“Objection—”
“I’ll rephrase. You did not actually carry a baby to term, did you?”
“No,” I say.
“In fact you had two miscarriages?”
“Yes.”
“And then a stillbirth?”
I look into my lap. “Yes.”
“It’s your testimony today that you’ve always wanted a child, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Your Honor.” Angela sighs. “All this has been asked and answered.”
“Why then, Ms. Baxter, did you murder your own child in 1989?”
“What?” I say, stunned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about—”
But I do. And his next words confirm it: “Did you or did you not have a voluntary abortion when you were nineteen years old?”
“Objection!” Angela is out of her seat immediately. “This is irrelevant and occurred prior to my client’s marriage, and I move that it be stricken immediately from the record—”
“It’s completely relevant. It informs her desire to have a baby now. She’s trying to make up for past sins.”
“Objection!”
My hands have gone numb.
A woman stands up in the gallery. “Baby killer!” she yells, and that is the hairline crack it takes to break the dam. There is shouting—by the Westboro contingent and by the Eternal Glory congregants. The judge calls for order, and about twenty observers are hauled through the double doors of the courtroom. I imagine Vanessa watching on the other side. I wonder what she’s thinking.
“Mr. Preston, you may continue your line of questioning, but without the editorial comments,” Judge O’Neill says. “And as for the gallery, if there is one more disruption, I will turn this into a closed session.”
Yes, I tell him. I had an abortion. I was nineteen, in college. It wasn’t the right time to have a baby. I thought—stupidly—that I’d have many more chances.
When I finish, I am gutted. I have only spoken once of the procedure since it happened, and that was at the fertility clinic, when I had to be completely honest about my reproductive history or compromise my chances of conceiving. It has been twenty-two years, but suddenly I feel the same way I felt back then: Shaky. Embarrassed.
And angry.
The clinic could not legally have released that information to Wade Preston. Which means that it must have come from the only other person who was at the clinic the day I gave my medical history.
Max.
“Is there a reason you were hiding this information from the court?”
“I wasn’t hiding—”
“Could it be because you thought, correctly, it might make you seem a little disingenuous when you start sobbing about how much you want a baby?”
“Objection!”
“Have you ever considered,” Wade Preston presses, “that the fact that you haven’t been able to have another child was God’s judgment on you for killing your first?”
Angela is furious. She goes after Wade with a verbal streak of fire. But even once he has withdrawn his question, it hangs in the air like the letters of a neon sign after you close your eyes.
