The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

that time to conspire with local authorities to install yellow tape and wooden barricades all around WellWomen.

“Crime-scene tape around an abortion clinic—how appropriate,” Mr. Glover said. “Well, here we are. You people get out hereand I’ll find someplace to park.”

The other side milling around behind the barricades nodded at one another as Jane and her friends approached. The cops intheir matching ponchos and squirrel-brown mustaches milled in their own small groups.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” A thirtysomething woman with a squinty, ironical smile, her skin like tallow, wavedat them from behind the barricades. She opened her arms in welcome, rather grandly, as if WellWomen were her estate and thecops her uniformed waitstaff. She wore galoshes and baggy jeans and a big puffy drawstring coat like the one Jane wore throughher pregnancies, like she was ready for a long hike through inclement weather. No one could be this persuasively upbeat atsix in the morning.

“My name is Bridie. I’m with the Choice Action Network.” Her hands, in Gore-Tex gloves, gripped and patted the barricade likeit was her trusty steed. “I would be doing you folks a disservice if I didn’t tell you that you’re going to want to keep acrossthe other side of Main Street today.”

“Tell it to the First Amendment,” Charity Huebler said.

Another woman, slightly older, scarecrow-thin, came scowling up behind Bridie’s shoulder. She wore a blue vest that read escort. “We know you folks made it onto Good Morning America just for praying and singing your little songs—” she started.

“All three of the morning shows, actually,” Summer interrupted. “National news.”

“But you won’t be happy with that, will you?” the scarecrow-woman asked. “You need more attention?”

“What my friend Jill here means to say by that,” Bridie continued, “is that we know that you folks are escalating today. Attempting a full-on clinic blockade.”

Jane looked around at the other Respect Life members, who looked as surprised as she felt. “Hello, my name is Jane,” she said.“I’m pleased to meet you. I’m being honest with you when I say that we haven’t heard anything about any kind of blockade.We’re here peacefully. Just as we were on Monday and Tuesday.”

“We’re not all that creative,” Phil said with a chuckle, and the Hueblers glared at him.

“Is there any coffee?” a pale skinny girl in all black called out behind the barricades.

“Coffee is a diuretic,” Bridie said mildly over her shoulder. “You don’t want to find yourself in a scuffle with an anti andhave to take a piss.” Bridie folded her hands and rested them on the battered wooden beam. “Pleased to meet you, Jane. Thankyou for your honesty. I don’t want any of you folks to take this personally. But you will need, eventually, to move to theother side of Main Street, if you don’t want the police to be involved.”

Fragments from twenty minutes earlier, and from days gone past, began to assemble themselves. At the meetup at Saint Benedict’sthat morning, Jane looked across the front lawn laid with thirty gravestones, to mark the thirty million dead babies. Pastthe graves, she could see a maroon Oldsmobile parked at the outer edge of the lot—a car she hadn’t seen there before. Yesterday,driving past the Rosens’ house, she saw cars filling the driveway and the street in front, and people—all women, she thought—assembledon the stoop. Jane assumed it was a “house call,” the kind of aggressive, in-your-face action that Respect Life avoided butthat might appeal to plenty of Oh-Rs who’d shown up over the weekend; now she wasn’t so sure. Nor was she sure she had reallyseen a maroon Oldsmobile in Mr. Glover’s rearview. Maybe her memory had maneuvered the car into view after the fact, in orderto explain the irrational scene laid in front of them now at WellWomen, this mocking party at which they were the guests ofhonor.

 

The first patients started arriving around eight thirty. The Oh-Rs called the other side the “pro-aborts,” pronouncing it probort. Probort sounded like the name of a humanoid blob from the arcade games the boys used to play at Darien Lake: a colleagueof Q*Bert, Dig Dug, Evil Otto. The proborts worked in formation, looping themselves around a patient’s car as it arrived,as many as five or six of them at a time, and then encircling the patient herself, guiding her and whoever was with her—amother, a friend, once in a while a father of the doomed child, or so one presumed—through the crowds. Summer and Charityyelled, “Deathscorts!” at the escorts in their blue vests. Jane was sure that they’d picked that up from the Oh-Rs. FatherSteve, when he finally arrived, wouldn’t approve of it, surely.

Looking back and forth on Main Street, Jane saw Choice Action Network sentinels in position for patients who arrived on foot.They wore neon-yellow vests that said peacekeeper. They had headsets and talked into their hands and crackled when they walked, like cops. They could radio ahead and formprotective circles blocks ahead of WellWomen. They closed into a phalanx as they came closer to the redbrick building.

A few Oh-Rs were unfurling a hand-lettered banner that said dr. rosen kills children. Jane came closer to them. She held her own abortion kills children sign across her chest to show she was one of them. The Oh-Rs wanted to hang their banner between two stakes plunged into thefront lawn of WellWomen, like laundry on a line. They argued with some cops about it for a while, yelled about freedom ofassembly and their First Amendment rights, but not one of them was getting through the barriers and yellow tape.

“Excuse me,” Jane was saying. “May I ask you about your sign?”

They weren’t listening. Now they had a notion that they could climb onto the roof of the Pancake Palace down the street and drape the sign over the restaurant’s awning. Dr. Rosen ate his lunch at the Pancake Palace most days. The cloth banner, strung on dowels, drooped and accordioned between them as they debated, soaking up dew from the grass.

Jane came a few steps closer, tried again. “How do you