Looking for Jane (11)
She looks up at the wall of the exam room. The clock says it’s nearly one in the morning. No wonder her eyes are itching. Nancy watches the hands move as the minutes tick by, knowing she’ll arrive home horrendously past her curfew and will have to face the consequences later.
The ward is quiet. All she can hear is the sound of a few doctors and nurses calling to each other, the occasional collegial laugh, the beeping of machines in the distance. Nancy leans back in the plastic chair and closes her eyes.
Twenty minutes later, a doctor appears at the door, her face grave. She looks about fifty, with a high forehead and greying brown hair pulled back into a low bun.
“Hi, there, Miss…?”
“Nancy. My name’s Nancy.”
“Okay. Nancy. I’m Dr. Gladstone.”
“Um, hi,” Nancy says, standing. “How’s Clara? The other doctor said…” She trails off.
Dr. Gladstone glances over her shoulder, then steps over the threshold of the room and closes the door behind her. Nancy takes a step back, unsure what’s happening.
“We’re pretty sure we know what happened here,” Dr. Gladstone says. “My colleague suspects certain things. Certain illegal things.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nancy says. She doesn’t plan on answering any of this doctor’s questions, either.
“Your friend is lucky to be alive.” Dr. Gladstone pauses, lowers her voice. “Listen to me carefully, Nancy. I don’t actually want you to say anything specific. But if I’m on the right track, I need you to give me some indication that that’s the case so that I can provide the right treatment for your friend. Can you do that for me? There’s no reason for me to call the police. I know my colleague threatened that, but that’s not how I operate. I need you to trust me.”
A long moment stretches out in the tiny space between them, then Nancy nods and scratches her nose.
“Okay, thank you. That’s all I need to know. I’ll record this as a spontaneous abortion. A miscarriage,” she adds in response to Nancy’s blank look. “I’ll have a look at her uterus and make sure all the tissue has been removed so she doesn’t get an infection.”
Nancy lets her breath out slowly. “Thank you,” she says, and means it.
“But I need to tell you something,” Dr. Gladstone says quietly. Nancy leans in to hear her. “If you, or a friend, or any other girl close to you ends up pregnant when they don’t want to be, you need to call around to doctors’ offices and ask for Jane.”
Nancy’s brow knits. “Jane?”
“Jane. Call around, keep asking for Jane, and eventually you’ll get what you need.”
“But I don’t under—”
“Just tell them you’re looking for Jane.”
Dr. Gladstone turns on her heel and opens the door, then heads into the brightness of the emergency room corridor. Her white cloak whips out of sight, leaving Nancy alone in the exam room.
CHAPTER 4 Evelyn
LATE FALL, 1960
Evelyn wakes suddenly as a high-pitched moan floats into the room from the dormitory across the hall.
It’s the early hours of the morning. That time just before dawn when the light is blue-grey and everything is silent, the world is waiting for the curtain to rise, and the night dwellers—the nocturnal animals, criminals, and thieves—are slinking back to the darkness of their dens before the sun breaks on the horizon.
Evelyn was dreaming of her own bed. The bed at her parents’ home, with its knotted pine posts and headboard, comfortable mattress, and goose-down pillows. The soft flannel sheets her mother used during the winter for added warmth. The walls of her bedroom covered in textured wallpaper and the thick pink rug under her feet when she swung them out of her bed in the morning. Not like this place, St. Agnes’s, where the scratchy carpet slippers have no padding in the soles and are too tight for her frozen feet.
Evelyn lies on her side in bed, struggles to pull the thin sheets and blankets over her body to seal out the chill, but no matter how hard she tries, her feet, shoulders, or elbows are still exposed to the cold air of the dormitory she shares with three other girls. All “fallen” women, all young. All waiting in a polite queue, allegedly to be redeemed.
In the bed next to hers, Margaret shifts. Her roommate hasn’t been sleeping lately. Although the house rules forbid it, Evelyn and Margaret have become fast friends over the past few weeks.
She arrived the day after Evelyn, appeared in the doorway as Evelyn unpacked her suitcase into the tiny dresser at the foot of her bed.
“Call me Maggie,” she said, when Evelyn introduced herself. “How long have you been here, Evelyn?”
“Oh, just since last night. Did Sister Teresa do your intake?”
“Yes. These rules are mad. And I suppose this is the prison uniform, is it?” Maggie asked, holding up a drab grey shift dress.
All the “inmates,” as Sister Teresa calls them, were given the same day dresses and nightgowns. The term reflects the grim, punitively militaristic environment the nun has curated within the home. The staff keep the girls busy with cooking and cleaning, shining shoes, and scrubbing the laundry they take in from the neighbourhood to subsidize the home’s upkeep. They have scheduled outdoor time in the back garden only at predetermined hours of the day, and under strict supervision. The home is intended to be a place of anonymity. The girls aren’t allowed to talk about much with each other. No one uses their last name. No one is supposed to talk about how they got pregnant. But the one thing all the girls whisper about, obsess over, is everyone else’s due date. It’s the first thing each new girl gets asked.