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I am pregnant, and based on the internal exam, they estimate I am about eleven weeks along. Still early enough to abort. “You can just put this all behind you, and go on with your life,” the little gray-haired woman said, the one who came in after the doctor told me to go ahead and get dressed. “I can schedule you the appointment.” She pulls out a little calendar and starts flipping through it.
“No,” I say. That will not make it better. I was an accident, a mistake, but do I wish never to have lived? Even with the turmoil, even with Mom breaking apart like an asteroid entering the atmosphere, do I wish she had aborted me? No. She should have, for her, so she could just go on, just continue living her life, graduate from high school, go to college, get married to a good, decent guy, and then have a family when she was more ready. She should have. She didn’t. It may be the only true gift my mother ever gave me. My life.
“No?” she asks, baffled.
“No. I won’t kill her.” I have already started thinking of the baby as a girl, as a second me, and I want to give her the childhood I wish I had. Those early years . . . I want her to have a life like that, but better. A life without a string of men, the ones who touched me like no man should ever touch a little girl, like Ed, who made me do things with the power an adult wields over a child. I sit in this sterile room, not listening as Little Miss Gray Hair goes on, explaining that the procedure is virtually painless, and I wouldn’t be aware of anything as it happened. It would just be a bad menstrual period. I start gathering my bag and drawing my shoes back on my feet, her words just draining from the side of my head.
I say again that I’m not going to kill her, and she looks at me like she thinks I’m stupid. She shakes her head at me, and her lips tighten into a line. I start to leave the room. The very last words she says to me, the only ones that truly stick, are the last words she says: “You are not equipped to raise a baby.”
I go out to the parking lot and get in my little red car and I drive away, shifting the gears smoothly and without a hiccup. I drive out past my little apartment and on down to the entrance to the interstate. I drive until my car is running on fumes, and after I refill, I drive a little longer until I reach the Mattoon-Charleston exit. I take 16 all the way through town, only taking my hand off my stomach when I need to shift gears. She is in there, resting, sleeping, growing. Not a wad of cells, but a heart beating, a living individual. She’s me, but better. She is me done right. Miss Gray Hair may be correct—I am not equipped to raise her—but that doesn’t make this child wrong. This child is right. This child may be a mistake, but she is alive because she is meant to be. She just can’t be wrong.
I turn left on Seventh Street and drive the five blocks to turn right onto Polk. I park in front of the house, where Leslie’s van sits, flanked by Mr. McGill’s midlife-crisis convertible, a red Chrysler LeBaron. I hadn’t thought it out when I came this way. I hadn’t thought that they may not want to see me, that they may be angry at me for the way I left. A deep flush begins to creep up my neck, and I start the car, holding the clutch in, waiting for my other foot to come off the brake. It doesn’t move, just sits there, pressing that pedal as if there is no room to move it elsewhere. The front door starts to crack open, and I release the brake and the clutch, slinking off down the road, hoping they didn’t see me. Stupid.
What was I thinking coming back here? I turn toward 16 without looking back. I get on the interstate and push my little car as fast as it will go, trying to get away. I am always trying to get away.
It is well into night, and I am well past tired when I finally pull into my parking spot.
***
I know what I’m going to do, and I spend a bit of the morning trying to figure out how to go about it. In the end, I find a number for a place called Life House out of Kansas City, Missouri. I write the number on my hand because I can’t find a piece of paper, and when I go downstairs to get to work, Lola takes one look at me and stops where she is, holding the drawer just out of the register, the “No Sale” tab sticking up in the screen.
“What’s wrong with you?” It is a simple question, and she asks it quiet and gentle.
“What do you mean? I’m fine,” I say, turning the sign over so “Open” shows through the glass.
“All right,” she says, but her eyes narrow on me, and I let myself lean into the counter. It hasn’t been a good morning. It wasn’t a good night.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask, and her eyebrows raise in a “go on” look so I do. “I have a problem,” but then I think better of my word choice and modify it to say, “I’m in a situation . . .”
“How far are you?” She gets right to the point as only she can.
“Eleven weeks.”
She nods, as if this confirms something she has known.
“What do you want to do?” she asks, and I can tell that my answer will give her the measure of me. It will tell her what kind of person I am, what kind of woman I will be.
“Well, I can’t keep her.” She nods, “I mean, I’m not able to raise a baby. Not well. Right? How would I work, where would she stay?” She nods, letting me talk myself around in circles, explaining my reservations, my fears. When we’ve moved from the front counter to the back, Lola begins to load the chemicals into the machine, and I sit on a stool with my back against the wall.
“Warren’s the daddy?” she asks, not in an unkind way, just assessing the situation. “Where is he?” I hear the disappointment, the lowering of her opinion of him in her voice.
“He’s gone.”
“Does he know?”
I shake my head. I don’t have any idea where Warren is, and after the phone call, I don’t think I could tell him. I shake my head again, trying to blur that last conversation out of my mind. I have something else I have to deal with right now. I can’t think about him. I can’t think about the things he said and what it meant. The baby—that is all that matters now. She matters. Her life matters. Her future matters.
“And you ain’t goin’ to tell him?” I shake my head, and kick the stool to spin it. “If you was goin’ to get rid of it, you are cutting it close, aren’t you?” There is more of that “measuring of me” in her voice, and I can’t tell if her opinion of me is going up or down with my answers.
“I’m not killing my baby,” I say, hearing the words in the world for the first time. My baby. My baby. I bite my lip and tell myself that I can never say that again. Every muscle in my heart has contracted, and I drop low over my thighs, my arms crossed over my stomach. I rock like that for a time, listening to Lola work, giving me the time I need. When pull myself together, she asks about my grandparents and if they will help me. I shake my head. They are old. He is sick. I’ve thought about Steven, but really, he’s separated from his wife, waiting for divorce papers, and only sees his boys every other weekend and holidays. “I don’t have anybody that can do that.”
“So what are you thinking?” she asks, pausing in her work to come and stand beside me, her hand running over my hair where it falls down my back.
“I want her to have a family.” I choke the words out. “I want her to have a family like I didn’t. I want her to be a have instead of a have-not.” I know Lola won’t understand. I want my baby to have Dylan’s life, or better yet, Kelci Bancroft’s life.