Mercy Street(35)

The composite image appeared on television, in newspapers, on billboards. At city hall, a press conference was held. Police appealed to the public for assistance. A tip line was established, a toll-free number. Text GIRL to 61717.

The tip line was inundated. Calls from concerned neighbors, from day care workers, from frantic grandparents. The most agonizing ones came from parents whose kids had been taken by DCF. Their children were safe in state custody, they were told again and again. No one actually believed this. The state, the world entire, could not be trusted. Your child was safe only in your arms.

The composite image was seen by sixty million people.

On the beach at Deer Island, an impromptu shrine was erected. Strangers left flowers and stuffed animals, a dozen Hello Kitties. A candlelight vigil was held.

The tips kept coming, more hay for the haystack. A funeral home in Worcester offered to bury the child free of charge—“To save her,” the Globe reported, “from a pauper’s grave.”

The mystery was solved in the most banal way imaginable. A drunk at a bar overheard a conversation, a young couple arguing. The woman and her boyfriend were questioned by police.

The man, Mark Keohane, was indicted for second-degree murder. The child’s mother, Lisa James, was charged as an accessory after the fact. Security video showed Keohane tossing a black contractor’s bag from the Tobin Bridge while his pickup truck idled nearby. Sitting at the wheel was Lisa James.

The security video went viral. Mark Keohane had confessed to the murder, but it was Lisa James who was called a monster—the woman who’d helped him dispose of the body, who had failed to protect her own child.

Her dismal history became, briefly, a subject of local fascination: the arrests for possession and prostitution, the evictions, one known overdose. According to the Globe, DCF had investigated her as far back as 2003, when another child was removed from her care.

To Claudia, the particulars of the story were eerily familiar. She combed through her predecessor’s notes. Mercy Street’s medical records had long ago been digitized, but Evelyn Dodd—seventy years old and resistant to technology—had been granted an exception. Each Access patient—minor, medical, or latecomer—was the subject of a detailed entry in a spiral-bound notebook, in Evelyn’s careful hand.

Claudia pored over the notebooks. The entries painted a vivid picture of the daily workings of the clinic—and, over time, of Evelyn’s physical and cognitive decline. Her notes, increasingly brief, became hard to decipher, full of underlines and cryptic abbreviations.

In the spring of 2006, a latecomer was seen in clinic, a nineteen-year-old woman named L. Jones (or, possibly, L. James—after her initial stroke, Evelyn’s handwriting had deteriorated). The patient was twenty-five weeks pregnant, just past the legal cutoff. Her baby would have been born that November—a child the Commonwealth forced her to bear, a child with no safe place to land.

Was this patient—a latecomer turned away at twenty-five weeks—Baby Doe’s mother? Claudia would never know.

Anything was possible. It was even possible (not likely, but possible) that Evelyn’s patient had found a happy ending. That L. Jones or L. James—poor, addicted, nineteen years old and unhappily pregnant—had risen to the challenge of sudden motherhood, that she’d detoxed, found housing, devised a way to support herself. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, she might somehow (somehow) have acquired the wherewithal to defend herself, to protect herself and her child from a man like Mark Keohane.

A man with a criminal record, a raging drug habit. A big man who could snap a child’s neck with one hand.

Nothing was certain, except this: Baby Doe had died violently. The little girl had disappeared from the world without explanation, for months on end, and nobody, nobody had noticed. If the tides had shifted that day in March 2008—if one additional nor’easter had battered the Massachusetts coast that winter—the contractor’s bag would have been swept out to sea. The child’s body would never have been found.

These were Claudia’s thoughts as she watched Shannon zoom down the hallway toward the reception desk, her fake Ugg boots sparking the carpet. On Monday morning, she would be a no-show. Her baby would be born addicted, to an addicted mother—a child with no soft place to land.

Claudia thought of the protestors gathered on Mercy Street: the churchgoing faithful, the celibate priests and monks. Would they have any interest in Shannon F.—a homeless addict who haunted the brick sidewalks of Downtown Crossing, harassing tourists for spare change—if she weren’t pregnant? Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life—the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible—didn’t trouble them at all.

WHAT MADE A PERSON A PERSON? HER MIND AND HER MEMORIES, all that she had done and felt and known and created, thought and wondered and seen and understood. A fetus had no thoughts or memories; it had made nothing, understood nothing. And yet, this mute, unthinking knot of tissue—alive, yes, but unformed, unconscious, incapable of tenderness or reasoning or even laughter—was the life that mattered. The woman carrying it, the complex creature formed by twenty or thirty years of living in the world, was simply the means of production. Her feelings about the matter, her particular ideas and needs and desires, didn’t matter at all.

A fetus was living tissue, no question. But it was not a person.

A fetus, at most, was raw material. The woman carrying it could, if she wished, make it into a person. But what was the point of making yet another person, when the woman herself—a person who already existed—counted for so little?