A rapid knock at the door made me startle. I jumped back on the table, snatching up the paper sheet.
“Everybody indecent?” the man asked.
I arranged the crinkly sheet around me. “Yes, I’m pretty indecent.”
He entered the room, followed by the Angilee lookalike. “I’m Dr. Alpern. I’ll be making you uncomfortable today.”
I managed a smile. I’d imagined someone stern and disapproving, lecturing me about unprotected sex.
“I’m very sorry to hear about your baby,” he said. “Was there a problem during labor?”
“He was eight weeks early. He had a heart defect.” I sucked in air, trying to make sure I breathed, but the next words still came out as a gasp. “They didn’t operate.”
The doctor nodded. “Well, your urine test was negative, but we’ll do a blood test to be sure. How long since you had unprotected sex?”
“A week.”
“So it could still come up. You can keep testing at home, but let’s take a look. Lie back for me and scoot to the edge.”
I fell back on the pillow and wriggled down to the end. The doctor aimed a light between my legs, and the nurse handed him something in a plastic wrapper. I focused again on the illustrated hand cupping the wide-nippled breast on the poster.
“Going in. Take a deep breath,” the doctor said.
I tried to relax. Still, the metal against my skin made me tense again.
“Just a little swab,” he said. “And another little bit of pressure.”
I felt something bump me inside, then he withdrew the speculum. I exhaled, not sure if I’d breathed even once while he was in there.
“I don’t see anything that worries me,” he said, pulling off his gloves. “No redness. No bumps. And no discoloration of the cervix that might indicate a pregnancy.” He reached for my hand and I grasped it so he could pull me to a sitting position.
He perched on the stool. “You can come back in a week for a follow-up blood test if you still feel concern, but the home tests are pretty accurate. Did you have a reason to think you might be pregnant?”
“I was on the shot last time I got pregnant.”
“You want to try something else? There’s the patch, IUDs, and diaphragms.”
“I hadn’t had sex for four years, so I hadn’t worried about it.”
He nodded, and I figured he was thinking — you picked a real winner to break your fast if you need VD screening.
“The shot is pretty good normally, but if it failed once, then there’s reason for doubt. You want to try an IUD?”
“Maybe,” I said. “We did add condoms.”
“Condoms aren’t a bad idea.” He nodded at the nurse, who promptly left the room. “So, Missy said you were pretty distraught when you came in. You want to talk about it?”
“I hadn’t been around stirrups in a while. Might be a bit of post-traumatic stress involved.”
“Makes sense. But you know what happened to the baby was not your fault.”
I couldn’t meet his gaze. He had no idea.
“It’s natural to think something you did caused a problem in the baby. But I assure you, it didn’t.”
Something cracked in me. If I couldn’t tell Gavin, if I had crossed the line in the sand with him, I could still tell his man. Maybe saying the words out loud, dispersing them into the air, would release the poison.
“I smoked pot when I was pregnant.”
He nodded again, no different from the gesture he’d made all along. “The whole pregnancy?”
“No, just before I found out.”
“How far along were you when you stopped?”
“Seven weeks. I didn’t know until then, not until I had real symptoms, since I hardly ever bled anyway.”
“Smoking anything — pot or legal cigarettes — can harm the baby’s lungs, but doing it that early isn’t going to cause a heart defect. What did he have? Do you remember?”
“Hypoplastic left heart syndrome.”
“I’ve never done a neonatal rotation, but I do know that heart problems are usually genetic. Did you talk to the hospital doctors about this at the time?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t tell anyone. I’ve never told anyone.”
“All these years?”
“No.” My voice had lost its force, so it came out as barely a whisper.
I teetered, the room swirling, and the doctor steadied me by my shoulder. “Slow down, Corabelle. Take a deep breath in through your nose, and exhale it through your mouth.”
I realized I was breathing fast. I brought it down, forcing myself to be calm.
He let me go, waited to see if I was steady, and said, “We have a speaker who comes to campus every year who talks about suicide.”
“I’ve never been suicidal,” I choked out.
“But it’s her story. She lost a baby when she was seventeen. He was born and lived a few hours.” He snapped his fingers. “I think she was here last night. I wonder if she’s still in San Diego.” He stood up. “I’m going to ask the nurses. I think you could benefit from meeting her.”
I didn’t want to talk to some stranger about our dead babies, but I nodded.
“I’ll see what I can find out.” He stood up. “Are you doing okay in school? Is this anxiety affecting your work? I can refer you to the mental health clinic. In fact, I’ll write it up. You can decide if you want to use it.”
“But I’m doing fine.” A lie, and we both knew it.
“You are. You really are. I’ll send Missy back in. We’ll have the lab results back in a couple days, but I think you’re fine.”
He strode out, but I didn’t move for a while, trying to pull myself together. When the nurse returned, I still wasn’t dressed.
“So I found Tina,” she said. “She’s heading to the airport tonight. We were thinking —” she held on to my arm like she did before —“that maybe you could drive her out there. Give you a chance to talk. Do you have a car? Could you do that?”
My brain screamed no, but Missy looked at me with so much earnest concern that I couldn’t say it.
“Okay.” I didn’t think I’d talk about anything important, but I could take her. Sure. Why not? If she once was suicidal, maybe there was someone out there who had a story worse than mine.
Chapter 40: Corabelle
Tina wasn’t anything like I expected. She waited in the lobby of the hotel, flipping through a magazine full of glossy images of nature photographs. Missy had told me I’d know her by her tiny pigtails, coming off either side of her head like a little girl’s.
She wore a short denim skirt, frayed at the bottom, and a crazy set of over-the-knee stockings with blue and black stripes. A couple mismatched suitcases sat by her legs. Her face was pixieish, and she lounged with her feet on a coffee table like she owned the place. By looking at her, you wouldn’t think for a minute that anything ever got to her, but as I approached, the red jagged scars up her wrists peeked out from her sweater sleeves, which were pushed up due to the oven-roasting heat that blasted across the lobby.
I came up behind her. “Tina?”
She looked up, her gray eyes merry, but still, I could see the sadness in the corners, lines around the edges from harder days. “You must be my ride.”
“I am. I’m Corabelle.” I stood awkwardly behind the sofa as she gathered up her suitcases. “I can carry one of those.”
“I’m good,” she said. “I travel light.”
We exited to the parking lot. “It’s still blistering hot in Texas,” she said. “I’m almost sad to be wrapping up this tour and going back.”
“You in college there?”
“I’m done, actually, but I haven’t found a job yet, so I kept my speaking tour going while I figure things out.”
So this girl was older than me? I opened the trunk of my car for her bags, studying her. Her petite frame didn’t seem sturdy enough to hoist even her smallish suitcase, but like most of us with baggage under our belt, she was tougher than she looked. “When did you graduate?” I asked.