Dear Old Dead(12)

“Life is certainly cheap up here,” the ambulance man said.

The doors to the emergency room opened and another ambulance man came out, dressed in whites, in a hurry. The first ambulance man saw him and straightened up.

“We’re out of here,” he said to Robbie. “You want the rest of my open pack? I’ve got a carton in the van.”

“Oh,” Robbie said. “Yes. Thank you.”

The first ambulance man handed Robbie the Winstons and began jogging toward the parked ambulances and his friend. The pack was missing only the two cigarettes Robbie and the ambulance man lit up out here. Robbie put the pack into his jacket pocket and picked up his sign again.

The culture of violence. The Holocaust. The destruction of the American family. People in the pro-life movement talked and talked and talked—and from what Robbie had been able to see, the other side talked and talked and talked, too. And it was all useless, because they were never going to convince each other. They were never even going to listen to each other. For Robbie, it was all much more simple. It had started on the day when he realized that a woman could have an abortion because the child she was carrying was mentally retarded. He didn’t know how she found out that the child she was carrying was mentally retarded. He was never too clear on the details. What he did know was that if the option had been available when his mother was carrying him, he would never have seen the light of day. Isn’t that what she’d told him, over and over and over again, all the time he was growing up. “Stupid retard,” she’d called him.

Robbie left metaphors and strategies and all the rest of it to people who understood those things, which he didn’t. As far as he was concerned, what he was engaged in was an act of self-defense.

The wind was picking up. Robbie zipped his jacket closed and hunched his shoulders against the growing cold, wondering what it was like in there, deep in there, in the places he’d never been. What would happen to him if he went inside? What would they do to him if he got Dr. Michael Pride into a corner and told him the truth about what this center was doing?

Then Robbie remembered. It wasn’t Michael Pride. It was the other one. Van Straadt. Was van Straadt in there? What would happen to the center if van Straadt was no longer around to give it money? What would convince van Straadt?

If Robbie hadn’t hated the center and everything it stood for, he could have used it. The center provided medical services to anyone who showed up at the door, no questions asked. Maybe he could just walk right inside and then walk right—

Where?

And then what?

He didn’t have the ghost of an answer to that. He only knew that the soles of his feet itched.





7


JULIE ENDERSON HAD BEEN in the refuge program for three months now, and in all that time—the only time in her life she could remember not being high for more than a couple of hours at a stretch; the only time in her years she could remember not having a pimp—she had never broken the rules of the center or the program even once. Julie had no real idea why she was being so careful. She knew that no one on the staff here was overly strict or too much of a purist about rules and regulations. Friends of hers had been caught drinking beer in the boiler room and sneaking boys into the utility shed out back and even shoplifting a little. No one had thrown them back onto the street. Julie didn’t want to risk it. She had told everyone here that she was eighteen years old. Sister Augustine suspected she was fourteen. Julie was, in fact, sixteen. The subterfuge was necessary, because Julie had had a very strange and checkered life. She knew much more about some things than the nuns did. Julie’s mother had been a black prostitute. Her father had been a white john. When Julie was eleven years old, her mother’s live-in boyfriend had sold her to a pimp for the drug money he never had enough of. Her mother had noticed only enough to register the fact that there was now a little decent dope in the house. Three weeks later, Julie had found herself out on the street, feeling numb and crazy and weak. It was the middle of February and the wind was blowing up Tenth Avenue, making her legs cold. That was what she remembered forever afterward—what she remembered with perfect clarity once she came to the center and started to dry out—streetwalking made her legs cold. Maybe it was because she was always wearing hot pants or very short skirts.

At the center, Julie wore baggy jeans and T-shirts and big cotton sweaters, even in summer, as if the point of being here was to claim her body for herself. When the temperatures began to fall this night in May, even though they didn’t fall very far, she put on a turtleneck to cover up her throat. Then she got her friend Karida and headed for the bridge that led from the west building to the east one. That was how the center had been built—or, rather, renovated into existence. Dr. Pride hadn’t had the money to put up a big new building. Hospital corporations ran fund-raisers for years and took money for the government to do that. Dr. Pride had had only his own money and some seed money. He’d bought the two tenement buildings on this block when they were abandoned and condemned. Then he had gone to work to make them habitable and suitable for the center he envisioned. What construction work had been done here was minimal. There was the emergency-room complex and the OR. Those were state of the art because they had to be. There was the interlocking security system. That was better than the one the CIA had at Langley. There was this bridge. The bridge was made of steel and stone and lined with windows on either side. The windows were great glass squares tinted smoky gray. Standing here you could look out over the tops of half the buildings in Harlem. Standing here, you could see the world.