At two forty p.m. on January fifteenth she waits, sweating and trembling, outside the door of eighth-period Latin.
It will need to be a home birth, to circumvent hospital records. Mattie is young and strong and shouldn’t be in any danger. The biographer can drive her to the ER if something goes awry. She’ll find a midwife to help them. They will doctor the birth certificate.
The girl will have all summer to recover.
The biographer will handle Mr. and Mrs. Quarles somehow.
Mattie emerges, knotting the blue scarf at her throat. Her cheeks are fuller, but you can’t otherwise tell—scarves and big sweatshirts and winter coats do a fine job of hiding her.
“Quick word?” says the biographer.
Too cold for a walk. They duck into the music room, used for storage ever since the music program was canceled. Posters of tubas and flutes hang over broken chairs, reams of copy paper.
“Are you checking to see if I’m all right?” says Mattie.
“Well, are you?”
“It smells like ham in here.”
The biographer only smells her own watery dread.
“Nothing has changed,” says Mattie, “since you asked me the other day.”
The biographer opens her mouth.
Give it to me.
Air moves lightly on her tongue and teeth. Dries her lips. “Mattie?”
“Yeah, miss?”
“I want to help you.”
“Then don’t tell anyone, okay? Not even Mr. Korsmo. I know you’re pals.”
She prepares to shape the words: Pay for your vitamins. Drive you to every checkup. If you give it to me.
The girl coughs, swallows a curd of phlegm. “By the way, I made an appointment at a—a place in Portland. I need to do it soon because I’m almost twenty-one weeks.”
Twenty-one weeks means nineteen left. Four and a half months.
Only four and a half months, Mattie!
“That far along,” says the biographer, “the procedure could be dangerous.” The glass splinter is choosing these words. “A lot of term houses have no idea what they’re doing. They just want to make money.”
“I don’t care,” says Mattie.
“I’ve heard of—” The biographer’s whole self is a splinter. “Fatal errors.”
“I don’t care! Even if the place is foul and they have other girls’ stuff in the buckets, I don’t care, I want this to be over.” Hands in fists, she starts hitting herself on either side of the head, bam bam bam bam bam bam bam, until the biographer pulls her arms, gently, down.
“I’m just saying”—holding Mattie’s wrists—“you have other choices.”
You can wait four and a half short months.
“Choices?” A new edge in her voice.
“Well, like adoption.”
“Don’t want to do that.” Mattie jerks out of her grasp, turns away.
“Why not?” Give it to me.
“Just don’t.”
“But why?” Give it to me. I’ve been waiting.
“You always tell us”—the girl’s voice flicks up into a whine—“that we make our own roads and we don’t have to justify or explain them to anyone.”
“I do say that,” says the biographer.
Mattie glares.
“However, I’d like to make sure you’ve thought this through.”
The girl slumps down against a green filing cabinet. Holds her head in both hands, knees up to her chest, rocking a little. “I just want it out of my body. I want to stop being infiltrated. God, please get this out of my body. Make this stop.” Rocking, rocking.
She is terrified, realizes the biographer.
“And I don’t want to put someone on the planet,” whispers Mattie, “who I’ll always wonder about my whole life. Like where is the someone? Are they okay?”
“What if you knew who was raising them?” The biographer sees a vast, sunny cliff top, blue sky and blue ocean beyond; and Mattie in a flowered dress, shielding her eyes; and the biographer crouching beside the baby, saying, “There’s your Aunt Mattie!” and the baby toddling toward her.
“I just can’t,” rasps the girl. “I’m sorry.”
Horror thuds in the biographer’s chest: she has made her apologize for something that needs no apology.
Mattie is a kid, light boned and soft cheeked. She can’t even legally drive.
Four and a half months.
Of swelling and aching and burning and straining and worrying and waiting and feeling her body burst its banks. Of hiding from the stares in town, the questions at school. Of seeing the faces, each day, of her parents as they watch the grandchild who won’t be their grandchild be grown. Having to wonder, later on, where is the someone she grew.
The glass splinter says: Who gives a fuck?
Mattie says: “Would you go with me?”
To the checkups and the prenatal yoga.
To the store for dark leafy greens.
To the clean, comfortable birthing bed set up in the biographer’s apartment, when it’s time.
For a dazzling instant she has her baby, who will be tall and dark haired, good at soccer and math. She will take the baby on a rowboat to the lighthouse, on a train to Alaska, practice math problems with the baby on a soccer field. She will love the baby so much.
Except that’s not, of course, what Mattie means.
Down her spine, an itching wire.
If the biographer were to admit her own Torschlusspanik motives, clarify that the baby would be for her, Mattie might end up agreeing. She wants to please—to be pleasing. She wants to make her favorite teacher happy.
The biographer would be asking something of her that she doesn’t believe should be asked of anyone. Deepest convictions, trampled.
Yet here she is, about to tell a sniffly child to give her what she’s growing.
The glass splinter says: This is your last chance.
Plunge.
The biographer says: “Okay.”
Mattie looks up, green eyes red and spilling. “You’ll go with me?”
“I will.” She feels like vomiting.
“I’m sorry to—There’s nobody who—Ash won’t—”
“I get it, Mattie.”
“Thank you,” she says. Then: “Is there more than one girls’ juvenile correctional facility in Oregon, do you know?”
“Are you—” But of course she’s scared. The biographer pats, clumsily, the top of Mattie’s head. “We’ll be all right.”
We will? They could both get arrested. The biographer could become a headline. SHIFTY SCHOOLMARM IS ABORTER’S ACCOMPLICE. She feels a rush of raw love for those who are caught, and for those who know they could be.
The girl stands up, shoulders her satchel, adjusts her scarf. Won’t meet the biographer’s eye. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” And she is out the door.
Seed and soil. Egg and shell.
A plug of bile is bobbing at the foot of her throat.
“The key to happiness is hopelessness,” says the meditation teacher.
Like a shark: keep moving.
The biographer walks up to a poster for the music club (WHY ARE PIRATES SUCH GOOD SINGERS? THEY CAN HIT THE HIGH CS!) and claws it off the wall and rips it in half.