Belle is soon snoring lightly, but it is a long time before sleep finds me.
The next day at dinner, Belle seeks me out to sit with me. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Belle says under her breath, her tone awash with alarm.
“Why? What is it?” I whisper back to her.
“I found out what they’re doing here. It’s not just women they’re cutting into. They’re doing it to some of the men, too. I bet you and I are on the list to have it done. They’ll wait for you because of the baby, but they could have me in there tomorrow if they want. We have to get out.”
“Why? What are they doing?”
Other female residents take seats next to and across from us, talking loudly. Belle turns from me and begins to butter her roll.
“What are they doing?” I ask again.
The other women stop talking with one another to look at me, thinking perhaps I am talking about them.
Belle ignores my question for several seconds until the women begin talking among themselves again.
“They don’t want people like us having children,” she finally whispers.
“What do you mean, people like us?” Fear makes my voice tremble.
“Like us, Rosie. Like us. They think you’re a freak and I’m a demented sex addict. They don’t want us having children and passing on our bad blood. They’re sterilizing people here.”
“What do you mean, sterilizing?” The word sounds like merely something dirty being made clean. Its color is a sharp yellow.
“I mean they are cutting into people and changing them so that they can never have children. Ever. We have to get out.”
I stare at Belle in horror and I cover my abdomen with my hand as if to protect my baby from an unseen enemy. “When?”
“Eat your food. Stop looking at me like that. You need to be ready to go at any moment. Not tonight, but maybe tomorrow night. Or maybe the next.”
“And my bag? We have to get it. Will Rudy’s keys open that closet on the first floor?”
“They’d better. We need to stop talking about this and eat.”
Belle begins to shovel food into her mouth, but my appetite has left me. I am picturing my body being sliced open and Dr. Melson shoveling out everything that makes me able to have a baby.
How can they do that here to people? How can they decide who should bring children into this world and who shouldn’t? How?
I leave the table with my dinner untouched.
Two days later, Belle tells me that Rudy has at last pledged his undying love to her and that he’ll find a way to get her out so that they can run away together. She kissed him, cried like a moonstruck schoolgirl, and told him our idea as if it had just occurred to her. The escape is now in play. We will leave Sunday night.
But the very next morning, I stand from my bed upon waking and a great splash of water gushes out of me, down my legs and onto the floor. As I stare incredulous at the puddle, a queer pain grips me. I turn in shock to look at the bed next to me. Belle is sitting up and staring at me wide-eyed.
“What’s happening?” I whisper.
Belle yells for the nurse.
12
Before...
OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER 1938
Autumn spilled golden and glorious onto the vineyard, and with it came my seventeenth birthday.
I awoke early that October morning achingly aware that my parents and Tommy should have been there to celebrate it with me. It was all wrong that they weren’t. I dressed for the day slowly and was late getting the coffee started. Celine came into the kitchen looking for it with an empty cup in one hand and a beribboned box of chocolates in the other.
