Looking for Jane (7)
“We’re not girls, Mum, we’re old enough to vote now, remember?”
“Well, where is this party, anyway? You haven’t said.”
“Oh, leave her be, Frances,” Nancy’s grandmama croaks from the rigid-backed chair beside the living room window.
“Well, I worry,” Frances says.
“Yes, but all of motherhood is just chronic low-level fear at the best of times, dear. You know this. And besides, a woman is entitled to a few secrets, after all, now, isn’t she?”
Frances shoots her mother a withering look and storms off into the kitchen. A few seconds later, the smell of Comet cleaner fills the air. Every time she and her daughter have an argument, Frances vents her frustration by donning a set of rubber gloves and scrubbing her kitchen to within an inch of its Formica-topped life.
Tonight’s argument was—once again—triggered by Nancy’s need for independence. The fact that she’s decided to move out of her parents’ home to attend university in the same city has caused Frances to cling to her with even more vehemence than normal, and Nancy doesn’t have the patience for it anymore.
She plants a kiss on her grandmother’s papery cheek. “Thanks, Grandmama. I hope you’re feeling better. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Flipping the oversized hood on her rain jacket, Nancy shuts the door behind her with more force than she intended and ventures out into the rainy night. She knows she did nothing to help avoid tonight’s argument, but she’s been on edge all day in anticipation of her appointment tonight with Clara.
Unlike her mother, Nancy isn’t one to shy away from bending the rules—or, if the occasion calls for it, outright breaking them—but sneaking out to see an illegal abortionist isn’t exactly within her comfort zone.
She agreed to it without really thinking, but her misgivings have increased since she first said yes a week ago. Clara called last Wednesday night and begged Nancy—choking on her words with sobs that became more and more fractured as her panic rose—to come with her as she gets an abortion. She had heard about a man who would do it for eight hundred dollars, she said, and no one ever needs to know.
“Does Anthony know?” Nancy asked her. Clara’s boyfriend Anthony has a temper like napalm; it sticks to anything he throws it at and burns everything in his path.
“No, of course not. He wouldn’t let me. You know that.”
That’s exactly the answer Nancy expected. She sighed and dropped her voice. “Are you sure about this, Clara?”
“Yes!” Clara wailed. “Mom and Dad’ll kill me. This isn’t a choice. There’s no other option, Nancy.”
“But, I mean, is this guy legitimate? You hear horror stories, you know? What if he’s some quack?”
“I don’t think so. The friend of a girl I work with at the diner used this guy, and everything was fine. That’s who told me about him. He’s out in the East End.”
“Is there…” Nancy hated herself a little for asking it. “Is there anyone else who can go with you?” She held her breath for the answer, curling the phone cord around her index finger.
“No,” Clara said. “I need you. I need a girl with me, and you’ve always been the closest thing I have to a sister.” An overstatement. “I can’t do this by myself. Please help me.”
And so Nancy waits underneath the misty glow of a streetlamp outside Ossington Station at nine o’clock on this rainy Friday night in August. She can’t see much through the downpour, but as a small silhouette emerges in the darkness, she suspects—given the hunched shoulders and harried pace—that it’s Clara. Nancy raises a hand and the figure hurries toward her. Her eyes are wide, the grey-blue standing out against her pale face. She throws her wet arms around Nancy’s neck, and Nancy can feel her shaking.
“Try to stay calm, Clara,” Nancy says, pulling away. “It’ll be over soon.”
The girls enter the subway station, drop their tokens into the metal box. They land with a clink, one after the other, on top of the hundreds of other tokens from that day’s commuters. Normally it’s a sound Nancy quite likes. It’s the sound of going places. Of visiting friends or adventurous Saturday afternoon excursions to the St. Lawrence Market. She loves just walking around the city, popping into shops, galleries, or cafés whenever the mood strikes her, discovering new and peculiar oddities and hidden gems within the boundaries of the city she loves so much. But tonight, the sound seems to echo off the walls of the quiet subway station with eerie magnitude.
They hurry down the stairs to the train platform, breathing in the smell of the subway: somehow damp and dusty at the same time, with pungent undercurrents of rotting garbage and urine. Their fellow travelers are all staring down the dark tunnel in impatient anticipation for the distant light of the train and the rush of wind that precedes its arrival. When Nancy and Clara finally board, they take two seats right across from the doors.
She notices Clara is staring resolutely at the empty seat across from her, her face white above the small gold cross hanging around her neck. Nancy’s never known anyone who got an abortion. Or at least, she thinks with a jolt, no one that she knows of. She isn’t entirely sure what to expect, and that makes her nerves tingle. She’s the type of person who’s most comfortable when she has all the information, for better or worse. But tonight it feels like she and Clara are groping blindly with only the vaguest sense of direction.