Janine had not had many friends. Having a brother with Down syndrome was time-consuming. It meant she had to be home after school when her parents were working, to be a babysitter. It meant explaining to everyone why Ben had to tag along, and sometimes she just didn’t have the energy or inclination. And it also meant defending him against stupid comments people made—calling him the R word, or saying But he looks pretty normal, or asking why her mother hadn’t had prenatal testing. It was easier to just not have anyone over to the house, to remain a loner in school.
Which was why, when she was sixteen and somehow got paired in biology with the queen bee of the sophomore class, she expected the worst. Instead, Monica took her under her wing, as if she were a clueless little sister, dragging her into the girls’ room to teach her how to do a cat’s eye with liquid liner; sharing YouTube videos that were supposed to make her laugh. It was the first time she was in on the joke instead of the butt of it, which was why when Monica invited her out on a Friday night, she went. She told her mother that she was studying for her bio midterm with her lab partner, which was only partly a lie. She met Monica, who gave her a fake ID to use that had belonged to her cousin, who looked like Janine with longer hair if you squinted hard. They were going to sneak into a frat party at the college.
Janine had only drunk wine at communion, and tonight’s fare was grain alcohol punch. It tasted like Kool-Aid and there was always a boy pressing another drink into her hand. The night became a collage of images and moments: a red Solo cup, a heartbeat made of music, boys who danced so close that the hair on the back of her neck stood up the way it did before a thunderstorm. Their hands on her shoulders, a massage. Teeth scraping her neck. The realization that most people, including Monica, had gone home. The green nap of a pool table on her bare thighs. Someone holding her down while another moved between her legs, splitting her in two. Don’t tell me you don’t want this, he said, and while she was trying to figure out whether the answer that would get him off her was a yes or a no, a dick was shoved into her mouth.
When she awakened, alone, bruised and oozing, she pulled down her dress. Her underwear was gone. The sun stabbed at the horizon as she let herself out of the frat house. The lawn was littered with beer cans, and one of the bros was passed out on the porch. She wondered if he had been on her, in her. At that thought she leaned over and threw up violently, until she believed there was nothing left inside.
She was wrong about that.
She found out she was pregnant the usual way—a skipped period, tender breasts, exhaustion. But beyond all that, she just knew. She could feel them, still inside her, dirty. Taking root.
No one knew. Monica had only said, Well, when I left you were surrounded by guys. You sure looked like you were having fun. Her parents still thought she had been studying. Janine was determined to keep it that way.
Where they lived, it was easy. She still had the fake ID. She used it to make the appointment at a clinic in a part of Chicago she had never been to before. She scheduled it during the afternoon, when she was supposed to be home watching Ben. I have to run an errand, she told him, and if you don’t tell Mom, I’ll let you watch TV the whole time.
She stole money from the jar in the kitchen cabinet that her parents used for emergencies. She took a cab there. They asked at the front desk if there was a father, and Janine did a double take, thinking they meant her dad. Then she realized—the father of the baby. But it wasn’t a baby to her. It wasn’t a human being. It was a wound that had to be closed.
The doctor was an Indian woman with perfume that smelled like a garden. There was a pinch, and then pressure, and she panicked and kicked her foot out of the stirrup. After that, a nurse came in to help hold her down, and that only made her think about Them and she fought harder. Finally the doctor sat back and looked at her. Do you want this, she asked dispassionately, or don’t you?
Don’t tell me you don’t want this.
She held it together during the procedure, and in recovery, and afterward, when she took another cab home. But when she saw Ben on the porch with their next-door neighbor, she panicked.
The neighbor picked up a blanket-wrapped bundle on the ground. “Galahad was run over,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
Their terrier was supposed to stay in the house unless he was on a leash. “You were taking a long time and I went to see if you were back and he ran outside before I could stop him,” Ben said. “He won’t wake up.”
She wrapped her arms around him. “It’s not your fault.”
Janine took the bundle from her neighbor. It was the first time she had ever held anything dead. Galahad’s weight felt slight, as if he were evaporating. That morning she had yelled at him because he was chewing on her sock. She had so many orphaned socks because of that dog, she had taken to wearing them in mismatched pairs. Even now, she had on a blue spotted one and a red one with tiny penguins on it. Janine was sick thinking about it, dizzy, the way you felt when you perched at the edge of a cliff. That’s all that stood between death and life, a single misstep.
She carried the dog to the backyard and using one of her mother’s gardening spades, dug a hole. Ben watched. He asked why she was putting Galahad’s face into the dirt.
She didn’t know how to explain life and death to her brother. She didn’t know how to keep from thinking that this was her punishment, for what she had done. Had the baby inside her been like this, alive one moment, dead the next? It was the first time—the only time—she had thought of it as a person and not a problem.
When Janine was finished, her hands black with dirt, she sat down in the backyard and sobbed. That was how her mother found her when she got home from work. She was inconsolable, and everyone in her family thought they knew why.
It turned out that if you surgically removed a memory, you might stop feeling for the edges of its scar. You might even come to believe that you had never been raped, had never been pregnant, had never gotten an abortion. The more distance that grew between that day and Janine’s future, the more she believed that she was different from other women who had found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. She had been the victim. She had whitewashed the stain with years of pro-life activism. She didn’t think of herself as a hypocrite. That thing inside her had not been a baby. It was something they’d left behind.
Janine had pretended to think that if she never told a soul where she had been that afternoon, it would be like it hadn’t happened. But of course, God knew. And that was why this shooting was her fault.
Coming here undercover had been a bad idea. It was as if the Center were Pandora’s box. She’d opened the door, and had released all the evil into the world.
—
NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF HUGH’S JOB as a hostage negotiator involved being a good listener, but this hadn’t always been a skill he possessed. When he and Annabelle broke up, she had accused him of constantly interrupting her and not taking her feelings into account. “That’s ridiculous,” he had blustered, cutting her off midsentence. Annabelle had held up her hands, as if to say, I told you so. The space between them had filled with shock, with Hugh’s bitter realization that she was right. “Maybe if you’d let me finish a thought,” Anna said into the silence, “I wouldn’t have had to find someone else who did.”
Hugh had not become a negotiator until after Annabelle left him. But he was bound and determined not to make the same mistake in his professional life that he had in his private one. He had been trained to stay calm, even when his adrenaline was pumping. He knew to keep his voice even, to stay engaged with what a person was saying, attuned to every detail.
He knew, too, to acknowledge when someone else spoke. To accept. To say, all right, yes, okay. But he did not say I understand, because he understood nothing, particularly what brought any particular person to any particular cliff.
It had always been easier for Hugh to be measured and dispassionate during a hostage standoff than it had been with Annabelle. He supposed it was because at work, he had nothing personal at stake.
Until now.