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Jake’s looking at me like I’m batty. Who knows, maybe I am.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, and I wonder if I made a noise in my surprise without even knowing it.
Grandma Lucy. Is my mind playing tricks on me? I’ve gone so long avoiding all my memories from that women’s clinic. Is that why the Holy Ghost lady at church looked so familiar, or am I just confused? Traumatized?
That’s a thing, you know. Post abortion stress disorder. It’s like PTSD, but for women who have abortions. I looked it up once online.
“You’re kind of tripping me out,” Jake says.
I try to shake reality back into my body and brain. I’m not in Spokane. A flashback. That’s all this was. Maybe I do have that post-abortion thing even though I didn’t go through with the procedure.
After I dozed off and had that dream in the women’s clinic, I told the nurse I had to get something from the car. She looked a little suspicious, so I said it was my inhaler. I don’t have asthma, but I lived with this foster kid once who did. Eliot Jamison. I’ve had tons of foster siblings, but he’s one of the only ones I remember in any sort of detail. Maybe because I teased him so bad. Anyway, I got dressed, and the nurse said she’d walk me to the car, but I told her I could go myself.
I think she still suspected something, either that or she didn’t want the clinic to get sued, because she followed me out anyway.
I should have just told her. Let her know I changed my mind, but she’d already prepped me for the procedure by then, and I was afraid she’d say it was too late.
So she trailed me to Jake’s car, and I had to make it look convincing that I was digging around for some imaginary inhaler, and then when I was all the way inside where she couldn’t get to me, I shut the door and locked myself in.
She knocked on the window, more scared than angry, and you could tell she was worried about getting fired or something. But I was done with the women’s clinic, and I wasn’t ever going to look back.
I never do.
Five minutes later, I was in a gas station bathroom, pulling out those dilator thingies. I was sure by now the people at the clinic were going nuts, but I hadn’t used my real name on the intake form or given them anything but a made-up phone number and address. There was no way they were going to see or hear anything from me again.
I flushed those little cinnamon-looking sticks down the toilet, prayed to God it wouldn’t clog, and jumped back in the car.
I was going back to Orchard Grove. Back to the father of my baby.