Windfalls: A Novel (4 page)

It was a photograph of a newborn baby, an infant even younger than Dylan had been at Christmastime. Only instead of lying in its mother’s arms, this baby was sprawled lifeless on top of a trash-filled can of garbage. It was as sickening and fascinating as pornography, and for a second, as she stared at it, Anna forgot about the crowd. A moment later she felt the horror of it slap her, and she flung the pamphlet to the ground.

“That’s your baby,” she heard the male voice boom as she reached the clinic door. “Don’t throw your baby away.”

She was shaking when she entered the waiting room. Her legs felt porous, too frail to bear her weight. She sank into the scoop seat of the plastic chairs that ringed the room, and for a hysterical second she wondered if she had wet her pants. The thought came to her that she should leave. She could catch the bus back to the university and deal with everything tomorrow, but her fear of the crowd outside kept her rooted where she was.

There were other people in the waiting room, six or eight women and several men. Anna snuck a quick check of their faces to assure herself that they had not witnessed the encounter outside, that they were not watching her now. Most of the other women sat as Anna had instinctively sat, with an empty chair between her and the person next to her. They all appeared both shaken and resigned, as though they had just heard bad news and were now waiting for a bus. Of the two men in the room, one was little more than a boy, a scrawny-haired teenager who held the hand of the girl sitting next to him with a furtive defiance. The other man was middle-aged and sat stolidly reading the newspaper, ignoring the woman who waited beside him.

At the front of the room was a counter. A sign below it read, “Please Confirm Your Appointment Before Taking a Seat.” Anna crossed the room to stand before the receptionist.

“I’m Anna Walters,” she made herself say, although her voice rasped like sand against her throat.

“Walters?” the receptionist echoed, without looking up.

Anna cleared her throat. “Yes.”

The woman reached for a stack of files, and Anna saw that her fingernails were so long that she had to handle them with a splay-fingered dexterity. It made her movements seem squeamish, as though everything she picked up was something she would rather not have to touch.

Anna said, “My appointment’s at eleven.”

The receptionist nodded and began to shuffle files. When she found the one she wanted, she opened it, studied it, and asked, “You have the money?”

Anna had known she had to bring money, but even so the question seemed so crude and the receptionist’s voice so loud that her throat clogged again. She coughed and answered, “Yes.”

“Cash? Or cashier’s check?”

“Cash,” Anna croaked, opening her backpack to get the money she’d withdrawn from the bank, almost half of what she had to live on for the rest of the semester. Even though she could have used his help with the money, Anna had not told the sculptor. Getting him involved seemed as silly as seeking out the person who had been sneezing the day before she caught the flu and insisting that he pay for her aspirin. Besides, she’d been reluctant to reveal such an intimate failure to a stranger. But now, standing alone in front of the receptionist with her rent money in her hand, she wished for a fleet moment that she’d told the sculptor, after all.

“Here’s your receipt,” the receptionist said, handing a slip of paper across the counter to Anna. “You have the consent form?”

Anna nodded. Pulling a folded piece of paper from the pages of
On Photography,
she laid it open on the counter. Words snagged her eyes—
perforation, hemorrhage, infection, death
. A woman had died in Texas only last October.

“You can sign it now,” the receptionist said, handing Anna a pen.

But this is different, Anna told herself as she wrote her name. She was paying cash for this, in a clinic. This was legal and safe. It wasn’t even an operation. A surgical procedure, it had said in the literature the nurse had given her, eleven times safer than birth.

“Okay,” the receptionist said, tucking the form with Anna’s signature into her file. “Sit down, and the nurse will call you as soon as they’re ready.” The woman looked up, and the warmth in her black eyes was so startling that Anna turned away in confusion.

She returned to her chair, opened her book, and stared at the page until the words doubled and smeared. There was a bathroom off the waiting room, and after a while one of the women got up and went inside. Through the closed door Anna heard the heave and splat of vomiting. There was the sound of water running, the roar of an institutional toilet flushing, and a moment later the woman reentered the room, her face empty of color.

Another door opened, and a nurse stood in the threshold, calling a list of names. At the sound of her own name Anna felt a jolt of fear. Each of the women in the room stood and glanced uncertainly at the others. They made an awkward cluster around the nurse, who shepherded them through the door.

“They’re going to do us all at once?” someone asked nervously as they shuffled down a narrow hall.

“You have the procedure one at a time,” the nurse answered over her shoulder. “But you get prepped and you recuperate together.”

She led them into a room filled with cots, like the sleeping cabin at a summer camp.

“Find a cot and get your gown on. The opening goes in back,” the nurse said.

“Will it hurt?” the girl who had been sitting beside the boy asked timidly.

“That’s what the medication is for,” the nurse answered crisply. “And you’ll be given gas during the procedure itself.”

As Anna turned her back to the roomful of strangers to get undressed, several of the other women began talking. Their voices were flat and loud, and they followed everything they said with a laughter that made Anna think of fiberglass insulation, pink and fluffy and sharp.

She was tucking her socks into her boots when a voice from a nearby cot said, “I wanted to keep it, but my boyfriend’s not ready.” At first Anna thought the woman was talking about a plant or a pet, and when she realized what the woman meant, she was startled to discover that she had never thought of it that way herself, had never thought of keeping anything or not. For her it had been a question of being or not being.

A mother.

She was not a mother, so how could she have a baby? It would be an accident if she were to have a baby, a failure, a great mistake. If she were to have a baby, she would lose all she was and all she wanted to become, would lose all she hoped to do and to create. And where would that leave the baby, with a mother who was not the person she was meant to be?

She folded her clothes with icy hands, tucked her underwear beneath her skirt and blouse, and then she sat on the edge of her cot with her eyes closed, willing herself to be still, to wait patiently, to be ready for whatever came next. Names were being called. Anna could hear women leaving their cots, could hear them returning. It occurred to her to meditate, but when she tried to say her mantra inside her head, it was like running through sand.

“Anna Walters,” the nurse announced. Anna’s eyes burst open. She stood, clearing her throat, clutching her gown behind her like a child. As she followed the nurse out of the room, she saw that a few of the women who had already returned were lying with their faces turned to the walls, while others were sitting up, eating Oreos and drinking purple juice from tiny paper cups. The feeling in the room was subdued, the chatter and sharp laughter all leached away.

Barefooted, still holding her gown closed with one hand, Anna followed the nurse down the hall into a room dominated by a stainless steel operating table. A squat machine sat in a corner. A tray stood next to the table, covered with a set of tools like curved screwdrivers and another gadget that looked like a plastic crochet hook.

“Hop up,” the nurse said, her voice matter-of-fact, “and fit your feet in the stirrups.” Anna climbed on the table and lay back. When she placed a heel in each of the steel cups, she could detect the faint residual warmth of the feet of the stranger who had lain there before her. For a moment she felt oddly comforted.

Then the nurse began to strap down her arms.

“Is this necess—” Anna said, attempting to sit back up.

“It just reminds you not to move,” the nurse answered, pressing her back onto the table.

Another nurse arrived, her face already covered with a surgical mask. A man came in, the doctor. His face was masked, too, and he wore a blue shirt. He gave a curt nod in Anna’s direction, although he did not meet her eyes.

“Open your legs,” the nurse commanded.

No one had said it would hurt so much. No one had said the nurse would thrust a black mask over Anna’s face, a heavy rubbery mask that stank and threatened to suffocate her. No one had said that the man in the blue shirt would bark, “Be still,” while he twisted his succession of instruments up inside her. No one had told her that he would try to split her open, to core her like an apple, the pain red and mean and inescapable. A machine came on, roaring like a carpet cleaner, but Anna was too occupied with pain to think what that noise might mean. No one had said she would writhe, that a thick sweat would soak her all at once, that she would cease to care how her gown hung open, or worry about the noises she made. No one had told her that, as she fought the pain and the hissing mask, she would hate the people who were helping her as much as she hated the sculptor and herself.

When the machine was finally silent, Anna lay panting and defeated on the table, the sweat on her neck and belly and thighs suddenly cold while the doctor removed his last instruments. Watching the expressionless eyes above the nurse’s mask as she began to unstrap Anna’s arms, Anna remembered the girl outside the clinic, remembered the broken baby in the photograph and the man’s sign with its red word—MURDER.

Still lying on the table, Anna blurted, “Can I see it?”

“It’s over now,” the nurse answered. “Time to go back to recovery.”

“I want to see,” Anna persisted, startled by the urgency of her own request. “I need to see—what came out.”

There were furrows in the nurse’s brow as she cast a glance at the doctor. He shrugged and answered, “Sometimes they do.” He addressed Anna directly for the first time since he’d ordered her to be still. “Are you sure?”

Unable to trust her voice, she nodded. Beating down great raw wings of panic, she elbowed herself up to sit, wobbly and wet, on the edge of the operating table. The nurse removed a glass jar from the machine and held it out toward Anna. As she leaned forward to look, she felt terrified and also vaguely embarrassed to be studying a product of her body in public. But what she saw when she peered into the jar was so astonishing, it made her forget about herself.

Suspended in the clear fluid was a billowing cloud of tissue. Like a strange flower or a rare sea creature, it was all tender pinks, iridescent whites, delicate webs of crimson. Anna bent closer, and for a moment she thought she glimpsed an elfin hand—a hand so tiny a doll that size might sleep forever stretched out inside a walnut, like Tom Thumb.

“Oh,” she gasped. She gazed, soaked in emotions she couldn’t begin to name, until the nurse made a small, impatient movement that set the contents of the jar swaying. Then, tearing her gaze away, Anna whispered, “Thank you,” as, trembling, she climbed down from the table.

T
HE STRIPES ON
C
ERISE ’ S WRISTS TURNED TO SCABS THAT CRACKED AND
caught on whatever she happened to brush against, and tore and bled. Sitting in the back of U.S. history or sophomore English or bonehead algebra, she sucked the ooze, thinking, This is me, and before the burns healed, she took the iron out again.

In the beginning she had almost hoped that someone would discover those burns, like a row of mouths seared shut inside each wrist—maybe one of the teachers at her school, or Sam, or even Rita. She’d imagined that person would ask her what had happened, and hoped that in explaining it to them, she would come to understand it, too. She’d hoped that someone else would be able to give her the sympathy she craved, that someone else would finally recognize what she couldn’t seem to realize for herself. Sometimes she even envisioned Sam running his fingertips across the rutted surface of her wrists, only in her daydream his fingers were cool and gentle, as tender as a girl’s.

At first she believed that things would change once someone noticed her wrists. But later she began to be embarrassed by their ugly skin and ragged scabs. The wrists of the other girls at school were fresh as clean sheets, and it wasn’t long before Cerise realized that there was something wrong with her, something sick and shameful about what she did. She began to worry that her wrists would betray her, and she started wearing long-sleeved shirts that hung below her palms. Now she dreaded being caught, dreaded being made to confess or to explain, dreaded having another of her weaknesses exposed to the whole school’s ridicule. But every afternoon when she got home, she had to battle with that craving to burn herself.

The first time Sam asked her to wait for him until he got off work, one of the reasons she agreed was so she wouldn’t have to be alone at home with the iron perched like a squat, hot idol on the kitchen counter, taunting her. Sitting on the bench in front of the market, she stared at the inexplicable equations in her algebra book, dug her fingernails surreptitiously among her blisters and scabs, and felt as terrified as if she were about to take a pop quiz. But she was thrilled, too, for it seemed like her real life was finally beginning, now that Sam had noticed her, now that someone had singled her out.