When She Woke. Hillary Jordan
doctors; women who’d bled to death or died of infection, who’d been anesthetized and had their organs stolen. For the first time, Hannah wondered how much of that was true and how much was fiction disseminated by the state as a deterrent.
The windows of number 122 were dark, but the apartment next to it was lit from within. Hannah couldn’t see the occupants, but she could hear them through the open window, a man, a woman and several children. They were having supper. She heard the clink of their glasses, the scrape of their silverware against their plates. The children started to quarrel, their voices rising, and the woman scolded them tiredly. The bickering continued unabated until the man boomed, “That’s enough!” There was a brief silence, and then the conversation resumed. The ordinariness of this domestic scene was what made Hannah cross the lot in the end. This she knew she could never have, not with Aidan.
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