A Spark of Light(49)

He promised that he would come visit her and that this wasn’t a one-time deal. He put his phone number and his name into her contacts. She floated home, wondering if everyone in Mississippi could see how different she was now, as if being loved left a patina on your skin.

Two days later he had still not texted, so she gathered up all her courage and made the first move. One second later her phone buzzed with the news that the text was undeliverable. She dialed the number, only to have an elderly lady pick up and tell her that there was no one there by that name.

There were too many John Smiths on Facebook to count. There was a John Smith at the University of Wisconsin, but an Internet search revealed him to be a professor of comparative literature in his mid-seventies.

“That rat bastard,” Miz DuVille said, shaking Beth out of her reverie.

“Yeah, that was only the start,” Beth replied. “I missed my period.”

“No condom?”

“No, but Susannah at church—who volunteered with me for the little kid Sunday School—told me you can’t get pregnant the first time.”

“That’s not—” The lawyer shook her head. “Never mind. Go on.”

“I figured I was all right. But I missed another period, so I took a pregnancy test.” She looked up, sheepish. “Actually, three.”

“Then what?”

Beth shifted. “I kept putting it off. I thought, Something will happen. It’ll go away.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I prayed. I prayed for a miscarriage.”

“Is that what happened?”

Beth shook her head. “I called the clinic and made an appointment.”

“Didn’t they ask your age?”

“Yeah. I said I was twenty-five. I was afraid they’d tell me they couldn’t help me.” Beth shrugged. “They asked when my last period was, and they told me I was fourteen weeks and they did procedures up to sixteen weeks. They said it would be eight hundred dollars for the procedure.”

“But the Center is—”

“Two and a half hours away. I took a bus, and all the savings I had from my job—a whopping two hundred and fifty dollars. I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t.” Beth took a deep breath.

“How were you going to raise the rest of the money?”

Beth shook her head. “I don’t know. I figured I’d steal, if I had to. From my dad. Or the cash register at work.”

“I’m confused. If you went to the Center—”

“They asked for picture ID, which would have given away that I was a minor. I started to cry. The lady at the front desk said if I couldn’t tell my parents, I could get a judicial waiver, and then come back. She gave me a form to fill out.”

Mandy DuVille frowned. “But you didn’t. And that’s why you wound up here.”

“I tried,” Beth said. “But the day before, someone from the judge’s office called and told me my hearing was canceled. They told me the judge was having a personal emergency and going to Belize with his wife.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” the lawyer said. “There’s always a judge on call, for restraining orders for domestic violence cases or anything else life-threatening—”

“I guess my life wasn’t being threatened,” Beth said. “Not the way they thought, anyhow. The lady who called me from the judge’s office said the quickest she could get me in was in two weeks. But I couldn’t wait that long.”

“Because the Center only does abortions up to sixteen weeks of pregnancy,” the lawyer said.

Beth nodded. “I had to do something. I read online about a girl who said she got ulcer pills from her bodega that could cause a miscarriage. I didn’t have a bodega anywhere near me, though. So I posted on a message board online.”

She remembered what she had typed: How do I get rid of a pregnancy without my parents finding out?

The responses had been horrible:

Throw yourself down the stairs.

Broomstick.

Good old-fashioned hanger.

You sick bitch, kill urself not ur baby.

But buried somewhere in the responses saying she was a sinner who should have kept her legs together was a girl who told her she could purchase abortion pills online.

“They came from China with instructions,” Beth said. “It only took five days to come in the mail.”

She’d thought it would be easy. Like taking Imodium when you had the runs, and then they magically were gone. She did everything the way she was supposed to, tucking the first set of pills high into her cheeks like a chipmunk, and she sat down on the toilet and waited. She threw the packaging into the trash. When the cramps started, she was so happy, she burst into tears. But soon they were so strong she had to run the water in the sink to drown out her moans. She staggered off the toilet and sank into a squat to try to make the pain go away and that’s when it happened.

“I wrapped it up,” Beth sobbed, “and I put it in the garbage. I didn’t know what else to do.”

She needed someone to tell her that she wasn’t a terrible person; that she hadn’t done the unthinkable. She wiped her eyes on the blanket and looked at her lawyer for the absolution she feared she would never have.

“Miz Duville,” she whispered. “It wasn’t a baby yet, was it?”