Now and Again by Charlotte Rogan Page A

and she was shocked at her own boldness. But something about it meshed with an inner readiness, as if she had spent the last sixteen years not only mothering and keeping house, but also training for a clandestine project she didn’t yet understand.
    “She’s too old for you,” Louis would say to Hugo if he was working a double shift, and Hugo’s face would become a cartoon of regret. Or Hugo would say, “Good morning, Momma,” and Maggie would reply, “So now they’re giving badges and guns to children—what is the world coming to?”
    But most of the time Hugo and the other guards only leered silently as they pawed through her things, and then Maggie would give her best imitation of a sultry smile and call them heartbreakers before gathering up her belongings and hurrying along the corridor to another set of locked gates and a walkway that led past the prison yard to the office block where she worked and thinking only about practicalities and the logistics of her day.
    3.2 Dolly
    D olly could smell whiskey on the doctor’s breath when he flicked his fingernail at the lab results for an underweight baby and thrust the folder back at her, saying, “Don’t you damn women know enough not to drink?”
    Dolly knew he didn’t mean her. She knew she was only a convenient ear when the doctor complained about inadequate insurance reimbursements or working conditions at the big city hospital where he spent most of his time or when he told her about a vacation he was planning or about a task force he had been asked to chair. He had been divorced twice from the same woman. He had a daughter in San Francisco and a son in New York. Over the years Dolly had learned many things this way, while the doctor would have been astonished to find out that she came from a family of seven children, all born at home, that her boyfriend was a soldier in Iraq, that many of her clients paid her late or not at all, and that there was an entire consciousness ticking behind her eyes.
    But the doctor also worked many cases for free, which was what convinced Dolly that underneath the gruff exterior a heart of gold was beating, trapped there like a caged bird and just waiting for something to free it. Each time she caught his eye over a swollen belly or a wriggling newborn, she thought she saw a window slide open, and sometimes she swore she could see right through the window to where the bird was flapping its wings against the bars and singing. But then he would cow a pair of anxiously waiting newlyweds into silence by barking, “While you’ve been sitting here reading magazines, I’ve been saving lives!” and she would go back to thinking he didn’t have a heart at all.
    Dolly liked the feeling of lives in her hands too, but for her, it wasn’t the power she liked, but the mystery of new life springing from the very atoms of the earth, animated by love and the merest puff of grace. She could imagine vast potentials in the tiny curls of the fingers with their even tinier nails. “You can be anything you want to be,” she would whisper to the babies. Even though she knew that half of them would succumb to drugs, abuse, or lives of crime, she had to believe that each little life she brought into the world would be one of the lucky ones, that each word she whispered into its ear would make a difference, that each happy thought would help it beat the odds.
    Mostly she only listened as the doctor talked, breathing out “Mm-hmm” or “Oh, my!” when a response seemed called for. Or she just hummed a song inside her head if the doctor waved his hand for silence. So she wasn’t quite sure what to think when he sought her out one afternoon and said, “What would you say if I told you they had altered a scientific report? What would you say if I told you the data had been fudged?”
    The doctor’s eyes were wide and searching, but what Dolly saw in them now was more a mine shaft than a window.
    “What report?” she asked him. “Does it