Free VC03 - Mortal Grace by Edward Stewart Page B

was calm, nothing showing.
    “I’m Bonnie. Your friend Tod said you wanted to talk to me.”
    “I didn’t want to talk to you.” The voice had a childlike petulance, an accent that might have been from New England. “It was his idea.”
    “Why do you suppose he had that idea?”
    The girl kept her face blank; closed. Her left arm flexed and she drew a crumpled pack of Marlboros from a fold in her tank top. Keyed-up fingers tapped a cigarette loose, coaxed flame from a blue Bic lighter. A dirt-edged Band-Aid capped the tip of the index finger. She inhaled deeply, held the smoke in her lungs, finally blew out a fine gray ribbon that twisted up toward the moon.
    “I’m pregnant.” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know what to do.”
    Bonnie sat on the wall beside her. “What do you want to do?”
    “I don’t know.” The girl’s lips trembled and her eyelids came up. “Tod thought maybe you could help.”
    “Maybe I can. I’ve helped other girls in your position.”
    The girl looked down uncomfortably at her cigarette. Silence rose out of her in a tightening spiral. Somewhere down the river a tugboat hooted.
    “Tell me about yourself, Nell.”
    “Same story as everyone else. Just trying to keep alive from moment to moment.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Almost sixteen.”
    Bonnie wondered if that was a lie. It felt like one. “Do you have a family?”
    “My family and me don’t talk.”
    “Any other relatives at all?”
    Nell stared at nothing, the way strangers in an elevator stare when they don’t want to look at one another.
    “Where do you live?”
    “Over there.” Nell nodded toward the Hudson, upstream. “The next dock. There’s a warehouse.”
    Bonnie could see the outline of some kind of building, a dark unmoving mass against the sparkling blur of the water. “Are you alone?”
    Nell didn’t answer.
    “Are you with Tod?”
    “Right now I don’t know who I’m with.” The hand with the cigarette reached to smooth down the back of her hair. “I’m in touch with a doctor.”
    “An obstetrician?” Bonnie said.
    Nell’s smile had a melancholy weight. “She needs two thousand dollars.”
    “How soon?”
    “Right away. Up front.”
    “Does that cover prenatal care and delivery and follow-up?”
    The eyebrows lowered. “It covers the abortion and twenty-four hours in the clinic.”
    Sadness descended on Bonnie. She wanted to reach out and soothe the panic and pain in this child. “You don’t have to do that.”
    The girl’s mouth moved at the corners as though she had just swallowed. “Don’t I?”
    “There are programs—you can go away where it’s peaceful and have your baby.”
    “And then what?”
    “And then put it up for adoption.”
    The girl glanced over. She was breathing in a slower and sharper way. “Church programs?”
    “Some of them.”
    “I’ve heard about those—they question you, make you feel guilty. And you don’t get paid if you place the baby through a church.” Nell shook her head vehemently. “I’m not going to go through that.”
    “You don’t have to go through anything you don’t want to.”
    The girl lobbed Bonnie a look that said, What planet have you been living on?
    A light rain had begun to fall, draining the colors from the lights on West Street.
    Nell stood up. “I gotta go.”
    Bonnie ransacked her mind for reassuring words. They weren’t there. “Nell, will you please hold off on any decisions? Don’t do anything till I have a chance to speak to you again.”
    Nell was silent, neither agreeing nor refusing.
    “How can I get in touch with you again?”
    “You can’t,” Nell said. “You can’t get in touch with me again.”
    Bonnie watched the girl in the tank top walk away down the dock.
    That was my chance , she thought, and I missed it and now it could be too late.

ELEVEN
    “I GIVE TWO EVENINGS a month to prostitute outreach,” Dr. Hillary St. Lawrence said. “The first and third Tuesdays.”
    “What exactly do