interrupted Hannah’s reverie. “Sorry about the sheets. I get them from the clearance bin, and this was all they had. They’re clean, though. I washed them myself.”
He opened a medicine bag, fished out a pair of rubber gloves and put them on, then began removing medical instruments from the bag and placing them on the table. Hannah looked away from their ominous silver glint, feeling suddenly woozy.
He gestured at one of the chairs. “Why don’t you sit down.”
She’d expected to have to get undressed right away, but when he’d finished his preparations, he drew up the other chair and started asking her questions: How old was she? Had she ever had children? Other abortions? When was her last period? When had her morning sickness started? Had she ever had any serious medical problems? Any sexually transmitted infections? Mortified, Hannah looked down at her hands and mumbled the answers.
“Have you done anything else to try to terminate this pregnancy?” Raphael asked.
She nodded. “I got some pills two weeks ago and, you know, inserted them. But they didn’t work.” She’d paid five hundred dollars for them and followed the instructions she was given carefully, but nothing had happened.
“They must have been counterfeits. About half the stuff out there is. No telling what you’re getting.” Raphael paused. Said, “Look at me, child.”
Hannah met his gaze, expecting judgment and finding, to her surprise, compassion instead. “Are you sure you want to terminate this pregnancy?”
There was that phrase again: not murder your unborn baby or destroy an innocent life, but terminate this pregnancy. How straightforward that made it sound, how unremarkable. Raphael was studying her face. This close to him, she could see the network of tiny broken blood vessels radiating across his cheeks.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”
“Would you like me to explain the procedure?”
Part of her wanted to say no, but she’d decided before she came that she would not hide from herself the truth of what she was doing here today. She owed it that much, the small scrap of life that would never be her child. She hadn’t dared research the procedure on the net; the Texas Internet Authority closely monitored searches of certain words and topics, and abortion was at the top of the list. “Yes, please.”
Raphael pulled a small flask from his pocket, unscrewed the lid and took a drink—to steady his hands, he said—and then described what he was about to do. His matter-of-fact tone and the clinical terms he used, “speculum” and “dilators” and “pregnancy tissue,” made it sound tidy and impersonal. Finally he asked Hannah if she had any questions. She had already asked and answered the most important ones in her own mind: whether this was murder (yes), whether she would go to hell for it (yes), whether she had any other choice (no). All but one, and it had tormented her ever since she’d decided to do this. She asked it now, her nails digging into the underside of the chair.
“Will it feel any pain?”
Raphael shook his head. “Based on what you’ve told me, you’re only about twelve weeks pregnant. It’s never been proven when fetal pain reception starts, but I can tell you for a fact that it’s impossible before the twentieth week.” Her shoulders slumped in relief, and Raphael added, “It’ll be painful for you, though. The cramping can be severe.”
“I don’t care about that.” Hannah wanted it to hurt. It seemed unconscionable to her, to take a life and not feel pain.
Raphael stood and had another swig from his flask. “Go ahead and undress now,” he said. “Just from the waist down. Then lie on the table with your head at this end. You can use the extra sheet there to cover yourself.”
He went into the adjoining bathroom, closing the door to give her privacy—this man who was about to peer between her spread legs. Hannah was grateful nonetheless for his discretion. She folded her skirt neatly, laid it on the chair and then tucked her panties beneath it, another gesture of decorum she knew to be ludicrous under the circumstances but couldn’t help making. Being naked from the waist down made her feel dirtier somehow than if she were completely nude. Hurriedly, she got on the table and covered herself. Forced herself to say, “I’m ready.”
THE PUNISHMENT TONE sounded, jerking her back into her cell, back into her bleeding body. It all comes down to blood, she thought, as she took the tampons and the wipes from the compartment and used them. Blood that comes out of you and blood that doesn’t. Mechanically, she cleaned the floor, flushed the stained wipes, washed her hands and changed her tunic, making no attempt to shield her nakedness. And when it doesn’t, when you wait and pray and wait some more and still it doesn’t come … She lay down on her side on the sleeping pallet, wrapped her arms around her knees and wept.
HOW MANY DAYS HAD SHE been here? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? She didn’t know, and her ignorance made her anxious. There were gaps of time she couldn’t account for, moments when she seemed to wake from a sleep she suspected had never occurred. She came out of these spells sweaty and hoarse, with a mouth full of cotton. Had she been talking to herself out loud? Raving? Revealing something she shouldn’t have?
She tried to stave off the spells with reading and pacing, but increasingly she felt too listless for either. Her reflection in the mirror had grown gaunt. She had no appetite, and she’d developed the ability to tune out the punishment tone to the point where it was just a distant, annoying whine, like a mosquito flying past her ear. She’d stopped taking her daily showers and her body smelled of stale sweat, but even this was a matter of indifference to her. Her usual fastidiousness had vanished along with her energy.
When she was lucid, the thing she feared most was that she’d said something to betray Raphael. The police had picked her up in the parking lot after a call from a suspicious neighbor, but Raphael had been long gone by that point, and as far as she knew they’d never caught him. She’d given them a false description, waiting until the third time they interrogated her before pretending to break and describing a slender, blond man in his thirties with an Earth First symbol tattooed on his right wrist. What Hannah didn’t know was that the neighbors had seen a heavyset older man leave the apartment. Once the police caught her lying, they were merciless. They questioned her repeatedly, sometimes harshly, other times with an unctuous concern for her welfare that a first grader could have seen through. She stuck to her story, against her lawyer’s advice and despite her father’s entreaties. She would not betray Raphael, with his earnest handshake and sad eyes.
She could have, though. He’d certainly told her enough about himself for the police to identify him. When he’d finished and was cleaning up, and Hannah was still woozy from the painkillers, she’d asked him why he did it. What she meant but didn’t say was, How can you bear to do it? By that point, Raphael had had more sips from the flask and was in a talkative mood. He told her he’d been an OB/GYN in Salt Lake City when the superclap pandemic broke out (the crude slang term discomfited her; in her world, it was always referred to as “the Great Scourge”), and Utah became the nexus of the conservative backlash (“the Rectification”) that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The decision had been cause for celebration in the Payne household, but Raphael spoke of it with anger, and of the Sanctity of Life laws Utah had passed soon afterward, with outrage. Even more abhorrent to him than the lack of exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health was the abrogation of doctor-patient privilege. Legally, he was bound to notify the police if he found evidence that a patient had had a recent abortion; morally, he felt bound not to. Morality won. When he got caught falsifying the results of pelvic examinations, the state
