"By fighting."
"Before that. You've had training."
"I learned tai chi in a class about twenty years ago. I've been running since I was a kid. I was on the track team. But I wanted something different that kept me flexible and strengthened my upper body. Later on, I took a man out of the world who happened to be a black belt in aikido. He was being hunted hard, so I had to stay with him for several months to make him safe and teach him how to be the person he was going to be. You're a young girl, so you don't have to account for much time. Most people you meet will just assume you've been in school from the time you were five until now. It's much harder for a middle-aged man. He has to account for twenty or thirty years of history beyond that—jobs, wives, hobbies, friends and relatives, education, experiences. That's tricky. He has to account for what he knows, but also pretend he doesn't know certain things, or people will figure out where he must have come from. We used to have long talks. I would ask him to tell me stories about his imaginary life, and I'd try to pick holes in them. When we got tired of that, he would teach me aikido for five or six hours a day."
"You must have done more than that. I saw you fight."
"Not exactly. You saw me not-fight. This is fighting." She pretended to deliver a series of punches and kicks that were so fast that Linda could barely follow the movements. "That's karate, of course. That's called a kata, and it's a set routine you can go into in a certain situation. You work on a kata until you can do it correctly. Then you practice it in exactly the same way a few thousand times. After two thousand you can usually perform the movements well enough. Another two thousand times and you have it ingrained deeply enough so you might think to use it if you were attacked. After you've done it many more times, you can do it very fast. It takes two-tenths of a second for the eye to receive and transmit an image to the brain and the brain to interpret it. If you can deliver a punch or a kick faster than two-tenths of a second, then you can hit an opponent before he sees the blow coming."
"That's what you did that night. Why do you call it not-fighting?"
"I broke his knee before a fight could start, and then I ran away."
"But you could fight."
"Only because he didn't think I could. He thought I couldn't hurt him, so he didn't pay enough attention to me, or protect himself. There was a huge difference between us. No matter how much work I do, or how much I learn, I'm never going to be as strong as even the average out-of-shape man. He has at least seventy or eighty pounds on me, a lot of it muscle. I have to attack very fast, fight very dirty, and get back where he can't reach me. I can't stand around hitting him and letting him hit me. If he lands one good punch he'll break bones."
"But you beat him."
"No, I tricked him. That man saw the two of us, and what he was seeing was like a pair of little pussycats. You can go up to a hundred cats, one after the other, and they're all perfectly docile. Then you meet that one that looks the same, but suddenly it has its claws digging into your arm to hold on while it sinks its teeth all the way into your hand. That's me. I'm the one that bites."
"That's what I want to be," said Linda. "I want to be able to fight back."
"You don't want to fight," said Jane. "You want what I want, which is to get away."
"I guess that's true."
"I was planning on helping you with that. We'll start tomorrow after the appointment at the doctor's office."
The next day was cooler but bright and clear, with a breeze that seemed to Jane to be an early summer treat before the humidity set in. Jane drove Linda along East River Parkway to the edge of the University of Minnesota campus. When she reached Harvard Street she turned left and pointed at the big building that dominated the area. "That's it."
"That's what?"
"The hospital. The Fairview-University Medical Center."
"It's big. And impersonal."
"Two wonderful qualities that we really want right now."
"I was thinking of maybe a small, private kind of place where everybody knows me and stuff."
"I know this seems as though it ought to be about your preferences, but it isn't. When you're having a baby, you've got to prepare for the possibility that things are not going to go smoothly. If they don't, the place you want to be is a big urban hospital with lots of really good surgeons and pediatricians and specialists and fancy equipment and superbly trained staff. We'll go in and interview Dr. Molinari. If you don't love him, we'll keep looking."
Jane drove up Harvard Street until she came to the parking structure for the hospital. They parked and walked to the main building, then rode the elevator up with a pretty woman about thirty years old who looked about six months pregnant. The woman said to Linda, "When are you due?"
Linda shrugged. "Early fall. Late September, early October."
The woman said, "Are you with Dr. Kwan?"
"Molinari."
Jane stood with a fixed smile on her face. The woman craned her neck to look across her at Linda as though she were some obstacle like a piece of furniture. Even the way the woman held herself when she spoke, leaning close to Linda, made it clear she was speaking only to Linda. The elevator door opened, and Jane led the way down the hall to Dr. Molinari's office.
Inside the waiting room, Jane saw that there were five women in various stages of pregnancy waiting for Dr. Molinari or one of his partners. While Jane waited, she found herself studying them, wondering what made it so easy for them to conceive, when it didn't seem to be possible for her. Had she simply waited too long? That didn't seem to be it. Two of them were about Linda's age, but the other three looked older than Jane. As the nurse came to the doorway and called them, one by one, to go back to the examining rooms with her, Jane watched them and compared her body to theirs. Maybe it was all the exercise she had done for the past twenty years, the running and martial arts. Maybe the stress on her body had stimulated some receptor, released some unnoticed chemical, that told the body not to reproduce. There were all of those teenaged gymnasts who never got their periods. Maybe—
"Linda Welles?"
After they had met with Dr. Molinari, Linda Welles decided he was the one. She officially selected him as her doctor, and made her first set of appointments.
When they got to the car, Linda said, "Now we're done with doctors for today. Can you show me some self-defense moves?"
Jane nodded. "I'll show you something that will work for you." Jane drove them out of the city into the nearly flat, empty land to the north. When they had driven for about an hour, she slowed down, looking for a particular spot. Finally, she turned off the road and guided the car along a barely visible unpaved road consisting of a pair of tire tracks winding through a forest of second-growth trees. She stopped in a place that looked as though it had been used as a turnaround. "This ought to be the right sort of place."
"For what?"
Jane pulled the car around so it was facing out again, then turned off the engine. She picked up her purse, opened it, and took out a small snub-nosed revolver.
Linda gasped, "Oh, my God. A gun?"
Jane swung out the cylinder, showed Linda that it was empty, and closed it again.
"Where did it come from?"
"When we stopped at the house in Amherst, this is one of the things I picked up. When I go, I'll leave it with you. It's a tricky thing to have a gun in the house at the best of times. When you expect to have a curious baby crawling around, it definitely has to be both locked up and well hidden. I have mixed feelings about doing this, but I don't see any other way for you to be safe."
"You don't? I thought you would teach me something from martial arts."
"You're pregnant. Even if you weren't, it takes years of practice to learn enough to do you any good at all. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all the practice does for a woman is to make her think she can stand her ground against some male attacker who takes her apart in a second. This works."