She shifted, slipping a crumpled picture out of her pocket. Yesterday, she had been one of a dozen women here for counseling, getting labs done and listening to Vonita walk through the forms required by the state and hearing Dr. Ward talk about the procedure. She had also been asked to give a urine sample, and had an ultrasound. A woman named Graciela had been the one who performed it; she had hair that reached past her hips, and even though her voice was soft, she was speaking by rote. “We are obligated to offer you the opportunity to listen to the fetal heartbeat and to see the sonogram,” Graciela told her, and to Joy’s surprise, she heard herself say yes. Then she started to sob. She cried for her own dumb luck, for her loneliness. She cried because even though she had taken every precaution possible, she had wound up—like her mother—boxed into bad choices because of a man.
Graciela had handed her a tissue and then squeezed her hands. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, breaking from the script. Although she wasn’t talking about the ultrasound, she put the wand back in its cradle.
“I’m sure,” Joy said. But she didn’t know if she believed it. Peeing on a stick was not seeing a fetus on a sonogram. “I want to see it,” she told Graciela.
So Graciela squirted gel onto her swollen belly and ran the wand over her skin, and abracadabra, a silver fish swam onto the little screen. It morphed into a circle, a curve, then a fetal shape.
“Can I…” Joy said, and then she swallowed. “Can I have a picture?”
“You bet,” Graciela replied. She pushed a button, and a little printout curled from the machine. Black and white, in profile. She handed it to Joy.
“You must think I’m crazy,” Joy murmured.
Graciela shook her head. “You’d be surprised how many women want one.”
Joy had not known what to do with the ultrasound picture. She only knew she could not leave without it. She didn’t want to fold it into her tiny wallet, and yesterday she had been wearing pants without pockets. So she had slipped it into her bra, over her heart. She told herself that when she got home later, she would crumple it up and throw it away.
She still had it with her today.
—
BETH FELT LIKE SHE WASswimming up from the bottom of a deep pool, and every time she tried to see the runny yolk of the sun, it seemed to get farther away. Then suddenly she surfaced in a rush of noise and activity. She was dizzy and dry-mouthed when her eyes popped open. Where the hell was she?
She slipped a hand underneath the blanket that was covering her and touched her belly, then lower, to the bulk of a pad in her underwear. Awareness struck her, one drop at a time, until suddenly she was soaked in the truth: they had asked her if she was pregnant and she’d said no, and it didn’t squeeze her heart to say it because it wasn’t a lie. But still, they had done a urine test and a blood test and had rubbed an ultrasound wand over her belly, as if they didn’t believe her. The last thing Beth remembered was looking up at the ugly fluorescent lights on the ceiling, and then she didn’t remember anything at all.
She tried to speak, but she had to dig deeper to find her voice, and when it came out it didn’t sound like hers at all. “Daddy?” she rasped.
Then he was leaning over her, his warm hands on her shoulder, her arm. “Hi, baby girl,” he said. He smiled down at her, and she noticed the deep lines that bracketed his mouth, like a parenthetical statement of fear. His temples had brown age spots she had never seen before. When had he gotten old, and why hadn’t she noticed?
“Where am I?”
He smoothed her hair away from her face. “You’re at the hospital. You’re going to be fine, honey. You just rest.”
“What happened?”
He looked down at the floor. “You were…losing a lot of blood. You needed a transfusion. Whatever it is, baby, we’re going to get through this together.”
Beth wished that could be true. She wished, in a crazy way, that the doctor would come back and tell her she had a rare and terrible cancer, because that would almost be easier to hear than the fact that she had disappointed her father.
He reached over, averting his eyes, tugging her hospital johnny more firmly behind her to tuck it in. “Don’t need to give a free show,” he murmured.
She had read somewhere that the victims of the Inquisition had been made to pay for their own punishments, their own imprisonment. To escape death, they had to offer up the names of others who did not believe Jesus Christ was God. Whether or not they were actually innocent had nothing to do with the process. Beth took a deep breath. “Daddy,” she began, and just then the nurse came into the room.
She was round everywhere—cheeks, butt, boobs, belly—and she smelled like cinnamon. Beth remembered, hazily, that face leaning down over her own.I’m Jayla, I’m your nurse, and I’m going to take care of you, understand?“It’s about time,” her father said. “It can’t be normal, that much blood, from…there. Is my daughter going to be all right?”
Jayla looked from Beth to her father. “Maybe I could talk to Beth privately?”
That was the instant that Beth understood her Day of Judgment had come, her moment before the Grand Inquisitor. But her father didn’t know this, and so he interpreted her sudden stiffness as fear instead of fatalism. “You can talk to us both. She’s only seventeen.” Her father gripped her hand, as if he could be the strength for whatever bad news was about to be delivered.
Was it Beth’s imagination, or did Jayla’s eyes soften as they met hers, as if she could couch the impact of her words? “Beth, your tests came back. Did you know you were pregnant?”
“No,” she whispered—a syllable that was maybe a lie and maybe a denial of what was surely about to happen.
Beth could not look her father in her eye. He lifted her hand, and for a breathless moment she thought that she had been wrong about him, that he would stand by her or forgive her or both. But instead he tugged until she could feel his thumb rubbing over the thin ridge of the silver promise ring he had bought her for her fourteenth birthday, the one that was supposed to signify that she’d stay pure until her wedding night. “Are you…did you…?”
The nurse murmured something and slipped out through the curtains of the cubicle. Beth hardly even noticed. She was somewhere else—behind a playing field, under the bleachers, with stars overhead that spelled out the answers to questions she was afraid to ask out loud:Should I…? What if he…? Could this be…?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
