"...which is on page 243.  Let us stand as we sing."  Reverend Allen was motioning for use to stand.

"Holy, Holy, Holy."  I knew it within the first few notes.  I know this song backwards, but oh God I can't sing it...can't make those words come without thinking...Funny how things always come back to me...memories that I think I've pushed away, and then something triggers them...

Holy, holy, holy
Lord God Almighty
Early in the morning
Our song shall rise to thee.

~*~*~*~

We were inside the clinic, but they were outside.  We had been seated an hour or so when I heard singing.  Protesters, standing outside the window, facing it -- a choirloft facing its congregation --sang "Holy, Holy, Holy."  I stood at the window, peering around the edge of the curtain.  Behind me, the nurses moved about the waiting room, calling names from the manila files tucked under their arms.  Dazed young women rose from their seats and followed the nurses' steps. Antiseptic and formaldehyde stung my nostrils.

There wasn't going to be a Baby Boy Wells.  I knew that Liz and Sean had agonized over that, but finally they decided to terminate the pregnancy for the welfare of mother and son.  Liz knew he was a boy. She felt my nephew kick her, like tiny butterfly flutterings inside her that should have been the strong jabs of a healthy baby.

So I flew with my sister and her husband to Wichita, Kansas.  It was the closet state that would perform an abortion at seven months. Cold rain followed every step.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get warm, even though it was the end of May.

~*~*~*~

"I can just hear what people will say.  I mean, people around here don't believe in abortion ever, and I didn't think I did either..."   The phone line was quiet, but in her silence I heard urgency mixed with fear.

I didn't know what to say.  I'd never been pregnant.  I had no idea what it was like to have a baby growing inside me.  I heard here words, I felt her sadness, but there was nothing that I could conjure within me to give me complete understanding of what she was going through.

I had always known it would happen.  The days that she played nurse to my scraped knees and briar-picked arms had finally culminated in this paradox, a reversal in cosmos, in which I, the little sister, would triumph for her...

"Liz, people always talk.  You have to rise above that.  I know it's really easy for me to say, but it's the only way you're going to survive."  I felt her reaching through the silence, reaching for my words.

~*~*~*~

"Elizabeth Wells?"  A nurse dressed in mauve smiled and beckoned to Liz.  "We just need to check you to see how you're doing." The nurse held the door, and I saw Liz disappear down the hallway.

Liz returned a few minutes later, her face pale and her teeth clenched.  "Everything's okay.  It should be any time now." She forced a smile.

But those protesters.  If she wasn't offended, I had no right to be.  After all, she and Sean were the ones going through it.  They leafed through magazines with nervous fingers, blankly staring at the pages.   But I was raging.  The religious irony made me sick.  All the times I stood in church singing that hymn, believing God always prevailed--goodness over evil.  I had rejoiced in its reassurance of salvation.  Sitting in the waiting room surrounded by wide-eyed frightened souls, I saw no sign of divine intervention; my own religion had betrayed me.

God wasn't there, but I was.  I saw what was happening.  I heard those women making a beautiful hymn into a political jab.  I wanted to jump up and scream.  We were wild animals caught in a trap of four walls, and I was the only one who could save us.  I thought that if I could summon some superhuman power to save them all -- or at least Sean and Liz and their baby -- make this not be happening to these people... to my sister...if I could deliver them...

Men nervously paced worn places on the carpet; young girls weeped with their heads on their mothers' shoulders.  One woman who had come alone was still as a statue, staring off into nowhere.  Liz sat without speaking.  Every few minutes her hand went to her stomach and caressed it, and then with a start, she would snatch her hand away as if it had been burned.

There was no rejoicing here.

~*~*~*~

The motel room was cold and still.  The only sounds were the chatter of the television and the monotonous rhythm of the rain.

Liz stood before the mirror, brushing her hair.  Her tired eyes were red and swollen, and her face looked as though years had passed since that morning.  The reflection in the mirror showed a smaller Liz, the reflection in her eyes, an emptier Liz.

She hummed as she brushed her hair.  She hummed, "Holy, Holy, Holy."  My mouth gaped.  No one had said anything about it, and I didn't realize anyone besides me had paid any attention to it.

Taking a breath I said, "It was really strange today, wasn't it?"  I felt like a stone in a slingshot, hurled into oblivion.

Liz stopped brushing her hair.  "It was really ironic."  I nodded.  She'd been somber and silent all day; I felt tension leave my body, just hearing her speak.

Tears formed in her eyes, and she sat down on the bed beside me.   "That song always comforted me when I sang it in church.  I felt protected.  Even though those women didn't mean it that way, I felt comforted by it."  She rolled the brush around in her hands while she spoke.  The tears spilled down her face, but she looked me straight in the eye.  "You were right.  I do have to rise above it.  What matters is what's between me and God, MY God.  And I knew He supported me when I heard that hymn today."

~*~*~*~*