“Well, what else you think is gonna happen with all that sex?”
He laughed. Vonita was one of his favorite people in the world. She had run the clinic since 1989, when the previous owner had retired. She painted it orange because she wanted it to stand out proud, like it had on its best Sunday clothes. Vonita had grown up in Silver Grove, cinched tight in the Bible Belt, and her mama was a devout Baptist. When Vonita opened the clinic, the church here had contacted her mama to let her know what her wayward daughter was doing. Vonita Jean, her mother had said on the telephone, don’t tell me you’re opening an abortion clinic.
Then, Mama, don’t ask me, Vonita had replied.
“How busy am I gonna be today?” Louie asked.
“Do I look like a crystal ball?”
“You look like the person who does the scheduling.”
She grunted. “Well. I hope you ate a big breakfast today, ’cause it may also be your lunch.”
Louie grinned. It would be busy; it was always busy. He’d already started his first case, in fact, a woman in her second trimester who needed her cervix softened before the procedure. She’d be the first and the last patient he saw that morning. The waiting room already had women in it who were here for their counseling sessions, who would come back tomorrow for their procedures. They came from Natchez and Tupelo and from around the corner. They came from Alligator and Satartia and Starkville and Wiggins. There were 48,000 square miles of Mississippi and this was the only clinic at which you could get an abortion. You might have to drive five hours to get there, and of course, you had to wait twenty-four hours between counseling and the procedure, which meant more travel expenses that many desperate women couldn’t afford. Vonita had on speed dial the names of benefactors and organizations she could call when a woman showed up who didn’t have money for lunch or bus fare home, much less a procedure. And then there were the women who had to be referred to other states, because the Center only performed abortions up to sixteen weeks.
Vonita was emptying one of the blessing bags that the protesters handed out to the patients, who often—bewildered—turned them in at the reception desk. “I’ve got three sets of booties,” she said, “but I’m holding out for a little hat.” She glanced up. “You do the Cytotec?”
“I did indeed,” Louie replied.
Vonita held up a little hand-printed card from the blessing bag. “Defund Planned Parenthood,” she read. “You think they know we’re not a Planned Parenthood?”
It was like using the word Xerox instead of copy machine. Plus, federal funds already were legally prohibited from being used for abortions. They covered gynecological care; abortions were self-funding. In fact, they were the only procedure reproductive health services clinics offered that didn’t operate at a loss.
If Planned Parenthood was defunded, it wouldn’t stop abortions. Abortions would literally be the only things they could afford to do.
Sometimes Louie felt like they only existed in relation to the antis. If they all disappeared, would he go up in a puff of smoke? Could you stand for something if there wasn’t an opposition?
He watched Vonita sweep the contents of the blessing bag into a trash can. “Ladies, who’s waiting on labs?” A peppering of hands went up. Vonita pressed a button on her phone and summoned Harriet to come get the next wave of patients for their blood tests. She did this fluidly and seamlessly; it was like watching a conductor raise beauty from the discord of an orchestra.
“Hey, Vonita,” Louie said, “you ever think about taking a vacation?”
She didn’t even spare him a glance. “I’ll take one when you do, Dr. Ward.” The phone rang, and she answered it, already dismissing him. “Yes, honey,” Vonita said. “You’ve got the right place.”
—
IN A SMALL BANK OF chairs beside the lab, Joy sat with her earbuds firmly jammed into her ears, listening to her Disney playlist while the Cytotec did its work inside her. It would take a few hours before her cervix was soft enough to be dilated, which meant that she would be in the Center for a while, while other women came and went.
She shifted, slipping a crumpled picture out of her pocket. Yesterday, she had been one of a dozen women here for counseling, getting labs done and listening to Vonita walk through the forms required by the state and hearing Dr. Ward talk about the procedure. She had also been asked to give a urine sample, and had an ultrasound. A woman named Graciela had been the one who performed it; she had hair that reached past her hips, and even though her voice was soft, she was speaking by rote. “We are obligated to offer you the opportunity to listen to the fetal heartbeat and to see the sonogram,” Graciela told her, and to Joy’s surprise, she heard herself say yes. Then she started to sob. She cried for her own dumb luck, for her loneliness. She cried because even though she had taken every precaution possible, she had wound up—like her mother—boxed into bad choices because of a man.
Graciela had handed her a tissue and then squeezed her hands. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, breaking from the script. Although she wasn’t talking about the ultrasound, she put the wand back in its cradle.
“I’m sure,” Joy said. But she didn’t know if she believed it. Peeing on a stick was not seeing a fetus on a sonogram. “I want to see it,” she told Graciela.
So Graciela squirted gel onto her swollen belly and ran the wand over her skin, and abracadabra, a silver fish swam onto the little screen. It morphed into a circle, a curve, then a fetal shape.
“Can I …” Joy said, and then she swallowed. “Can I have a picture?”
“You bet,” Graciela replied. She pushed a button, and a little printout curled from the machine. Black and white, in profile. She handed it to Joy.
“You must think I’m crazy,” Joy murmured.
Graciela shook her head. “You’d be surprised how many women want one.”
Joy had not known what to do with the ultrasound picture. She only knew she could not leave without it. She didn’t want to fold it into her tiny wallet, and yesterday she had been wearing pants without pockets. So she had slipped it into her bra, over her heart. She told herself that when she got home later, she would crumple it up and throw it away.
She still had it with her today.
—
BETH FELT LIKE SHE WAS swimming up from the bottom of a deep pool, and every time she tried to see the runny yolk of the sun, it seemed to get farther away. Then suddenly she surfaced in a rush of noise and activity. She was dizzy and dry-mouthed when her eyes popped open. Where the hell was she?
She slipped a hand underneath the blanket that was covering her and touched her belly, then lower, to the bulk of a pad in her underwear. Awareness struck her, one drop at a time, until suddenly she was soaked in the truth: they had asked her if she was pregnant and she’d said no, and it didn’t squeeze her heart to say it because it wasn’t a lie. But still, they had done a urine test and a blood test and had rubbed an ultrasound wand over her belly, as if they didn’t believe her. The last thing Beth remembered was looking up at the ugly fluorescent lights on the ceiling, and then she didn’t remember anything at all.
She tried to speak, but she had to dig deeper to find her voice, and when it came out it didn’t sound like hers at all. “Daddy?” she rasped.
Then he was leaning over her, his warm hands on her shoulder, her arm. “Hi, baby girl,” he said. He smiled down at her, and she noticed the deep lines that bracketed his mouth, like a parenthetical statement of fear. His temples had brown age spots she had never seen before. When had he gotten old, and why hadn’t she noticed?
“Where am I?”
He smoothed her hair away from her face. “You’re at the hospital. You’re going to be fine, honey. You just rest.”
“What happened?”