Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

Yes, I tell him. I had an abortion. I was nineteen, in college. It wasn’t the right time to have a baby. I thought-stupidly-that I’d have many more chances.

When I finish, I am gutted. I have only spoken once of the procedure since it happened, and that was at the fertility clinic, when I had to be completely honest about my reproductive history or compromise my chances of conceiving. It has been twenty-two years, but suddenly I feel the same way I felt back then: Shaky. Embarrassed.

And angry.

The clinic could not legally have released that information to Wade Preston. Which means that it must have come from the only other person who was at the clinic the day I gave my medical history.

Max.

“Is there a reason you were hiding this information from the court?”

“I wasn’t hiding-”

“Could it be because you thought, correctly, it might make you seem a little disingenuous when you start sobbing about how much you want a baby?”

“Objection!”

“Have you ever considered,” Wade Preston presses, “that the fact that you haven’t been able to have another child was God’s judgment on you for killing your first?”

Angela is furious. She goes after Wade with a verbal streak of fire. But even once he has withdrawn his question, it hangs in the air like the letters of a neon sign after you close your eyes.

And even if I don’t have to reply out loud, I may just have already answered silently.

I don’t want to believe in a God who’d punish me for having an abortion.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t wondered if it’s true.

“You want to tell me what the hell that was all about?” Angela asks the minute the judge says that we are adjourning for the day. “How did he get your medical files?”

“He didn’t have to,” I say flatly. “Max must have told him.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me ? It would have been much less damaging if we’d been able to bring it up on direct instead of cross!”

Like Max’s alcoholism. Everyone likes a reformed sinner. If we’d been the ones to bring up his drinking, it would have looked like he had something to hide.

Which is exactly how Wade Preston has painted me today.

Preston has finished packing up his briefcase; he smiles politely as he walks by. “Sorry you didn’t know about the skeleton in your client’s closet. The literal one, that is.”

Angela ignores him. “Is there anything else I need to know about? Because I really do not like surprises.”

I shake my head, still numb, and follow her out of the courtroom. Vanessa is waiting with my mother-both of them still sequestered. “What happened in there?” Vanessa asks. “How come the judge threw out half the gallery?”

“Can we talk about it in the car? I really just want to go home.”

But the moment we open the front door of the courthouse and step outside, there is a hail and volley of questions.

I’m expecting this. Just not the ones they ask.

How far along were you when you had the abortion?

Who was the baby daddy?

Do you still keep in touch with him?

A woman walks up to me. From her yellow T-shirt I realize she is from Westboro Baptist Church. She’s holding a recyclable plastic bottle filled with some kind of fruit punch, but it looks like blood from here.

I know she’s going to throw it at me the moment before she actually does. “Some choices are wrong,” she cries.

I step back, shielding myself, so that the liquid only lands on my right foot. I completely forget about Vanessa until I hear her voice beside me. “You never told me.”

“I never told anyone.”

Vanessa’s eyes are cold. She glances at Max, walking between his attorneys. “Somehow,” she says, “I don’t believe you.”

My mother wants to go after Wade Preston for dragging up my history; it takes Angela’s interference and the magic word (grandchild) before she agrees to go home without putting up a fight. She tells me she will call me later to make sure I’m all right, but it’s pretty clear to her that I don’t want to talk right now. To anyone except Vanessa, that is. The whole ride home, I try to explain what happened during my testimony. She doesn’t say a word. When I mention my abortion, she flinches.

Finally, by the time we park the car, I can’t stand it. “Are you going to give me the silent treatment forever?” I yell, slamming the car door and following Vanessa into the house. I strip off my panty hose, which are still sticky. “Is this some Catholic thing?”

“You know I’m not Catholic,” Vanessa answers.

“But you used to be-”

“This isn’t about the damn abortion, Zoe. It’s about you .” She is facing me now, her hands still clutching the keys to the car. “That’s a pretty big bit of history to leave out of a relationship. It’s like forgetting to tell someone you have AIDS.”

“For God’s sake, Vanessa, you can’t catch an abortion like an STD-”

“Do you think that’s the only reason to disclose something incredibly personal to the people you love?”

“It was a horrible decision to have to make, even if I was lucky enough to be able to make it. I don’t particularly enjoy reliving it.”

“Then tell me this,” she argues. “How is it that Max knew, and I didn’t?”

“You’re jealous? You’re actually jealous that I told Max about something horrible in my past!”

“Yeah, I am,” Vanessa admits. “Okay? I’m a selfish bitch who wishes that my wife opened herself up to me as much as she opened herself up to the guy she used to be married to.”

“And maybe I’d like my wife to show a little compassion,” I say. “Considering I was just raked over the coals by Wade Preston and that I’m now Public Enemy Number One for the entire religious right.”

“There’s more than just a u in us ,” Vanessa says. “Not that you seem to realize it.”

“Great!” I yell, tears springing to my eyes. “You want to know about my abortion? It was the worst day of my life. I cried the whole way there and the whole way home. I had to eat ramen noodles for two months because I didn’t want to ask my mother for money; and I didn’t tell her I’d done it until I was back home for the summer. I didn’t take the medicine they gave me for the cramps afterward because I felt like I deserved the pain. And the guy I was dating-the guy who decided with me that this was the right thing to do-broke up with me a month later. And in spite of the fact that every doctor I’ve ever seen tells me that my infertility has nothing to do with that procedure, I’ve never really been able to believe it. So how’s that? Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?”

By the time I finish, I am crying so hard I can barely understand my own words. My nose is running and my hair is in my face and I want her to touch me, to take me in her arms and tell me it’s all right, but instead she steps back. “What else don’t I know about you?” she asks, and she leaves me standing alone in the entryway of a house that no longer feels like home.

The actual procedure took only six minutes.

I know, I counted.

They had talked to me about all my options. They had given me lab tests and a physical. They had given me a sedative. They had opened my cervix with dilators. They had given me forms to sign.

This took a few hours.

I remember the nurse fitting my feet into the stirrups, telling me to scoot down. I remember the shine of the speculum as the doctor lifted it from its sterile napkin. I remember the wet-vac sound of the suction device.

The doctor never called it a baby. She never even called it a fetus. She referred to it as tissue. I remember closing my eyes and thinking of a Kleenex, balled up and tossed in the trash.