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Jenny Lemke sat close to Jim Westford on a stiff wooden bench in the entrance–way at the convent in Pensacola, waiting for Mary Sebastian to call them in for a conversation with the nurse. The afternoon light was brilliant and clear. It broke through a swaying palm outside and lit up a stained glass Virgin across from them like ocean water, flooding their faces with purple and green. For the moment, all was deathly, deep quiet in the hall.

Was there really a school next door? Nuns living upstairs? You wouldn't have known. Jenny was thinking of the last time she'd been here, when she came to adopt her son. The sisters gave them a party with ginger ale and red velvet cake. Then she walked with him past this same little bench, holding his hand, and they opened the big oak doors onto the Florida sun.

Jim groaned, interrupting her reverie.

"What is it?" she asked.

He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Oh, I was thinking that if this woman doesn't calm down, we might have to take a tougher line."

She sat quietly for a second, and then laughed.

"Sibyl will gladly break her thumbs if she talks."

"Yeah, Sibyl!" he said. "She'd have made a good hitman."

"Well, she wants a revolution. You and me, Jim, we're the ones holding it back."

"That's definitely how she sees it."

"I think sometimes I should just hand it all over to her."

"I don't know. If she were in charge of the League, I could never be a part of it. She has no judgment."

"But she has the passion," said Jenny. "I've talked myself into a kind of blandness. I feel blank. Meanwhile nothing changes."

"That's bull. Plenty's changed."

"Like what? Three percentage points on an opinion poll? Does that count for anything in human lives?"

"Listen, if people don't choose to care, we can't make them. We can only argue our case. The rest is up to God and the courts."

"So what happens if the courts don't see things our way, Jim? Do we ever give up?"

"I don't know. I can't answer for you."

"What about for yourself?"

"I need to keep fighting abortion, that's all I know." He sounded tired. "But definitely not with my sister in charge."

"How about your feelings? Do you get moved any more?"

"No," he said, "not often. Not really."

"Millions of babies dead," she said. "I don't even feel it."

" 'Baby' is just a word, Jenny. And the numbers don't matter. I don't know why, but the numbers don't matter. You can't expect to be moved all the time. You just have to keep going."

"Maybe I was making up for my past. It's so far away, now. It seems like another life."

"Stop trying to feel it if you can't. You're tired, that's all."

They sat in silence for a moment. She could hear him swallow.

"Did you ever think about doing something revolutionary?" he asked in a low voice.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean whether you'd be capable of it. I don't mean shooting a doctor. Just a little butyric acid in a clinic, something more than what we're doing."

She shook her head.

"Do you? What good would it serve? Giving the other side free martyrs. Great."

"I used to think about it, before I cooled off. I mean like maybe if I got a terminal illness, and I was going to die anyway. I'd go do some damage, you know? With nothing to lose."

"You'd never hurt people, Jim."

"You mean I'm too much of a coward?"

"I mean it's against God. Against natural law."

The Bible's full of violence. And this is to save innocent life, anyway. So it's different."

She shook her head.

"You Protestants. You have to figure everything out for yourselves." She crossed herself with a skinny purple hand and stretched out her lime green legs. "So anyway, what happens if the nurse does go to the police?"

He shrugged.

"I think we win either way. If we can get names from her, great. If she goes to the police and it comes out that we saved a live baby, we get some free publicity."

"You'd be disbarred. We'd probably both go to prison."

He scratched the back of his head.

"We're always saying that we need victims. God gives us one, a living child. Everything's turned rightside up. No more abortion doctors acting like lambs to the slaughter. The child's the victim."

She shuddered.

"I don't want to go to jail."

"So maybe next time we better take the baby straight to family services. If we're willing to risk what they'll do with it."

She sat up and folded her arms.

"Anyway," she said, "it wouldn't be fair to Clara or the baby. It's bad enough what we have to do to save them; we're not going to use them for publicity, too."

"Yeah, yeah." He sighed, and then nodded. "Jenny, I've been thinking about Rose Merriman. What if we get her to take pictures of some of the older victims—the girl that's been on TV already, or that boy in Canada? He has to be six or seven by now. Maybe Theresa, if I can talk her into it."

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