The Truth About Alice(30)

“Kelsie, we’re going to take care of things,” she said, staring out the windshield, not looking at me. I glanced at her face once in a while and then I looked out at the billboards and the rundown houses that popped up on the sides of the highway. It was still dark, but the sun was just starting to come up. I think that was the moment I knew what my mom was planning, but I couldn’t believe it could possibly be true.

There in the car that morning when I glanced at my mom’s neutral expression, I kept thinking back to that picture I’d found in the attic back in Flint. The funny-colored hair. The nose ring. The look on her face that told me—even if she’d never admit it—that back then, she’d been having fun. Lots of it. I knew I could stare at my mother’s face for the rest of her life, and I’d never see that same expression on it ever again. She’d left it back in Chicago in 1993.

She kept on driving.

All the times I’d seen the Women’s Care Clinic, it had been from the outside. It’s big and gray and the windows are small, skinny strips of glass that are so tiny they might as well not even exist. It looked like a prison. I’d felt really bad every single time we protested there, if you want to know the truth. Even though deep down inside I was pretty sure that abortion must be murder (after all, what else could it be if it isn’t that?), when I looked at the faces of the girls and the women walking in for an appointment and how sad and confused they looked, I didn’t see the point of all the protesting. What is it ever really going to change? Sometimes I’d seen girls that looked my age walking inside, and they’d be holding onto women who had to be their moms, and the girls would sort of lean their heads in and cry against their moms’ shoulders as they walked past us. The couple of times I’d seen a mother–daughter pair like that, I’d been a little jealous. Me. Jealous of a girl getting an abortion because she gets to cry on her mom’s shoulder.

So that should tell you something.

When we went into the clinic, it was so early there weren’t any protestors outside yelling at us yet, and I knew my mom had planned it this way. I didn’t get to cry on my mom’s shoulder. Not that she’d let me if I’d tried. She just walked me into the lobby and we got frisked by a security guard who looked like he weighed about five hundred pounds. Then we got buzzed into another room, and from that moment on it’s just this weird blur in my mind.

My mom never actually said, “Kelsie, you’re going to have an abortion.” Later on, I figured out my mom probably believed not saying it makes it like it never happened. Because after that day, she never talked about it again. Like that day just never even happened.

I knew the clinic people must have recognized us, but they acted like they didn’t, and for this I was really thankful. I sat in the waiting room and I stared at my sneakers, and I tried to figure out how I felt. Relieved? Scared? Sad? Really, I don’t know what I felt. I didn’t have time to feel.

My mom filled out some forms and she didn’t talk to me once. I overheard her confirming with the nurse that we lived at least one hundred miles away from the clinic, so we could have the procedure completed in just one trip. Soon I was in a room with just a nurse and a doctor, and I was holding the nurse’s hand, and the nurse was so nice. She was, like, ridiculously nice. She kept explaining everything that was going to happen step by step by step, and the entire time she never let go of my hand. Her hand was so warm and soft, it was like wrapping my hand up in cotton T-shirt straight from the dryer.

“You’re so nice,” I said to her. “Thank you for being so nice.” Hot tears were sneaking out, and I tried to blink them back, but I couldn’t, so they just ran out of my eyes and down my cheeks.

“Of course, sweetheart,” the nurse said, and she leaned into me, crinkling my blue paper gown as she did so. She pressed up against my shoulder and I smelled her skin, which smelled like talcum powder. She was wearing a thin chain with a tiny cross around her neck just like my mother’s. Her purple scrubs were covered in butterflies.

“Thank you for being so nice,” I said again, and I said this over and over during the whole entire thing. If I could keep on saying it, it would make everything okay. I was convinced of that.

“Of course, sweetheart,” the nurse said every single time, and her voice was so gentle, so soft. She kept answering me even as she stopped to tell me what was happening, step by step by step.

Thank you for being so nice.

Thank you for being so nice.

The drive home I didn’t feel well. I guess she knew I might get sick, because my mother had come prepared with a plastic bag from Seller Brothers in the front seat, and she gave it to me when I told her I felt like throwing up.

“Can’t we pull over?” I asked her when I saw what she was handing me.

“No,” my mother said, never taking her eyes off the road. “Use the bag.”




I’ve made my mom look pretty evil, but I guess when we got home she wasn’t so bad. She helped me into bed, and she sat on the edge of the mattress reading the aftercare instructions on the paper the clinic gave her. She studied them like she was going to be quizzed on them later or something. I’m not sure what she told my dad or sister, but no one except for my mom came into my bedroom for the rest of the weekend. I just sat in my bed looking through magazines and ignoring all of Alice’s texts and calls and thinking about the nurse at the clinic and how I wished she could come and sit with me for a while and hold my hand.