After a moment's thought, Mary Lou had locked her office door and sat on the floor behind her desk with the Atlanta phone book. Routinely, the church organized protests where they all piled into the church van and, barring unexpected rain, picketed in front of different abortionaries in Atlanta. They carried signs that said, 'MURDERERS!' and 'STOP KILLING BABIES!'. The doctors who worked at the clinics were so ashamed they could not look at the church members. They kept their heads down, their ears covered as the chanting began. 'Save the babies! Kill the doctors!'
Mary Lou had called these places first. When they had all explained to her the same thing that the doctor had earlier said, she had moved on to the yellow pages, trying all the gynaecologists whose names looked like they might be open to helping her out. She had started with the Jewish doctors, followed by a couple of Polish-sounding ones, then a Hispanic doctor's office where the woman answering the phone barely spoke English, yet managed to convey to Mary Lou that not only was what Mary Lou was asking illegal, it was against God's law.
Those names exhausted, Mary Lou had called the obvious places, the clinics with the word 'women' in their names, then the 'feminist' centres. She had searched the Internet and found numbers for places relatively close by in Tennessee and Alabama, but all of them, down to the last, had told her in no uncertain terms that such a procedure could not be performed. One woman who sounded sympathetic had told her that there were a handful of states that did allow abortions this late in the term, but there had to be clear evidence that the mother's life was in danger.
Mary Lou had considered the phrase, finally coming to the conclusion that her life
was
in danger. She could not continue working at the church as an unwed mother. There was barely enough money to feed William and herself, let alone a child. What's more, babies were always sick, always needing medicine and office visits and God; the thought of it made her feel as if she had swallowed glass. The church was exempt from the law that would have required them to give her health insurance and the private plan she had looked into years ago was six hundred dollars a month. After paying the mortgage and car insurance so she could drive to work, Mary Lou barely had six hundred dollars left over from her pay cheque. The visit to the doctor across town had meant peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for two weeks.
The last phone call she had made to a clinic nearly sent her over the edge. The woman on the other end of the line had actually preached to her, said there were good Christian organizations that would help her through this difficult time. Mary Lou had bitten her tongue to keep from screaming that she was part of that Christian organization, and she would be out on the street if they found out.
Instead, she had slammed down the phone, furious. She was not a crack addict, for God's sake. She was not like those women who used abortion for birth control. She wasn't some career minded whore who did not have time for a child. She loved children. She volunteered at the church nursery the last Sunday of every month. She was a
mother.
Tears sprang into her eyes, and she found herself putting her wrist to her mouth, sucking it as she had done as a child. The charms on the bracelet chattered against her teeth, and the metallic taste burned her throat. She worked each charm into her mouth, sucking it as if to draw some sort of power. She had always seen the thing as evil, a nasty reminder of her sin, but now she found herself counting off the charms – the locket, the ballet slippers, the lighthouse, the cross – like a rosary.
Mary Lou had been teasing the cross with the tip of her tongue when it had occurred to her that of course these places would refuse to say anything incriminating over the phone. She could be anyone, after all. A state regulator, a detective, a pro-life activist trying to trap them into saying something while the phone call was secretly being recorded. Mary Lou would have to go in and meet them face-to-face. She had no doubt that they would help her then. They would see she was not someone out to trick them, but someone who genuinely needed their help.
Stephen had seemed surprised when Mary Lou had asked for a day off. She was given a certain number of sick days every quarter, but at that point in time she had taken no more than a handful of them over the course of her ten years at the church. Still, he had given her a look that said, 'Don't make a habit of this.'
She could have said something about the affair then, something that would have given her the upper hand, but they both knew she would not do it. The church was all that she had left. It was literally her life. She worked here and worshipped here and what few remaining friendships she had were through the church. Mary Lou spent more hours in this place than she did in her own home. If the affair got out, it would not be Stephen they blamed. They would all point the finger at her. Even when Brian had left her, cheating on her in such an obvious way that his own mother had called him worthless, people had still blamed Mary Lou. What had she done to make her husband stray? Was she not a good wife? Surely the fault could not lie with Brian. He was a good man who always provided well for his family, right up until the day he left them.
Much the same logic would come to the defence of Stephen. Not only was he a married man with two adorable children, neither of them insisting they be called Pud, he was a man of God, a learned man. Stephen Riddle had attended Seminary in Atlanta. He had a doctorate in biblical studies. He was not the type to be hurt by this kind of exposure. Knowing the congregation, Mary Lou suspected they would love him even more for having been through such a trial while still remaining loyal to his family. She could even imagine the sermon he would get out of it. 'God tested me, and I failed,' he would say, spreading the blame even as he waited for his sins to be washed away.
Regret bit into her every time she thought about the way Stephen had treated her as she stood in his office, asking for what was rightly hers. The groundwork giving him all the power had been laid that very moment, and unsurprisingly he had been a much more skilful engineer. When he had challenged her with a curt, 'Is that all?' Mary Lou had been unable to do anything but nod. He had then looked down at his desk, at his open bible, dismissing her with the top of his head.
The clinic in Atlanta was tucked out of the way, but Mary Lou had known how to find it. She had driven there several times, actually, with anywhere from twenty to fifty people, most of them women, holding small coolers or sandwiches or thermoses of coffee, as if they were going on a field trip instead of going to prevent what amounted to murder.
It was murder, after all. There was no way around that. Mary Lou had avoided this basic truth as she drove to Atlanta, a considerable distance. As it had so many times the last few months, her mind had wandered back to her childhood. She had imagined herself sitting in the basement of her Uncle BuelPs house, listening to the gospel. How simple things had seemed back then, how black and white everything had been. There was nothing that hard work and prayer could not eventually overcome. There was nothing the spirit could not embrace. God never gave you more than you could bear, and even if you broke from the stress, he would build you back and make you stronger. That was his blessing. That was his gift.
Having never been inside the abortion clinic, Mary Lou had been shocked to find how welcoming everyone was. From the outside, the building had seemed gloomy and forbidding, like the death chamber it was. The bars on the windows and the guard at the door certainly lent to this air, as if the women passing through the heavy wooden door were prisoners on death row. Inside, there were cheerful posters of children and animals covering the brightly painted walls. Most surprisingly, there were pamphlets on fertility treatments, adoption and post-natal care. She had never realized that the clinic was also a gynaecological office, where women got routine pap smears and received counselling. Most shocking of all, there were pictures of children on a crowded bulletin board by the door, living children delivered by doctors who worked at the clinic.
Looking at the pictures of children, with sudden clarity, Mary Lou had realized she could not go through with this. Her stomach had pitched, but not with morning sickness. Instead, what she had felt was fear so intense that her bowels seized as if they had been clamped into a vice.
When the nurse called for 'Mrs Riddle', Mary Lou had bolted out the door, gasping for air as she had walked across the street to her car. Still mindful that she was in Atlanta, Mary Lou had kept her keys in her fist, the sharpest one pointed out in case she was attacked. She was not attacked, but there was a man leaning against her car when she had got to it.
He had said, 'Good morning, sister,' looking her up and down the way a farmer might appraise a cow he was thinking of buying. He was filthy-looking, obviously homeless. His arms were crossed over his chest the way her father's used to be when Mary Lou had done something to displease him.
'Please move,' she had said, though there was no threat in her voice. She was exhausted, emotionally spent and incapable of articulating anything but defeat.
'You come from that place,' he had said, indicating the clinic. 'I seen you leaving.'
'No,' she had lied, trying to breathe through her mouth as the wind shifted and she smelled him. 'Please move aside or I'll be forced to call the police.'
He had given her that look again, the same look she had been getting all of her life: you're worthless. You won't stand up to me because you know you deserve this. William looked at her this way and Brian before him and now Stephen Riddle. She was suddenly fed up, and decided then and there that she would not take it from a seedy stranger. Anger had welled up inside her, and without thinking, Mary Lou had lunged at the homeless man, scratching wildly with the key, a startlingly primal yell coming from her mouth as she gouged his face, his neck, his hands as he held them up in an attempt to protect himself.
The attack was still fresh in her mind as she had driven home to Elawa. She had actually drawn blood. Mary Lou had jumped on the disgusting homeless man with more vengeance than she had ever known, anger washing over her like a flood, eroding her better judgement, leaving nothing in its wake but a loose silt of hatred that would not come clean. Part of her had wanted to kill the man. Most surprisingly, part of her had been
capable
of killing him. Mary Lou had never even thought it possible for her to have the strength to defend herself, let alone to be the kind of person someone should have to defend themselves against.
When she had looked into the rear-view mirror, she had been surprised to see blood on her cheek. This wasn't from the homeless man, she knew. The blood was her own. Mary Lou had scratched herself with the charm bracelet as she drew back the key and aimed for his eyes. Had he not turned away his head in that split second, she would have blinded him. Had he not managed to crawl under the closest car when she had raised her foot to kick him, Mary Lou had no doubt that she would have strangled him with her own hands.
How had that happened, she wondered. What had gotten into her? The poor man had probably wanted nothing more than money, a few dollars for a cup of coffee or whatever rotgut had made him homeless in the first place. What had turned inside her that made Mary Lou Dixon capable of murder?
She had put her wrist to her mouth as she drove, her mind reeling with possibilities. She could taste her blood on the charms, and she had suckled them like a child. There was something bad inside of her, something that was turning her into a monster. She had nearly slammed into an eighteen-wheeler in the next lane when she had realized what it was. Mary Lou had dropped her hand, shifting the gears and pulling on to the shoulder of the highway to a cacophony of car horns.
The bad thing inside of her was Stephen's child. The child was her sin, working against her, trying to break her. The solution was simple: the only way to rid herself of her sin was to dispel the child.
Prayer had come to her like salvation. Around the time William was born, she had lost her connection to God. Being a mother had become the focus of her life and she had found herself bowing her head only during the difficult times. Chest rattling coughs from William's room in the middle of the night. High fevers that would not go away. Inexplicable scrapes and bruises. Meningitis at the neighbouring playschool.
When Stephen called for silence in the chapel, Mary Lou merely went through the motions, bowing her head and waiting, the possibility of actually convening with God far from her mind as she glanced at her watch, took note of who was wearing what and sitting with whom. Working for the church as she did made everything more about the business than the church, so that when she was sitting in church, all she could think was that the upholstery on the deacon's chairs needed mending, or that Randall needed to be reminded to dust the baseboard around the stage.
After her sexual encounters with Stephen, even the thought of prayer had seemed blasphemous. Buell had set it in her mind early on that the preacher was the conduit through which God could be reached. Mary Lou could not see Stephen as a conduit. As a matter of fact, whenever she imagined him, all she could see was the time he was behind her, moaning in pleasure, and she had opened her eyes to see what all the excitement was about, only to glimpse her breasts hanging down like the udders of a cow that had not been milked in some time.
Sitting in her car on the highway outside Atlanta, Mary Lou had felt lifted up by the possibility of salvation. She had kept the bracelet in her mouth, nestling the tiny cross on her tongue, praying to God to release her from her sins. As the car shook from passing traffic, she had squeezed her eyes tightly shut and begged Him to break her no more. It had to be possible that God would forgive her without completely ripping her in two. She had prayed for His understanding of her situation and when prayer failed, she had prayed for the strength to do what she knew she had to do.