Wincing, Leif shook his head, but Nic was caught up in her memories.
The grocery store had been full of pregnant women. Some lumbered, while others sported cute little bumps. One woman, belly jutting alarmingly ahead of her, sauntered along on four-inch heels Nic could never have worn, pregnant or not. She bought the cheapest pregnancy test, so generic it didn't even have a name.
At home, she made sure the bathroom door was locked before she peed on the white stick. A moment later, she watched the first pink line form. According to the instructions, that meant the test was working. When the second line began to appear, at first Nic told herself that she was imagining it. It wasn't that dark. It must be a false positive. She couldn't be pregnant. Not really.
Nic looked at the instructions again. Any line, no matter how faint, meant it was positive.
She called the advice nurse. "Is it possible it's a false positive?" "Bless your heart," the nurse said.
Something inside Nic died.
Then the nurse added, "May I ask you something? Are you married?"
Instead of answering, Nic had hung up.
Now she told Leif, "I was going to have an abortion. I felt like garbage. Like a whore. I felt like everyone could tell, just by looking at me, what I had done."
Leif looked at her, bit his lip, looked away. Was he ashamed of her, embarrassed by her?
"Then my mama found me throwing up in the bathroom and figured out what was going on. You have to understand, my family is religious."
"And you're not?" Leif asked gently.
She thought of how she had begged God to make it not so, to take it away so that she could go back to her old life. "Not anymore, no. I don't want any part of a God that would let things like what happened, happen. If that's a problem for you"--her eyes flashed up to his--"then it's good you know it now."
"I'm listening," he said softly. "I'm not going anywhere."
"So my mama quoted some psalm to me, about how God knits babies together in their mothers' wombs. I tried to tell her it was just a blob of tissue. See, at that point, we both thought the same thing. That I had gotten drunk and made a mistake. We didn't know the rest. My mama and my daddy and my pastor--they all said people would help with the baby, that I could go back to school later, that God had given me this baby for a reason. And I listened to them. And then--and then the other shoe dropped when I was five months along and it was too late to do anything."
"What was the other shoe?'
"These two guys--Roy Kirk and Donny Miller--were arrested after a housekeeper found a videotape, still in the player, of them having sex with a passed-out woman. Roy had stacks of tapes like that, but only two of them had Miller too. When I saw their photos in the paper, I came forward. I wanted to see my tape." She took a deep, shaky breath. "But there wasn't one."
He put his hand over his eyes and asked, "What did they use, do you think?"
"At the trial, they said GHB."
Leif sucked air through his teeth and dropped his hand to the table. Colorless and odorless, GHB, or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, had a slightly salty taste that was easily disguised. A few drops could render a person close to unconscious for four hours or more, leaving them with little or no memory of events. And GHB exited the body within twelve hours, so victims were often tested too late. Five months after the fact, any proof would have been long gone.
Leif's low voice was edged with bitterness. "Yeah, why bother to use a gun or a knife when you can slip something into the drink of the girl of your choice? Not only will she not fight back; she won't even remember being attacked."
"You say that, but inside, even when everyone else started calling it a rape, I knew it was my fault. I had flirted and laughed with them. I had gone to the bar with them when they suggested it."
He groaned. "Nic, no."
"And now I was going to have a baby whose father was a monster. In an odd way, I felt sorry for it. For the baby. No one cared about it. I was its mother, and I didn't want it. I told Mama I was going to give it up for adoption. I couldn't raise it."
She remembered Berenice's reaction.
"Nicole, no," Mama had protested, dropping the wooden spoon she had been stirring a pot of soup with. "Have you prayed about it?"
Nic had straightened up. Anger shot through her, from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers. She felt more alive than she had since the night it had happened.
"Prayed about it? What kind of God would let two animals rape me in the first place? They drugged me and they used me like a piece of Kleenex. I don't care what God thinks. He didn't protect me. It's up to me to make decisions now."
"Oh, Nicole, don't say that!" Mama put her hand to her chest. Her eyes were bright with tears."Look, when our people were slaves, many, many children were conceived in rape or from forced breeding. But those mothers still loved those children."