I tried to play it cool, but my relief must have shown on my face, because that was the first time I saw her grin, as sly and delighted as a child who knows all your secrets.

Then she was gone.

Chapter 5

I MET WITH GLENNA a week later at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. She referred to it as “P and S” and suggested that we talk in an empty classroom when I told her that our interview would go smoother without interruptions. Glenna was eighteen minutes late, and her pantyhose must have fit because she did not remove them.

During the interview, I discovered that Glenna was a third-year student, done with her classes and med boards, and beginning her clinical rotations.

“I’m doing psychiatry now,” she said. “It’s nine to five, hardly any overnight on call, and weekends are usually free. Medicine is next, at the end of October, and that’s a drag.”

The huskiness of her voice didn’t help my concentration, but unlike our interview in the cafeteria, I managed to ask plenty of questions and to scrawl enough notes on NYMSRAL to fill the N volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I said, “You never told me why you got involved in abortion reform.”

“After Palmer started treating women who’d been to the illegal butcher shops, he joined NYMSRAL and asked me to help.”

“So it was Palmer asking?”

“Great tie,” she said.

“Thanks.”

It was a Peter Max, with a colorful pattern of planets and stars, and a prime feature of my reporter’s ensemble: safari jacket with my hair combed over the collar, blue work shirt, denim bell-bottoms, and new low-cut construction boots from Smitty’s Army-Navy.

“There’s more to it,” Glenna said, and undid the rubber tube that was laced through a buttonhole of her lab jacket. “Do you have to quote everything I say?”

“No. It can be off-the-record.” I thought Glenna was going to tell me that she’d had an abortion, and I wondered about the guy who got her pregnant. What he was like. How I compared.

Glenna said, “You have hazel eyes.”

“That’s what it says on my driver’s license.”

Glenna laughed, a muted, fleeting sound. “I’ve never told anyone this before. My parents knew. It was years ago.”

I watched Glenna pull the tubing out of the buttonhole.

“Her name was Vicky Wyland. We met at sleepaway camp in the Poconos when we were fifteen. She was small and shy with short blond hair. The girls in our bunk thought she was weird; I thought she was cool. When everyone was reading romance comics or movie magazines, Vicky was reading a history of the Incas. When we were making lanyards, Vicky was painting watercolors of winged canoes flying over the lake. I liked talking with her, and she liked that I wasn’t shy and danced with boys.”

Glenna wrapped the rubber tube around her index finger. “Vicky used to disappear after dinner, and I finally found her in the woods behind the mess hall. She was playing a guitar and singing ‘The Water Is Wide.’ The purity of her voice was hypnotic. Vicky stopped when she saw me and said, ‘I borrowed the guitar from the office. I’m not very good.’ I said, ‘No, you’re great.’ She didn’t believe me, but I began going to the woods with her to listen.”