The Leavers(51)

One of my roommates said to me, “Girl, when are you due? Tomorrow?”

Maybe cold weather makes for cold people. But when I saw my reflection in a store window it looked like I’d doubled in size. This body definitely did not belong to me.

It was Polly, not Peilan, who went to the free clinic uptown, where there was a woman doctor who was Chinese and spoke Mandarin.

“Do your parents know?” She handed me a paper shirt.

“I don’t have parents.”

The doctor’s hair was cut short, forming a trim arrowhead at the nape of her neck, and her eyes were dark and kind. “How old did you say you were, Miss Guo? Sixteen?”

I sat on a long metal table that was also lined with paper. My feet stuck out of the paper shirt and I stared at a ring of dirt on the floor. I’d told the doctor my name, address, and birthdate, which she scribbled on a form. “Why does it matter how old I am? I don’t need anyone’s permission to be here.”

“You’re right, you don’t.”

There was a plastic figure on the counter with what appeared to be organs inside, and I wanted to remove them and tap them against the doctor’s desk.

She looked at the form again. “Eighteen. Sorry, you look a lot younger. How did you get to New York?”

“I came by myself.”

“That must have been hard.”

“No big deal. I wasn’t scared.”

The doctor opened her mouth as if to talk, then closed it.

“Lay down. Scoot up a little,” she said. “That’s good.”

I was poked, first with fingers, then with a cold metal tongue. The doctor asked where I was from.

“Fujian. Where are you from?”

“Zhejiang.”

“And did your parents bring you here?” I asked her.

“I came here for university and stayed after medical school, to work.”

She ran a boxy device attached to a cord over my belly and pointed to a television screen with a black-and-white image of a shadowy blob. “Looking good.”

“I don’t want it,” I said, though I’d lived with you for so many months, it was hard to be entirely sure.

The doctor looked at the form again. “Oh, you hadn’t mentioned that.” She switched off the video screen. “You can sit up now.” She walked around to face me. “You’re over seven months pregnant.”

I counted backwards, trying to recall how many months it had been since the motel with Haifeng, but I could barely recall his face.

“Twenty-nine or thirty weeks.” The doctor’s face looked sad. “We can’t terminate after twenty-four weeks, or six months. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll go to another clinic, then.”

“It’s the law. They won’t do it either.”

My thighs were clammy against the table, my stomach smeared with jelly. Slime dripped from between my legs.

“I can give you some resources. I’d like to refer you to another doctor, so you can get the proper care.”

“I have to have the baby?”

My belly grew cold. The doctor lowered her voice. “Listen, don’t be afraid. They have good hospitals here.” Her Mandarin accent was citified, polished. “I can also share information about adoption.”

“I didn’t say I was afraid.”

The doctor backed away. There was a spray of gray hairs on her temple, a gold wedding band on her finger. I sat very still in that big paper gown. The screen was blank again. I had traveled thousands of miles just to learn there was no difference between the provincial hospitals with their IDs and age requirements and marriage permits and this clinic in New York with its stupid rules on twenty-four versus twenty-eight. Four measly weeks.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded, looking at my lap. She gave me a sheet of phone numbers and several pamphlets in English and Chinese. I promised to return for another checkup and to buy vitamins.

I walked out of the clinic into a cloudy and cool afternoon, fell asleep on the subway and woke at the end of the line, in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood full of white people speaking some language that wasn’t English. I got off and heard seagulls and smelled salt water, and I walked to the edge of the city, removed my shoes, rolled up my jeans, and stepped into the ocean for the first time.

I stepped in farther. The cold water made me curl my toes and the waves lapped at my shins in a sharper, faster way than the dark blue of the river in the village, yet here the sea was cleaner, grayer, larger, more angry and thirsty and beautiful all at once, not unlike New York itself. I took another step. The water was up to my waist. My teeth chattered, but the cold felt good.

I had run out of choices; I was fucked. I had to have the baby. Or rather, Polly would have to have the baby.

I heard a voice calling from the shore. A man was waving at me and jumping up and down. A woman joined him. They yelled, their arms beckoning me to come back.

The water wasn’t that cold. “I’m not afraid,” I yelled in Mandarin.

Standing in the Atlantic, it grew into a challenge. For Polly, the girl who’d defy odds, the girl who could do anything. New York was a parallel gift of a life, and the unrealness of being here gave even the most frightening things a layer of surreal comedy. Peilan continued on in the village, feeding chickens and stray cats and washing cabbages, as Polly lived out a bonus existence abroad. Peilan would marry Haifeng or another village boy while Polly would walk the endless blocks of new cities. Polly could have a baby without being married. A baby might soothe the sharp edges of my loneliness, the loneliness that bubbled up when I saw couples and families and people laughing with their friends. I could raise my child to be smart and funny and strong.