Bulletproof Vest (13 page)

Step.

At.

A.

Time.

You pull out the phone book and call a few clinics in the area.

“Are you sure you want to get rid of it?”

“There are other options, you know.”

“Abortion is a sin.”

“Have you considered adoption?”

“Jesus loves you.”

The voices on the other end start sounding like your mother, and you hang up. Jesus may love you, but He certainly can't help you now. In fact, you're starting to think that maybe this is His doing, His way of dealing with you, the same way that taking your brother was His way of dealing with your father. Maybe this is your punishment for drinking too much, for being a rebellious daughter, for taking after your father.

If there is one thing you know for certain, it's that your mother can't find out, because not only will she blame you for it, she will force you to keep it. The same way she made your sister Roselia keep hers when she was sixteen and the twenty-five-year-old guy she was dating got her pregnant. “I better not catch that son of a bitch coming around here,” your father said, when he found out that his daughter had been knocked up by a hallelujah. By then, Roselia had already moved out of the house and soon she and the guy got married at your mother's church, and everyone attended the wedding except your father, and then the baby came and everything was all right—until it wasn't.

You call 411 and get numbers for clinics in the city. It's expensive—really expensive. You pick up a few extra shifts at work and start saving your money.

“Is everything okay?” Ms. Flint asks you after class one day. You were in her AP English class your junior year, and once again your senior year, and she has noticed that you are not participating in class discussions the way you used to. But how to participate when you haven't done the reading assignments, and how to read when you are having a hard time concentrating, because you can practically hear it growing, hear it ticking inside of you? There is something so sincere in her large blue eyes that you want to confide in her—tell her everything—but you feel like a fuckup, feel like you have let her down, and you press your lips tight and nod your head, but you don't dare say anything.

You walk out of her classroom and keep moving down the hallway, listening to lockers slamming on either side, and you can almost hear them whispering as you pass, because you're certain that everyone knows—certain they can all hear it ticking. And then you're walking straight out the back door and bracing yourself against the brisk spring air, the sun blurring across the student parking lot as you make your way to your car. Then it's just you and the road, and you are driving fast, driving straight out of town, though you're not exactly sure where you're going, until you are turning onto the gravel road that leads to the forest preserve on the edge of town. You drive deep into the woods, park your car in the vacant lot, climb out, and lay down on the hood. The sun feels good shining on your swollen eyelids, nothing but the sound of a few birds chirping fills the space around you. What has it been? Six weeks? Eight weeks? Your stomach has grown tight, and though your long torso conceals it, your mother has begun to give you suspicious looks.

Two weeks later, you run into Bradley at a bonfire.

“I'm so sorry,” he says. “I saw him come back into the house, saw him go downstairs, I just never thought…”

“It's okay,” you say, perhaps more to yourself than to him. Like if you keep telling yourself that it's okay, then it will be.

“If you decide to press charges, or go to the police, I'll go with you,” he says.

When you're leaving the bonfire, a girl you've never met before comes up to you.

“Hey, I heard about what happened with Michael,” she says. “I had something similar happen with him, and so did this other girl I know.” There had been others? He had done this before? So he must have been calculating. “You should make him pay for it,” she says. “If you want, I'll get you his number.” She hands you a piece of paper with her name and number on it.

On Monday night you call her, because even with the extra shifts you've picked up, you still don't have enough money. She gets you his number. You call him and leave a message, but never hear back. You leave several messages, saying that you need to speak with him, but he never calls you. Maybe he's hoping that if he ignores you, you will just go away, recede back into silence. After a week of leaving messages, you find out where he lives, and one day, after school, you drive to his house.

It's a two-story blue-aluminum-siding house with an American flag waving out in front. Two white plastic ducks sit at the base of the flagpole, next to an iron bench. Yellow and red tulips line the flowerbed that runs along the base of the porch. An acorn wreath hangs on the front door. You take a deep breath and ring the bell. Almost instantly, there is the sound of footsteps approaching on the other side of the door, and your heart starts racing. Suddenly you get the urge to run away, thinking this was a terrible idea, that you should have never come here, but then the door is swinging open and there is a plump blonde woman standing there, wiping her hands on a checkered apron and smiling at you.

“Hi,” you say, “is Mike here?”

“He's up in his room, sweetie,” she says. “Why don't you come in?”

“No, that's okay,” you say. “I'll wait here.”

“Michael,” she calls over her shoulder, “someone is here to see you.” She glances back at you, still smiling. “Would you like anything to drink?”

“No, thank you,” you say. She seems like such a nice lady, such a nice normal lady, maybe you should tell her why you're here. Let her know what type of scum she's raising under her roof.

“He'll be right down, hon,” she says, turning and walking away.

She leaves the door ajar and makes her way down a long hallway that runs in between a dining room on the right and a family room with a fireplace on the left. A carpeted staircase runs up into the ceiling just beyond the fireplace. Soon she is back in the kitchen, standing behind an island, chopping vegetables. Out of the corner of your eye, you see him materialize as he comes down the stairs—white socks, scrawny legs, knee-length denim shorts, red T-shirt, and a navy-blue cap with some sports team logo on it. And then he's moving down the corridor toward you. He grabs the doorknob, steps outside, and pulls the door shut behind him.

“How did you get my address?” he asks, looking not at you, but behind you, over your shoulder, and out toward the main road where cars are whizzing by.

“From Amy Miller,” you say, and he glances at you for a split second, as if trying to figure out exactly how much you know, before looking down at his socks and busying himself with rubbing a bit of dirt off one sock with the other. “I need three hundred and fifty dollars,” you say.

“I don't have any money,” he says, sliding his hands into his pockets as if to prove they're empty. You tell him you'll be back in a week, and either he has the money or you're going to tell his mother everything—and not just about you, but about the others as well. There's no point in threatening him with going to the police—his father works for the department.

He stares at you, hard, as if he wants to punch you in the face, but you don't flinch, you don't look away. You're certain none of those other girls he had done it to in the dark had come looking for him in plain daylight, threatening him. You climb back into your car and leave and, a week later, you're back.

“I'm sorry,” he says when he hands you the money, though it's not so much an apology as it is a question, or a plea—a way of saying, we're cool now, right? You're not going to come back around here making any more threats, right?

You take the money and leave and, two days later, you're at a clinic in the city, your feet dangling over the edge of the cot, waiting for the doctor. She comes in carrying your file, sets it down on the stainless steel counter, and crosses her arms.

“It's too late,” she says, and you think please don't let it be what I think it is. She explains how you've already entered your second trimester, and they can no longer perform the operation. Somehow, you had miscalculated. Time had gotten away from you, and now it was too late—too late for apologies, too late to be sorry, and too late for the life you had dreamed up for yourself—college, traveling, visiting Paris, living in New York someday—you could practically see it all receding from you. He had not only taken it—he had taken everything. Now you were just another pregnant Hispanic teenager, just another statistic.

A few days later, Sonia is taking a bubble bath and you go into the bathroom to wash up for bed.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “Why?”

“No reason,” she says, eyeing you from the other side of the sliding glass door. “I had a dream the other day,” she says, “and in it, you were all alone in the middle of a field somewhere, far away from home, and you were crying.”

You sit down on the toilet and, once you get ahold of yourself, you tell her everything.

“You should talk to Mom,” she says.

“Are you crazy?” you say, because you never talk to your mother about anything. There is a distance built between the two of you, a deeply rooted distrust that you can't explain. She feels it too. Sometimes she asks why you can't be more like your sisters, why you can't just open up to her. You might be living under the same roof, but it's like you don't even speak the same language.

After calling just about every clinic in the area, you find one in a suburb that is two hours away and, given the circumstances, is willing to do it, though it will cost you nearly triple. Sonia says she'll let you borrow the rest of the money and you call them back to make an appointment. The nurse explains that you have to come in the following day, as there is no time to waste. It's a two-day procedure. The first day, the doctor will insert a sponge to make you dilate, and then you'll have to return the following day. Assuming the sponge does its job, they'll be able to perform the operation. But if it doesn't work, there will be nothing they can do to help you.

“You will have to go under,” the nurse says. “There could be consequences. If you hemorrhage, you could bleed to death.”

Death. Was that the ultimate consequence? So be it. If you went under and never woke up, then at least it would all be over.

“Hello? Miss? Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to make an appointment?”

“Yes.”

The next day you skip school and drive yourself out to the clinic. The insertion of the sponge is relatively quick and painless. The following day, Sonia drops you off on her way to work, signs you in, and leaves. A nurse takes you into a room where you slip into a light-blue gown, sit on the operating table, and wait for the doctor. The small room is filled with gleaming metal objects. Everything is sterile, cold, and sharp. The doctor comes in and instructs you to put your heels in the stirrups and slide down. You stare at the fluorescent lights above thinking, Please, God, please.

“All good,” he says. He comes around one side of the bed and the nurse comes around the other. He explains the procedure and reiterates that if you were to hemorrhage, you could bleed to death, and are you sure you want to go through with this?

You nod your head.

He shoots the nurse a look and moves to the foot of the bed. You hear his stool creaking, the metal in the tray clanking. The nurse takes your hand and turns it over gently so that your palm is facing up. Even through the rubber gloves, her touch feels warm, and you don't want her to ever let go of your hand. She explains how you're going to feel a slight prick in your arm and soon you'll feel very sleepy. The minute the needle pierces your flesh you feel the instant warm flush in your veins, her voice already drifting away like a white butterfly vanishing into a dark tunnel. If you had stayed under forever, her voice would have been your farewell, same as the whisper of the river had been your brother's farewell. He had been the first to arrive and the first to go.

Two hours later the nurse's voice summons you and you come to. You're in a holding room with a few other girls who are all propped up in their individual beds. Sugar cookies and a can of ginger ale sit on a tray next to your bed. Your hands gravitate toward your stomach, moving over the starched white sheet, the blue gown. You dig your fingers into it, almost in disbelief: empty. What a relief. Your life has been given back to you.

A few weeks later, once all the anesthesia has worn off and the pain that shocked every muscle in your body the day after the procedure has subsided, something else starts growing inside of you: You want revenge. You want to make him pay—really pay. You make a few phone calls, meet a detective in the grocery store parking lot, and though she looks more like a suburban mom than a law enforcement official, you sit in the passenger seat of her blue Lincoln and answer all of her questions while she fills out a form.

“Why did you wait so long?”

“Why didn't you scream?”

“Why were you drinking?”

She concludes that too much time has passed and that even if Bradley and the other two girls testified, you don't really have a case. If you want to press charges, it will be your word against his and his lawyer will be relentless, and the newspapers will be all over it, and do you really want to put your family and yourself through that?

“Have you told your parents?” she asks.
Your parents?
You don't plan on ever telling your mother, and you have no intention of ever speaking to your father again, though he has resurfaced. You've heard he is now living in Colorado with the woman and their two kids, and that he's living under an alias and working as a dishwasher at a busy restaurant in Denver. “I think the best thing would be for you to file a police report,” she says. “This way, if it happens again, he will have a record.”