The Abortionist's Daughter (11 page)

Huck shook his head.

“What’s your real name?”

Huck reached up to readjust his rearview mirror. “Just Huck,” he replied, which suggested to Megan that it was probably something dorky, if he didn’t want to tell her. Harvey, maybe.

She looked at the card again, then opened the door to get out of the car. “So are you like head cop on this case or something?”

“No,” said Huck. “That’s the head cop.” He pointed to a man in a heavy leather bomber jacket, who was holding a doughnut between his teeth while pouring himself a cup of coffee from the back of the van. Megan recognized him as the chief of police. Of course. Who else would be head cop on a case like this?

All the way back to the Goldfarbs’ house, Megan skidded and slipped on the black ice. By now it was seven o’clock. Soon the long day would be over. She would go back now, maybe even go on stage; she would make more small talk with whoever was lingering too long, and eat more junk, and then she would go upstairs to the Goldfarbs’ guest room and shut the door. She would get out of her clothes, put on a sleep shirt, and brush her teeth, because that’s what you do, even when your mother has died. Then she would take a Xanax and climb into bed under Sandy Goldfarb’s pillowy comforter and try not to think about how shitty it all was, until the drug took over and her jaw relaxed and her shoulders sank and she could return to that time and space—was it so very long ago?—where taking a good hard honest look at the world always came up roses.

—————

When Huck saw Megan Thompson approaching the house, his hope had been counterintuitive. Which is to say that he’d hoped that she would walk right by. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask her, and he knew that her input would be crucial to the investigation, but he was not prepared to stand face to face with the woman he’d seen online last night.

But she hadn’t walked by; she’d seen him and waved, and he knew it would seem rude if he didn’t talk to her. So he’d gone over, and they’d sat in his car, and he’d really gotten no information from her, except that she’d last seen her mother the morning of the murder. Actually he had the sense that she got more information out of him than he got out of her. She was good at asking questions.

After she left, Huck went over to the van, where Ernie was drinking coffee and eating a doughnut.

“So what’d the girl say?” asked Ernie.

“Not much. She knew about the videotapes. She said there might be some letters lying around the house.”

“Well, get this,” said Ernie. “You know that shirt we got out of the hamper? The one that was damp? Turns out it had traces of chlorine in it.”

“What size?”

“Fifteen and a half.”

“Frank’s size.”

“That’s right. And the long dark curly hair on it belonged to Diana.”

“That’ll stun a jury.”

“Don’t get fresh. The shirt was balled up and stuffed under a bunch of towels in the bottom of the laundry basket.”

“So?”

“So he was hiding it, Arthur. Come
on.
Tell me more about the girl. Did she say anything about her parents’ arguments?”

“I didn’t get into that,” said Huck. “This wasn’t anything formal.”

“You get what you can get, when you can get it,” Ernie said.

“Well, this isn’t the last time I plan on talking to her, you know. Has Frank come up with any kind of an alibi?”

“I think the guy probably had other things on his mind today,” Ernie said. “All we know is everyone saw him leave the office pissed off. The neighbor saw him running into the house around four, heard them fighting, heard a glass break. And nobody else went into the house.”

“So she says,” said Huck.

“Who?”

“The neighbor. She has a little kid, though. It’s not like she can stand there watching the Duprey house for three hours straight. Did they get a cast on the footprints?”

“There wasn’t anything to cast. Why are you holding back on Frank? He’s presumptive to begin with. Then there’s all this evidence of a fight. Add in the pictures online, and they’d cause anyone to snap.”

“At his wife? Why would he hold her responsible?”

“Apparently you’ve never been married,” Ernie said.

“Apparently so,” replied Huck. “Fine. Maybe Frank’s at the top of the list. But I wonder if there’s anything else going on with all of us here.”

“Like what?”

“Like Templeton. Like let’s stick it to Frank.” As soon as he said it, he hated himself. The Templeton case was viewed as Ernie’s baby, really, and now for him to imply that Ernie couldn’t set aside an old grudge was—well, it was a bad thing to do to a friend.

“What are you getting at, Arthur?” Ernie asked in a low voice.

“Forget it.”

Ernie narrowed his eyes. “I have to say, you must have a pretty low opinion of me, if you think I’m settling scores.”

One thing Huck was working on these days was correcting a mistake before it got too big. He shook his head and looked Ernie in the eye. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “It was just words popping out.”

“Yeah. It happens.” Huck couldn’t tell if Ernie was accepting the apology or not. “It’s okay,” Ernie said. “Anyone who’s a friend of Frank’s is going to be thinking the same thing.”

“But I don’t,” Huck said firmly.

“Fine. Fine!” he exclaimed when Huck continued with his woeful look. They both turned, embarrassed, and hunted intently for the right kind of doughnut, which wasn’t there.

“Well,” Huck finally said, “we’ll have to look into all the threats she got.”

“The reverend does not advocate violence,” Ernie reminded him. “And say he is behind this. Why isn’t he taking credit? What’s the point of killing someone for a cause, if you’re not going to make your cause clear?”

Huck sighed. Whatever common wavelength he and Ernie usually shared seemed blocked at the moment. He was glad that they’d been able to put the apology behind them, at least. “I don’t know,” he said.

“You see? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Huck dumped his remaining coffee into the snow. “What about the videos?”

“Kind of bizarre,” Ernie agreed. “Why she saved them, I can’t tell you. If it were me, I wouldn’t even open the packages; I’d turn them right over to the police.” He pulled the string on a pack of Life Savers and popped one into his mouth, glancing down as he did so. “Hey pup,” he said, for a dog had trotted up and was now sniffing the ground at their feet. “How come you’re not on a leash?”

The dog, an overweight husky, sat down and began to howl. Ernie threw him a piece of doughnut. The dog vacuumed it and sat back down, panting.

“That’s enough,” said Ernie. “You’re fat. No. Bad dog. Go on. This is my doughnut.” He threw the dog another piece.

Just then Stan Wolfowitz, the chief of police, walked up to the van. “Hey, chief,” said Huck. “What’s new?”

“Well, I’m cold and I’m tired and I’ve got an upset stomach,” he said. “But I just got a phone call from the coroner’s office. Guess what.”

“Is it good?” said Ernie.

“It is good,” said the chief. “There’s a bunch of skin under Diana’s fingernails.”

Skin meant DNA analysis, scientific evidence, certainty.

“There you go,” said Ernie. “In another week Frank’ll either be on the bus or off the bus.”

“Yeah, and my guess is he’s on.”

“Who’s going to handle things over at the DA’s office?” Ernie asked.

“I don’t know,” Stan said. “They might even refer out to another county. Hey!” he shouted, for the husky had lifted its leg by his car. “Get outta there! Whose dog is this? We don’t need a dog around here right now! Where’d this dog come from?”

A woman in a red fleece jacket came up and shooed the dog away. “You guys better come inside.”

“Whatcha got, Jane?” said the chief.

“You have to hear it,” Jane said. The three men followed her up the walkway and into the house and down the hall to Diana’s study, a tiny room dominated by a large wooden desk and three walls of books. On the desk, beside the neat rows of carefully marked plastic bags, was an ancient answering machine.

“I thought we went over all the messages,” said the chief.

“This machine was in the back of a junk drawer. Listen.” Jane pushed the play button. There was a hiss. They all waited, hands on hips, eyes cast downward. Then a woman’s voice came on.

You’re next, Dr. Duprey.

“Southern drawl,” the chief noted.

Jane held a finger to her lips. They heard the sound of a baby crying.
Do you hear that sound?
the woman asked.
Do you know what it is? Maybe an embryo? Or what you call a protoplasm? Oh my goodness me, why, that’s the sound of a fetus, Dr. Duprey—the sound of a little live human being, born at thirty-five weeks.
The voice paused.
You will answer to God.

There was a long silence as the tape continued to hiss. Finally Jane shut it off. The four of them looked at one another with raised eyebrows.

The chief gave a low whistle. “Well,” he said. “There goes the simple Frank theory.”

PART TWO

——————

JANUARY

CHAPTER SEVEN

——————

THE FIRST TIME
Diana performed an abortion, she was twenty-six years old and so nervous that she performed the entire procedure without uttering a single word. The attending physician stood by, waiting to answer her questions, but Diana—normally a gregarious person—didn’t even clear her throat. Who could ask questions with all the voices hollering in her head?
Don’t miss any tissue! Don’t perforate the uterus! Don’t traumatize the patient!
There was so much noise she was afraid that if she tried to talk, she would end up shouting just to make herself heard, and that would scare everyone, herself included.

So she kept her mouth shut in order to concentrate. The girl was sixteen, a little overweight but not fat, with soft freckled skin and coppery hair. She came with her mother, a thin straggly woman who stood by her daughter’s side the whole time, wiping the girl’s forehead with a damp cloth and murmuring soft words of encouragement. (Diana was grateful that
someone
was talking.) Afterward, when the color had returned to the girl’s face and she was sitting up in the sun-washed recovery room sipping apple juice, the mother followed Diana out into the hall and thanked her.

“Don’t thank me,” said Diana. “Thank Harry Blackmun.”

From the beginning Diana had a special touch, a kind of sixth sense for doing the things an abortion doctor has to do. The attending physician had noticed this even that first day, the way her long slender fingers were able to slip the plastic cannula in through the cervix, the way she guided it around while the vacuum aspirator pumped out the contents. She wouldn’t come to understand what he meant until she herself was training medical students and saw how some of them pushed too hard or pushed too little or angled it the wrong way, causing the woman to cry out not so much in pain as in fear. “Guide with your fingertips, don’t push with your whole hand,” she would tell them. “Don’t hold it in one place for so long. Keep it moving. Good.”

As time went by, the voices that had first been so loud in her head quieted down, and she found herself able to chat through the procedure. She told the patient exactly what she was doing, step by step: injecting the anesthetic, removing the laminaria, emptying the uterus. “You’ll feel some cramping now,” she would say, “but we’re almost through. Everything’s going just fine . . . There you go.”

“It’s over?”

“Not only that,” said Diana, straightening up, “but you’re not pregnant anymore.”

Magical words, to Diana’s patients.

Not only did she have a certain touch, but she also found herself able to perform her work with detachment—something she credited to her father’s philosophy that certain things had to be done even if they weren’t pleasant. When Diana was eight, for instance, she’d come across some pictures of laboratory rats riddled with big lumpy tumors. She’d been horrified, but her father had explained to her that if we were going to find a cure for cancer (“Remember how sick Aunt Joelle was?”), we were going to have to experiment on rats. It was plain and simple. Period. Given this upbringing, then, when she happened to glance in the bucket after a procedure, she was able to tell herself it was no worse than some of the things she’d seen during her surgical rotation. Even when during a second-trimester abortion she might recognize a body part, still she was able to focus on the women lying on the operating table: women lacking money, lacking partners, lacking the emotional wherewithal to raise a child—that’s what Diana focused on, not the bloody tissue in the bucket. Her job, as she saw it, was simply to push the reset button for the woman on the table.

When she found herself pregnant for the first time, a lot of people (Frank in particular) worried that she would find it too difficult to continue her work. But Diana proved them wrong. Just because she wanted her baby didn’t mean the patients in her office wanted theirs. Both her parents had taught her that if you believed in something, you didn’t let your own personal circumstances stand in the way; the true test of your convictions came when your emotions rose up and threatened to scribble over everything you stood for. Those who let it happen—well, they must never have felt very strongly about things in the first place.

So off she went to work each day, helping her pregnant patients become not pregnant, sending them off with an Rx for plenty of rest and fluids—all the while eating three balanced meals a day, which included plenty of folate and an additional thirty grams of protein to the point where she felt like a slab of beef; and when Frank tried, in his empathetic manner, to broach the topic of how hard it must be for someone in her position to do vacuum aspirations all day long, she waved him away, because people were relying upon her.

All went smoothly, until Megan kicked.

Diana was poised between a patient’s knees, inserting the first laminaria into the woman’s cervix to start the dilation process, when she felt her stomach rumble. Only no, it wasn’t a rumble. Someone was tapping on a drum from within. Diana froze. She’d been imagining this moment since the very start of her pregnancy, but she’d had no idea it could feel so
vital.
The nurse asked what was wrong. Diana rolled her stool back and took a deep breath. The nurse asked if everything was all right, and Diana was about to say no when she caught the look of terror in her patient’s eyes—for the girl had immediately inferred that something
was
wrong, not with Diana but with
her.
Diana managed to finish inserting the laminaria, but afterward she snapped off her gloves and told her staff that she didn’t feel well and would they please cancel the rest of her appointments for the day. Immediately she went home and lay down on her bed, waiting for another tap on the drum. There it was! And there! And there again! All afternoon she lay with her hands upon her stomach, happily feeling the lump rolling around within, rising up here, nudging her there, all over her broad pink belly.

That evening she told Frank she wanted to take a leave of absence. They discussed the pros (peace of mind) and the cons (her obligations, boredom, money) and concluded they could afford it; and Diana had just gone upstairs to take a bath and relish in the thought of
four straight months to herself,
when the phone rang. It was the local NARAL chapter, informing her that the antiabortionists were introducing legislation requiring a husband’s consent and asking her if she would testify against the bill. No, Diana said emphatically, I’m pregnant, leave me alone, and then she flashed on the recent patient whose boyfriend had told her he would beat the living shit out of her if she ever got an abortion.

“Send me the file,” she sighed. She took her bath, but the next morning she went back to work, and the issue of a leave of absence didn’t arise again. Not with Megan, not with Ben. If Diana had believed in God, she would have said that God put her on earth for a reason: to give these women another chance.

To push their reset buttons.

—————

She was thirty when she founded her clinic, using a small inheritance she received when her father died. Located on the ground floor of a medical office building, it was three minutes from the hospital, five minutes from downtown, and eight minutes from her house. It was on a bus route. There was plenty of parking. There was a pharmacy on the ground floor where her patients could fill their prescriptions for painkillers. Satisfied that she couldn’t have found a better location, she signed the closing papers and thus became the sole proprietor of the Center for Reproductive Choice.

First off, she gutted the office space because the previous occupant (a podiatrist) had set things up like a maze, with narrow halls and tiny examination rooms, and she wanted things different, open and airy, with a pleasant waiting room where you weren’t all crammed together side by side amid crumbling dried flowers and back issues of
Smithsonian.
To that end she painted the waiting room a pale shade of salmon, installed a decent sound system, and filled an entire wall with books on women’s health. On the other walls she hung framed photographs of simple scenes: a battered window full of geraniums, say, or an empty rocking chair on a summer porch by the sea. She often thought that if she were waiting to have an abortion, she would find it helpful to meditate on the image of oneself alone on that quiet porch, rocking, listening to waves, feeling the cool ocean breeze.

She’d planned on hiring partners, but it never happened; whether this was because of Diana’s headstrong nature or simply due to the lack of a good match didn’t really matter, because Diana operated happily as a sole practitioner. When her staff reached eight—three nurses, an assistant, two counselors, and two office workers—she stopped hiring. Any larger, and the clinic would be too big. Any smaller, and they wouldn’t be able to provide the necessary services. Eight seemed just right.

Over the course of the first decade, Diana had no trouble hiring and keeping the right people. In fact, her folder of résumés grew so fat she had to assign them an entire file drawer. People
wanted
to work at her clinic, not just because they supported what she did but because Diana was known to run a very egalitarian establishment: at the CRC, the receptionist who set up appointments was as important as the counselor who listened to fears, who in turn was as important as the doctor who pushed the reset button.

But when the violence began escalating, the résumé file began to shrink as people shied away from her line of work. On her office wall Diana kept a map of the country, marking the attacks with yellow pushpins. Florida was vulnerable, it seemed. Boston was vulnerable. Maryland was vulnerable; Buffalo, Madison, Seattle, Berkeley—Christ, the whole damn country was vulnerable.

The CRC had its own first real attack right smack in the middle of the holiday season, the year Megan turned three. Diana and Frank had just finished tearing up the house to build an addition for the second child they’d finally decided they wanted. On that December morning Keisha the receptionist went out to get the mail and got her right hand blown off by a pipe bomb. Diana wasn’t surprised when Keisha left to take a job answering the phone at an orthodontist’s office instead; but she
was
surprised when Deborah, a nurse who had been with her since the start, suddenly took a job over at the hospital in Labor and Delivery.

“Nobody’s going to shoot me for timing contractions,” Deborah confessed.

No question, they all felt vulnerable these days. Along with success came notoriety, and although there were several other clinics in town, the CRC seemed to be a magnet for the antichoice contingent, especially after Diana testified before the state legislature—this time against a proposed ban on late-term abortions. It was a bad bill, and Diana had spent the morning in uncomfortable stockings and pumps trying to explain that the term
partial birth abortion
didn’t even exist in the medical literature and how their particular bill would ban not only those late-term abortions everybody hated to think about but second-trimester abortions as well: cases of shriveled heads with no cranium, for instance, or spinal craters the size of a fist. Diana brought pictures and thought she’d spoken quite reasonably, but on its six o’clock broadcast Channel Four used as its sound bite her statement that the mostly male legislature had no business telling any woman what to do with her body, even if she was eight and a half months pregnant, and they ran it alongside the story of a twenty-six-week preemie who lay fighting for life in an incubator down at Children’s, a little alien-looking thing hooked up to tubes and wires, and the implication was clear: if the mother of that preemie had asked, Diana would have scraped and dismembered that baby limb by limb in the interest of the mother’s freedom of choice.

“You might as well have said you’d execute a kid for being a pain in the ass,” Frank said glumly. “Why’d you have to go and say that?”

Afterward the Center for Reproductive Choice become the bull’s-eye of regional hatred. For every bomb threat they received—and there was a time when they were getting one a week—they had to evacuate the clinic, patients and staff alike shivering out on the sidewalk while wild-eyed dogs sniffed through the building. People broke into their offices, dumping files, stealing equipment; and one winter day somebody entered at six in the morning and poured fuel oil all over the floor, and the clinic was saved from arson only by luck when the security guard caught the man washing his hands in the restroom, a cigarette lighter on the edge of the sink. They received suspicious packages in brown paper wrapping—which they knew not to open, of
course
they knew, but which invariably ratcheted up the fear factor.

Finally, upon Frank’s insistence, Diana began to take precautions. No shots had ever been fired at her, but she installed bulletproof glass in the windows—not only at the clinic but at her house as well (a decision that would end up doubling the cost of the solarium). She bought a bulletproof vest. She hired two security guards—one to patrol the halls of the building, and one to patrol the sidewalk and keep the protesters the requisite eight feet away from patients entering the clinic.

They were there rain or shine: shouting, singing, holding posters of Baby Mary, Baby Paul, Baby Joseph—grotesque photographs of fetal remains carefully laid out on white towels. They came early and they left late. They came with their toddlers, who waved signs of their own. Often Reverend O’Connell was among them.

One summer evening—Megan was in high school at this point—Diana left the clinic a little after seven and was surprised to find that the protesters had all gone home. Usually a few stayed until she left, politely inquiring how many babies she had murdered that day, but that night a strange silence hung in the air. As she walked to her car, she noticed things she normally didn’t: skateboarders in the parking lot, flower baskets hanging on the lampposts. This really was a nice place to live, she reflected. She needed to take a little time off and enjoy it.