Throughout the weeks that followed Eppie spent most of her after-school hours at the mission, assisting the residents with small chores in the afternoons and doing her homework in the evenings. During this time she became very attached to the Applebaums, who took to her as if she were their own granddaughter. Eppie quickly saw in the gregarious old couple a sweet, nurturing nature which seemed to contribute enormously to their ability to successfully run a home for castaway women.
Mrs. Applebaum was an insuppressibly spry and outgoing person—one who sat still only long enough to tell you about the next project that she would soon be undertaking. She worked her kitchen utensils as deftly as she did her knitting needles, and, just to show you that she could, it seemed, was never afraid to pick up a hammer or a paint roller if she felt that one of the rooms in the house was in need of some touching up. Her ever-flowing energy was as infectious a bug as ever beset the race, and no resident could ever lay about unproductively in her presence for very long.
Her husband, not to be outdone, fancied himself a handyman extraordinaire. Be it carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, or what have you, he was proud to say that he had no idea where his wife kept the yellow pages and had no need to know anyway. He and his wife had lived in the house twenty-seven years now, he would say, and there wasn't a corner of the old place that one could point to in which he couldn't show you some improvement he had made. And he would be more than happy to sit with you over a cup of coffee and tell you the whole story behind any one of those projects, large or small. Or, if you preferred, he'd regale you with his thoughts on why that certain team had won the World Series the year before, or which team might win it this year. And when the coffee cups were empty and some other duty needed gettin'-after, he would always thank you kindly for the company, 'cause Lord knows when you live in a house full of women and little kids you don't often get the chance to talk baseball.
In addition to the Applebaums, Eppie got to know several of the women who resided at the mission, and she developed a particularly close and rewarding relationship with Shelley. Theirs was a mutually supportive connection which arose almost effortlessly between them. Eppie looked up to her new friend like an older sister—a kindred spirit who was living her life a few steps ahead of her and was showing her by example the proper way to handle the challenges that she herself would soon face. They were lessons that would, Eppie was certain, serve her well in due course. And Shelley, in turn, seemed to gain a form of internal strength from Eppie's friendship. Whether it was by way of the practical benefit she derived whenever Eppie leant her a helping hand with some small chore, or through some more ephemeral lift to her spirits that she felt whenever the girl looked at her with that sense of admiration and empathy in her eyes, Shelley escaped through her association with Eppie the preying sense of aloneness and incapability that often stalked her at other times.
And, as much as anything else, Eppie developed a happy, irresistible bond with the infant Jonathan. Each day she looked after the baby by herself for an hour or two so that Shelley could run errands unencumbered or grab a short nap. Eppie delighted in the time she spent with him. Within a few days she had learned how to change his diaper and how to give him a bath. (The former task she found to be significantly less unpleasant than she had expected, and the latter task to be a pure joy.) Shelley sensed the happiness that Eppie derived from caring for her child, so she did not hesitate to ask for Eppie's assistance. Eppie, in turn, was greatly relieved that Shelley understood her desire to help. She noticed that each day, soon after she arrived at the mission, Jonathan would invariably be in need of some form of attention, and Shelley would promptly offer her the chance to attend to him. She was grateful for each opportunity to spend time with him, and more grateful still for the fact that she did not have to ask to do so. At first she worried that she might appear too eager in her desire to care for a child who was not her own, but Shelley seemed quite comfortable with the arrangement. There soon developed an unspoken agreement between them by which Jonathan would be placed in Eppie's care for a short time each afternoon. By the end of the first week this routine had become so established that Eppie's concerns had dissipated entirely.
Unfortunately for Eppie, no such easy routine of understanding arose between herself and her roommates at the apartment. With each passing day, as she grew closer to her new friends at the mission, she felt her relationship with Rachel and Allison grow more distant. The two women had been released from jail on the Monday following their arrest, but Eppie did not see much of them because she spent so few of her waking hours at the apartment. Now that she had a key of her own she was not so concerned about coming and going according to the set schedule that she had followed in the past.
Rachel noticed the change in Eppie's routine almost immediately, but she did not mention anything about it to her for several days. At first she thought that Eppie might simply be annoyed with her and Allison for forgetting about her after their arrest and was only venting her annoyance by her absence, so she said nothing and hoped that things would return to normal on their own after a few days. By the end of the second week, however, when Eppie continued to spend almost all of her free time away from the apartment, Rachel grew concerned enough to ask her about it.
She caught up with Eppie on a Saturday morning, as the girl was heading out the door after coming in late again the previous night.
"Where are you off to so early on a Saturday?" Rachel asked.
"Oh, nowhere special," Eppie replied, trying to sound undisturbed by the question. "I'm just going out for a while." Eppie was not good at the art of deception, and she felt a pang of guilt at her evasive answer. She did not know precisely why she was reluctant to tell Rachel about the time she spent at the mission, although she realized that her desire to spend such time there was in large measure a reflection of the lack of fulfillment she found elsewhere, and to admit as much to Rachel seemed an insult which she did not want to give.
"Do you know how long you're going to be gone?" asked Rachel.
"Not really," came the reply. "Probably most of the day."
Rachel moved a few paces closer to Eppie, communicating her desire for a more frank conversation.
"Eppie," she said, softening her voice as she spoke, "I know that you like having your own key to the apartment now, and I'm glad to see that you're using it to come and go as you wish. I'm not your mother, and you're old enough to look after yourself, so where you go and what you do in your spare time may not be any of my business. But I've noticed that you've been spending a lot of time away from the apartment lately. Allison and I have hardly seen you at all for the last couple of weeks. If you'd rather not tell me where you've been spending your time, that's fine—I don't want to be a busybody. But I just want to know if you're upset with us. Is that why you're not here very much anymore?"
Eppie looked at Rachel blankly. "No," she said, wrinkling her brow. "Why would I be upset with you?"
"You know," said Rachel, "because we left you locked out of the apartment the other week. I couldn't really blame you if you felt irritated by that. If somebody did that to me I know I wouldn't be very happy with them. Especially if I wound up having to spend the night in a homeless shelter, for God's sake."
Eppie looked at the floor and didn't know what to say.
"I can only imagine what that must have been like for you," Rachel continued, trying to sound empathetic. "I hear that place is run by a bunch of religious types. They probably try to convert every poor soul who shows up just looking for a bed or a hot meal."
Eppie felt her stomach bind up in a tight knot. "It's all right, Rachel," she blurted out at last. "Don't worry about the other week, that doesn't bother me at all. I'm not mad at you or Allison. I just need to spend some time away from the apartment for a while. It's nothing against you guys, okay?"
Rachel looked at Eppie and sighed, her shoulders drooping slightly. "All right," she said, reaching out and touching Eppie lightly on the upper arm. "If you say that things are okay, then that's good enough for me. I just wanted to be sure, that's all."
Eppie nodded her head silently and opened the door.
"Will you be back in time for dinner tonight?" Rachel asked. "I was thinking of making spaghetti and meatballs." She knew that it was Eppie's favorite dish.
Eppie paused in the doorway, looking back at Rachel with an apologetic expression. "I don't think so, Rachel," she said. "Maybe tomorrow night. I'll see you later." She closed the door snugly behind her and disappeared quickly down the outside stairs.
Rachel stood alone inside the apartment and rubbed her fingertips across her forehead. Eppie's behavior worried her, and she wished that she could do something about it. A part of her wanted to run after the girl, catch her by the arm and demand to know where she was going and what she was doing every day when she should be home, but she resisted the urge to do so. Teenagers need their space, she told herself. She remembered how she had felt years earlier when her father had tried to restrict her activities and dictate her friendships to her. She vowed that she would never be that oppressive to Eppie.
She drew a long, frustrated breath and shook her head. It always caught her by surprise when events caused her to see herself in her father's place. She smiled at the irony of the situation. I must be getting old, she told herself.
* * *
The Mayor scowled as he sat in his study that evening and reviewed the numbers from his pollster's latest report. He was not pleased. His support among all registered voters had dropped two percentage points in the last two weeks; among likely voters he was down three points. Momentum was everything in the final weeks of a close campaign. He knew that ten percent of the voters would not make up their minds until the day of the election; five percent would not decide until they had actually stepped into the voting booth. And most of those late-deciding voters would opt for the candidate who appeared to have a positive momentum in his favor. It was simple human nature—people wanted to vote for a winner.
At this point the Mayor had a momentum to his campaign, but it was precisely in the wrong direction. His support was clearly weakening and the governorship was slipping away from him—he saw it in the numbers before his very eyes—and only three weeks remained before election day to turn his campaign around.
He thought about the tactics that he had employed in recent weeks. The underlying weakness, he saw clearly now, was not a flaw in his message but a lack of coverage by the news media. The political press, and therefore by extension the electorate, was not paying attention to him. The reason for this was obvious—there was nothing new to report. The press did not cover policy speeches or campaign rallies particularly well at any point in the political season, and such events were almost entirely glossed over as election day grew near. The candidates' positions on the issues were already well known. They had been reported on repeatedly for months and were not going to change in any significant way this late in the campaign. The stories that the press now focused on disintegrated into a sordid mixture of gossip and spin, not about issues relevant to the governance of the state primarily, but rather about the candidates themselves. Which candidate could be ensnared by which scandal? Which candidate said something unflattering about which other candidate? How did the other candidate respond? How did their poll numbers respond? How did each candidate respond to their poll numbers' response? These were the types of things that the press now covered. It was a tawdry cycle of gamesmanship and insincerity which all politicians denounced, even as they engaged in the next round of such nonsense, yet those were the rules by which the game was played.
It was a rare candidate for high office who could break out of the narrow confines of the modern political drama. Rare because most politicians were supremely averse to taking any position which was in the least way controversial. They spoke in bland platitudes on broadly agreed-upon topics and avoided serious debate on any subject of discord. The Mayor held such candidates in the deepest contempt. He saw his opponents as plastic men cast in empty roles.
He saw himself, on the other hand, as a very different type of candidate. He would not shy away from controversy as the others did. Rather, he would seek it out, engender it where he would, and use it to his advantage even as his opponents criticized him for doing so. The press would soon pay attention to him. He would not allow himself to suffer from lack of coverage much longer.
The Mayor put aside the pollster's report and picked up the memo from the medical examiner's office. It disappointed him as well. No fetal tissues had been found in any of the batches collected from the hospital and the clinic since those collections had begun two weeks earlier. Time was running short on his opportunity, and he grew impatient with the unexpected delay. His frustration mounting, he suddenly caught himself, and he paused for a moment to consider the irony of his situation. He despised abortion as a sinful act, and he prayed every day for its abolition, yet here he sat with his political career on the line, hoping for his own sake that evidence of the procedure would appear. Could it be? Was he, in his heart of hearts, actually wishing for an abortion to occur? Had he come to the point where he would concede one life for the sake of all the others? For a moment his conscience scolded him, telling him that he should have found some other way to advance his plans, one that would have allowed his hopes to remain pure. One that would not have allowed his daughter and her cohorts to yell hypocrite! at him, even if their voices rang out with the word only in his mind. He shook his head and soon brushed his doubts aside. He justified his wishes with the rationalization that he would use the effects of today's sin to eliminate tomorrow's. His was not an evil hope, he told himself. He was simply being practical in working for the greater good.
But all of this practicality was moot if he was unable to acquire the means to advance his plans. The thought occurred to him that the hospital's administrators might be working against him. Perhaps they had seen through his plans and were purposely turning away any abortion cases until the election was over. Perhaps they were referring such cases to other clinics in other locations. Or perhaps they were simply disobeying the municipal order outright, turning over all tissues except those which they suspected he really wanted. He would take the steps necessary to learn the truth later, he told himself, but he had no time to investigate now.
Knowing that he needed to act, he came up with an idea for getting what he wanted even more quickly, and he chastised himself for not thinking of it sooner. He had wasted valuable time. But, if this new idea worked, there was still enough time left in the campaign to execute the rest of his plan as he had originally conceived it. He rolled the idea around in his mind, and as he did, his level of confidence in it grew. Yes, he thought; it would work. And it would be much easier to execute than this cat-and-mouse game he was playing with the hospital. He smiled to himself. His opponents may have delayed him, but they would not succeed in denying him what he needed, he would see to that.
He opened one of his desk drawers and pulled out his personal phone directory. He looked up the entry he wanted, then reached for the telephone and punched in the number.
Thirty miles away, a well-dressed man was sitting at a table in an upscale restaurant with an equally well-dressed woman when he heard his cellular phone ring. The woman gave the man a sour look as he checked the number of the incoming call and then pressed the button to answer it.