AT PRECISELY 9:01 A.M. Wren popped out of her chair and walked up to Ms. Beckett, the health teacher. Everyone was taking a test that involved labeling the parts of the male and female reproductive systems—with points taken off if you spelled fallopian or vas deferens wrong. Ms. Beckett was pretty cool, as teachers went. She was young and had married the hot gym teacher, Mr. Hanlon, last year. Although Ms. Beckett hadn’t officially told anyone yet, it was clear from her ever-loosening wardrobe of jumpers and caftans that she was going to need a long-term sub in a few months while she was on maternity leave. There was a poetic justice to that, Wren thought—a sex ed teacher who had gotten pregnant.
It was also why she knew that if she walked up to Ms. Beckett’s desk and told her the truth—she needed to leave school to get the Pill—the teacher would probably have covered Wren’s tracks for her. But it wasn’t like contraception was a valid excuse for getting out of class, so she did the next best thing when Ms. Beckett looked up from her computer. She screwed her face into a grimace of abject pain and whispered, “Cramps.”
The magic word. Thirty seconds later, she was walking through the school with a pass to the nurse. Except instead of turning right to go to the nurse’s office she made an abrupt left and walked out the door near the foreign language wing, letting the hot sun scald her. She reached for her phone and texted, and ten seconds later, Aunt Bex’s car pulled up to the curb. Wren yanked open the door and slipped into the passenger seat just as one of the school safety officers rounded the corner of the building. “Go,” she urged. “Go, go!”
Aunt Bex screamed away from the curb. “Lord,” she said, as her tires squealed. “I feel like Thelma and Louise.”
Wren turned to her blankly. “Who?”
“My God, you make me feel like a dinosaur.” Aunt Bex laughed. She reached behind her, fumbling around the backseat until she grabbed a paper bag, which she dropped into Wren’s lap. Wren didn’t even have to open it to know it was donuts.
She supposed that it was moments like this when it paid to have a mother around. But to be honest, her mom was so extra, living in an artists’ commune or something in the Marais and getting piercings in places where not even Wren would want them. Aunt Bex wasn’t the next best thing. She was better.
Wren slouched in the seat and put her feet on the dashboard.
“Don’t do that,” Aunt Bex said automatically, although it was hard to imagine how this old beater of a car could be damaged in any way by the footprint of Wren’s shoe. There were paint rags on the backseat and empty buckets and dust from stretched canvases and everything smelled a little like turpentine.
“Go ahead,” Wren said.
“Go ahead?”
“Give me the lecture. What is it you always say? A free lunch isn’t ever really free.”
Aunt Bex shook her head. “Nope. This lunch has no strings attached.”
Wren sat up, tilting her head. “Really?” Her aunt was the only person who seemed to understand you couldn’t schedule when you fell in love, like it was a doctor’s appointment. “Aunt Bex,” Wren blurted, “how come you never got married?”
Her aunt shrugged. “I’m sure the story you’re hoping for is much more romantic than the truth. I just didn’t, that’s all.” She glanced in her niece’s direction. “I’m not taking you here today because of some unrequited love of my own,” Bex said. “I’m taking you because I’d rather you have the Pill than an abortion.”
Wren reached into the paper bag and took a bite of her donut. “Have I told you I love you?”
Her aunt raised a brow. “Because I’m taking you to the Center, or because I got you chocolate crème?”
Wren grinned. “Can it be both?” she asked.
—
WHEN OLIVE WENT TO KISS Peg goodbye, she found her wife underneath the sink trying to fix the trash disposal. She took in the sight for a moment, admiring the wriggle of Peg’s hips and the swell of her breasts as she reached up to do something to a pipe. Hell, she might be old, but she wasn’t dead. Yet.
“How did I get so lucky?” she mused out loud. “Marrying a plumber. And a hot one at that.”
“You married an engineer with plumbing skills.” Peg slipped out from the cabinet. “And a hot one, at that.”
Peg grinned up at her. Olive wanted to memorize every detail of their life together: the chip in Peg’s front tooth, the lip of pink sock peeking out from her tennis shoe. The orange juice sweating on the counter, and the newel post of the banister that fell off its perch weekly no matter how much wood glue they used. The scatter of pens near the phone, tossed like runes, that were all out of ink. There was such art in the ordinary, it could leave you in tears.
“Where are you off to today so early, anyway?” Peg asked, sticking her head back underneath the sink.
Olive hadn’t told Peg about going to the oncologist’s office last week; she had hid the file with the confusion of numbers and tests underneath the mattress, where Peg wouldn’t find it. It was tucked inside her purse now, for the nurse at the Center to interpret. But did Olive really need the translation? She knew, even if she needed someone else to say it to make it true. “A checkup. No big deal.”
Olive heard the throaty growl of the disposal, and Peg’s arpeggio of laughter. God, she had danced to the music of that laugh for a decade now. She felt like an explorer moving through a world she had always known, charged with cataloging the minutiae of the common, the grooves of the routine, just in case a thousand years from now someone else wanted to see things exactly as they had looked through her eyes. The way her hand slipped seamlessly into Peg’s in the dark of a movie theater when they didn’t have to worry if anyone might be shocked by two old women in love; the long silver hair, coiled into the shape of infinity in the shower drain; the cool, possessive stamp of her kiss.
What she would miss were these details. She wondered if, when you left this world, you got to take a certain number of them deep in your pockets, clenched in your fists, or tucked high on the roof of your mouth, with you forever.
—
WHEN LOUIE WASN’T PERFORMING ABORTIONS, he was teaching new doctors how to do them. He was an associate professor at the University of Hawaii and Boston University. He started his semesters the same way, telling the students that over five thousand years ago, in ancient China, mercury was used to induce abortions (although it most likely also killed the women). The Ebers Papyrus from 1500 B.C. mentioned abortions. He showed a slide of a bas relief from the year 1150 decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a woman in the underworld was getting an abortion at the hands of a demon.
He told his medical students that Aristophanes mentioned pennyroyal tea as an abortifacient—just five grams of it could be toxic. That Pliny the Elder said if a woman didn’t want a pregnancy, she could step over a viper or ingest rue. Hippocrates suggested that a woman who wanted to miscarry jump and hit herself on the bottom with her heels until the embryo released and fell out; if that didn’t work, there was always a mixture of mouse dung, honey, Egyptian salt, resin, and wild colocynth that you could insert into the uterus. A Sanskrit manuscript from the eighth century recommended sitting over a pot of boiling water or steaming onions. Scribonis Largus, the court doctor for Emperor Claudius, had a recipe that included mandrake root, opium, Queen Anne’s lace, opopanax, and peppers. Tertullian, the Christian theologian, described instruments that match the ones used today for a D & E and said Hippocrates, Asclepiades, Erasistratus, Herophilus, and Soranus all employed them.
Abortion had been around, Louie told them, since the beginning of time.
“I got a new one for you, Dr. Ward,” Vonita said as he wandered into the reception area during a five-minute break. “Tansy.”
“She a patient?”
Vonita laughed. “No, it’s an herb. Or a flower or something. It was used in the Middle Ages to abort.”
He grinned. “Where’d you learn that?”
“Reading one of my romance novels,” she said.
“I didn’t think romance novels covered that topic.”