The Good Girl (16 page)

Eve
After

We sit in the waiting room, James, Mia and me, Mia sandwiched in the middle like the cream filling of an Oreo cookie. I sit in silence with my legs crossed and my hands folded on my lap. I stare at a painting on the wall opposite her—one of many Norman Rockwells in the room—of an old man holding a stethoscope to a little girl’s doll. James sits with his legs crossed as well, ankle to knee, flipping through the pages of a
Parents
magazine. His breathing is loud and impatient; I ask him to please stop. We’ve been waiting more than thirty minutes to see the doctor, the wife of a judge friend of James’s. I wonder if Mia considers it odd that every magazine cover in the entire room is cloaked with babies.

People size her up. There are whispers and we hear Mia’s hushed name escape from the tongue of strangers. I pat her hand and tell her not to worry; just ignore them, I say, but it’s hard for either of us to do. James asks reception if they can hurry things along, and a short, redheaded woman disappears to see what is taking so long.

We haven’t told Mia the real reason why she’s here today. We didn’t discuss my suspicions. Instead we told her that we were worried that she hasn’t been feeling well lately and James suggested a doctor, one whose Russian name is nearly impossible to pronounce.

Mia told us she had her own doctor, one in the city who she’s been seeing for a half dozen years, but James shook his head and said no, Dr. Wakhrukov is the best. It never occurs to her that the woman is an ObGyn.

The nurse calls her name, though of course she says
Mia
and it takes an elbow from James to get her attention. She sets her magazine on the chair and I look at her with indulgent eyes and ask if she wants me to keep her company. “If you want,” she says, and I wait for James to disapprove but he is silent.

The nurse stares strangely at Mia as she weighs her and gets a height. She eyes poor Mia like she’s a celebrity of some sort, instead of the victim of a horrible crime. “I saw you on TV,” she says. The words come out sheepishly, as if she isn’t quite sure whether she said them aloud or managed to keep them in her head. “I read about you in the paper.”

Neither Mia nor I am quite sure what to say. Mia has seen the collection of newspaper articles I clipped during the time she was away. I tried to hide them in a place where she wouldn’t see, but she did anyway when she was looking for a needle and thread in my dresser drawer, to replace a button that had fallen from a blouse. I didn’t want Mia to see the articles for fear of what they might do to her. But she did nonetheless, reading each and every one until I interrupted her, reading about her own disappearance, about how the police had a suspect, about how, as time went on, it was feared she might be dead.

The nurse sends her to the bathroom to urinate in a cup. Moments later, I meet her in the examination room, where the nurse takes Mia’s blood pressure and pulse then asks that she undress and put on a gown. She says that Dr. Wakhrukov will be with us in a few minutes and as Mia begins to undress, I turn my back.

Dr. Wakhrukov is a somber, subdued woman who must be approaching sixty. She comes into the room quite abruptly and says to Mia, “When was your last menstrual period?”

Mia must find the question terribly odd. “I...I have no idea,” she says, and the doctor nods, remembering only then, perhaps, of Mia’s amnesia.

She says that she is going to perform a transvaginal ultrasound and covers a probe with a condom and some sort of gel. She asks that Mia sticks her feet into the stirrups and without an explanation, she plunges the device into her. Mia winces and begs to know what she’s doing, wondering what this has to do with her overwhelming fatigue, with the listlessness that makes it nearly impossible to rise from sleep in the morning.

I remain silent. I long to be in the waiting room, beside James, but I remind myself that Mia needs me here and let my eyes wander around the room, anything to avoid the doctor’s very intrusive examination and Mia’s obvious confusion and discomfort. I decide then that I should have told Mia about my suspicions. I should have explained that the fatigue and the morning sickness are not symptoms of acute stress disorder. But perhaps she wouldn’t have believed me.

The exam room, I find, is as sterile as the doctor. It’s cold enough in here to kill germs. Perhaps that is the intention. Mia’s bare flesh is coated with goose bumps. I’m certain it doesn’t help that she’s completely nude with the exception of a paper robe. Bright fluorescent lights line the ceiling, revealing every graying hair on the middle-aged doctor’s head. She doesn’t smile. She looks Russian: high cheekbones, a slender nose.

But when she speaks, she doesn’t sound Russian. “Confirming the pregnancy,” the doctor states, as if this is common knowledge, something Mia should know. My legs become anesthetized and I sink my way into an extra chair, one placed here for elated men who are soon to be fathers.

Not me, I think. This chair is not meant for me.

“Babies develop a heartbeat twenty-two days after conception. You can’t always see it this early, but there is one here. It’s tiny, hardly noticeable. See?” she asks as she turns the monitor to Mia. “That little flicker of movement?” she asks as she points a finger at a dark blob that is practically still.

“What?” Mia asks.

“Here, let me see if I can get a better look,” the doctor says and she presses on the probe, which delves farther into Mia’s vagina. Mia squirms in apparent pain and discomfort, and the doctor asks her to hold still.

But Mia’s question was something other than what the doctor interpreted it to be. It wasn’t that Mia couldn’t see where her finger was pointing. I watch as Mia lets a hand fall to her abdomen.

“It just can’t be.”

“Here,” the doctor says as she removes the probe and hands Mia a tiny piece of paper, a whimsy of blacks and whites and grays like a lovely piece of abstract art. It’s a photograph, much like the one of Mia herself long before she became a child. I clutch my purse in my shaking hands, ravaging its insides for a tissue.

“What’s this?” Mia asks.

“It’s the baby. A printout from the ultrasound.” She tells Mia to go ahead and sit up, and pulls a latex glove from her hand, which she tosses into the garbage can. Her words are lifeless as if she’s given this lecture a thousand times: Mia is to come back every four weeks until she reaches thirty-two weeks; then biweekly and a few weeks later, every week. There are tests they need to run: blood tests and an amniocentesis if she wants, a glucose tolerance test, a test for Group B Strep.

At twenty weeks, Dr. Wakhrukov tells Mia, she can find out the sex of the baby if she’s interested. “Is that something you might want to do?”

“I don’t know” is all Mia manages to say.

The doctor asks if Mia has any questions. She has only one, but she can barely find her voice. She tries, and then, clearing her throat, tries again. It’s spineless and faint, little more than a whisper. “I’m pregnant?” she asks.

This is every little girl’s dream. They begin thinking about it when they’re too young to know where babies come from. They carry around their baby dolls and mother them and dream of baby names. When Mia was a girl it was always overtly flowery names that flowed off the tip of a tongue: Isabella and Samantha and Savannah. Then there was that phase where she thought everything should end in
i
: Jenni, Dani and Lori. It never crossed her mind that she might have a boy.

“You are. About five weeks.”

This is not the way it’s supposed to be.

She rubs a hand against her uterus and hopes to feel something: a heartbeat or a small kick. Of course it would be too early and yet she hopes to feel the flutter of movement inside her. But she feels nothing. I can see it in her eyes when she turns and finds me weeping. She feels empty. She feels hollow inside.

She confides to me, “It can’t be. I can’t be pregnant.”

Dr. Wakhrukov pulls up a swivel stool and sits down. She drapes the gown over Mia’s legs and then says, her voice softer now, “You don’t remember this happening?”

Mia shakes my head no. “Jason,” she says. But she’s shaking her head. “It’s been months since I’ve been with Jason.” She counts them on her fingers. September. October. November. December. January. “Five months,” she concludes. The math simply does not add up.

But of course I know Jason is not the father of that child.

“You have time to decide what you’d like to do. There are options.” The doctor is producing pamphlets for Mia: adoption and abortion, and the words are coming at her so fast that she can’t possibly keep up.

The doctor sends for James, allowing Mia a few minutes to get dressed before the nurse brings him in. While we’re waiting, I ask Mia if I can see the ultrasound. She hands it to me, her lifeless words repeating...
it just can’t be.
It’s then, taking that photograph in my hands and laying eyes on my grandchild, my own flesh and blood, that I begin to cry. As James enters the room, the crying turns into a moan. I try to suppress the tears but simply can’t. I yank paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and blot my eyes. It’s just as Dr. Wakhrukov returns that I can no longer hold it inside and I wail, “He raped you. That bastard raped you.”

But still, Mia feels nothing.

Colin
Before

Winter has arrived. It was snowing when we woke and the temperature in the cabin had dropped by what felt like twenty degrees.

There’s no warm water. She layers on all the clothes she can find. She puts on two pairs of long johns and that gangly maroon sweatshirt. She slips on a pair of socks, complaining that she hates to wear socks, but without them her feet would freeze. She says that she’s always hated socks, even when she was a baby. She would rip them from her feet and throw them to the floor beside her crib.

I haven’t admitted to being cold before, but it’s fucking freezing. I started a fire the moment I woke up. I’ve already had three cups of coffee. I’m sitting with an old, torn U.S. map spread across the table. I found it in the glove compartment, along with an all but dried-up pen and I’m circling the best routes to get us the hell out of here. I’ve got my mind set on the desert, somewhere between Las Vegas and Baker, California. Somewhere warm. I’m wondering how to make a detour to Gary, Indiana, first, without highway patrol spotting the truck. I figure we’d have to ditch the truck and swipe a new one, somehow, and hope it doesn’t ever get reported. That or hop a freight train. Assuming people are looking for us there could be roadblocks in our honor, especially around Gary, just in case I have the nerve to go home. Maybe the police are using her as bait. Maybe they’ve got a surveillance team lined up around the old Gary home, waiting for me to call or make a stupid move.

Damn.

“Going somewhere?” the girl asks, looking at the map as I fold it up and push it away.

I don’t answer her question. “Want some coffee?” I ask instead, knowing we couldn’t stay in the desert for long. Squatting in the desert nixes any chance of a quasinormal life. It would all be about survival. We can’t go to the desert, I decide, then and there. The only chance we stand is somewhere abroad. We don’t have enough cash for a flight anymore, so the way I see it, there’s two choices: up or down. North or south. Canada or Mexico.

But of course to get out of the country, we need passports.

And that’s when it hits me: what I have to do.

She shakes her head no.

“You don’t drink coffee?”

“No.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I don’t drink caffeine.”

She tells me that she did drink caffeine, for a long time, but it made her agitated and jittery. She couldn’t sit still. Eventually the caffeine high would fade, only to be replaced by extreme fatigue. So she’d have another cup of coffee. A vicious circle. “And when I tried to avoid caffeine,” she says, “I’d succumb to debilitating headaches, only to be soothed with Mountain Dew.”

But I pour her a cup anyway. She takes the warm mug into her hands and presses her face to the rim. The steam rises up to meet her. She knows she shouldn’t but she does it anyway. She raises the mug to her lips and allows it to sit there. Then she takes a sip, burning every bit of her esophagus on the way down.

She chokes. “Be careful,” I say too late. “It’s hot.”

There isn’t a damn thing to do but sit and stare at each other. So when she said she wanted to draw me I said okay. There isn’t anything else to do.

To be straight, I don’t want to do it. At first it’s not a big deal, but then she wants me to
hold still
and
look straight
and
smile
.

“Forget it,” I say. “I’m done.” I stand up. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and smile at her for the next half hour.

“Okay,” she concedes, “don’t smile. Don’t even look at me. Just sit still.”

She places me beside the fire. She presses her frigid hands to my chest. She lowers me into place, on the floor. My back all but touches the stove. The flame nearly burns a hole in my shirt and I begin to sweat.

I think of the last time she touched me. The desperation of her hands as she tried to undress me. And the last time I touched her, smacking her across the face.

The room is gloomy, the dark pine logs of the walls and ceiling blocking any light. I count the log walls, stacked fifteen high. There is no sun to pass through the small windows.

I look at her. She isn’t all that bad to look at.

She was beautiful that first night, in my apartment. She watched me with these unsuspecting blue eyes, never thinking for a minute that I had it in me to do this.

She sits on the floor and leans against the couch. She pulls her legs into her and rests the notebook on her knees. She takes a pencil from the pack, extracts the lead. She tilts her head and her hair falls clumsily to one side. Her eyes trace the shape of my face, the curve of my nose.

I don’t know why, but I feel the urge to knock the guy who was with her before me.

“I paid him off,” I confess. “Your boyfriend. I gave him a hundred bucks to make himself busy for the night.”

He didn’t ask why and I didn’t say. The coward just grabbed the money from my hand and disappeared into thin air. I don’t tell her I confronted him in the john with my gun.

A hundred bucks can buy a lot these days.

“He had to work,” she says.

“That’s what he told you.”

“Jason works late all the time.”

“Or so he says.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Sometimes. Maybe.”

“He’s very successful.”

“At lying.”

“So you paid him off. So what?” she snaps.

“Why’d you come home with me?” I ask.

“What?”

“Why did you come home with me that night?” She forces a swallow and doesn’t respond. She pretends to be lost in her work, the fury of her lines as she sketches manically across the page. “I didn’t realize it was a hard question,” I say.

Her eyes well up. A vein in her forehead protrudes through the skin. Her skin becomes clammy and her hands shake. She’s mad.

“I was drunk.”

“Drunk.”

“Yes. I was drunk.”

“Because that’s the only reason someone like you would come home with someone like me, right?”

“Because that’s the only reason
I
would go home with
you
.”

She’s watching me and I wonder what it is she sees. What she believes she sees. She thinks I’m numb to her indifference, but she’s wrong.

I take off my sweatshirt and drop it to the floor beside my clamorous boots. I’ve got on an undershirt and jeans that she’s probably never seen me without. She scribbles my face on the page, delirious lines and shadows to describe the demon she sees before the fire.

She had a few drinks that night, but she was lucid enough to know what she was doing, to welcome my hands on her. Of course, that was long before she knew who I really was.

I don’t know how long we’re silent. I hear her breathe, the sound of lead striking the paper’s surface. I can almost hear her thoughts in my mind. The hostility and anger.

“It’s like cigarettes or smoking pot,” I finally say to her.

The words startle her and she tries to catch her breath. “What is?”

She doesn’t stop drawing. She pretends, almost, like she’s not listening. But she is.

“My life. What I do. You know they’re bad for you the first time you try. Cigarettes. Pot. But you convince yourself it’s okay—you can handle it. One time, that’s it, just to see what it’s like. And then all of a sudden, you’re sucked in—you can’t get out if you want to. It wasn’t because I needed the money so bad—which I did. It was because if I tried to get out I’d be killed. Someone would rat me out and I’d end up in jail. There was never the option of saying no.”

She stops drawing. I wonder what she’s going to say. Some smart-ass comment, I’m sure. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything. But the vein in her forehead fades away, her hands stand still. Her eyes soften. And she looks at me and nods.