I zigzagged through Long Beach to avoid stoplights, tapping my fingers against the steering wheel one at a time, counting the weeks since my missed period, trying to force a new calculation, a more tractable measurement of time. Who had decided a week was seven days? A month, twenty-eight, or -nine, thirty, thirty-one? Time seemed capricious and immeasurable and yet, I tried to harness the weeks into a smaller, tidier number. Was I beginning with the right day? The right week? I thought about the afternoon I had gone to my on again-off again lover’s house. I couldn’t afford birth control pills and hadn’t brought condoms. He, with his long-term, live-in girlfriend, probably didn’t have any. And, I had a boyfriend I rarely saw so I didn’t worry about getting pregnant with him. That afternoon, I hoped I wasn’t ovulating. I would often feel a slight zing, a reminder my reproductive system was working even if I wasn’t ready for it.
I clenched the steering wheel to prevent myself from my pointless tallying, reaching the inevitable conclusion. Most of the intersections heading south out of Long Beach had four-way stop signs instead of stoplights, which I preferred, favoring the illusion of momentum. Like most of the overcrowded cities hugging the coast, parking was challenging, with cars parked to the corners. A screech and a thud drowned out my radio as glass nuggets exploded, pinging off the dashboard and showering my lap. I slammed on the brakes and closed my eyes. When I opened them, a stocky man in a fleece top, board shorts, and flipflops stood beside his smashed yellow VW Bug. I pulled over, relieved my car was drivable even if the passenger door V-ed in and its window was scattered all over my car.
My stomach corkscrewed as I stood beside the man and tried to process what had happened. It hadn’t been a four-way stop. He had the right of way. It was my fault. I pushed my fists into my forehead and groaned.
“Are you okay?” the man peered at me. Lines creased the corners of his eyes as if he had been born laughing and hadn’t stopped. His chubby face looked concerned, not angry.
I nodded. “Are you?”
He was an inch or two taller than I was and about two times rounder. I couldn’t tell how old he was, maybe forty-something. To me, in my mid- twenties, guys looked like high school kids or old men.
“Surprised as hell. You were just a bolt of red in front of me!”
“Your car . . . my mom had a green Bug when I was a kid. She worked at Ryder Truck and had it painted bright yellow. Just like yours.” I took a deep breath to stop babbling.
Barely anyone had cellphones in 1988. Someone in one of the neighboring houses must have called the police. The distant wail of a siren whirled toward us. A policeman pulled up and assessed the scene. Chilly rain needled my face. It had only rained four days in the year and a half I had lived in California, and now a fifth. I looked at the hole where my window had been. Was I going to be one of those people who duct- taped a garbage bag to their car? I thought about the high-interest loan offers I had tossed in the recycling bag and knew I would be one of those people who paid an insane amount of interest to get out of a tight spot.
The cop invited us into the backseat of his squad car and asked for our driver’s licenses and proof of insurance. I handed him my license through a small gap in the metal grid between the front and backseats. He held his hand out, “Insurance?”
“I don’t have any.” It topped the list of things I couldn’t afford. I knew it was mandatory, but I had just spent two months’ worth of car insurance to replace my brakes. I had waited too long—way past the squeal to a horrible grinding sound—until the rear back braking plates broke, too. I had made every financial misstep possible. I couldn’t afford the fifty- dollar fee for the student health center which meant I couldn’t get free birth control. I had been picking up extra shifts at the restaurant to pay for the abortion I hadn’t counted on.
“Why not?”
I looked at the cop and the man with the pug-nosed Bug beside me, at their clean-shaven faces, kind eyes. The windshield wipers swiped and shuddered. Rain drummed against the roof and tires swished through the intersection. Blood pounded in my ears. I weighed my options and calculated their reactions. Maybe they had been in my shoes. Well, not exactly in my shoes, but close enough.
“I’ve been saving for an abortion.” The catch in my voice surprised me. I thought I had grown numb to my predicament, my decision. I held my breath. The VW guy might not judge me, but the cop? Other than the rain and the windshield wipers there was no sound in the car. Were the men also holding their breath? The cop wrote down our contact information and turned around to look at us.
“You’ll have to pay for his repairs.”
I nodded, unable to speak around the lump in my throat and hoped my roommate hadn’t taken the recycling out.
“I’m not going to give you a ticket. You’ve had a rough enough year.
Just get everything taken care of and get some insurance.”
I thanked him, overwhelmed by his unexpected empathy, my stomach a knot, my head a jumble of numbers with no easy solution.
*
After work, I pulled the loan offer out of the recycling bag and read and re-read the flyer, the fine print in an almost unreadable font size, tying the interest rate to a formula linked to the APR. I had no idea what it was, but assumed it wasn’t low. The loan offers had been filling my mailbox, circling, waiting for a moment of vulnerability, a moment when I would be too weak to fight one off. I added calling the number to my to-do list for the next morning. The interest rate was nearly thirty percent. The maximum I could borrow paid for the VW repairs and allowed me to buy a mismatched car door from an auto salvage yard, red on the outside like my car, but burgundy inside rather than gray. It was like driving inside a patchwork quilt. When I stopped by the man’s apartment to give him the cashier’s check, he pulled up his shirt to show me his bruise.
“Lucky for me, I retrofitted my seatbelts!” A belt of laughter burst from him. A maroon diagonal bruise crossed his chest and round belly like a bandolier.
“I’m sorry.” Of their own volition, my fingertips traced his bruise. I half-expected his skin to sizzle beneath my cold fingers. I knew nothing about faith healing, but if I had, I would have held my hands to his bruises to make them disappear. How fortunate he had been wearing a seatbelt. The cost for medical issues would have been exponentially greater than I could have ever afforded, loan or no loan. “I’m so sorry.”
*
For the most part, I kept my pregnancy to myself. Nobody in my family knew. The few people I told: my lover, my roommate, the waitresses I worked with, and my friend, Craig. There was still so much shame and stigma associated with abortion and I didn’t want to constantly justify my decision. A couple of weeks after my car accident, Craig pulled up in front of my apartment, the top down on his celery-green MG.
“I still can’t believe you found a car that matches your eyes.” He batted his eyelashes at me.
“Goofball. We should probably close the top.”
His eyes grew wide. Even though he knew our destination, I watched the realization dawn on him that this drive could be more than a trip to Trader Joe’s. He got out and we secured the soft top to the windshield. “Hanging out with straight chicks isn’t supposed to be dangerous.”
“There weren’t any protestors last week. The ultrasound tech told me they usually show up on weekends.”
We had met in a Chinese history class during my first summer in California and exchanged stories about our boyfriends. He, newly out and wild, had plenty. Craig became my go-to for car and fashion advice. He introduced me to his mechanic when my radiator blew up. Car maintenance was not my forte and I couldn’t afford it anyway. If anything rattled or made noise, I turned up the radio. When we hung out on campus, he would eye my outfit and give me a thumbs up if I passed his test.
The clinic was in a part of Long Beach I had never been to until my pregnancy test and ultrasound the week before. Instead of gay nightclubs and almost trendy restaurants like our neighborhood, a series of payday loan stores, bail bond businesses, and law offices with signs in English and Spanish peppered the streets. Craig pulled into the quiet lot adjacent to the building, much like any small squat office building except for the bars over the doors and windows as if the clinic were a repurposed pawn shop—a pawn shop without the possibility of changing your mind and getting your sacrificed possessions back. We huddled beside each other on stiff plastic chairs. A chill ran through me, and I shivered.
“Oh, baby, are you okay?” He took my hand in his.
Before I could answer, a nurse opened the door across the room and called my name. I clutched Craig’s hand. “You don’t have to stay. They said it’s going to be a couple of hours.”
He squeezed my hand. Hard. “I’ll be here.”
And I knew he would. I had asked him—a man who would never get me or any woman pregnant—to take me after my roommate had burst into tears when I told her I was getting an abortion. She said she couldn’t, wouldn’t be a part of it.
The week before, I had asked the ultrasound tech what it sounded like. Her discomfort thickened around us as she swiped the ultrasound wand across my belly. “I just want to prepare myself.” The irony wasn’t lost on me. I evidently hadn’t worked hard enough to prepare myself in November. When she asked me if I wanted to keep the ultrasound picture, did she want me to change my mind? Put a blob-like face on my stupidity, my untimely fertility? My eyes flitted across the monitor, trying not to register the tiny fluttering dark spot. I knew it was the heart and closed mine.
*
The nurse inserted an IV with a small dose of anesthesia to take the edge off. As much as I wanted to pretend to be elsewhere, I couldn’t. The doctor and nurse wore surgical masks and talked to me throughout as if we were getting to know each other better, some sort of stilted social hour. The doctor asked polite chitchat questions: “Where do you work?” “What are you studying?” “Do you have any favorite TV shows?” The nurse repeated ‘the procedure’ over and over. “During the procedure, you may feel a slight tug.” “After the procedure, you may feel nausea and cramping.” “You won’t be able to have sexual intercourse for four to six weeks after the procedure.” My hazy brain wanted to shout at her, “It’s an abortion!” I wanted them to be quiet so I could hide deep within myself, much like years later when I declined anesthesia while giving birth to my son, I wanted to feel everything, be in the pinprick of light I felt inside me, release the pain, and embrace him. I wondered if the fetus could be reincarnated, if its energy could hover around and in me, waiting for me to be ready.
I tried to see things from the doctor’s and nurse’s perspective. Maybe they had to put a face and a story to each vulva and cervix to humanize the experience. Maybe they wanted to allay my anxiety. Maybe they cared about each woman before them in a disjointed way. I wanted to know how many they did each day, each week, each month. Did the sum of all these miscalculations wear on them? Did some women cry? Did they know how much I appreciated the ability to not be shackled to my stupidity? Should I say thank you?
As the nurse walked me to the recovery room, she mentioned the cramps would feel like a heavy period. I had never experienced cramps. Finally, the pain my friends talked about made sense. I dozed in the darkened room, siphoned of energy. Some women lay on the cots quietly weeping. One woman prayed the rosary in Spanish over and over, the beads clicking.
My mental preparations hadn’t anesthetized my regret. I didn’t regret my choice, just the events leading up to it. No health insurance.
No birth control pills. No honesty about no birth control. Having an affair while also dating another man, albeit a man I rarely saw because he wasn’t willing to drive twenty miles to see me. Not telling him I was pregnant because he said his last girlfriend had an abortion and he’d kill himself before going through it again. Such a luxury, I thought, to be so melodramatic. Pragmatism was much more economical. No matter what, I didn’t want his blood on my hands. The bundle of cells, much more than cells—less than an inch long—was the only casualty of my carelessness.
By the time I returned to the waiting room, the cramps had ebbed to a dull throbbing deep in my womb, maybe from having my vagina held open by the speculum for longer than a Pap smear or maybe my body was responding to a loss my heart didn’t want to feel.
Craig flashed an eager smile, a little disarming in the joyless room, surrounded by women sitting alone or in small clusters.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“What’d you do, rob a bank?” He held out his hand for my purse. “Can we take the top down?” The morning fog had burned off and I wanted to feel the meager January sun on my face even if the heat came from his vents.
He scanned the parking lot and sidewalk. It must have been too cold for protesters or maybe this corner of Long Beach was tired, not newsworthy. I lifted my chin to embrace the sun. Eucalyptus shadows flitted across my eyelids as his MG purred through Long Beach.
“I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I was looking at the other women and wondered how someone as smart as you ended up there.”
“You don’t have to take an IQ test to fuck.” I leaned against the headrest and lifted my face to the sun, too drained to glare at him.
*
That summer, my mom spent a few weeks with me while my roommate was out of state. She offered to strip and refinish my desk. I agreed but didn’t have time to empty the drawers before I left for work. Around noon, I remembered the envelope. The plain white envelope with my name on it. The nurse had given it to me with post-procedure instructions. I shoved it in a drawer and tried to forget it. I could have thrown it away but hadn’t. I don’t know why. It wouldn’t go in a scrapbook with my diplomas and report cards, mementoes of my years in California. I stared at my computer screen, certain my mom would open the envelope and read it. My privacy meant nothing to her.
When I got home from work, the desk stood by the front door of my apartment, sanded down, all traces of the white paint removed. The contents of the drawers lay neatly piled on my bed, the white envelope peeking out beneath a stack. At dinner, Mom said she had a dream during her afternoon nap that I had been pregnant. I said it sounded like a nightmare and changed the subject. From time to time, she claimed to have a similar dream. I knew she knew, and she knew that I knew she knew.
*
After graduation, I moved back to the Midwest and had a series of futureless relationships. I stayed on birth control until I went through a long stretch without a boyfriend. When I met a man and got pregnant— again unplanned—I knew it was time. This was my chance to get it right. I barely contained my excitement, delighted in every change in my body, relished every doctor’s visit, thrilled by the wow-wow-wow of the baby’s heartbeat. After my son was born, he and I would drive to Milwaukee to spend weekends with his dad. My son’s calm blue eyes watched the clouds scud by, an old soul in his wee body.
*
While I still lived in California, I had bought a bumper sticker that read, “If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?” and mostly forgot about it unless people left nasty notes on mywindshield, berating me for choosing to have sex or calling me a slut or baby killer. I would take the slips of paper off my windshield, get inside my car, and lock the door, waiting until I drove away to roll down my windows.
I drove up Seventh Street after work one Sunday night. The streetlights cast yellow cones on the empty road. If timed just right, the lights strobed in the car, making me feel like I was in a sci-fi film. The yellow glow felt suffocating. A cop I had dated told me that cities used them to slow down traffic. When I pulled up to a red light, I noticed movement from the car to my left and glanced at the man in the front seat, pantomiming for me to roll my window down. He looked cute from the deltoids up, sun-bleached hair kissing the collar of his dark polo. I imagined khakis and Vans and rolled my window down.
“Can I ask you a question?”
I glanced at the light. Still red. “Sure.”
The light changed and we both pulled forward and stopped at the next light. On Sunday nights, the downtown streets were usually deserted, a few homeless people slumped in doorways or pushed grocery carts, brimming with plastic bags. Like many big cities, Long Beach had stoplights at every intersection downtown. They must have been on timers. I could have turned right but was curious about where he would steer the conversation.
“Have you had one?”
I knew what he meant. Maybe I wouldn’t have responded if I lived anywhere besides California. Possible scenarios flashed through my mind before I answered him. The conversation could have gone sideways fast. He could have sworn at me, maybe forced my car to the side of the road, anything unpredictably violent. “Yes.”
The light changed again, definitely timed. I had driven past my turn but wanted to continue the conversation then go past, much past my street before I turned back. No cars approached from any direction. We idled at the light, an unspoken agreement.
“Would you do it again?”
I had asked myself this question over and over. “I’d hope I wouldn’t have to.”
The light changed again, but we stayed. “Why did you do it?”
“I don’t like surprises. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure who the dad was.”
He ran his right hand through his blond hair and nodded, deep in thought. “Thanks for being honest. I don’t know anyone who’s had one.”
“You do. More than you can imagine.”
I think about him from time to time and wonder if he ever asked any of his female friends or girlfriends or maybe a fiancée or wife if they had had an abortion. I wonder if any of these women trusted him enough to tell the truth.
Kathleen Quigley is a writer and massage therapist living in Southeast Wisconsin. After pursuing an MFA at Columbia College, Chicago, she took a hiatus to raise her son. Her chapbook Twinkies won the 2023 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press nonfiction chapbook award. She has published fiction and nonfiction in Hypertext Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Seventh Wave, and Hairtrigger, among others. She lives and runs in Wisconsin with her rescue dog. She has been awarded residencies at Ragdale Foundation and is completing a memoir which explores identity, mortality, and mother/daughter relationships.