"Is counsel trying to tell the court how to do its job," Angela asks, "or does he actually have a question for my client?"
"Yes," Wade replies. "I do have a question. You testified, Ms. Baxter, that you went through several in vitro procedures, all of which resulted in disaster?"
"Objection--"
"I'll rephrase. You did not actually carry a baby to term, did you?"
"No," I say.
"In fact you had two miscarriages?"
"Yes."
"And then a stillbirth?"
I look into my lap. "Yes."
"It's your testimony today that you've always wanted a child, correct?"
"That's right."
"Your Honor." Angela sighs. "All this has been asked and answered."
"Why then, Ms. Baxter, did you murder your own child in 1989?"
"What?" I say, stunned. "I have no idea what you're talking about--"
But I do. And his next words confirm it: "Did you or did you not have a voluntary abortion when you were nineteen years old?"
"Objection!" Angela is out of her seat immediately. "This is irrelevant and occurred prior to my client's marriage, and I move that it be stricken immediately from the record--"
"It's completely relevant. It informs her desire to have a baby now. She's trying to make up for past sins."
"Objection!"
My hands have gone numb.
A woman stands up in the gallery. "Baby killer!" she yells, and that is the hairline crack it takes to break the dam. There is shouting--by the Westboro contingent and by the Eternal Glory congregants. The judge calls for order, and about twenty observers are hauled through the double doors of the courtroom. I imagine Vanessa watching on the other side. I wonder what she's thinking.
"Mr. Preston, you may continue your line of questioning, but without the editorial comments," Judge O'Neill says. "And as for the gallery, if there is one more disruption, I will turn this into a closed session."
Yes, I tell him. I had an abortion. I was nineteen, in college. It wasn't the right time to have a baby. I thought--stupidly--that I'd have many more chances.
When I finish, I am gutted. I have only spoken once of the procedure since it happened, and that was at the fertility clinic, when I had to be completely honest about my reproductive history or compromise my chances of conceiving. It has been twenty-two years, but suddenly I feel the same way I felt back then: Shaky. Embarrassed.
And angry.
The clinic could not legally have released that information to Wade Preston. Which means that it must have come from the only other person who was at the clinic the day I gave my medical history.
Max.
"Is there a reason you were hiding this information from the court?"
"I wasn't hiding--"
"Could it be because you thought, correctly, it might make you seem a little disingenuous when you start sobbing about how much you want a baby?"
"Objection!"
"Have you ever considered," Wade Preston presses, "that the fact that you haven't been able to have another child was God's judgment on you for killing your first?"
Angela is furious. She goes after Wade with a verbal streak of fire. But even once he has withdrawn his question, it hangs in the air like the letters of a neon sign after you close your eyes.
And even if I don't have to reply out loud, I may just have already answered silently.
I don't want to believe in a God who'd punish me for having an abortion.
But that doesn't mean I haven't wondered if it's true.
"You want to tell me what the hell that was all about?" Angela asks the minute the judge says that we are adjourning for the day. "How did he get your medical files?"
"He didn't have to," I say flatly. "Max must have told him."
"Then why didn't you tell me? It would have been much less damaging if we'd been able to bring it up on direct instead of cross!"
Like Max's alcoholism. Everyone likes a reformed sinner. If we'd been the ones to bring up his drinking, it would have looked like he had something to hide.
Which is exactly how Wade Preston has painted me today.
Preston has finished packing up his briefcase; he smiles politely as he walks by. "Sorry you didn't know about the skeleton in your client's closet. The literal one, that is."
Angela ignores him. "Is there anything else I need to know about? Because I really do not like surprises."
I shake my head, still numb, and follow her out of the courtroom. Vanessa is waiting with my mother--both of them still sequestered. "What happened in there?" Vanessa asks. "How come the judge threw out half the gallery?"
"Can we talk about it in the car? I really just want to go home."
But the moment we open the front door of the courthouse and step outside, there is a hail and volley of questions.
I'm expecting this. Just not the ones they ask.
How far along were you when you had the abortion?
Who was the baby daddy?
Do you still keep in touch with him?
A woman walks up to me. From her yellow T-shirt I realize she is from Westboro Baptist Church. She's holding a recyclable plastic bottle filled with some kind of fruit punch, but it looks like blood from here.
I know she's going to throw it at me the moment before she actually does. "Some choices are wrong," she cries.
I step back, shielding myself, so that the liquid only lands on my right foot. I completely forget about Vanessa until I hear her voice beside me. "You never told me."
"I never told anyone."
Vanessa's eyes are cold. She glances at Max, walking between his attorneys. "Somehow," she says, "I don't believe you."
My mother wants to go after Wade Preston for dragging up my history; it takes Angela's interference and the magic word (grandchild) before she agrees to go home without putting up a fight. She tells me she will call me later to make sure I'm all right, but it's pretty clear to her that I don't want to talk right now. To anyone except Vanessa, that is. The whole ride home, I try to explain what happened during my testimony. She doesn't say a word. When I mention my abortion, she flinches.
Finally, by the time we park the car, I can't stand it. "Are you going to give me the silent treatment forever?" I yell, slamming the car door and following Vanessa into the house. I strip off my panty hose, which are still sticky. "Is this some Catholic thing?"
"You know I'm not Catholic," Vanessa answers.
"But you used to be--"
"This isn't about the damn abortion, Zoe. It's about you." She is facing me now, her hands still clutching the keys to the car. "That's a pretty big bit of history to leave out of a relationship. It's like forgetting to tell someone you have AIDS."
"For God's sake, Vanessa, you can't catch an abortion like an STD--"
"Do you think that's the only reason to disclose something incredibly personal to the people you love?"
"It was a horrible decision to have to make, even if I was lucky enough to be able to make it. I don't particularly enjoy reliving it."
"Then tell me this," she argues. "How is it that Max knew, and I didn't?"
"You're jealous? You're actually jealous that I told Max about something horrible in my past!"
"Yeah, I am," Vanessa admits. "Okay? I'm a selfish bitch who wishes that my wife opened herself up to me as much as she opened herself up to the guy she used to be married to."
"And maybe I'd like my wife to show a little compassion," I say. "Considering I was just raked over the coals by Wade Preston and that I'm now Public Enemy Number One for the entire religious right."
"There's more than just a u in us," Vanessa says. "Not that you seem to realize it."
"Great!" I yell, tears springing to my eyes. "You want to know about my abortion? It was the worst day of my life. I cried the whole way there and the whole way home. I had to eat ramen noodles for two months because I didn't want to ask my mother for money; and I didn't tell her I'd done it until I was back h
ome for the summer. I didn't take the medicine they gave me for the cramps afterward because I felt like I deserved the pain. And the guy I was dating--the guy who decided with me that this was the right thing to do--broke up with me a month later. And in spite of the fact that every doctor I've ever seen tells me that my infertility has nothing to do with that procedure, I've never really been able to believe it. So how's that? Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?"
By the time I finish, I am crying so hard I can barely understand my own words. My nose is running and my hair is in my face and I want her to touch me, to take me in her arms and tell me it's all right, but instead she steps back. "What else don't I know about you?" she asks, and she leaves me standing alone in the entryway of a house that no longer feels like home.
The actual procedure took only six minutes.
I know, I counted.
They had talked to me about all my options. They had given me lab tests and a physical. They had given me a sedative. They had opened my cervix with dilators. They had given me forms to sign.
This took a few hours.
I remember the nurse fitting my feet into the stirrups, telling me to scoot down. I remember the shine of the speculum as the doctor lifted it from its sterile napkin. I remember the wet-vac sound of the suction device.
The doctor never called it a baby. She never even called it a fetus. She referred to it as tissue. I remember closing my eyes and thinking of a Kleenex, balled up and tossed in the trash.
On the way back to campus, I put my hand on the stick shift of my boyfriend's old Dodge Dart. I just wanted his palm to cover mine. Instead, he untangled my fingers. "Zoe," he said. "Just let me drive."
Although it was only two in the afternoon when I got back to my dorm room, I put on my pajamas. I watched General Hospital, honing my focus on the characters of Frisco and Felicia, as if I would have to pass a test on them later on. I ate an entire jar of Jif peanut butter.
I still felt empty.
I had nightmares for weeks, that I could hear the fetus crying. That I followed the sound to the courtyard outside my dorm window and crouched down in my pajama bottoms and torn tank to dig with my bare hands in the ragged ground. I pulled up hunks of sod, chipped my fingernails on stones, and finally uncovered it:
Sweet Cindy, the baby doll I'd buried the day my father died.
I can't unwind that night. I hear Vanessa moving around above me, in the bedroom, and then when it gets quiet I assume she's fallen asleep. So instead, I sit down at my digital keyboard and I start playing. I let the music bind me like a bandage. I sew myself together note by note.
I play for so long that my wrists begin to cramp. I sing until my voice frays, until I feel like I'm breathing through a straw. When I stop, I lean my forehead so that it rests on the keys. The silence in the room becomes a thick cotton batting.
Then I hear clapping.
I turn around to find Vanessa standing in the doorway. "How long have you been there?"
"Long enough." She sits down beside me on the piano bench. "This is what he wants, you know."
"Who?"
"Wade Preston. To break us apart."
"I don't want that," I admit.
"Me neither." She hesitates. "I've been upstairs doing math."
"No wonder you've been gone so long," I murmur. "You suck at math."
"The way I figure it, you were with Max for nine years. I plan to be with you for the next forty-nine years."
"Just forty-nine?"
"Stick with me, here. It's a nice round number." Vanessa looks at me. "So by the time you're ninety, you'll have spent over half your life with me, as opposed to ten percent of your life with Max. Don't get me wrong--I'm still wicked jealous of those nine years, because I can't ever have them with you, no matter what I do. But if you hadn't lived them back then with Max, maybe you wouldn't be here with me now."
"I wasn't trying to keep a secret from you," I tell her.
"But you should be able to. I love you so much that there's nothing you could possibly tell me that would change that."
"I used to be a guy," I say, straight-faced.
"Deal breaker." Vanessa laughs, and she leans forward and kisses me. She puts her hands on either side of my face. "I know you're strong enough to do this alone, but you don't have to. I promise not to be an idiot anymore."
I settle closer to her, rest my head on her shoulder. "I'm sorry, too," I say, an apology as wide as the night sky, with no limits.
VANESSA
My mother used to say that a woman without lipstick was like a cake without icing. I never knew her to go without her signature color, Forever After. Every time we went to a drugstore to get aspirin or tampons or asthma medication, she picked up a couple more tubes and stashed them in one of her dresser drawers--one that was completely filled with the small silver tubes. "I don't think the company's gonna run out," I used to tell her, but she, of course, knew better. In 1982, they stopped making Forever After. Luckily my mother had stockpiled enough to carry her forward a decade. When she was in the hospital, so drugged for the pain that she couldn't remember her own mantra, I made sure she was always made up. When she took her last breath, she was wearing Forever After.
She would have found it incredibly ironic that I had turned out to be her cosmetic guardian angel, since I had been running away from her mascara wand since I could walk. Whereas other little girls liked to sit on their mothers' bathroom counters and watch them transform themselves into works of art, I couldn't stand the feel of anything other than soap on my face. The one time I let my mother come near me with eyeliner, it was to pencil in a Gomez Addams mustache on my upper lip for a school play.
I mention all this to duly underscore the fact that at 7:00 A.M. I am poking my eye out with Zoe's eyeliner applicator. I am grimacing in the mirror so that I can roll Hot Tamale lipstick over my mouth. If Wade Preston and Judge O'Neill want to see the traditional woman who stays at home and does her nails and cooks roasts for dinner, I'll become one for the next eight hours.
(Unless I have to wear a skirt. That is just not happening.)
I lean back with spots dancing before my eyes (it is really hard to not go cross-eyed while you're putting on liquid liner) and scrutinize my handiwork in the mirror. Just then, Zoe stumbles into the bathroom, still half asleep. She sits down on the closed toilet seat and blinks up at me.
Then she gasps, horrified. "Why do you look like a scary clown?"
"Really?" I say, rubbing my hands over my cheeks. "Too much blush?" I frown into the mirror again. "I was going for that nineteen fifties pinup look. Like Katy Perry."
"Well, you got Frank-N-Furter from Rocky Horror," Zoe says. She stands and pushes me down on the seat instead. Then she takes makeup remover, squirts it on a cotton ball, and wipes my face clean. "You want to tell me why you've suddenly decided to use makeup?"
"Just trying to look more . . . feminine," I answer.
"You mean less like a dyke," Zoe corrects. She puts her hands on her hips. "You know you look fine without a drop of anything on your face, Ness."
"See, this is why I'm married to you instead of Wade Preston."
She leans forward, sweeping blush along my cheekbone. "And here I thought it was because I had--"
"An eyelash curler," I interrupt, grinning. "I married you for your Shu Uemura."
"Stop," Zoe says. "You're making me feel so cheap." She tilts up my chin. "Close your eyes."
She brushes and dabs at me. I even let her use the eyelash curler, although I nearly wind up blind in the process. She finishes by telling me to let my mouth hang open, and she swipes it over with lipstick.
"Ta da," Zoe says.
I am expecting a drag queen. Instead, I see something entirely different. "Oh, my God. I've turned into my mother."
Zoe peers over my shoulder, so that we are both looking at our reflections. "From what I hear," she says, "it happens to the best of us."
Angela pays a janitor twenty bucks to let
us into the courthouse through the delivery door in the back. We walk in spy-novel silence past the boiler room and a supply closet stocked with paper towels and toilet tissue before he leads us into a rickety, grimy service elevator that will take us up to the main floor. He turns the key and pushes a button and then looks at me. "I got a cousin who's gay," he says, this man who hasn't spoken more than four words to us the whole time he's been with us.
Because I don't know what he thinks of that cousin, I don't say anything.
"How did you know who we are?" Zoe asks.
He shrugs. "I'm the custodian. I know everything."
The elevator belches us out into a corridor near the clerk's office. Angela winds her way through the maze of hallways until we are at the door of our courtroom. There is literally a wall of human media facing away from us, toward the door, waiting for our entrance up the front steps of the courthouse.
While we're actually standing right behind the morons.
I think I have more respect for Angela at that moment than I ever had before.
"Go get a granola bar or something in the snack room," she advises. "That way you'll be outta sight, outta mind while Preston's coming into court, and the reporters won't come after you." Because I'm still sequestered--at least for the first few minutes of today's court session--this makes sense. I watch her safely tuck Zoe inside the courtroom and then slip down the hallway unnoticed while the rest of the counsel arrives.
I eat a pack of Nutter Butters, but they make me queasy. The truth is, I'm not good when it comes to public speaking. It's why I'm a school counselor and not up in front of a classroom. The fact that Zoe can sit on a stool and sing her heart to shreds in front of an audience leaves me in awe.
Then again, watching Zoe load the dishwasher pretty much takes my breath away, too.
"You can do this," I say under my breath, and by the time I come back to the double doors of the courtroom, a bailiff is waiting to bring me inside.
I do the whole rigmarole--the swearing on the Bible, the name and age and address. Angela walks toward me, looking much more poised and intense than she does when she's not in front of a judge. To my surprise, she drops her pad of notes about a foot in front of me. "You know how Wade Preston sleeps?" she whispers quickly. "He lies on one side and then he lies on the other." When she sees me smother a laugh, she winks, and I realize she didn't fumble that pad at all.