Louie watched Allen’s eyes glaze with confusion. “Do you have a daughter, Allen?”
“I do.”
“How old?”
“Twelve.”
“What would you do if she got pregnant now?”
Allen’s face flushed. “Your side always tries to do that—”
“I’m nottryingto do anything. I’m asking you to apply your dogma personally.”
“I would counsel her. I would take her to our pastor. And I would be confident,” Allen said, “that she would make the right choice.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” Louie said.
Allen blinked. “You don’t?”
“No. Your religionshouldhelp you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation. But the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place. When you say you can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a good thing. When you sayIcan’t don’t something becauseyourreligion forbids it, that’s a problem.” Louie glanced at his watch. “Duty calls.”
“You know, it’s always funny to me how pro-choice folks were all actuallyborn,” Allen said.
Louie grinned, gathering their trash. “Thank you for the company. And the dialogue.”
Allen picked up his sign. “You make it very hard to hate you, Dr. Ward.”
“That’s the point, brother,” Louie said. “That’s the point.”
—
BETH HAD TRIED TO DOit the right way. She had gone to the Center, which might as well have been Mars given the distance and the cost of the bus ticket. She had filled out the parental consent waiver and had it filed back in her own county. It wasn’therfault that the judge whiffed out on her to go on avacationwith his wife. Judges shouldn’t be allowed to take them, not when other people’s lives were hanging on their verdicts.
In the end, she had run out of time. The pills had come from overseas, and the instructions were in Chinese, but she still had the paperwork from the counseling session she had attended at the Center, including the instructions for those getting a medication abortion. She remembered the lady at the clinic who’d talked to the group, saying that there was a cutoff for the people who took the abortion pill. She couldn’t remember what that magic number of weeks was, but Beth was sure she was beyond it now.
She was in the bathroom, doubled over with cramps. At first she was sure she had done something wrong, because there hadn’t been any blood at all. Now, it wouldn’t stop. And it wasn’t just blood, it was clots, great dark, thick masses that terrified her. That was why she had come to sit on the toilet. She could reach behind her and flush. She was terrified of looking down between her legs and seeing tiny arms and legs; a sad, minuscule face.
She felt her insides twist again, as if someone had attached a thousand strings to the inside of her belly and groin and yanked them. Beth drew her knees up even higher to her chin, the only thing that brought relief, but to do that she couldn’t sit. She got off the toilet and rolled to her side, sweating, groaning. Her breath shortened, stuttered links on a chain.
The thing that slipped between her legs was the size of a clenched fist. Beth cried out, seeing it on the linoleum, pink and unfinished, its translucent skin showing dark patches of future eyes and organs. Between its legs was a question mark of umbilical cord.
Shaking, she grabbed a hand towel and wrapped the thing up (it wasn’t a baby, it wasn’t a baby, it wasn’t a baby) and stuffed it into the bottom of the trash, arranging tissues and makeup wipes and wrappers on top of it, as if out of sight would be out of mind.
She was starting to see stars, and she thought maybe she was dying, but that didn’t make sense because there was no way she was going to Heaven anymore. Maybe she could just close her eyes for a minute, and when she woke up, this would never have happened.
She heard a pounding, and for one terrified moment she thought it was coming from the trash can. But then it got louder, and she realized someone was calling her name.
Beth wanted to answer, she did. But she was so, so tired.
When the door broke open, the lock shattered by her father, she used all the energy she had left to speak. “Don’t get mad, Daddy,” she whispered, and then everything went black.
—
GEORGE LEFT THE TRUCK RUNNING,parked illegally in a fire zone. He dashed to the passenger side and lifted his unconscious daughter into his arms, carrying her through the automatic doors of the emergency room. She was bleeding through the blanket he had wrapped around her. “Please help my daughter,” he cried, and he was surrounded immediately.
They took her away, setting her on a gurney and rushing her into the back as he followed. A nurse put her hand on his arm. “Mr.…?”
“Goddard,” he said. “That’s my girl.”
