The Derry Younger Center. The kind of nondescript name that did little to keep it hidden.
A two-story building, painted a shade of pink, the roof mottled green. On another day Saint might have faced placards, maybe a couple of men who laid claim to women and their bodies like rapists champing at a noble cause. Your body, my choice.
Inside Saint gave her name and took her seat and did not look up to notice the others.
Two hundred miles from Monta Clare, from Jimmy and his bloat, his tired eyes and the pitch of his disappointments. Sometimes Saint would clean the small house and Jimmy would not lift his legs for the vacuum cleaner.
She had booked him an appointment to see Dr. Caldwell. Thought maybe he needed some pills to redress the imbalance since he failed his exams. He had not gone.
“Does it hurt?”
She looked at the teen beside her.
Saint wanted to tell the girl that she guessed it would, at some uncalled for time in the future, when she could look back from a different vantage point and not feel that retaining cord stretched so taut. The cord that tied her to him and that life where she was not the lead or even a bit part. Perhaps it would ache come Christmastime. Or when a friend fell pregnant.
“You’ll be fine,” Saint said.
On a small black-and-white screen she watched the channel 9 news as cops tracked James and Linwood Briley and four other death row inmates who bunked from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center.
“There’s something romantic about a prison break,” the girl said.
“Spree killers running loose, be still my beating heart.”
The girl laughed, and Saint wondered at her life.
“I don’t know how I got here,” the girl said.
Saint smiled but guessed she did know. Like they all knew.
“Is there a difference between a mistake and a regret?” the girl said.
“If you learn from the mistake, it’s less of a regret.”
“I’m never having sex again.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Saint heard her name called.
At the desk she handed in her form. Behind the tired receptionist she saw a photograph, and in it she saw a line of people the first day the clinic opened. Dr. Tooms stood slightly away from the rest. He did not smile.
Saint kept her eyes on his as she was led through.