The Art of Crash Landing (15 page)

Before she leaves, I say, “Was it an accident?”

“I don't think so.” She frowns at the damp books in her arms. “I think those hoodlums discard their soft drinks in the night depository on purpose.” Her voice is shaking with emotion—this from a woman who takes rogue library turds in stride.

“I meant my grandfather,” I say. “Did he die in an accident?”

Fritter pauses, then replies, “I wouldn't say that.”

“Well, what
would
you say?”

“I would say, if you're finished in Periodicals, can you please go help Tawny in Children's?”

“There's no doubt that I
can
,” I reply. “Are you asking me if I
will
?”

Her mouth curls into a thin smile. “Actually, I'm not asking at all.”

M
y mother wasn't going to tell me. I don't remember how I learned that she was sick and bleeding, or of her doctor's appointment. It could have been from Queeg, but they'd been divorced for years, and he was no longer a reliable source of information about my mother. Or I could have noticed something at the studio. I was working there at the time; a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness—and by happiness I mean kick-ass parties and badass boyfriends—makes it hard to maintain steady employment, which is how I ended up working for my mother. Of course, by working for her I don't mean to imply that we saw much of each other. She just took more jobs and farmed out some of the easier ones to me, so we tended to go our separate ways.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I found out because of the Malibu. The car had suffered yet another nervous breakdown, and at the last minute my mother needed a ride to her appointment.

The doctor's office was on the seventh floor of a tall, mirrored building near the hospital. I followed my mother to the receptionist's
window, then to a set of empty chairs. Sun streamed in through the wall of windows, potted plants glowed with green health, and the chairs were filled with women whose bellies swelled with promise.

I looked at my mother as she sat filling out forms and noticed for the first time that her belly, too, was swollen. Not the soft pooch of a
menopot
, as my mother called the potbellies of middle-aged women, nor was it the thickened middle I had come to associate with her alcoholism. And certainly it was not the happy roundness of the mothers-to-be around us. No, my mother's bulge looked low and firm and, judging from the way she shifted the clipboard as she tried to write, uncomfortable. How long had she had this? Nobody had said the word
cancer
yet, at least not to me, but still I felt a knot of fear in my own flat stomach.

I didn't say anything, but my mother must have sensed my worry. She leaned over toward me and whispered. “It's just a D and C. They're no big deal.”

I could smell the booze on her breath.

“You've had one before?”

“I never said that.” She turned her attention back to the forms in her lap.

I remember wondering if she'd had an abortion at some point in her life, and if so, if it had been before or after she had me. And I wondered if she wished she'd had one instead of having me. I didn't say any of that to her.

When a nurse came out and called her name, my mother stood and then I stood. She looked at the nurse and then at me.

“Are you crying?” she asked.

I shook my head. “It's just too bright in here.”

She reached in her purse and pulled out her ridiculously large Jackie O sunglasses and handed them to me, watching expectantly until I slipped them over my eyes.

“I'll be right back,” she said and then followed the nurse through the door.

The only reading material available was parenting and pregnancy magazines and, surprisingly enough, a few bridal magazines. I picked up one and was thumbing through the photos of frothy gowns, when a strange squeaking and clanking noise made me look up. From the left side of the room a roped platform appeared outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Inch by inch it lurched farther and farther along the wall until finally the man standing on the platform became visible. He wore heavy coveralls and a thick harness around his waist from which a rope extended to a clasp on the platform railing.

Squeegee in one hand, sponge in the other, bucket at his feet, he smeared fluid in sweeping arcs, then pulled it off with the rubber blade. Back and forth, up and down, then a pause and the platform eased over a few feet, stopped, and he repeated his motions. The man wore wraparound mirrored sunglasses that in turn reflected the mirrored windows, which gave his face the illusion of being two sections of flesh divided by a strip of sky. I pulled the painter's name from a distant memory—Magritte. I could still remember the breathless feeling in art class when our teacher showed slides of his work. Painting after painting of people who were not quite whole, their missing pieces filled with blue and clouds.

I stood and walked to the window, stopping when the man and I were less than three feet apart. Wet and wipe, across and down, he never paused, never acknowledged me standing there.

“It's mirrored,” a woman behind me said. “He has no idea what's going on in here.”

“Lucky him,” I replied.

T
his afternoon I am operating under a theory I deduced at an early age: it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Once Fritter leaves to spend the afternoon with her brother at the nursing home, I encourage Tawny to take the first lunch break. When she returns, I tell her I'm going to walk to the diner for lunch, then I snag someone's apple from the fridge and go out to Tawny's truck. Just as I expect, the keys are in the ignition. Unfortunately, the seat is still jammed all the way forward and the adjustment lever seems to be rusted in place, which leaves me driving hunched over with my legs spread and the steering wheel practically touching my ribs. Ah well, needs must when the devil drives.

I approach the small gray brick building with apprehension, and when I step through the clinic door, the medical disinfectant smell within weakens my knees. Nothing good has ever happened in a place that smells like this. I actually consider leaving, but the receptionist notices me standing frozen at the door, and gestures me in.

“Sign in.” She pushes over a piece of paper and a pen with a plastic flower taped to the end. Her nasal voice sounds familiar;
she must be the same woman I spoke to when I made the appointment yesterday. She asks if I have insurance, and I tell her no. With a Tawny-worthy eye roll, she pushes herself up out of her chair and crosses to a filing cabinet against the far wall. I notice that though her legs and arms are thin, her middle is round and tightly packed. I smile, finding comfort in the knowledge that this rude woman will someday be one of those unfortunate old ladies shaped like a tick.

I fill out the required forms, and before long I am escorted to an exam room. A few minutes later, sporting the paper vest and drape de rigueur, I am flipping through an illustrated pamphlet on the latest and greatest STDs when the door opens. A woman of average height, in her mid-forties, I'm guessing, with short salt-and-pepper hair and a white coat, enters.

“Ms. Wallace? I'm Dr. McDonald.”

When we shake hands my paper garments rustle.

“So what seems to be the problem?” She looks down at the pamphlet in my hand.

“Not an STD,” I reply without thinking it through. In all honesty, I have contracted the ultimate sexually transmitted disease.

“I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

I shake my head. “Pee test.”

We go through the expected questions regarding my last period, then she has me lie down on the paper-covered table, place my feet in stirrups, and scoot, scoot, scoot to the edge.

The fluorescent light overhead hums and has a flicker that I sense more than see. There's a constellation of dead bugs in the fixture's plastic covering. The Bug Dipper. I squint my eyes and try to decide which one is the North Moth, the moth by which I could find my way home.

After a few minutes of intimate poking and prodding, the
doctor tells me to sit up, scoot back onto the table, and lie back down. She lowers the paper blanket covering my middle and squirts some slime onto my lower abdomen. It's cold and I startle a little as it hits my skin.

“Sorry,” she says, not sounding terribly sorry, and then she reaches into a drawer and pulls out a plastic gadget with what looks like a thick pen attached by a twisty cord to a walky-talky base. She puts the walky-talky speaker to her ear and the flat end of the pen into the goo on my belly and starts moving it around. A few seconds later she pulls the speaker away from her ear and turns up the volume dial with her thumb.

There's a roaring static noise, but underneath that a fast, rhythmic whooshing. The doctor's eyes meet mine. “There's the heartbeat,” she says.

I look away.

After turning off the machine, the doctor wipes my belly with a Kleenex and tells me to sit up. She looks at my paperwork, then pulls a small cardboard wheel from the pocket in her white coat and fiddles with it for a few seconds. “I put your due date in mid-December.”

It's either my sigh, or the look on my face, that prompts her to put a hand on my arm and say, “Why don't you get dressed and come visit with me in my office,” rather than “Congratulations.”

A woman in scrubs leads me to Dr. McDonald's office. The room is small but cheerful, with white walls and a narrow clerestory window behind her desk. A bookshelf holds comfortingly large medical volumes on the lower shelves with a top shelf filled with photos of young children displayed in matching silver frames.

The doctor smiles at me. When I sit down, she pushes the box of Kleenex on her desk closer to me.

“I'm not going to need that,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she replies, but she leaves the box where it is.

“You don't happen to have a farm do you?”

She shakes her head. “About this pregnancy. I get the impression that it wasn't anticipated.”

“Correct,” I say.

“Would you like to spend a few moments discussing your options?”

“I give birth or I get an abortion. Doesn't that about cover it?”

“Well . . .” She picks up a pen lying on her desk and clicks the button a few times before answering. “I would have added adoption in there.”

“That would certainly be a part of the give birth process. For me anyway.”

She clicks her pen a few more times. “If you do decide that an
abortion is the right decision for you, I'm afraid that it will have to be surgical.”

“Surgical?”

“Before eight weeks it's possible to do what's called a medical abortion. Oral medication is used to induce a miscarriage. I think you're around ten weeks, possibly eleven.”

“So the surgical one is what, like a D and C?”

“Exactly. It's very safe.”

“You think so?”

“You don't? Have you had one?”

My mother was the one lying on the paper-covered table while I sat in a waiting room hiding my eyes. Of course getting a cancer diagnosis wasn't what killed her; hell, it wasn't even cancer that killed her. But that doesn't stop my heart from skipping a beat as we discuss the procedure.

“No” is all I tell the doctor.

“Don't worry.” She sets down her pen. “It's a simple procedure performed at a clinic under light sedation. The decision you need to make shouldn't be focused on the procedure itself. A surgical abortion is ten times safer than childbirth; I can show you studies to that effect. But terminating a pregnancy brings with it certain ethical implications and a number of emotional issues. That's where your focus needs to be.”

“I shouldn't be anybody's mother,” I tell her.

She nods. “I understand how you feel.”

I glance up at the photos on the shelf and then back at her.

She answers my unasked question. “I have children. But I still worry about being a good mother.”

I'm not sure how to respond to that, so I don't. She's not too far from the age my mother was when she died. I wonder if this woman waited until her late thirties to start a family; that wouldn't surprise me. Or perhaps she just prefers to display photos of her kids as young children, before they began to disappoint. That wouldn't surprise me either.

“Adoption is a valid option,” she is saying. “There are lots of couples who are unable to conceive, but desperately want to be parents.”

“How much does it cost?” I ask

“Well, if you go with an open adoption, the adoptive parents generally assume the financial burden—”

“No, I mean an abortion. How much do you charge?”

I watch her face for a flicker of disappointment, but see none. She is good. “We don't do them here, but I can refer you to a clinic in Tulsa. Once there, state law now requires the clinic to provide you with a state-directed counseling session followed by a twenty-four-hour waiting period prior to the procedure.”

“But how much will it cost?”

“Hard to say exactly. It's an hour drive to the clinic, so there would be transportation expenses there and back each day. All that aside, however, the cost of the procedure would be approximately $600 to $700 right now.”

“Right now?”

“In another two weeks you'll be in your second trimester. At that point, the procedure itself often takes two days—the first day a dilator is inserted, then the second day the curettage is performed. Still perfectly safe and reasonably painless, it's just somewhat more expensive.”

“Somewhat?”

“It's around $1,500.”

“That's more than somewhat.”

She picks the pen back up, but thankfully does not begin to click. “Women often get help with the cost from the father of the child.”

I run a trial conversation with Nick through my mind. Although I'm pretty sure he'd be in favor of an abortion, he is unpredictable at best, cruel at worst.

“How long do I have?” I say.

“Legally? Eight more weeks, maybe nine. It's legal until the fetus is twenty weeks, but I would strongly recommend sooner rather than later. It gets more difficult the further along you are. Physically and emotionally.”

The window behind her desk stretches the length of the wall, up close to the ceiling. From where I'm sitting all I can see is blue sky and a steady procession of clouds blowing past from right to left, misshapen cotton balls on a conveyor belt. I look again at the doctor. She looks at me. She's leaning forward, her arms resting on the desk, her fingers knitted. She's waiting for me to say something, to make some sort of a decision.

“Any more questions?” she says. Her tone is friendly, but at the same time it's clear that she doesn't have all day.

The thing is, even though I can't imagine staying pregnant for seven more months, I can't seem to focus on taking any action to become unpregnant. The harder I try to think about it, the faster
the idea slips out from under my attention. It's like trying to eat a peanut with a fork.

“Do you guys use window-washers?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“You know, the guys that stand on the platform that hangs from the roof and they use that squeegee on the glass . . .”

She studies me with a worried look on her face before saying, “This building only has one floor.”

“Right,” I say, feeling my face flush. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

She seems to realize that she's not getting a decision from me today, because she just nods and stands, so I stand, and then we observe each other across her cluttered desk. I glance again at the photos on her bookshelf. In one, Dr. McDonald and a tall man are wearing Santa hats. Seated between them, on a fence rail, are three dark-haired children. A horse stands on the other side of the fence, its liquid eyes looking at the camera from between the middle-size and smallest child.

“Nice hats,” I say.

“We took it for a Christmas card.”

“Taken at your place?”

“We have a few acres. It's not really a farm.”

“And a horse?”

“Two,” she replies.

I smile. “E-I-E-I-O.” Reaching down, I push the Kleenex box back to the center of the desk. “Told you I wouldn't need those.”

“You were right,” she says. She echoes my smile, but hers looks a little sad. I have a feeling mine does, too.