Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [102]
“It wasn’t a real abortion. I mean, it was real enough. Stockton knew this script doctor who’d been disbarred, or whatever, for writing too many prescriptions for Seconal and Quaaludes and stuff.”
“I know what a script doctor is,” Red said dryly.
“Anyway, he was making his living doing illegal abortions. He did them in his house. Cheap. That was the draw—a bargain abortion. A bedroom outfitted with hospital equipment. He didn’t have a suction thing, just scraped you out. I was conscious as hell but all drugged up. It really hurt. I just couldn’t summon the energy to resist. Then, in the middle of things, he tells me I had a beautiful cervix. What can you do? So, I got an infection anyway and ended up in the hospital. Those doctors said this was bound to happen, and if I ever got pregnant again, I’d probably have trouble carrying full-term. You know, you’re twenty-two, you’re invincible, you think it’s cool to know criminals. Nobody will ever hurt you and all the bad stuff happens to somebody else.”
“That’s youth all right,” Red said, careful not to exhibit his distress.
“I never imagined it would hurt a real living baby. Or you.”
“If anything happens,” Red said, “nobody would ever blame you.”
At the doctor’s, Red told the receptionist that Libby might be having a miscarriage and she was called in right away. He sat in the waiting room trying desperately to stay calm. Next to him, a woman glugged from a large bottle of Evian between whimpers. Red tried to read a celebrity magazine, but the sentences didn’t follow one another in any coherent fashion. After ten minutes or so, a nurse called him into the room, where Libby, now dressed, sat on the examining table while a doctor jotted notes on her chart.
A few dots of blood and cramping, the doctor said, was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to be alarmed about. He was a pleasant, boyish man with blond hair, at least five years younger than Libby. There was no dilation, he said. Nothing wrong with her blood. No sign of miscarriage. Libby was healthy and everything was normal. Even the dark, irrational fears were normal. The doctor nodded encouragement to Libby. So far, there were no signs she might have any trouble carrying to term. And if there was any loss of womb strength from a poorly administered abortion, they’d put something called a cerclage around the cervix to hold it shut, and prescribe bed rest for the duration. But this was the worst that could happen.
On the way home, Libby’s spirits were buoyant, elated. “ ‘Cerclage.’ Such a beautiful word if you don’t think about what it does—lassoes the cervix. Now, Red, did you happen to notice how enormous the doctor’s head is? I pity his wife when they have kids. I’d be terrified my whole pregnancy just thinking about having a baby with a head that big. I’d sign up for a C-section right off the bat. Now you, Red, you have a beautiful head. A dream head.”
DAVID stayed inside Tuesday morning. Día veintiuno. Day twenty-one. He read and talked to his parents and cousins on the phone. Around noon, he moved outside with the dog under the shade of the plum tree in his uncle’s backyard, amid the drunken buzzing of flies and soft conversation of chickens. He shucked sweet corn for his aunt and helped her with dinner. “I can feel people’s prayers,” he said. His uncle had been working with him daily, praying with him, giving him a bitter tea that made his blood race. “You must kill off a part of yourself to satisfy the poison,” Rafael said. “Otherwise, it takes all of you.”
They ate outside on the picnic table, staying until it grew dark and the earth exuded dampness, then moved inside, where David and Rafael did a small ritual, a sweeping, with herbs and a prayer. They smudged the house with rosemary and sage and chanted more prayers. His aunt Gloria lit candles at the kitchen altar, where the votives flickered in red and blue glass and the virgin revealed her flaming heart.
They sat around the kitchen table under the portrait