Chapter Thirty
I had imagined a ring of clinics along the border like a constellation of stars. Like a lasso around the state. Like if they all sent up a beacon and you were in a plane at night, you would see a map of Texas projected against the dark, an outline of negative space, all that wasn’t there.
Isn’t here.
But of course I couldn’t get on an airplane. And of course there was no constellation of clinics.
“You have to tell them anyway,” I said.
“I will,” said Lola, “but not till after.”
“They’ll be mad, but they’ll understand.”
“Yeah, they’ll understand they made me sit through a million conversations about safe sex and not being home alone with Lucas and using my head, and I was too stupid for any of it to work.”
“They won’t think you’re stupid. They’ll be supportive.”
“Eventually, but first they’ll be apoplectic.
I’ll have to wait two weeks for Dad to fly home from Dubai or somewhere so he can attend the What-to-Do-About-Lola Sessions, even though the entire time he won’t uncross his arms or look at me or say one single word.
Then I’ll have to wait two more weeks for Mom to reschedule the world’s most important board meetings so she can make a color-coded fourteen-tab spreadsheet on how to deal with the Lola Problem. ”
“Yes,” I conceded, “but—”
“Please, Grandma. You can’t tell them. They can’t know till it’s over.”
“They could help you,” I said weakly.
“I don’t need help.” Lola wrapped her hands around a mug of cocoa she wasn’t drinking. “I only need you.”
I remembered Darcy’s zeal to take me to Disneyland to get an abortion. I remembered her insistence that this is what anyone would do. Including herself, she said. Including her girls, she said.
And I’d lied to my granddaughter before because I also remembered Dr. Blankman’s warnings. I wasn’t zikher that helping Lola wouldn’t get me in trouble. I was zikher that Lola needed help. I was zikher that if someone was going to get in trouble for helping Lola, better it was me than Darcy.
Colorado also required parental consent. Illinois was four states and, in my condition, at least an eighteen-hour drive away. In New Mexico, there were a number of clinics that provided medical abortions, pills they prescribed for you to take home with you. But Lola didn’t want that.
“I want to do it in the clinic. Fast and over with and there. Not over a couple days. Not messy. Not here.”
I despaired, but Lola is better at the internet than I am, and eventually she found it.
A lone viable option. An hour past the border into New Mexico, six hundred miles from home, a ten-hour drive if we didn’t have to stop every thirty minutes for me to use the bathroom and walk around a parking lot.
So we had a plan. At least the beginnings of one.
I didn’t want to tell it to Moth, though, because I knew he would have a great many very reasonable objections that didn’t matter because I’d made a promise to my granddaughter. But I had to tell him because we’d be gone at least two days and I didn’t want him to be worried.
He was worried anyway. “Are you off your trolley?”
“I’m … not sure.” British slang is sometimes hard to parse.
“You want a wee three times an hour.”
“We’ll take breaks,” I said.
“At which rate, it will take you two months to get to New Mexico.”
“I’ll drink less.”
“Righto, because dehydration is just what you and the pupacorn need.”
“We’ll pack some of those electrolyte popsicles.”
“They’ll melt!”
“In a cooler,” I added.
He put his hands on his hips. “You can’t sit that long.”
“I can. I just have to break it up.”
“By lying down on your side with a pillow between your knees, not by stopping for petrol.”
“I can stroll gently around the gas pumps.”
“Where you’ll be mobbed by photographers, lunatics, nosy drivers, all sorts.”
“We’ll leave in the middle of the night,” I said. “The horde will be home sleeping.”
“Someone will recognize you.” His hands grasped at thin air.
“Who?”
“Everyone!”
“The clinic’s in New Mexico,” I said.
“Your fame crosses state lines.”
“But we won’t be doing anything illegal in New Mexico,” I said, “so it won’t matter if anyone recognizes me.”
“It will matter to Lola,” he said, and I nodded because that was fair.
“I told her that.” I took a deep breath, let it out again. “But she’s not worried about being recognized. She’s worried about getting in trouble. And about getting me in trouble.”
“But how will she feel when everyone finds out? When the whole world knows she’s had this procedure?”
I raised my chin. “She has nothing to be ashamed of.”
“And still, she probably doesn’t want her abortion to be front-page news.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t.”
“In which case, this is a good plan why?”
“This is not a good plan.” I shrugged, but more in defiance than defeat. “She doesn’t have all the options she deserves. All she can choose is which shitty one to settle for.”
“This is a terrible idea, Sarge.”
“Do you have a better one?”
“I do, actually”—he wound his fingers through his hair triangles—“though nearly any idea would be better than this one.”
I ran my nails over the balloon of my belly. Lately, it felt itchy all the time. “Go ahead.”
“I drive,” he said.
“You don’t have a license.”
“Neither do you!”
“It’s the same amount of time in the car.”
“We’ll hire a big one. You can have a lie-down in the back seat while I drive.”
I untangled his hands from his hair and took them both in mine. “I promised I would take her.”
“And you will. But you didn’t promise you would take her all alone.”
Maisie rented a car, no subterfuge necessary.
She showed them her license, handed over her credit card, and brought us the key.
The only stretched truth was the word “car.” This one was more like a water buffalo, solid and stocky, enormous in all directions.
I needed a step to climb up into it—helpfully provided by the door itself when it opened—and there was enough room in back for me to not only lie down but stretch out.
It was discreetly gray all over. Even the windows were tinted.
Then we had to wait three days. I had a doctor’s appointment I couldn’t skip without raising not just suspicion but the cavalry.
Lola had an Algebra II final about which she said the same.
We wouldn’t be gone long enough for Darcy to notice I was missing, but she’d certainly notice her daughter was, so we couldn’t go until Friday anyway.
“Tell her you’re spending the weekend with a friend,” I proposed, though I felt bad about suggesting she lie to her mother.
She had a fix for that at least. “No need. I’ll just tell her the truth.”
Thank God. “I think that’s smart, Lols. Are you ready? Do you want me to be there when you tell her?”
“Not that part of the truth,” Lola said. “But when I tell her I’m sleeping over with you all weekend, she won’t even have any follow-up questions.”
Fortuitously, we’d been laying the groundwork of this deception for Lola’s entire life.
The evening before we left, we were already in pajamas when Moth knocked on the door with supplies: Three pairs of those huge, hideous, incredibly effective sunglasses old people wear over their regular glasses.
(Lola: “Hardest of passes.”) Two of those rubber hot-water bottles that were already old-fashioned when I was a child.
Snacks. Coolers. An enormous navy blue hoodie. A folding cane.
“I don’t need a cane.” I tried to sound certain, indignant, zikher.
“Doubles as a weapon.” He winked, but his joking didn’t make it unnecessary.
My hips, knees, ankles, even my toes protested louder by the day my ever-shifting balance, my ever-amassing mass.
And I was steadier on my feet in my apartment and in Vista View’s railing-lined hallways than I was out in the world. And I could not afford to fall.
Moth also had a box for Lola. She eyed it nervously then opened it and looked inside.
“Moth,” she whispered, more of an exhale really. “Oh.”
She was crying again. She reached in and lifted out two tiny hamsters, one for each hand.
“What happened to Ivy?” I said.
“She’s fine. These are new hamsters. Just for Lola. Something to come home to.”
We left before dawn the next morning. It was hours before the horde would arrive, but there was a giant pile on the grass next to the parking lot: bouquets of flowers in their cellophane wrappers, stuffies in the shape of every animal that ever walked the earth, candles, Bibles, photos in plastic sleeves, cards and drawings made, apparently, by children.
“Are these for anyone?” Lola said.
“I guess they’re for me. Or maybe the …” I patted the pupacorn in small circles.
“But can anyone take something?”
I’d never even thought to. The pile was usually subsumed by the horde. “I guess?”
Lola leaned over and plucked out an orange ukulele with longhorn horns for tuners.
“You play the ukulele?” No one told me anything.
She shrugged. “It’s just like the guitar but smaller.”
That made sense. “You play the guitar?”
“Lucas was teaching me.” She seemed like she might cry again.
“You can play for us in the car,” I said. “We’re driving through a lot of places where there won’t be radio stations.”
“Ray. Dee. Oh?” Lola sounded out then rolled her eyes. “We’ll use our phones.”
“Too small to hear with old ears,” Moth reported sadly.
“They go through the car stereo.” Lola’s tone suggested this was beyond obvious. “Don’t worry. I made a playlist.”