THE ICE CUBE
Steve Ripley telephoned Mack McCourtney and asked him to get David Markus and bring him to the hospital.
Paula Simms, the emergency room doctor, insisted on giving R.J. a tranquilizer. It made her very quiet and withdrawn but otherwise had no discernible effect on her horror. She was sitting frozen next to Sarah, holding her hand, when David arrived, his eyes wild.
He didn’t look at R.J. “Leave us alone.”
R.J. went out into the waiting room. After a long while, Paula Simms came to her.
“He insists that you go home. I think you’d best do it, R.J. He’s very … you know. Upset.”
Consciousness hurt unbearably. Sarah couldn’t be gone forever like that, just … gone. It was hard for her to face. It hurt to think, even to breathe.
Suddenly the ice cube in which she had lived after Charlie Harris’s death was back.
She made the first call to David that afternoon. After that, she telephoned every fifteen or twenty minutes. Each time she got his recorded business voice, so professional, so relaxed, thanking her for calling the Woodfield Realty Company and inviting her to leave a message.
Next morning she drove to his house, thinking perhaps he was sitting there alone, not picking up the phone. Will Riley, David’s far neighbor from down the road, was putting a new fence post into the ground.
“He home, Mr. Riley?”
“No. Found a note from him taped to my door early this morning, asking me to feed the animals for a couple of days. I thought the least I could do is fix the fence. Hell of a thing, isn’t it, Dr. Cole?”
“Yes. Hell of a thing.”
“That wonderful little girl.”
Sarah!
What was going on with David? Where was he?
When she went into the house it was just as it had been when she and the ambulance crew had left it, except now the blood had dried to a paste a quarter of an inch thick. She stripped the sheets and the blankets from the bed and placed them into a garbage bag. She used David’s garden spade to scrape up the terrible pudding from the floor, then she carried it into the woods in a plastic bucket and buried it. She searched out David’s stiff brush and soap and scrubbed the floor until the successive rinse waters turned from red to pink to clear. Under the bed, she found the cat.
“Oh, Agunah.”
She would have liked to pet the cat, hug her, but Agunah stared at her like a cornered lion.
She had to drive home fast in order to shower and get to the office in time to see patients. It was mid-afternoon when she met Toby in the hallway and learned what half the town already knew, that David Markus had taken his daughter back to Long Island for burial.
For a little while she sat at her desk and tried to make sense of the next patient’s case history, but words and letters wriggled on the other side of a deep liquid glitter. Finally, she did something she had never done before. She told Toby to apologize and reschedule patient appointments. Sorry, terrible headache.
When she got home she sat in a chair at the kitchen table. The house was very quiet. She just sat.
She cancelled all appointments for four days. She walked a lot. Got out of the house and just walked, over the trail, over the fields, along the road, without knowing where, to start and look about her in surprise: How on earth did I get here?
She telephoned Daniel Noyes, and they met for an uncomfortable, sorrowful lunch.
“I gave her a good examination,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t see anything wrong with her at all.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Dr. Noyes. I know that.”
He gave her a long, searching look. “It wasn’t your fault either. Do you know that, also?”
She nodded.
Outside the restaurant, he kissed her on the cheek before he turned away and walked toward his car.
R.J. had no trouble sleeping. On the contrary, at night she sank into a deep and dreamless place of refuge. Mornings she lay under the covers in the fetal position, unable to move for long periods.
Sarah.
Her mind told her to reject guilt but she understood that guilt was hopelessly intertwined with her sorrow and from now on would be part of her.
She decided it would be better to write to David before she tried to talk with him. It was important to her that he understand that Sarah’s death might just as easily have occurred following an appendectomy or a bowel resection. That infallible surgery didn’t exist. That it was Sarah’s own decision to have had the abortion and that she would have had it even if R.J. hadn’t agreed to help her.
R.J. knew it would be little comfort for David to be told that some losses are incurred even in the safest invasive procedures. That in electing abortion over pregnancy, Sarah had been increasing her chances for survival, because in the United States, one out of every 14,300 women who continue pregnancy will die, while of women who are aborted—even after fourteen weeks of pregnancy—one in 23,000 can be expected to die. And that since everyone’s chances of dying every time he or she enters an automobile are one in 6,000, both pregnancy and abortion are extremely safe risks.
So Sarah’s death as a result of a legal abortion was a rarity. A rarity.
She wrote letter after letter, until finally she finished one that satisfied her, and then she drove to the post office.
But instead of mailing it, she tore it up and threw the pieces in the Dumpster. She realized she had written it as much for herself as for David. Anyway, how could it make a difference. What did he care about statistics.
Sarah was gone.
And so was David.