Right to Life

* * *

Should have locked the damn door, she thought. Fucking stupid not to. It was sloppy.

Stephen would be pissed. But it was Stephen’s fault too.

There was nothing to do but try to repair the damages.

They sat at the dining room table over some hot herbal tea. Grandma’s Tummy Mint. Celestial Seasonings. She supposed it was meant to be nice and reassuring. It wasn’t. Outside the window the day was gray and still and dark. In a couple of weeks kids would be out trick-or-treating. She wondered if any of them would bother to come out this way.

It was Saturday. Around four. Stephen was still working in the garage. She could hear the whine of his circular saw.

She sat and listened and drank her tea and petted the cat curled up in what passed for her lap nowadays.

“Look,” Kath was saying. “In the old days they only used cesarean when the mother was dying. Now the whole thing is to save the mother and the baby. What you do is, you make an incision through the skin and the wall of the abdomen. Most of the time there isn’t even much of a scar. Then you open up the wall of the uterus. The incision can be transverse vertical or low vertical, transverse usually because there’s less bleeding and it heals better. Then you deliver the baby and we suture you up again and that’s that. I mean this is all just in case. Only if there’s a problem. But it’s really very simple. You don’t have to worry, I know what I’m doing. I’ve assisted on hundreds of these.”

And on how many murders? she thought.

And she realized now that she was listening to a very good and convincing liar. There was only that single slip in the attic. Otherwise Kath was practically flawless. Which called into question again all these tales all these months about the Organization.

She decided she was going to proceed as though there were none.

Another weight lifted. It was astonishing. Just like that.

The Organization was suddenly… gone. Frozen out of her. Trapped in the glacier of her resolve.

She was going to live.

Where in the world did I find this calm? she thought.

She was suddenly calm as the cat was.

She decided it was in the knowing that she’d found it. In the certainty. What had trapped her up to now was lack of certainty. Not knowing on a daily — even momentary — basis what they would or wouldn’t do to her. These people if you could even dignify them with the word people had played on that uncertainty like a harp. Headbox or no headbox? Beating or no beating? Upstairs in the light or downstairs in the dark? They’d kept her off balance for months now.

Was this balance? Yes it was.

Balance was knowing and knowing was calm.

Take them one by one, she thought. And no time like the present.

Do I have it in me? Yes I do.

As certainly as I have this little girl inside me.

Greg’s little girl and mine.

It was the first she’d thought of him for ages. That was balance too.

“Kath? Do you think I could have a little more tea?”

She shrugged. “Sure. You know where it is.”

She lifted the cat gently off her lap and put her down on the floor thinking yes I do, I know where everything is, you bitch and walked past Kath to the kitchen and ran water from the sink into the mug and put the mug into the microwave and turned it on and then opened the bottom cabinet door and took out the twelve-inch stainless steel frying pan they hardly ever used, the pan looking new as they day they’d bought it, new as the stainless steel cart upstairs and gripped it in both her hands and walked over to Kath who was hunched over her mug, who had the mug to her lips sipping Tummy Mint tea and brought the pan down as hard as she could on the crown of her head, the pan ringing like a bell, the sound true and pure and brave, Kath’s face driven down into the ceramic mug and the mug to the table, the mug shattering between table, teeth, flesh and bone and flooding the surface with a liquid the color of autumn leaves.

Not a sound out of Kath as she brought the pan up and hit her again, the pan musical once more against the side of her head which suddenly sprouted glistening drops of red forming a rough half-circle across her forehead at the hairline.

She examined the base of the pan. The base was flecked with blood and a stray brown hair or two. Despite the rapid heartbeat she felt steady and powerful.

“You dead yet? Should I hit you again?”

She had the urge to giggle.

No. She’d done it right so far and Kath hadn’t made a sound. Only the pan had made a sound and that one was delightful — the tolling of her freedom-bell. She could still hear Stephen’s saw whining in the garage but he might stop at any time. Don’t push it, she thought. You still have him to deal with.

Or do you?

Car keys, she thought. Fucking car keys. In her purse.

Where the fuck was her purse?

The purse was on the couch in the living room.

The cat peered out at her from the hall as she crossed the living room and put the pan down on the couch and rifled through the purse. She felt the baby kick inside. The baby was urging her on.

Yes! Got ’em!

The keys jingled in her hand. Smaller bells of freedom.

The saw outside stopped.

She picked up the pan. The pain had stained the couch. She hadn’t meant to do that but hadn’t thought of it either. She walked quickly through the living room past Kath at the dining room table to the kitchen and looked out the window to the garage. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t cutting across the lawn and walking toward the house. She couldn’t see him anywhere.

What she could see though was that the keys were useless. Kath’s station wagon was the one sitting there in front of the garage which meant that Stephen’s pickup would be directly in back of it. That meant she needed Stephen’s keys, not Kath’s. Stephen would have them in his pocket. And now she realized that she’d been wrong before, she didn’t know where everything in the house was because she didn’t know where they kept the goddamn spares.

They weren’t in the kitchen. She’d spent a lot of time in there and would’ve noticed them. The bedroom? The end-table drawers in the living room?

The basement?

She wasn’t going into the basement. Not ever again.

Goddammit! There wasn’t time! There just wasn’t time to go through every damn drawer in the house. The sawing had stopped. God only knew what he was doing. He was probably finishing up out there. He could walk in on her at any second.

The pan felt puny in her hand.

She needed more.

She needed to get out of there but first she needed more because she wasn’t going to go strolling out like the first time only to get caught again.

The shotgun, the pistol. Where would they be?

The bedroom. She wasn’t allowed in the bedroom and though the door was never locked she never thought to disobey and go there.

She’d damn well disobey now. She had no idea how to shoot a pistol unless you counted what you saw in the movies and what he’d shown her in the basement and even less idea how to load and fire a shotgun but she was