69

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

Jane was walking back home from the Free Clinic again with her prescriptions, thinking about the last few weeks.

All her efforts to travel to a “blue state” had come to naught. She had no job, no money, no car, no excuse to leave town. The calendar was moving very swiftly. Even blue states had cutoff dates. From the Internet, the key moments seemed to be 20 or 24 weeks. She was, by her calculations, at 13 weeks. She had begun to wear loose-fitting clothing to conceal the increasingly qualm-producing area of her anatomy. She spent even more time on her laptop in her room, looking for solutions to her situation. Her parents did not notice, given her mother’s hectic work and church schedule and her father’s continuing political obsession.

She had made some attempts to contact the father. “Father” seemed to be the wrong word. Jake had turned out to be more of an infant. When she had tracked him down easily from his prominent and well-funded role in “the movement,” as he had called it, he had reacted with panic, then a sort of crazed self-righteousness that had bordered on threat.

“You took advantage of me being a celebrity,” he had actually responded. She had laughed at that, then responded “Thought you people were all about personal responsibility and family values.”

This had not had a constructive effect. He flipped between accusing her of entrapment, demanding that she “take care of it yourself,” and lecturing her about her own morality.

Ultimately, when she asked him for some money, so she could “take care of it,” as he wanted, he had screamed about blackmail, swiveled to denouncing abortion as murder, then simply blocked her. She had shortly afterward been the recipient of several threatening texts from unknown numbers, which she had deduced were those of friends of his. She thought about going to the police, but then everything would come out, and that was the last thing she wanted to happen.

Well, maybe the second-to-last thing. Having this jerk hypocrite rapist’s baby was the last thing, she thought, as she trudged toward home. She could have the baby and give it up for adoption, but the thought of that made her sick as well. And that would require her leaving for several months as well, so without money, that would be hopeless as well.

Why couldn’t she have held out to get to know Billy, that surfer dude? He seemed so much nicer than this complete dickhead she had ended up with.

The entire past three months had been like a bad dream. At first, before she knew she was pregnant – she still had difficulty even thinking the word – she had successfully repressed the entire memory of the encounter. Since then, she had been holding panic at bay with more and more difficulty.

The experience had been quite reminiscent, she thought as she crunched her way home step by step over gravel and asphalt and the occasional melting snow patch, of a period in her life about five years earlier, when her brother had hanged himself.

Her mother had almost gone out of her mind with grief. Her father, sensing that it was his role as the newly returned prodigal parent, had kept his own sorrow in check, taking care of the funeral arrangements and shielding her mother from the official investigation, the autopsy, and the like. Jane had observed his performance appreciatively but numbly, as if from a distance. She had watched her mother cry herself to exhaustion only to resume crying again when she woke again. The only coherent words she heard her mother utter during that period before the funeral were, “At least Jane didn’t have to see him.”

But I did see him, Jane thought to herself as she walked toward home.

She had come home after school and made herself a snack like a good latchkey kid. She had turned the TV on and watched it for maybe half an hour. Then she had gone to the bathroom.

She had opened the door, and almost as quickly, she had shut it. She had begun shaking uncontrollably. She then had whirled around, looking for she did not know what, and had grabbed her backpack and coat, and had rapidly walked out of the house and locked the door and begun walking around the neighborhood in random directions for several hours.

Eventually she had made her way to a friend’s house. By then the shaking had subsided, or maybe the cold had simply made it more explicable. She had knocked on the door and been let in by her friend’s mother, who, distracted by other children, had noticed nothing amiss. She had made her way to her friend’s bedroom, where she had been playing music.

What’s wrong with you, her friend had said. You look like you saw a ghost.

Jane had simply smiled and sat down. Her friend had begun talking about boys and school and clothes, and Jane had interjected just enough encouragement that she had continued for the better part of ninety minutes, until Jane’s own phone had rung, and it had been her father asking her please to come home.

Which she did not want to do, because if she had just stayed there, the whole thing would not have to be real. But she had left and gone home and everyone had said she had taken the news with great maturity and poise.

And now she was in the midst of another crisis. But this time her parents had not an inkling that it existed, and unlike her brother’s suicide, this crisis just kept going on and on without resolution. She was thinking that she needed to figure out some way to deal with this thing when she came to the door of the house and put her key in the lock and turned it, just as she had five years ago. Except this time, and every time since that awful day, she remembered how carefree she had been that day as she opened the door, and she was reminded that she might never be that carefree ever again.

She walked into the house and saw her father at the kitchen table. He was on the phone.

“No, I won’t forget this time, I promise. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I’ll tell her. She just walked in. Okay. Love you. Bye.” He ended the call.

“Mom?” Jane asked.

“Yeah. She reminded me of something I should have told you a couple of weeks ago.”

Yeah, well, I have something I should have told you back in December, she thought.

“What was it?” she said, aloud.

“We are going out to dinner with your cousin Joe,” her dad said.

“When?”

“A week,” he replied. “Next Monday. You free?”

At first, Jane thought, I don’t want to get all dressed up for nothing and go out to dinner. Then she had a sudden thought.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“That fancy steakhouse near the airport,” Jeff said. “It could be fun. He’s an interesting guy. Did you know he’s working for the President now?”

“No,” Jane said. “I knew he had some kind of cool job in Washington.”

She restrained herself from flinching as she turned the knob on the bathroom door, as she had done for five years now.

This could be my lifeline, Jane thought, as she opened the door and walked in.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian