Janine had been twelve when her mother conceived again, an accident, at age forty-three. She remembered how her parents had come home from an appointment with two new bits of knowledge: the baby was a boy, and he had one extra chromosome. The doctor had counseled her mother to terminate the pregnancy, because the baby’s life would be full of developmental and health challenges.
She’d been old enough to pick up on her parents’ fear. She had Googled Down syndrome. Half the kids who were born with Down syndrome also needed heart surgery. They had increased chances of developing leukemia and thyroid problems. By age forty, many had early Alzheimer’s. And then there were other complications: ear infections, hearing loss, skin problems, bad vision, seizures, gastrointestinal disorders.
She believed she knew everything about her baby brother before he arrived. But she didn’t know that Ben would have a belly laugh that made her start laughing, too. Or that he would be ticklish on his right foot but not his left. She didn’t know that he wouldn’t go to sleep unless Janine read him exactly three books. She knew that he would meet milestones later than other kids, that he might need help. But she didn’t know how much she would needhim.
It wasn’t all rosy. There were blogs where parents talked about having kids with Up syndrome, and how they’d been given an extra blessing from God in the form of that additional chromosome. That was bullshit. It took Ben three years to be potty trained. He whined when he was tired, like any other little brother. He was bullied in school. One year, Ben had a surgery on Janine’s birthday, and her parents completely forgot to give her a cake, a party, a moment of attention.
At college, when she was president of the Students for Life club, she had plenty of conversations about the moral quicksand of abortion, and she used her brother as an example. Ben may not have been the child her parents had expected, but he was the one they got. Having a child is a terrible risk, no matter what. You might have a healthy baby who then gets a heart condition, diabetes, addicted to opioids. You might raise a kid who gets her heart broken, who miscarries her own baby, whose husband dies fighting overseas. If we are meant to only have children who never encounter difficulty in life, then no one should be born.
Had Janine’s mother done what the doctor suggested at that prenatal appointment, Ben would never have existed. She wouldn’t have seen the triumph on his face when he finally learned how to tie his own shoes, when he brought home his first friend from school. He wouldn’t have been there on the day her dog Galahad was hit by a truck, the day everything went wrong, when no one could make her stop crying and Ben just crawled into her arms and hugged her.
Now, Janine glanced at Joy, who was curled sideways in her chair, her face buried in her hands. She wished she had been standing at the fence today when Joy came into the clinic to have her abortion. She might have kept her from making the decision she had.
It was too late for Joy’s baby. But that didn’t mean it was too late for Joy.
Janine sat up a little straighter. Even Norma McCorvey changed her mind. She had been Jane Roe inRoe v. Wade. In the 1970s, when she was twenty-two, she found herself pregnant for the third time. She lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal unless the mother’s life was at risk. Her lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court, and of course, you know howthatturned out. She became an abortion advocate, until the nineties, when she did an abrupt one-eighty. From that moment, all the way till she died in 2017, she asked the Supreme Court to overturn their decision on her case.
What led to her change of opinion? She was born again.
Janine smiled to herself.
Born again.
She didn’t think it was any coincidence that the term for letting God back into your heart had, at its core, birth.
—
IZZY SAT ON THE FLOORbeside the body of Olive Lemay. Her hands were still shaking with the effort of trying to resuscitate the woman, but she had known that there wasn’t a prayer. The gun had gone off at close range. The bullet had torn through the older woman’s heart. Even as Izzy had tried to stanch the flow of blood, she had felt Olive’s hand come up to cover hers. She had seen the fear in the woman’s eyes.
“That was a very brave thing you did,” Izzy whispered fiercely.
Olive shook her head. Her eyes held Izzy’s.
Sometimes, being a nurse doesn’t matter. Being human does.
So Izzy eased up the pressure on Olive’s chest. She grabbed Olive’s hand with both of her own and she stared into the woman’s eyes, nodding in answer to the question that hadn’t been asked.
She had been in this profession long enough to know that people sometimes seemed to need permission before they left this world.
The first death she ever saw was when she had been a nursing student, and had a patient with metastatic breast cancer. The woman was a former beauty queen, now in her fifties. She’d been in the hospital before for palliative care and for rehab after a pathological fracture. But this time, she had come back to die.
One quiet night, after her family left, Izzy had sat down beside the sleeping woman. Her head was bald from the chemo; her face was gaunt, and yet somehow it only served to make her features more arresting. Izzy stared at her, thinking of the woman she must have been, before cancer ate away at her.
Suddenly the woman’s eyes blinked open, a lucid and lovely sea green. “You’ve come to get me, haven’t you?” she said, smiling softly.
“Oh no,” Izzy replied. “You’re not going for any tests tonight.”
The woman moved her head imperceptibly. “I’m not talking to you, honey,” she said, her gaze fixed somewhere over Izzy’s shoulder.
A moment later, the woman died.
Izzy always wondered what she would have seen, had she been brave enough to turn around that night.
She wondered if she would be shot, like Olive.
She wondered how long it would be until an autopsy was done, and someone found out she was pregnant.
She wondered, if her life ended today, whether anyone would be waiting for her on the other side.
