16.

I kept my laptop screen tilted away from my bedroom door. It was January—a month since my un-abortion—and I jumped every time the radiator in my room clanked, thinking it was Mom coming home from dinner. No, I did not want to become a member of Babylove.com, I just wanted to quickly see what it looked like. I signed in as a guest, and the Web page asked for the conception date. I didn’t know for sure but guessed it must have been sometime in late September, after Will moved up to Columbia, since he’d been away with his family before that. It took me to a page that said my twelve-week-old baby was two inches long and developing reflexes. The page said, “Click here to see what your baby looks like.”

I’d called Dr. Moore’s office the afternoon I got home from the un-abortion in December, afraid they’d call me and Mom would answer. They’d asked me if I wanted to reschedule, and I’d made another appointment for the following Friday. I gave them my cell phone number and asked them to call that, not my house, to remind me. When Friday came, I’d left school early, without saying anything to Vanessa. I’d gotten a 6 train to Moore’s office on the Upper East Side, but as the train flew past Eighth Street, then Fourteenth, I started to feel sick, the collar of my down jacket choking me. I focused on the lawyer advertisements plastered up and down the train, but I felt dizzy, like if I took my eyes off the subway ads, the rest of the world would go black. So I got off at Forty-Second Street and grabbed a shuttle to the West Side. I thought if I could just tell Will how sick and scared I felt, he’d understand and know what to do. I got on a 1 train uptown and when I got to Will’s hall, I spotted him in the lounge, sitting at a card table doing a million-piece puzzle with a red-haired girl. I paused to spy for a moment but didn’t get the sense that there was anything going on with her. As I moved toward them, I realized the puzzle was all white. Every single tiny piece.

“G-Rock!” He looked surprised but happy to see me. “It’s the Beatles’ White Album,” he said, maneuvering me onto his lap. “Melanie and I have committed to finishing it by Sunday. Right, Melanie?”

Melanie nodded and we smiled at each other. The air around her smelled like cigarettes.

“You’re going to help us, right?” he said, nuzzling my neck, sending a delicious chill through me that for a lovely moment overpowered everything else. “We neeeeed you.”

So I ended up staying and doing the puzzle, thinking we’d go off to his room and I would tell him everything, that I hadn’t had the abortion yet and that I didn’t know what to do. But we didn’t go to his room. He seemed so happy that night—so unlike the lovelorn soul he was on the phone with me, complaining about how it was too loud in his dorm and how there were too many people around and how maybe this place wasn’t for him. It sounds lame considering what was going on, but I didn’t want to spoil it. Or maybe I just wanted to escape it too. Someone turned on the TV and then a stereo blared out of a room near the lounge, and someone brought in some beer, and Will smoked pot with a guy in a purple rugby shirt, and we did the puzzle and talked with whoever came through, until it got late and I told him I had to get home, and he walked me downstairs and got me a cab.

I clicked on the tab to see what my baby looked like. Someone had done a line drawing of an enormous head on top of a small tadpole-like body. Big, wide-set black eyes and holes for ears. So, this was my baby, I thought. How had someone drawn it? Had they studied a printout of an ultrasound or was it something else, where the baby wasn’t alive anymore? Not ready, I said to myself. Not yet. I pushed away the thought that I was almost three months pregnant, that the tiny person inside me was now larger than a quarter, and as I heard Mom’s keys in the door, I felt a strange, visceral urge to defy the hopelessness of it all.