Chapter Thirty-One
The clinic the next morning felt like a beacon. Like a sanctuary. Like the miracle everyone kept accusing me of being.
But it looked like a low brick building in a cracked parking lot with a few scattered battered cars.
A few scattered battered cars and maybe twenty people shouting and pumping signs, big posters on long wooden dowels.
Pictures of babies and pictures of babies disguised as fetuses and pictures of hell and pictures of happy families and pictures of bloodied and unclean surgical instruments.
The people waving them were yelling, fists clenched white, bodies pitched forward, though whether under the weight of their signs or their own rage and culpability wasn’t entirely clear.
I had a flash of regret about making Moth wait for us back at the hotel.
I’d reasoned Lola and I could do this part on our own.
I’d reasoned an abortion wasn’t the sort of occasion to which you brought along your grandmother’s prom date.
But Lola was in tears again, and I thought of what I’d momentarily forgotten: that there are very few circumstances under which you wouldn’t choose more love if more love were on offer.
I turned off the engine of the water buffalo and parked as far away as I could. It wasn’t far, and anyway, as if someone had fired a starter pistol, the signs and the people underneath them galloped at once in our direction.
“Protesters,” Lola said under her breath.
“Bullies,” I corrected. “Protesters are noble fighters battling injustices. These people are perpetrating one. They know nothing about you and therefore aren’t entitled to an opinion about you. Ignore them.”
“No.” Lola shook her head. She was weeping, but she also sounded strong, resolved. “I don’t want to ignore them. I want to fight.”
“In that case”—I nodded once—“all you have to do is get out of the car.”
It was a tall order, though. Lola opened her door and stepped down into the fray.
It took me longer. I was not moving quickly that morning.
I had not been moving quickly in a long, long time.
The bullies surrounded her at once, teeth bared, spittle flying.
“Abortion is murder,” they screamed. “Baby killer,” they screamed.
“You’re going to burn in hell,” they screamed.
“Murderer,” they screamed. Lola couldn’t get through.
She couldn’t raise her head. They surrounded her, and she had nowhere to turn.
Or rather, she turned and turned but there was nowhere to go.
Instead, she opened her mouth—to explain?
to yell back? to defend herself?—but was shouted down.
She couldn’t make herself heard, or maybe she couldn’t make herself speak, but I was proud of her.
It was brave to try, and she was only fifteen.
She covered her eyes, then her face. She folded into herself.
She turned back toward the car, but they got between her and the door, between her and the clinic, between her and the world.
She was surrounded. She looked terrified.
I unfolded myself slowly, climbed gingerly onto the pop-out step then free of the car, and slammed the door.
The bullies’ heads all turned in my direction at once.
When they saw me, all of me, in all my vast, expansive glory, the screaming ceased all at once.
You could say a hush descended, but it was less a hush than an extinguishing of sound, less descent than crash, like they had all been silenced by a spell.
Moth’s giant sunglasses sat in a fat black band over my face like my eyes had been censored for divulging state secrets.
My gray tangles frizzed out the back of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap.
My belly was as oversized as anything in Texas (which is saying something).
I extended the cane with as much flourish as I could muster and made sure my hand on it was steady before I took my first step.
I imagined using it to clear a path. I remembered Moth’s joke that it doubled as a weapon and considered my odds versus a wooden dowel.
I saw my hand on the grip—my hand with its brown spots and its wrinkles and its knuckles aiming to escape my too-thin skin—and was unafraid.
I unfurled my enormous wings.
The bullies parted like a dry path had risen out of a storming sea for Lola and me alone. I held my other hand out to her. “Ready?”
“No.”
“Want to change your mind?” I said. “We can absolutely turn around and go home.”
“Also no.”
“Then let’s go. These people don’t scare me.”
“They scare me.”
“They can’t hurt you, baby.”
“How do you know?”
“You’ve got me.”
“You might not be enough,” Lola said.
“And I’ve got you,” I added. “I promise.”
At first, Lola had to go with a nurse by herself.
This made sense. The nurses and doctors would have to ask her questions and run tests and tell her details one wouldn’t want to answer or undergo or receive in front of one’s grandmother.
They would want to make sure Lola had arrived at her decisions on her own and wasn’t being pressured or coerced by anyone, especially not her knocked-up abortion-loving infamous septuagenarian progenitor.
For security reasons, no bags or purses were allowed.
I’d put my phone and key and wallet in my pockets and carried in my hands only the book I’d brought.
In the waiting room, I opened it and prepared to settle in for the day.
I set an alarm on my phone so I wouldn’t forget, twice an hour per Dr. Kim’s orders, to take a turn about the waiting room like a Regency heroine.
But I was only on page twelve when the nurse returned to bring me back.
“If you feel squeamish or uncomfortable, you can wait out here,” she said, “but Lola has invited you to be with her.”
My surprise must have been evident because she added, “Lola will have a doctor or nurse with her at all times, but we find that patients are calmer and more comfortable if their support person can be with them as well.”
So I inserted my bookmark, hauled myself upright, and waddled through a heavy iron door after the nurse.
The treatment room looked just like any other: exam table, stirrups, instruments, rolling stool, chair.
This last had been situated by Lola’s head, and I took it gratefully, then Lola’s hand, then a moment to ready myself for whatever might be coming, but nothing was.
A nurse handed Lola a tiny paper cup of pills and a larger one with water, and then we all sat and waited for the ibuprofen to work and the doctor to come in.
I had been picturing an operating room—scalpels, needles, canisters of gas, machines with tubes and engines to suck and whir and intimidate. But there was none of that.
They put Lola’s feet up in the stirrups, used the usual duck lips and ring light to see inside, threaded in a rubber tube no bigger around than a pencil, attached one of those handheld suction things that look like the toy syringe that comes in a child’s doctor’s kit, and pulled back its plastic plunger.
It took maybe five minutes. At one point, Lola breathed in hard.
“Try to relax,” the doctor said, as they always do, and as you never can.
“You okay?” I stood and laid the hand that wasn’t holding Lola’s on her forehead.
“Just a little pinch,” Lola said. “I’m fine. Are you?”
“Me? Don’t worry about me.”
That was as long as we had to talk during the procedure—it was so fast—but in the recovery room, when we were alone again, Lola said, “Are you jealous?”
“Jealous?”
“Because I get to have an abortion when you don’t?”
“Not at all.” This had honestly never occurred to me. It was another example of how impossible it is to understand what it feels like to be a grandmother when you are only fifteen. “I’m grateful.”
“Grateful?” She opened her eyes to see if I was serious. “Why?”
“Because you get to have an abortion when I don’t.”
She closed her eyes again. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not, no,” I agreed. “But if you can’t have fair—and you can’t, you never can—this is what you want instead.
You know how many things I can do that my grandmother never dreamed of?
This is the natural order of unfair. The best you can ever do is for it to be less unfair on more fronts for you than it was for your grandmother. ”
“Is for your grandmother,” Lola corrected.
“Yes,” I conceded.
“And I have less rights than you did.”
“Fewer,” I said. But otherwise, she wasn’t wrong.
An hour later, we were back at the hotel. We’d gotten two rooms, but I was staying with her rather than with Moth. Just in case. We changed into pajamas, even though it was only lunchtime, and put Moth’s snacks and hot-water bottles to immediate use.
“It’s hard to believe all that fuss about such a tiny procedure,” Lola said.
I plugged in the hotel coffeemaker to fill the hot-water bottles. “That’s not what all the fuss is about,” I said.
The next morning when I opened my eyes, very early, Lola wasn’t in the other bed. She wasn’t in the bathroom. She wasn’t—thank God—passed out on the carpeting. So where the hell was she?
I took three seconds, counted them aloud, to make sure I was remembering correctly where I was and why. I looked down at my belly—still pregnant—then Lola’s sheets—no blood. I looked at my phone. No new texts, no missed calls. Where, then?
I pulled enormous maternity shorts on under my nightgown as quickly as I could—which was not that quickly—slipped my swollen feet into sandals by feel alone, then flung the door wide onto the open-air corridor, suffused with early-morning light, my eyes streaming against the new-risen sun.
I banged on Moth’s door, and he threw it open in his pajamas, hair too wild even to triangulate, eyes wide with panic already.
“She’s not here?” I demanded, and watched his face cycle from terror at my pounding on the door at that hour to relief that I was okay to terror again at what my question must mean.
He dressed more quickly than I had.
Back outside, our heads whipped right then left, but our feet froze.
Which way to go? There was no blood on the terra-cotta tiles.
I double-took on a Lola-shaped cactus in a pot at the end of the corridor.
I debated whether to spend the extra seconds it would take to go back in the room and get the cane.
And then Moth placed a cool hand on my arm and pointed with his chin, and there she was, sitting on a lounge chair in the pool area, playing ukulele for the dawn.
The sun was just cresting the craggy needles of the mountains, washing everything in pink and gold, a new day, a new start, undeniable.
I wanted to tell Lola that in my experience, my vast experience, when you find yourself at an end, you are probably also knee-deep in beginnings.
I wanted to tell her that being knee-deep in beginnings is a good indication that the mires you’ve been wading through are mostly still damp and mud-clogged.
And though I knew she wouldn’t understand it for years yet, I wanted to tell her that most of life is muddy middle, normal on the way to ordinary, that the mistake people make is to want it any other way, as if prosaic is boring and a failure of character rather than the dream.
I let myself into the pool area. We had it to ourselves.
“Hi, Grandma.” She wasn’t looking at me. She was concentrating on her fingers, squinting against the sunrise. A little more blood in her cheeks than yesterday. None anywhere else that I could see.
“You frightened us,” I said. “We didn’t know where you were.”
“It’s a small hotel. Not a lot of options.”
“Still, you shouldn’t scare old people. How do you feel?”
“Same. Mostly just tired.”
“Well, it’s early.”
“Yeah.” She plucked at the ukulele some more. I didn’t recognize the song, nor would I have sworn that it was one per se, but it was pleasant to listen to anyway. Then she paused, fingers perched over the strings. “Also, I called Mom.”
She still wasn’t looking at me, stayed bent over her instrument, but her voice broke. I laid a hand on the back of her neck. She leaned her head into it.
“I know,” I said.
She looked up at me, her eyes leaking. “You do?”
I fished my phone from the pocket of my nightgown so she could see. I’d had a series of texts from Darcy in the middle of the night.
12:12 a.m.
I can’t believe you did this
12:14 a.m.
*had to do this
12:15 a.m.
*instead of me
12:22 a.m.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
Lola’s eyes spilled over. “I guess we should go home,” she said eventually.
“I guess we should,” I agreed. “You feel up to it? We could wait the day.”
Her face suggested I had recommended a convalescence at a 7-Eleven, even though the pool looked lovely really, the light like a promise. “Here?”
“Here’s where we are.” I turned my hands up.
“Duh,” said Lola, but then she added, “You need to get back to Vista View and Dr. Kim and bed rest.”
“And you need to get back to school and your parents and your life.”
“I feel like a different person,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
“Me too,” I said. “Me neither.”
We packed up and buckled back into the water buffalo. I took the first shift driving. Lola picked at the ukulele in the back seat. Moth sang along gamely in the front.
Our sign, when we came to it, was more grammatically irritating than New Mexico’s.
WELCOME TO TEXAS. DRIVE FRIENDLY—THE TEXAS WAY
Despite the -ly at the end, “friendly” is not an adverb. But I was glad to see it anyway. I reached out and reset the trip odometer.
“Why’d you do that?” Lola said.
“Be it ever so humble—and backward and bigoted and infuriating AF, as you would say—there is no place like home.”
We were two and two-tenths miles into Texas when a siren chirped and I raised my eyes to flashing red and blue lights in the rearview mirror.