Jonathan Evison - This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

Harriet promptly flags the waitress and orders another glass.

“I thought you said you’ve had enough.”

“Mind your own business.”

Caroline is polishing her monkey’s fist under the table, as though she might conjure a spell out of the thing.

Harriet’s temples pound with rage. The camaraderie, the healing, the easy laughter — all just a ruse.

“Durable power of attorney? Why not legal guardianship, Caroline? I’m sure they’ve got a notary on board. Then you could really have your way with my assets. Lock me up in Sherwood Arms and throw away the key, why don’t you?”

“Nobody’s trying to lock you up. And Sunny Acres is hardly Sherwood Arms.”

“My God, you could’ve just asked for money. It always worked before.”

“I don’t want your money. But now that you mention it, you might have left me a little something after Dad died.”

“Funny, I had other things on my mind, Caroline. But you’re right,” she says bitterly. “You’re absolutely right.”

She fishes her checkbook from her purse and picks up Caroline’s pen and quickly scrawls out a check, barely legible, for eight thousand dollars. She writes nothing in the memo line.

“C’mon, Mom, knock it off.”

“Should I add a zero? Would you rather I leave the amount blank?” Harriet tears the check from her register and pushes it across the table. “There, are you happy? Don’t cash it until we get back. I’ll have to transfer the funds.”

Caroline pushes the check back.

Harriet volleys the check back, then picks up the pen again. “And while I’m at it.”

She grabs the document and flips to the second page and signs it, hand trembling. “There,” she says, to the bewildered couple at the adjacent table. “You saw that.” Then, turning back to Caroline: “You’ll need signatures.”

Harriet stands up, just as her glass of wine arrives. “And for the record, your father is still alive.”

“See? It’s statements like that that make me think you’re—”

“That’s not what I mean, Caroline.”

“What are you talking about?”

Harriet looks her daughter straight in the eye, unflinchingly. “All these years you’ve been begrudging the wrong man.”

Caroline leaves off rubbing her knot, matching Harriet’s gaze for what feels like forty-eight years.

This time it’s Harriet who looks away first. “Now look what you’ve made me do,” she says, and walks away from the table, wobbling slightly. As she exits the Crow’s Nest, a wave of remorse courses through her like nausea. She pauses briefly to look back at her daughter, pale and perplexed, fondling her monkey’s fist again. And in that moment realizes she just made the biggest mistake of her life.

Okay, maybe the second biggest mistake of your life. You’re wracked with guilt the instant Charlie Fitzsimmons climbs off of you, mops the sweat off his brow, and straightens his toupee. You maintain silence as you dress, an easy state of affairs for the two of you, let’s face it.

Before you can begin to unravel the mess you’ve made, before you can begin to calculate your next move, you feel it. A tickle at first. Something takes root in you in that instant, even as Charlie pulls his pants up and fastens his belt. Yes, something starts growing, something that will still be with you forty-nine years later, Harriet, something you’ll never be able to outrun: contempt. Mostly for yourself but, to a lesser degree, contempt for the world. And yes, Harriet, as tough as it is to admit, as awful as it sounds, contempt for the unwitting life that has taken root inside you.

Now let’s be perfectly clear on something: You want to get rid of this, this. . what shall we call it, child? That seems a little premature. This thing? That’s a little objectifying, don’t you think?

Hell, why mince words? Let’s just call it Caroline.

The second-to-last thing in the world you need right now is another child (the last thing being an illegitimate one). But you really have no choice, Harriet, at least not a safe or reputable or affordable one — and many would say not a moral one. It’s 1966. The National Organization for Women is less than a week old. Legal abortion is still four years off, a reality so distant that Margaret Sanger won’t live to see it. The available options are all prohibitive one way or another. They involve back alleys or intercontinental flights or precarious home remedies. Your only legitimate (sorry, poor word choice) option may be a trip to the roller skating rink, where a couple of good hard falls might do the trick.

So you’ve got that going for you.

Sick with worry and wracked with guilt, but certain beyond all reasonable doubt that you are pregnant, you return home late from work that evening and find that Bernard has prepared himself beans and toast and sits in his chair working a crossword. You graze his shoulder on the way past. He tries to pat your fanny. Playfully, you elude him. But inside you’re dying. Stealing to the bathroom, you take a shower so hot it burns, scrubbing yourself raw to rid yourself of Charlie Fitzsimmons, inside and out. Your efforts, of course, are futile.

Your life has jumped the tracks, Harriet Chance. So what’s a grown girl to do?

In bed that night, under the covers, though your stomach and your heart are in knots, and the very idea is revolting in every aspect, you take Bernard firmly in your hand until he’s at full attention, then you straddle him in the darkness, hating yourself, sobbing so quietly he can’t hear you, hoping beyond hope that he can somehow unroot or dislodge your error, your — dare we say it — mistake. Not to be crass, but the plain truth is, when he rolls you over on your back to assume missionary, you’re wishing Bernard could fuck the life out of you.

Not really his style. After three minutes, or an hour, or a year, Bernard groans his release and rolls off of you, whereupon he promptly falls asleep without a care in the world.

From here on out, Harriet, it’s all a charade. Thank heavens, Charlie Fitzsimmons was a Caucasian, or this one would come back in nine months to bite you, for sure. Maybe not an ideal solution to your problem (and your problem is just getting started here), but hey, given the available choices, what was a girl to do?

Observe, Harriet, the world’s biggest Band-Aid. Believe it or not, it’ll get the job done for almost fifty years. But man, is it gonna sting when you pull that baby off.

The frigid air of the observation deck sobers Harriet almost immediately as she leans on the rail, staring dumbly at the blackened form of the mountains, crouching in the moonless night. Somewhere out in the vast, dim quiet, there’s an answer for everything. But all Harriet can hear is the wind rocketing past her ears. All she can feel is dread, cold and implacable as the Yukon night.

Rising at the back of her throat is a clot of emotion, crude and shapeless as a lump of coal.

Dear God, help me see clearly. Give me the strength, give me the courage.

But praying doesn’t help. This one’s not in God’s hands. This one stands squarely on Harriet’s shoulders. And not the other Harriet.

Caroline’s not in the room when Harriet returns. She sheds her jacket and moves restlessly about the cabin for a few minutes, finally taking up the remote. Flipping through channels, she pauses the instant she sees black and white. Good old black and white, so soothing next to the barrage of color.

There’s Bogey on the screen with Bacall. Key Largo, an old favorite. A movie she’d seen for the first time ten years after its original release, a second screening with Bernard at the Uptown Theater, before the new owners gutted the place. They’d sat on the balcony, Harriet pregnant with Skip, though nobody knew it yet.