Looking for Jane (66)

Dr. Taylor glances up at the house. “I know.”

“Honestly, it feels like a relief to even be able to talk about it to you. I haven’t told anyone. I’ve just been carrying it all here.” She points to her chest. “And it gets heavy sometimes.”

The two women stand across from each other on the sidewalk of the quiet side street, their private thoughts unknowingly overlapping across the sticky, shared memory of the night of Nancy’s abortion. It’s a perfect summer evening. A gentle breeze has picked up from the south, caressing the leaves of the lush maple trees. The sun is sinking in the sky, tiring out after a long day’s work.

“I know what that’s like,” Dr. Taylor finally says. “It can be really difficult to trust anyone with something that huge. It took me a while to be comfortable telling my husband about some of my darkest spots. But in the future, you might feel differently.”

Nancy watches the shadow flit across Dr. Taylor’s face, wondering what those dark spots might be for her. Her eyes flicker toward the nursing home again, then back to Nancy, who remembers she’s just come from saying goodbye to an old friend.

“Listen, I should get going,” Nancy says. “I don’t want to keep you.”

Dr. Taylor extends a hand, which Nancy shakes. “You’ve got a good, strong handshake,” she says. “I like that. Don’t lose it. None of that wet-fish nonsense some women offer. You take care, now.”

She lifts a hand in farewell and heads down the sidewalk into the sun. Nancy watches her go with a feeling of warmth that’s woven with a prickly thread of loss.

“Wait!” she calls, and rushes forward again. “How, um, how can I help?”

“Help?”

“With the Janes,” Nancy says. “You said you’re strapped for volunteers?”

“We are, yes.” She considers Nancy for a moment. “Do you think it would be doable for you? A lot of women find—afterward—that they just want to put it all behind them. But we do have a handful of Janes who started out as patients themselves. They often make the best counsellors because they know what it’s like.”

“That makes sense to me,” Nancy says. “It’s just the experience I had with you and Alice, with the police raid, I mean, you saw how I reacted. I was so fed up. I shouldn’t have had to track you down like I did, like abortion is some black-market luxury. But at least I felt safe. At least you knew what you were doing, and I didn’t have to be afraid I was going to die. My cousin sure as hell didn’t feel safe. She shouldn’t have had to go through that. And it made me wonder how many other women are out there with no options. I feel like I was lucky, and that’s not right, is it? With Jane, it’s like you’ve taken it into your own hands somehow. It’s women helping women, allowing us to be at the steering wheel of our own lives for once, right?”

“That’s the idea, yes.”

“I want to help other women feel that.”

Dr. Taylor nods.

“This house,” Nancy continues, gesturing back toward the old building, “it used to be a home for wayward girls. They gave up their babies here. I can’t imagine girls like me not having a choice. Of being forced into anything.”

“A lot of them were even younger than you,” Dr. Taylor says quietly. She holds Nancy’s gaze for a long moment. “If you’re really interested, you can come to the next volunteer recruitment meeting. We do them in batches, but I have to say, Nancy, a lot of the women who think they want to volunteer don’t end up sticking around. We don’t begrudge them for it. It’s a pretty big risk. You have to accept going into it that what you’re doing is criminal activity and you might get arrested. It can also bring up a lot of tough memories. It’s pretty high stakes for a volunteer position.”

The flare Nancy feels in her gut is excitement, not fear. “I’m sure. It’s the least I can do. The Janes changed my life. I’d like to join.”





CHAPTER 18 Angela




MARCH 2017




Angela hasn’t received any positive responses yet from the Nancy Birches she sent Facebook messages to, so she’s decided to shift tracks and instead try to locate Nancy’s birth mother, Margaret Roberts. She’s starting with St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers, hoping they may have some kind of record that might help her track down its former resident.

She’s spent the past two hours at the university library while Tina teaches an evening class. Nursing a decaf coffee, she started with a deep dive into Google, where she found brief references to the home in a couple of books and academic articles, but none of them listed what parish the home was connected to, which might have allowed her to track down the Roberts family. As of now, she can’t even see the tip of a thread she might tug to unravel this mystery.

Reluctantly conceding that she isn’t going to find the information she needs on the internet, Angela stands up from the uncomfortable chair she’s been parked in all night and heads to the deserted microfilm room. At a computer, she navigates to the directory and enters the keywords: Agnes Home Unwed Mothers Toronto.

There’s only one hit. She clicks on a scan of a news article from the Toronto Star, printed in August 1961.


SCANDAL-PLAGUED