always considered you a friend, Stephanie,” David said.
“Likewise, David.” But I didn’t. I had only seen him at the occasional barbecue, party, movie. Dinner out, dinner in, hike, rock concert, camping trip, vacation, funeral, softball game. But I was Mona’s friend.
Now he touched my hand. “There’s nothing I can’t handle, Stephanie.”
I smiled.
Whenever you spend time with a friend’s boyfriend, you grant him a sexiness that he might not deserve, just because your friend finds him somehow desirable. I considered David objectively for the first time. His butt had that expansive thing going on. It wasn’t big yet, but just give it a few more years in front of the television. His face was ruddy and childish, but something about his nose suggested that he could have been an artist, that he had a natural, neglected talent for something.
“Who’s she fucking?” he asked, which woke me up. I started laughing.
“You’re cruel,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” I straightened my face. “What makes you think something crazy like that?”
“She won’t sleep with me. She’s had these mysterious disappearances. Overnight. I called and called, and then I went over to her place. She’s distant. She’s uninterested.”
“Maybe she’s just … uninterested.”
“I wouldn’t mind that so much. I just don’t want to be made an idiot.”
I felt sorry for him. I scanned his face, handsome in anger. I was sort of afraid for Mona if he ever found out about the abortion. I realized that I probably knew every single Democrat in Colorado Springs, and David wasn’t one of them.
“Why don’t you try being supportive of her,” I suggested.
“What?” He leaned forward and looked hard at my face.
“Suh. Por. Tive.”
“What?” His expression got gentle. “You have something in your teeth.”
Horrified, I immediately lodged my fingers in my mouth. “Where?”
“Here.” He brushed my hands away and delicately stroked one of my front teeth. I felt the pressure and not the touch. I started to blush.
“There, it’s gone,” he said. He looked at me again, considering. I tilted my head. I wasn’t taken in. But I understood the appeal.
He ruined it by suddenly demanding, “How about a little compassion for me?”
“There is no such thing as compassion,” I said. He rolled his eyes, but I’m telling you. Nobody has it easy. Nobody gets anything they don’t make themselves.
I VISITED Mona at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. She opened the door, still in pajamas. She said, “I’m watching a Natalie Wood movie. Wanna?”
The movie was about a pregnant woman who didn’t want to get married. Steve McQueen was the irritated father-to-be. She made him drinks and got mad at him, and he played the banjo in the street to make it all better. I didn’t really get it. I kept thinking about Natalie Wood falling into the water and never coming up.
When the credits started rolling I asked, “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know. I got rid of the fetus because I wanted a life. But now I’m just moping around wondering if I made a mistake. And I’ve started thinking about God.”
“God?”
“Yeah, and Hell. Like, what if it’s all true? Let’s take a cosmic leap into the possible. What if abortions really do send you to Hell? Then does motherhood make you a saint? Are men just pawns in this game of the afterlife, and women call all the shots?”
“No,” I told her, “men murder, rape, declare war. It seems that they have some stake in eternal damnation.”
“But abortions seem worse somehow. Because we’re impatient. We don’t wait to see what happens.”
“What would have happened, Mona?”
She shrugged. “I would have been a pissed-off mother who resented her kid. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like, you’re perfect or nearly so in the beginning and little by little your life becomes one long catalogue of mistakes.”
“Like bowling,” I said.
“So was it fair of me to deprive this fetus of its one shot at perfection?”
“Maybe you did the right thing by sparing it the rest. All those inevitable failures that make us human beings.”
“Maybe I should have let all that transpire. Who am I to say, Stephanie? Instead, I killed it. Those possibilities,” she amended when she saw my look.
“What about your own possibilities? Did you really want to trade your life for your baby’s? Isn’t that another kind of murder? Is that what you want?”
“No,” Mona said. “But looking at it now, wouldn’t it have been a relief? An awful relief?”
I LEFT town to camp alone at the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. As I drove south past Pueblo, the land flattened and rose like acres of brown bread. The high desert. Everything smelled of pinion sap and the things that flow in the desert but nowhere else.
I stopped to look at a roadside memorial. They were scattered all over the roads of southern Colorado, at every sharp corner where someone had perished in a car. This memorial was for an entire dead family—parents and kids. Someone had set up a life-sized nativity scene with gigantic crosses, candles, and silk roses. Strewn about were bandannas, key chains, rosaries, earrings. Plastic flowers in a yogurt container, a Christmas wreath, a macaroni necklace, a wooden cross dangling inside a spaghetti jar, a squash, a stuffed rabbit, a pack of Luckies, a photograph of the mountains, and a scrunchie. For the dead little girl.
I got to the campgrounds after dark. I set up my tent and lay down, but I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept wondering if someone would invade my tent with a knife, and imagining what I would do then. I listened to the rustling sounds of other campers, shushing their children or having muffled sex. Finally, I crawled out of my tent, grabbed a bottle of water and headed toward the dunes in the moonlight.
I took off my sandals to wade through the stream that separated the scrub from the sand, and then started hiking the dunes barefoot. At first it felt like I was just pushing sand around with my feet, but then I started moving in the shadows.
I climbed until there was nothing in any direction but hulking masses of sand. I sat on the ridge of a dune, hugged my knees and tried to decipher the shapes. I thought I saw my mother’s nose. I saw the shape of a dog I knew when I was small. I stayed there all night, listening to the wind smooth out the surfaces, breathing the smell of sand without ocean, without reason.
In the morning, I opened my eyes to the sun already midway up the sky. I sat up on the dune and brushed sand out of my hair. Everything had changed color now that it was light. Blue sky, yellow sand, and me between the two. I realized that I hadn’t been missed. Nobody had noticed me, alone on the dunes or anywhere else. Nobody was going to hurt me; nobody was going to do anything at all to me. I thought about the word nobody as I started back toward camp. It was getting hot already. The sand shifted through my sandals. It felt like the tips of matches just barely lit, then blown out.
I MET WITH Mona after I got back from my trip, my skin glowing and rubbed raw. We met at a diner and hugged across the table. She patted her short hair immediately afterwards. “You look gritty,” she said. We talked about her work.
After our food came, Mona leaned over her fluorescent grilled cheese sandwich. “We’re going to try to get pregnant.”
For a second, I thought she meant herself and me. Then, “Oh no, Mona. No.”
Mona pulled the paper napkin out of her lap