Glenna turned. She had on a white turtleneck under a charcoal-gray herringbone jacket.

“This is confusing,” she said. “I feel—I think I might still be mad at you. And I’m angry at myself for—”

“For?”

“For still being mad,” she said, and tried to smile, but didn’t quite make it. “Hold on to my coat while I find the ladies’ room.”

I watched her wend between the tables, her hips swaying in smartly tailored dove-gray slacks, and suddenly I had the dizzying sensation of bouncing from the past to the present and back again. I stood there, unable to move, frozen by memory’s guile, its sad and evil magic.

Finally, I went and sat at a table by the fireplace.

Part II

Past

Chapter 4

THE FIRST TIME I met Glenna Rising, she was thirty-nine minutes late. I waited for her inside the main entrance of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, while doctors and nurses passed, patients in wheelchairs rolled by, and visitors strode in with baskets of fruit swaddled in cellophane.

At last, I saw a young woman in a white lab jacket with a stethoscope curled in a pocket and a section of rubber tubing looped through a buttonhole. She was smiling and walking toward me, every curve of her body as smooth as water. The sight of her was disconcerting, the helplessness I felt when confronted with her heartbreak of a face and all that maple-silk hair spilling past her shoulders.

“Oh, fuck a duck,” she said sweetly, after we’d exchanged names. “Am I late? I’ve got to remember to bring my watch.”

I almost asked her how she had been able to take a patient’s pulse, but my own was galloping off, and it was about to get worse. She led me to a dead-end corridor and pulled up her white skirt.

“Pantyhose are a hassle,” she said, her voice clipped and breathless, as though suppressing some private joke. “They fall down to your ankles and you waddle around like Old Mother Hubbard. I don’t need them to be interviewed, do I?”

It was a rhetorical question. After a cursory glance to make sure no one was in the hall, she stepped from her white sandals and peeled the offending nylon down her shapely legs.

“That’s better,” she said, cramming the pantyhose in a pocket of her lab jacket.

In the cafeteria line, Glenna described her organization: New York Medical Students for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. NYMSRAL consisted of med students, interns, and residents whose primary function was to provide legislators with data that could be used to sway votes in Albany. The organization had started out by doing a study for Assemblyman Bert Cohane, a Manhattan Democrat, who had pioneered the reform effort, which indicated that abortions could be performed without overnight hospitalization. At the moment, NYMSRAL was combing emergency rooms for victims of back-alley jobs and documenting the cases of cervical tears, perforated uteruses, chronic pelvic pain, severe hemorrhaging, and runaway infections—typically peritonitis or septic shock.