Mercy Street(3)

The part stands in for the whole.

Claudia didn’t explain this to the Tufts professor. She didn’t want to say the word, and she particularly didn’t want to hear him say it. He was just some guy she’d met on the internet. Her cunt was none of his business.

SHE FILLED HER MUG AND WENT DOWNSTAIRS. THE WAITING room was bright and cheerful, painted a sunny yellow. There were comfortable chairs, tables stacked with cooking and decorating magazines, boxes of Kleenex strategically placed. One wall was covered with giant photographs, taken by the director’s son while he was in the Peace Corps: smiling African women in colorful dresses, carrying bundles on their shoulders, backs, and heads. They carried water jugs, bushel baskets of bread or fruit or laundry. They carried all the things you’d expect them to carry, except babies.

That morning, half the chairs were occupied: several pairs of women who might have been sisters or roommates or mothers with daughters; an Indian couple in professional dress, each staring at a cell phone. A boy and girl, college-aged, sat shoulder to shoulder holding hands. They wore look-alike hoodies and sweatpants, as though they’d just come from the gym.

She crossed the waiting room and continued down a long hallway to the call center. The door was open a crack. A woman was talking on the phone, a voice Claudia recognized. Naomi had worked on the hotline for as long as there’d been one, her most dedicated volunteer.

“What was the first day of your last menstrual period?” Naomi asked.

This was always the first question.

The call center was packed with cubicles. Each held a desktop computer and a standard-issue office telephone. At each workstation was posted a printed notice: SILENT CALL PROCEDURE.

In the corner cube Naomi consulted her chart, a cardboard wheel the size of a floppy disk, to calculate gestational age. The younger volunteers used the online version, but Naomi was old-school. She hunched over her wheel like a medieval soothsayer, reading tarot or tea leaves.

“You are eight weeks and five days pregnant,” she said.

The volunteers came in two varieties. Half were gray-haired, old enough to remember illegal abortions, some from personal experience—Pam, Naomi, Janet, Karen. The rest were grad students in psychology or social work or public health—Meghan, Amanda, Lily, Marisol. They were called counselors, but it was a poor description of the work they did. Callers to the hotline needed many things: information, appointments, decent jobs, any sort of health insurance. Childcare, affordable housing, antibiotics, antidepressants. Counsel, honestly, was pretty far down the list.

This was especially true for AB calls. By the time a woman Googled “abortion Boston,” she wasn’t looking for advice from a stranger. Her decision was already made. The counselor told her what to expect on the day of the appointment: how long the procedure would take (ten to fifteen minutes), how long she’d spend at the clinic (two hours, including recovery), what to eat that morning (nothing), what to bring with her (socks and a sweater—the procedure room could get chilly).

“Are you diabetic?” Naomi asked. “Do you take methadone, Suboxone, or Subutex?”

Claudia slipped on a headset and settled in at her desk.

They explained the procedure and answered questions. Will I be awake? Does it hurt? Those were common questions, but not the most common.

The most common question was, how much does it cost?

“The first set of pills is mifepristone,” said Naomi. “You’ll take those here in our clinic. The second set is misoprostol. You take those later, at home.”

More and more, women were choosing the medication AB over the in-clinic procedure. Either method, without insurance, cost $650—a drop in the ocean, compared to the cost of raising a child, but for many of the callers, it was an unimaginable sum. Holy shit, Claudia had been told more than once. Looks like I’m gonna have a kid.

Her first call was a Pill question. As the caller spoke, Claudia took the following notes: Started pack three days late. Missed two white, took week two. Missed one pink. Only green left.

She had long since mastered the Pill question, having heard every possible variation: started late, started early, vomited up a white one, took two pink ones by mistake. She could answer a Pill question in under a minute, in English, Spanish, or Haitian Creole.

“You’ll need to use a backup method,” she said. “Condoms for the rest of your cycle.”

The caller was unhappy to hear this. No one was ever happy to hear this.

“It’s those white pills I’m worried about. Unless you take them consistently the first week, you’re not protected.”

The moment she disconnected, the line rang again.

The second caller gave her name, Tara. In the background a television was playing. Claudia recognized the opening music of Dr. Phil, the Texas twang of the doctor himself, testifying like a revival-tent preacher: This is going to be a changing day in your life.

“What was the first day of your last menstrual period?” Claudia asked.

Tara was nine weeks pregnant, HIV positive, and sleeping on a stranger’s couch. She took methadone, but not regularly, lithium, but not recently. She lit cigarettes one after the other—scratch, pause, inhale. At ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning, she was already high. As she spoke, Claudia thought of the word problems she’d solved in high school algebra, trains traveling at different speeds, in opposite directions. How long before their paths intersect? The problem, always, was knowing which variable to solve for. Tara’s life was a burning building with a fire on each floor. Which fire did you put out first?