Janine had nearly thrown up when the nurse, Izzy, cut into Bex’s flesh. Without anesthesia. With Bex wide awake. The skin beneath the scalpel had divided to become a howling mouth, red and angry.
Janine looked down at her arms, covered to the elbows in blood, and suddenly it all hit her. She had had her hands in another woman’s chest. She was trapped with a gunman who didn’t realize that one of his hostages was just as disgusted by abortion as he was. She started to weave on her feet.
Izzy looked up as Janine grabbed on to the wall for support. “Are you going to faint?” she asked.
Her own voice was distant and buzzy, like that of the conductor on a train you could never really hear. I have to get out of here. Izzy put a reassuring arm around Janine’s shoulders. “I have to get out of here,” Janine said more firmly.
“Let’s take some deep breaths,” Izzy said, with a note of warning in her voice. She flicked her eyes toward the gunman, who had turned around to stare at them.
“No.” Janine wrenched away. She walked toward the shooter, who held the gun at waist level, pointed at her. “Sir, excuse me, but I don’t belong here,” she said, smiling at him.
“Sit the hell down,” he growled.
“I’m like you, not them. I’m not a patient. I was here because … Well, it’s a long story.” She reached up and took off her blond wig, revealing a pixie cut of dark hair. “I think abortion is a sin. They kill babies here, and they deserve … they deserve …” She glanced around to find everyone in the waiting room staring at her in shock. “Please let me go,” she begged.
“Be quiet,” the shooter demanded.
“I promise I won’t—”
“Stop talking—”
“I’ll tell them you’re a reasonable man. A good man. With a good heart, trying to give a voice to the unborn.” She took a step forward, emboldened. “You and I, we’re on the same side—”
Janine saw the shooter lift his weapon. And then everything went black.
—
NOBODY MADE A MOVE TO help the girl who’d been coldcocked. Had he not been immobilized with a tourniquet, Louie couldn’t even say for sure that he’d have done it, the Hippocratic oath be damned.
She must have come here to try to trap them. For years, now the antis had infiltrated clinics, trying to find proof of the mythology that fetal parts were being sold and that employees were forcing women to terminate late-term pregnancies. The result? People believed them … so much so that it inspired violence. In Colorado, a man shot up a Planned Parenthood because he was certain they were selling baby organs and tissue.
Who knew what lies had driven the shooter here, today?
Louie knew all the protesters; it was really a matter of self-preservation. There were too many dark roads in Mississippi, too many places for his car to be driven off into a culvert, like they used to do to civil rights activists. So Allen had complimented him on his haircut recently. Wanda offered donuts to the staff every Monday. Raynaud, who wore the sandwich board with photos of body parts, didn’t make eye contact with anyone. Mark only came on Tuesdays and sat on his walker, his oxygen tank in tow for his emphysema. Ethel, who knit the booties and caps that went into the blessing bags, had once given Louie a pair of mittens at Christmas.
There were those who were more disruptive: protesters who took photos of the license plates of cars parked in the lot and published them on websites so that they could be harassed; protesters who had created a geo-fencing mechanism so that as you came within a couple hundred feet of the clinic, your phone’s browser would be filled with anti-abortion advertising. (When Louie checked Facebook at work, a pop-up reminded him that he could keep his baby.) Davis, a young minister, blocked incoming cars with his body and screamed at the patients, telling them they were going to hell. Reverend Rusty, from Operation Save America, drove down from Wichita every couple of months in an old VW bus with a group of followers he could whip into a frenzy with his horsewhip voice and rattlesnake eyes.
Every now and then there was someone new. Last March, a Christian college had a spring break trip to Mississippi, and a busload of fresh-faced college students picketed for a full week. There was a man who showed up for a few days with a snarling pit bull, but he disappeared as quickly as he’d come. There was the time, about a year ago, when a crazy protester barreled into the clinic and chained himself to an ultrasound machine—not realizing that they were portable and could be wheeled out, which was exactly how the police transported him from the building to arrest him. And, apparently, there was Janine.
With that wig off her head, he recognized her as an anti. He couldn’t believe that they had been under the same roof and he hadn’t recognized her, until that moment. It made him feel foolish. Violated.
When Louie was a boy, Miss Essie would come visit and sit on their porch and complain about the head of the ladies’ auxiliary at church, yet every Sunday she’d be cozying to the woman as if they shared a twin bed. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, she would say, when his grandmama called her on her hypocrisy.
Then find yourself more suitable company, his grandmama used to argue.
Louie imagined that this young lady had been trying to save her own skin. Clearly, it had backfired. When she regained consciousness, would she apologize to the women who’d come to this Center because they had reached the end of their ropes? Or to Izzy and himself, who fought society and politics and, yes, violence, to give those women a last chance?
She could apologize a thousand times to Vonita, but it wouldn’t bring her back to life.
This woman lying feet away from him would probably be surprised to know that she was not the first pro-lifer to walk into the Center. He had personally performed abortions on at least a dozen.
Louie did not know a single colleague who hadn’t done the same. These women claimed to be pro-life and insisted the fetus was sacred, until it happened to be inside them and didn’t square with their life expectations. They would come into the procedure room and say that it was different, for them. Or they would bring their daughters and say that obviously this was an exception. Louie wanted to point out that everyone who walked through the Center’s door was someone’s daughter. But he didn’t.
If these women burst into tears on Louie’s table because they never imagined themselves there, he did not call them hypocrites. Any of us can rationalize the things we do. But he hoped empathy would spread, an invasive weed of compassion.
A day or two later, after he performed their abortions, these same women would call him a killer again as he walked from his car into his place of work. He did not consider them frauds. He understood why they felt they had to go back to being who everyone else in their social circles believed them to be.
Indeed, when pro-lifers came to him to terminate a pregnancy and told him that they did not believe in abortion, Louie Ward said only one thing:
Scoot down.
—
PROBLEM SOLVED, JOY THOUGHT BITTERLY. Want to clear up a divisive issue? Throw all the parties into the crucible of a hostage situation, and let them simmer.
She looked down at the unconscious body of the woman who had been suffering beside her. Never in a hundred years would it have occurred to her that she was an undercover anti-choice protester. If she had known, would Joy have even given her the time of day?
This was karma, in its purest form. It wasn’t as if Janine had just wandered into the wrong place, like Joy had.