“You pay attention to the news, then, eh?”
“Yeah. It’s on the TV back at the bar. It’s been hard to ignore. Not that I wanted to,” she rushes to clarify. “But it’s everywhere. It’s a big day.”
“That it is.”
“So, what are you going to do now that it’s legal?”
Evelyn eats another fry. “The same thing I’ve been doing for years.”
“Really?”
“Well, yes. Just because it’s legal now doesn’t mean no one needs it anymore, right? I’ll do it as long as they need me.”
The girl cocks her head to the side. “I guess you’re right. But do you think they’ll always need you?”
Evelyn’s coffee mug is halfway to her mouth when she pauses. She sets it back down on the table. She takes in the waitress’s youthfulness. She doesn’t remember whether this girl ever told her why she came in for an abortion. She never enquires, of course. Their services are on-demand, no questions asked. But many of the women willingly tell her why, either to remind themselves for the twelfth time that day that this is the right decision, or to alleviate a persistent sense of guilt. All the stories her patients have ever told her run through her mind like a film reel. Their reasons are numerous and varied and hardly any two are exactly the same.
Suddenly she feels tired. “Yes. There will always be a need.”
CHAPTER 25 Nancy
WINTER 2010
Nancy opens the front door of her parents’ house and enters a space that still smells like the mother she’ll never see again. She surveys her surroundings.
The house is silent except for the tick tock tick tock of the antique grandfather clock in the hallway. He forges on, resolutely counting down the seconds for no one in particular. Nancy feels an odd stab of pity for him, at his lack of awareness that his mistress doesn’t need him anymore. His usefulness has ended, and he doesn’t even know it.
No one told Nancy how difficult this part was going to be. That when your last parent dies, everyone around you is focused on helping you cope with the grief of their passing and plan all the details of the funeral. They send casseroles for the nights when you’re too exhausted and heartbroken to even shower, let alone cook for yourself. Flowers for something bright and pretty to look at before they wither into brown, crispy, rotted stems, leaving you with one more reminder that death is inevitable. As if you didn’t already know.
And no one told her what it would be like after the funeral was over, how it would feel to paw through her mother’s personal effects and clear out her home. A decade older than Frances, Nancy’s dad died years ago, but there wasn’t a lot for Nancy to do then, since her mother refused to move out of the house. Nancy had helped plan the funeral, of course, and gave the eulogy, but Frances’s stubbornness and need to maintain normalcy meant that she didn’t want a fuss and didn’t want help. She planned to trek on as though nothing had changed.
Nancy gave herself a full three days after Frances’s funeral before she bit the bullet, grabbed the keys to her mother’s house, and drove over here with a stack of moving boxes to deal with the inevitable. She knew Michael wouldn’t be any help with this. Since their divorce, things between them have been chilly but civil. He attended the funeral, at their daughter Katherine’s insistence, but he made it clear he was there to support their daughter’s grief, not Nancy’s.
Michael had an affair two years ago, which ended their marriage in a formal way, though things had been going downhill for years. When Nancy confronted him about his infidelity, he threw her accusations of lies and secrets right back in her face. She could hardly blame him, really. The hypocrisy was stark. Michael had wanted to do couples’ therapy after the revelation of his affair, convinced that his infidelity was a symptom of everything else that was failing in their marriage, that they could work things out. But Nancy had refused, fearing she would be forced to reveal more of herself than she wanted to. She stopped working with the Janes when they disbanded after abortion became legal, but she was still keeping plenty from Michael. And a part of her was relieved for it to be over, anyway. It had been an exhausting twenty-five-year marriage, with neither of them ever fully trusting the other after Nancy’s confession in the nursery. They only ever ended up having the one child, though that, too, was a bone of contention between them. Michael always wanted more, but Nancy just couldn’t do it.
Katherine offered to help clear out Frances’s house, which was sweet, but Nancy knew this was something she had to do by herself. Although she has the booties, she assumes the hidden box and Margaret’s note will still be inside the special drawer, and she wants to be alone in the room with that secret.
She climbs the staircase. The stairs and her knees both creak a little with age. As she drags her feet one step at a time, she thinks about the night she discovered the secret of her birth. The night from which there was no turning back. She set out alone and dug too deep for her buried treasure, breathless with anticipation and the promise of possibility. But she couldn’t find her way back out, and there was no one waiting up at the surface to throw her a rope.
She turns the corner at the top of the stairs, running her hand along the banister as she walks down the short hallway toward her parents’ bedroom. It looks the same as it always has. A deep red patterned runner muffles her footfalls across the creaky pine floorboards of the hallway. A weak, icy grey winter light filters through the lace curtains on the window facing the street.
As she reaches for the doorknob, she can see her younger self layered in a translucent mist underneath, like a ghost; the smooth skin of her hand grasping the door handle, recklessly determined to uncover a dangerous truth. Her older hand, with its protruding veins and thinning skin, turns the knob more slowly, aware that all kinds of things can irreparably break if they aren’t handled with care.
Nancy steps into the quiet darkness of her parents’ room and in that moment, as the smells and sights hit her senses, she experiences the crushing realization that she’s now an orphan. Alone.
She drops the flattened moving boxes and garbage bags she’s been carrying and flicks on the light. It all looks exactly as it did before her mother went into the hospital. The bed is made, but Nancy finds a half-drunk cup of tea resting on the bedside table, the milk now curdled, a brown ring stained into the inside rim. It sits on top of a book her mother will never finish; a delicate crocheted bookmark is tucked in between pages 364 and 365, just nearing the end. The sight of that makes Nancy’s heart ache even more. The thought that her mother would have left anything undone is just so uncharacteristic, but once the brain tumour had regrown, reading became much more of a challenge.
Nancy picks up the novel, walks it back over to the pile of boxes and bags. She supposes she has to start somewhere, so she wrestles the moving box into its proper four-walled placement—earning herself a deep paper cut for her efforts—and sets the book down in it. She’ll keep it and finish it for her mother. She needs to know how it ends.
Nancy works her way through her mother’s closet now. She wants to bury herself in the dresses and sweaters, breathe in Frances’s smell in a sobbing heap on the floor of the bedroom. Or maybe just stay here forever and pretend she’s still a child playing dress-up in her mother’s old high heels, because the thought of being motherless is simply too horrifying to bear. But instead, she pulls the items out one by one and weighs their sentimental value against the limited storage space in her basement, tossing most of them into the garbage bags bound for a secondhand store. Nancy does her best to remember that it isn’t her own mother she’s discarding. They’re just clothes.