Evelyn approaches her from behind. “Sister Agatha?” she asks timidly.
Agatha turns. She’s wearing an apron and rain jacket over her habit, and oversized Wellington boots on her small feet. She looks like a child playing dress-up. “Hello, Miss Evelyn.”
Evelyn has practiced this speech in her head as she’s gone about her chores over the past few days, imagined the conversation as she tosses and turns in bed at night, unable to sleep. But she decides to skip right to the point. She has a plan and she needs Agatha’s help.
“Sister Agatha, I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. All I can think about is my baby, and where she is, whether she’s happy, and, you know… loved.” Her throat is so tight she’s not sure she can get the words out. “I need to know where she is. I need to know who has her. I just don’t think…” She shifts her weight to the other foot and her boot squelches into the soggy grass. “I can’t see myself being able to move on if I don’t know where she is. I need to know. I need your help.”
The nun clutches the garden shears tightly in her gloved hand. “I think you just need to give it some more time, Miss Evelyn.”
“I can’t.”
“But you must. It’s early days, yet. This happens to most of the girls, right at first. It’s very difficult. But given time, things usually start to look a little brighter. Especially after you go home.”
Evelyn scoffs. “I need you to help me find out where she is.”
“Oh, Miss Evelyn, I can’t.”
Evelyn watches the nun’s eyes closely and starts to see a change in them. They droop somehow, weighed down. Her shoulders fall in defeat.
“Do you know something?” Evelyn’s heart is racing now. “What is it?”
“I can’t say,” she says, glancing nervously back toward the house.
“Sister Agatha, please.”
Agatha searches Evelyn’s face, looking for something. Finally, she takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Your baby… your baby didn’t make it, Miss Evelyn. She—she died.”
The world stops moving, and all Evelyn can feel is the misty rain, blurring her vision. “She’s… dead? But… how?”
Agatha takes a step toward Evelyn. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said.” She looks agonized. “It’s just one of those things. She was small, remember. But you can move on now, Miss Evelyn. There’s nothing to chase or worry about. You can put all this behind you. You can… move on,” she finishes weakly.
Evelyn starts to shake as the shock sets in. She can’t process what she’s just heard. She feels nothing and everything and all the things in between. She holds Sister Agatha’s gaze in an iron stare as the young nun shrinks back, then turns on her slippery heel and staggers back toward the house.
CHAPTER 11 Angela
LATE JANUARY 2017
Since finding Frances Mitchell’s letter and the note from the young girl named Margaret, Angela has been sending out messages to Nancy Mitchells everywhere in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond, but so far her search hasn’t yielded any results. Despite Angela’s niggling sense of shame at pursuing the unknown Nancy, she doesn’t feel right sneaking around behind Tina’s back, so she decides to tell her about “the Nancys,” as she has collectively dubbed them in her head, on their way to the fertility clinic.
Tina nods in her usual sanguine way. “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”
The rest of the car ride passes in a prickly silence that Angela acknowledges she may have imagined, but any lingering tension is instantly overshadowed once they enter the treatment room. They’re in today for another expensive intrauterine insemination procedure—their ninth. Five of them didn’t take at all. Two did, but both ended in miscarriages.
Almost a year ago, Angela had to go to an abortion clinic to treat one of the miscarriages that hadn’t naturally completed. At the time, she had no idea that the abortion procedure was also used after some miscarriages. While she didn’t have any real preconceptions of the women who access abortion services, she was reminded that these clinics aren’t just filled with irresponsible teenagers. Even the most anti-abortion, right-wing woman might at some point need to have the procedure after a miscarriage to avoid a potential infection. After all is said and done, it’s just like any other surgery or treatment. But the protesters outside the clinic didn’t seem to have gotten that memo.
When she and Tina arrived at the clinic, they immediately noticed a crowd of people gathered on the south side of the street across from the entrance. They all wore the same black toque, and about half of them were carrying neon poster boards boasting a variety of ominous phrases in thick marker. Angela could see other signs with pink and red images on them, and more giant headlines propped up along the sidewalk. From a distance she couldn’t tell what they were, but she could guess: gruesome photos of alleged fetuses juxtaposed with happy grannies holding fat white babies behind a soft blurry camera filter.
On the north side of the street, a few counterprotesters held up purple signs. Three police cars were parked in front of the clinic and the police were chatting with the counterprotesters. One officer was standing sentry near the front door of the building.
Tina took hold of Angela’s gloved hand. The pro-choice counterprotesters waved them through, smiling at them both as they passed.
“Ignore them,” one said to Angela, indicating the shouting mass across the street. “They know they’ve lost, and they’re pissed off about it.”
But they were, by design, difficult to ignore. Glancing sideways, Angela caught sight of some of their signs:
LIFE IS SACRED
ABORTION IS MURDER
YOUR ALL BABY KILERS
At least spell your fucking sign correctly, Angela thought wryly. There was even a small boy, just four or five years old, holding a placard that read MY MOTHER CHOSE LIFE. Her pulse had started to race then, and Angela couldn’t stop herself.
“Do you think I actually want to be here?” she’d screamed at them. “Do you think I don’t wish I were still pregnant? You ignorant fucks!”
“Ange!” Tina had grabbed her shoulders. “Ange, come on. Come on. It’s not worth it. Leave it.”
Their experiences at the fertility clinic are so bright and positive, despite the physical discomfort. The nurses and technicians offer well-wishes and support for their choice to become mothers. No one protests outside its doors, screaming at passing women and judging them for wanting to be pregnant. Yet aren’t fertility clinics and abortion clinics just two sides of the same coin?
Angela was grateful that she hadn’t needed to go back to that horrible place after the most recent miscarriage, which completed on its own.
But that was then, she reminds herself as they wait in the treatment room. Today is a day of positivity. Today they’re at the point in the fertility roller coaster where their hopes are high for a successful insemination and implantation, and they try not to remember how crushingly disappointing it is if it doesn’t take. Angela knows Tina is tired of the process, but she isn’t ready to give up.
The next one will be it, she tells Tina every time, repeating the mantra to herself whenever she starts to doubt it. The next one. The next one. We’ll get a baby on the next one.