Carver gripped his cane and climbed out of the Olds, locking it behind him. As he approached the demonstrators, they stared at him. He squinted against the sun and stared back, trying to place faces, but he couldn’t remember if any of these people had been at the Women’s Light Clinic the morning of the bombing,
The sign the young girl was carrying did indeed depict a dead fetus. There was no lettering on the sign. Other signs read KILLER LIVES HERE, DOCTOR MURDER, and BABY KILLER.
A tall, skinny man on the other side of the street lifted a bullhorn to his mouth, danced around in a tight circle to gather energy and attention, and screamed, “Stop slaughtering the unborn!” He screamed it again, louder. Then over and over at a pitch of high emotion.
The demonstrators repeated the appeal after him, and the pace of those who were walking back and forth with signs and wooden crosses picked up. They repeated the “stop slaughtering” chant three or four times, apparently prompted by Carver’s arrival. For all they knew, he was from the press. The rest of the block was as bustling as a sunny ghost town. Who could blame anyone for staying inside? The demonstrators were intimidating the Benedicts’ neighbors.
Finally the skinny man stopped gyrating and shouting, lowered the bullhorn and placed it on the ground, and the knot of demonstrators fell silent.
Up close they looked sweaty, miserable, and determined.
“Are you with Operation Alive?” Carver asked no one in particular as he approached the mouth of the driveway.
A shirtless, middle-aged man wearing khaki shorts and an NRA baseball cap with an oversize bill glared at him and yelled, “Stop the slaughter!” again and again. The woman behind him joined in the mantra, now that the guy across the street with the bullhorn had run out of breath. She was wearing a faded T-shirt lettered THE QUICKEST WAY TO A MAN’S HEART IS THROUGH HIS CHEST. The young girl with the bloody fetus sign was sporting a Grateful Dead shirt. Back at the cottage, Carver had a Jerry Garcia designer tie in his closet. Things sure were getting mixed up.
No one touched Carver or tried to block his way as he turned into the driveway and walked toward the low brick house with the wide tinted windows. He thought he saw movement behind one of the windows but couldn’t be sure. Mostly what he saw in the windows were reflections. Behind him, the guy with the megaphone was at it again, maybe with another slogan, but from even this short distance, it was difficult to make out what he was saying or what the demonstrators were shouting in response.
Carver stepped up onto the porch and used the tip of his cane to press the doorbell button.
Almost immediately Leona Benedict opened the door.
“I was watching you approach,” she said, “in case somebody out there did anything to you.”
“They’re loud,” Carver said, “but they don’t seem to be building up to action. Maybe it’s too hot.”
“I hope so. I hope it gets even hotter for them.”
Leona stepped back and Carver entered the house for the second time.
“Is your husband home?” he asked.
“No. You just missed him. I don’t know where he went.” A whiff of gin fumes carried to him as she spoke. In Carver’s experience, the drug of choice for lonely women.
He noticed a folded blue garment bag with red trim lying on the floor near the door.
“I was packing,” Leona said, seeing his gaze fall on the bag. She was slurring her words slightly now. The control she’d exercised to answer the door and appear sober was slipping. He stood silently, and when she saw he wasn’t going to comment or leave, she said, “You gotta excuse me while I finish. A cab’s on the way to pick me up.”
“Where are you going?” Carver asked, leaving the elegantly furnished living room and following her down the hall to a bedroom, as if she’d invited him to watch her finish packing.
“Away from this place.” She resumed transferring lingerie from a dresser drawer to a hard-sided blue suitcase open on the bed.
“To get away from the demonstrators?”
“To get away from my husband,” she said, throwing a bra into the suitcase as if for emphasis.
Carver had no idea what to say about that.
She continued with her packing, examining the contents of a small, felt-lined jewelry box she’d removed from the drawer, as if trying to decide which pieces to take with her. She closed the lid and placed the entire box in the suitcase. “Away from his long hours and macho determination to keep working while he plays the hero and expounds on the nobility of his calling. I’ve had enough of his ego and self-importance, and I’m afraid for my own life.” A pair of sweat socks followed the bra and jewelry box into the suitcase. “I’m finally leaving him.”
“Finally? As in forever?”
“As in forever,” she repeated. “As in for eternity.” She pointed toward the front of the house and the chanting demonstrators, barely audible in the bedroom. “I’ve tried to live with that kind of thing, but I can’t. Whatever I try, no matter how hard I attempt to ignore them, it works for a while, but only a while. And then it gets worse than ever before. The pressure, what they do to you, it builds up in you, and eventually they win. They know that. It’s why they’re out there. They know they can outlast people like me.”
“But not your husband?”
“Oh, no. They might think so, but they’re mistaken. They won’t outlast Saint Benedict!” She slammed down the lid on the suitcase, lifted it slightly for a second to poke a corner of material back inside, then latched it and tried to drag the suitcase off the side of the bed and onto the floor.
It was too heavy for her, and she emitted a frustrated, boozy sigh. Carver walked to the bed and helped her stand the suitcase on the floor. He saw that it had plastic wheels. She unfolded a small handle from it and rolled it into the living room to leave it near the garment bag.
Carver followed. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “you seem too angry to be thinking clearly right now. Maybe you should calm down, then see if you still want to leave.”
She stared at him, her lower lip trembling. “Men! You think this is sudden, that the geeks outside are the final straw and I broke. Mister, I’ve been contemplating this for months. Years!” She walked to a walnut desk and pulled open a large drawer. From the drawer she pulled out a sheaf of newspaper clippings and handed them to Carver. “Look at this-my collection. You’ll get some idea what our marriage has been like for the past year, and even before that. You’ll understand why I’ve had my fill and have to get out.”
There was a burst of noise from the demonstrators, then the sound of a car in the driveway. A horn gave two curtailed beeps, as if not wanting to further disturb the neighbors.
Leona opened the front door about six inches and peered out. “That’s my cab,” she said. She opened the door all the way and stood in the doorway.
A few seconds later she backed up a step, and a wizened, gray cab driver appeared and entered the house. He glanced at Carver, then hoisted the garment bag and heavy hard-sided suitcase and lugged them toward his cab, out of sight.
Leona paused for a moment in the doorway, looking at Carver, who was standing with newspapers clippings in each hand.
“If you see my husband,” she said in a flat, decisive voice, “tell him I didn’t say good-bye to him or this house or this city. Tell him I walked away and didn’t look back.”
She picked up a large white purse from a nearby chair and stalked out, leaving the door hanging open as she disappeared from sight. For a woman who’d obviously drunk way too much, and on such a hot morning, she moved steadily and in a straight line. Carver guessed she’d been a regular drinker for a long time, and he wondered if Dr. Benedict, busy with his calling and his patients, had noticed.
He heard car doors slam, then the cab drive away. There was another burst of shouting from the mouth of the driveway as the vehicle slowed and made its turn into the street. The man with the bullhorn shouted something Carver couldn’t make out.