Free When Life Turned Purple by Eva Adar Page A

her phone, her mouth slightly open and her skin even paler than usual.
    “What happened, baby?” he said. Her demeanor worried him, but he tried to joke. “Don’t tell me—they finally found an asteroid that really is on a head-on collision with Earth?”
    Lia looked up at him and closed her mouth. Not taking her eyes from his, she held up her phone.
    It was an email from Emma.
    He glanced at Lia and said, “She’s crazy now. Just....”
    “Read it,” said Lia.
    He took the phone from Lia and read:
    Hey there, you vampire beeyotch,
    I bet you don’t know who I am. I bet Russ has never mentioned me to you. But tonight, you’re wearing the dress I was supposed to wear and marrying the man I was supposed to marry. And you’ll be having the baby I was supposed to have. But never will.
    Me and Russ killed our baby. And then he dumped me. Real life is too messy to actually stay in a relationship. So how’d YOU managed to hook him? Well, just wait till real life hits, wait until you get sick of dealing with his garbage, when you can’t stop crying, when things don’t stay so pretty and the bad times don’t go away so fast. And then he’ll dump you and move on to somebody more convenient and less real. Until stuff gets to be too much again. And you’ll be left like me—a fat ugly chipped shell of what you were before he got a hold of you.
    I hate this. I hate you. And I really, really hate him. But most of all, I hate myself. And there’s no point in me polluting the atmosphere anymore with all the carbon dioxide I expel. So I’ll be gone by the time you get this. And I hope it ruins the honeymoon that should have been mine.
    Wishing for you to both drop dead,
    Emma King
    Russ looked from the phone to Lia several times before saying, “She was totally not normal. She was like bi-polar or something. I mean, by the time we broke up—that’s why we broke up. Because she’d gotten so crazy—”
    “Did you guys have an abortion?”
    Russ’s voice caught in his throat. Then he said, “We didn’t know. We just thought—”
    “Russ. Did you guys have an abortion?”
    “Well—yes.”
    Rubbing her lips together, Lia nodded to herself. “That’s really tragic.”
    “We didn’t know,” said Russ. “In fact, I didn’t know that she actually wanted to keep it or that she wanted me to marry her and raise it together. She didn’t really say. I found out later that she’d hinted about it, but I didn’t pick up on it at the time.”
    Lia looked away from Russ and leaned back against the headboard.
    Russ came to sit near Lia’s feet. Then he found himself telling her all about the time when Emma came to his store and what happened then, and what Emma said and how he tried to help her.
    Lia just listened the whole time, her cheek resting against her wrist as she watched Russ talk.
    When he finished, he just gazed at Lia, hoping for—what? Forgiveness? Absolution?
    Lia dropped her hands into her lap, interlacing her fingers together. “There’s a spike in the suicide rate after an abortion. And depression, nightmares, addictions—it’s all common after an abortion.”
    “But lots of girls have abortions,” said Russ. “And everyone seems fine.”
    Lia gave him a wry smile. “That’s sort of the plague of our society today. Everything always seems fine—even when it’s not.” She looked solemn again. “It doesn’t always hit them right away. Sometimes, it’s not until she’s pregnant again—this time, with a baby she wants to keep—and in going through the normal process of studying the different stages, she discovers that a 2-month old fetus is not just ‘a clump of cells’ or ‘a blob of tissue.’ And it sometimes happens after her baby is born that she wonders what life would have been like with the first baby, and what that baby would’ve been like.” She sighed. “And then there are some pretty freaky stories about children who have no idea they were born after an aborted sibling,