Authors: Elle Lothlorien
“It’s so bad…” I start shaking again.
He pulls me close, my cheek resting on his chest. “Well, I
know
you’re not dying,” he says. He chuckles. “Unless she asked you back for a follow-up.”
I turn my head, butting his chest with my forehead. “It’s worse.” My voice is barely a whisper.
His hands are warm on my back, kneading those little circles with his fingers that I love so much. “
Worse
than dying?”
I don’t say a word.
“Are you pregnant?” he says.
I hold my breath while my body rattles like an old clothes dryer and tears roll down my face.
He’s calm as can be, like he’s just asking in passing, no big deal. “Well, are you?”
I swallow and start breathing again. “How did you know?”
He kisses the top of my head. “Claire, there aren’t very many diagnoses you can make with in-house lab tests for symptoms that include frequent urination.”
We sit there, wrapped around each other, for the better part of five minutes, listening to the surf pounding the rocks below. Now that he knows, I don’t know what else to say. I feel numb, and strangely tired.
“I love you, Claire, you know that?”
I don’t answer, not right away. “What do I do?”
He tucks his chin to his chest to look down at me. “What do you mean?”
“This wasn’t even supposed to happen.” I still can’t look at him. “I’ve been on shots for five years.”
“I know.”
“You do?” I peek up at him from behind the safety of my sunglasses.
“I know you think I didn’t read your medical records before you came into the clinic that first day, but I did.”
I snort. “Yeah, that’s why you thought I was, like, twelve years old.”
“I did
not
think you were twelve. I just thought there was a typo on your record. Happens all the time with electronic medical records. I figured the twenty-nine was supposed to be a nineteen. Anyway, Depo was listed on the records that one of your other doctors–” He stops. “Oh. Oh, no.”
“What?” When he doesn’t answer I sit up and smack him on the chest to get his attention. “
What
?”
He runs the fingers of one hand back and forth through his hair. “Oh, shit. This is my fault.”
“Uh…well, I didn’t think we had to go on
The Maury Povich Show
for you to realize the obvious.”
“Not that.” He starts pacing back and forth across the stone apron, muttering to himself. “The carbamazepine? Or maybe the two together. No, that’s the kidneys.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It must have been the carbamazepine.”
“What about it?”
“Carbamazepine. It makes the body metabolize drugs faster, makes them not work as well.”
I frown. “Wouldn’t this have been something to think about before you lured me into a situation involving little to no clothing?”
He looks sheepish. “How dumb would you think I am if I said I’m used to treating children under ten?”
“Yeah, but what about Wendy? Wouldn’t she have thought about it?”
He shakes his head. “It didn’t even come up once any of the times we discussed your case. Plus, there’s no way she could’ve known for sure that you and I were…you know…together.”
“According to Wendy, I chatted her up about our budding romance all the time.”
“Suspecting and knowing aren’t the same thing.” He turns towards the ocean and drops his sunglasses over his eyes. “Do you know how many weeks you are?”
“As a doctor
and
the father, you think you’d be able to shed some light on it.”
And inquiring minds like Lucinda Gaelic want to know
, I add in my head. “But since you’re asking, I’m pretty sure that I’m around–
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s too late.”
“Too late for what? To terminate?”
He spins around. “What? No! Wait–” He pulls his sunglasses off, and then seems to forget he’s even holding them. They fall from his hand and clatter across the polished stone. “You’re not thinking of–Claire, please don’t do that.” He stands there, looking at me with this expression of desperation. “I mean, I’m begging you.”
I’m confused, not sure how the conversation took this turn. “I’m not–I wasn’t–I thought…wait, what are
you
talking about?”
He exhales. “Carbamazepine. It can cause…certain problems if you take it when you’re pregnant.” His eyes unfocus and he starts to mutter to himself again. “But you always drank a lot of orange juice. Gallons of it.”
“Is anything you’re saying supposed to make any sense? Or is this the part where I tell you how dumb I think you are?”
“Forget it. Don’t worry about it.” Suddenly he startles, like something just occurred to him. “Wait a minute…”
“What?”
“The district attorney, she has your medical records...”
I flinch. “I know. I thought Lana was going to keep the results out of my file. I didn’t know that Lucinda Gaelic knew until she called Rev.”
“Have you gone to an obstetrician yet?”
“No. I’ve been putting it off, I don’t know why.” Actually I do. Unlike Lucinda Gaelic, I wasn’t super keen on finding out just
how
pregnant I was. For better or for worse, Davin’s “Compilation Episode 4” disk has removed any anxiety I had on that front. “But if you want to know how far along I am, I’m pretty sure–”
He pulls out his cell phone. “I’m going to call an OB friend of mine so we can find out for sure.”
“I
am
sure.”
“Well, we can guess a range of dates, but there’s only one way to know for sure.” He holds the phone to his ear.
“It wouldn’t be a range,” I say. “I don’t know exactly the week or month, but whenever you can feel–”
“Claire, just let me do this and–”
“If you could just tell me when a woman can normally–”
He holds up a finger. “Just give me two minutes, okay?”
“Fine,” I say, bending over to pick up his discarded sunglasses from the ground. “Fine, I’ll just tell the OB that I felt the baby move last night.”
He pulls the phone away from his head. His arm just sort of freezes in the air like that. “Are you sure?”
I roll my eyes. “What kind of question is that? Of course I’m sure.”
Well,” he says, finding his voice. He reaches out, tentatively, to rest his palm on the tiny, barely-there swell of my belly. “That’s just, I mean…”
We stand there, just like this, for a few moments, and despite the catastrophic events of the last few days I think there’s no way I could ever feel happier than I do right this second.
“Does your OB friend have a private entrance or something?” I say, breaking the spell. “Maybe I can take the last appointment of the day so no one will notice I’m there.”
“Forget that, we’re going
now
.”
“Today? Who’s going to see me on a Sunday?”
“Someone who owes me an enormous favor.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Why does this friend of yours owe you a favor?” I say.
Brendan has driven a convoluted route to his friend’s office, even going so far as to backtrack a few times to be sure that no photographers are following us, so the trip’s taken twice as long as it would have otherwise.
“I did my obstetrics rotation under him. He’s a really great doctor, a fantastic mentor. I have a lot of respect for him.”
“The favor?”
“His son got hit by a car about three years ago while he was riding his bike.”
“Oh, my god.”
“Yeah. He was wearing a helmet and everything, but he had a really bad head injury.
Really
bad.”
“Don’t need the details,” I say, waving my hand. “I’m still getting over the ‘skull in the freezer’ story.”
“He was flown to our hospital and they–well, one of them was Trent Seles, you met him–they operated on him, but his injury was so bad we all thought he would never make it.”
“But he did.”
“He did, yeah. I’d just read about a procedure they were doing experimentally in Japan, and I suggested to him that we try it on his son. We’d tried everything else. And he said yes.”
“Wow, the poor guy, having to make that kind of decision. But it worked?”
“It worked. It worked great. His son was, I don’t know, about sixteen at the time. He just started at UCLA a month ago.”
“He went from brain surgery to UCLA?”
“
Definitely
not. There was about two years of physical therapy and speech therapy in between. He had to learn how to walk and talk all over again.”
I muse over the story as we pull into an empty parking lot in front of a standard brick medical office complex.
“Let me go first,” he says. “He’s going to have to walk down from his office to let me in, so just wait until you see the door open.”
“Okay.”
He walks to the building entrance, talking on his cell phone at the same time. When one of the building doors swings opens, he turns back and waves at me. I take one final look around, jump out of the car, and half-run, half-walk to meet him.
Once I’m inside the lobby I have a chance to check out the friend who owes his son’s life to my baby-daddy. I was expecting a man in his mid to late forties, but this guy is definitely early to mid-sixties. His hair has receded into a horseshoe shape, but the back is grown out, the length of it in a gray braid that reaches his shoulder blades. He’s wearing a short sleeve, button-up shirt, and his arms are covered with a carpet of gray hair.
First impression:
No, way, no WAY I’m letting this guy look at my–
“Claire, this is Billy Brady.”
Oh, great
, I think.
Even his name is creepy.
“Hi…Bill.”
I try, but I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to call anyone 1) over the age of ten 2) who is not an Old West outlaw 3) or one of the kids on
The Brady Bunch
“Billy.”
“Hi, Claire,” he says, pumping my hand. “Great to meet you. Why don’t you guys come up? The place is totally empty.”
We follow him through a set of glass doors into a dark waiting room. At the end of a long hallway, a bright light radiates from one doorway. His office is comfortable and warmly lit, with lamps of amber glass and walnut bookshelves crammed with books and papers. I settle into an overstuffed chair, feeling a little less apprehensive.
We share a few minutes of small talk, and then Bill gets right to it. “Brendan says that you found out a few days ago that you’re pregnant.”
I’ll admit it: I hate the word “pregnant.” It’s all the hard, harsh consonants in the word–P, G, T–like it’s taken from a German root word that means “you’ve been fucking, haven’t you?” Also, it sounds too much like the word “impregnable,” making me feel like my uterus is a sturdy, easily defensible fortress that an invading army has laid siege to. Which, now that I think about it…
I feel my face turn red. Brendan and Bill are both looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Brendan squeezes my hand.
“I am–I’m–”
With child
, I almost say. I quickly clear my throat. “Pregnant.” I spit the word out like a bad peanut.
“Do you know how many weeks along you are?”
Using advanced mathematical formulae, scattered goat entrails, and my sketchy recollection of the date Davin told me that I evicted the teddy bear camera from my bedroom, Brendan has concluded that my impregnable fortress was likely impregnated on July eleventh.
“Um…about eighteen weeks.” I clear my throat. “Best guess.”
I’ve decided that “eighteen weeks” sounds a lot better than “four and a half months.” Because who’s so stupid that they don’t know they’re four and a half months pregnant? I’ve drafted the short list: thirteen-year-old girls, chicks in comas, and ultra-religious women who change their clothes with the lights off and refer to their breasts as “dirty pillows.”
“Brendan says you’ve been having morning sickness for about two months?”
“Not any more, not for about a month.”
“And you’d been getting birth control shots, correct?”
I nod. “For the last five years.”
“Do you remember the date of your last shot?”
“It was the middle of August.”
“What about the one before that?”
“I think it was the middle of May.”
“What other medications were you on at the time?”
“Um, Dr. Pickering put me on...” I look at Brendan.
“Wendy Pickering suggested therapeutic lithium and carbamazepine to treat an onset of Klein-Levin Syndrome.”
“Not prophylactic?”
What the what
? I hold my breath, sure that the good doctor has just asked Brendan why he didn’t use a rubber. Apparently not, because Brendan just casually shakes his head and continues speaking more medical gibberish.
“Diagnosis came after a twenty-four hour polysomnography following a hypersomiac episode onset.”
“What is she getting?”
“Initially three hundred milligrams lithium oh-dee increased to seven hundred fifty milligrams until serum levels reached point eight mek.”
“Carbamazepine?”
“Four hundred milligrams oh-dee. No increase. Both were discontinued July thirteenth once the episode resolved.”
Bill looks at me. I feel like I’m expected to say something, to agree or disagree with the entire exchange. Since I don’t know what the hell either of them has said, I just add a somber “yes” and hope that settles it.
Bill smiles and lifts his chin towards Brendan. “This guy always talk like that?”
“Usually only when I’m already asleep.”
The obligatory ice-breaking joke having been made, I brace myself.
“Well,” says Billy Brady, Physician Outlaw, “here are my thoughts.”
I sit up straighter. It’s been my experience that doctors don’t share “thoughts” as much as “bad news” when they start using euphemisms.
“I have concerns,” he says. “First, I’m concerned about fetal exposure to the Depo-Provera, only because of the date of that May shot. Conception within four weeks of the injection has been correlated to low birth weight.” He spreads his hands quickly, and just as quickly folds them again. “So. There’s that.”