Warily, Allen nodded.
“But we can’t make policies based on religion when religion means different things to different people. Which leaves science. The science of reproduction is what it is. Conception is conception. You can decide the ethical value that has for you, based on your own relationship with God … but the policies around basic human rights with regard to reproduction shouldn’t be up for interpretation.”
Louie watched Allen’s eyes glaze with confusion. “Do you have a daughter, Allen?”
“I do.”
“How old?”
“Twelve.”
“What would you do if she got pregnant now?”
Allen’s face flushed. “Your side always tries to do that—”
“I’m not trying to do anything. I’m asking you to apply your dogma personally.”
“I would counsel her. I would take her to our pastor. And I would be confident,” Allen said, “that she would make the right choice.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” Louie said.
Allen blinked. “You don’t?”
“No. Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation. But the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place. When you say you can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a good thing. When you say I can’t don’t something because your religion forbids it, that’s a problem.” Louie glanced at his watch. “Duty calls.”
“You know, it’s always funny to me how pro-choice folks were all actually born,” Allen said.
Louie grinned, gathering their trash. “Thank you for the company. And the dialogue.”
Allen picked up his sign. “You make it very hard to hate you, Dr. Ward.”
“That’s the point, brother,” Louie said. “That’s the point.”
—
BETH HAD TRIED TO DO it the right way. She had gone to the Center, which might as well have been Mars given the distance and the cost of the bus ticket. She had filled out the parental consent waiver and had it filed back in her own county. It wasn’t her fault that the judge whiffed out on her to go on a vacation with his wife. Judges shouldn’t be allowed to take them, not when other people’s lives were hanging on their verdicts.
In the end, she had run out of time. The pills had come from overseas, and the instructions were in Chinese, but she still had the paperwork from the counseling session she had attended at the Center, including the instructions for those getting a medication abortion. She remembered the lady at the clinic who’d talked to the group, saying that there was a cutoff for the people who took the abortion pill. She couldn’t remember what that magic number of weeks was, but Beth was sure she was beyond it now.
She was in the bathroom, doubled over with cramps. At first she was sure she had done something wrong, because there hadn’t been any blood at all. Now, it wouldn’t stop. And it wasn’t just blood, it was clots, great dark, thick masses that terrified her. That was why she had come to sit on the toilet. She could reach behind her and flush. She was terrified of looking down between her legs and seeing tiny arms and legs; a sad, minuscule face.
She felt her insides twist again, as if someone had attached a thousand strings to the inside of her belly and groin and yanked them. Beth drew her knees up even higher to her chin, the only thing that brought relief, but to do that she couldn’t sit. She got off the toilet and rolled to her side, sweating, groaning. Her breath shortened, stuttered links on a chain.
The thing that slipped between her legs was the size of a clenched fist. Beth cried out, seeing it on the linoleum, pink and unfinished, its translucent skin showing dark patches of future eyes and organs. Between its legs was a question mark of umbilical cord.
Shaking, she grabbed a hand towel and wrapped the thing up (it wasn’t a baby, it wasn’t a baby, it wasn’t a baby) and stuffed it into the bottom of the trash, arranging tissues and makeup wipes and wrappers on top of it, as if out of sight would be out of mind.
She was starting to see stars, and she thought maybe she was dying, but that didn’t make sense because there was no way she was going to Heaven anymore. Maybe she could just close her eyes for a minute, and when she woke up, this would never have happened.
She heard a pounding, and for one terrified moment she thought it was coming from the trash can. But then it got louder, and she realized someone was calling her name.
Beth wanted to answer, she did. But she was so, so tired.
When the door broke open, the lock shattered by her father, she used all the energy she had left to speak. “Don’t get mad, Daddy,” she whispered, and then everything went black.
—
GEORGE LEFT THE TRUCK RUNNING, parked illegally in a fire zone. He dashed to the passenger side and lifted his unconscious daughter into his arms, carrying her through the automatic doors of the emergency room. She was bleeding through the blanket he had wrapped around her. “Please help my daughter,” he cried, and he was surrounded immediately.
They took her away, setting her on a gurney and rushing her into the back as he followed. A nurse put her hand on his arm. “Mr.… ?”
“Goddard,” he said. “That’s my girl.”
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” He gulped. “I found her like this in the bathroom. She’s bleeding from … from down there …”
“Vaginally?”
He nodded. He tried to see what the doctors were doing, but there were so many of them, and they moved around her, blocking his view.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” the nurse asked.
When she was little, and couldn’t pronounce her name, she called herself Lil Bit. That stuck for the longest time. As she grew up, he had dropped the second half of that term of endearment. But he was the only one to call her Lil; everyone else used a different nickname.
“Elizabeth Goddard,” George said. “She goes by Beth.”
—
LAST NIGHT, BEX HAD DREAMED of a piece of art that was still inside her mind. It was a pixilated fetus curled on its side. In the white space, though, carved out by the absence of arms and legs and umbilicus, you would see the optical illusion of a profile. And if you looked closely, you’d know it was hers.
She was not surprised that today, of all days, she would find inspiration. Just yesterday she had finished her last commission. It was time to start fresh.
She had already called Hugh to wish him a happy birthday and she had finished a cup of tea. Her body was humming with anticipation, like a child waiting for the sun to rise on Christmas. She was going to savor every second of this morning, pluck it like a violin string, let it sing through her.
In the closet of her studio where she kept her paints and her turpentine and her brushes there was a tiny panel that, with the press of a finger, would bounce free to reveal a hiding spot. It had come with the house. She had no idea what it had been used for by the previous owners—a safe, maybe, or hidden love letters. Bex kept a shoe box inside, one that she pulled out now and set on her workbench.
Inside was an impossibly small blue cotton hat, and a hospital bracelet: BABY BOY MCELROY. And then, best of all, the photograph—fading now, into rusts and yellows and greens that she associated with the seventies. It was 1978, and there was Bex in the hospital bed, fourteen years old and holding a newborn Hugh.
Bex could have gotten an abortion—it was legal—but her mother, a devout Catholic, talked her out of it. She came up instead with the solution that became a secret. From the moment Bex left the hospital, she was no longer Hugh’s mother, but his sister. Her father got a job in a different state and they moved there, plastering over the subterfuge until sometimes Bex even forgot the reality. There had been a point when her mother died that Bex had considered telling Hugh, but she was afraid he might be so angry that he’d hate her. This she couldn’t risk.