"You should." Another voice — were they trying to confuse him by talking from different spots in the room?
"Why?"
"Because you killed us."
The absurdity of the statement made him laugh. He straightened from the table and stepped forward. "Okay. That's it. This isn't the least bit funny."
A little boy shoved him back, roughly, violently. His strength was hideous.
"M-my wife will be here s-soon." He was ashamed of the stammer in his voice, but he couldn't help it. "She'll call the police."
"Sergeant Morelli, perhaps?" This voice was more mature than the others — more womanly. He found her and looked her in the eye. She was the tall one in her early twenties, dressed in a sweater and skirt. He had a sudden crazy thought that maybe she was a young teacher and these were her students on a class trip. But these kids looked like they spanned all grades from pre-school to junior high.
"Who are you?"
"I don't have a name," she said, facing him squarely. "Very few of us do. But this one does." She indicated a little girl at her side, a toddler made up like a hobo in raggedy clothes with burnt cork rubbed on her face for a beard. An Emmett Kelly dwarf. "Here, Laura," she said to the child as she urged her forward. "Show Dr. Cantrell what you looked like last time he saw you."
Laura stepped up to him. Behind the makeup he could see that she was a beautiful child with short dark hair, a pudgy face, and big brown eyes. She held her bucket out to him.
"She was eleven weeks old," the woman said, "three inches long, and weighed fourteen grams when you ripped her from her mother's uterus. She was no match for you and your suction tube."
Blood and tissue swirled in the bottom of her bucket.
"You don't expect me to buy this, do you?"
"I don't care what you buy, Doctor. But this is Sandra Morelli's child — or at least what her child would look like now if she'd been allowed to be born. But she wasn't born. Her mother had names all picked out — Adam for a boy, Laura for a girl — but her grandfather bullied her mother into an abortion and you were oh-so-willing to see that there were no problems along the way."
"This is absurd!" he said.
"Really?" the woman said. "Then go ahead and call Sergeant Morelli. Maybe he'd like to drive down and meet his granddaughter. The one you killed."
"I killed no one!" he shouted. "No one\ Abortion has been legal since 1974! Absolutely legal! And besides — she wasn't really alive!"
What's the matter with me? he asked himself. I'm talking to them as if I believe them!
"Oh, yes," the woman said. "I forgot. Some political appointees decided that we weren't people and that was that. Pretty much like what happened to East European Jews back in World War II. We're not even afforded the grace of being called embryos or fetuses. We're known as 'products of conception.' What a neat, dehumanizing little phrase. So much easier to scrape the 'products of conception' into a bucket than a person."
"I've had just about enough of this!" he said.
"So?" a young belligerent voice said. "What're y'gonna do?"
He knew he was going to do nothing. He didn't want to have another primary-grade kid shove him back against the table again. No kid that size should be that strong. It wasn't natural.
"You can't hold me responsible!" he said. "They came to me, asking for help. They were pregnant and they didn't want to be. My God! I didn't make them pregnant!"
Another voice: "No, but you sure gave them a convenient solution!"
"So blame your mothers! They're the ones who spread their legs and didn't want to take responsibility for it! How about them!"
"They are not absolved," the woman said. "They shirked their responsibilities to us, but the vast majority of them are each responsible for only one of us. You, Dr. Cantrell, are responsible for all of us. Most of them were scared teenagers, like Laura's mother, who were bullied and badgered into 'terminating' us. Others were too afraid of what their parents would say so they snuck off to women's medical centers like this and lied about their age and put us out of their misery."
"Not all of them, sweetheart!" he said. He was beginning to feel he was on firmer ground now. "Many a time I've done three or four on the same woman! Don't tell me they were poor, scared teenagers. Abortion was their idea of birth control!"
"We know," a number of voices chorused, and something in their tone made him shiver. "We'll see them later."
"The point is," the woman said, "that you were always there, always ready with a gentle smile, a helpful hand, an easy solution, a simple way to get them off the hook by getting rid of us. And a bill, of course."
"If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else!"
"You can't dilute your own blame. Or your own responsibility," said a voice from behind his chair. "Plenty of doctors refuse to do abortions."
"If you were one of those," said another from his left, "we wouldn't be here tonight."
"The law lets me do it. The Supreme Court. So don't blame me. Blame those Supreme Court justices."
"That's politics. We don't care about politics."
"But I believe in a woman's right to control her own life, to make decisions about her own body!"
"We don't care what you believe. Do you think the beliefs of a terrorist matter to the victims of his bombs? Don't you understand? This is personal!"
A little girl's voice said, "I could have been adopted, you know. I would've made someone a good kid. But I never had the chance!"
They all began shouting at once, about never getting Christmas gifts or birthday presents or hugs or tucked in at night or playing with matches or playing catch or playing house or even playing doctor —
It seemed to go on endlessly. Finally the woman held up her bucket. "All their possibilities ended in here."
"Wait a goddamn minute!" he said. He had just discovered a significant flaw in their little show. "Only a few of them ended up in buckets! If you were up on your facts, you'd know that no one uses those old D and C buckets for abortions anymore." He pointed to the glass trap on the Zarick suction extractor. "This is where the products of conception wind up."
The woman stepped forward with her bucket. "They carry this in honor of me. I have the dubious distinction of being your first victim."
"You're not my victims!" he shouted. "The law —»
She spat in his face. Shocked and humiliated, Cantrell wiped away the saliva with his shirtsleeve and pressed himself back against the table. The rage in her face was utterly terrifying.
"The law!" she hissed. "Don't speak of legalities to me! Look at me! I'd be twenty-two now and this is how I'd look if you hadn't murdered me. Do a little subtraction, Doctor: 1974 was a lot less than twenty-two years ago. I'm Ellen Benedict's daughter — or at least I would have been if you hadn't agreed to do that D and C on her when she couldn't find a way to explain her pregnancy to her impotent husband!"
Ellen Benedict! God! How did they know about Ellen Benedict? Even he had forgotten about her!
The woman stepped forward and grabbed his wrist. He was helpless against her strength as she pressed his hand over her left breast. He might have found the softness beneath her sweater exciting under different circumstances, but now it elicited only dread.
"Feel my heart beating? It was beating when your curette ripped me to pieces. I was only four weeks old. And I'm not the only one here you killed before 1974 — I was just your first. So you can't get off the hook by naming the Supreme Court as an accomplice. And even if we allowed you that cop-out, other things you've done since '74 are utterly abominable!" She looked around and pointed into the crowd. "There's one! Come here, honey, and show your bucket to the doctor."
A five- or six-year-old boy came forward. He had blond bangs and the biggest, saddest blue eyes the doctor had ever seen. The boy held out his bucket.