An Ornithologist's Guide to Life by Ann Hood Read Free Book Online

skipping through the emptying rooms and splashing in her bath each night, is Sofia, the child she did have. Hers and Peter’s child.
    â€œIt could be that rooster’s too,” Rachel says, too quickly.
    Liz recovers immediately. “That’s irrelevant anyway,” she says, in what Rachel guesses is her lawyer voice. “Let’s not waste time. Call your doctor. Set up an appointment.” Then, gentler, “You only have two weeks before you go.”
    â€œI know,” Rachel says.
    Outside, Sofia’s voice rises up to her through the open windows. It is late summer, the air has not yet turned cool. Everything around them has gone past green to gold and looks burned, parched. A wave of nausea washes over Rachel. Is it her first? She remembers thinking she had food poisoning at a picnic last week. She remembers thinking she might be coming down with something.
    â€œI’ll drive you,” Liz says. “Let me check my calendar.”
    â€œNo,” Rachel tells her. She is thinking of other things. That flight to Paris in two weeks. The way a plane points straight upward when it’s first airborne.
    â€œLook,” Liz tells her, “you’re not alone here.”
    Rachel knows this. She has Sofia, after all.
    S HE CANNOT FIND a doctor to do it.
    â€œMy God,” she tells Liz the night before, “it’s like the sixties or something. I mean, this is legal, right?”
    In the end, there is no place to go except a clinic, where everyone else will be twenty years younger than her, clutching the hand of a frightened boy or a disappointed mother.
    Rachel almost asks Mary to watch Sofia for the day. She has been asking, Won’t I even get to say goodbye to Sophia? and Rachel has made up ridiculous stories about why they haven’t played together. Now, after all this time of not calling, she cannot bring herself to finally do it to ask for a favor. She believes that Mary is sitting in her lovely cool home, expecting that Rachel will eventually call. But somehow that is even worse, the idea that she would call and Mary would gush, forgive, go back.
    So she leaves Sofia with Peter and Yvonne, who acts troubled by the surprise midweek intrusion. Sofia will have to stay with us at the office , they say like a threat. We have appointments to keep . Rachel knows those appointments, the rabies shots and neutering and hairball removals. But Sofia likes that idea. She will help with the animals. She will make them better. Oddly, in these weeks before they leave for Paris, she has neglected her Madeline doll. She leaves it now, as she runs to her father, tossed in a corner like an orphan.
    Rachel has decided to walk to the clinic; she is too nervous, pent-up is how she thinks of it, to ride in a car and circle around for a parking space. Liz will pick her up at two. She has opted for anesthesia and she will, they advised her, be groggy, too groggy to drive or walk alone.
    The heat of the day makes her stomach flip-flop. And, walking, she is aware of her breasts, the fullness there. She is definitely pregnant. Why now? she wonders, when everything was finally going so right. But then she stops herself from that line of thinking. She has managed, hasn’t she? She has packed up her and Sofia’s lives, she has—long distance!—found them a new place to live. At night she listens to languagetapes, carefully repeating the phrases. Comment ça va? Je m’appelle Rachel. Ou est la gare du nord?
    And she has managed this. This phone calls. The hushed voices. The appointment. On the phone the receptionist had warned her that Thursday was known with pro-life groups as baby killing day. Rachel supposed that was a test, a way of asking if she had the guts to actually go through with it, if she was certain she was doing the right thing.
    Now, though, as she turns the corner onto the street where the clinic sits, she realizes that the receptionist has given her a real