“That’s what I’m trying to decide,” I said, ready to talk and share my misgivings. Not so long ago, I’d have paid a pretty penny to be pregnant, and part of me secretly still would. If a recovering junkie unearths a forgotten bindle of heroin in an old jeans pocket, does she shoot up? I could already smell my new baby’s scalp, yeast and uterine water. Part of me was already high, and this was counseling, or so I mistakenly guessed, waiting for the nurse to guide me in some definitive direction.
“I already have five kids at home,” I said.
“I’ve only got two, and they drive me mad,” she said. “You’re a saint.” In the same day, only moments apart, I’d been condemned then exalted; I was me and not me.
“Well, there’s no rush, but our schedule fills quickly,” she said. “You might as well schedule something and then call and cancel if you’d like.” And that was the extent of the counseling, hardly sage or illuminating.
Then, the doctor: young, beautiful, but equally wearied. Abortionist—yet another example of a job that induces empathy fatigue, I thought. She handed me a pamphlet, again required by law, detailing the so-called risks of abortion, but I already knew vacuum aspiration was one of the safest procedures in medicine—far safer than natural childbirth. “You can either take this with you or deposit it inside the waste bin right there,” she said, pointing to a receptacle filled to the brim. When I dropped mine in there, adding to the abundance of propaganda, she said, “Good choice.”
“Even if the decision feels painful, that doesn’t make it wrong,” she continued. Her job was to counteract the emotional warfare on the front sidewalk. Everybody outside was fired up; everybody inside was cool, calm, and fully collected, even if nobody sang me a lullaby. Perhaps I was disappointed, furtively waiting for a health care professional to talk me out of this, to send me home, where I’d announce my pregnancy.
On my way to the front entrance, I stopped at the sliding glass window, deciding to make an appointment I could later cancel, and when I finally reemerged on the street, a new escort was waiting. A sleeveless T-shirt beneath his orange vest revealed tattooed biceps, bulging and oily. He walked alongside me in bodybuilder stance, eclipsing the protesters with every step, a barricade between me and a public flogging. Through the scruff around his mouth, he muttered, “They’re just ignorant. Don’t let it bother you.”
And in that moment, for the first time since learning of this, my sixth potentially viable pregnancy, I began weeping uncontrollably. Although he never touched me, I could swear he gave me a swift but gentle push into the alley as if sending me like a small rowboat from shore into the big, wide lake. When I called Ryan, I cried so incoherently that we had to hang up.
On the drive home, I passed a pickup truck hauling a motor home. The jokester in charge had propped an inflatable woman behind the camper’s steering wheel. Her plastic cone-shaped head bobbled up and down, her red lips puckered to blow kisses, if only her synthetic hands moved. My bad habit was to take every oddity as a sign—from the universe, from myself to myself. This hollowed-out female body: was she me? I hated to think of that sinkhole inside me, my defunct uterus growing cobwebs instead of babies, if, in fact, I ended this pregnancy. I’d become a caricature of what feminists I knew rallied against, a woman defined by reproductive function, a pathetic, washed-up beauty queen refusing to abdicate her throne. I’d been in favor of women’s reproductive rights—I’ll say it, abortion—since girlhood, but paradoxically, I was also singing the blues. Mine was not a song of guilt, regret, or relief. Predisposed all those years to depression, I felt my sadness entirely usurping everything else. I could not win. From baby maker to baby killer, and nothing in between, I felt the solid footing of the middle ground slip away.
For three days, between my initial consultation and the appointment, I ran endless miles, my little blastocyst becoming a gastrula, just barely an embryo. They said time was on my side, but I kept thinking, It’s now or never. I needed to be soothed, but I was a mother to my own five children. Nobody remained to comfort me. I wanted more than anything to rock, to read, and to be lulled to sleep. Whenever I read Goodnight Moon, a personal favorite, I wondered about the quiet old lady whispering “hush.” Did Margaret Wise Brown mean for her to represent comfort or rigidity, and why isn’t she referred to as the bunny’s mother or grandmother? After all, Rob McNally was the only person I knew who referred to his mother in this fashion, as in, “My old lady was such an addict she was all collapsed veins and track lines and shit.”
Less than a year later, released from prison on the meth charges, McNally would materialize in Ryan’s office as only a magician can. Poof, and there he loomed like a genie from a lamp Ryan hadn’t even rubbed. He’d fattened up again, a little extra plumpness smoothing out the hard lines. Ryan snapped a photo and sent it to me: “Look who just paid me a visit.” My heart ballooned up with emotion and almost popped. This was how guys like McNally discharged their old debts.
Say cheese (from bottom to top): faded jeans, a nickel-plated wallet chain, a black T-shirt with a sexed-up zombie lady walking a pit bull, and a real smile, sweet as punch. Our favorite criminal was living in a Podunk town west of Oshkosh now.
“And guess what, bro?” he said. “I’m getting hitched.” The gal at his side was recently widowed when her husband died of a heroin overdose. Naturally, Ryan had represented the guy
