Mercy Street(56)

The fake clinic stayed open for nearly a year, until the Whole Family Initiative quietly folded; its founder, caught in a sexting scandal, had resigned in disgrace. The building in the Fenway sat empty for months, until it reopened as an Aveda hair salon. Claudia hadn’t thought about the fake clinic in years. Now, apparently, another crisis pregnancy center had opened its doors.

LADAN WAS SKEPTICAL.

“But that’s crazy!” she said when Claudia had finished explaining. “Why do they want to trick people like that?”

“Religion, mostly. They think God is on their side.”

Ladan said that she was familiar with that argument. Everything she’d ever been forced to do was because God said so.

Claudia was impressed by her equanimity. Considering that she was pregnant and hadn’t eaten in twelve hours and had been conned into having a baby she didn’t want, her composure was remarkable. If she slapped me, Claudia thought, I would understand.

Ladan leaned forward and laid her head on Claudia’s desk. “I’m so hungry,” she moaned. Her hair was twisted into tiny braids, each thinner than a pencil and glistening with hair oil that smelled like oranges.

Claudia reached into the desk drawer and handed her a granola bar.

“I feel so stupid,” Ladan said, chewing. “I should have known it was taking too long.”

“You’re not stupid. None of this is your fault.” Claudia handed her a second granola bar. She’d demolished the first one in three bites.

“The counselor was so nice,” Ladan said. “Katie was her name. She even gave me her cell phone number. She said I could call her anytime.”

“Do you still have that number?”

Ladan took a phone from her pocket, poked and swiped at the screen. As she read off the digits, Claudia wrote them on her desk calendar, an annual gift from their sales rep at Quincy Adams Medical Supply.

“So what am I going to do now?” Ladan asked.

It was the only question that mattered.

Claudia explained that in some states, the law was different. In Virginia, abortion was legal up to twenty-five weeks.

“Okay, then. I’m going to Virginia.” Ladan got to her feet, gingerly stretching her lower back, as though preparing to lift something heavy.

“Where is Virginia?” she said.

CLAUDIA SPENT HER LUNCH HOUR ON THE PHONE. IT TOOK SOME doing, a few heated exchanges with receptionists, but she managed to secure a last-minute appointment at the Wellwoman Clinic in Alexandria, Virginia. The AB would cost two thousand dollars, more than three times what Mercy Street charged. Ladan would pay half. A Massachusetts charity, the Reproductive Choice Action Network, would cover the difference, plus a round-trip bus ticket to Alexandria.

These arrangements in place, Claudia made two more phone calls. The first was to Ladan. The second was to the number she’d written on the desk calendar. She had no clear idea what she was going to say to the fake counselor at the fake clinic. Mainly she needed information. At the very least, she needed a name.

The line rang twice before voice mail picked up. A young female voice, full of sunshine: Hi there! You have reached Katie at Women’s Choice Boston. I can’t take your call right now, but leave me a message! I’ll call you back the first chance I get. Have an awesome day!

Claudia was tempted to leave a message. The urge was nearly overpowering. Katie, this is Ladan. Guess what? I’m still pregnant. Please advise.

In the end she hung up without speaking, having gotten what she needed. She had a name.

“Women’s Choice,” a name intended to confuse. The clinic on Mercy Street was called Women’s Options. A few miles to the west, in Brookline, was the Choice Center for Women’s Health. Across the river, in Cambridge, was the Women’s Center for Reproductive Choice.

Claudia booted up the hulking desktop computer, rarely used. A Google search for “Women’s Choice Boston” took her to a slickly designed website:

WOMEN’S CHOICE

Free pregnancy testing

State-of-the-art ultrasound

Options counseling

A caring, patient-centered approach

She clicked around the site. There wasn’t much else to it, just that landing page, photos of smiling young women pretending to be patients. Predictably, it had been made to look exactly like Mercy Street’s website. Anyone would have been fooled.

Claudia felt a pulsing behind her left eye, the beginnings of a headache—premenstrual, or possibly not. Her cycles were unpredictable. Thirty years after her teenage flirtation with malnutrition, she still bled grudgingly, on her own mysterious schedule—two periods in a single month, or sometimes none at all. It was a basic, incontrovertible truth of female life: everything that ever happened to you unfolded against this backdrop, the unending play of shifting hormones. Month after month, year after godblessed year, there were logistics to be managed, symptoms to be treated, effluvia to be absorbed.

Mary knocked briefly at the door frame. “How’d it go with Ladan?”

“It went,” Claudia said. “Women’s Wellness was booked solid, but Wellwoman can see her tomorrow.”

“Thank God for Wellwoman! Can she get herself down there?”

“The bus leaves at midnight. I got RCAN to spring for the ticket.”

“RCAN still exists?”

“Apparently.” Claudia felt suddenly exhausted. “Of course, it’s an eight-hour bus ride, and she has a six-year-old at home, and two jobs and no sick days and no family and no childcare. So, you know, what could go wrong?”