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Chapter 2
The pills were small and white. On Thursday morning at eleven, Dr. Brown gave me the mifepristone, misoprostol, and a prescription for both Zofran, an anti-nausea med, and Percocet, for the pain that would probably start later that day. The first pill was inserted, along with an IUD, by the doctor while I lay on the paper-covered bench, my bare legs in stirrups under the fluorescent lights. I stared up at the ceiling and counted the beige tiles to keep myself from crying.
It didn't work.
On the way home, I stopped at a Duane Reade and picked up an industrial-sized carton of maxi pads, per Dr. Brown's advice. It was a gorgeous spring day: New York in the full green of late spring and early summer. Birds chirped from all the trees planted on my sidewalk, drowning the everyday drone of cars on the busy streets. The air was balmy enough that most people walking around wore shorts. White, puffy clouds punctuated the sunshine, and every so often, a stray butterfly would wisp through the air.
Everything about it made me feel sick.
Still nauseous from the craze of hormones surging through me, I stumbled into my grandmother's house, ignoring Bubbe's questions about how the doctor's appointment had gone and whether they had given me something for the nausea. I pulled myself up the stairs, and lay in bed, waiting for the hours to tick by while cramps slowly built in my belly.
That afternoon, while Bubbe was out with her mah-jongg group and Dad had gone down to the club to meet with his band, I inserted the second pill. An hour later, the bleeding started. Contractions came and went, and I stumbled back and forth between the bathroom and my room throughout the day, hazy from the Percocet, clutching my belly every time the muscles pulled together.
Twelve hours later, it was done.
~
"How are you feeling?"
I stretched out on my bed, holding my cell phone to my ear while I stared at the ceiling. I watched as a lazy cobweb twisted limply in the dank, airless space.
"Fine," I said. My voice was groggy, like I hadn't used it in several days.
"Maybe I should rephrase," Jane said. "What are you feeling?"
Wrapped in an old terrycloth robe that I'd had since high school, I shrugged, even though she couldn't see me. It wasn't a question I wanted to answer, because thinking about what I had done just made me hurt in a completely different way that the Percocet couldn't cure.
"Nothing, really. I just feel...numb. And really tired."
"Is the cramping better now?"
I turned so I was curled on my side. The clock on my bedside table now read ten a.m. Jane, knowing what was going on, had stayed up with me through the day and into the night, picking up every time I needed to cry, needed to yell, needed to whimper, or just needed to be silent with someone else there.
"Yeah, it's pretty much done now," I mumbled. "I...I could tell when it happened."
Jane was silent. We both knew what I meant. She had been calling every hour since I'd gotten home from the clinic, worried that I didn't have the support system recommended for going through the procedure by myself. At first, I'd fought it, but no one ever tells you that an abortion is going to be painful enough that you'll want to have someone there to help. No one tells you how much it might hurt, inside and out.
"Does your grandmother know?" she asked again.
I sighed. "I don't know. Maybe."
That was the truth. I had tried to hide as much of the evidence as I could, and I had told Bubbe and my dad that the mono was acting up again. But the ginger cookies stopped appearing next to my bed, and Bubbe had been giving me awfully sad looks when she came upstairs to check on me.
"What about...you know who? Are you going to let him know what happened?"
I rolled my face into my pillow. There was that ache again, not in my belly, but in my heart. It wasn't the first time she'd brought up his name in the last twelve hours without actually saying it. At one point, when the pain was at its worst, I had cried into the phone that this was all his fault, that I missed him, that he should be here, but I'd expressly forbidden Jane to contact him at all. I didn't want him to know about this, ever.
"It's probably for the best," Jane said when I didn't respond. "You don't need any more stress."
"Yeah."
It was all relative. Just a different kind of stress.
"Did you see the Forbes profile I sent?"
I groaned. "Jane! I'm trying not to think about Brandon!"
I had, in fact, seen the magazine cover while I was waiting in line at the pharmacy. A full-page spread of Brandon's patented, thousand-watt smile had been kind of hard to miss. Luckily, I had been much too sick to do anything more than glare at it with equal parts longing and hatred. Extreme nausea will do that to you.
