“How?”

Again, all the arguments against abortion in which Janine had been tutored floated to the tip of her tongue, but instead, she looked at Joy and spoke from the heart. “You might not have given birth to the next Einstein or Picasso or Gandhi,” she said. “But I bet whoever he was, he would have been amazing.”

Tears welled in Joy’s eyes. “Don’t you think I know that?”

“Then … there must have been another way. There’s always another way.”

Joy shook her head. “Do you think I wanted this? Do you think anyone wakes up and says, I think I’ll go get an abortion this morning? This is the last stop. This is the place you go when you run through all the scenarios and you realize that the only people who say there’s another way are the ones who aren’t standing there with a positive pregnancy test in their hand. I did it. I don’t regret it. But that doesn’t mean I won’t think about it every day of my life.”

Janine struggled to sit up, her head pounding. “Doesn’t that sort of prove, on some level, that it’s questionable?”

“It’s completely legal.”

“So was slavery,” Janine replied. “Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Their whispers were getting louder. Janine worried that they’d attract the shooter’s attention. She wondered if she would die here, today, a martyr for her cause.

“All that legal protection you want for the unborn,” Joy said. “Great. Give it to them. But only if you can find a way to not take it away from me.”

It made Janine think of King Solomon, suggesting that a baby be split down the middle. Obviously that wasn’t a solution. “If you carried the baby to term, yes, maybe you’d have some problems to solve, but it wouldn’t threaten your existence. There are plenty of women who can’t have children, who would do anything to adopt.”

“Really?” Joy said. “Then where the fuck were they when I was in foster care?”

—

WHEN JOY WAS EIGHT YEARS old, her prized possession had been a Walkman cassette player she had bought at a church yard sale for two dollars, with a cassette still inside: Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill. Joy didn’t particularly like Steely Dan, but beggars could not be choosers. Every night she fell asleep to “Reelin’ in the Years,” because it blocked out the other sounds in her house.

There had been crying. Shouting. Joy would turn up the volume of her Walkman and pretend she was somewhere else. Then, in the morning, her mother would wake her up, sporting a bracelet of bruises on her arm, blisters on her palm. I’m so clumsy, she would say. Fell right off the step stool. Put my hand down on the stove when it was still hot.

Joy had never known her daddy, but there had been a parade of men in the apartment since she was small. Some stayed for a week, some for years. Some were better than others. Rowan had brought her coloring books and stickers. Leon had a dog, an old coonhound named Foxy, that she used to feed scraps to underneath the table. But Ed had liked to watch Joy when she slept, and more than once she woke in the night to find him sitting on her bed, stroking her hair. And Graves, the man who was with her mama now, was mean as a trapped cat.

One night Joy heard the voices escalating and turned up her Walkman volume only to have it garble and fade and then quit entirely. She opened the little battery pack and saw one of the two double As frothing at the tip. Setting aside the cassette player, she realized the house had gone silent, which was somehow even worse.

Joy slipped out of bed. She crept into the kitchen.

The reason her mama wasn’t screaming was that Graves had his hands wrapped around her throat. Her face was flushed, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Joy grabbed a knife out of the kitchen drawer and plunged it into his back.

With a cry Graves whirled around, grabbing for the hilt of the blade, reaching for Joy. She danced away from him, backing out of the kitchen even as her mama collapsed.

Later, Joy would not remember running out of her apartment and banging on the other doors in the hallway. She did not recall Miz Darla open the door wearing her head scarf and housecoat; how she washed Joy’s hands and face with lukewarm water. When the police came to take her away, Joy noticed the small bloody handprints marking every door on the fourth floor.

She was taken to a foster home, a couple called the Grays, who looked like they sounded: thin and bled colorless by the four kids they housed. Her mother was allowed to visit her once a week. She showed up only once, and Joy begged to be taken back. Her mother said this wasn’t such a good time, and that’s how Joy realized that Graves was still living in their apartment.

Her mother never returned.

Joy went to three other foster homes just that first year. The Grays’ biological daughter bullied her, and when she finally decked the girl, she was placed somewhere else. She loved her second home, but the couple moved out of state because of the father’s job. At the third home, one of the other foster kids—a thirteen-year-old named Devon—made her touch him places she didn’t want to, and threatened to say she was stealing from the foster family if she didn’t.

By age ten, Joy was a husk of the girl she had been. When she cut her wrists at age eleven, it wasn’t because she wanted to kill herself. It was because she wanted to feel something, even if that was only pain.

Staring at Janine all these years later, Joy sure as hell felt. She felt volcanic anger—for having been born to a parent who couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of her. For being judged by a stranger who acted holier than thou. How dare she think Joy was selfish, when in fact, she was being selfless—knowing she didn’t have the resources to raise a child, giving up the one person who might love her unconditionally?

“I was in foster care for ten years,” Joy said. “Trust me. There are not people lining up to adopt the children other parents don’t want.”

“If you didn’t want to get pregnant then why did you …” Janine’s voice trailed off.

“Have sex?” Joy filled in.

Because I was lonely.

Because I wanted to.

Because I wanted fifteen minutes where I was the center of someone’s world.

But Joe, bless his heart, had neglected to mention that he was already married.

The fourth week he came through Jackson, Joe told her that he and his wife had been having problems for a while, and that she had finally accused him of having an affair. For one beautiful, breathless moment Joy had imagined the rest of her life—one in which Joe admitted that he was in love with Joy, chose to be with her, lived happily ever after. But he had come to say goodbye.

It was good, Joe said. To get everything out in the open.

He had looked at her with his beautiful eyes, which no longer reminded Joy of seas she might travel, but of pale glaciers, an ocean of ice.

I should have told you. I would have if … His voice trailed off.

If what? Joy thought. What condition had to exist for her to be loved?

We’re going to Belize. Some place Mariah found that’s off the grid, so that we have nothing to do but talk. I’m taking a two-week leave of absence from the bench.

Mariah, Joy thought. That’s her name.

She thanked God for her prescription for Ortho-Novum.

A few weeks later she discovered she was one of the 9 percent of women who still got pregnant while using the Pill.

She had not let herself think about Joe. Telling him about the pregnancy might have been morally right, but to what end? He had made it clear that it was over.

But now, she gave herself a hiccup of space to imagine where he was at this moment, and what he was doing. She wondered if he had heard the news about a shooter at an abortion clinic. She wondered if she would be a casualty, if when the victims’ names were read by a reporter, he would grieve.

“You want to know why I had sex?” Joy repeated. “Because I made a mistake.”

“Babies are born flawless. They deserve the world.” To Joy’s surprise, Janine started to cry. She reached for Joy’s hands. “Babies are born flawless,” she repeated, “and they deserve the world. I’m not talking about … what you did today. I’m talking about you. I’m sorry that you got stuck in foster care. I’m sorry you didn’t feel safe. Just because you didn’t get that protection doesn’t mean you were born any less than perfect.”

Joy had not cried the night she stabbed a man.

She had not cried when she was taken away to a foster home.

She had not cried when she was told her mother had died of a broken neck after an “accidental” fall.

She had not cried when she was sexually abused or when she woke up in the pediatric psych ward, her wrists wrapped with bandages.

She had not cried when she found out she was pregnant.

She had not cried during this morning’s procedure. Or afterward.

But now, Joy sobbed.

—