Right to Life

He could see it in the distance on the corner of 68th Street a block and a half away, an undistinguished grey highrise that was probably built back during the mid-sixties, the bank on the first floor and offices above. Across Broadway a Food Emporium and the huge Sony movie complex. And yes, there were the long blue sawhorses and the two cops standing at the door and people crying signs walking back and forth along the curb.

“Pull up behind them,” she said. “I don’t feel like getting out right in the middle of that.”

He glided to a stop. She opened the door.

He put his hand on her arm and stopped her and then he didn’t know what to say. He just sat there moving his hand slowly over the warm smooth flesh of her arm and then she smiled a little. He saw the worry and sleeplessness that ambushed her just behind the smile. The eyes couldn’t lie to him. They never had.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said. “I can probably find something on 67th or over on Amsterdam.”

“I’ll be fine.”

She got out and shut the door and he watched her walk away toward the dozen or so people ahead of her moving in circles curbside at the oilier end of the block and then he pulled out slowly past her and she glanced at him but didn’t smile this time, only hitched her purse up on her shoulder. He passed the stem-faced, holier-than- thou types milling across the sidewalk like flies on a carcass and then he turned the corner.

* * *

Go on, she thought. You have to do this. You’ve got no choice. He’s got a wife and he’s got a son. You knew that going into this and in your heart you never did believe he was going to leave them. Not until his son was grown. Despite what you wanted to believe and despite what he said he wished to do. Greg was faithful as hell in his own peculiar way. It was part of what she loved about him.

In a way it was a shame just how good they were together. In a way it was almost cruelty. If only it had been just an affair. If there hadn’t been love, caring, tenderness, sharing. All of it, the whole ball of wax.

You had it all, she thought. And couldn’t really have anything.

She realized she’d been thinking about them in the past tense.

Now why was that?

She glanced at him through the window as he drove on by. It was impossible to smile for him again though she knew he needed it. She knew how he was feeling. But a single smile was all she had in her today and she’d spent that currency in the car.

The sound and feel of her heels on the sidewalk seemed to jolt straight through her. The cold hard streets of New York City. She realized she was trembling. A young hispanic delivery boy on a bicycle shot past her. Going the wrong way, against traffic, and on the sidewalk no less. She shot him a disgusted angry glance that he was moving too fast to see.

Her hands were cold. Her face was flushed. Already she dreaded the picketers moving ahead of her a few yards away. Despite what she’d said to him.

Because this was no examination. This was the real thing.

A life was going to end here.

For a moment she was angry with both of them. Sara and Greg, playing at love.

No, she thought. Give the devil his due.

They weren’t playing.

And that was the saddest part of all. Because it wasn’t fair. Years and years alone after Daniel’s death and her shattered marriage and finally someone comes along who’s got everything Sam never had and more. Kindness. Consideration. Sobriety. And he loves her. Not just wants her or wants to fuck her but loves her and she loves the man back with a power she finds quite astonishing. And then having to learn all over again that love protected nothing. Love was as necessary to people in the long run as food and shelter but love was also a cruel joke, a trick, both at once, two sides of the same coin. And you never knew when the coin would be turning. Because if it didn’t wind up this way, wind up stranding you between love and necessity, even if it did work out between you, then one of you was going to die before the other and leave you all alone again. Love was also about the death of love.

Like this.

Like killing the child inside, their child, who should have been a wonderful child alive and whole and made of all they had together.

Sara even thought she knew when she’d conceived her — on a warm windy beach that night in St. John just three months past, both of them so crazy over each other especially in that place with his other life so far behind him that they were downright ridiculous together, unable to stop touching, stroking, laughing, all through drinks and dinner. And then later making love in the Carribean sea, the warmth of the waves, the huge gentle womb of stars and sky.

Which led here.

It was as though it were love itself they were killing.

In the eye of her flesh she saw a beautiful baby girl.

And knowing that the child was there and knowing already the empty pain of the loss of her, so unexpectedly like that other loss so many years ago, here and now on this busy sunny street, she wondered how long she could go on with him afterwards. If this were not the turning point for both of them.

If she weren’t killing the child inside in more ways than one.

She’d begun to cry again. A thin haze of tears as she approached the picket lines. She blinked them back instead of wiping them away. These people might notice. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

How can you do this? she thought. How can you be so small and misty and so monumentally selfish as to approach me now, when I’ve never been so vulnerable?

But of course they would.

They saw it as their right, their mission.

There were many kinds of evil in the world and as far as she was concerned this was definitely one of them.

She heard a car approach slowly behind her close to the curb, wheels over pebbled glass and gravel. In her peripheral vision she saw the fender and the light blue hood, the driver’s-side window and roof and noted that it was a station wagon, one of those fake woodies, maybe ten years old. A city transit bus pulled laboriously around to the left of it. She passed an elegant slim young woman pushing two infant babies in a double stroller. A teenager on a skateboard.

And then the car stopped moving beside her and the passenger door opened in front of her and she felt someone’s arm wrap tight around her from behind just beneath her breasts, pinning her arms to her sides while his hand sought and covered her mouth to stifle the protest, the scream, grasping at the jaw so she couldn’t bite and then she was shoved inside, his hand still over her mouth and she glanced back to the sidewalk and saw that one of the protesters, a man wearing a dark blue windbreaker, had noticed her, was looking straight at her, is seeing all of this but was saying nothing, not one word to the others nor to the police at the clinic door, astonished by this as she felt a needle pierce the bare flesh of her upper arm and saw that it was the driver, a woman, holding a plastic syringe between her fingers and grimly clutching the wheel with her other fisted hand while the man who’d grabbed her slammed the door.

As darkness descended over all her sudden fears and long familiar sorrow they slowly pulled away.

* * *

He walked by an old woman with a shopping cart full of groceries and then past the picketers, barely noticing them this time and past the pair of cops, one male and one female, who were standing at the entrance. He walked through the revolving doors and past the bank’s ATM machines to the elevators, got in and punched eleven. The door to the reception room swung open ahead of him and he stepped aside for a young blonde woman in jeans and a teeshirt who smiled at him. Or maybe she was just smiling at the world that day.

At least somebody was happy.

He walked in and the reception room was empty. He thought my god, had they taken her in already?

Was anything that had to do with medicine or New York City ever that fast?

The receptionist behind the sliding glass windows smiled at him too. A purely formal smile, meant to be reassuring. See? We’re harmless here.

“Sara Foster.” he said quietly.

She checked her clipboard.

“Yes. She’s got a ten forty-five with Doctor Weller.”