“You! Girl!” he barks in Nancy’s direction. Half a dozen other people in the waiting room look up in mild alarm.
“Y-yes?” Nancy says.
“Come with me.” He beckons with an imperious hand, and she follows him back through the swinging doors into the bowels of the emergency room, the place you only go to if someone you love is really in trouble. Apparently, Clara is.
“You need to start talking about what happened to your friend,” the doctor demands. “You barely said a word when the triage nurse asked you what was wrong. You just said she’s bleeding a lot, which she is. She’s hemorrhaging, actually. It’s really bad.” He crosses his arms. “Start talking.”
Nancy’s tempted to, she really is. Clara is in serious condition, but that’s nothing compared to the trouble they’re going to be in if she confesses that Clara underwent an illegal back-alley abortion.
“Is she… is she going to make it?” Nancy parries the doctor’s question with one of her own.
“I think so, yes. But barely. We need to know exactly what’s going on so we can treat her fully. She’s unconscious now and can’t tell us anything. We’re transfusing her. She lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood.”
“So, she’s going to survive.”
He shakes his head, and for a moment Nancy fears the worst. A rush of cold hits her veins before she realizes he’s judging their behaviour, not Clara’s fate. “Yes. She will.”
“Okay. Thank you.” Thank God.
“But you want to know what I think?” He steps closer to Nancy. He smells like rubbing alcohol and pine aftershave. “I think she had a little problem and the two of you decided you’d take care of it yourselves. Is that what happened?”
Nancy freezes, fighting the shiver she can feel rising in her body. “No.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve been around a long time,” the doctor says, “and you know what? When we get girls in here hemorrhaging, it’s because they attempted an abortion and perforated an organ. This kind of shit not only kills babies, it kills women, too. That’s why it’s illegal.”
Nancy can feel the anger coming off his body. “We didn’t attempt any abortion.”
Half true.
“Well, I happen to think you did.”
He stares her down, and they end up in a stalemate. She’s not going to say any more, and he knows it.
“This is the end of my shift, but you better be prepared to answer some questions for the doctor that’s relieving me. Because I can tell you one thing: If she suspects the same thing I do, she’s going to be calling the police before she even thinks about discharging your friend. You can go ahead and lie to them and see how far that gets you.” He points to a small observation room to Nancy’s left. “Sit,” he orders. “And wait for my colleague to come talk to you.”
Nancy doesn’t even think about arguing. She steps into the room, settles herself down on the chair, and waits. The pure white panic she felt when she saw all the blood on the subway seat dissipated somewhat once they took Clara into the emergency room, but it’s rising again now. She’s tapping her foot incessantly.
She looks up at the wall of the exam room. The clock says it’s nearly one in the morning. No wonder her eyes are itching. Nancy watches the hands move as the minutes tick by, knowing she’ll arrive home horrendously past her curfew and will have to face the consequences later.
The ward is quiet. All she can hear is the sound of a few doctors and nurses calling to each other, the occasional collegial laugh, the beeping of machines in the distance. Nancy leans back in the plastic chair and closes her eyes.
Twenty minutes later, a doctor appears at the door, her face grave. She looks about fifty, with a high forehead and greying brown hair pulled back into a low bun.
“Hi, there, Miss…？”
“Nancy. My name’s Nancy.”
“Okay. Nancy. I’m Dr. Gladstone.”
“Um, hi,” Nancy says, standing. “How’s Clara? The other doctor said…” She trails off.
Dr. Gladstone glances over her shoulder, then steps over the threshold of the room and closes the door behind her. Nancy takes a step back, unsure what’s happening.
“We’re pretty sure we know what happened here,” Dr. Gladstone says. “My colleague suspects certain things. Certain illegal things.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nancy says. She doesn’t plan on answering any of this doctor’s questions, either.
“Your friend is lucky to be alive.” Dr. Gladstone pauses, lowers her voice. “Listen to me carefully, Nancy. I don’t actually want you to say anything specific. But if I’m on the right track, I need you to give me some indication that that’s the case so that I can provide the right treatment for your friend. Can you do that for me? There’s no reason for me to call the police. I know my colleague threatened that, but that’s not how I operate. I need you to trust me.”
A long moment stretches out in the tiny space between them, then Nancy nods and scratches her nose.
“Okay, thank you. That’s all I need to know. I’ll record this as a spontaneous abortion. A miscarriage,” she adds in response to Nancy’s blank look. “I’ll have a look at her uterus and make sure all the tissue has been removed so she doesn’t get an infection.”
Nancy lets her breath out slowly. “Thank you,” she says, and means it.
“But I need to tell you something,” Dr. Gladstone says quietly. Nancy leans in to hear her. “If you, or a friend, or any other girl close to you ends up pregnant when they don’t want to be, you need to call around to doctors’ offices and ask for Jane.”
Nancy’s brow knits. “Jane?”
“Jane. Call around, keep asking for Jane, and eventually you’ll get what you need.”
“But I don’t under—”
“Just tell them you’re looking for Jane.”
Dr. Gladstone turns on her heel and opens the door, then heads into the brightness of the emergency room corridor. Her white cloak whips out of sight, leaving Nancy alone in the exam room.
CHAPTER 4 Evelyn
LATE FALL, 1960
Evelyn wakes suddenly as a high-pitched moan floats into the room from the dormitory across the hall.
It’s the early hours of the morning. That time just before dawn when the light is blue-grey and everything is silent, the world is waiting for the curtain to rise, and the night dwellers—the nocturnal animals, criminals, and thieves—are slinking back to the darkness of their dens before the sun breaks on the horizon.
Evelyn was dreaming of her own bed. The bed at her parents’ home, with its knotted pine posts and headboard, comfortable mattress, and goose-down pillows. The soft flannel sheets her mother used during the winter for added warmth. The walls of her bedroom covered in textured wallpaper and the thick pink rug under her feet when she swung them out of her bed in the morning. Not like this place, St. Agnes’s, where the scratchy carpet slippers have no padding in the soles and are too tight for her frozen feet.