He smoked the joint at bedtime and slept deeply. The next morning he went for a walk.
On the bus driver’s advice, he called Tim Flynn.
Each day he walked a little farther. One morning he made it as far as St. Dymphna’s. The church was warm and smelled of candle wax, birthday candles, the best moments of childhood. Gradually the pews filled; the morning Mass happened around him.
He sat in a back pew holding his head.
At Mass he was the kid in the room, the object of geriatric cooing. At Christmas Mrs. Paone knitted him a muffler. Mrs. Morrison baked him a pie. It may not have been accurate to say that faith saved him. If he’d gone through the motions of daily Mass without actually believing, it might have worked just as well.
Each morning he set out walking. He took off his hat so the salt breeze could aerate his brain.
WHEN HE RETURNED TO HIS COMPUTER, AN ALERT WAS FLASHING on his screen, an instant message from Excelsior11—after Tim Flynn, his second-best friend.
Excelsior11: How was turnout?
Not bad, Anthony wrote. Maybe 30, give or take.
Excelsior11: Pix?
Anthony wrote, Uploading them now.
THEY HAD KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR SIX MONTHS, IN THE PECULIAR way strangers know each other online: screen name, alleged age and gender and whatever else the other chose to reveal or embellish or outright fabricate about himself. Excelsior11 lived in a log cabin in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. A Vietnam vet and former long-haul trucker, he now devoted himself, full-time, to the defense of the unborn. These facts were, of course, unverifiable, but Anthony accepted them at face value. It wasn’t the sort of biography anyone would bother to invent.
Excelsior11 was not Catholic. His insistence on this point was, at first, disquieting.
Excelsior11: I reject the worship of saints and angels. But I can see that you are a righteous man and I have no quarrel with your beliefs.
Anthony found these words reassuring. He had never been called righteous before. That his second-best friend was a Protestant made him feel worldly, cosmopolitan. He began to see Excelsior11 as a kind of mentor—like the old Japanese coot in The Karate Kid, the all-time favorite film of his youth.
Excelsior: ever upward. Though not Catholic, he had chosen a Latin screen name.
His method was Socratic. Each day, he sent Anthony a question to ponder.
Excelsior11: How would you defend the Right to Life if you found yourself in discussion with a Nonbeliever?
Excelsior11: What is the appropriate legal punishment for a woman who chooses to kill her child?
These questions lit up his brain. In thirty-nine years of attending Catholic Mass, he’d sat through so many sermons about abortion that the word itself had a soporific effect, like the “midnight sedation” he’d been given when his wisdom teeth were removed. To Anthony, who had never impregnated anyone and had little hope of doing so, abortion was a distant, abstract problem—a thing you were supposed to care about, like the national debt.
Then, a few months back, Excelsior11 had approached him with a proposition—a mission, he called it. There was an abortion mill operating in plain sight, just off Boston Common. Anthony’s mission was to document its activities, the daily holocaust of the unborn.
7
The patient had a diamond chip in her face. A Monroe, she called it.
It took Claudia a moment to grasp the reference. The diamond sat an inch above the girl’s top lip and slightly off center, the exact placement of Marilyn’s famous mole. Under the fluorescent lights her skin looked pale and waxy, like the petals of a lily. She was dressed in stretch pants, a thermal undershirt pulled tight across her belly, a man’s plaid shirt hanging open in front, sleeves rolled down to hide her arms. Claudia had seen her before, underdressed for the weather, panhandling on the pedestrian mall at Downtown Crossing. Or maybe she hadn’t; it was hard to say for certain. That winter in Boston, there were plenty of girls who looked like Shannon F.