The clinic Alma sends you to is really just the back room of a Seven Eleven across the street from the Thai restaurant where Raj was supposed to propose. There’s an examination table covered in last week’s Washington Post and an ultrasound machine with a cracked screen. The walls are made of cinderblock, and the floor reeks of spilled slurpees. It’s not what you pictured, but you don’t complain: you’re not exactly in a position to be choosy.
A white man in a leather jacket butters the ultrasound’s plastic wand with gel. When he tells you to relax, your abdomen tightens, and you apologize, take deep breaths, try to will your anxiety away. The man manages to maneuver the wand inside your body, to press it against your cervix. The ultrasound’s fluttering screen settles into a single pixelated smudge.
“Well, you’re definitely pregnant,” he says.
“What about the heartbeat?” you ask.
“Too early for all that,” he says, pulling out the wand and cleaning it with a wet wipe. “You need any pills? Procedures?”
Last week, when you went hiking with Alma along the Billy Goat Trail and she made you memorize the address of the clinic, Alma had made you memorize her instructions. And she’d given you more instructions, too.
“Just the test. Nothing else,” she’d said softly, allowing the brash currents of the Potomac and the clatter of dry leaves to swallow up her words. “No medications. No prescriptions. No printouts. Get your results and go.”
“No thanks,” you tell the man, pulling on your black cotton underwear, your sharply pressed Calvin Klein suit pants you bought at Filene’s. Patting your still perfect hair, you hand the man a neatly folded stack of bills. You try not to meet his eyes, hoping that your face is one he won’t have any reason to remember.
When you leave, it’s only four o’clock, but the light is already fading. You pause to reassure yourself, again, that the convenience store looks like nothing more than a convenience store, that you look like nothing more than a customer leaving with a packet of gum in your pocket, an overpriced bottle of juice in your bag. In the parking lot, a group of teenagers in vintage sweaters perched on the hood of an ancient Toyota, their slurpee-reddened tongues flashing between their teeth, their eyes bright with desire. It’s a Friday night, and their flirting makes your stomach lurch.
You trudge the three chilly miles back to your apartment, unwilling to risk a bus ticket or a metro card. Your cell phone is tangled up in your quilts, generating GPS evidence that you spent the evening at home, reading a book, perhaps, or sipping a glass of wine. When you finally reach home, your hair smells like wind and woodsmoke and antiseptic. You toss your gummy underwear into the washing machine alongside your cotton socks, your dusty jeans.
In the shower, you turn the hot water all the way up, erasing the air with steam. Through the half-open window, you can see the alley behind your building lined with forest green dumpsters. Last month, your landlord found an empty packet of misoprostol fluttering between the trash bags. He called the police, who ribboned off your lobby with caution tape. Like all the other wombed residents of the building, you sat by your door in your best suit, waiting to be interrogated. But before they got to you, they arrested your across-the-way neighbor, a biracial trans man who had once brought a misdelivered water bill to your door. You watched through the peephole as they snapped handcuffs over his sand-brown wrists, as they led him through the carpeted halls to the elevator and, you assume, out the front door.
Exhausted, you lean your forehead against the grout. Your abdomen twitches with pain. Must be anxiety, you tell yourself. Water droplets slither down your limbs, dragging the day into the drain.
You were thirteen when your father gave you “the talk.” At school, you’d already sat through two cycles of sex ed, where you’d learned about the importance of abstinence, the reasons why, in the modern era, women were only allowed to have children within heterosexual wedlock. You’d already listened to your history teacher - a balding white man in tortoise shell glasses and corduroy pants - as he waxed poetic about the election of 2016, the appointment of righteous judges, the elimination of funding for reproductive health, the gutting of protections for women and immigrants and queer and trans folks.
“I know about reproductive criminality,” you told your father, prickling with irritation. You were about to go to bed, and your arms smelled of Nivea. “Our teachers told us.”
“They didn’t tell you everything,” your father whispered. In preparation for your talk, he’d already powered down all his devices and nudged you over to the couch in the basement, where the cell phone signal was weakest. “They didn’t tell you that it’s different for you.”
“For me?” you asked, picking at the block printed pajamas your grandmother had sent you from India.
“You, and people like you,” your father said. “Brown and Black women.”
“Different?” you asked. “But how?”
“When Black and brown women – or, really, any Black and Brown people with wombs - are accused of reproductive crimes, they’re more likely to be found guilty. To have longer sentences,” your father said. “They’re less likely to have a fair trial.”
“Okay,” you replied, self-righteously. “Who cares, though? I’m not going to get pregnant.”
“Everyone makes mistakes,” your father said.
“Everyone except for me,” you replied.
The next day later, your father took you to the post office, an ivy-covered brick building down the street from your home. In the lobby, he paused in front of the wall of Wanted posters.
“Take a look,” he murmured.
But you were already looking. Rows and rows of stone-faced women, all of them dark skinned, dark haired, all of their images captioned with “Wanted for Murder.” Their surnames were Nigerian and Navajo, Mexican and Middle Eastern, Pueblo and Pakistani. They looked like Alma. They looked like you and your mother.
Your father’s warning broke open like a capsule of poison.
“Did mom have a wanted poster?” you asked, nervously running a hand through your coconut oiled curls.
“No,” your father said. “They didn’t need to search for her. They arrested her at home, in the basement. You were asleep on her lap.”
“Go to a doctor,” Alma says. It’s Sunday, and the two of you are huddled in your bedroom, door locked, router and devices off. Yellow and orange foliage blaze through cracks in the drawn blinds. You speak in whispers, your breath warm on each other’s ears. “A proper doctor.”
“There are proper doctors who do this?” you ask.
“Not here,” she says. “Overseas.”
“India,” you say. “I can go to India.”
Alma sips the coffee you made her in your Ikea French press, her lips restless on the rim of the mug.
“This is the only option, right?” you ask.
She shrugs and says, “You can wait it out. One in five pregnancies end in miscarriage.”
Your window is closed, but the glass isn’t thick enough to filter the cacophony of early evening in your neighborhood: dogs barking, children laughing, taxi brakes squealing. Top 40 music pirouettes out of the window of a parked car, its right taillight broken, its exhaust pipe spewing smoke.
When you see it, you automatically think, What an irresponsible driver. Until you realize that when it comes to irresponsibility, you are not in a place to criticize anyone.
“You broke up with Raj, right?” Alma asks.
“More like ghosted him,” you say. “We haven’t talked in weeks.”
“Good,” Alma says. “Keep it that way.”
“How do you know all this?” You ask, your voice barely audible. “Where to go? What to do?”
“How do you think?” Alma hisses. She stands up so abruptly that she spills the rest of her coffee on your carpet. Instead of apologizing, though, shoves her way out of your bedroom and heads for the front door.
“It’s none of my business! I’m sorry!” You call out, but it’s too late. Alma has already tugged on her coat and her shoes, has already slid into the hallway, slamming the door behind her.
Alone, you gulp the rest of your coffee. Its bitterness pools inside you, just north of your womb.
You last met Raj six weeks ago, on your twenty-eighth birthday, at a Thai restaurant halfway between the law firm where he was about to make partner and the educational publishing company where you were a highly valued copyeditor. The waitress seated you in a dimly lit booth with vinyl upholstery. At the cash register, sandalwood smoke rose from a stick of incense and circled a collection of ceramic cats.
Earlier that afternoon, Alma had spotted Raj in a jewelry store. She’d texted you picture of him leaned over a glass cabinet full of diamond rings. It should have made your heart leap. Instead, your shoulders sagged with relief.
That night, instead of studying the menu, you studied Raj’s face. His sculpted cheekbones, his wide nostrils, his cleft chin. You imagined moving into his studio apartment – he would never move into yours – and hanging your suits inside his closet, stretching a fitted sheet across his bed. In a few years, you pictured tossing used baby blankets and stained onesies into his washing machine, retrieving diapers from the top shelf of the closet where he now kept his tennis racket.
Raj waved the waiter over and ordered papaya salad and spring rolls for the table.
“And two Sapporos,” he told the waiter.
“Just one,” you said quickly. “None for me.”
“But you love Sapporo,” Raj said. You do not love Sapporo, or any other beer. You’d told Raj this enough times that you no longer had the energy to correct him.
Instead, you fibbed, “I just don’t feel like it tonight.”
Raj was, above all, a product of his times, a man socialized to believe that women are naïve creatures unfit to govern their own bodies. Every environment Raj passed through reinforced his humanity by dismantling yours. Still, out of all the men you’d dated – journalists and bankers, Black men and brown men, Native men and immigrants – Raj remained the least objectionable. He answered your texts. He never missed a date. On your birthday, he bought you roses. (You prefer hydrangeas, but he didn’t know that.) Most importantly, although he wouldn’t allow you to fill your birth control prescription – in the last five years, a cis-man’s signature had become a requirement for accessing the pill - during sex, he wore a condom.
When it came to marriage, Raj was a solid choice. A practical choice. If Raj proposed – when Raj proposed – you would say yes.
Saying no would have been a mistake.
After the waiter left, Raj clutched your hand, and said, “Listen. There’s something we should talk about.”
“Yes?” You asked, your pulse racing.
“I really like you,” he said. “You’re a good girl. And I’ve had so much fun with you.”
“I’ve had fun with you too,” you said. Subtly, you placed your free hand on your lap and squeezed the fabric of your pencil skirt, nervously.
“Which is why this is so hard to say,” he said. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t see you anymore. This is getting a little too serious, and I’m just not there yet.”
“Serious?” You asked. “What do you mean serious?”
“I mean, we see each other every week. You’ve left your toothbrush at my house,” he said, sighing heavily, as though your dental supplies were a huge burden. “I’m not in a place to have a real relationship now. You get it, right?’
“Oh,” you said, your heart sinking, your mind automatically recalculating what it would take to get Raj back, weighing what it would mean to start over, with someone new. “Yes, of course. I get it.”
“It’s not you,” Raj said. “It’s me.”
At first, you believed him. But then, the next day, you and Alma saw him at a bar with a wire thin blond woman hanging off of his arm. Her left hand shimmered with the weight of a brand new diamond ring.
After you dig your passport out of your meticulously organized filing cabinet and confirm that your Indian ten-year multiple reentry visa hasn’t yet expired, you flip open your laptop and navigate to the airline that you always take to visit your grandmother. At the “destination” dropdown bar, however, you pause, realizing that although you’ve been to India a handful of times, you’ve never actually been to an Indian hospital.
Where, in India, is the safest place to get an abortion? Which city will look the least suspicious on your credit card bill? Where can you go without your relatives finding out – without your father finding out – the true purpose of your trip?
Nervously, you enter “medical tourism India” into the search bar, hoping the phrase doesn’t tip off whatever surveillance technique the government has instituted to monitor wombed people like you. As the result loads, your phone rings, its screen flashing with a picture of your father grinning into the camera, his glasses halfway down his nose, his mouth folded into a grin.
“Hello kanna,” He says. “Are you free Friday? The temple is having a Deepavali dinner, but Deepak Uncle and Sheela Aunty say they’re coming.”
“This Friday?” You ask, clicking on a link to a group of hospitals in eastern India. When you realize that they specialize in gastroenterology, you snap the virtual window closed. “Sorry, can’t. I’ve got this work thing.”
“Fine. Abandon me then,” your father says. Sheela Aunty and Deepak Uncle are extremely conservative. Your father hates dining with them alone.
“I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” you say, clicking on a page advertising a hospital in Chennai that turns out to specialize in orthopedic surgery.
“What’s going on at work?” your father asks.
“We have a – um, a training,” you say. It pains you, the lying, the leaving. But if your father knows where you’re going, and you somehow get caught, he’d be arrested as an accomplice.
“Hmmm,” Your father says. In the background, you hear sizzling oil, popping mustard seeds. Your stomach rumbles. “Ok then. How’s Raj?”
“Fine,” you say nonchalantly. You haven’t yet told your father you’ve broken up. You don’t want to hear the disappointment in his voice. To face the consequences of your poor judgement.
As your father rambles on about Raj, you click on a link to a hospital in Mumbai, and then sit up straighter. There, in the corner of the screen, is a link labeled, “Abortions for reproductive refugees.”
“All this to say, I believe you have to start discussing your future,” your father says. “Have you two discussed marriage?”
“Dad!” You say, bile rising in your throat. You hover your mouse over the hospital link, wishing you could click on it, wishing you could access whatever information it contains, whatever comfort it might provide.
“What?” your father asks. “You’ve always wanted kids. And, in the United States, you have to be married to a man to have them. Raj would make fine father, don’t you think?”
Suddenly, it’s all too much. The lies you’ve had to tell your family, tell yourself. The hiding and sneaking around. The rejection, the disappointment, the pain. Frustration and anxiety and anger howl through you with a deafening roar and your whole body begins to shake, uncontrollably. Beneath the computer table, your legs quiver, your thighs twitch. Still clenching your mouse, your hands shake so hard they rattle.
They shake so hard, in fact, that, inadvertently, you click on the forbidden link. In an instant, the web page unfurls on your screen: a banner reading “Abortions for Reproductive Refugees,” a series of photos of women smiling from hospital beds, a phone number to call for assistance. Before you can look at it properly, though, it flashes closed, leaving behind a message that reads, “This web site is forbidden by the government of the United States of America.”
“Shit!” you yell.
“Honey?” Your father asks, voice laced with concern. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Your stomach heaves. Your head spins. The afternoon’s coffee gushes up your throat.
Without answering your father, you hang up and hurl yourself into the bathroom, vomiting into the sink. As you rinse off your face, cramps crash through your abdomen, wetness seeps between your legs.
When you pull your pants down, your underwear is full of blood.
The day before her sixteenth birthday – and a month before you and Alma started ninth grade - Alma’s sister Gabriela held a funeral for her baby. You wore a black polyester dress that left a collar of itchy welts around your neck, a pair of kitten heels your father polished to a dark shine. Throughout the service, which was held at her family church, Alma clutched your sweaty hand.
Instead of reciting some kind of eulogy, the priest gave a sermon about the importance of celibacy before marriage. When he spoke, you couldn’t keep your eyes off of the doll-sized coffin displayed on the dais.
“Why is it closed?” You asked. Alma’s abuela’s funeral had an open casket. You’d been afraid to be in the same room as the body. Alma, on the other hand, had kissed her grandmother’s corpse on both cheeks.
“There’s no body,” Alma said. “Gabriela had a miscarriage. She was nine weeks along. We’re only having a funeral because it’s the law.”
“It is?” You asked. “Since when?”
Rolling her eyes, Alma asked, “Don’t you read the newspaper? Like, ever?”
She knew you didn’t. Newspapers, you’d told Alma, were for people who didn’t have the sense to prevent unwanted pregnancies. People who couldn’t control their emotions, their desires. People like Gabriela. Like your mother.
Not people like you.
On the first day of school, Alma arrived at the bus stop alone.
“Where’s Gabriela?” You asked.
“In Tamaulipas with my tía,” Alma said.
“What?” You asked. “Why?”
Alma sighed and said, “You really don’t understand anything.”
You run your underwear under the faucet. The blood that runs off of it isn’t like your usual menstrual blood, red and clumpy and reeking of iron. This blood is a brown, a muddy sludge that reeks of decay. Your period blood smells like life. This blood smells like death.
After you clean yourself up, you pull on a pair of your softest pajamas and massage your most expensive lotion into your skin. Gratitude washes over you. Your body, you think, has saved you. Saved you from committing a crime. Saved you from implicating your loved ones in your mistakes. Under the covers, your muscles unclench, your stomach stills. Exhaustion washes over you.
I’m safe now, you tell yourself. No one can hurt me. I’ve done nothing wrong.
Except that you have done something wrong. The memory washes over you, keeping you awake.
The night you saw Raj walk into a bar with his new fiancée – a woman whose perfect hair matched her perfect skin, whose perfect wardrobe matched her perfect race – you knew you should stay home. Instead, after work, you shimmied into a bright red, A-line dress you’d been saving for a special occasion, slathered yourself with French perfume you’d splurged on at duty free, and took yourself out to a bar in downtown DC where the drinks were named after dead white movie stars.
Physically, you coursed with adrenaline. Mentally, you were exhausted. Exhausted from doing everything right. Exhausted from being sensible. Exhausted from the effort of not being your mother. From being yourself.
You paid for your first gin and tonic. A slender, sandy-haired man with hairy knuckles paid next for your next three. You don’t remember the sound of his voice, the color of his eyes, or his name. You don’t remember leaving the bar, or letting yourself into your apartment, or taking off your clothes. Or taking off his.
You do remember the rich, sweet smell of the skin lining his collar bone, the muscles of his back arching beneath your hands. The press of his lips along the perfumed line of your neck.
“A condom,” you’d gasped, as he’d run his rough palms between your thighs.
“Don’t have one,” he’d said, his mouth buried in your navel.
Gasping, you’d pulled open your nightstand drawer and handed him a plastic packet.
“Put it on,” you said, seconds before you felt him inside you, before your abdomen rippled with pleasure.
The next morning, you woke up to sore thighs, a headache, an empty bed. And also, to the condom, buried beneath the sheets, still in its wrapper.
You fall asleep just long enough to be startled awake by the wail of police sirens, by red and blue lights renting the bruised-purple sky. Three white men pound at your door, fist-falls like bullets. Disoriented, you try to sit up, to pull yourself out of bed. But before you are fully conscious, they have already rammed down your door and burst into your bedroom, they have already raked aside your quilt to reveal your weary body curled in a puddle of blood.
At first, you think there is an intruder, that the police are protecting you. After all, their Kevlar vests, their helmets, the guns strapped to their waists – these couldn’t possibly be for you. What would necessitate so much protection? Certainly not a barely awake woman in a studio apartment bleeding through the pajamas set she fished out of the bargain bin at Target.
But it is for you, all of the equipment and the screaming and the aggression. One of the men – a red head with a crooked nose - snaps your wrists into handcuffs. A blonde one with a black eyes grips your elbow and says, “You are under arrest for the murder of an unborn child.”
The third hovers in the corner of the room, stroking the black stubble on his chin, wondering, you imagine, what to do.
“But I didn’t murder anyone,” you say, as the blonde one hauls you out of bed. “I swear, I didn’t. I can explain.”
The blonde raises his voice and tells you, “You have the right to remain silent.”
“Can I at least change my pad?” You ask. Instead of answering, they pull you to your door and gesture to your shoes. You tug on your sneakers and realize, Of course they won’t let me change my pad. My blood is evidence.
Evidence of the crime I didn’t commit.
On the sidewalk, the autumn wind knocks goosebumps onto your forearms. Blood seeps out of your saturated pad, slithers down your thighs. Your tennis shoes squeak against the sidewalk, whining and desperate.
Who was it that betrayed you? Was it the man at the clinic? Alma? Your father? Did the link you clicked send an alert to the police? Or was it a stranger, a neighbor who heard you through the walls, or one of the teenagers in the Seven Eleven parking lot?
In the squad car, you pull away, your uterus throbbing. You glance, one last time, at your apartment building. Curtains slide across glass. Blinds snap, rotate closed. Your neighbors turn away, and you don’t blame them. Sometimes, other people’s mistakes are just too heavy to hold.
Contributor Notes
Mathangi Subramanian is a neurodiverse South Asian American author, mother, and musician currently based in Denver, Colorado. Her novel A People’s History of Heaven was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner, the Center for Fiction First Book Award, and the TATA prize. Her middle grades book Dear Mrs. Naidu won the South Asia Book Award. Her essays and op-eds have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., The Washington Post, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. An instructor at VONA and the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, she holds a doctorate in education from Columbia University Teachers College.
