The tanned nurse stood right beside her. She complimented the sun streaks in Susan’s hair and then held her hand when she drew a sharp, unsteady breath at the cold touch of the instruments. She told her, “Go ahead and say ‘Ouch’ if it hurts,” but Susan only turned her head, her eyes now fixed on the woman’s white uniform, which was the same woven polyester of her Woolworth’s smock. She could smell the sweet clean odor of the detergent it had been washed in. “Not much longer now,” the nurse said. And, “You’re doing great.” She was supposed to be in what they’d called, so prettily, a twilight sleep, but the pain was on a steady rise and in the midst of it, Susan gripped the woman’s hand and raised it to her own mouth to stifle a sob. There was the smell of hospital soap on the nurse’s skin, sharp, medicinal, and, because of the pain, somehow cruel. It was a scent that would return her to this moment for the rest of her life.

They brought her to another room to recuperate. She had not worn a sanitary napkin and a belt since she was thirteen and the thing felt like a diaper between her legs. There was a kind of chaise longue for her to sit on, a small table beside it with grape juice and a few cookies: a kindergarten snack, a clean sheet, and a light blanket. The tanned nurse lowered the light a little further and said she would go tell her friend she was okay. She could go home in an hour or so, depending on how she felt.

“Rest a bit, honey,” she said, like a mother, before she left the room.

Susan could hear the traffic rising up from the street, the bang and rattle of trucks, taxi horns, a warning shout and a whistle and then a man’s laugh. She could picture the men in the street below, men pushing carts and backing vans into narrow parking spaces, men in suits, men with briefcases, going to lunch, ducking into cabs, running their hands down their ties as they walked across a subway grate. She closed her eyes but knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had never gone to sleep in New York City.

An Act of Contrition started up in her head. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” more a habit of mind than a plea for absolution. Because she could not balance any remorse against the dawning sense of relief. However terrible it might be, what she had done, it was over: gotten through, finished. However terrible it was, its immediate effect was that she could go back to school next week, her senior year. She could take the SATs, go to the prom, go to graduation. She could apply to colleges and choose one and move into a dorm in September. She could go out with her friends this weekend, maybe meet another guy. She could sleep late tomorrow (she had already asked for a late shift at the store, three to nine) and go downstairs in her work clothes and her smock-”Going”-her car keys in her hand, her father singing from another room, “It was a lucky April shower, it was the most convenient door,” sweet and affectionate and naive as he always was because he had no fear of trouble for this beautiful child, no quicksand, no terrible diversions, no nightmares to drive her from the room he and his son had plumbed and paneled with their own hands. “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

The tanned nurse came in again to take her temperature and check her pad. She came back a little while later to say the doctor would be in to talk to her once more and then she could get dressed and go. “Although,” she said, blithely, “I’m not sure where your friend has gone off to.”

Susan almost said, “Annie?”-but instead pursed her lips to show she had no answer.

The nurse glanced at her watch. “I thought maybe she’d gone out for a bit of lunch, but she’s been gone a while now.” She gave Susan the full, professional warmth of her brown eyes. “Pam at the desk said she just kind of flew out.”

Susan nodded. She and Annie had agreed to have lunch together, if she was up for it, at a diner on Third Avenue. Vanilla egg creams and greasy cheeseburgers, they’d said.

“We can’t let you go home alone, you know,” the nurse told her kindly, deliberately. “Is there someone else you can call? If she doesn’t come back?”

Jill O’Meara came to mind, but Susan suspected she was probably at work now. Susan didn’t even know the name of the card store. Jill would be two hours coming in from Long Island anyway. The Jackass had a car-a GTO, the whole problem-and lived in Queens, and it would serve him right to get the full weight of the whole summer delivered to him in one phone call (You screwed me, you dumped me, I just had an abortion, and you need to drive me home), but she wasn’t that crazy. She knew he caddied on Tuesday and Thursday anyway; she’d made enough plans this summer to casually drop by the golf course.

Slowly, she shook her head. “She’ll be back,” she told the nurse. “She said she might run over to Bloomingdale’s.” And then, when the nurse had gone out again, wondered how messed up she was to find herself praying, praying earnestly this time, that her half-assed lie was true.

The doctor, without a smile, gave her a lecture about venereal disease and a prescription for birth control and told her about the new risks a second abortion would raise. Then she handed her a small white business card, the name and number of a social worker.

Frowning at her from behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the doctor suddenly asked, in quick succession, “You live with your family? Mother and father? Are you afraid of your father? Is he violent? Does he hit you?”

After everything, Susan was surprised to feel herself blush. There was a time when she might have been afraid that her father would hit her. When she and her brother were kids, he had often shown them the back of his hand, and though they’d never once been struck, they had always flinched. But that was long before Tony went to Vietnam, and came back, and disappeared. Long before the night she saw him weeping in their father’s thick arms, not like a baby or even a kid, but like a lunatic, one of her father’s own patients, God’s mistakes, as he called them, saliva veiling his open mouth. Or the day he put his fist through the living-room wall. Or the day their mother told Susan that it would have been easier for their father if Tony had been killed in the war.

“My father’s never hit me,” she told the doctor. “Not at all.” After everything, it was the first time she saw them suspect a lie.

The nurse had just handed her the first month’s supply of pills in a little case that looked like a pink compact when she said, cheerfully, “Your girlfriend’s outside.”

Annie was on the same couch where Susan had left her, but it was clear, even in the warm light of the waiting room, that she’d been crying.

There were two other, middle-aged, women also in the room so Annie whispered when she said, “You okay?” and Susan whispered back, “Yeah, are you?”

“Fine,” Annie said shortly, and then handed Susan her purse.

They walked down the hall to the elevator in silence. Although they lived on the same street, although Susan’s father had helped to deliver Clare, they had been best friends only since the first week of freshman year. At mixers with the all-male Catholic schools, they had discovered they were the perfect boy-meeting pair: You ask the blonde, I’ll ask the brunette. They had gone on their first dates together. They had lost their virginity within a week of each other-Annie on the night of the junior prom, Susan a week later in gratitude for the prom and in regret for not having done it, perhaps more memorably, then. They had gone through this ordeal all summer knowing that their places were interchangeable-that Annie could be Susan and Susan could be Annie. Knowing, too, all they knew about breaking the baby’s arms and legs and drowning it in salt water.

“Did you have lunch?” Susan asked her in the elevator and Annie said, “No. Aren’t we going to the diner?”