  She nudged me again and tapped the window above me. I sat up and peered out. A woman was struggling to get out of her car. She swung one leg out, then the other. Aiming her enormous stomach at the doctor’s office, she gripped the doorframe with both hands and catapulted herself up and out.

  We’d put the signs in the back of the car, so Carol had to crawl over me to get to hers. By the time she had it, the woman was halfway across the parking lot.

  “Lady!” Carol shouted, charging forward, sign hoisted like a lance. “Hey, lady! Laaay-dyyyy!”

  The woman turned around just as Carol caught up to her, bouncing off her bulging stomach and stumbling backwards, dropping her sign.

  “Oh my goodness,” the woman said. “Are you all right?”

  Carol took several gulps of air. “Please. Don’t.”

  “Don’t what, dear?”

  “Your. Baby.”

  The woman bent down and put her hands on her knees. “Are you out here all by yourself, sweetheart? Should I get someone?” People were always bending down to talk to Carol, calling her sweetheart. I half expected them to pinch her cheeks.

  Carol was used to it. “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Well, all right then,” the woman said and carried on to the hair salon.

  I got out of the car and walked over to Carol. “She’s just fat,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I picked up Carol’s sign for her. Some of the glitter had come off. Otherwise it was okay. I held it for her while she took a hit from her inhaler. She didn’t always need it, but it made her feel better.

  “I really thought this was my destiny,” she said.

  While I tried to think of something comforting to say, a woman in a nursing uniform and pink cardigan came out the doctor’s door. She stood on the sidewalk and shouted across the parking lot. This was private property, she said. We had no right. If we didn’t leave, she’d call the police. She held up a finger and shook it at us. For once even Carol was speechless.

  A small man opened the office door and stood beside the nurse. He had a cap of silver hair and wore baggy brown corduroys under his white coat. He looked like a nice person. He looked like somebody’s kindly grandfather. He touched the sleeve of the nurse’s cardigan and said something to her. She shook her finger at us one more time before following him back inside. I felt bad for both of them. Nobody said they liked what they did for a living. Maybe their high school guidance counsellors had chosen their careers for them. Maybe they’d had really bossy friends.

  “Do you realize what this means?” Carol said.

  “That we should go home?”

  She stared at me for a minute. “Hardy har har,” she said. “You almost had me there.”

  —

  When Vera Miller knocked on our door this time, she wasn’t wearing pink but a pale grey shift and white sling-back pumps. Instead of a small suitcase, she carried a clipboard and a pen. It looked like she was there to grade us for something.

  “Darling,” she said, taking in Mom’s caftan. “It’s your lucky day. We’re about to make history.” She handed us each a button. She had the same one pinned to her dress. George McGovern’s three smiling faces beamed at one another.

  Mom handed the button back. “I’m Canadian, Vera. I can’t vote.”

  Vera dropped the stewardess smile and fanned herself with the clipboard. The armholes of her dress were rimmed with sweat. It was August. We all had pit stains the size of sand dollars. “Are Canadians allowed to make iced tea?”

  While Mom was in the kitchen, Vera stood in the middle of the living room, smirking at the mess. It was a wonder, I’ll admit, how we managed so much of it with so little furniture.

  “Still going for the post-apocalyptic look, I see,” Vera said.

  “When in Rome,” Mom said.

  “That explains the toga.”

  They went out to the backyard. We still had chairs there. I settled back on my blanket on the grass, while Mom pushed the medical records to the centre of the table to make space for their glasses. Half the hospital was on vacation, so on top of working full-time, she brought work home on the weekends to catch up. The transcripts didn’t make her cry anymore. Now she’d shake her head at them and say things like, “How on earth did they miss that tumour? They can see a putting green from three hundred yards, but this they miss.”

&n
bsp; Mom lit Vera’s cigarette, then her own. “So what happened to transforming the women of America one lipstick at a time?”

  “A spectacular failure,” Vera said. “You and my maid were the only sales I ever made. They make you buy those kits, you know. There’s sixty-two bucks I’ll never see again. If you ever want any blue eyeshadow…Anyway, who needs women’s lib when you’ve got alimony.”

  “Has it come to that?”

  “My first husband was a big proponent of women’s lib. He always said, ‘Find something you’re good at, Vera, and then find a way to make money at it.’ Turns out the only thing I’m good at is divorce.”

  “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you.”

  “So am I. There’s no stingier ex-husband than a divorce lawyer. Though he did give me this perfume for my birthday.” Vera held out her wrist, and Mom sniffed obligingly. “It says Possession on the box, but I call it nine-tenths of the law.”

  “Oh, Vera. Is it that bad?”

  Vera waved Mom’s pity away. “On the bright side, the little hippie left him. She said he was giving off bad vibrations. I told him it’s the wheat grass emanating from his pores. He’s getting daily colonics now to clear it out. I was thinking I should send her a thank-you card for that.”

  “You’re the Emily Post of post-nuptials.”

  Vera took a sip from her glass, winced and swallowed. “Now I know who to call when I need a cup of Drano.”

  “I ran out of tea,” Mom said. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a casserole.”

  “That’s why I didn’t call,” Vera said, and they smiled at each other.

  They drank their iced coffee and smoked their cigarettes. The sun dug in its heels. I leafed through my magazine lazily.

  “So you and McGovern are going to change the world,” Mom said after a while.

  “I’ve wasted twenty years trying to change men. This seemed easier.”

  “I’m not sure you can do one without the other.”