CHAPTER 11 Angela 
LATE JANUARY 2017
Since finding Frances Mitchell’s letter and the note from the young girl named Margaret, Angela has been sending out messages to Nancy Mitchells everywhere in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond, but so far her search hasn’t yielded any results. Despite Angela’s niggling sense of shame at pursuing the unknown Nancy, she doesn’t feel right sneaking around behind Tina’s back, so she decides to tell her about “the Nancys,” as she has collectively dubbed them in her head, on their way to the fertility clinic.
Tina nods in her usual sanguine way. “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”
The rest of the car ride passes in a prickly silence that Angela acknowledges she may have imagined, but any lingering tension is instantly overshadowed once they enter the treatment room. They’re in today for another expensive intrauterine insemination procedure—their ninth. Five of them didn’t take at all. Two did, but both ended in miscarriages.
Almost a year ago, Angela had to go to an abortion clinic to treat one of the miscarriages that hadn’t naturally completed. At the time, she had no idea that the abortion procedure was also used after some miscarriages. While she didn’t have any real preconceptions of the women who access abortion services, she was reminded that these clinics aren’t just filled with irresponsible teenagers. Even the most anti-abortion, right-wing woman might at some point need to have the procedure after a miscarriage to avoid a potential infection. After all is said and done, it’s just like any other surgery or treatment. But the protesters outside the clinic didn’t seem to have gotten that memo.
When she and Tina arrived at the clinic, they immediately noticed a crowd of people gathered on the south side of the street across from the entrance. They all wore the same black toque, and about half of them were carrying neon poster boards boasting a variety of ominous phrases in thick marker. Angela could see other signs with pink and red images on them, and more giant headlines propped up along the sidewalk. From a distance she couldn’t tell what they were, but she could guess: gruesome photos of alleged fetuses juxtaposed with happy grannies holding fat white babies behind a soft blurry camera filter.
On the north side of the street, a few counterprotesters held up purple signs. Three police cars were parked in front of the clinic and the police were chatting with the counterprotesters. One officer was standing sentry near the front door of the building.
Tina took hold of Angela’s gloved hand. The pro-choice counterprotesters waved them through, smiling at them both as they passed.
“Ignore them,” one said to Angela, indicating the shouting mass across the street. “They know they’ve lost, and they’re pissed off about it.”
But they were, by design, difficult to ignore. Glancing sideways, Angela caught sight of some of their signs:
LIFE IS SACRED
ABORTION IS MURDER
YOUR ALL BABY KILERS
At least spell your fucking sign correctly, Angela thought wryly. There was even a small boy, just four or five years old, holding a placard that read MY MOTHER CHOSE LIFE. Her pulse had started to race then, and Angela couldn’t stop herself.
“Do you think I actually want to be here?” she’d screamed at them. “Do you think I don’t wish I were still pregnant? You ignorant fucks!”
“Ange!” Tina had grabbed her shoulders. “Ange, come on. Come on. It’s not worth it. Leave it.”
Their experiences at the fertility clinic are so bright and positive, despite the physical discomfort. The nurses and technicians offer well-wishes and support for their choice to become mothers. No one protests outside its doors, screaming at passing women and judging them for wanting to be pregnant. Yet aren’t fertility clinics and abortion clinics just two sides of the same coin?
Angela was grateful that she hadn’t needed to go back to that horrible place after the most recent miscarriage, which completed on its own.
But that was then, she reminds herself as they wait in the treatment room. Today is a day of positivity. Today they’re at the point in the fertility roller coaster where their hopes are high for a successful insemination and implantation, and they try not to remember how crushingly disappointing it is if it doesn’t take. Angela knows Tina is tired of the process, but she isn’t ready to give up.
The next one will be it, she tells Tina every time, repeating the mantra to herself whenever she starts to doubt it. The next one. The next one. We’ll get a baby on the next one.
Back before Christmas, when Angela got her period after the last failed treatment, she walked out of the bathroom sobbing, shaking with rage and resentment and a dozen other emotions. But mostly, she was full of hate. So full of it that she couldn’t breathe.
She hated her friends who already had children.
She hated those stupid teenagers who got pregnant by accident, without even trying.
She hated how fucking hard this was on her body and her heart and her marriage. Her bank account.
She hated trying to get pregnant but hated the thought of not getting pregnant even more.
Tina came home from work to find Angela in her spot on the couch, a glass of real wine in her hand and Grizzly curled up in her lap as tears poured down her swollen face, and she knew immediately what had happened. They were both so intently tuned in to Angela’s cycle, they knew that in the coming days they were approaching either the beginning or the end of something.
“Oh, Ange,” Tina said, flopping down on the couch beside her wife and pulling her into a hug. Grizzly meowed between them, and to Angela it somehow sounded like an apology for everything they wanted and couldn’t have. Angela sobbed even harder in Tina’s arms, devastated by the loss of the possibility.
A couple of days later after Angela had calmed down enough, Tina broached the idea of adoption with her. They talked all evening, but Angela wouldn’t budge. Having been adopted herself, there was a drive deep down in her being to have a biological baby of her own, a direct line where her child could connect the dots, without having to search for them like Angela had. Tina never wanted to be the one to carry, and Angela was determined.
Tina eventually agreed to keep trying, though Angela could tell she still worried about the impact their fertility efforts were having on them. People talked about it as a “journey,” a trip down a winding road guided by a presumption that eventually they would reach their golden destination, but most of the time it just felt like a Sisyphean task. They never spoke about it directly, but Angela had the sense that there was a limit of some kind on the horizon—financial, emotional. She wasn’t sure exactly what, but she could see it in the creases in Tina’s forehead every time they came in for an IUI procedure. Every time one failed. Every time Angela started bleeding.
In the treatment room now, Angela looks up at her wife’s face and sees those same creases of apprehension. But she squeezes Angela’s hand as the nurse approaches the table with the syringe.
“All right, Angela, take a deep breath now and keep breathing. This’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Yeah,” Angela says, letting her breath out in a long stream, staring at the institutional drop ceiling and thinking of all the other times she’s lain on this table in a hospital gown, praying that this time will be the one. But she’ll keep pushing that boulder up the hill as long as she can. “I know.”
Two weeks later, Angela unpacks a box of Valentine’s Day decorations on the cash desk at the antiques shop. She dug out the dusty cardboard box from the bottom shelf of the tiny storeroom, and she’s spent the past hour finding appropriate locations for the various shiny red baubles, glittery strings of beads, and pink plastic dollar-store hearts. It’s a slow Monday morning at the shop, so she’s getting the decorating finished before the foot traffic picks up later in the afternoon.
Angela puts her second pot of decaf on to brew, then carries some decorations, a pair of scissors, masking tape, and a step stool to the back of the store. She’s just hung the first strand of hearts from the top of a bookshelf when the bells above the door jingle, welcoming her second customer of the day.
“Hello!” she calls, stepping down off the stool.
“Hi, there! Delivery for you,” a male voice responds.
“Excellent, thank you.”
Angela weaves her way to the front, brushing her hands on her jeans to rid them of the thick coat of dust and making a mental note to do a thorough spring-clean.
The delivery driver holds his mobile phone out to her, and she signs a sloppy signature with the tip of her index finger. She takes the first of several boxes from him without thinking. It’s heavy, and she realizes that she’ll have to ask him to bring the boxes around to the back of the cash desk next time. She shouldn’t be lifting anything heavy at the moment.
The bells jingle as the driver leaves the shop, and a chorus of street sounds rushes inside before the door swings shut again.
After Angela finishes hanging the decorations, she pours herself a cup of coffee, then slits the tape on the first box and starts unpacking this month’s shipment of used books.
It’s a curious collection: contemporary and classic fiction—Angela swears they must already have fourteen copies of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and she’s just unpacked another two—biographies and memoirs, outdated travel books that rarely sell, dog-eared and oil-splattered cookbooks, unread self-help guides, and a smattering of general nonfiction in a sweeping array of topics from war history to terrace gardening and horse breeding.
Angela sorts the books into piles by genre, entering each one into the computer system as she goes. She’s nearly at the end of the fifth and final box when she pulls out a paperback bound in a slightly tattered black cover with a bold white title.
THE JANE NETWORK
The author is a Dr. Evelyn Taylor. There’s no cover art or anything else to indicate what the book is about. Is it fiction or nonfiction? Both intrigued and a little irritated at the extra effort required to sort this book into the appropriate pile, Angela opens it to the copyright page, scanning for more detail. It’s nonfiction, published in 1998. Under the subject heading, she reads: Jane Network, The (abortion service) | Abortion services—Toronto—Ontario—CANADA | Abortion—Canada—History.
“Wow.” Angela’s eyebrows pop up into her dark bangs. On the opposite page, she reads the dedication, which simply says: For the Janes. She flips two more pages and smooths down the table of contents.
- 1. No Other Choice: A (Very) Brief History of Women’s Reproductive Options to 1960
- 2. My Montreal Years: Training Under Dr. Morgentaler
- 3. A Right to Know: The Birth Control Handbook and Other Subversive Texts
- 4. The Revolution Begins: The Abortion Caravan of 1970
- 5. The Jane Network Is Born
- 6. “I’m Looking for Jane”: Expanding the Service
- 7. Raids, Revival & Restructuring
- 8. R. v. Morgentaler (1988): The Trial & Decriminalization
- 9. “There Will Always Be a Need”: Life After Jane
“Huh.” She sets the book aside near her computer monitor and quickly processes the remaining two books in the box. She glances at the clock; it’s nearly time for lunch and she’s starving. Angela heads into the storeroom and pulls her lunch out of the mini-fridge on the floor. She heats up her leftover soup in the microwave, tapping her finger impatiently on the white plastic door and ignoring the fact that she’s now made the whole store smell like onions. Using her scarf as an oven mitt, she takes the steaming container back to the cash desk and settles down on the stool. Propping The Jane Network up against the computer monitor, she flips through its pages.
Angela wonders whether Tina has ever come across this organization in her academic life. Angela’s never even heard of it. After blowing on her first spoonful of soup, she picks up her cell phone and dials her wife’s number. Tina answers after two rings.
“Hey, T,” Angela says. “Got a question for you. Have you ever heard of something called the Jane Network?”