“How do the women find you?”

“They don’t. They go through people Palmer has helping us. They’re the ones who collect the money and make the arrangements. And there are only two people who bring women to the town house. We wear surgical greens, caps, and masks so we can’t be identified if we ever have to stand before one of our patients in a police lineup.”

A steady drizzle began to fall.

“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.

“Palmer, another resident from Presbyterian, and one from Mount Sinai.” Glenna pulled up the hood of her bright yellow rain jacket. “I’m the only med student.”

“Do you know how to do this?”

“I’ll do the endometrial aspirations. They’re done when a woman’s about a month late with her period. I thread a tube into her uterus. The outside end is attached to an empty syringe, and using suction, I extract the mucous lining the uterine wall. It’s simple. Lots of times, the woman’s not even pregnant.”

“What about the other kind—the dilation and curettage?”

“Palmer and the other residents will do those,” she said. “That’s for a pregnancy up to twelve weeks. The woman has to be anesthetized, and you insert a curette—a metal loop on a long handle—into her uterus and scrape the lining. You have to be careful or you’ll puncture the uterine walls. I know how to do it, but I won’t. It feels—”

We stopped walking and watched the raindrops dimpling the water of the creek. Glenna slid her arm under my poncho and around my waist.

I said, “Feels?”

“At twelve weeks, the fetus has eyelids, and you can see fingers and toes, and the external ears. It would feel like—I won’t do it. The aspirations are different. That feels like birth control.”

We stood in the cozy gloominess of the rain. Glenna said, “You understand why I want to help with this?”

“Your friend Vicky?”

“My friend Vicky. I’ve been thinking about her lately. I even had a dream about her two nights ago. She was onstage at camp singing ‘Moon River,’ and I was sitting with you in the audience and waving at her. She wouldn’t look at us, and I kept waving, but she still wouldn’t look. The more she ignored us, the angrier I got.”

I pulled Glenna closer to me.

“I wish Vicky were alive. And even with what I know as a med student, if I’d done her abortion, she probably would be.”

It was raining harder now. Fog was wafting over the creek and swirling through the trees.

“You don’t see me, do you?” Glenna said.

This sounded like the start of a fight, so gently I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Glenna the looker. Glenna the smart girl, the med student. That’s all you see.”

Her perceptiveness caught me off guard, and before I could come up with an answer, she said, “You think it’s wrong, what I’m doing, don’t you?”

“Not if it’s done early. First of all, like you said, sometimes with the endometrial aspirations the woman’s not pregnant. If she is, it beats having a child no one wants. And since women are going to have abortions whether they’re legal or not, it’s best that they’re done by people who know what they’re doing or they’ll—”