Windfalls: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the encounter outside, that they were not watching her now. Most of the other women sat as Anna had instinctively sat, with an empty chair between her and the person next to her. They all appeared both shaken and resigned, as though they had just heard bad news and were now waiting for a bus. Of the two men in the room, one was little more than a boy, a scrawny-haired teenager who held the hand of the girl sitting next to him with a furtive defiance. The other man was middle-aged and sat stolidly reading the newspaper, ignoring the woman who waited beside him.
    At the front of the room was a counter. A sign below it read, “Please Confirm Your Appointment Before Taking a Seat.” Anna crossed the room to stand before the receptionist.
    “I’m Anna Walters,” she made herself say, although her voice rasped like sand against her throat.
    “Walters?” the receptionist echoed, without looking up.
    Anna cleared her throat. “Yes.”
    The woman reached for a stack of files, and Anna saw that her fingernails were so long that she had to handle them with a splay-fingered dexterity. It made her movements seem squeamish, as though everything she picked up was something she would rather not have to touch.
    Anna said, “My appointment’s at eleven.”
    The receptionist nodded and began to shuffle files. When she found the one she wanted, she opened it, studied it, and asked, “You have the money?”
    Anna had known she had to bring money, but even so the question seemed so crude and the receptionist’s voice so loud that her throat clogged again. She coughed and answered, “Yes.”
    “Cash? Or cashier’s check?”
    “Cash,” Anna croaked, opening her backpack to get the money she’d withdrawn from the bank, almost half of what she had to live on for the rest of the semester. Even though she could have used his help with the money, Anna had not told the sculptor. Getting him involved seemed as silly as seeking out the person who had been sneezing the day before she caught the flu and insisting that he pay for her aspirin. Besides, she’d been reluctant to reveal such an intimate failure to a stranger. But now, standing alone in front of the receptionist with her rent money in her hand, she wished for a fleet moment that she’d told the sculptor, after all.
    “Here’s your receipt,” the receptionist said, handing a slip of paper across the counter to Anna. “You have the consent form?”
    Anna nodded. Pulling a folded piece of paper from the pages of On Photography, she laid it open on the counter. Words snagged her eyes— perforation, hemorrhage, infection, death . A woman had died in Texas only last October.
    “You can sign it now,” the receptionist said, handing Anna a pen.
    But this is different, Anna told herself as she wrote her name. She was paying cash for this, in a clinic. This was legal and safe. It wasn’t even an operation. A surgical procedure, it had said in the literature the nurse had given her, eleven times safer than birth.
    “Okay,” the receptionist said, tucking the form with Anna’s signature into her file. “Sit down, and the nurse will call you as soon as they’re ready.” The woman looked up, and the warmth in her black eyes was so startling that Anna turned away in confusion.
    She returned to her chair, opened her book, and stared at the page until the words doubled and smeared. There was a bathroom off the waiting room, and after a while one of the women got up and went inside. Through the closed door Anna heard the heave and splat of vomiting. There was the sound of water running, the roar of an institutional toilet flushing, and a moment later the woman reentered the room, her face empty of color.
    Another door opened, and a nurse stood in the threshold, calling a list of names. At the sound of her own name Anna felt a jolt of fear. Each of the women in the room stood and glanced uncertainly at the others. They made an awkward cluster around the nurse, who shepherded them