Right to Life

Jack Ketchum RIGHT TO LIFE

“…endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights… unong these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”

— Thomas Jefferson

“God finds you naked and he leaves you dying. What happens in between is up to you.”

— Robin Hitchcock and the Egyptians

THE FIRST DAY

ONE

New York City

June 8, 1998

10:20 a.m.

They drove to the clinic in silence.

The night before they’d said it all. Now there was nothing left to say.

It just remained to do it. Get it over with.

Morning rush hour traffic had ended over an hour ago and traffic was fairly light. The streets of the Upper West Side seemed strangely still and dreamlike, the blue-green Toyota van in front of them drifting from stoplight to stoplight like a guide taking them from nowhere to some other nowhere while they followed to no determinate end.

Running on empty, Greg thought. Both of us.

The silence turned him back in time to their bed last night in her apartment, making love through a haze of tears which came and went with the gentle anguished regularity of waves at low tide, their very heartbeats muted, the two of them drawn more closely together than they had ever imagined or wished possible in the grim sad knowledge that pleasure now was also pain and would remain so for a very long time. Her tears cooling on his cheek and mingling with his own, the musky smell of tears and then the feel of them falling to his chest as she sailed astride him like a ship on a windless sea and when it was finished, the long dark night embracing in warm attempted sleep.

Then stillness too through the loud morning rituals of water, razor and toothbrush, both he and Sara alone now in these things as they would ever be. Then coffee drunk in silence at the table, Greg reaching out to take her hand a moment across the polished pine to feel the warmth of her again, to bind them for a moment before walking out through the door into the cool bright morning air. To the morning errands of New Yorkers along 91st and West End Avenue, the cars and cabs and delivery trucks. And then down to the car parked deep in the cooler echoing basement garage next door, Greg driving them across to Broadway and then downtown. Bringing them forward along the wheel of time to this awful empty place. This quiet, this exhausted drift of feeling.

“Are you all right?” he said finally.

She nodded.

The clinic wasn’t far. 68th and Broadway, only five blocks away. One of only three of them left open on the entire West Side from the Village to the Bronx.

“It’s a girl,” she said.

And it was that, he thought and not his question that truly broke the silence.

“How can you tell?”

“I just know. I remember the way Daniel felt, even at this stage. This feels… different.”

He was aware of something thick and heavy inside him again. He’d heard the story many times in the six years he’d known her. Her perceptions of the thing varying slightly over time and distance and depth of understanding. Daniel, her son, dead in a frozen lake in upstate New York at the age of six. Even his body lost to her beneath the ice and never found.

If there was ever a woman he would have wished to have a child with, to have raised his child, especially a girl-child, it was this one.

His hands were sweating on the wheel.

Because of course it was impossible.

“Why don’t you drop me off in front,” she said. “Find a place to park. I’ll go in and register. Less time waiting.”

“Are you sure?”

“The front will be fine.”

“What about those people with their goddamn picket lines. They’ll probably be out again.”

“They don’t bother me. Except to piss me off. They’ll let me by, don’t worry.”

He supposed that — no, she was not about to be intimidated. Last week going in for her examination there had been seven of them on the sidewalk by the entrance to the Jamaica Savings Bank, the building which housed the clinic and held its tenuous lease, seven men and women standing behind blue police barricades, carrying cardboard signs saying HE’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and waving pamphlets and holding out tiny plastic twelve-week foetuses cupped in the palms of their hands.

One of them, a surprisingly handsome fortyish man, shoved his own little specimen at Sara’s face and Sara turned on Greg’s arm and said you stupid shit and walked on by past the three policemen lounging at the door who were guarding these creeps on his and her tax dollars thank you very much, and into the building.

Then this other one, this ordinary-looking woman about the same age as the man, who followed them to the elevator and up and sat there with a magazine across from them in the waiting room staring until Sara’s name was called and then got up and left. A more subtle form of harassment. Were they even allowed to do that? They’d never said a word to her though he’d wanted to. And she’d evidently known what he was thinking. To hell with her, she’d whispered, she’s not worth the effort.

She could deal with them.

Still he’d feel better if he was with her.

“What’s another minute or two?” he said. “Let me just park this thing and we’ll go in together.”

She shook her head. “Please, Greg. I want to get this over with as soon as possible. You know?”

“Okay. Sure. I understand.”

But he didn’t. Not really. How could he? For all the talk last night it was impossible to gauge how she felt at just this moment. Not now in the light of day, far beyond the familiar comfort of home and bed and the comfort of lying in his arms and even the comfort of tears. He wanted to know suddenly, needed to know, that she didn’t hate him, didn’t blame him fundamentally — though twice last night she’d said she didn’t and he’d believed her. But now it was different. He wanted to know she forgave him. For everything. For his marriage. For his son. Even for his sex. For being born a man so that he didn’t have to carry — couldn’t possibly carry — the full weight of this. He’d have done it in a minute if it were possible.

Her diaphragm had failed them. It happened sometimes. They were adults and they knew that. It was her diaphragm. It didn’t matter. He’d never felt so guilty in his life.

Do no harm, his mother had told him when he was a boy. The physician’s rule. Her personal golden rule. And here he was, doing harm to the woman he loved.

Still more harm.