Jack Ketchum - Right to Life

New York City

June 8, 1998

10:20 a.m.

They drove to the clinic in silence.

The night before theyd said it all. Now there was nothing left to say.

It just remained to do it. Get it over with.

Morning rush hour traffic had ended over an hour ago and traffic was fairly light. The streets of the Upper West Side seemed strangely still and dreamlike, the blue-green Toyota van in front of them drifting from stoplight to stoplight like a guide taking them from nowhere to some other nowhere while they followed to no determinate end.

Running on empty, Greg thought. Both of us.

The silence turned him back in time to their bed last night in her apartment, making love through a haze of tears which came and went with the gentle anguished regularity of waves at low tide, their very heartbeats muted, the two of them drawn more closely together than they had ever imagined or wished possible in the grim sad knowledge that pleasure now was also pain and would remain so for a very long time. Her tears cooling on his cheek and mingling with his own, the musky smell of tears and then the feel of them falling to his chest as she sailed astride him like a ship on a windless sea and when it was finished, the long dark night embracing in warm attempted sleep.

Then stillness too through the loud morning rituals of water, razor and toothbrush, both he and Sara alone now in these things as they would ever be. Then coffee drunk in silence at the table, Greg reaching out to take her hand a moment across the polished pine to feel the warmth of her again, to bind them for a moment before walking out through the door into the cool bright morning air. To the morning errands of New Yorkers along 91st and West End Avenue, the cars and cabs and delivery trucks. And then down to the car parked deep in the cooler echoing basement garage next door, Greg driving them across to Broadway and then downtown. Bringing them forward along the wheel of time to this awful empty place. This quiet, this exhausted drift of feeling.

Are you all right? he said finally.

She nodded.

The clinic wasnt far. 68th and Broadway, only five blocks away. One of only three of them left open on the entire West Side from the Village to the Bronx.

Its a girl, she said.

And it was that, he thought and not his question that truly broke the silence.

How can you tell?

I just know. I remember the way Daniel felt, even at this stage. This feels different.

He was aware of something thick and heavy inside him again. Hed heard the story many times in the six years hed known her. Her perceptions of the thing varying slightly over time and distance and depth of understanding. Daniel, her son, dead in a frozen lake in upstate New York at the age of six. Even his body lost to her beneath the ice and never found.

If there was ever a woman he would have wished to have a child with, to have raised his child, especially a girl-child, it was this one.

His hands were sweating on the wheel.

Because of course it was impossible.

Why dont you drop me off in front, she said. Find a place to park. Ill go in and register. Less time waiting.

Are you sure?

The front will be fine.

What about those people with their goddamn picket lines. Theyll probably be out again.

They dont bother me. Except to piss me off. Theyll let me by, dont worry.

He supposed that no, she was not about to be intimidated. Last week going in for her examination there had been seven of them on the sidewalk by the entrance to the Jamaica Savings Bank, the building which housed the clinic and held its tenuous lease, seven men and women standing behind blue police barricades, carrying cardboard signs saying HES A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and waving pamphlets and holding out tiny plastic twelve-week foetuses cupped in the palms of their hands.

One of them, a surprisingly handsome fortyish man, shoved his own little specimen at Saras face and Sara turned on Gregs arm and said you stupid shit and walked on by past the three policemen lounging at the door who were guarding these creeps on his and her tax dollars thank you very much, and into the building.

Then this other one, this ordinary-looking woman about the same age as the man, who followed them to the elevator and up and sat there with a magazine across from them in the waiting room staring until Saras name was called and then got up and left. A more subtle form of harassment. Were they even allowed to do that? Theyd never said a word to her though hed wanted to. And shed evidently known what he was thinking. To hell with her, shed whispered, shes not worth the effort.

She could deal with them.

Still hed feel better if he was with her.

Whats another minute or two? he said. Let me just park this thing and well go in together.

She shook her head. Please, Greg. I want to get this over with as soon as possible. You know?

Okay. Sure. I understand.

But he didnt. Not really. How could he? For all the talk last night it was impossible to gauge how she felt at just this moment. Not now in the light of day, far beyond the familiar comfort of home and bed and the comfort of lying in his arms and even the comfort of tears. He wanted to know suddenly, needed to know, that she didnt hate him, didnt blame him fundamentally though twice last night shed said she didnt and hed believed her. But now it was different. He wanted to know she forgave him. For everything. For his marriage. For his son. Even for his sex. For being born a man so that he didnt have to carry couldnt possibly carry the full weight of this. Hed have done it in a minute if it were possible.

Her diaphragm had failed them. It happened sometimes. They were adults and they knew that. It was her diaphragm. It didnt matter. Hed never felt so guilty in his life.

Do no harm, his mother had told him when he was a boy. The physicians rule. Her personal golden rule. And here he was, doing harm to the woman he loved.

Still more harm.

He could see it in the distance on the corner of 68th Street a block and a half away, an undistinguished grey highrise that was probably built back during the mid-sixties, the bank on the first floor and offices above. Across Broadway a Food Emporium and the huge Sony movie complex. And yes, there were the long blue sawhorses and the two cops standing at the door and people crying signs walking back and forth along the curb.

Pull up behind them, she said. I dont feel like getting out right in the middle of that.

He glided to a stop. She opened the door.

He put his hand on her arm and stopped her and then he didnt know what to say. He just sat there moving his hand slowly over the warm smooth flesh of her arm and then she smiled a little. He saw the worry and sleeplessness that ambushed her just behind the smile. The eyes couldnt lie to him. They never had.

Ill just be a minute, he said. I can probably find something on 67th or over on Amsterdam.

Ill be fine.

She got out and shut the door and he watched her walk away toward the dozen or so people ahead of her moving in circles curbside at the oilier end of the block and then he pulled out slowly past her and she glanced at him but didnt smile this time, only hitched her purse up on her shoulder. He passed the stem-faced, holier-than-thou types milling across the sidewalk like flies on a carcass and then he turned the corner.