“Not a problem,” said Patricia easily. She opened a drawer and selected papers from three different piles. “We have information here on abortion, adoption, and carrying to term and raising the baby yourself. I’ll give you all of these when you leave.”
She laid the papers on the counter and looked again at Mary. Mary cleared her throat and said, “For, um.” She couldn’t get the word out, she kept tripping on it. “For an abortion.” Patricia waited. “How, um. How long…” Get it together, Mary, she told herself sternly. She cleared her throat again and thought of Andi and Daphne and how kindly they spoke to her, and how they used to tease her about Josh being her beau, making it all sound so innocent and fun, like something out of a movie about American high schools. She felt like she’d disappointed them, of all people, by getting into this situation. She said, “When would I need to? Decide by.”
“We do not perform abortions here,” said Patricia kindly, and Mary thought what a funny word perform was in this context. Like this whole thing was a play or a YouTube video. Entertainment. “We can give you information on the procedure, but if you want to go that route you’d need to go to a clinic in Bangor. We can give you contact information for that clinic. The laws in the state of Maine dictate that abortions can be performed up until twenty-two weeks. But there is a limit to how far individual doctors and clinics are willing to go. In Bangor the latest is thirteen weeks and six days. After fourteen weeks you’d need to go to a Planned Parenthood clinic or down to Massachusetts.”
“Thirteen weeks and six days,” repeated Mary softly. It was such a specific number of days.
“That gives you some time from now,” said Patricia. “You would need to make an appointment earlier, of course. And if you’re certain about it, the earlier the better, it makes things easier all around.” She squinted at Mary, and Mary wondered how many times a day or a week she said things like that. “If you’re not certain, of course you want to make sure you are. We encourage patients who aren’t certain to at least call the clinic in Bangor and to make an appointment to get more specific information.”
Except for that time she’d waited for him at the wharf, Mary had lately been avoiding Josh. She had it in her mind that after this appointment things would somehow change, that she’d be able to tell him, or that the need to tell him would magically have disappeared. When he showed up at the café, Mary ducked into the bathroom and asked Daphne to tell him she wasn’t working that day. If he came to her house she planned to turn off all of the lights and lock the door and hide under the covers. But Josh hardly ever came to her house.
“Lover’s spat?” Daphne inquired. “Oh, too bad. I’m sure you’ll get over it. These things happen.”
“Daph and I used to fight like cats and dogs,” said Andi cheerfully. “Now we’re older, who has the energy?”
Mary laughed the way she thought they wanted her to laugh and pushed the broom vigorously into the corner of the café, where muffin crumbs congregated.
Now Mary took a deep, shuddering breath that felt like it traveled all the way down to her toes. Did the baby inside her feel that breath? Did he or she sense where Mary was at that very moment, what she was talking about?
“What about my mom? Does she need to sign a form or something?”
“Doesn’t have to be your mom,” said Patricia. “A trusted adult needs to be involved in the decision for someone under eighteen. That can be a grandparent or someone else. And if you have no trusted adult in your life there are licensed staff at the clinics who can fill that role.”
Mary thought again of Andi and Daphne; she thought of Ms. Berry. She even thought of the phone number Eliza Sargent had tapped into her cell phone at the wharf. She couldn’t, in a million years, imagine asking any of these warm and wonderful women to help her undo her pregnancy. Undo. It sounded so easy and technical, put that way. Delete.
Mary tried to read from Patricia’s tone of voice what she thought Mary should do. Surely she had some opinion! But her voice was easy and neutral, just like Sarah’s had been. She was giving nothing away.
“Now. If you’re considering carrying the pregnancy to full term, Mary, we have information on here on proper prenatal care, including vitamins, healthy food, and so on. We don’t offer prenatal care at this clinic, but we can give you a list of doctors who do. Getting your baby off to a healthy start now is essential. If you’re smoking, if you’re drinking, if you’re using drugs, any of these actions can be extremely harmful to the fetus.”
“Okay,” said Mary obediently. “I’m not.”
At the front desk, Mary was relieved to learn that the clinic charged for visits on a sliding scale; for those without insurance and no ability to pay there was no charge, just a voluntary donation. Mary dug in her wallet for a five-dollar bill, which seemed inadequate—less than a movie!—but the woman took it with a smile. The people at this clinic seemed to be the least judgy people on the planet. Mary was almost sorry to leave.
Now she had the pamphlets (literature, the bosomy lady at the desk called it—another funny word, in Mary’s opinion); she had a packet of prenatal vitamins; she had a list of care practices in Ellsworth and Bangor; and she had a gnawing sensation in the center of her body that could have been hunger or panic but more likely was the certainty of her future settling in like an anchor.
The only, only thing that sounded good to Mary after that was a root beer float, so she pulled into Jordan’s on Route One on the way home. When she was younger and her father still took his weekend fathering duties seriously, he used to bring her here to sit at one of the wooden picnic tables with a grilled cheese and a vanilla soft-serve. Thinking of grilled cheese now made her stomach turn over.
She realized her mistake as soon as she turned the ignition off and saw Alyssa Michaud climbing out of her father’s steel-gray Jeep Cherokee. A little-known fact about Alyssa was that she had failed her driver’s test three times—twice for inadequate parallel parking and once for driving on the wrong side of the road at the very beginning of the test. (“I thought it still counted as the parking lot.”)
Mary knew this because she and Alyssa had once been best friends; in fact, they’d been best friends all the way through junior year, when Tyler Wasson had dumped Mary in favor of Alyssa. He later dumped Alyssa too. After that, Alyssa got serious about college and Mary got serious about Josh.