Looking for Jane (48)
“My name’s Alice and this is Evelyn,” Alice begins, nodding at her boss. “We heard about you through my sister, who heard through a friend, et cetera. I followed up to get the information about when and where you’d be meeting.”
“Okay. But you’re not actually looking for Jane, though, are you?” the woman asks, frowning. “As in tonight? ’Cause that’s not—”
“Oh, oh no,” Alice interrupts. “I’m a nurse and Evelyn’s a doctor and we’re interested in—” Evelyn clears her throat loudly. “Possibly interested in helping out with, you know, the cause,” Alice finishes, her cheeks flushing.
The woman’s eyes pop like champagne corks and she extends a hand to Evelyn, who offers her own. The woman nearly crushes it with enthusiasm before grasping Alice’s in turn. “That’s excellent, excellent news, thank you both so much for coming. My name’s Jeanette. We’re in desperate need of willing doctors, that’s the focus of the meeting tonight. Down the stairs to the right over there,” she says with an enormous smile. “We’ll be starting in a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you,” Evelyn and Alice say in unison, and head off in the direction of the staircase, which takes them down into the basement of the building. There’s a single door with a paper sign that reads KNITTING CLUB MEETING scribbled in black marker. Alice raises an eyebrow at Evelyn and pulls the handle.
They emerge into a large community room. Orange plastic chairs are set up lecture-style facing a wooden pulpit with a brass cross inlaid onto the front of it. The air smells like a library, and it’s full of the excited chatter of at least a dozen women. Evelyn gestures to a line of four empty seats at the back, and as they settle in, she scans the room with a keen eye. Her shoulders relax with relief that there’s no one here she recognizes.
A few minutes later, a young woman who looks like she can’t be more than twenty-five years old sidles up to the pulpit and grasps the sides of it in both hands. She leans forward, smiling at the assembly. Silence falls almost instantly, and Evelyn can feel an electricity in the room.
“Welcome everyone,” the woman says with a voice like chocolate. “Thank you for coming to tonight’s Knitting Club meeting.” An appreciative chuckle from the crowd. “My name is Holly. I see we have a few new faces, so I’d like to ask our newcomers to hang back after the meeting so we can get to know each other a bit, and I can make sure you’re not a spy.”
She smiles, but a few of the women glance back at them with suspicion. Evelyn shifts in her seat.
“So, tonight’s meeting is a bit of a check-in for the movement and the organization,” Holly continues in a crisp tone, looking down at a sheet of paper in front of her. “I’m proud to say that since this movement began, we’ve been able to connect almost a thousand women with a few doctors who are willing to provide safe, effective abortions.”
Applause erupts from the assembled women. One of them lets fly a whoop! of support.
“It’s great, it really is, it’s amazing,” Holly says. “We’ve been able to save a lot of lives through the Jane Network and we couldn’t have done that without all the time, energy, and sacrifice you’ve put into making it happen. So, thank you. But there are still a lot of women waiting. We’ve done our best to not turn anyone away. That was always one of our commitments, our goals. But one or two have fallen through the cracks. They came to us almost too late, needing a procedure immediately, and we didn’t have a doctor available to perform it. And those cases weigh heavily on our collective conscience.”
Evelyn catches herself holding her breath. The crowd is hushed. Holly may be young, but she certainly knows how to command a room.
“But we have a good news story here with us today,” she goes on, smiling at a woman in the front row. “I’d like to hand the floor to Lillian, our guest speaker, who is going to share her experience with us. A little support for her, please!”
Holly initiates a round of applause and steps back from the pulpit as Lillian rises from her seat. Holly gives her a warm hug, then Lillian faces the Janes. She coughs into her fist, which is trembling slightly. She’s a short girl with sandy blond hair and shoulders that turn inward, protective.
“Hi, there,” she says.
A chorus of warm female voices call, “Hi, Lillian!”
“I, um, I don’t have a whole lot to say, but I just wanted to come say thank you to every one of you who had a hand in helping me, you know, get an abortion.” Her voice drops off on the last word. “I heard about Jane through a friend of a friend, like pretty much everyone does, I guess. I was really scared at first. I…” She falters, casts her eyes down. “I was really desperate. I—I got raped by my stepdad.” Her voice goes up at the end, like it’s a question she’s still trying to answer. “After a lot of other abuse. For a long time. And obviously I couldn’t…”
The unspoken words press down on the shoulders of every woman at the meeting. They all feel the magnitude of Lillian’s experience, the crushing weight of it.
“It’s a special kind of evil mother that allows that shit to happen under her own roof,” Evelyn says bitterly.
Alice grasps Evelyn’s cold hand in her own, squeezes it tight. “I know,” she whispers.