At 4:55, Carla drove into Szechuan’s parking lot. Marc’s car was already parked. As she walked into the restaurant, Marc got up from a chair as if claiming his guest, placing his hand behind but not directly on her back, and said to the hostess, “We’re ready to be seated.”
Carla turned to face him, struck again with the self-confidence he exuded seemingly in every circumstance. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he replied, simply. When they’d both sat down, he said, “I’m not much for eating alone.”
Carla didn’t try to hide her skepticism, rolling her eyes in a friendly manner. She knew it wasn’t for loneliness that Marc had wanted her company.
He smiled. “Thanks for meeting me. There are some things I’d like to talk about.”
“No shop talk,” Carla said, hiding a grin and with a distinct tease in her voice.
“Well, there might be a little.”
Carla looked at her dinner companion, amazed at how relaxed she felt. “Thank you, God,” she said under her breath. Then, out loud, “The hot and sour soup is excellent. Nancy and I often have it for lunch when we eat here.”
“I’ll try it. Must be good if both of you like it.”
After the food was ordered, the two made small talk. But when the soup and entrees arrived together per Marc’s request, he came right to the point.
“Carla, I have specific reasons for wanting to meet you tonight. Of course, it goes without saying that I’ve missed you.”
“Thanks,” Carla replied, but she let no emotion show, because there was none: she had asked God to guard her heart in anticipation of this surprise rendezvous, and she knew He was doing just that.
“And I have to apologize for spying on you and Nancy Saturday morning.”
Carla raised her eyebrows. “Go on.”
“You knew I drove past the clinic, right?”
“I didn’t until Nancy told me she thought she’d seen you, and then I saw you myself as we were leaving in the car.” She looked down at her plate, asking, “Why were you there?” When she looked up, Marc was almost staring through her and past her, looking pensive as he sat with his elbow on the table, covering his mouth and chin in his left hand.
“Why was I there?” he repeated, his eyebrows arched. “Why was I there.” He put his hand down and sighed loudly.
“Well, several reasons. Rita’s comments had piqued my curiosity, for one thing. I wanted to see you and Nancy in action—this other side of you both. You’ve told me what you do at the clinic, but I wanted to see first hand.”
“And what did you think?” Carla was still amazed at how relaxed she felt, as if Marc were her brother instead of her handsome boss to whom she’d been so extremely attracted.
“Your group as a whole looks pretty assorted…”
“As in motley?”
“Yeah.”
“We are a motley bunch,” Carla agreed, hastening to add, “but it includes some really wonderful people—caring people, willing to give up their Saturday morning routines in order to try to save one or two lives that no one else seems to care about.”
“And you do this every Saturday morning?”
“Pretty much.”
Marc opened a fortune cookie from the basket on the table and read the tiny script aloud. “Share the past with a good friend and have a better future.” He smiled. “Think I should take this to heart?”
Carla was about to dismiss it with a comment to the effect that you can’t put much stock in fortune cookies, but she caught herself, feeling a nudge in her spirit to hold her tongue. So she merely said, “Read it again.”
Marc did.
This time, Carla felt led to say, “Do you have a past to share? I think I’m a good friend.”
“You’re a very good friend.”
Carla smiled in acknowledgement.
“And, yes, I do have a past to share. It’s the real reason I asked you to have dinner with me tonight.”
Carla’s eyebrows rose. “It is?” she asked softly.
“Yeah.” Marc wasn’t smiling. His lips were pressed together in a combination of resignation and determination. He inhaled, blew out a long sigh as he looked down at his plate, and then proceeded.
“I told you I wanted to see first-hand what you and Nancy did Saturday mornings. I also wanted to drive by the abortion clinic to see… to see where my son died.” He looked at Carla with a piercing directness.
She whispered, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Let me just talk.” He paused, looking from her down to the tabletop. “Patrice and I never married. When she told me she was pregnant, I was very happy about it. She didn’t seem crazy about the idea; in fact, she said she wasn’t ready to have a baby. But she didn’t say any more about it, and as the weeks passed, and then months, I guess I just assumed she had changed her mind. Looking back, I remember that she never really shared my excitement to feel the baby moving; and when we learned that the baby was a boy, I was elated, but she didn’t seem to care that much…” Marc pursed his lips in a vain effort to hide the strong emotion he felt. “I never had a brother—or a sister, and to have a family is to me what life is all about.”
He looked at Carla as if to verify that she was sincerely listening to this intimate disclosure. Reassured by her gentle, understanding nod, he went on.
“Patrice didn’t want anyone to know she was pregnant. I didn’t understand why, but I figured it was just because she was proud enough to think she could get through nine months of pregnancy and have no one guess.” A cynical smile settled on his face, as he acknowledged Carla’s look of disbelief. “Later I understood the real reason. Her plan early on was to abort the baby full-term, and she knew even her hardcore pro-choice friends might have had a hard time coping with that. She obviously wasn’t successful at keeping her pregnancy secret at work, and I don’t know what she told them after the abortion—probably that she’d miscarried. All I know is that she didn’t work there much longer—until they hired her back later, after she had lived with Nancy for a while.”
He took a deep breath and let it out in an extended sigh. “Our social circle had always been fairly limited—we were both busy with our own aspirations and found enough fulfillment in our jobs and our physical and emotional dependency on each other. So outside of work, her pregnancy basically did remain hidden. I never mentioned it because she had asked me to keep it a secret.”
“Mmm.” Carla listened intently, but she kept quiet. In her mind, she was thinking about the time she’d met Marc and Patrice who was wearing the new ring, and how she had thought Patrice, wearing a short sweater jacket and close fitting slacks, looked as though she could possibly be pregnant.
“I was the one who came up with a name for our baby—Trent Patrick. Patrice never expressed much interest in a name or even in the baby, for that matter, until one night when she was in her ninth month.”
As Marc unfolded the events of that evening, including his drive out of town in a state of disbelief and rage, Carla sat quietly, trying to absorb what she was hearing.
“My son Trent died in that building you picket every Saturday, Carla. The little boy I couldn’t wait to hold, to play with. The one I loved to feel kicking and stretching in his mother’s belly. All my dreams of watching his first steps, of watching him play soccer, of going to get a hamburger—just Trent and I sometimes, of helping him buy his first car… All those dreams were suddenly jerked away from me, and I couldn’t do anything but feel rage and helplessness.”
“Did you try to stop her?”
Marc looked at Carla, his eyes pleading for understanding. “I was going to call a friend of mine to get some legal advice, but then I remembered I’d promised Patrice I wouldn’t tell anyone she was pregnant.”
All of Marc’s vulnerability now surfaced, as he buried his head in his hands. Carla was thankful for the privacy of the restaurant booth.
“I could have broken my promise. I should have broken my promise. For some God-forsaken reason, I didn’t.”
Carla had never imagined Marc had been carrying such painful regret. She shook her head, her face full of compassion, feeling his pain herself.
“I don’t know if I was too proud to acknowledge that I had no control over my… over Patrice, or whether I was too ashamed to have to tell my friend what kind of person I’d chosen to be the mother of my child. I don’t know.” He looked up helplessly. “I just know I wish I’d tried every single thing possible to stop her—because there was no second chance for Trent. He’s dead, and I sat by, allowing him to be killed.”
Marc looked down at his plate and there was silence a long moment.
“Marc,” Carla finally offered, gently, “You said you should have broken your promise to save your baby’s life, but are you sure you would have been able—legally—to intervene, even with your friend’s help?”
Marc looked up, startled. “What do you mean?”
“I’m pretty sure that unless a couple is married, the father has no legal rights regarding the child—at least not enough to intervene against an abortion the mother wants.”
“No way!” He looked incredulous.
“In a strange way, by our laws, it’s only the mother’s decision that counts.”
“Hmm… Are you sure?” Marc asked, still appearing incredulous.
Carla nodded, slowly.
Marc’s lips twisted into a pursed smile. “Then I was wrong when I told Patrice that nobody owns another human being. You’re telling me that every female in America is given the right to kill her baby, even when the father wants the baby to live? I can’t believe that.”
Carla spoke softly but deliberately, unable to restrain herself from asking what she had to ask. “And if you and Patrice had agreed together to abort Trent?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have named him if we were going to abort him.”
“And that’s why Patrice didn’t.”
“Ah… Yeah. You’re right.”
Carla said nothing, sensitive to Marc’s emotional state. She was surprised, therefore, when he said, just a bit defensively, “Carla, I can tell you have things you want to say, but you’re not saying them. Go ahead and say them.”
“I’m not sure now is the…”
“Yes!” Marc said, in a vehement whisper. “Yes. Talk. I want to hear what you’re thinking. Please don’t hold anything back. God knows—if there is a God—that I’m doing and will do everything in my power to justify what’s been done—to push the blame on someone else…” He looked down at the table, shaking his head. “…to finally conclude that it’s not my fault that Trent’s dead. Just… speak it. You’re on the other side: I need to hear all sides, because this isn’t resolving in me. It gnaws at me—incessantly. Talk!” he pleaded. “Please talk.”
“Well, it’s really too big a subject to cover in a short time.”
“Start!” he demanded.
“All right.” Carla spoke slowly, in a low voice, shrugging one shoulder, as if to say, “You asked for it.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s just take this one piece. You said you wouldn’t have named Trent if you knew you were going to—if you were willing to—abort him. Right?”
“Right.”
“You’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘What a beautiful world if every child were wanted.’”
“Not really.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s a pro-choice phrase. In Trent’s case, was he wanted or half-wanted?”
“He was wanted—fully wanted!”
“But not by Patrice.”
“It doesn’t matter—he was wanted by another human being. Me—his father.”
“But current law has categorized him as unwanted.”
“Well, that’s a sick law.”
“But wait. If you hadn’t wanted Trent, either, would he have been wanted or unwanted?”
“Unwanted.”
“What if his grandmother, or aunt, or uncle wanted him? What if Michael or Nancy—or a perfect stranger picketing the abortion clinic—wanted him? Would he be wanted or unwanted?”
“Well, it becomes really complicated.”
“Too complicated for Trent to survive?”
Marc looked at her but said nothing.
“When our constitution was drawn up, I bet there was a lot of controversy surrounding the phrase, ‘All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ They didn’t write, ‘All men are born’ with these rights. Abortion’s been around in one form or another throughout history, Marc. Those men writing the Constitution were brilliant, and you can bet both slavery and abortion were taken into account when they wrote about these inalienable rights.”
Carla paused to refill her teacup and then looked at Marc, verifying that he was ardently listening. “As you probably remember from American History class, there was a time in our country, right before the Civil War, when a lot of people were not considered full persons. A slave was considered three-fifths of a person.” She leaned forward, shaking her head in disbelief. “That’s amazing, isn’t it? For almost one hundred years, slavery flew in the face of that—that preamble. Now abortion flies in its face, and although we say we are every one endowed by our Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, what we do is allow every pregnant mother to deny her unborn child these rights. Every unborn child is susceptible to being killed at the whim of his mother.”
“But there are extenuating circumstances to consider.”
Carla looked at Marc, her eyes penetrating. She sighed and unconsciously shook her head. “Let me put it this way. Every unborn child is vulnerable while his mother–or others–weigh all the facets of letting him live or having him killed–an inhuman decision in the first place. It’s kind of like she straddles the lever at the guillotine and quietly, with a heavy heart, gets off—or maybe she jumps off with carefree relief. And—whoosht—the baby dies. But whether the mother’s gone through personal torture to arrive at abortion as the answer, or through rational contemplation, or whether she’s decided upon it glibly, makes absolutely no difference for that baby. The verdict is the same—death.”
Marc said nothing, and Carla waited a moment before adding, “So today every American is endowed by his Creator with certain rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that his mother can trump.”
“Well, I don’t know.” Marc wasn’t convinced. “Again, it’s a complicated issue.”
“Marc,” Carla said, sighing deeply, “we’ve used the excuse that it’s complicated to legalize stripping so many people of their inalienable rights.” As Carla spoke these words, there was deep sadness in her voice that reflected the subject of the conversation, as well as her own resignation that this would probably be the last time Marc would ask her to have dinner with him.
She felt a voice deep inside her being. Did you count this cost?
“Yes,” she whispered in her spirit. “Not fully, but enough. Just help me, please.”
“Marc,” Carla spoke audibly now. “I’m a Christian. That Creator referred to in the Constitution—I believe in Him.” Carla’s eyes filled with tears and she didn’t try to stifle them. “I’m so sorry Trent died. I can see how much you wish you could reverse things.” She held his gaze through eyes brimming with tears. “God’s the one who can help you resolve this, Marc.”
Carla got up as Marc turned to stare at the wall. She put her hand on his arm. “You know I’ll be praying for you,” she said. Then she picked up her purse and quietly left.
……….
On an autumn Sunday three weeks after she had seen little Austin Mackey at Crossroads Medical Center, Patrice made the decision not to walk, as she usually did, the ob-gyn and maternity wards, choosing another way to spend the afternoon. Much as she had tried to avoid being conscious of the anniversary date of her abortion, remembering Danielle’s advice not to look back, she hadn’t succeeded. The date had loomed in front of her from the time she saw the cute little baby boy named Austin.
At the risk of exposing herself to unknown emotional reaction, her plan was to catch a glimpse of what Trent would have looked like on this date. She found a phone book and looked for Mackey—there couldn’t be that many. There were four. One didn’t have an address listed, but Patrice mapped out a route to drive to each of the other three in hopes of narrowing down the residence of Austin. She first drove to Jill Mackey’s address, only halfway expecting it to be the one she was looking for, because she had a strong feeling that the couple she’d seen walking into the ward that evening were Austin’s parents.
Jill Mackey apparently lived in a townhouse. Patrice drove to Martin Mackey’s house. A man about sixty-five was working out in the yard. She drove on to the address of Robert Mackey.
Bingo. She could see through the chain link fence what looked like a portable sandbox in the back yard. No one was around, and it was almost noon. Patrice decided they were maybe enjoying a lazy start to the day, and she opted to get some lunch and come back in a couple of hours.
At 2:30 she drove slowly past the house. She rolled down the windows and heard laughter coming from the back yard, but she couldn’t see anyone. Then a male figure appeared, carrying a very young toddler on top of his shoulders.
Patrice drove on without having positively identified man or child as those she’d seen at Crossroads. She decided to circle and come back again in a few moments, and this time a woman was in the front yard, cutting some roses from a bush by the door. Yes, that had to be Mrs. Mackey. Patrice was satisfied and drove home. She knew she would drive here again before fall was over.
Back in her apartment, she refused to think about her abortion. But strangely, she looked forward to keeping tabs on this child.