Babies? I had steeled myself not to think of them that way. Planned Parenthood had said they were blobs of tissue. I knew better, of course—at least on some level. But that’s the only way I could live with myself, to think of them as “problem pregnancies,” the flotsam and jetsam of an untimely conception, not as babies.

Heaven? Until that moment, I had vaguely thought of them as formless blobs out there in the universe somewhere. Were they really babies, really in heaven, as Melissa had just said?

“When my daughter was eighteen months old,” Melissa continued, “she had a life-threatening experience. Actually, she died. Then they brought her back. Later, when she was old enough to talk, she told us about seeing Jesus during that time. She said she had seen Jesus with lots of children, and they were very happy.” I was spellbound.

“So that’s how I know your children are in heaven with Jesus,” she said. And then she hugged me as I grappled, for the first time, with the reality that I had aborted five children, not blobs. And they were in heaven, not floating around in space somewhere. They were real—real beings, real . . . real babies.

That conversation with Melissa Smith came back to me as I listened to “Tilly” and struggled to maintain my composure. On the radio, Kathy was crying and asking the daughter she had aborted to forgive her.

“Don’t cry, Mommy. It’s all right,” a little girl’s voice replied. The road blurred in front of me as I tried to blink away the tears. “I forgive you. I love you . . . Jesus forgave you a long time ago . . . I don’t hurt anymore.”I bit my lip to stifle a sob and wondered if I would have to pull over and let Bobbi drive.

The broadcast ended and I managed to hold the car steady, but by the time we arrived at Huntington Beach, I was white-knuckled and shaken to the core.

I pulled into the parking lot and stationed the car under the swaying palm trees. Ordinarily I’m the fussbudget who gets everything unloaded and set up and arranged just so. But not that day; I could barely speak.

“I, uh, have to go for a walk,” I stammered as Bobbi started to retrieve our beach gear from the car.

“Okay,” she said, shooting me a surprised but sympathetic look. She busied herself with the kids as I stumbled toward the water. I thought I would take a stroll on the concrete pier, the longest on the California coast, but I never made it that far.