She was still in hell.
The shooter was pacing, muttering to himself. The nurse was re-dressing the bandage on the doctor’s thigh. She peeled back the soaked gauze from the wound, and Janine turned away so she wouldn’t have to see any more.
Her cheek fell into a cupped hand. Janine found herself staring at Joy.
Suddenly it all came flooding back—what she had said, what had happened. She looked at her wig, lying like roadkill a few feet away. She felt her face flame with embarrassment. “Why would you take care of me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Joy replied.
They both knew the answer to that.
Janine scrutinized Joy. “You must hate me,” she murmured. “All of you. Oh my God.”
Joy gingerly touched a spot on Janine’s cheekbone. “You’re gonna have a hell of a bruise,” she said. She hesitated, and then looked Janine in the eye. “So you didn’t just say that stuff to get out of here? You’re really anti-choice?”
“Pro-life,” Janine automatically corrected. In this war, labels meant everything. She had heard so many on the other side take umbrage when they were called pro-abortion. It’s pro-choice, they always said, as if there was something wrong with being pro-abortion. And wasn’t that exactly the point?
Joy stared at her. “So … you didn’t even have to be here.”
Janine met her gaze. “Neither did you.”
Joy didn’t move away from her, but Janine could feel the line between them solidify. “I came to get … evidence,” she explained. “Audio. Proof of people being forced into … you know.”
“I wasn’t forced,” Joy said. “It was necessary.”
“That’s not how your baby felt.”
“My baby felt nothing. It wasn’t even a baby.”
Janine knew that there wasn’t a moral difference between the embryo you used to be and the person you were today. So the unborn were smaller than toddlers—did that mean adults deserved more human rights than children? That men were due more privileges than women?
So the unborn weren’t fully mentally aware—did that preclude people with Alzheimer’s or cognitive deficits, or those in comas, or those sleeping from having rights?
So the unborn were hosted in the bodies of their mothers. But who you are is not determined by where you are. You are no less human if you cross state lines or move from your living room to your bathroom. Why would a trip from womb to delivery room—a voyage of less than a foot—change your status from nonhuman to human?
The answer was because the unborn were human. And Janine, for the life of her, could not understand how people like Joy—like all the others in this clinic—couldn’t see what was so clear.
But somehow, it didn’t seem like the time or place to have this fight. Especially with someone who was resting your aching head in her lap, and gently stroking your hair.
Unbidden, the thought came into Janine’s mind: Joy would probably have been a good mother.
“Would you have tried to stop me?” Joy asked. “If you had been outside?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Again, all the arguments against abortion in which Janine had been tutored floated to the tip of her tongue, but instead, she looked at Joy and spoke from the heart. “You might not have given birth to the next Einstein or Picasso or Gandhi,” she said. “But I bet whoever he was, he would have been amazing.”
Tears welled in Joy’s eyes. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Then … there must have been another way. There’s always another way.”
Joy shook her head. “Do you think I wanted this? Do you think anyone wakes up and says, I think I’ll go get an abortion this morning? This is the last stop. This is the place you go when you run through all the scenarios and you realize that the only people who say there’s another way are the ones who aren’t standing there with a positive pregnancy test in their hand. I did it. I don’t regret it. But that doesn’t mean I won’t think about it every day of my life.”
Janine struggled to sit up, her head pounding. “Doesn’t that sort of prove, on some level, that it’s questionable?”
“It’s completely legal.”
“So was slavery,” Janine replied. “Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”
Their whispers were getting louder. Janine worried that they’d attract the shooter’s attention. She wondered if she would die here, today, a martyr for her cause.
“All that legal protection you want for the unborn,” Joy said. “Great. Give it to them. But only if you can find a way to not take it away from me.”
It made Janine think of King Solomon, suggesting that a baby be split down the middle. Obviously that wasn’t a solution. “If you carried the baby to term, yes, maybe you’d have some problems to solve, but it wouldn’t threaten your existence. There are plenty of women who can’t have children, who would do anything to adopt.”
“Really?” Joy said. “Then where the fuck were they when I was in foster care?”
—
WHEN JOY WAS EIGHT YEARS old, her prized possession had been a Walkman cassette player she had bought at a church yard sale for two dollars, with a cassette still inside: Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill. Joy didn’t particularly like Steely Dan, but beggars could not be choosers. Every night she fell asleep to “Reelin’ in the Years,” because it blocked out the other sounds in her house.
There had been crying. Shouting. Joy would turn up the volume of her Walkman and pretend she was somewhere else. Then, in the morning, her mother would wake her up, sporting a bracelet of bruises on her arm, blisters on her palm. I’m so clumsy, she would say. Fell right off the step stool. Put my hand down on the stove when it was still hot.
Joy had never known her daddy, but there had been a parade of men in the apartment since she was small. Some stayed for a week, some for years. Some were better than others. Rowan had brought her coloring books and stickers. Leon had a dog, an old coonhound named Foxy, that she used to feed scraps to underneath the table. But Ed had liked to watch Joy when she slept, and more than once she woke in the night to find him sitting on her bed, stroking her hair. And Graves, the man who was with her mama now, was mean as a trapped cat.
One night Joy heard the voices escalating and turned up her Walkman volume only to have it garble and fade and then quit entirely. She opened the little battery pack and saw one of the two double As frothing at the tip. Setting aside the cassette player, she realized the house had gone silent, which was somehow even worse.
Joy slipped out of bed. She crept into the kitchen.
The reason her mama wasn’t screaming was that Graves had his hands wrapped around her throat. Her face was flushed, her eyes rolled back in her head.
Joy grabbed a knife out of the kitchen drawer and plunged it into his back.
With a cry Graves whirled around, grabbing for the hilt of the blade, reaching for Joy. She danced away from him, backing out of the kitchen even as her mama collapsed.
Later, Joy would not remember running out of her apartment and banging on the other doors in the hallway. She did not recall Miz Darla open the door wearing her head scarf and housecoat; how she washed Joy’s hands and face with lukewarm water. When the police came to take her away, Joy noticed the small bloody handprints marking every door on the fourth floor.
She was taken to a foster home, a couple called the Grays, who looked like they sounded: thin and bled colorless by the four kids they housed. Her mother was allowed to visit her once a week. She showed up only once, and Joy begged to be taken back. Her mother said this wasn’t such a good time, and that’s how Joy realized that Graves was still living in their apartment.