Jane

Jane’s children had accustomed her to the arbitrariness of time. The hourless blur of cluster-feeding a newborn, the dilating minutes and hours of a rainy afternoon confined indoors with toddlers, when the stutter-stop ticking of the clock became the clenching of a diseased and faltering heart. She remembered the shattering seasick disorientation of looking at the clock and knowing that whatever time it really was, it could not possibly be the time shown on the clock, that surely someone in charge would be here soon to work this all out, and quite frankly it was unacceptable that it hadn’t been worked out already, before all this time had passed.

On this third day of the Spring of Life, three days after Easter, Mr. Glover pulled up to the redbrick WellWomen clinic on Main Street—Jane in the passenger seat and the Huebler twins in the back, Betty and Phil in Phil’s car just behind them, the vans of out-of-towners, the Operation Rescue types, descending all around as planned—the clock in Mr. Glover’s Datsun said 5:58 a.m., and Jane’s wristwatch said 5:58 a.m., but it was not 5:58 a.m., it could not be, because they were supposed to be first, and they were last.

“These aren’t our people,” Mr. Glover said, peering out the window.

The other side was already there, waiting for them. The other side had sneaked into their homes, turned back their clocks, unplugged their phones, they had papered over their windows and blocked out the rising sun, they had stolen time itself and used that time to conspire with local authorities to install yellow tape and wooden barricades all around WellWomen.

“Crime-scene tape around an abortion clinic—how appropriate,” Mr. Glover said. “Well, here we are. You people get out here and I’ll find someplace to park.”

The other side milling around behind the barricades nodded at one another as Jane and her friends approached. The cops in their matching ponchos and squirrel-brown mustaches milled in their own small groups.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” A thirtysomething woman with a squinty, ironical smile, her skin like tallow, waved at them from behind the barricades. She opened her arms in welcome, rather grandly, as if WellWomen were her estate and the cops her uniformed waitstaff. She wore galoshes and baggy jeans and a big puffy drawstring coat like the one Jane wore through her pregnancies, like she was ready for a long hike through inclement weather. No one could be this persuasively upbeat at six in the morning.

“My name is Bridie. I’m with the Choice Action Network.” Her hands, in Gore-Tex gloves, gripped and patted the barricade like it was her trusty steed. “I would be doing you folks a disservice if I didn’t tell you that you’re going to want to keep across the other side of Main Street today.”

“Tell it to the First Amendment,” Charity Huebler said.

Another woman, slightly older, scarecrow-thin, came scowling up behind Bridie’s shoulder. She wore a blue vest that read escort. “We know you folks made it onto Good Morning America just for praying and singing your little songs—” she started.

“All three of the morning shows, actually,” Summer interrupted. “National news.”

“But you won’t be happy with that, will you?” the scarecrow-woman asked. “You need more attention?”

“What my friend Jill here means to say by that,” Bridie continued, “is that we know that you folks are escalating today. Attempting a full-on clinic blockade.”

Jane looked around at the other Respect Life members, who looked as surprised as she felt. “Hello, my name is Jane,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet you. I’m being honest with you when I say that we haven’t heard anything about any kind of blockade. We’re here peacefully. Just as we were on Monday and Tuesday.”

“We’re not all that creative,” Phil said with a chuckle, and the Hueblers glared at him.

“Is there any coffee?” a pale skinny girl in all black called out behind the barricades.

“Coffee is a diuretic,” Bridie said mildly over her shoulder. “You don’t want to find yourself in a scuffle with an anti and have to take a piss.” Bridie folded her hands and rested them on the battered wooden beam. “Pleased to meet you, Jane. Thank you for your honesty. I don’t want any of you folks to take this personally. But you will need, eventually, to move to the other side of Main Street, if you don’t want the police to be involved.”

Fragments from twenty minutes earlier, and from days gone past, began to assemble themselves. At the meetup at Saint Benedict’s that morning, Jane looked across the front lawn laid with thirty gravestones, to mark the thirty million dead babies. Past the graves, she could see a maroon Oldsmobile parked at the outer edge of the lot—a car she hadn’t seen there before. Yesterday, driving past the Rosens’ house, she saw cars filling the driveway and the street in front, and people—all women, she thought—assembled on the stoop. Jane assumed it was a “house call,” the kind of aggressive, in-your-face action that Respect Life avoided but that might appeal to plenty of Oh-Rs who’d shown up over the weekend; now she wasn’t so sure. Nor was she sure she had really seen a maroon Oldsmobile in Mr. Glover’s rearview. Maybe her memory had maneuvered the car into view after the fact, in order to explain the irrational scene laid in front of them now at WellWomen, this mocking party at which they were the guests of honor.

 

The first patients started arriving around eight thirty. The Oh-Rs called the other side the “pro-aborts,” pronouncing it probort. Probort sounded like the name of a humanoid blob from the arcade games the boys used to play at Darien Lake: a colleague of Q*Bert, Dig Dug, Evil Otto. The proborts worked in formation, looping themselves around a patient’s car as it arrived, as many as five or six of them at a time, and then encircling the patient herself, guiding her and whoever was with her—a mother, a friend, once in a while a father of the doomed child, or so one presumed—through the crowds. Summer and Charity yelled, “Deathscorts!” at the escorts in their blue vests. Jane was sure that they’d picked that up from the Oh-Rs. Father Steve, when he finally arrived, wouldn’t approve of it, surely.

Looking back and forth on Main Street, Jane saw Choice Action Network sentinels in position for patients who arrived on foot. They wore neon-yellow vests that said peacekeeper. They had headsets and talked into their hands and crackled when they walked, like cops. They could radio ahead and form protective circles blocks ahead of WellWomen. They closed into a phalanx as they came closer to the redbrick building.

A few Oh-Rs were unfurling a hand-lettered banner that said dr. rosen kills children. Jane came closer to them. She held her own abortion kills children sign across her chest to show she was one of them. The Oh-Rs wanted to hang their banner between two stakes plunged into the front lawn of WellWomen, like laundry on a line. They argued with some cops about it for a while, yelled about freedom of assembly and their First Amendment rights, but not one of them was getting through the barriers and yellow tape.

“Excuse me,” Jane was saying. “May I ask you about your sign?”

They weren’t listening. Now they had a notion that they could climb onto the roof of the Pancake Palace down the street and drape the sign over the restaurant’s awning. Dr. Rosen ate his lunch at the Pancake Palace most days. The cloth banner, strung on dowels, drooped and accordioned between them as they debated, soaking up dew from the grass.

Jane came a few steps closer, tried again. “How do you know about Dr. Rosen?” she asked.

She heard shouting, not just an argument but something violent. A half block west, some Oh-Rs were scuffling with proborts. Jane turned toward the commotion, and in front of her stood an out-of-towner, maybe an Oh-R, a large, tuberous man in a dark fleece and a fisherman’s hat, holding a sign twice as wide as he was. It was pasted with side-by-side photographs of Dr. Rosen and a bloody fetus. Under Dr. Rosen’s photo, it listed his name, home address, and telephone number in block letters, easy to read from a distance. The words printed over the top of both pictures were which one of these is human garbage?

Jane rehearsed a quick speech in her head, like the first time she stood outside the Respect Life classroom. She opened her mouth and balked, lifted her foot and put it down again. She would tell him that she is Dr. Rosen’s neighbor. That her daughter is friends with Dr. Rosen’s son. That we hate the sin and love the sinner. That this is a community, and yes, we have our differences, and we all want what’s best for women and babies, but even if Dr. Rosen has lost his way, there’s a better path to—

“Just so’s you know, Rosen has a practice of his own, three blocks east of here,” Mr. Glover was saying to the man in the dark fleece.

“Three blocks from this place?” the man replied, incredulous. “Y’all got more abortion mills than gas stations around here. You walk out your house any direction and somebody’s killin’ a baby. Buffalo has gotta get its house in order.”

Jane opened her mouth and closed it again. Mr. Glover’s mustache twitched. “We love our city,” he said. “We hope you do, too. Anyway, a house is what you’re looking for—big brick entryway tacked on the front—can’t miss it. He should be able to see your sign. It would do him good to see it.”

 

Jane looked at her watch. It was time to meet Pat in the 7-Eleven parking lot, just past the Pancake Palace, where he would hand off Mirela so she could attend the protest with Jane for a couple of hours.

“It’s not too late!” the Oh-Rs were yelling at a cordon of escorts concealing a patient as they approached the barricades around the WellWomen building. “You don’t have to go through this! Who’s making you do this? Who’s gotten into your head? Come talk to us! You’re going to be okay, just don’t go through that door!”

Jane walked west on Main Street toward the 7-Eleven, past the proborts chanting, “Pray! You’ll need it! Your cause has been defeated!” There were so many of them, skies and rivers and glaciers of them, beneath the low dirty clouds. Or they moved as one body, one endocrine system, heeding orders from the same glands, activated by the same secretions. Receptors and plasma membranes. Instincts but no intentions. Some of them didn’t live anywhere near western New York. Others were students from UB or Buff State—they didn’t grow up here, or they wanted to pretend like they hadn’t. Sometimes, though, Jane could hear the flat hoof of the accent stomping in the chant. Yer kaaz. Gunna stap.

An Oh-R leapt toward a barricade and clapped a sign over the head of a probort who had unlocked arms with his comrade for a thoughtless instant. Culling the herd. The moan of a fallen beast. The sign buckled in half and a cop tackled the Oh-R. The sign read abortion kills a baby but not her memory.

The protesters thinned out as Jane approached the intersection with Harlem Road. Bridal shop, knitting supply store, bakery. When she reached the Pancake Palace, she turned around to watch the scene of the protest from a distance, scanning it for the heroic detail, the single black-and-white freeze-frame that could run on all the front pages—the moment of the water cannon’s impact, the protester confronting a bayonet with a chrysanthemum. But this was just people yelling at each other while other people stood around and watched. Father Steve was right—it had the busy idleness of a tailgate, one where too many people had started drinking too early in the day.

Hubris was the thing Jane hated most in herself, and hubris had brought them all here. They thought they could do Wichita all over again, in a different town and a different season, with a different cast, like a traveling show, like the proborts couldn’t rewrite and restage it with just a little heads-up. Jane turned back and could see the dragon wagon idling in the 7-Eleven parking lot. She sprint-walked toward the car. She turned her abortion kills children sign facedown against her chest and stomach with one hand, and with the other, she waved at Pat as he walked around the car to open Mirela’s door. Forget all this hullabaloo, Jane would say to the two of them—let’s all head home together instead, or grab a bite at the Pancake Palace first. It was so rarely the three of them together, they could make something nice out of it, play hooky—

“Are you sure about this, Jane?” Pat was asking. His face was gnarled, like he’d just tripped over the Samersons’ deck. “Is this an appropriate place for a child?”

He was already angry with her, and she hadn’t spoken a word. Of course he was angry; of course he would ask this question. He was right to ask it. And he did seem genuinely aggrieved. And yet he had agreed to this drop-off plan. And yet he had driven Mirela here, to the protest at the abortion clinic that he so avidly disapproved of. And yet he was already lifting Mirela out of her car seat and handing her over to Jane like she was a sack of groceries. And yet he was getting back inside the car. And yet he was staring at Jane through the open window, appalled at the things she made him do.

A memory: Jane in their driveway, trying to get PJ, not yet three, into his car seat as he arched his back and flung his body around, howling and pulling at her hair as Pat hovered over them, so close and so useless, telling her to get control over the situation, Jane, for Christ’s sake, when Sean, not yet two, toddled off down the driveway toward the street, and Pat yelled, “Excuse me, Jane, your child is running into the road!” and she bolted to catch Sean, leaving PJ crying and tangled in his straps, and as she lugged her youngest back up to the car, Pat’s face contorted in disbelief at this preposterous woman and her preposterous children. From beginning to end, he hadn’t moved one inch from where he was standing.

The “Excuse me, Jane” was what really made the memory special, the preening fake gentility of it. Jane laughed. Mirela, her hand in Jane’s, laughed, too, and pointed accusingly at Pat.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Pat said. Age and anger were pulling downward at his face, draining it.

She couldn’t remember where Lauren was in the memory. Jane spaced out, staring at the asphalt, trying to find Lauren.

“What is wrong with you?” she heard Pat asking.

Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

Pat knew the answer, too. He wanted so badly for her to be wrong, and now, for once, she was. Bringing Mirela here was a bad idea. But there were so many times when Pat had wanted Jane to be wrong when she wasn’t. It was a crushing debt he’d racked up. She couldn’t forgive it, not yet. First he had to pay some of it down.

“Wish us luck today, honey. See you later—we can grab a ride home with a friend,” Jane said, and she let Mirela spin her round and round.

They swung arms and skipped as they headed back toward the protest. Things might go well for Mirela today, Jane thought, because Mirela would be surrounded by nothing but new people, engaged in nothing but new situations. The first two days of the Spring of Life, the mostly peaceful tedium of it, had convinced Jane of this. Maybe even Jane would seem like a new person to Mirela when she was out of the house and playing another role.

They walked past the Pancake Palace. Bakery, knitting supply store, bridal shop. “Baby killers!” was the first refrain that reached them from the crowd as they approached WellWomen.

“Babby koowa!” Mirela cooed. Pat had chosen appropriate dress for her—a lined windbreaker, thermal socks—but had put her jeans on backward.

“Don’t say that, Mirela, it’s not nice,” Jane said. “Wait, what happened here?”

The crowds around the barricades were suddenly much thinner. On the opposite side of Main Street, the pro-life protesters stood behind the curb, facing a line of police. They sang a forlorn hymn that she didn’t recognize.

“What happen!” Mirela cried with excitement, jumping up and down, still holding Jane’s hand. “What happen!”

“Jane, over here!” Betty Andrower among the crowd, hoisting her abortion kills children sign over her head. Jane realized that she must have left hers behind on the roof of the dragon wagon.

“Mirela, let’s cross the street,” Jane said, squeezing her hand.

“It was that Oh-R moron who sucker punched the pro-choicer,” Betty said, maneuvering past a protester and stepping off the curb as Jane reached her side. Jane let go of Mirela’s hand long enough to clasp arms with Betty. “It was his fault—they pushed us all back after that.” Betty’s hands on Jane felt mysteriously nice, sending out slinky little lines of euphoria that shimmied through her shoulders and met in a puff of surprise at the base of her throat. To investigate the feeling further, she threw her arms around Betty, so small and so full, for a long hug, and she could have cried for how nice it felt, but she had to break the hug to grab on to Mirela’s hand again.

“Back behind the curb, people, on the sidewalk, nobody in the street,” the cops said. They sounded as forlorn as the hymn.

“Do you think we can sneak back up?” Jane asked Betty. “That Bridie woman told us this would happen.”

“Oh, let’s just keep as close to the curb as we can,” Betty said. “What do they think we are, criminals?”

“It is absolutely absurd to suggest that our action has brought violence to Buffalo,” tiny red-haired Kitty Stenton from Witness for the Innocents was yelling at a cop who stared past her. “I was born and raised here in Buffalo. Witness for the Innocents is a local, grassroots organization. This is our home—”

“This clinic is open! This clinic is open!” the proborts were shouting.

“Where is Father Steve?” Jane asked Betty. Mirela tugged at Jane’s hand.

Betty shrugged. “God knows,” she said. “No one’s seen him. I bet he knew this would be a bust.”

“We don’t know it’s a bust just yet,” Jane said. She was watching the curb. The protesters were inching forward. A few more of them were off the curb. The cops creeping backward, arms crossed, exchanging glances, nodding in acknowledgment.

Mirela tugged harder and started to whine.

A sign that read abortion stops a beating heart migrated forward, the length of itself. A cop took a step backward, then another. Mirela tugged and Jane almost came off her feet.

“Mirela—wait—”

Three more pairs of pro-life feet shuffled off the curb and onto Main Street. One woman was chest to chest with a female cop, a hand patting her uniformed shoulder, her face pleading, appealing to her sense of reason. The female cop looked at her colleague beside her, and Jane tried to read their expressions. A glint of indulgence, mischief—an opening. The cops had the air of the midday parent: already tired, sure, but plenty of patience left, wanting above all just to keep things on an even keel, there’s a long way to go yet, no reason to risk a meltdown by being too rule-bound about snacks or television time or precisely where a pro-life protester could stand on Main Street without being arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

Three more pairs of feet came off the curb. The female cop took two more steps back as Kitty Stenton’s voice rose in volume and pitch.

Mirela’s hand twisted inside Jane’s and she was gone. Running in her crooked slap-slap to the barricades across Main Street, ducking under the tape, Jane just behind her but then a cop body-checked her, a big mitt grabbing her shoulder.

“Is this a joke?” Jane asked, one hand on the asphalt, the other pointing over the barricades. “That’s my kid who just ran past you!”

The cop let go, unbothered, concealed behind his sunglasses. He folded his arms and reassumed his wide-legged stance in front of the barricades, elbow to elbow with his colleagues, like Jane held no interest for him, and never had. They were a tighter operation over here on the north side of Main Street, wearing more equipment, not inclined to chitchat.

“Whose side are you on?” one probort shouted at Jane.

“Just let her get her kid,” another probort said.

Two cops down the line nodded at Jane. She slipped between them and under the yellow tape and began pushing into the crowd. “Mirela, where are you? Mirela, come to Mommy!”

“You’re desperate, you lost! You’re desperate, you lost!” the proborts were chanting. Their side was younger. Not all of them were sensibly dressed for the gray weather. Band T-shirts over flannel. One read fudge-packin’ crack-smokin’ satan-worshippin’ motherfucker. Their side had more women, but not mothers, Jane thought—just college students and lesbians, not women like her. There were women kissing each other on the mouth—in greeting, nothing more, but still. She shouldered and elbowed past and through their bodies in a shush-shush rhythm of polyester coat sleeves and calling out her child’s name. They would know who she was and that she didn’t belong among them. Jane came against a tall tomato-red coat, her nose pressed against a shush-shushing armpit and a Columbia brand insignia, and she felt the obscure pleasure again, the longing to squeeze her eyes shut and wrap her arms around this body in this coat, push her head inside it, unbutton the buttons on the shirt underneath it, and breathe in the skin inside.

“Mirela!” she called.

“Someone help this gal find her child!”

“She’s here—we’ve got her,” a woman’s voice called out. Jane moved toward the sound.

A pocket had opened in the crowd, a protective circle around Mirela. She turned and turned, smiling and waving at each face watching her, the rosie in the ring.

“Mirela, thank God . . .” Jane said, reaching for the girl’s arm, but Mirela eluded her and ran over to Bridie, pulling at Bridie’s hand, laughing, jumping up and down.

“Aren’t you a charmer!” Bridie said to Mirela.

“Our bodies, our lives, our right to decide!” they were chanting.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Bridie asked.

“Babby koowa!” Mirela replied readily.

Bridie’s colleagues tittered. Even here, Jane and Mirela found themselves putting on a show.

Bridie’s eyes fell on Jane. “Ah, Jane, you’ve made it back to us. Hope you had a safe journey. This cutie pie is yours, I presume?”

Jane nodded and swallowed. She had her speech prepared. “My name is Jane, and this is my daughter Mirela,” she said over the clamor. “She got a hard start. The first few years of her life were hell. But she had a right to be born, and I’m so blessed and humbled by God to—”

It had felt so right in her head lying in bed last night, and in the shower long before dawn this morning. When she was still in the shower and the proborts were already here.

“Hey, lady,” a white woman in dreadlocks on Jane’s right called out, “I spoke with God today, and you know what? She’s pro-choice! And she told me that my body is mine alone!”

“—I’m so blessed to be given the chance to show her a good life—”

“Ho-ho, hey-hey,” three college-aged protesters on Jane’s left sang in unison, “Operation Failure, go away.”

“I’m not from out of town—”

Someone had given Mirela a glazed doughnut, and she was trying to stuff it into her pocket, backward on her hip.

“I’m not with Operation Rescue,” Jane said. “I live here. I’m from Buffalo.”

They could hear a cop on the other side of the tape, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the opposing sides, maybe smack in the middle of Main Street. He was trying to give orders over the feedback of a bullhorn. Everyone gasped and covered their ears and Mirela laughed and spun. The cop started yelling. “Everyone has to back up!” he bayed. “Everyone who is not an officer of the law or an identified escort, back up, back up, back up!” She hoped Mirela’s disappearance had caused some kind of diversion, and now the street belonged to their friends.

Jill came up behind Bridie, sidled around in front of her. “Out!” She was pointing at Jane. “Get her out of here!”

“Jane, unless you’ve had some radical change of heart, I think it may be time—” Bridie’s voice was caustic.

“Your kid was trying to tell you something, coming over to our side,” said a young bearded man in a poncho.

“Maybe she was,” Jane said, fixing him with her best earnest gaze. “Scripture tells us always to listen and consider what our children have to say. Scripture says—”

“Yeah, time’s up, lady. You got what you came here for,” said White Dreadlocks.

“Scripture says, ‘But Mary treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ I try to do the same,” Jane said.

Poncho Guy nodded. “Uh-huh. She’s adopted? That girl?”

“Where is she from?” asked White Dreadlocks.

The bullhorn was screeching again, and Mirela laughed at the beauty of the painful sound. Poncho Guy and White Dreadlocks grimaced and crumpled inside the feedback, and Jane saw her chance to lead Mirela back to their group. They pushed and pulled through the crush back to Main Street.

“Racist, sexist, anti-gay, born-again bigots, go away!”

“We don’t want any of your sidewalk counseling! You need your own counseling!”

The pro-life protesters had covered Main Street on their hands and knees. Their bodies were not their own. These were the bodies of vulnerable children, barely able to crawl. Jane watched Phil as he knelt straight down in a puddle—he could have easily avoided it. He was acting out a child’s clumsiness, or indulging his own thirst for martyrdom. “Hold the line!” Phil was shouting from the puddle. “Hold the line! Link your arms and link your feet! Crawl toward the yellow tape! Keep your eye! On! The tape! If they’re not touching you, move!” A dozen of the Oh-Rs had linked themselves together, arm in arm, with horseshoe-shaped bicycle locks. A larger swell of cops now stood between the pro-life side and the clinic. A few cops were leaning over the kneeling protesters, their fingertips resting primly on their bowed heads.

“Come down here on the ground with me, Mirela,” Jane said, and Mirela obeyed, getting on her hands and knees in imitation of Jane, as Jane had been almost certain she would, because she had never asked Mirela to do such a thing before.

“It’s not your body, honey,” Summer Huebler was calling out on her knees, “it’s a child.”

A chant began. “There will never be another you! There will never be another you!”

An officer took up Summer’s hand as if to place a ring upon her finger, and instead he fitted plastic handcuffs around her wrist. Summer went limp, as they had all been instructed to, and the cop dragged her toward a line of police cars. The pressure of her dead weight against the pavement prodded a loafer off her foot. Mirela pointed and laughed at the abandoned shoe. “Babby koowa!” she screamed at Summer.

Charity Huebler cried after her sister from her hands and knees. “Summer, I’ll come find you!”

“Charity, I’m okay!” Summer called back.

Mr. Glover was sitting up on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him. His arresting officer had left him there to consult with two colleagues on various clamps and implements that might succeed in separating the bike-locked Oh-Rs. “Jane,” Mr. Glover called out to her, “what you and Mirela did before was galvanizing. We never would have made it back into Main Street without Mirela’s bravery.”

“That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Glover,” she called back, “but if you’ve ever been to Wegmans with Mirela, you know that bolting away is just how she does things.”

Mr. Glover offered a magnanimous shrug and fell backward. “God works in mysterious ways, Jane!” he shouted, prone.

Mirela climbed onto Jane’s curved back. “Ho-sey wide!” she announced.

“Mirela, you’re going to break my back,” Jane gasped, spreading her hands apart and bending her elbows to distribute Mirela’s weight. Mirela tumbled onto the pavement, on purpose, and let out the laugh that meant she was hurt. Charity stared at Mirela and murmured the Hail Mary as a cop cuffed her.

“That kid is Teflon,” Mr. Glover was calling over to Jane. “Just watch. She’s your Kryptonite. Your human shield!”

“Lady.” A different cop was admonishing Jane, looming over her bent shoulder. Jane waited for the pinch and click of the cuffs around her wrists. “Just get outta here already, and take the kid with you,” he said. “I won’t tell ya again.”

“She gets to leave?” Charity was asking. “Just like that? Because she brought a kid with her?”

“I’m not moving,” Jane called back to Charity.

“Jane, Jane, go to Rosen’s—” Mr. Glover was calling.

“That’s a good idea, actually,” Charity yelled as a cop began lugging her away. “Go to Rosen’s, Jane!”

“Go to Wozen!” Mirela said, rolling around on the pavement.

“I’m not leaving all of you,” Jane said.

“Ma’am, I need you to get up,” Jane’s cop was saying.

“Get up!” Mirela said, rising to her feet.

“Go to Rosen’s, Jane,” Mr. Glover repeated. “See what you can make happen there. Mirela is our Joan of Arc!”

“Go to Wozen!” Mirela agreed. She started running east, the right direction. Jane followed her, darting and weaving through the mazes and chains of kneeling protesters in various states of prayer and arrest, feeling the vertigo of impunity. Mirela was running away and for once no one was telling her not to, no one was grabbing her by the arm or saying no, don’t, bad, stop.

Three blocks. That was nothing to Mirela. Mirela could outlast and outrun them all.

 

Dr. Rosen operated his practice out of a timber-frame clapboard house with a rolled-tile roof. Similar houses nearby had wraparound porches, but Dr. Rosen’s entrance was through a brick enclosure, one that looked like it was added to the original house later, as a fortification. Two young women sat cross-legged atop the roof of the brick addition, like snipers, one peering through a camcorder with a blinking red light. Cheap roofing sheet curled upward around them, like a rotting carpet. There were no police barricades erected around the house, but police in riot helmets and neon-orange smocks were everywhere. The proborts had wrapped themselves around the house five deep, arms locked. The swaddling mass of bodies was claustrophobic, sickening, annihilatingly sexual, a python consuming its prey. The obscure pleasure placed its hand again on the small of Jane’s back. To push, to press, to bear another body, to be wrapped in another body. No faces, just rising and falling musculature under shush-shushing fabric and clammy, clinging fingers. To submit to the python, to struggle against its impersonal, motiveless crush.

A line of cops on the sidewalk in front of the house, separating the two sides. In the street, another crawling procession toward yellow tape, like the scene in front of WellWomen. “Hold the line!” a man was calling from his hands and knees.

“Go to Wozen,” Mirela was imploring Jane, tugging on her coat sleeve.

Mary treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Jane took Mirela’s hand as they came close to the rear of the crawling procession. A riot cop materialized in their path, arms crossed.

“You brought your kid to this?” the cop asked.

“Babby koowa!” Mirela said.

Jane smiled apologetically at the cop. “I can’t believe the language she’s picked up already this morning,” she said. “We just, uh—we need to get through?”

“You live on this block?” the cop asked. “You got ID?”

“Uh, Dr. Rosen is my neighbor,” Jane said, careful not to lie.

“Dee-ya! Dee-ya!” Mirela was pointing at the python. Jane glimpsed Delia in the outer ring of the python, arm in arm with protesters on either side. “Right-to-life, your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die!” she was chanting.

“Yes, that’s Delia!” Jane called out.

“Hey, Mrs. Brennan!” Delia called back, pulling one arm free of her companion and waving.

“Nice to see you!” Jane said, waving back, hoping the cop would take note of this neighborly exchange. Mirela smiled sweetly at the cop, mimicking Jane.

The cop shrugged and looked away. “Do what you gotta do,” he told Jane. “But this is no place for a kid.”

“I’ll get her home safe, Officer, thank you,” Jane said. Jane and Mirela walked silently past Dr. Rosen’s practice, the python on their left, the line of riot cops on their right. Jane recognized the reverend’s voice, calling from the front of the kneeling procession.

“What do we do when they scream in our faces?” the reverend was asking. His batter-beigeness in person put Jane in mind of the gingerbread man. “We stay calm. We sit. We sing. We pray. We think about the babies. We need to stay with them. Stay right there with the babies. Feel them in your hearts. They need to know they’re not alone.”

This all sounded like a speech Father Steve would give. Jane wondered if he had arrived at WellWomen yet. She hoped the cops hadn’t snagged him before she’d had a chance to talk to him about how the protest was going.

“Let’s pray for the women who have been scheduled here. There are appointments that will be happening right now.” The members of the procession folded their hands on the pavement and rested their heads there. Butts in the air. Each of Jane’s kids had slept like that at some point in their babyhood.

Jane could see, as she and Mirela came closer, that the reverend was standing atop a wooden crate. The sun had come out just for him. Three local camera crews were set up in front of where he stood, as if he had summoned them, directed them.

“You, there,” the reverend called. “The woman in the blue coat, with the child. Welcome!”

“Hello, howyoo!” Mirela replied.

“Keep moving, lady,” said a cop on her right.

“Ladies and gentlemen, a mother with her child—we haven’t seen enough of that today, have we? Because that is what this is all about, isn’t it? Join us, please.”

The cop moved to place himself between Jane and the kneeling procession, and Mirela darted around him and into the street. “I have to . . .” Jane began, and the cop put up his hands, allowing Jane, too, to run into the street and catch Mirela by the arm just as the girl tripped over a praying leg.

“What did Jesus say?” the reverend was asking. “Jesus said, ‘Suffer the children and forbid them not to come unto Me, for such is the kingdom of heaven.’ Who is this child, ma’am? Come closer, both of you.”

Jane and Mirela edged closer to the reverend, praying bodies shuffling aside to let them past. Jane got to her knees on the asphalt and pulled Mirela down beside her.

“Tell us of yourself and of your child, ma’am,” the reverend said.

“My name is Jane, and this is my daughter Mirela,” she began, and faltered. She could not find the rest of it. “She is—I am—blessed and humbled by God.”

“Your soul is a masterpiece, Mariella!” someone called out behind them.

“Every child deserves a birthday!” another yelled, and others began chanting the refrain.

“Mah buh day?” Mirela asked.

Behind her Jane sensed the cops moving in on the procession. She could hear the clink of handcuffs, the grating of the bodies on the pavement. Jane craned around to watch the last testaments of the witnesses before they were swept into police vans.

“We are not the ones disturbing the peace and killing babies! Over there—arrest them, arrest them! We are here for peace!”

“I pray to God for a peaceful resolution of the child-killing issue before other people get hurt!”

Jane turned back. The reverend was rummaging around beneath his crate. There was Tupperware under there.

“There is a doctor who performs late-term abortions at Children’s Hospital! At a children’s hospital! Can you imagine the depravity?!”

The reverend stood up and held aloft—

He held—

He had—

Held in his hands—

What was it? What did Jane think—at first, at the time—it was? A doll? A package? A parcel of victuals for the tailgate they had all been promised? A rubbery cross-section of internal organs used as a teaching tool in middle-grade science classrooms? She blinked and cocked her head and still it refused to come into focus. She could not see what she was seeing. She heard a gasp, a shout, a collective groan. Other people were seeing it. What was it?

You are far enough along that we have two choices here.

(The first choice, of course, was they could break down the baby inside her and take it out with instruments.)

She’d seen her before.

(The second choice, of course, was she could give birth to the baby, who was already dead.)

They put you in my arms, and I knew it was you.

“This! This is what abortion on demand and without apology looks like—that says it all, doesn’t it? Nips it in the bud.”

“Buddy, what is—is that what I think it is?” A man’s voice, a Buffalo accent, from over near the camera crews.

She glanced over at Mirela, who had acquired an abortion kills children sign and held it over her head as she spun in circles.

“What do you think it is?” the reverend asked.

“Buddy, that is—you are disgusting. That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“That’s horrible.”

“Isn’t it horrible?”

“You are horrible. That is sick, what you’re doing. You are sick.”

“This is sick? Well, I would agree. We agree with each other.”

“How did you get that?” a woman’s voice called.

“I agree with you that—”

“How did you get that? Where the hell did you get that?” More and more voices. Bystanders, Jane could see. Not necessarily proborts.

The python couldn’t see the reverend.

“See, we have found a place where we agree. We agree that this is sick.”

“Is that real?”

“This is not a political issue. This is not a partisan issue.”

“Is it real?”

“This is not politics.”

“Guys, it’s real—he says it’s real!”

“It’s not real.”

“That is sick!”

“If it’s real—”

“Would you like to touch her?”

“You are sick—”

“Say what you want about me—but would you like to touch her? Her name is Thea.”

“You are fucking sick, man.”

“Would you like to touch her, and decide for yourself if she is real?”

“This is sick, man.”

“I understand why you might feel sick.”

“We are going to have to take that thing away from you.” Two cops were pulling the reverend off his crate.

“Reverend—” Jane said from the ground.

“She’s a she, Officer. She’s not a thing,” the reverend said calmly, cradling what he held in his hands.

“Reverend—you don’t know—” Jane said.

“She’s a human being, murdered, Officer.”

“Reverend,” Jane said, “that’s not a—you don’t know she’s a—”

“We’re going to have to take you into custody, sir.”

“A real aborted baby, Officer, sir, dead at nineteen weeks.”

“Why are you arresting him?”

“Sir, why in the world did you bring that here?”

“Nineteen weeks?” Jane asked.

“More or less,” the reverend replied. He was looking at her again. “What difference does it make?”

“Nineteen weeks?” she asked again.

“Ma’am, please stand up.”

“Reverend,” Jane said, “that’s a stillborn baby.”

This is the body of Christ.

“Jane? Jane, is that you?”

This is the blood of Christ.

“Reverend, that’s a stillborn baby.”

He gave his only begotten son.

“Where is the baby’s mother?” Jane said. “Does she know you’ve done this?”

“Ma’am, I already told ya—”

We have two choices here.

“Jane—”

“Did you ask her—did you tell her—that baby had a mother—”

Where is the mother’s body? Jane thought, and one arm twisted behind her back.

“That baby had a mother—”

Are you my mother? asked the baby bird.

Hands all over her body. “Please don’t touch me—I have every right to be here—you do not have the right to touch me—”

The officer pulled her other arm behind her back.

“I didn’t say that you could touch me—”

Her arm twisted back and her chest cavity opened and her heart fell into her stomach and something, a brittle thought, the recognition, flapped out of her sternum, fell on the ground dead.

“Mirela?” she asked, almost to herself, as she wrenched her head around to one side and the other as far as she could. “Mirela?”

 

Another year, another wedding. Their table had started talking about a movie. What was it called? Karen Allen was in it, or Brooke Adams—one of those. All those toothsome, tough-pretty brunettes from around the time when the boys were born. Debra Winger. Margot Kidder? Pat corrected Jane on a minor plot point, and Jane countered that Pat’s correction was incorrect, and Pat ended up throwing his dessert fork down and stalking off who knows where, and in the car home the dispute became a fight about Pat’s incessant need to prove Jane wrong on everything and Jane’s incessant need to show herself to be perfect and both of their incessant needs to embarrass each other in front of good, respectable people who would never see them the same way again or invite them to their homes or their families’ weddings, and what was different about this fight was that when Pat and Jane returned home, Pat paid the teenager who had watched the children and drove her home and drove back, and Jane did some tidying up, and then they both went to bed. They did not speak to each other, though they slept side by side. The next morning, they still said nothing, locked in a businesslike stalemate. And then Pat asked Jane if she had time to go to the dry cleaner that day and Jane asked Pat if he’d remembered to fill the tank of the dragon wagon, and regular communications more or less resumed.

All at once, silently and together, they had reconsidered their options. They could argue and fume for days, which was what they usually did. They could whisper-fight in their bedroom for hours in hopes of coming to some resolution, the failure of which would still result in more days of arguing and fuming. Or they could forget about it. Let it wither for lack of sunlight. Finally put the ficus out of its misery. A wound should not be allowed to fester, but perhaps their marriage would heal over adequately enough if they could both just resist the urge to pick at it, because neither of them was going to change, because nothing could ever happen to prevent these fights in the future, because their marriage had mutated into a third person, a fourth (now fifth) child, a toddler, whose tantrums were debilitating but also a normal, unavoidable aspect of development—except this was worse, so much more debilitating because they did not love this toddler, could not bring themselves to pay more than grudging attention to this toddler, who would never develop out of the tantrums, in fact would never grow up at all, but wouldn’t die or go away, either, would just continue to whine and weep and Magic Marker the walls and shit the diaper and rip the shitty diaper off for laughs for the rest of their godforsaken lives.

Their conflicts and their resentments were weather. Nothing could be so trite as to talk about the weather.

So Jane felt something like surprise, lying in bed with the lights out at day’s end—the day Mirela ran away and went missing, not that she’d gone missing very long, not that she was ever really missing at all, as the whole affair was totally blown out of proportion—when Pat sat down on the other side of the bed and said, “We need to talk about what happened today and what’s next.”

“Not now,” Jane said into the dark.

“Yes, now.”

“I’ve been up since four a.m. and I’m very tired.”

Pat snickered. “And why are you so tired, Jane?”

“I know that how things are now is not tenable.”

“Tired from your pro-test? Because you’re a pro-tester now? Saving babies? Washed in the blood of the lamb? Who are you, Jane Fonda on a tank?”

“And I know we need to do something to make things better.”

“And what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, seeing as it’s all on me to figure it out and I can’t hope for any help from you—”

“You made this happen! You want my help to clean up your mess?”

“I know what I’m going to do. There is a clinic in Colorado that specializes in treating children like Mirela.”

“Hmmm, another clinic. Not sure we’ve had the best of luck with clinics lately.”

“They are very highly regarded, cutting-edge. I heard about them from a brilliant graduate student at UB—her name is Delia Reizer. I’ve had the clinic’s materials for a while and I’ve thought it over carefully.”

“Sure, just make a few phone calls, right?” Pat sneered. “Easy as calling in the electrician. Just do a little rewiring, presto.”

“You would know who Delia was, and what she had to say, if you paid any attention to the challenges Mirela faces,” Jane said.

“If you knew anything about the challenges Mirela faces, you wouldn’t have brought her to that shit show–”

“Who brought her there, Pat? Who brought her there?”

“You told me to! It was your decision! All of this is your doing!”

Pat flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

“I made you do it,” Jane said. The nyah-nyah tone in her voice was ugly and stupid and intoxicating.

“Fuck you, Jane!” he hissed, bolting up from bed again and pacing the carpet, his hands balled into fists. If she pushed a little further, nyah-nyahed one more time, she could make him punch the dresser, rip the curtains from the rods, try to strangle a bedpost. She could make him do it.

“In any case,” Jane said. “I called this afternoon, the second I got home—”

“Home from jail,” he said.

“Pat, they took us to the Clearfield rec center. In a Metro bus. It was like a field trip the kids would go on. I mean, we could have dropped by the library afterward if we wanted to. Clearly nobody took any of it all that seriously.”

“You were arrested.”

“The clinic is in Colorado—I called them when I had a chance to breathe after Dee and Marie came over, and by the way, I’m grateful that they could help out today, Pat, and I’m grateful that they are in our lives—”

“Oh, shut up, Jane.” He was grinding his fists into his eyeballs, groaning.

“All righty, then. Just to finish my thought—”

“And you’re always accusing me of being passive-aggressive. What a joke.”

“—the clinic can take us on short notice. I can buy the plane tickets tomorrow. And yes, Pat, this has all been a joke. All I ever think about is how can I do a funny ha-ha joke on you and make you feel bad, bad, bad.”

He sat down on the bed, back turned to her. She was still on her back, hadn’t even bothered to raise herself on one elbow, but she’d moved him all around the room, with just her words.

“And that’ll fix it, is that right?” Pat said. “Some clinic, God knows where?”

“I didn’t say it would fix it. Colorado is not God knows where. It’s one of the fifty states of America, the country of our birth and citizenship. It’s spelled C-O-L-O-R-A—”

“You just pick up the phone, buy the tickets—oh, and I have to wonder who’s paying for that—and that’s it, all better? If that’s the case, then why didn’t you take her to the clinic in the first place?”

“Mirela. Her name is Mirela.”

“Why did you do this to us, Jane?”

“You never say Mirela. It’s always she, her. It, why don’t you call her it?”

“You are an id-ee-it.”

“And it’s only been six months.”

“And it feels like six goddamn years.” The mattress nudged and eddied Jane as he got up again and flipped on the bedside lamp. Jane shaded her eyes as her pupils shrank.

“I had no say in this.” Pat was standing over her, pointing his finger in her face. “You turned my life upside down, you turned the kids’ lives upside down, and you didn’t even ask me.”

“I did ask you.”

“You didn’t ask them.”

“I did ask you. We talked about it. You just didn’t take it seriously.”

“Bullshit.”

“And I didn’t need your permission.”

“I never adopted her, Jane. There was no legal process—”

“No. Enough. I didn’t need you.”

“Did you adopt her? Legally? Where is the paperwork? Whose is she, Jane?”

“Stop.”

“Where is her mother?”

“I am her mother.”

“Her real mother!”

“I am her real mother.”

Now Jane understood why it rankled her when people asked about Mirela’s real mother. The implication was not only that Jane was unreal, but that Mirela was, too—that she was false, fake, unverifiable until her real mother could be located and interrogated.

Jane got out of bed. “Whose is she?” Pat demanded as she slipped past him out the door.

She moved down the hallway, pausing to steady herself against the wall, hand flat against the spot where PJ’s first-grade portrait used to hang, the one where he was missing all four front teeth.

“Lauren?” she whispered, opening the door to Lauren’s room.

“Yeah, Mom,” Lauren said. She sounded wide awake, like she’d been listening to her parents fight. Her room was closest to theirs.

“Honey, Dad is snoring, so I’m going to sleep with you tonight, okay?”

“Okay, Mom,” Lauren said, moving over in the bed.

Jane tickled Lauren’s hair with her fingers, rubbed her arm. Lauren lay so eerily still in the spoon that Jane knew she wasn’t asleep but rather wanted to be thought asleep. Jane worried the bottom hem of Lauren’s T-shirt between her thumb and forefinger. It had been a long time since she had prayed before bed. She begged Jesus Christ, the only Son of the Father, for forgiveness for her sins, and when she had run out of her own sins she said the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition, alternating between them over and over, lips silently forming the words, starving herself of sleep like a saint would, although a true saint would never share a bed with a man, or with a child of her own making.

Jane’s mind whirred. She was ground beneath its wheels. She stopped her prayers and instead took an inventory of the child or the girl or the almost-woman whose body was in hers. Lauren’s knees pulled chestward, almost seated in her mother’s lap, her mother’s outline curving around her. As they had begun.

Once upon a time, it was just Jane and Lauren. Or it could have been. Duck and bight and honey-almond folds. The grimy rental on Evans Road. If only they had gotten that far. What difference did it make what other people thought of them, if they knew who they were and knew their love for each other? Surely it would have been the first stop on a big adventure. Jane consented to the thought that erased PJ and Sean and Mirela. Or worse than erased Mirela—just left her where she was, in a dank cot across an ocean. Jane lay down in the thought. The best time of all had been just Lauren, because that was the time when they could get away.

Lauren had gotten away. Or almost, she was almost there. She had what she needed: she was pretty and slim and she got straight As. She was an athlete, she was smart, creative, her teachers paid her lots of attention, they wanted to see her up on a stage—she belonged there, all eyes on her. Two lead roles in a row as a freshman, and no training, no voice or dance lessons, nothing. A natural talent. She was special. Jane had been distracted from her lately, yes, but others were captivated. Lauren was fine. So much more than fine. She wouldn’t be like Jane. She would go to college. She would create a life that was her own, intentional. She would date different boys before deciding on one forever. Her children would be—if she chose to have—her children would be—

The whirring again. She felt herself driven to dust. She pressed her face against her baby’s hair, her ribs under her light hand rose and fell. The baby, the baby, the baby is okay, she is still in her arms, the baby is okay, the baby, the baby is okay.