by Kelly Rimmer
* * *
I was already feeling jittery when I pulled into Grace’s street on Friday morning. I couldn’t stand the thought of breakfast, nor could I stand my mother’s delight at my lack of appetite. She commended me on my decision to eat less, predictably noting that it might be easier for me to find a husband if I lost a little weight. Of all the days for her to make such a comment. I was so angry with Patrick Walsh that just bringing his image to mind was enough to make me shake, and by the minute, my resolve to avoid marriage was only growing stronger.
The children were in the yard again that day. Jeremy was throwing a ball at the other children, in a version of dodgeball that was slightly too mean to be innocent. There was no sign of Grace, so I parked the car at the curb and walked up the path toward the front door. The children noticed me as I reached the porch.
“You’re back again,” Tim stated helpfully. “Mom isn’t in the laundry today. She’s in her bedroom.”
“Thank you,” I said stiffly, and I waved the children away and made my way to the porch. The front door was open just a crack, so I knocked then let myself inside.
“Grace?” I called as I let myself into the house.
“I’m in here!” she called back. I followed the sound of her voice and found her sitting at a dresser in one of the small bedrooms. She looked so much better than the previous day, her hair styled into a low bouffant, with the ends curled upward. She was even wearing a little makeup, and a pair of costume earrings I remembered Mother gave her for her birthday one year. Her swing dress was navy with big white polka dots and a matching white belt, and although her shoes were worn, they were pretty—navy pumps with a big buckle on the side.
Grace looked beautiful, but it wasn’t just her outfit—when she met my eyes in the mirror, relief had relaxed the tension from her features. I was still nervous for her and for what we were about to do, but the renewed calm in my sister’s eyes was enough to reassure me that we were doing the right thing. Grace didn’t just want to end this pregnancy. She needed to do so.
“Are you ready?” I asked her. She stood and smoothed her dress over her hips.
“I’ll just run next door and get Mrs. Hills to come and watch the children.”
While Grace went to the neighbor’s house, I let myself out the back door to stand on the ramp and watch the children play. The game of dodgeball had ended, and now the boys were riding tricycles, while the girls played with some wooden blocks. Even Beth was better dressed today, wearing a floral pinafore, her hair woven into a braid.
Grace returned with Mrs. Hills, who seemed to be as old as the hills. She used a cane and had a severe expression on her face, suggesting that although she might not have known the details of what was going on, she was certain we were up to no good. Grace gave her a series of instructions, directed her to the sandwiches already prepared for the children’s lunch and then kissed each child on their forehead.
“Where are you going?” Jeremy asked, blinking up at her with a confused frown.
“I’m just going out for lunch with Aunty Maryanne.”
“Me, too?” Ruth asked hopefully. Grace flushed a little, even as she laughed and ruffled up Ruth’s hair.
“No, silly. It’s a grown-up lunch. But we’ll play tea parties when I get home.”
“Momma,” Beth said, throwing her arms around Grace’s leg. Grace bent down and picked her up, then kissed her cheek.
“Its Mrs. Hills’s turn to look after you, okay, darling? I’ll be back in a few hours. You be brave.”
Beth blinked her big blue eyes, trying to hold back the tears. Grace kissed her one last time, then firmly handed her to Mrs. Hills, then all but bolted for the car.
“Do you have everything? Did you get the extra cash?” I asked her. She patted her handbag and nodded.
“He wasn’t happy about it,” she sighed. “We had a screaming argument. It was awful. And you know my husband will never forgive you now that he thinks we helped you commit a mortal sin.”
“Gracie, I love you to death, but I don’t care even one bit what your husband thinks of me,” I snorted. Grace gave me a sad look, then glanced over her shoulder and walked a little faster.
“Let’s get out of here. I’ve never left them all behind before. I’m a bit scared someone’s going to cry.”
“They’ll be fine for a few hours.”
“It wasn’t them I was talking about,” Grace sighed, and then we both laughed.
“You seem better today,” I told her.
“It’s funny what a bit of hope can do for a person,” she murmured.
I was proud then, that I had become the kind of woman who lived what I believed. Wasn’t this what it was all about? Helping others to live the life they chose, and not the life society dictated for them? Helping women to reach their full potential, and not to stay subjugated into the roles their husbands assumed they would adopt.
The roads were clear—we’d hit the sweet spot between the morning peak and the lunchtime rush. I drove in silence for a while, and then Grace asked me quietly, “You think I’m doing the right thing, don’t you?”
“I think you know better than absolutely anyone else what’s best for you, and it’s strong of you to seek it.”
She flashed me the closest thing to a beam I’d seen since my arrival back in Washington State.
“Tell me what your life is like down there,” she said, adjusting her legs against the buttery leather of Dad’s “weekend” car.
“I work hard. My jobs take up a lot of my week. But I fit in a lot of fun around that—clubs and dancing and talking with professors and the other students about exciting ideas,” I said. “I feel like I’m right where I belong.”
“That’s lovely, Mary,” she said, smiling at me with an odd sadness in her gaze.
I signaled to change lanes and move around a slow truck, then glanced at her and prompted, “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Feel like you’re where you belong.”
Grace picked at a knot in the fabric of her dress and avoided my gaze as she pondered this question, but she looked out the window while she answered it.
“We’re very different, Maryanne. You’re destined for bigger and better things than I ever was. I never had it in me to swim upstream the way you do. I was always going to marry young, have a bunch of children and see out my days wiping noses and changing dirty diapers.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Dad would say this is the ultimate honor for a woman. To be a wife and mother, I mean.”
“Dad would also say that a woman pursuing a career is the beginning of the end of society. Dad says a lot of things that he thinks are fact but that are, in fact, uninformed opinion,” I muttered.
“Will you ever get married?”
“Never.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“I’ve met some lovely boys, but I’ve never been in love.”
“Well, how can you say you won’t marry if you’ve never even felt love? It’s love that led me to marry.”
“Love is a feeling. I value my thoughts far above my feelings,” I said. “If I were to fall in love, I’d do my absolute best to override that emotion with sensible decision-making. I don’t plan on becoming any man’s property.”
“I wish you would fall in love. I wish you’d love a man the way I love Patrick. I know you only see his flaws, but I still see his potential, and I know that one day he’s going to be a great man,” she sighed. “And for all of his faults, and I know he has many, I still love my place in his life. I know you two don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but if you could see each other the way I see you, I just know you’d love each other.”
“I don’t want to find a place in a man’s life at all. I just want to be in charge of my own life.”
“You hav
e such a unique way of viewing the world, sister.”
“There are plenty of women who feel as I do,” I assured her. “And they are finding the strength to speak out, more and more every day. A hundred years from now things will be very different.”
She gave me a weak smile, then turned to look out the window again. After a while she reached across and took my hand and squeezed it. Hard.
“I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for this. I feel like I was headed for a head-on collision with disaster, but you jumped in and intervened and now I’m going to walk away unscathed.”
“Tell me about what it’s like for you when you had the children. Do you think you’re just prone to the ‘baby blues’ more than others?”
“I don’t know what it is. But whenever I’ve been pregnant and had a child, I feel like an ungodly fog descends on me, and it takes me at least a year to claw my way out. Having Beth nearly killed me, and feeling like that with another baby? I wouldn’t survive it.” She drew in a sharp breath, then admitted very quietly, “I’ve been a terrible mother, Maryanne.”
“Don’t say that,” I protested. “Why on earth would you think such a thing?”
“I let them down all the time when they were small. You have no idea how dreadful I was in the early days after each birth. Some days with the twins, I’d forget to feed one...probably both. Tim is four years old and he knows how to organize lunches now, because I’ve been through this twice since he was born, and he’s had to grow up too fast. In the summer I let Beth crawl around some days without a diaper because I couldn’t be bothered to change her. I had days where I cried from the minute I woke up until the minute I went to sleep. The misery just felt endless, even when I’d done this before and I knew it would pass if I just held on.”
“Didn’t you have friends to help? I know Mother and Father haven’t been good to you lately, but surely there were others you could call.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“I know it doesn’t make any sense at all, but the sadder I get, the less I’m able to reach out and so all of my friends drifted away. It’s like I curl up into a miserable ball, even when I know that doing so makes everything else worse.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I tried. I sat down to write you last year after Beth, but I was mortified to admit how awful things were,” she murmured.
“Are you really telling me you’d cry all of the time? What was Patrick doing during all of this?”
“He took me to the doctor once, but the doctor just said I needed to be stronger. Patrick didn’t understand—I’m convinced he thought I wasn’t trying hard enough. He just wanted me to handle myself better.”
“So you were on your own, depressed for months on end, with no relief?” I surmised grimly, thinking that the next time I saw my brother-in-law, we were going to have words.
“Well, I have found an outlet recently. I’ve been writing these notes to myself. It probably sounds a little silly, but just sitting down and scrawling my thoughts out on paper has helped me a bit since Beth. Even today I wrote one before we left...about what we’re doing today. About how grateful I am to you.”
“You wrote a confession letter and named me in it, then left it in the house for Patrick to find?” I gasped. Grace laughed softly.
“Maryanne, I’ve been doing this for over a year and he’s never even come close to finding my notes. I keep them in the last place he’d ever think to look for them, believe me. And they help me so much, I do think it’s worth the risk. It’s like jotting those words down on paper gives me the chance to see them with fresh eyes, and sometimes once they’re out, the bad thoughts aren’t as big as they seem when they’re locked up in my mind.”
I was still unnerved, if a little relieved to hear this “note” wasn’t sitting out in the open somewhere. And I knew she was probably getting nervous about the procedure as the city drew nearer, but I decided that later, when it was all over, I’d ask her to destroy that note. I couldn’t risk my part in this coming out somewhere down the line—I wasn’t at all ashamed of what we were doing, but the risk to my career was simply too great.
“Have you thought about what happens after this?” I asked her instead. “How you’ll make sure you don’t end up in this position again?”
“I just don’t know. I’ll be sure stay out of Patrick’s bed for a long while after this. And...well, we did manage to avoid a pregnancy for some months just by...” She paused, then flushed furiously as she muttered, “Well, we found a way anyway.”
“Was he pulling out?” I asked her.
“Maryanne!” she gasped. “Don’t talk about these things.”
“Oh, Gracie, there’s no shame in it. Pulling out works some of the time, but if you really don’t want another baby, then maybe you need to get yourself a diaphragm. Or better yet, find a doctor who will give you a hysterectomy. Then you know you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“Patrick always wanted a big family,” Grace said softly.
“Patrick gets you pregnant and leaves you to deal with the aftermath.”
“Maybe if some more time passes and Beth and the kids grow up some more...then maybe I’d be able to cope with another baby when one comes.”
“Do you even want more children, Grace?”
“What I want doesn’t matter,” she laughed softly, slightly confused, more than a little bitter. “Babies don’t come when you want them.”
“You shouldn’t have to keep having pregnancy after pregnancy until it kills you.”
“I just have to hope that’s not my destiny.”
“You control your destiny. That’s why we’re doing this today, because you know what you want and you have every right to make it happen for yourself.”
“Maybe,” she murmured. I sighed and pulled the car over to park beside a clothing store. When I flicked the ignition off, neither one of us moved.
“What time is it?” Grace asked me. I glanced down at my watch and butterflies rose in my stomach.
“We have ten minutes to walk to the meeting point.”
Grace breathed in, then exhaled.
“Okay.”
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“Kind of. Mostly, I just wish you could come with me.”
“Me, too,” I said softly, but then I felt compelled to reassure her. “But everything is going to be fine, Grace. You’ll see. A few hours from now we’ll be home and it will all be over.”
* * *
Grace and I walked slowly on our way to the meeting point, striding so close that our arms kept colliding. A heavy cloud cover had come over, casting shadows down onto the footpath, and the air felt charged with danger as we neared our destination. I could hear Grace’s breathing was heavier than it should be, and when I glanced at her, she was positively green. I wanted to promise her that everything was going to be fine. Women had abortions every day. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t say what I needed to in order to reassure her. It felt like the words were stuck in my throat, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t convince myself to say them. Maybe it was because, despite my bravado, I knew on some level that there was a very real chance that everything wouldn’t be fine.
When we reached the mouth of the alley, we slowed to a stop, and we stood in complete silence for a long moment. Grace wrapped her arms around her waist, took a sharp breath in then exhaled slowly.
“You’ll wait here, won’t you?” she whispered, her gaze desperately searching mine. “Out of sight so he doesn’t get upset with me. But I’ll feel a bit better if I know you’re here.”
“Of course,” I promised. I actually had every intention of following the car, but I didn’t want to promise her that I’d be right behind her, because I knew that keeping up with him was a long shot in the busy city traffic.
Grace drew in another
deep breath, then threw her arms around me. I hugged her back, my arms locked tight, feeling somehow that I could keep her safe just by embracing her with all of my strength.
But then in the distance, I heard a clock strike twelve, and we both knew she had to go. The alley was clear for now, but the man was due any minute. Grace disentangled herself from me, took a step back and offered a wan smile.
“I’ll see you at two o’clock.”
“Two o’clock sharp,” I promised.
“I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for this.”
“Knowing you’re well will be repayment enough.”
“I love you, Mary.”
“And I love you, too, sister. See you soon.”
Grace nodded and turned and walked into the road, disappearing into the shadows and the dismal gray of a city road at noon on an overcast day.
* * *
I did as promised. I lurked just beyond the top of the alley, standing in front of a restaurant with a book in my hand. I hoped it looked as though I was waiting for someone to join me for a lunch date. Only a few minutes passed before I saw a faded lemon Ford emerge from the alley. A man was in the driver’s seat and at first, I thought it must be a different car because I couldn’t see Grace in the back. Only when he passed did I see the blanket over the backseat, and the unmistakable shape of someone beneath it.
I closed the book and walked briskly to my car. As the Ford waited for a break in the busy traffic, I opened the car door with shaking hands and slipped inside. On first attempt, the engine stalled, and I swore and shook a little harder as I tried again. Finally, the car spluttered to life, just as the Ford passed. I wanted to look calm. I couldn’t afford to panic and drive erratically and rouse suspicion. Dad’s car was already eye-catching enough—a near-new aqua Chevrolet Bel Air.
So my instincts were to pull out without indicating and to gun the engine to catch up with the man, but I waited until another car passed, and then in the smallest of gaps, slipped into the traffic behind it. For several blocks I managed to hang just a car or two behind the yellow Ford, and my heart rate was starting to settle and I was actually starting to think I’d be able to follow him all the way to wherever he was going.
