ONLY ONE OTHER WOMAN HAD been in the recovery room when Joy was brought in. She wore an Ole Miss sweatshirt and pool shoes, and she was crying. “You have a seat in that chair, honey,” Harriet said, flicking a glance at the other patient. She handed Joy a juice box and a packet of Fig Newtons. “You got your azithromycin?” Joy nodded. “Good. You take that as directed. You can also take Motrin or Advil in two hours, but no aspirin, okay? It thins the blood. And here’s a prescription for Sprintec, that’s the birth control you picked, right?”
Joy nodded absently. She couldn’t stop staring at the other woman, who was sobbing so hard that Joy felt rude for intruding on someone’s visible grief. What did it say about Joy, who wasn’t crying? Was this the proof that she had been looking for, that she would have been a lousy mother?
“Will you excuse me a second?” Harriet said, and she went over to the woman’s chair and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right? Are you in pain?”
The woman shook her head, past speech.
“Are you sad that you had to make this decision?”
Who wasn’t? Joy thought. What hellish tributary of evolution had made reproduction—and all the shit that came with it—the woman’s job? She thought about all the women who had sat in the very chair she was in, and the stories that had brought them here, and how, for one brief chapter, they all intersected. A sisterhood of desperation.
The woman took a Kleenex from a box that Harriet offered her. “Sometimes we have to make choices when we don’t like any of the options,” the nurse said. She drew the woman into an embrace. “You’ve been here long enough. I can get your driver if you’re ready to go.”
A few minutes later the woman was signed out. A boy (he really was no more than that) stood awkwardly beside her as she got up and started to walk down the hall. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off, and Joy watched them until she couldn’t see them anymore, moving in tandem with six fixed inches of distance between them.
Joy put in her earbuds and filled her head with music. Had anyone asked, she would have said she was listening to Beyoncé or Lana Del Rey, but the truth was she was listening to music from The Little Mermaid. At one of her foster homes, she had been given that CD as a birthday gift and had memorized every last word of it. When things got really bad, she used to put the pillow over her head and whisper the lyrics.
Wouldn’t you think I’m a girl, a girl who has everything?
“Miz Joy?” the nurse said. “Let’s get some vitals.” She came and stood beside Joy’s oversize armchair in the recovery room.
Joy let Harriet stick the thermometer into her mouth and Velcro the cuff around her arm. She watched the red numbers blink on the machine, proof that her body, battered as it was, was still functional. “One-ten over seventy-five, and ninety-eight point six,” the nurse said. “Normal.”
Normal.
Nothing was normal.
The whole world had changed.
She had had two hearts, and now she did not.
She had been a mother, and now she was not.
—
GEORGE SAT IN HIS TRUCK, his hands fisted on the steering wheel, going nowhere. The ignition was off, and he had two choices. He could start the engine again and drive back home and pretend he’d never come. Or he could finish what he’d started.
He was breathing heavily, like he’d run here, instead of driving hundreds of miles to distance himself from a truth he couldn’t absorb.
He thought about how he and Lil had once been part of a Thirty Days for Life vigil with the church: where the congregation took shifts round the clock huddled in a prayer circle in front of the state capitol. They had brought blankets and lawn chairs and thermoses of hot chocolate and had held hands and asked Jesus to help lawmakers see the right path. Lil had been a child—maybe eight or nine—and she and some other kids in the congregation had run around while the adults prayed. He could remember watching them spell out their names with sparklers in the dark, and thinking this was what the movement for life was all about.
How could Lil have gotten an abortion?
She had to have been pressured. Someone here must have told her this was the right thing, the only thing, to do. She couldn’t have possibly believed that he wouldn’t have helped her, raised the child, done anything she wanted.
In the back of his mind was a thought like a worm in the core of an apple: what if this was what she wanted?
George didn’t believe it; he couldn’t. She was a good girl, because he had been a good father.
If the first half of that statement wasn’t true, didn’t it negate the second half?
Lil had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. She knew that life began at conception. She could probably rattle off five Bible verses proving it. She was kind, generous, beautiful, smart, and everyone fell in love with her when they met her. Lil was, quite simply, the one instance of perfection in George’s life.
He realized, of course, that everyone was a sinner. But if there was any splinter of evil in his daughter, he knew where it had come from.
Him.
George, who had spent nearly two decades trying to scrub clean the stains from his soul by giving himself to the church. George, who had been told forgiveness was divine; that God loved him no matter what. What if all that had been a lie?
George shook his head clear. It was this simple: something terrible had happened; someone was to blame for it. This was a test from God. Like the one Job faced. And Abraham. He was being asked to prove his devotion to his faith, and to his daughter, and he knew exactly what was expected of him.
He slipped on his coat and zipped it up halfway. Then he took the pistol out of the glove compartment and tucked it into his waistband, concealing it beneath the fleece. His pockets were already full of ammunition.
He started sweating almost immediately, but then again, it was easily eighty degrees outside. He began moving toward the hazard-orange building. It was garish, a scar on the cityscape. George ducked his head, pulled his collar up.
There was a fence around the Center, and on that perimeter was a cluster of protesters. They held up signs. There was a woman sitting in a folding chair, knitting; and a big man holding a sandwich in one hand and a baby doll in another. George thought about Lil. He wondered if he was walking the same path she had.
A Black woman was leaving the clinic. Her husband or boyfriend had his arm around her. As they passed the protesters, he folded her more protectively into the shell of his body. He crossed paths with the couple, and kept walking. The big man eating the sandwich called out to him. “Brother,” he said, “save your baby!”
George continued to the front door of the Center, thinking, I will.
—
OUT OF SHEER BOREDOM, Wren was eavesdropping.
“Dr. Ward’s been at it since nine-thirty,” Vonita was saying. “We had a fifteen-week come in for Cytotec this morning and she’s in the back now.”
“All that while I was sitting home eating bonbons?” The girl with pink hair laughed.
“Bonbons,” Vonita sighed. “I wish.” She took a sip from her tumbler.
“What’s in there?”
“I hope it’s the ground-up bones of supermodels,” Vonita said sourly. “This crap is the work of the devil.”
“Why do you even drink that garbage?”
Vonita gestured to her generous curves. “Because of my torrid love affair with food.”
Aunt Bex stood up. “I think I’m growing roots,” she said, starting to walk in small circles. “How long can it take to give someone a prescription?” Wren watched her lift her arms over her head, bend at the waist, and do it over again.
Oh my God. Her aunt was doing old-person yoga in public.
A buzzer hummed on the reception desk, and Vonita glanced up over her reading glasses. “Now who does this one belong to?” she mused.
Wren craned her neck. The glass window in the door of the Center was specially made, so that they could see out but whoever was on the outside could not see in. She glimpsed a middle-aged man squinting into the mirrored surface.