Alice McDermott - After This

Susan almost said, “Annie?”-but instead pursed her lips to show she had no answer.

The nurse glanced at her watch. “I thought maybe she’d gone out for a bit of lunch, but she’s been gone a while now.” She gave Susan the full, professional warmth of her brown eyes. “Pam at the desk said she just kind of flew out.”

Susan nodded. She and Annie had agreed to have lunch together, if she was up for it, at a diner on Third Avenue. Vanilla egg creams and greasy cheeseburgers, they’d said.

“We can’t let you go home alone, you know,” the nurse told her kindly, deliberately. “Is there someone else you can call? If she doesn’t come back?”

Jill O’Meara came to mind, but Susan suspected she was probably at work now. Susan didn’t even know the name of the card store. Jill would be two hours coming in from Long Island anyway. The Jackass had a car-a GTO, the whole problem-and lived in Queens, and it would serve him right to get the full weight of the whole summer delivered to him in one phone call (You screwed me, you dumped me, I just had an abortion, and you need to drive me home), but she wasn’t that crazy. She knew he caddied on Tuesday and Thursday anyway; she’d made enough plans this summer to casually drop by the golf course.

Slowly, she shook her head. “She’ll be back,” she told the nurse. “She said she might run over to Bloomingdale’s.” And then, when the nurse had gone out again, wondered how messed up she was to find herself praying, praying earnestly this time, that her half-assed lie was true.

The doctor, without a smile, gave her a lecture about venereal disease and a prescription for birth control and told her about the new risks a second abortion would raise. Then she handed her a small white business card, the name and number of a social worker.

Frowning at her from behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the doctor suddenly asked, in quick succession, “You live with your family? Mother and father? Are you afraid of your father? Is he violent? Does he hit you?”

After everything, Susan was surprised to feel herself blush. There was a time when she might have been afraid that her father would hit her. When she and her brother were kids, he had often shown them the back of his hand, and though they’d never once been struck, they had always flinched. But that was long before Tony went to Vietnam, and came back, and disappeared. Long before the night she saw him weeping in their father’s thick arms, not like a baby or even a kid, but like a lunatic, one of her father’s own patients, God’s mistakes, as he called them, saliva veiling his open mouth. Or the day he put his fist through the living-room wall. Or the day their mother told Susan that it would have been easier for their father if Tony had been killed in the war.

“My father’s never hit me,” she told the doctor. “Not at all.” After everything, it was the first time she saw them suspect a lie.

The nurse had just handed her the first month’s supply of pills in a little case that looked like a pink compact when she said, cheerfully, “Your girlfriend’s outside.”

Annie was on the same couch where Susan had left her, but it was clear, even in the warm light of the waiting room, that she’d been crying.

There were two other, middle-aged, women also in the room so Annie whispered when she said, “You okay?” and Susan whispered back, “Yeah, are you?”

“Fine,” Annie said shortly, and then handed Susan her purse.

They walked down the hall to the elevator in silence. Although they lived on the same street, although Susan’s father had helped to deliver Clare, they had been best friends only since the first week of freshman year. At mixers with the all-male Catholic schools, they had discovered they were the perfect boy-meeting pair: You ask the blonde, I’ll ask the brunette. They had gone on their first dates together. They had lost their virginity within a week of each other-Annie on the night of the junior prom, Susan a week later in gratitude for the prom and in regret for not having done it, perhaps more memorably, then. They had gone through this ordeal all summer knowing that their places were interchangeable-that Annie could be Susan and Susan could be Annie. Knowing, too, all they knew about breaking the baby’s arms and legs and drowning it in salt water.

“Did you have lunch?” Susan asked her in the elevator and Annie said, “No. Aren’t we going to the diner?”

At the third floor, they got the full whiff of the famous hair salon and then watched a tall, beautiful woman get on, her frosted hair blow-dried to elaborate perfection. Stepping back to make way for her, the two girls exchanged a look behind her back, a grimace and a grin.

If Annie hated her for what she had just done, Susan thought, then she would be alone in the world, as lost as her crazy brother screaming in his dreams.

In the diner, they found a booth near the window. The cheeseburgers were perfect, flat and juicy and turning the soft rolls beneath them a reddish pink. The sweet egg creams, in frosted fountain glasses, might have been a balm for any number of things. They both put their straws in and then drew them out again and licked the white, vanilla-scented foam.

“So, where’d you go?” Susan asked, hoping to deflect Annie from saying, How was it? This morning she would have trusted her not to ask “How was it?” but now, suddenly, everything seemed tentative between them. It was possible Annie hated her for what she had just done.

Annie slipped the straw back into her drink, churned it a bit. Reluctant to speak until finally, she simply said, “I lost it.” For Susan, the thick pad and the cramps and the terrible word-curettage-that set her teeth on edge, all gave way to the sudden descent her heart took. If their places were exchanged, Annie would not have done what she’d done. And there was no undoing it.

Tears came into Annie’s eyes-green eyes now against their red rims. Susan saw her swallow hard before she leaned across the Formica tabletop and asked, whispering, “Do you know she dies?”

Susan felt herself draw away from the question, even as Annie seemed to lean into it. “Catherine,” Annie said. “In the book. Did you know she dies at the end, and the baby’s dead and he walks out into the rain by himself?”

Annie’s voice seemed to twist away from her and she tried to laugh through it, suspecting she would lose it again were it not for the good cry she had had an hour ago, in a deserted ladies’ room some floors below the clinic-a place she had sought blindly, flying (as the receptionist had said) from the waiting room (another pair of women had entered by then, a greenish-looking girl in her twenties and an older woman who might have been her mother) and into a nearby stairwell where the first sob had broken from her throat and echoed so loudly that she’d run heavily down the stairs just to cover the sound with her own footsteps. Out onto another floor where there was, luckily, an empty ladies’ room. She had locked herself in a stall and sobbed for the unbearable sadness of the story: Catherine dead and the baby dead and nothing at all left for him-like saying goodbye to a statue, he had said-but to walk out into the desolate rain all alone.

She had cried for what must have been twenty minutes and then went out to the sink and splashed cold water on her face-knowing she should get back upstairs for Susan-and then began to cry again.

Because it was intolerable: Catherine dead and their baby dead. Intolerable and terrible and made even more so by the fact that within the same hour of her reading, the book had convinced her (there in the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and death and pain (despite the way the girl with a woman who might have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a nice hotel, a warm fire, a fine meal, love.