What had the brochure said? You live with the choices you make. I would live with this, not the fetus but the memory of sucking it away. It was mine, this plastic tube and its whirring, like an animal emerging from the paper gown, the hooded darkness of my crotch. I’d done things, and now these things were going to make me hurt.

I came up slowly, which was a good thing, because the procedure ended before the hurting did. They wheeled me into a recovery room where women sat in blue reclining chairs against the wall, like patients in a hair salon. A man with green eyes and a long beard handed me some ginger ale and a few crackers. The pains were like sutures holding me together. Each one ached along its seam. Another cramp tugged at these seams and cinched them tighter, like my whole gut was a drawstring purse. I asked the bearded man for a pain pill. “In a few minutes,” he said. “Get something in your stomach first.”

I sat there for a while, I’m not sure how long, until the same man stood beside me and cupped his hand over my shoulder. He offered me orange juice and a paper bag with two jars of pills, some Advils and a rattling case of antibiotics. There was a pamphlet titled: What to Expect After Your Procedure. In little letters beneath: Electric Vacuum Aspiration. There was a column called Physical and another called Emotional. I clutched my paper bag with two fingers, knuckles large and quaking. I felt the paper softening from my palms.

Before I left, Luella made sure somebody was taking me home. “You need an escort,” she said. “You know the rules.”

It was true; I had been told. I said somebody was coming. But this wasn’t the case. I would duck into the deli two doors down alone, and buy one of those cookies as large as a fist, and sit as long as I needed, until I felt better.

“That’s good, honey.” Luella turned back to her computer screen. She didn’t want to break open my lie; she probably got it all the time. Her nails clicked the keyboard. She wouldn’t be the one who saved me from my own life. She was just a stranger with an honest smile. She was someone’s daughter, maybe someone’s sister or someone’s mother—maybe all three—and she’d heard all kinds of terrible stories about how much it hurt to be a woman. I could see it in her face, the insistent beauty of her painted nails, that she still believed in the end of the day, the possibility of getting there. She’d already heard so many tales about aching. I could tuck myself into them like body hollows left on mattresses, easily, without saying a word.

Tilly was quiet for a long time. Her skin was dry and smooth but her eyes looked weary. Finally, she said, “That’s a terrible thing, getting rid of a baby.”