Her dismal history became, briefly, a subject of local fascination: the arrests for possession and prostitution, the evictions, one known overdose. According to the Globe, DCF had investigated her as far back as 2003, when another child was removed from her care.
To Claudia, the particulars of the story were eerily familiar. She combed through her predecessor’s notes. Mercy Street’s medical records had long ago been digitized, but Evelyn Dodd—seventy years old and resistant to technology—had been granted an exception. Each Access patient—minor, medical, or latecomer—was the subject of a detailed entry in a spiral-bound notebook, in Evelyn’s careful hand.
Claudia pored over the notebooks. The entries painted a vivid picture of the daily workings of the clinic—and, over time, of Evelyn’s physical and cognitive decline. Her notes, increasingly brief, became hard to decipher, full of underlines and cryptic abbreviations.
In the spring of 2006, a latecomer was seen in clinic, a nineteen-year-old woman named L. Jones (or, possibly, L. James—after her initial stroke, Evelyn’s handwriting had deteriorated). The patient was twenty-five weeks pregnant, just past the legal cutoff. Her baby would have been born that November—a child the Commonwealth forced her to bear, a child with no safe place to land.
Was this patient—a latecomer turned away at twenty-five weeks—Baby Doe’s mother? Claudia would never know.
Anything was possible. It was even possible (not likely, but possible) that Evelyn’s patient had found a happy ending. That L. Jones or L. James—poor, addicted, nineteen years old and unhappily pregnant—had risen to the challenge of sudden motherhood, that she’d detoxed, found housing, devised a way to support herself. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, she might somehow (somehow) have acquired the wherewithal to defend herself, to protect herself and her child from a man like Mark Keohane.
A man with a criminal record, a raging drug habit. A big man who could snap a child’s neck with one hand.
Nothing was certain, except this: Baby Doe had died violently. The little girl had disappeared from the world without explanation, for months on end, and nobody, nobody had noticed. If the tides had shifted that day in March 2008—if one additional nor’easter had battered the Massachusetts coast that winter—the contractor’s bag would have been swept out to sea. The child’s body would never have been found.
These were Claudia’s thoughts as she watched Shannon zoom down the hallway toward the reception desk, her fake Ugg boots sparking the carpet. On Monday morning, she would be a no-show. Her baby would be born addicted, to an addicted mother—a child with no soft place to land.
Claudia thought of the protestors gathered on Mercy Street: the churchgoing faithful, the celibate priests and monks. Would they have any interest in Shannon F.—a homeless addict who haunted the brick sidewalks of Downtown Crossing, harassing tourists for spare change—if she weren’t pregnant? Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life—the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible—didn’t trouble them at all.
WHAT MADE A PERSON A PERSON? HER MIND AND HER MEMORIES, all that she had done and felt and known and created, thought and wondered and seen and understood. A fetus had no thoughts or memories; it had made nothing, understood nothing. And yet, this mute, unthinking knot of tissue—alive, yes, but unformed, unconscious, incapable of tenderness or reasoning or even laughter—was the life that mattered. The woman carrying it, the complex creature formed by twenty or thirty years of living in the world, was simply the means of production. Her feelings about the matter, her particular ideas and needs and desires, didn’t matter at all.
A fetus was living tissue, no question. But it was not a person.
A fetus, at most, was raw material. The woman carrying it could, if she wished, make it into a person. But what was the point of making yet another person, when the woman herself—a person who already existed—counted for so little?
Baby Doe had been a person, a little girl who felt love and joy, who delighted in her pink leggings and giggled when her toenails were painted and who, in the end, felt shock and fear and betrayal and pain. As a fetus she’d been protected by Massachusetts law, the twenty-four-week cutoff. As a person she was utterly dependent on a woman who couldn’t raise her and didn’t want to. Once she became an actual person, Baby Doe was on her own.
THE BAR WAS A NEIGHBORHOOD PLACE, A STALE-SMELLING DIVE known for cheap beer and—in summer—extravagant air-conditioning, delivered by massive units anchored high on the wall. In February the place was the same temperature. As they did most Friday nights, the clinic staff staked out a corner table. Bolted to the gantry were dueling televisions: at one end, the NECN weatherman making dire predictions, another monster nor’easter; at the other, the Bruins pummeling Detroit.
“The Bride Game,” said Claudia. “Does anyone remember this?”
“The what?” said Heather Chen, the nurse practitioner. She was roughly Claudia’s age, old enough to recall the cozy pastimes of an analog childhood: board games, jigsaw puzzles. “I’m drawing a blank here.”
“Don’t look at me,” said Florine, the executive director. “This is not a Black thing.”
“Mary will remember.” Claudia waved to Mary Fahey, who’d just returned from smoking a cigarette. “The Bride Game. Go.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Mary sat heavily, cold air and tobacco smoke radiating from her coat. “My sister had it. They never let me play. Mostly I just watched. Remember the cakes?”
“Cakes,” Florine repeated. “I’m losing the thread here.” She was the clinic’s public face—telegenically charming, a former Miss Tennessee who’d grown up on the pageant circuit. She was also a lethal debater, a frequent guest on the cable news channels. Claudia had seen her take apart a right-wing congressman with effortless grace, like an expert chef disarticulating a chicken.
Another arctic blast as the door opened, Luis coming to join them. Claudia slid over to make room.
“The point of the game,” she said, “the object of the game, was to plan your wedding. You needed a dress and a ring and a wedding cake and I’m forgetting something.”
“Flowers,” said Mary. “Also the groom.”
“Groom, yes. And you rolled the dice and moved around the board and when you landed on a Ring space you got to choose which ring and then the cake, et cetera.”
“An actual ring?” said Florine.
“Well, no. There were no actual rings. No actual cakes. You picked a card with a drawing of a ring or a cake. It was a simpler time.” Claudia sipped at her beer, which tasted flowery. This happened whenever she sat next to Florine, who took her name seriously. That day she wore silver earrings shaped like peonies and her trademark jasmine perfume.
“The winner was the one who put a whole wedding together first. But there was a hierarchy: the best flowers, the best cake. The wedding dress, I remember, was hotly contested. There was a particular one everyone wanted. You wanted to land on a Dress space right away, to get first pick.”