JUNE 23
There are no other patients in the waiting room when I come in. It doesn’t look like a medical office at all, which takes away some of my nerves. It’s painted a soft pink and carpeted with a green rug, and a group of tall houseplants in yellow ceramic pots sits in one corner. A woman with a pixie haircut is behind the check-in counter. She looks like a lady from Bea’s church, Ruth … something.
Please don’t let it be Ruth.
She looks up from her computer and smiles when she sees me.
“You must be Camille,” she says. “I’m Jean. We spoke on the phone. How are you doing, darlin’? Feeling any better?”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “I’m okay.”
“I was so worried about you,” Jean says. “My Bible study group has been praying for you.”
What she says doesn’t bother me because so many people in Texas are religious. But it seems strange to me that someone like her would want to work in a family planning clinic.
“How come there aren’t any protestors here?” I say. “I was worried about that.”
“Oh, they don’t bother us,” Jean says. She hands over a clipboard and asks me to fill in the information. I sit in one of the chairs. It asks the usual medical information, but I hesitate over the personal stuff like my address and emergency contact number.
“Excuse me, Jean? How confidential is this form?”
“No one will know but us, hon.”
At the end of the form is a question: What do you expect from this visit? I write in: I would like to schedule an abortion.
I hand it to Jean and sit down. I take my cell phone out to check my messages and Jean pipes up: “Darlin’, it’s clinic policy to turn your cell phone off. It interferes with our equipment.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I switch off my phone. A little TV across from me comes on and a video starts. A fetus floating in a uterus flashes on the screen. “Life is a miracle,” a man narrates.
I stand up and pretend to be interested in the plants. They’re fake.
A woman comes from the back dressed in pink scrubs. She’s holding my folder. “Hi, Camille,” she says. “I’m Lisa. You want to come with me?”
I follow Lisa in her pink scrubs down the hallway.
“How’s the weather out there?”
“Um, it’s hot,” I say.
She pauses by a scale and I set my purse down, take off my shoes, and stand on it. I’m ten pounds heavier than the last time I weighed myself. I flush with embarrassment, but Lisa doesn’t say anything. She makes a note in my file and leads me down a short hallway and into a darkened room. “Undress from the waist down and then sit on the table.” She hands me a sheet. “Cover up with this. I’ll be right back.”
I take off my shorts and underwear. I hesitate over my socks. I don’t think it would matter if I left them on, but she said everything from the waist down, so I take my socks off, too.
The tile floor is freezing, and my feet are cold by the time I sit down. The paper on the table rustles underneath me. I spread the sheet over my knees and tuck it around my waist.
Lisa comes back into the room and sits on a rolling stool. She takes out a long plastic rod and rolls what looks like a condom on it. “You can lie down now. This won’t take but a minute.”
“I … What is that?” I say.
“It’s an ultrasound probe, hon. It’s the best way to confirm the age of your baby,” she says. “It has to go in your vagina, okay?”
My heart starts to pound. “Do we have to do this?”
She doesn’t hear me. “Put your feet in the stirrups there and lie back.”
I do as she says. I lie back and set my feet carefully in the little metal hooks at the bottom of the table. They’ve covered them with baby socks—one pink, one blue.
Stirrups used to mean horses and trail rides and friends. Now stirrups mean ultrasounds and god-awful-looking probes.
“I’m gonna hand it to you, and you put it in. Just like putting in a tampon, okay?”
I take it, embarrassed beyond words. I slide it in. It’s cold and gooey.
She takes the handle from me and moves the probe back and forth; I can feel it swiping around. I stare up at the ceiling. There’s a sign up there that says JESUS LOVES YOU. The ultrasound machine is making this loud humming noise, and when Lisa moves, her stool squeaks. There’s a pineapple-shaped wax melter on the table next to me, and the fake tropical fumes wafting out of it are the kind that give me an instant headache. I turn my head away from it and try to hold my breath.
Lisa swipes the probe around some more. She’s taking forever, and I hope this means she doesn’t see anything. I hope the pregnancy test is wrong. Maybe it will be okay. I cross my fingers and then uncross them. Stupid.
“I love this job,” Lisa says. “It’s like opening a present at Christmas, seeing the baby for the first time. It’s such a miracle.”
I wish she wouldn’t call it a baby.
She taps something onto the keyboard on the machine. “There!” she says. “There’s your baby.”
My heart sinks. It’s true, and there’s no running away from it now.
She turns the screen toward me. “Here she is. Or he. We can’t tell the sex just yet. You’ll know that in a few weeks. Unless you want it to be a surprise when you deliver. Are you hoping for a girl or a boy?”
I stare up at the ceiling. I won’t look. I don’t want to see it.
“Look at that teeny little miniature baby.”
I shrug.
“You don’t want to see your baby?” she says in disbelief.
I shake my head.
“You have to look,” Lisa says with warning. “It’s Texas law. If you don’t look, then you have to pay for the exam, and it’s four hundred dollars.”
I look. The picture on the screen is black and white. In the middle is a round blank space with a white shape, which Lisa points to. She smiles.
“This is your baby here. You can see she has little arms and legs, and her heart fluttering, that means it’s beating. Isn’t that exciting?”
I stare at the ceiling again. “Not really,” I say.
“A heartbeat, it’s a love beat, we say in the clinic. Just like that cheesy old seventies song.”
“When can I schedule it?”
“Schedule what, hon?” she replies.
“The procedure.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine at all. I don’t know whose it is.
Lisa says nothing.
“And I’ve never heard of that song,” I whisper.
Lisa prints out a copy of the ultrasound and puts it in my folder, but her friendliness is gone. I pull out the probe and hand it to her. She does whatever she has to do with it to make it ready for the next person, hands me a washcloth, and leaves.
I sit up and wipe myself off.
I get dressed. There’s a butt-shaped wrinkle in the paper on the table where I was sitting. I tear it off, bunch it into a ball, and cram it into the trash can.
No one comes back in, so I pick up my purse and go out in the hall. I stand there. After a few minutes, Lisa appears and gestures for me to follow her into an office. She leaves the folder on the desk, steps back into the hall, and closes the door behind her without saying a word to me.
I hear whispers in the hallway. I make out Lisa saying something about me being determined to have an abortion. There’s a rustling of paper and then footsteps walking away.
I didn’t do a good enough job cleaning the ultrasound goo off, and I can feel my underwear sticking to it. I cross my arms over my chest. It’s cold in the office. What’s taking so long? I’m the only one in the clinic. I’m going to be late for work, and Iggy will yell at me.
A silver digital picture frame sits on the corner of the desk. I watch as a photo of a couple and two elementary-school-age boys dissolves into a photo of the family standing in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Disneyland castle.
I reach for my phone for something to do, but I remember I’m not supposed to turn it on. There is a stack of pink and blue pamphlets on a table next to me, so I pick one up. The information inside is about all the side effects of an abortion, things like breast cancer, suicide, and hysterectomy from a punctured uterus. I put the pamphlet down.
Finally, a woman comes in—it’s the lady from the pictures. The rims of her flesh-colored peds are visible inside her black patent leather flats. Her chin-length soccer mom bob is hair-sprayed perfectly in place.
“Hello, Camille.” She sits down at the desk. “I’m Susan Clark, your pregnancy counselor.”
“Hi.”
“So we know you’re pregnant, that’s definitely positive from the ultrasound.” She speaks carefully, trying to meet my eyes, but I won’t look at her.
“Do you want to tell me how this happened? Sometimes it’s very comforting to tell someone.”
“I…” I glance at Susan. “Do I have to?”
“It’s important,” she says. “It gives us a picture of who you are and how we can help you. What you tell me stays here in my office. This is a safe place.”
I clear my throat. “Um … well, I was dating this guy, and we hooked up. We used a condom, but I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Unfortunately, condoms don’t work very well. Condoms fail at least fifty percent of the time, so I’m not surprised it broke.” She pulls my folder toward her. “Most birth control does fail, including birth control pills. The only one hundred percent way of being sure you’ll never get pregnant is to wait to have sex until you’re ready to have a baby, right?” She nods, her eyebrows raised, as though I’ve done something really wrong. “You know the mistake you made, right?” Again, the raised eyebrows and the nod.
“I don’t think that’s right about condoms,” I say quietly. I try to think back to tenth grade when we had sex ed, but no one talked about contraception.
She stares at me.
I feel stupid, but more than that, I feel shamed.
“Now you know. And now you can do better going forward from here, right?” Susan finishes all her questions with the word right. Like I agree with her completely.
Susan opens my folder and goes through the information. She’s taking forever. I shift in my chair.
“I have to get to work,” I say. But it’s like she doesn’t hear me.
She flips the pages to the ultrasound picture. She smiles and turns it so I can see. “Look at that little miracle—” she says.
“I think there’s a mistake,” I say, interrupting her.
She looks at the name on my folder. “You’re Camille Winchester, right?”
“That’s my name, yes.”
“Looks like your due date will be—”
“I don’t need to know the due date because I’m not having it.”
“It?” Susan says. “What is it?”
I swallow. “The…”
“Baby?” Susan says. “Because it is a baby, you know that, Camille, right?”
“I guess I should have said on the phone. I think Jean misunderstood.” I bunch my hands in my lap. This is bad. I should have spoken up and told them right away instead of assuming they knew I wanted an abortion. Now I’ll probably have to pay for that ultrasound, and I only have a few dollars in my purse.
“Well, let’s chat about that,” she says. Her voice is calm and she forms each word perfectly. “God sent you here to us, and we want to look after you. Now, you have other options for your little one, and I’d like you to know what they are before you jump to a decision you may regret later in your life, right?” She comes around to my side of the desk and sits on the chair opposite me. She leans forward and puts her hands over mine. “We can help you find a wonderful deserving Christian family to adopt your baby, or you can keep her and raise her yourself. Both of these decisions will give her the same chance at life that your mother gave you. Can I tell you a little bit more about how we can help?”
Four hundred dollars, I think. I’ll owe that if I don’t listen. So I nod.
“It looks like you’re three months pregnant.” She reaches into a wicker basket on the table and takes out a little doll. “This is what your baby looks like now.” The tiny figure has a face and little arms and legs.
“I’m not that far along,” I say.
She sets the figure on my lap. “It’s very hard to tell the exact age.”
“But that can’t be—”
“Now, the first step is to keep you safe, happy, and healthy. Our school for expectant mothers will protect you from people who might try to make you feel bad for your decision. We also have a dormitory if you feel unsafe or unwelcome in your home. In addition, we’ll teach you important mommy skills like baby care and budgeting. We also offer vocational skills at the school like retail sales, waitressing, housekeeping, to help you earn money.”
Over on the picture frame, a photo of a lady’s birthday party slides into view. Her grayish blond hair is tightly curled, and she looks like an older version of Susan Clark.
“I’m not dropping out of my school,” I say. “Why would I do that?”
Susan stands and reaches up to take a pamphlet off the shelf. “We find it’s for the best. Our girls made the terrible decision to give themselves to boys before marriage, and they have to deal with that. Bullying only adds fuel to the fire. Our school is the best option.”
“I don’t want to drop out of my high school,” I say again, this time more firmly. “I want to finish my senior year and go to college. I don’t want to have a baby.”
“I know you feel that way now,” she says. “But once you hold your baby in your arms and see her little face for the first time, you’ll realize you’ve done the right thing. Don’t you want to do the right thing, Camille?”
“I … of course, but—”
“What if your mother had aborted you? Have you ever thought of that?”
“My mother resents me,” I blurt out. “She had to give up her dream of being a pastry chef when she had me. If my mom had aborted me, she’d be living her dream. So…”
Susan’s face hardens.
“Why is my life more important than hers?” I whisper.
She slides the pamphlet across the desk. “To take a life, a little innocent baby’s life, is tantamount to murder. I think you need to think a little harder about this decision. It’s proven that abortion can cause terrible mental health issues for you like depression and suicide, and physical problems down the road like uterine perforations and infertility. It can also cause painful periods for the rest of your life.”
I shouldn’t have yelled at her like that. Now she’ll kick me out and force me to pay. “Can I just schedule the … procedure? Please?”
“You can’t say the word out loud?” She looks me right in the eye, her face expressionless. “Abortion.”
I meet her gaze, but I don’t reply.
“We are here for mothers, not murderers. I think the next step for us is to contact your parents.” She reaches for the phone. She opens my folder. I see my mom’s cell phone number under emergency contact.
I stand up and snatch my folder from under Susan’s hand; the doll tumbles to the floor. I race out of the room.
“That folder is clinic property,” Susan shouts.
I cram the folder into my backpack on top of my Iggy’s uniform and push the door open.
I’m halfway down the street when I hear footsteps behind me. I’m scared it’s Susan or Lisa running after me to make me pay for the ultrasound and to get my folder back. But it’s Jean. She’s holding a bag with tissue poking out of the top.
“I want you to have this,” Jean says. “It’s a little something I made for you the night you called.” She hands the bag to me. “You get in touch if you need anything, Camille. I mean that.”
When I get to work, I look inside the bag. Under the tissue paper is a pair of pink-and-blue knitted baby booties with little tassels. I find a trash can and shove the booties underneath a pile of wrappers smeared with ketchup and chili cheese.