Lightning

29

The hospital had informed Carver that Dr. Benedict wasn’t seeing his first patient that day until two o’clock. Carver didn’t phone Benedict to see if he was home. Better to surprise the doctor than to reveal the day’s prognosis.

As he turned the corner and drove down Macon Avenue toward the Benedict house, he saw about a dozen pickets in front of the driveway, another half dozen or so across the street. He pulled over to the curb half a block away and studied them. They were ordinary enough looking people, many of them women. They were dressed for casual comfort in the heat, wearing short-sleeved shirts or pullovers, shorts, and athletic shoes or sandals. A few of them wore plastic water bottles slung around their necks, the kind with thin plastic tubes protruding from their caps, like athletes use when they want to tilt back their heads and squirt water into their mouths as if it were wine from a goat bladder. One of the women, blond, heavyset, in her twenties, carried an infant in a sling so that the child sat facing her ample chest. Carver saw that several other women carried infants as well, and there were two girls of about twelve among the pickets. One of the preteen girls carried a sign showing the universal circle-and-slash “No” signal superimposed over what looked like an enlarged photo of a bloody fetus. Some of the other demonstrators carried the familiar white wooden crosses, resting them on their shoulders military fashion at a forty-five-degree angle, as if they were the rifles of troops on the march. Christian soldiers.

Carver gripped his cane and climbed out of the Olds, locking it behind him. As he approached the demonstrators, they stared at him. He squinted against the sun and stared back, trying to place faces, but he couldn’t remember if any of these people had been at the Women’s Light Clinic the morning of the bombing,

The sign the young girl was carrying did indeed depict a dead fetus. There was no lettering on the sign. Other signs read KILLER LIVES HERE, DOCTOR MURDER, and BABY KILLER.

A tall, skinny man on the other side of the street lifted a bullhorn to his mouth, danced around in a tight circle to gather energy and attention, and screamed, “Stop slaughtering the unborn!” He screamed it again, louder. Then over and over at a pitch of high emotion.

The demonstrators repeated the appeal after him, and the pace of those who were walking back and forth with signs and wooden crosses picked up. They repeated the “stop slaughtering” chant three or four times, apparently prompted by Carver’s arrival. For all they knew, he was from the press. The rest of the block was as bustling as a sunny ghost town. Who could blame anyone for staying inside? The demonstrators were intimidating the Benedicts’ neighbors.

Finally the skinny man stopped gyrating and shouting, lowered the bullhorn and placed it on the ground, and the knot of demonstrators fell silent.

Up close they looked sweaty, miserable, and determined.

“Are you with Operation Alive?” Carver asked no one in particular as he approached the mouth of the driveway.

A shirtless, middle-aged man wearing khaki shorts and an NRA baseball cap with an oversize bill glared at him and yelled, “Stop the slaughter!” again and again. The woman behind him joined in the mantra, now that the guy across the street with the bullhorn had run out of breath. She was wearing a faded T-shirt lettered THE QUICKEST WAY TO A MAN’S HEART IS THROUGH HIS CHEST. The young girl with the bloody fetus sign was sporting a Grateful Dead shirt. Back at the cottage, Carver had a Jerry Garcia designer tie in his closet. Things sure were getting mixed up.

No one touched Carver or tried to block his way as he turned into the driveway and walked toward the low brick house with the wide tinted windows. He thought he saw movement behind one of the windows but couldn’t be sure. Mostly what he saw in the windows were reflections. Behind him, the guy with the megaphone was at it again, maybe with another slogan, but from even this short distance, it was difficult to make out what he was saying or what the demonstrators were shouting in response.

Carver stepped up onto the porch and used the tip of his cane to press the doorbell button.

Almost immediately Leona Benedict opened the door.

“I was watching you approach,” she said, “in case somebody out there did anything to you.”

“They’re loud,” Carver said, “but they don’t seem to be building up to action. Maybe it’s too hot.”

“I hope so. I hope it gets even hotter for them.”

Leona stepped back and Carver entered the house for the second time.

“Is your husband home?” he asked.

“No. You just missed him. I don’t know where he went.” A whiff of gin fumes carried to him as she spoke. In Carver’s experience, the drug of choice for lonely women.

He noticed a folded blue garment bag with red trim lying on the floor near the door.

“I was packing,” Leona said, seeing his gaze fall on the bag. She was slurring her words slightly now. The control she’d exercised to answer the door and appear sober was slipping. He stood silently, and when she saw he wasn’t going to comment or leave, she said, “You gotta excuse me while I finish. A cab’s on the way to pick me up.”

“Where are you going?” Carver asked, leaving the elegantly furnished living room and following her down the hall to a bedroom, as if she’d invited him to watch her finish packing.

“Away from this place.” She resumed transferring lingerie from a dresser drawer to a hard-sided blue suitcase open on the bed.

“To get away from the demonstrators?”

“To get away from my husband,” she said, throwing a bra into the suitcase as if for emphasis.

Carver had no idea what to say about that.

She continued with her packing, examining the contents of a small, felt-lined jewelry box she’d removed from the drawer, as if trying to decide which pieces to take with her. She closed the lid and placed the entire box in the suitcase. “Away from his long hours and macho determination to keep working while he plays the hero and expounds on the nobility of his calling. I’ve had enough of his ego and self-importance, and I’m afraid for my own life.” A pair of sweat socks followed the bra and jewelry box into the suitcase. “I’m finally leaving him.”

“Finally? As in forever?”

“As in forever,” she repeated. “As in for eternity.” She pointed toward the front of the house and the chanting demonstrators, barely audible in the bedroom. “I’ve tried to live with that kind of thing, but I can’t. Whatever I try, no matter how hard I attempt to ignore them, it works for a while, but only a while. And then it gets worse than ever before. The pressure, what they do to you, it builds up in you, and eventually they win. They know that. It’s why they’re out there. They know they can outlast people like me.”

“But not your husband?”

“Oh, no. They might think so, but they’re mistaken. They won’t outlast Saint Benedict!” She slammed down the lid on the suitcase, lifted it slightly for a second to poke a corner of material back inside, then latched it and tried to drag the suitcase off the side of the bed and onto the floor.

It was too heavy for her, and she emitted a frustrated, boozy sigh. Carver walked to the bed and helped her stand the suitcase on the floor. He saw that it had plastic wheels. She unfolded a small handle from it and rolled it into the living room to leave it near the garment bag.

Carver followed. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “you seem too angry to be thinking clearly right now. Maybe you should calm down, then see if you still want to leave.”

She stared at him, her lower lip trembling. “Men! You think this is sudden, that the geeks outside are the final straw and I broke. Mister, I’ve been contemplating this for months. Years!” She walked to a walnut desk and pulled open a large drawer. From the drawer she pulled out a sheaf of newspaper clippings and handed them to Carver. “Look at this-my collection. You’ll get some idea what our marriage has been like for the past year, and even before that. You’ll understand why I’ve had my fill and have to get out.”

There was a burst of noise from the demonstrators, then the sound of a car in the driveway. A horn gave two curtailed beeps, as if not wanting to further disturb the neighbors.

Leona opened the front door about six inches and peered out. “That’s my cab,” she said. She opened the door all the way and stood in the doorway.

A few seconds later she backed up a step, and a wizened, gray cab driver appeared and entered the house. He glanced at Carver, then hoisted the garment bag and heavy hard-sided suitcase and lugged them toward his cab, out of sight.

Leona paused for a moment in the doorway, looking at Carver, who was standing with newspapers clippings in each hand.

“If you see my husband,” she said in a flat, decisive voice, “tell him I didn’t say good-bye to him or this house or this city. Tell him I walked away and didn’t look back.”

She picked up a large white purse from a nearby chair and stalked out, leaving the door hanging open as she disappeared from sight. For a woman who’d obviously drunk way too much, and on such a hot morning, she moved steadily and in a straight line. Carver guessed she’d been a regular drinker for a long time, and he wondered if Dr. Benedict, busy with his calling and his patients, had noticed.

He heard car doors slam, then the cab drive away. There was another burst of shouting from the mouth of the driveway as the vehicle slowed and made its turn into the street. The man with the bullhorn shouted something Carver couldn’t make out.

The demonstrators might not know it yet, but they’d achieved at least a partial victory in their ongoing war. They’d contributed to the breakup of an abortion doctor’s marriage.

Carver sat down on the white leather sofa, the mass of newspaper clippings in his lap. In the bright light streaming through the open door, he leafed through the clippings. They covered more than two years and were all from the Gazette-Dispatch, articles about protests, threats, demonstrations that had gotten out of hand. There were plenty of photographs. In one, Carver noticed white wooden crosses and what looked like a duplicate of the dead fetus sign the girl outside was carrying, but the sign in the photo was being waved at a terrified-looking young woman by a man with a beard. Another photo was of two groups of people yelling at each other, some of them throwing what appeared to be rocks and bottles, some in the foreground blurred by their motion as they ran toward each other. One group was carrying pro-life signs, the other pro-choice. They appeared equally angry with tortured faces, their mouths distorted by the insults and challenges they were hurling at each other. At the left edge of the photo, uniformed police were visible, apparently recently arrived on the scene. The photo’s caption identified the groups as demonstrators from Operation Alive and angry pro-choicers from a local chapter of the National Alliance of Women.

He was about to put the photo aside when he noticed in the photo’s background a tall man looming above those around him, possibly leaning against a car. He caught Carver’s eye because he appeared to be smiling. The photo was grainy, and the man wasn’t wearing horn-rimmed glasses, but Carver was sure he was looking at a likeness of the WASP. And he didn’t figure to be a member of the National Alliance of Women. Or a cop.

Which left Operation Alive.

Carver folded the clipping carefully, so the face of the tall man in the photo wouldn’t be creased, and slid it into his shirt pocket.

After quickly thumbing through the other clippings, he got up and replaced them in the desk drawer. He looked around the peaceful, well-furnished house and thought it was a shame two people couldn’t find happiness here. Then he went out, setting the latch so the door would lock behind him.

The guy with the bullhorn was quiet, and no one said anything to Carver as he walked from the driveway and made his way to where he’d left the Olds parked. He half expected to find the car vandalized, paint sprayed on it or its tires or the convertible top slashed, but the vehicle sat level and unmarked, and its taut canvas top was unmarred by any new stains or slashes.

As he drove past the Operation Alive demonstrators, they stood motionless and stared at him in the heat with a kind of dull but unmistakable hostility, as if he might be hauling lions to the Colosseum.

At his office, Carver put the photograph of the WASP in an envelope and wrote a short note on the back of one of his business cards to accompany it.

Then he addressed the envelope to Desoto and left to find a mailbox with an early pick-up time.

As he drove along streets so hot that rising vapor danced on them, the screaming voice of the man with the bullhorn echoed around the back of his skull. Along with Leona Benedict’s words before climbing into a cab and abandoning her world: “Eventually they win.”