Single-handedly, Barb Vance had erased him. In a few short years he would be expunged from human history, his line extinguished. Victor Prine would be gone without a trace.
DAY AND NIGHT, HE DREAMED OF WOMEN.
On an endless loop he watched the parade of whores. The killing of an unborn child wasn’t just a murder; it was also a theft. Always there was a second, invisible victim, a man robbed of his progeny. It was a perversion of the natural order, the female trying to run the table. For a brief, frightening time, she had absolute control of a man’s legacy. She could hold his line hostage out of stupidity, whorishness, laziness, or spite. The female had been put on earth for one reason only, a single exalted purpose. Stubbornly, perversely, the Barb Vances of the world refused to play their part.
For such females he felt the same contempt he’d felt for hippies, the whiny longhairs who’d burned their draft cards while he’d offered up his life. Women who refused to be women were no better—they were far worse—than men who refused to be men.
The female who slaughtered her offspring was an abomination. She had committed an atrocity, a high crime against nature. At best she was irredeemably sick, deformed by some extreme mental illness. If you saw a dog eat its own pups, you’d be disgusted. You’d do anything to prevent its sickness from spreading.
In the interests of herd health, you would put that bitch down.
12
Ladan B. was twenty-six, from South Sudan by way of Ethiopia. Her name, she told Claudia, meant healthy. Her mother had died in childbirth shortly after giving her this name.
“We’re too late.” Mary Fahey handed Claudia the ultrasound report. “Twenty-four weeks and three days. She’s just over the line.”
“Four days!” The patient had a notable voice, deep and resonant, too big for the tiny room. “I come four days ago, it would have been no problem. Is this true?”
Her eyes were red from crying. Claudia slid a box of tissues across the desk.
“Massachusetts law is very specific,” she said. “To get an abortion, you have to do it before twenty-four weeks.”
“Okay, but four days?” Ladan sank into the puffy yellow jacket they’d given her at the church, a type of garment she’d never had a use for, never known existed, until she came to Boston. “What difference does it make, four days?”
It was a reasonable question. Morally, the law made no sense. On Monday an AB would have been acceptable. On Thursday it was a crime.
“I’m sorry, but we have no choice in the matter. That’s the law.” Claudia had said these words before, and would say them again. It was the one part of her job she hated, the moment she dreaded most.
Ladan made a sound low in her throat, a moan ending in a sob. “So what am I going to do now?”
“We can talk about that,” Claudia said, feeling her heart. “But first I want to understand why you waited so long. Did you have second thoughts about having an abortion? Are you sure this is what you want?”
“No second thoughts,” Ladan said firmly. “No baby. I know from the beginning it’s not possible.”
She explained that she had a child already, six years old, born over there when she still had a husband. The boy was her heart and her life and yet he made everything harder. When you were just yourself you could live anywhere, sleep anywhere. You could work the worst kind of job cleaning floors at South Station; you could work all day and all night because what else did you have to do?
“One child already makes it harder,” she told Claudia. “Two is not possible.”
When Claudia asked about the man involved with the pregnancy, Ladan waved a hand dismissively. “Dee is his name. He’s just a kid.”
In fact he was her age exactly; he only seemed younger. “Born in America makes you younger,” Ladan said.