In those years she rarely spoke to her own mother. When she did, Deb’s stories never changed: a cranky resident at the County Home, senseless beefs with coworkers, a foster who had nightmares or played with matches or started fights or wet the bed. Deb, notably, asked no questions. Her daughter’s life in New York—the glamorous job, the handsome husband, the exemplary new parents—didn’t interest her at all.
Phil hated to be alone, so they arranged their lives accordingly. They shared a small apartment in a congested neighborhood of a vast teeming city. There were weekly brunches with his parents, drinks and dinners and movie nights with their lively circle of friends.
For their first anniversary he gave her a cell phone. It seemed an extravagant gift. At the time they were expensive and not everyone had one, but Phil felt it was necessary, in case he needed to reach her. To Claudia this made no sense—there was a telephone in their apartment, and another in her office at Damsel—but she didn’t say that to Phil.
She took the phone with her to work, to the gym, to yoga class—feeling, always, that she’d been assigned a tracking device, like Uncle Ricky after his DUI. At least once a week, she’d leave it behind in one of those places, and there would be a mad scramble in which she tried to remember when she’d last had it and where.
Later it would seem obvious that she lost the phone on purpose, for reasons she couldn’t have explained at the time. She wanted simply to be alone, to wander aimlessly through the vast teeming city, unnoticed and unaccounted for. To prove to Phil, but mostly to herself, that she was not incarcerated. That unlike Uncle Ricky, she had a choice.
They might have gone on that way forever—Claudia losing her phone, Phil losing patience—if chance hadn’t intervened. A few months into her cell phone contract, she fell pregnant—an expression she’d learned at Damsel, from a South African photo editor who worked there until she too fell.
Claudia’s pregnancy was unintended. The Pill gave her blinding migraines, so she’d quit taking it. She and Phil used condoms most of the time, which was only slightly better than not using them at all.
When she fell pregnant, that was exactly how it felt: a plummeting sensation, the plane losing altitude. She didn’t want a baby but was, apparently, going to have one. She didn’t consider doing otherwise. At that age, she had a horror of making decisions. She’d been raised in a sea of lost potential, people trapped by their own bad choices. Her own judgment seemed equally suspect. A choice of this magnitude—of any magnitude—was paralyzing. Every possible outcome seemed like a mistake.
When she miscarried at eight weeks, it seemed like a miracle. Her relief was unspeakable, so she didn’t speak it, and her silence passed for grief. Eventually Phil’s mother took her to see a therapist. She had married into a family where this was a normal thing to do.
Therapy embarrassed her. It was hard to talk about herself for fifty minutes straight. She was young and there wasn’t much material—at least, none she was willing to share. Her background, her entire history, was unmentionable, so she complained about her in-laws. Phil’s family was half the reason she’d married him, and yet she’d come to resent their generosity and concern and relentless advice, which she badly needed but couldn’t bear to receive. She had misrepresented herself to them and they had believed her, which made them seem stupid. The Claudia they loved was a fiction, the person she pretended to be.
Their sorrow at her miscarriage seemed disproportionate. She’d never told them about the fosters—of course she hadn’t—but she blamed them for not knowing. Children, actual children, were dying every day—of abuse, neglect, wholly avoidable causes—while these kind silly rich people cried over a fetus the size of a gumball.
It wasn’t a baby; it was a menstrual period. That’s what she wanted to say.
She went to therapy for four months, twice as long as she’d spent being pregnant. In the end, she and Phil divided their CD collection. At their age, it was what divorce looked like.
She has no idea what became of the South African photo editor, whose fall was cushioned by a breathtakingly extravagant baby shower. She married a Wall Street trader and moved to Connecticut and was never heard from again.
Boston didn’t, after New York, feel like much of a city. Restaurant kitchens closed at nine p.m. The slow, creaking underground trains went nowhere she wanted to go. In December Boston came into focus, a city with a certain idea of itself. On Beacon Hill, snow danced under the streetlamps. Men wore long wool coats and Burberry mufflers. Historic cobblestones were carefully preserved. Diplomas were the local industry, like steel or textiles, so she earned a master’s in social work. She’d been skeptical of therapy, which seemed like an expensive crutch for whining rich people, but it had helped her. It might have helped her mother or Uncle Ricky or any one of the fosters. Social work was therapy for people without money, for people like her.
BACK AT THE CLINIC, THE CROWD HAD THINNED. PUFFY HAD put down his sign to eat his usual lunch, French fries and Chicken McNuggets. He nodded in Claudia’s direction, a friendly guy in his real life. She gave him a half wave.
She was two paces from the door when she noticed the protestor leaning against the side of the building, a beardo in a red jacket, a ski lift ticket hanging from the zipper. He didn’t accost her, didn’t even see her. It was his sign that caught her attention—hand-painted, a bespoke creation. ABORTION CAUSES BREAST CANCER. Beneath this caption was a cartoon drawing of a naked woman, rendered in pornographic detail: melon breasts, nipples like small fingers. Over one grotesquely large breast was a red bull’s-eye.
It is said that certain animals—ornery males, bulls and roosters—are inflamed by the color red. Claudia imagines they have no idea why the color provokes them and no memory of their aggressive behavior unless, like her, they see a video posted later on the internet.
In the video she starts out calmly, conversationally, explaining that the sign is factually inaccurate. Just so you know, there is no connection at all between abortion and breast cancer. Her smile is tense, wincing. I mean, just so you know.
She can remember feeling a human presence behind her—a slowing of sidewalk traffic, pedestrians stopping to listen—but she had no idea that someone was filming her with a cell phone.
By the end of the video she looks and sounds like a shrieking madwoman. (Abortion is not a risk factor! Having breasts is a risk factor!) It was the man’s smugness that inflamed her, his undeserved power. The power to threaten strangers—female strangers—with the illness women fear most.
The video is sixty-eight seconds long. It ends with heavy footsteps, a male voice off camera. Luis, the security guard, had been watching on closed circuit.
Sir, please step out of the way.
The video doesn’t show what happened next: Luis dragging Claudia into the building, grasping her arm, hissing into her ear: “For God’s sake, have you lost your fucking mind?”