Authors: Jodi Picoult
“So you wouldn’t plan to raise these pre-born children with any religion?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I’m going to raise a child to be loved and to show love; to be self-respecting and open-minded and tolerant of everyone. If I can find the right religious group to support that, then maybe we will join it.”
“Ms. Baxter, are you familiar with the case of
Burrows v. Brady?”
“Objection!” Angela says. “Counsel is referencing a custody case, and this is a property issue.”
“Overruled,” Judge O’Neill says. “Where are you going with this, Mr. Preston?”
“In
Burrows v. Brady,
the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled that, when parents are divorced, each parent who has custody has the right to raise the child in the faith they think is in the child’s best interests. Moreover,
Pettinato v. Pettinato
said that the moral character of each potential custodial parent must be considered—”
“Is counsel trying to tell the court how to do its job,” Angela asks, “or does he actually have a question for my client?”
“Yes,” Wade replies. “I do have a question. You testified, Ms. Baxter, that you went through several in vitro procedures, all of which resulted in disaster?”
“Objection—”
“I’ll rephrase. You did not actually carry a baby to term, did you?”
“No,” I say.
“In fact you had two miscarriages?”
“Yes.”
“And then a stillbirth?”
I look into my lap. “Yes.”
“It’s your testimony today that you’ve always wanted a child, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Your Honor.” Angela sighs. “All this has been asked and answered.”
“Why then, Ms. Baxter, did you murder your own child in 1989?”
“What?” I say, stunned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about—”
But I do. And his next words confirm it: “Did you or did you not have a voluntary abortion when you were nineteen years old?”
“Objection!” Angela is out of her seat immediately. “This is irrelevant and occurred prior to my client’s marriage, and I move that it be stricken immediately from the record—”
“It’s completely relevant. It informs her desire to have a baby now. She’s trying to make up for past sins.”
“Objection!”
My hands have gone numb.
A woman stands up in the gallery. “Baby killer!” she yells, and that is the hairline crack it takes to break the dam. There is shouting—by the Westboro contingent and by the Eternal Glory congregants. The judge calls for order, and about twenty observers are hauled through the double doors of the courtroom. I imagine Vanessa watching on the other side. I wonder what she’s thinking.
“Mr. Preston, you may continue your line of questioning, but without the editorial comments,” Judge O’Neill says. “And as for the gallery, if there is one more disruption, I will turn this into a closed session.”
Yes, I tell him. I had an abortion. I was nineteen, in college. It wasn’t the right time to have a baby. I thought—stupidly—that I’d have many more chances.
When I finish, I am gutted. I have only spoken once of the procedure since it happened, and that was at the fertility clinic, when I had to be completely honest about my reproductive history or compromise my chances of conceiving. It has been twenty-two years, but suddenly I feel the same way I felt back then: Shaky. Embarrassed.
And angry.
The clinic could not legally have released that information to Wade Preston. Which means that it must have come from the only other person who was at the clinic the day I gave my medical history.
Max.
“Is there a reason you were hiding this information from the court?”
“I wasn’t hiding—”
“Could it be because you thought, correctly, it might make you seem a little disingenuous when you start sobbing about how much you want a baby?”
“Objection!”
“Have you ever considered,” Wade Preston presses, “that the fact that you haven’t been able to have another child was God’s judgment on you for killing your first?”
Angela is furious. She goes after Wade with a verbal streak of fire. But even once he has withdrawn his question, it hangs in the air like the letters of a neon sign after you close your eyes.
And even if I don’t have to reply out loud, I may just have already answered silently.
I don’t want to believe in a God who’d punish me for having an abortion.
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t wondered if it’s true.
“You want to tell me what the hell that was all about?” Angela asks the minute the judge says that we are adjourning for the day. “How did he get your medical files?”
“He didn’t have to,” I say flatly. “Max must have told him.”
“Then why didn’t you tell
me
? It would have been much less damaging if we’d been able to bring it up on direct instead of cross!”
Like Max’s alcoholism. Everyone likes a reformed sinner. If we’d been the ones to bring up his drinking, it would have looked like he had something to hide.
Which is exactly how Wade Preston has painted me today.
Preston has finished packing up his briefcase; he smiles politely as he walks by. “Sorry you didn’t know about the skeleton in your client’s closet. The literal one, that is.”
Angela ignores him. “Is there anything else I need to know about? Because I
really
do not like surprises.”
I shake my head, still numb, and follow her out of the courtroom. Vanessa is waiting with my mother—both of them still sequestered. “What
happened
in there?” Vanessa asks. “How come the judge threw out half the gallery?”
“Can we talk about it in the car? I really just want to go home.”
But the moment we open the front door of the courthouse and step outside, there is a hail and volley of questions.
I’m expecting this. Just not the ones they ask.
How far along were you when you had the abortion?
Who was the baby daddy?
Do you still keep in touch with him?
A woman walks up to me. From her yellow T-shirt I realize she is from Westboro Baptist Church. She’s holding a recyclable plastic bottle filled with some kind of fruit punch, but it looks like blood from here.
I know she’s going to throw it at me the moment before she actually does. “Some choices are wrong,” she cries.
I step back, shielding myself, so that the liquid only lands on my right foot. I completely forget about Vanessa until I hear her voice beside me. “You never told me.”
“I never told anyone.”
Vanessa’s eyes are cold. She glances at Max, walking between his attorneys. “Somehow,” she says, “I don’t believe you.”
My mother wants to go after Wade Preston for dragging up my history; it takes Angela’s interference and the magic word
(grandchild)
before she agrees to go home without putting up a fight. She tells me she will call me later to make sure I’m all right, but it’s pretty clear to her that I don’t want to talk right now. To anyone except Vanessa, that is. The whole ride home, I try to explain what happened during my testimony. She doesn’t say a word. When I mention my abortion, she flinches.
Finally, by the time we park the car, I can’t stand it. “Are you going to give me the silent treatment forever?” I yell, slamming the car door and following Vanessa into the house. I strip off my panty hose, which are still sticky. “Is this some Catholic thing?”
“You know I’m not Catholic,” Vanessa answers.
“But you used to be—”
“This isn’t about the damn abortion, Zoe. It’s about
you
.” She is facing me now, her hands still clutching the keys to the car. “That’s a pretty big bit of history to leave out of a relationship. It’s like forgetting to tell someone you have AIDS.”
“For God’s sake, Vanessa, you can’t catch an abortion like an STD—”
“Do you think that’s the only reason to disclose something incredibly personal to the people you love?”
“It was a horrible decision to have to make, even if I was lucky enough to be able to make it. I don’t particularly enjoy reliving it.”
“Then tell me this,” she argues. “How is it that Max knew, and I didn’t?”
“You’re jealous? You’re actually jealous that I told Max about something horrible in my past!”
“Yeah, I am,” Vanessa admits. “Okay? I’m a selfish bitch who wishes that my wife opened herself up to me as much as she opened herself up to the guy she used to be married to.”
“And maybe I’d like
my
wife to show a little compassion,” I say. “Considering I was just raked over the coals by Wade Preston and that I’m now Public Enemy Number One for the entire religious right.”
“There’s more than just a
u
in
us
,” Vanessa says. “Not that you seem to realize it.”
“Great!” I yell, tears springing to my eyes. “You want to know about my abortion? It was the worst day of my life. I cried the whole way there and the whole way home. I had to eat ramen noodles for two months because I didn’t want to ask my mother for money; and I didn’t tell her I’d done it until I was back home for the summer. I didn’t take the medicine they gave me for the cramps afterward because I felt like I deserved the pain. And the guy I was dating—the guy who decided with me that this was the right thing to do—broke up with me a month later. And in spite of the fact that every doctor I’ve ever seen tells me that my infertility has nothing to do with that procedure, I’ve never really been able to believe it. So how’s that? Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?”
By the time I finish, I am crying so hard I can barely understand my own words. My nose is running and my hair is in my face and I want her to touch me, to take me in her arms and tell me it’s all right, but instead she steps back. “What else don’t I know about you?” she asks, and she leaves me standing alone in the entryway of a house that no longer feels like home.
The actual procedure took only six minutes.
I know, I counted.
They had talked to me about all my options. They had given me lab tests and a physical. They had given me a sedative. They had opened my cervix with dilators. They had given me forms to sign.
This took a few hours.
I remember the nurse fitting my feet into the stirrups, telling me to scoot down. I remember the shine of the speculum as the doctor lifted it from its sterile napkin. I remember the wet-vac sound of the suction device.
The doctor never called it a baby. She never even called it a fetus. She referred to it as
tissue.
I remember closing my eyes and thinking of a Kleenex, balled up and tossed in the trash.
On the way back to campus, I put my hand on the stick shift of my boyfriend’s old Dodge Dart. I just wanted his palm to cover mine. Instead, he untangled my fingers. “Zoe,” he said. “Just let me drive.”
Although it was only two in the afternoon when I got back to my dorm room, I put on my pajamas. I watched
General Hospital,
honing my focus on the characters of Frisco and Felicia, as if I would have to pass a test on them later on. I ate an entire jar of Jif peanut butter.
I still felt empty.
I had nightmares for weeks, that I could hear the fetus crying. That I followed the sound to the courtyard outside my dorm window and crouched down in my pajama bottoms and torn tank to dig with my bare hands in the ragged ground. I pulled up hunks of sod, chipped my fingernails on stones, and finally uncovered it:
Sweet Cindy, the baby doll I’d buried the day my father died.
I can’t unwind that night. I hear Vanessa moving around above me, in the bedroom, and then when it gets quiet I assume she’s fallen asleep. So instead, I sit down at my digital keyboard and I start playing. I let the music bind me like a bandage. I sew myself together note by note.
I play for so long that my wrists begin to cramp. I sing until my voice frays, until I feel like I’m breathing through a straw. When I stop, I lean my forehead so that it rests on the keys. The silence in the room becomes a thick cotton batting.
Then I hear clapping.
I turn around to find Vanessa standing in the doorway. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough.” She sits down beside me on the piano bench. “This is what he wants, you know.”
“Who?”
“Wade Preston. To break us apart.”
“I don’t want that,” I admit.
“Me neither.” She hesitates. “I’ve been upstairs doing math.”
“No wonder you’ve been gone so long,” I murmur. “You suck at math.”
“The way I figure it, you were with Max for nine years. I plan to be with you for the next forty-nine years.”
“Just forty-nine?”
“Stick with me, here. It’s a nice round number.” Vanessa looks at me. “So by the time you’re ninety, you’ll have spent over half your life with me, as opposed to ten percent of your life with Max. Don’t get me wrong—I’m still wicked jealous of those nine years, because I can’t ever have them with you, no matter what I do. But if you hadn’t lived them back then with Max, maybe you wouldn’t be here with me now.”
“I wasn’t trying to keep a secret from you,” I tell her.
“But you should be able to. I love you so much that there’s nothing you could possibly tell me that would change that.”
“I used to be a guy,” I say, straight-faced.
“Deal breaker.” Vanessa laughs, and she leans forward and kisses me. She puts her hands on either side of my face. “I know you’re strong enough to do this alone, but you don’t have to. I promise not to be an idiot anymore.”
I settle closer to her, rest my head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, too,” I say, an apology as wide as the night sky, with no limits.
VANESSA
M
y mother used to say that a woman without lipstick was like a cake without icing. I never knew her to go without her signature color, Forever After. Every time we went to a drugstore to get aspirin or tampons or asthma medication, she picked up a couple more tubes and stashed them in one of her dresser drawers—one that was completely filled with the small silver tubes. “I don’t think the company’s gonna run out,” I used to tell her, but she, of course, knew better. In 1982, they stopped making Forever After. Luckily my mother had stockpiled enough to carry her forward a decade. When she was in the hospital, so drugged for the pain that she couldn’t remember her own mantra, I made sure she was always made up. When she took her last breath, she was wearing Forever After.