When She Woke

She entered the apartment without knocking and shut the door behind her, leaving it unlocked as she’d been instructed. “Hello?” she whispered. There was no answer. It was pitch black inside and stiflingly hot, but she’d been warned not to open a window or turn on the lights.

“Is anyone there?” No response. Maybe he wasn’t coming, she thought, half hopeful and half despairing. She waited in the airless dark for long, anxious minutes, feeling the sweat gradually soak her blouse. She was turning to leave when the door opened and a large man slipped inside, closing it behind him too quickly for Hannah to get a look at his face. The loud crack of the deadbolt sent a surge of alarm through her. She made a wild movement toward the door and felt a hand grip her arm.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said softly. “I’m Raphael. I’m not going to hurt you.”

It was an old man’s voice, weary and kind, and the sound of it reassured her. He let go of her arm, and she heard him move across the room toward the window. A sliver of light from outside appeared as he opened the curtain and peered out at the parking lot. He stood at the window for quite a while, watching. Finally he shut the curtain and said, “Come this way.”

A beam of light appeared, and she followed it through the living room, down a short hallway and into a bedroom. She hesitated on the threshold.

“Come in,” Raphael said. “It’s all right.” Hannah entered the room and heard him close the door behind her. “Lights on,” he said.

Raphael, she saw then, didn’t look like a Raphael. He was overweight and unimposing, with stooped shoulders and an air of absentminded dishevelment. She guessed him to be in his mid-sixties. His wide, fleshy face was red-cheeked and curiously flat, and his eyes were round and hooded. Tufts of frizzled gray hair poked out from either side of an otherwise bald head. He reminded Hannah of pictures she’d seen of owls.

He held out his hand, and she shook it automatically. Just as if, she thought, they were meeting after church. Wonderful sermon, wasn’t it, Hannah? Oh yes, Raphael, very inspiring.

The room was empty except for two folding chairs, a large table and an ancient-looking box fan, which sputtered to life when Raphael turned it on. Heavy black fabric covered the one window. Hannah stood uncertainly while he opened a duffel bag on the floor, removed a bed sheet from it and spread it on the table. It was patterned incongruously with colorful cartoon dinosaurs. They jogged her back to her ninth birthday, when her parents had taken her to the Creation Museum in Waco. There’d been an exhibit depicting dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden and another showing how Noah had fit them onto the ark along with the giraffes, penguins, cows and so forth. Hannah had asked why the Tyrannosaurus rexes hadn’t eaten the other animals, or Adam and Eve, or Noah and his family.

“Well,” said her mother, “before Adam and Eve were cast out of Paradise, there was no death, and humans and animals were all vegetarians.”

“But Noah lived after the fall,” Hannah pointed out.

Her mother looked at her father. “He was a smart guy,” her father said. “He only took baby dinosaurs on the ark.”

“Duh,” Becca said, giving Hannah’s arm a hard pinch. “Everybody knows that.”

Becca was Hannah’s barometer for her parents’ displeasure; the pinch meant she was on dangerous ground. Still, it didn’t add up, and she hated it when things didn’t add up. “But how come—”

“Stop asking so many questions,” her mother snapped.

Raphael interrupted Hannah’s reverie. “Sorry about the sheets. I get them from the clearance bin, and this was all they had. They’re clean, though. I washed them myself.”

He opened a medicine bag, fished out a pair of rubber gloves and put them on, then began removing medical instruments from the bag and placing them on the table. Hannah looked away from their ominous silver glint, feeling suddenly woozy.

He gestured at one of the chairs. “Why don’t you sit down.”

She’d expected to have to get undressed right away, but when he’d finished his preparations, he drew up the other chair and started asking her questions: How old was she? Had she ever had children? Other abortions? When was her last period? When had her morning sickness started? Had she ever had any serious medical problems? Any sexually transmitted infections? Mortified, Hannah looked down at her hands and mumbled the answers.

“Have you done anything else to try to terminate this pregnancy?” Raphael asked.

She nodded. “I got some pills two weeks ago and, you know, inserted them. But they didn’t work.” She’d paid five hundred dollars for them and followed the instructions she was given carefully, but nothing had happened.

“They must have been counterfeits. About half the stuff out there is. No telling what you’re getting.” Raphael paused. Said, “Look at me, child.”

Hannah met his gaze, expecting judgment and finding, to her surprise, compassion instead. “Are you sure you want to terminate this pregnancy?”

There was that phrase again: not murder your unborn baby or destroy an innocent life, but terminate this pregnancy. How straightforward that made it sound, how unremarkable. Raphael was studying her face. This close to him, she could see the network of tiny broken blood vessels radiating across his cheeks.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

“Would you like me to explain the procedure?”

Part of her wanted to say no, but she’d decided before she came that she would not hide from herself the truth of what she was doing here today. She owed it that much, the small scrap of life that would never be her child. She hadn’t dared research the procedure on the net; the Texas Internet Authority closely monitored searches of certain words and topics, and abortion was at the top of the list. “Yes, please.”

Raphael pulled a small flask from his pocket, unscrewed the lid and took a drink—to steady his hands, he said—and then described what he was about to do. His matter-of-fact tone and the clinical terms he used, “speculum” and “dilators” and “pregnancy tissue,” made it sound tidy and impersonal. Finally he asked Hannah if she had any questions. She had already asked and answered the most important ones in her own mind: whether this was murder (yes), whether she would go to hell for it (yes), whether she had any other choice (no). All but one, and it had tormented her ever since she’d decided to do this. She asked it now, her nails digging into the underside of the chair.

“Will it feel any pain?”

Raphael shook his head. “Based on what you’ve told me, you’re only about twelve weeks pregnant. It’s never been proven when fetal pain reception starts, but I can tell you for a fact that it’s impossible before the twentieth week.” Her shoulders slumped in relief, and Raphael added, “It’ll be painful for you, though. The cramping can be severe.”

“I don’t care about that.” Hannah wanted it to hurt. It seemed unconscionable to her, to take a life and not feel pain.

Raphael stood and had another swig from his flask. “Go ahead and undress now,” he said. “Just from the waist down. Then lie on the table with your head at this end. You can use the extra sheet there to cover yourself.”

He went into the adjoining bathroom, closing the door to give her privacy—this man who was about to peer between her spread legs. Hannah was grateful nonetheless for his discretion. She folded her skirt neatly, laid it on the chair and then tucked her panties beneath it, another gesture of decorum she knew to be ludicrous under the circumstances but couldn’t help making. Being naked from the waist down made her feel dirtier somehow than if she were completely nude. Hurriedly, she got on the table and covered herself. Forced herself to say, “I’m ready.”

THE PUNISHMENT TONE sounded, jerking her back into her cell, back into her bleeding body. It all comes down to blood, she thought, as she took the tampons and the wipes from the compartment and used them. Blood that comes out of you and blood that doesn’t. Mechanically, she cleaned the floor, flushed the stained wipes, washed her hands and changed her tunic, making no attempt to shield her nakedness. And when it doesn’t, when you wait and pray and wait some more and still it doesn’t come … She lay down on her side on the sleeping pallet, wrapped her arms around her knees and wept.

HOW MANY DAYS HAD SHE been here? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? She didn’t know, and her ignorance made her anxious. There were gaps of time she couldn’t account for, moments when she seemed to wake from a sleep she suspected had never occurred. She came out of these spells sweaty and hoarse, with a mouth full of cotton. Had she been talking to herself out loud? Raving? Revealing something she shouldn’t have?

She tried to stave off the spells with reading and pacing, but increasingly she felt too listless for either. Her reflection in the mirror had grown gaunt. She had no appetite, and she’d developed the ability to tune out the punishment tone to the point where it was just a distant, annoying whine, like a mosquito flying past her ear. She’d stopped taking her daily showers and her body smelled of stale sweat, but even this was a matter of indifference to her. Her usual fastidiousness had vanished along with her energy.

When she was lucid, the thing she feared most was that she’d said something to betray Raphael. The police had picked her up in the parking lot after a call from a suspicious neighbor, but Raphael had been long gone by that point, and as far as she knew they’d never caught him. She’d given them a false description, waiting until the third time they interrogated her before pretending to break and describing a slender, blond man in his thirties with an Earth First symbol tattooed on his right wrist. What Hannah didn’t know was that the neighbors had seen a heavyset older man leave the apartment. Once the police caught her lying, they were merciless. They questioned her repeatedly, sometimes harshly, other times with an unctuous concern for her welfare that a first grader could have seen through. She stuck to her story, against her lawyer’s advice and despite her father’s entreaties. She would not betray Raphael, with his earnest handshake and sad eyes.

She could have, though. He’d certainly told her enough about himself for the police to identify him. When he’d finished and was cleaning up, and Hannah was still woozy from the painkillers, she’d asked him why he did it. What she meant but didn’t say was, How can you bear to do it? By that point, Raphael had had more sips from the flask and was in a talkative mood. He told her he’d been an OB/GYN in Salt Lake City when the superclap pandemic broke out (the crude slang term discomfited her; in her world, it was always referred to as “the Great Scourge”), and Utah became the nexus of the conservative backlash (“the Rectification”) that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The decision had been cause for celebration in the Payne household, but Raphael spoke of it with anger, and of the Sanctity of Life laws Utah had passed soon afterward, with outrage. Even more abhorrent to him than the lack of exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health was the abrogation of doctor-patient privilege. Legally, he was bound to notify the police if he found evidence that a patient had had a recent abortion; morally, he felt bound not to. Morality won. When he got caught falsifying the results of pelvic examinations, the state took away his medical license, and he left Salt Lake City for Dallas.

Hannah had been eleven when Texas passed its own version of the SOL laws. Not many doctors had openly protested, but the ones who had were vociferous. She could still remember their impassioned testimony before the legislature and their angry response when the laws, which were almost identical to Utah’s, inevitably won passage. Most of the objectors had left Texas in protest, and their like-minded colleagues in the other forty states that eventually passed similar statutes had followed suit. “Good riddance to them. California and New York can have them,” her mother had said, and Hannah had felt much the same. How could anyone sworn to preserve life condone the taking of it or seek to protect those who’d taken it, especially when the future of the human race was at stake? That was the third year of the scourge, and though no one close to Hannah had caught it, they were all infected by the fear and desperation that gripped the world as increasing numbers of women became sterile and birthrates plummeted. The prejudicial nature of the disease—men were carriers, but they had few if any symptoms or complications—hindered efforts to detect and contain it. In the fourth year of the pandemic, Hannah, along with every other American between the ages of twelve and sixty-five, went in for the first of many mandatory biannual screenings, and by the time the cure was found in the seventh year, there’d been talk of quarantining and compulsory harvesting of the eggs of healthy young women, measures that Congress almost certainly would have passed had the superbiotics come any later. As distressing as the prospect had been, Hannah was well aware that if she lived in a country like China or India, she would have already been forcibly inseminated. Humanity’s survival demanded sacrifices of everyone, moral as well as physical. Not even her parents had objected when the president suspended melachroming for misdemeanor offenses and pardoned all Yellows under the age of forty, ordering that their chroming be reversed and their birth control implants removed. And when he’d authorized the death penalty for kidnapping a child, Hannah’s parents had supported the decision, though it went against their faith. Child-snatching had become so endemic that wealthy and even middle-class families with young children traveled with bodyguards. Hannah and Becca were too old to be targets, but their mother still glared at any woman whose eyes rested on them too hungrily or for too long. “Remember this, girls,” she’d say when they encountered one of the childless women who loitered like forlorn ghosts around playgrounds and parks, in toy stores and museums. “This is what comes of sex outside of marriage.”

And this, Hannah thought now, studying her red reflection in the mirror. She’d been so certain of everything in those days: that she’d never have premarital sex, never be one of those sad women, never, ever have an abortion. She, Hannah, was incapable of such terrible wrongdoing.

It still surprised her that Raphael hadn’t seen it as such. In his mind, it was the SOL laws that were wrong, and those who espoused them who were guilty of a crime. His deepest contempt was reserved for other doctors: not just those who’d supported and enforced the laws, but also those who’d remained mute out of fear. When Hannah asked him why he’d stayed in Texas instead of going to one of the pro-Roe states, he shook his head and took a swig from the flask. “I suppose I should have, but I was young and hotheaded, saw myself as a revolutionary. I let them talk me into staying here.”

“Who?”

Raphael froze momentarily and then turned away from her, visibly agitated. “Her, I mean, my wife—that’s what I meant to say. She’s from here. She wanted to be near her sister, they’re very close.” He fumbled to close his bag, and Hannah didn’t need to see the bare fourth finger of his left hand to know he was lying.

She felt a dull cramping sensation in her abdomen and clutched it involuntarily.

“You can expect quite a bit of cramping and bleeding for the next several days,” Raphael said. “Take Tylenol for the pain, not ibuprofen or aspirin. And stay off your feet as much as you can.”

He went to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. “The money. Did you bring it?”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry.” Hannah looked in her purse, took out the cash card she’d bought that morning and handed it to him. He thrust it into his pocket without even checking the amount.

“Lights off,” he said. The room went black. Hannah heard him open the door and exhale loudly, with what sounded like relief. “Wait ten minutes, then you can leave.”

“Raphael?”

“What?” he said, impatient now.

“Is that how you think of yourself? As a healer?”

He didn’t answer right away, and Hannah wondered if she’d offended him. “Yes, most of the time,” he said finally. She heard his footsteps crossing the apartment, the bolt being turned, the front door closing behind him.

“Thank you,” she said, into the empty dark.

THE CELL WENT suddenly dark, disorienting her. Had the tones sounded? She hadn’t heard them. She groped her way to the platform and lay down on her back, lost in memory. Raphael had been so gentle with her, so compassionate. So different from the police doctor who’d examined her the night of her arrest. A woman only a little older than Hannah, with cold hands and colder eyes, who’d probed her body with brutal efficiency while she lay splayed open with her ankles cuffed to the stirrups. When she winced, the woman said, “Move again, and I’ll call the guard to hold you down.” Hannah went rigid. The guard was young and male, and he’d muttered something to her as the policeman led her past him into the examination room. She’d heard the word cunt; the rest was mercifully unintelligible. She clenched her teeth and lay unmoving for the rest of the exam, though the pain was fierce.

Pain. Something sharp jabbed her in the arm, and she cried out and opened her eyes. Two glowing white shapes hovered above her. Angels, she thought dreamily. Raphael and one other, maybe Michael. They spun around her, slowly at first and then faster, blurring together. Their immense white wings buffeted her up into heaven.

WHEN THE LIGHTS CAME ON, Hannah’s lids opened with reluctance. She felt thick-headed, like her skull was stuffed with wadding. She pushed herself to a sitting position and noticed a slight soreness in her left wrist. There was a puncture mark on the underside, surrounded by a small purple circle. She studied herself in the mirror, seeing other subtle changes. Her face was a little fuller, the cheekbones less pronounced. She’d put on weight, maybe a couple of pounds, and although she was still groggy, her lethargy was gone. She dug through her memories, unearthed the two white figures she’d seen. They must have sedated her and fed her intravenously.

Something about the cell felt different too, but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Everything looked exactly the same. And then she heard it: a high-pitched, droning buzz coming from behind her. She turned and spied a fly crawling up one of the mirrored walls. For the first time in twenty-some-odd days, she wasn’t alone. She waved her arm and the fly buzzed off, zipping around the room. When it settled she waved her arm at it again, for the sheer pleasure of seeing it move.

Hannah paced the cell, feeling restless. How long had she been unconscious? And how much longer before they released her? She hadn’t allowed herself to think beyond these thirty days. The future was a yawning blank, unimaginable. All she knew was that the mirrored wall would soon slide open, and she’d walk out of this cell and follow the waiting guard to a processing area where she’d be given her clothes and allowed to change. They’d take her picture and issue her a new National Identification Card sporting her new red likeness, transfer the princely sum of three hundred dollars to her bank account and go over the terms of her sentence, most of which she already knew: no leaving the state of Texas; no going anywhere without her NIC on her person; no purchasing of firearms; renewal shots every four months at a federal Chrome center. Then they’d escort her to the gate she came in by and open it to the outside world.

The prospect of crossing that threshold filled her with both longing and trepidation. She’d be free—but to go where and do what? She couldn’t go home, that much was certain; her mother would never allow it. Would her father be there to pick her up? Where would she live? How would she survive the next week? The next sixteen years?

A plan, she thought, forcing down her growing panic, I need a plan. The most urgent question was where she’d live. It was notoriously difficult for Chromes to find housing outside the ghettos where they clustered. Dallas had three Chromevilles that Hannah knew of, one in West Dallas, one in South Dallas and a third, known as Chromewood, in what used to be the Lakewood area. The first two had already been ghettos when they were chromatized, but Lakewood had once been a respectable middle-class neighborhood. Like its counterparts in Houston, Chicago, New York and other cities, its transformation had begun with just a handful of Chromes who’d happened to own houses or apartments in the same immediate area. When their law-abiding neighbors tried to force them out, they banded together and resisted, holding out long enough that the neighbors decided to leave instead, first in ones and twos and then in droves as property values went into a free fall. Hannah’s aunt Jo and uncle Doug had been among those who’d held out too long, and they’d ended up selling to a Chrome for a third of what the house had been worth. Uncle Doug had died of a heart attack soon afterward. Aunt Jo always said the Chromes had killed him.

Hannah quailed at the thought of living in such a place, surrounded by drug dealers, thieves and rapists. But where else could she go? Becca’s house was out too. Her husband, Cole, had forbidden her to see or speak to Hannah ever again (though Becca had violated this prohibition several times already, when she’d visited Hannah in jail).

As always, the thought of her brother-in-law made Hannah’s mood darken. Cole Crenshaw was a swaggering bull of a man with an aw-shucks grin that turned flat and mean when he didn’t get his way. He was a mortgage broker, originally from El Paso, partial to Western wear. Becca had met him at church two years ago, a few months before their father was injured. Their parents had approved of him—Becca wouldn’t have continued seeing him if they hadn’t—but Hannah had had misgivings from early on.

They surfaced the first time he came to supper. Hannah had met Cole on several occasions but had never spoken with him at length and was eager to get to know him better. Though he and Becca had only been dating about six weeks, she was already more infatuated than Hannah had ever seen her.

He was charming enough at first and full of compliments: for Becca’s dress, Hannah’s needlework, their mother’s spinach dip, their father’s good fortune in having three such lovely ladies to look after him. They were having hors d’oeuvres in the den. The vid was on in the background, and when breaking news footage of a shooting at a local community college came on, they turned up the volume to watch. The gunman, who’d been a student there, had shot his professor and eight of his classmates one at a time, posing questions to them about the Book of Mormon and executing the ones who answered incorrectly with a single shot to the head. When he’d finished quizzing every member of the class, he’d walked out of the building with his hands up and surrendered to the police. The expression on his face as they shoved him into the back of a squad car was eerily peaceful.

“Those poor people,” Hannah’s mother said. “What a way to die.”

Cole shook his head in disgust. “Nine innocent people murdered, and that animal gets to live.”

“Well,” Hannah’s father said, “he won’t have much of a life in a federal prison.”

“However much he has is too much, as far as I’m concerned,” said Cole. “I’ll never understand why we got rid of the death penalty.”

Becca’s eyes widened, reflecting Hannah’s own dismay, and their parents exchanged a troubled glance. The Paynes were against capital punishment, as was Reverend Dale, but the issue was a divisive one within both the church and the Trinity Party. Soon after he’d been made senior pastor at Ignited Word, Reverend Dale had come out in support of the Trinitarian congressional caucus that cast the deciding votes to abolish the death penalty over the vehement objections of their fellow evangelicals. Hundreds of people had quit the church over it, and Hannah’s best friend’s parents had forbidden their daughter to associate with her anymore. The controversy had died down eventually, but Hannah’s friend had never spoken to her again, and eight years later, the subject was still a sensitive one for many people.