Lie Still

9

The sign near the receptionist’s desk had promised WOMEN CARING FOR WOMEN, as if that was worth bragging about, and so far, so good.

Dr. Gretchen Liesel’s waiting room was like a giant womb, bathed in warm red tones and indirect light, without a harsh fluorescent bulb in sight. Somehow, I hadn’t expected Texas to be like this.

After filling out a little paperwork, my body nestled itself into one of six overstuffed chairs as a classical music station played faintly, the way I imagined the baby could hear music in his insulated cocoon. I dug into the Sunday Arts section of The New York Times, a treat, because I’d started reading it on Mike’s iPad since we moved, and it just wasn’t the same. I had taken exactly one bite from a chocolate chip granola bar from the loaded snack basket when a sweet-faced nurse named Anna called my name.

I obediently followed her into an exam room, outfitted with the same soft lighting, a couch, and custom oak cabinets that hid the cold, glistening tools that made every muscle in my body clench. Or maybe they used those awful disposable plastic ones here. Surely women caring for women knew that, for some reason, cheap, hard, disposable plastic hurt more than steel. Anna left the room, and I shed my clothes and pulled on the cuddly, high-thread-count, blue cotton gown folded on the exam table.

I lay back on it and thought about my sole reason for being here.

Paranoia.

Paranoia about an ache in my belly this morning that was either a sign that I was losing my baby or that I shouldn’t eat red Doritos every day.

Paranoia about Caroline’s ridiculous fortune-cookie secrets. About yesterday’s vile package on my doorstep and whether the missing Caroline could possibly be responsible. I wanted to believe that Dr. Liesel had the answers to all of these concerns, all of it covered by doctor-patient confidentiality.

When I called several hours ago, the receptionist heard my first sentence about pain in my lower abdomen and immediately plugged me in as a new patient at 4 p.m.

Two raps on the door. Dr. Liesel stepped inside, dressed in pale green scrubs.

“Hello, Emily.” She gave my shoulder a gentle pat before heading to the sink to wash her hands. The pat. It changed the entire dynamic of the doctor/patient relationship. Perfecting the patient pat should be a medical school graduation requirement.

“So what’s going on?” She dried her hands on a paper towel and rolled her stool over, unhooking the blood pressure cuff from the wall.

“It hurts all across here. Probably something I ate?” Hopeful.

“Don’t talk.” She pumped up the cuff.

The blood pressure machine hissed like an angry snake, the only sound in the room. I thought about Mike, who had no idea that I was here, or that something might be wrong. My worry was all I could carry this time. He was more afraid of losing me than of losing another child he didn’t know.

But I knew this child. He had wrapped his little fingers tightly around my soul. So had all the ones before him.

I breathed deeply and tried to focus on the cool and gentle fingers pressing on my wrist, feeling my pulse.

“150 over 90.” Dr. Liesel ripped off the Velcro cuff. “Not ideal. Your pulse is a little fast. When did you last see Dr. Herrera?”

Why was this always a surprise to a doctor? That pulses race faster and blood pounds in the presence of someone who could rock your world with a few words of irrefutable science?

“Several days ago. Everything checked out fine.”

“Lie back and let’s untie your gown.” She flipped a switch on a screen above my head, pulled out an ultrasound wand, and squirted warm jelly on my stomach.

Searching, searching, searching for that elusive heartbeat. I squeezed my eyes shut, and wondered where women caring for women heated up the goo.

I tried not to imagine a tiny, curled-up form perfectly still on the screen above my head. Too still. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I heard horses galloping through a stream and almost choked on air. My baby, beating away.

“From what I can see so far, your baby looks and sounds perfect.” She gently wiped the jelly off with a soft washcloth.

“Lie back for a second.” Careful hands massaged my stomach. From my angle, it appeared to be protruding about two more inches than yesterday. She pressed a stethoscope to my belly before pulling it out of her ears and adjusting the exam table into a sitting position. “It’s noisy in there. Maybe eat some plain yogurt. Do you know the sex?”

“Yes.” Overflowing with gratefulness, indebted, as everyone is to a doctor who delivers good news, as if they’re somehow responsible for it. “A boy.”

“Relax, OK? You’ve made it well past the first trimester this time. I see here in your paperwork faxed over from Dr. Herrera that you’ve had a number of miscarriages. The percentages are with you at this point.” She paused, frowning at my paperwork. “Is this right? A glass of wine a day?”

“More like every other day.”

“Cut back. One a week.”

“OK.” Timid. With doctors, always timid, whether they were assholes or angels, ones who patted my shoulder or ones who coldly told me that my future adorable first-grader who cut out construction paper butterflies was now a dead fetus that needed to be harvested by a machine.

“Do you take someone… like me? High risk?” The words rushed out unexpectedly.

She studied my face. “You want me to follow this pregnancy?”

“I think so.”

“My first delivery was twin calves in my uncle’s barn in Massachusetts. Sticking my arms up that poor cow at age sixteen prepared me for just about anything. I’m not worried if you aren’t. Still, Dr. Herrera is an excellent doctor and her facilities are a little more impressive. So what will it be?” She glanced up for confirmation, and I nodded.

You. I don’t know why I trust you, but I do.

She started pecking with two fingers into a small laptop on the counter. “I could do a full exam, but I don’t like to bother the baby unless it’s absolutely necessary. My nurse will set up a schedule of appointments. Call me anytime you’re worried. No big deal.”

Eat some yogurt. No exam. No big deal.

“Any other questions?”

I hesitated. Things were going so well.

“Do you have any idea where Caroline could be?”

“No. Unfortunately, I don’t.” Clipped.

She stood up, patted my shoulder in exactly the same spot, and headed for the door. “You can get dressed.”

“Wait. Please.” I sucked in a breath. “Caroline invited me over with some other women. We passed around… a box.”

Her hand stilled on the doorknob.

“And yesterday someone left a pol-a piece of paper on my doorstep. I need to know if Caroline’s behind it. It’s about something that happened to me a long time ago.” My voice began to plead. “You warned me. I need to know why.”

She turned to press the intercom button on the wall. “Anna, I’m going to take a few minutes with Emily in my office. Call Mrs. Lindstrom on her cell and check on her, will you? She’s in labor in her car in the emergency room parking lot. She’s hoping she can make it till midnight. If the baby has other ideas, let me know.”

She turned back to me, smiling, as if there were no undercurrents, no torture instruments behind the cabinets, no fears about a baby who could die regardless of statistics that said he shouldn’t. No ridiculous thoughts of blackmail and no missing Caroline.

“Mrs. Lindstrom’s insurance company pays for only two days, and the day starts whenever you show up. But she likes to get her full forty-eight hours. This is baby number six. She could probably deliver it herself.”

I wondered what it would be like to be so blasé about a pregnancy that I’d sit in a parking lot in full-blown labor, playing a game of chicken with the insurance company.

“Meet me in my office,” Gretchen said. “The door on the right at the end of the hall. Just come on in after you get your clothes on.”

A few minutes later, I found her sitting in fresh blue scrubs in one of two overstuffed purple chenille armchairs. The chairs faced a massive cherry desk, the top barely visible under a slough of papers, medical journals, two iPads, and a large flat-screen computer monitor glowing with what looked like a tiny white rat in a man’s hand. A baby? I peered closer. No, it definitely appeared to be a rat.

The doctor gestured for me to sit in the other chair. Equals. No power moves, with her behind the desk.

My eyes skimmed a diploma from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. Medical journals were crammed up against John Irving and Emily Dickinson on the bookshelves. A small bar in the corner was set up with crystal glasses and a few bottles of premium hard stuff. “It took me a second to get that.” I pointed to a small wooden sign that hung over the bar alcove. “Oh-be-gin. Clever.”

“A gift,” she said, “from a very relieved woodworking daddy.”

“Cute, cute.” I sounded idiotic. Absurdly nervous. Filling the space. How the hell was I going to start this conversation? It turned out, I didn’t have to.

“First, call me Gretchen, Emily. Second, you need to know that Caroline is an extremely complex person. What is that line Jessica Rabbit says? ‘I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.’ Anyway, it’s always reminded me of Caroline.”

Gretchen’s eyes were an unusual color. Almost lavender. Lavender, and bloodshot. No makeup. A short nose, blunt chin, a casual bob of hair shot with gray. Not a beautiful face, but a compassionate one. I felt guilty about taking up her time. One of the Bunko girls had told me that Gretchen delivered as many as five to ten babies a week. A third of the time she was paid in tamales. Besides her own practice, she volunteered at the county’s free clinic, which served mostly illegal immigrants.

“Thirty years ago,” Gretchen told me, “we were just a small group of women trying to find their way in sexist and repressive small-town Texas. Not all of us were born in the South and held pedigrees. It was a shock to our systems, like it probably is to yours.”

She pushed herself up from her chair and walked to the bar, pulling out two bottles of Dasani from a small refrigerator underneath. “Don’t kid yourself. The good old boys’ network is still thriving here and will be long after the two of us are dead. It’s like racism. A lot of people just spray on more whipped cream and keep serving it up. It’s so ingrained, we don’t even acknowledge that it’s there. These are the same men who pat themselves on the back for not being racist like their daddies and then suggest electrifying a large wall on the border.” She handed me an ice-cold bottle of water, and sucked two-thirds of hers down while I waited for her to continue.

“It couldn’t even be called a club at first. Most of us were either in the early stages of careers or were wives supporting men who were. We drank. We shared. We traded our secrets in little living rooms, long before careers took off and money rained down. Caroline burst into our lives maybe a decade after we began, when we’d already started meeting regularly, once a month. She said she lost both her son and husband in a house fire in Kentucky and all she had left was a pile of money and a sister she hardly ever saw. She needed a clean start. What she really needed, it turned out, were people to take care of.”

A sister, I remembered. But Caroline told me her sister was dead.

I couldn’t believe Gretchen was actually sharing all of this. She finished off the water, and leaned forward to toss the bottle into a bin for recycling. The bleach on her scrubs hung in the air. It reminded me of hiding in the freshly laundered sheets my mother hung on the line. Everything lately, it seemed, was reminding me of people I had lost.

“We were those people,” Gretchen was saying. “Caroline became our mother confessor. She made herself available at all hours, on the phone, in person. She delivered instant intimacy. Unconditional friendship. It was like being seduced, without the sex. She paid hundreds of dollars for therapy for women in this town who didn’t want their husbands to find out the real person they’d married. One was drinking and slapping her kids after school if they brought home anything less than an A. Another was molested by her father as a child and had been faking orgasm ever since. Intimate, scary stuff. Caroline took our friendly little club to a whole new level. And, yes, there were copious amounts of liquor and that little box involved.” Gretchen forced a tight smile. “Caroline puts so much money in the clinic, it should have her name on it. But she won’t let the board of directors do it. How do you hate a woman like that?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t asked Gretchen if she hated Caroline. Was she trying to ease my mind by pouring forth all this information? If so, she wasn’t. I’d only seen hints of the do-gooding woman Gretchen raved about. The whole thing sounded way too Southern gothic, an overwrought Pat Conroy novel. And wasn’t Gretchen, a doctor, just a little too smart and cynical to be pulled into this?

“It wasn’t until a year ago that I realized that Caroline was… losing it a little,” Gretchen said bluntly. Defensively. “I should have seen it much earlier.”

My head snapped up. It was like she heard my thoughts. Just as easily as she had conjured my child’s tiny, beating heart a few minutes ago.

Gretchen ran her palms distractedly down her thighs, ironing out wrinkles in the scrubs that weren’t there. “She wasn’t as discreet with our private lives. She taped our meetings, even personal lunches. She was clearly in a mental tailspin. Suspicious all the time. Of everyone. One night about two months ago, she called at two a.m., sobbing, asking if I knew where Alice was. I had no idea who she was talking about. The next day, she acted like the conversation never happened.”

“So maybe she did harm herself.” Or maybe she had pushed someone in the club too far. Maybe someone who was Alice in another life.

Gretchen didn’t appear to mind-read that one. She shook her head. “Emily, she’s my friend and my patient. I’m skirting a thin ethical line here. In fact, I’m well over it because I want you to understand why you should stay out of this. I’m not going into more details. The club has someone looking for her. We’ve hired a private professional. And to be perfectly clear, I know nothing about Caroline attempting to blackmail you.”

“But she’s done it before,” I persisted. “Hasn’t she? I get that she handpicks the club, so there’s loyalty. But maybe some of them didn’t want to play her party games anymore. Not with so much at stake.”

She stared at me intently before replying. “I don’t think one of the girls made off with her, if that’s what you’re asking. She’s been gone a little more than a day. If it weren’t a small town, the police wouldn’t even be paying attention yet. We’ll find Caroline in a few days, and we can resolve this quietly. I’ll have a word with her. I’m trying to help you, Emily. I obviously can’t stop you, but I’d prefer that you didn’t share all these details with your husband unless Caroline doesn’t show up soon. Maybe put him off a little.” The overall tone was now less warm, less polite. The message was the same as the cop’s. Lay off.

I suddenly wondered whether Gretchen was manipulating me, not the other way around.

Anna peeked her head in the door, which I’d left cracked.

“Sorry to interrupt, Gretch. The emergency room called to say that Ms. Lindstrom just delivered in her car.”

Gretchen stood. “All’s well?”

“Yep. Although she is out-of-her-mind ticked off at that poor baby for not waiting it out. The resident, that Duke snot, wants to know if he can give her two mils of Valium. Wants her to stop cussing at him.”

“No, he can’t,” Gretchen said. “Tell him I’m leaving now.”

Anna stared at me pointedly. Office hours were over.

I walked to the Volvo slowly. Happy, and not. My baby was fine. But I was as confused as ever about Caroline and her little club. The parking lot was crammed, and a white, late-model Lexus SUV crept behind me, a little too close for comfort, apparently hoping to grab my spot. I turned, annoyed. The glass windshield was too black for me to make out the driver, an illegal tint job, which I’d seen plenty of here in Texas.

Except that a few minutes later at a red light, I could swear the very same Lexus was right behind me. When the light turned, I pulled off into a McDonald’s and flipped my head to watch the SUV gun by. The sticker on its back window urged me to HAVE A BLESSED DAY. The right bumper declared the driver an ABORTION SURVIVOR. That was a brain twister.

My eyes lit on the neon pink graffiti on the McDonald’s window heralding the “return” of the McRib.

My stomach really wasn’t hurting anymore. I promised myself I’d eat better, starting tomorrow.

I rolled up to the drive-through and ordered.

On the way home, I decided.

I was going to tell Mike about the rape.