Every Little Thing in the World (27 page)

“Doctor,” I whispered. I looked at her name tag. “Dr. Colwin.”

“Yes?”

It had been so long since I said it out loud. And then I wondered if I had
ever
said it out loud. Natalia, after all, had been with me when I took the test. And of course I'd never told Tommy, or Cody, or anyone else. So it sounded so foreign, so incorrect, when I opened my mouth and whispered, in a tone that was more question than statement, “I'm pregnant?”

Dr. Colwin cocked her head. I saw her examining my features the way I'd examined hers.

“What's your name?” she said.

“Sydney Biggs,” I whispered.

She scribbled it across her pad without looking down. “And how old are you, sweetheart?”

“Sixteen,” I said.

She smiled a sad, closed-lip kind of smile and called over her shoulder to a nurse. “Betty?” she said. “Will you please bring Sydney to curtain five?”

I waited behind curtain five on the other side of the ER. A nurse had brought me there and drawn blood. Then I sat, very still, for a long, long time. Finally Dr. Colwin pulled the curtain aside. She smiled at me again and put on a pair of rubber gloves.

“So, Sydney,” she said. “Do you want to tell me about this situation?”

“There's not much to tell,” I said. “There was this guy, and now I'm pregnant. I took a test before I left for camp.”

“And when was that?”

“Almost six weeks ago.”

“Okay,” she said. “And do you know what you want to do about this?”

I paused, staring at the wall behind us. “Did you test my blood?” I asked her. “Am I really pregnant?”

“Yes, sweetheart. You're really pregnant.”

Until that second, throughout everything, I had held on to the shred of possibility that the whole thing was a giant mistake. Even though I had known it wasn't, known it in my heart for all these weeks, hearing the words made the world fall away from underneath me. Bright fluorescent lights, civilization—so much less real than the world of lakeside forests we had left behind. I wished I could go back there and just continue as if none of this had ever happened.

“I can't tell my mother,” I whispered. “And I don't have any money.”

“Money for what?” said Dr. Colwin.

“An abortion.”

“You don't need money,” she said. “You've got the Canada Health Act. Abortion is a medically required procedure. If that's what you want.”

“A medically required procedure,” I whispered. The words sounded so absolving. I could almost push away Natalia's phrase,
the love of your life,
echoing ominously inside my exhausted head.

I leaned back on the table while Dr. Colwin examined me. Her fingers probed gently, tenderly. I felt so tired, I could almost have fallen asleep with my feet in the stirrups. All I wanted, finally, was for this to be out of my hands.

Outside the window, morning had started with a slow, gray light. “Okay,” Dr. Colwin said. “You're under twelve weeks. We can schedule you for an abortion this afternoon, if that's what you want.”

Before I had a chance to nod, the nurse—Betty—stuck her head into the curtain. Dr. Colwin stepped outside with her, and I could hear them talking in low voices. Then their footsteps moved away, soft soles over linoleum, and I could feel a new kind of fear burbling up inside me. I could tell there was some sort of a problem, and I cursed myself for believing that one single thing in the world would ever go easy for me, ever go right. It felt like hours before Dr. Colwin returned. Her cheeks looked mottled and flushed, almost like she'd been crying.

“Sydney,” she said, “we have a problem.”

“What?” I said. “What?” I had been so close. My life, so close to returning to its correct track. How could I go back, in that other direction, when I'd been so close?

“I didn't realize you're not Canadian,” she said. “You don't have a health card. I can't schedule the procedure without a health card unless you can pay for it.”

“How much does it cost?” I asked, even though I didn't have a penny. I guess I felt, after everything, I should at least find out how much it would cost to solve this problem.

“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” Dr. Colwin said. It sounded like such a ridiculous amount, piddling and impossible at the same time.

“But listen,” I said. “All the other kids, my friends, they're American too. You're treating them. They don't have health cards.”

“The camp's going to pay for their treatment,” said Dr. Colwin. “They can get reimbursed by their insurance company. But American insurance doesn't cover abortion, unless it's medically necessary.”

Medically necessary. As easily as those words had been given to me, now they were taken away. I stared at the sympathetic doctor, not knowing what to do.

“You didn't tell anyone at the camp, did you?” I said.

“No, I sure didn't,” she said. “And I sure won't, no matter what you decide. But Sydney, you are going to have to make some decisions here.”

“I don't have any money,” I whispered.

“I know,” Dr. Colwin said. She had that look again, like she might start crying, and I thought that maybe if I just sat there, not saying a word, she would offer to pay for it herself. Or maybe she could take up a collection from the nurses and other doctors. Ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, and we would have the money in no time.

We sat awhile in silence, and I could almost see the possibilities running through her head while they ran through mine. My stomach grumbled, and my muscles ached from the long,
hard row. And before long I realized that I knew two things, definitely and without a doubt. The first: My abortion was not Dr. Colwin's responsibility. It was mine. The second: After having come this far—this close—there was no way on earth I could walk out of this hospital still pregnant.

Betty brought me a cordless phone. First I called my mother's work number, but she wasn't there. Probably she had spent a long early morning on the phone with my father, and people from Camp Bell, hearing about what had happened.

There was no answer at home, either, so I called her cell. She answered on the first ring. Her voice sounded breathless and oddly young.

“Mom,” I said, “it's Sydney.”

“Sydney.” Her voice cracked in a way that made me want to cry. “Sydney, where are you? Are you all right?”

I knew how worried she must have been since getting that late-night call. I knew the words she wanted to hear most in the world:
Yes, Mom, I'm fine
. But I also knew if I said that, I wouldn't be able to continue on and tell her the truth.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom, I'm pregnant.”

I could hear her breath suck in. “Oh, Syd,” she said. “Oh, honey. When? How?”

I ignored that last, obvious question and said, “A little while before I left.”

I waited for her to ask why I hadn't told her, but she didn't say anything. I guessed in that moment she knew exactly why
I hadn't told her, because the quiet on the other end sounded more sad than angry.

“Mom,” I said. “I want an abortion.”

“Honey,” she said, in that same watery and sympathetic voice. “Of course you do. Of course.”

I hate to say it: It broke my heart a little, hearing her say that. Like, what other thing could you possibly want, faced with the nightmare of having a child?

But then there was this little pause, and I could tell she was about to speak, and I knew exactly what she would say. Something she used to say when I was little but hadn't said in a long, long time.

“Sydney,” she said. “You're my whole heart. You know that, don't you?”

I nodded at the phone. Because I did know it, as well as I knew that I myself wasn't anywhere near ready—to have my whole heart outside my body, walking around in the world. Someday, maybe. But right now, I needed it for myself. I needed this to be over.

And by evening it was. I lay in a recovery room—far away from my fallen tribe—coming out of the anesthesia from my D & C. Dr. Colwin didn't perform the procedure, but afterward she came in and sat with me awhile. She even held my hand. Before she left, she leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“Good-bye, Sydney,” she said. “I'm glad to have met you.”

“Thank you,” I said, never in my life meaning the words so completely. “Thank you.”

chapter fifteen

whole again

The next night found me alone at base camp while the rest of my group still recovered at the Keewaytinook Falls hospital. Mr. Dickerson and Mrs. Potter had motored Bucket Head and all our equipment back there. The dog had been waiting for me at the pier, and my pack had been waiting for me on a bunk in the cabin closest to the dining hall. Meredith's and Natalia's packs sat on the bottom bunks next to me. I moved Natalia's to the far end of the cabin, then walked to the dining hall to eat dinner with the camp secretary and the camp cook and a few maintenance men. They thumped me on the back and smiled as I piled one plate of cold cuts for me and another for Bucket Head.

After dinner, I carried the day's worth of hospital-quality sanitary napkins in a paper bag down to the fire pit by the lake. There was nobody to stop me from building a fire—me, feeling like the lone surviving camper from Group Four. I used the foolproof technique that Jane had shown us, a small tepee of twigs followed by slightly thicker sticks, and then—once the embers had taken—a small log. When the flames climbed and
crackled toward the sky, I placed the bag on top of it, participating just this once in the ritual—though there were plenty of clean, unused trash cans I could have used instead.

Earlier, in the bathroom mirror, my face had stared back at me, weirdly unfamiliar. My eyes in a deeply tanned face seemed paler and not as large. My hair curled more crazily and hopelessly than I could ever have remembered, and streaks of blond shot through the dark, unruly mass. My white T-shirt had gone gray, stained with blueberries and dirt. I looked like some kind of girl Tarzan. Who could guess what she'd been through, that primitive girl in the mirror, after all those years in the jungle?

Now I sat on a log with the dog at my feet. I watched the smoke climb into the sky. Carrying so much away with it. Carrying possibility and sorrow, I couldn't deny. But at the same time, carrying my life—my future, my self—back home to me.

I stood up and walked to the water. It was a clear, starry night. I heard loons and crickets. Mosquitoes feasted on my bare arms, but I barely even felt them anymore. The lake lapped the shore, soaking my sneakers, and I knelt down to fill my palms with water. I splashed it on my face, then filled my palms again and drank in a deep slurp. The dirt on my hands made the water taste gritty, salty.

In a few minutes I would douse the fire. I would walk up to the bathroom and shower away the grime and oil of three and a half weeks. The blood of more weeks than that would spiral
down the drain, as it now spiraled in the smoke, climbing back up toward the sky.

In the light of the fire, I took off my clothes and walked into the water. The lake gathered around my body in a clingy, delicious chill—crisp and heavy enough to bring me down, if only I weren't so strong: strong enough to reclaim my life, and stay afloat.

I remembered then the last lines of that Robert Frost poem, the one that Natalia had tried to recall back at the abandoned village. And the words—about what's discovered after losing your way—filled me up with the greatest finality, and the most complete relief. I closed my eyes and let myself sink just under the surface, while the last lines of the poem surrounded me as entirely as the lake. I lunged up, out of the water, and after I took in a deep, soul-cleansing breath, I spoke the words out loud.

“‘Here are your waters and your watering place,'” I called up to the starlit sky. “‘Drink and be whole again beyond con-fusion.'”

chapter sixteen

northern lights

For the other campers, the return to base camp felt like a celebration. Everyone was so happy—to have toilets and beds, and showers, and hot meals served indoors, with no plates or pans to scrub in the lake. By afternoon the camp was full of campers, freshly showered but still wearing their filthy clothes.

Group Four arrived by motorboat somewhere near evening. I walked down to the launching pier to greet them. They looked amazingly healthy, considering the pumped stomachs and intravenous fluids. The hospital staff had done laundry for them, so they were the only campers wearing clean clothes. They all had thick gauze bandages on each arm. They stepped off the boat one at a time and gave me a hug. They smelled like the strangest combination of antiseptic and campfire smoke.

Mick got off the boat before Natalia. He swept me into a bear hug that cracked the back of my ribs. I hugged him back, thinking how familiar his scent had become to me—the faraway but lingering odor of Tide, the acrid scent of Brendan's Off !, and his own indefinable sweat, a very personal fingerprint.

I waited for a second after he let go. Natalia stood in front of me, her hair pulled off her face by a cloth headband. She had her hands in the back pockets of her denim skirt. “Guess what?” she said in her old cafeteria voice.

“What?”

“I looked at Jane's chart,” she said. “She's only seventeen.”

“No way.”

“Born exactly ten months before me,” Natalia said. “I knew it. I knew she was no kind of adult.”

“Did you look at Silas's chart?”

“Yup. Nineteen years old.”

“Now if you could just tell me if they've been having sex,” I said, and Natalia laughed. Then she caved in and hugged me. “Go for a walk?” she said.

“Sure.”

We'd had such good weather. All summer the sky had been kind to us, offering few days of rowing against headwinds, or sleeping and traveling under rain. Today was no exception. Mrs. Potter had told me that the canoe trails around Lake Keewaytinook were established over thousands of years by the Teme-Augama Anishnabai: the Deep Water People. Their ancient path, where Natalia and I now walked, was dappled with sunlight, a lovely warmth beating on the back of our necks, along with a cooling breeze. We couldn't see a single cloud above us, not the barest wisp of white, only a clear blue sky. Tomorrow would be August. The air felt a
little crisper, a little colder. Fall would come early here in the north.