Right to Life

Her hands were cold. Her face was flushed. Already she dreaded the picketers moving ahead of her a few yards away. Despite what she'd said to him.

Because this was no examination. This was the real thing.

A life was going to end here.

For a moment she was angry with both of them. Sara and Greg, playing at love.

No, she thought. Give the devil his due.

They weren't playing.

And that was the saddest part of all. Because it wasn't fair. Years and years alone after Daniel's death and her shattered marriage and finally someone comes along who's got everything Sam never had and more. Kindness. Consideration. Sobriety. And he loves her. Not just wants her or wants to fuck her but loves her and she loves the man back with a power she finds quite astonishing. And then having to learn all over again that love protected nothing. Love was as necessary to people in the long run as food and shelter but love was also a cruel joke, a trick, both at once, two sides of the same coin. And you never knew when the coin would be turning. Because if it didn't wind up this way, wind up stranding you between love and necessity, even if it did work out between you, then one of you was going to die before the other and leave you all alone again. Love was also about the death of love.

Like this.

Like killing the child inside, their child, who should have been a wonderful child alive and whole and made of all they had together.

Sara even thought she knew when she'd conceived her – on a warm windy beach that night in St. John just three months past, both of them so crazy over each other especially in that place with his other life so far behind him that they were downright ridiculous together, unable to stop touching, stroking, laughing, all through drinks and dinner. And then later making love in the Carribean sea, the warmth of the waves, the huge gentle womb of stars and sky.

Which led here.

It was as though it were love itself they were killing.

In the eye of her flesh she saw a beautiful baby girl.

And knowing that the child was there and knowing already the empty pain of the loss of her, so unexpectedly like that other loss so many years ago, here and now on this busy sunny street, she wondered how long she could go on with him afterwards. If this were not the turning point for both of them.

If she weren't killing the child inside in more ways than one.

She'd begun to cry again. A thin haze of tears as she approached the picket lines. She blinked them back instead of wiping them away. These people might notice. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction.

How can you do this? she thought. How can you be so small and misty and so monumentally selfish as to approach me now, when I've never been so vulnerable?

But of course they would.

They saw it as their right, their mission.

There were many kinds of evil in the world and as far as she was concerned this was definitely one of them.

She heard a car approach slowly behind her close to the curb, wheels over pebbled glass and gravel. In her peripheral vision she saw the fender and the light blue hood, the driver's-side window and roof and noted that it was a station wagon, one of those fake woodies, maybe ten years old. A city transit bus pulled laboriously around to the left of it. She passed an elegant slim young woman pushing two infant babies in a double stroller. A teenager on a skateboard.

And then the car stopped moving beside her and the passenger door opened in front of her and she felt someone's arm wrap tight around her from behind just beneath her breasts, pinning her arms to her sides while his hand sought and covered her mouth to stifle the protest, the scream, grasping at the jaw so she couldn't bite and then she was shoved inside, his hand still over her mouth and she glanced back to the sidewalk and saw that one of the protesters, a man wearing a dark blue windbreaker, had noticed her, was looking straight at her, is seeing all of this but was saying nothing, not one word to the others nor to the police at the clinic door, astonished by this as she felt a needle pierce the bare flesh of her upper arm and saw that it was the driver, a woman, holding a plastic syringe between her fingers and grimly clutching the wheel with her other fisted hand while the man who'd grabbed her slammed the door.

As darkness descended over all her sudden fears and long familiar sorrow they slowly pulled away.

***