Page 37 of The Echo Wife
Regardless of all that: if something was wrong with her impossible baby, I couldn’t help her with it. “We should probably call your obstetrician.” She looked at me blankly. “Your doctor?”
She shook her head again, turned her attention back to lathering dish soap on the surface of the fabric. “I don’t have one of those,” she said. “I’m sure it’s fine, though.”
I reached past her and gently turned off the water. I took her hands in mine and eased the underwear out of her grip. “It’s not normal to bleed a lot when you’re pregnant,” I said, gentling my voice as best I knew how. “And I don’t know how much is okay when you’re this far along. Did you ever go to a class or anything?”
She shook her head, and I felt a far-off pang of culpability. I had never asked. I hadn’t asked if she had appointments to get to, if there were books she should be reading. I had been thinking ofthe baby as her responsibility, as her problem. It never occurred to me to ask about it, because in spite of myself—in spite of all evidence to the contrary—some part of me kept thinking of Martine as though she were an actual adult. As though she were more than two and a half years old.
She didn’t even know that she should be worried about the blood. Nathan had never told her, had never offered her the tools to learn. She didn’t have a cell phone or a computer. I wasn’t even sure if she knew about the internet. She had trusted that he would tell her what she needed to know, and he had failed her.
And now, so had I.
“Okay,” I said, pushing the guilt aside for later. “How are you feelingnow?”
“Fine,” she said. “A little bit of cramping, maybe.”
I was still holding her underwear. I looked down at it again, let my mind click into the clinical perspective that would let me dodge the strange, invasive intimacy of looking at someone else’s underthings. The bubbles of soap foam had already subsided, and it was immediately apparent that most of the crotch of the garment had soaked through with blood. I tried to calculate how many cc’s of blood she’d lost, but I didn’t have experience with the relative absorbency of lace. “Are you still bleeding?”
“A little,” she said. She answered without hesitation, without embarrassment. She didn’t seem troubled by my questioning. The first few weeks of her life had almost certainly been defined by questions like this, Nathan trying to figure out if he’d gotten it right. Her eyes slid away from mine. “I took a pad from under the bathroom sink. I hope that’s all right. I didn’t—”
I cut her off. “Of course that’s fine. Anything you need here is yours, let’s just make that a rule, and if you’re ever notsure,you can ask.”
I wasn’t being kind to her. It was just simpler this way, not having to worry that she was suffering because she was afraid to take something of mine. That’s all.
I took Martine to a clinic downtown, the kind of place whereI would have expected to see protestors holding picket signs and screaming about murder. As though they knew anything about murder. There were none, but Martine still looked nervously at the camera next to the buzzer at the outer door.
“Is this another lab?” she whispered. I shook my head and told the person on the other end of the camera that we were there for a walk-in appointment. We entered the clinic through a set of nesting doors. It did feel a lot like the airlock at the lab, once I thought about it—except that my airlock wasn’t bulletproof.
“This is a doctor’s office,” I said. “They’ll be able to make sure the baby’s okay.”
It was perfect. The woman at the front desk assured me, without being asked, of the confidentiality of our visit. I reflexively told her that I was Martine’s sister, realizing even as I said it that she hadn’t asked. We’d brought cash; I had coached Martine on my salient medical history in the car. I didn’t need to tell the woman taking our fake names anything at all. She was going to make a point of not remembering me. She looked between us briefly, her face unreadable, and gave me paperwork to fill out.
I stayed with Martine during her appointment. I held her hand during the ultrasound. When the doctor said that she wanted to perform a manual examination, Martine placed her feet into the stirrups at the foot of the bed without flinching. Her eyes unfocused, and her grip on my fingers went loose.
She’d told me that she’d never visited a doctor’s office before, but she seemed to know how this kind of exam would go. I hated Nathan more in that moment than I had hated him in any other moment since the day I’d met him.
After the exam was complete, the doctor asked me to step out of the room.
“Please don’t go,” Martine whispered.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, looking at me as though she meant it. “Martine and I have to do this part alone.”
It was only five minutes or so before the doctor walked out.She smiled at me as she passed, the smile of someone who had seen a hundred of me before and would see a hundred more of me before her next day off. It was a comforting feeling, one I would later reflect was almost certainly intentional. It was her job to make me feel as though I’d been seen, but wouldn’t necessarily be remembered. She was giving me the gift of as much anonymity as I wanted.
Martine came out of the exam room a few minutes later, fully dressed. The hair at her temples was damp, smoothed down, and I pictured her standing at the sink with water on her fingertips, arranging herself before leaving the room. She told me that the doctor had promised results within a couple of days, and that she was supposed to rest in the meantime.
I waited until we were in the car to ask how she was doing.
“I’m fine,” she said.
I turned out of the parking lot, more carefully than usual. I kept my eyes forward, not looking at Martine. “What did she do while I was gone?”
Martine’s voice was taut. “Just asked me questions. She wanted to know if I was safe. Asked if I was being forced to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
“How did you answer?” I asked, tracing the stitching on the top of the steering wheel with my fingertips.
“Yes and no,” she said brusquely. “Respectively.”
I don’t know why I couldn’t seem to believe her. It felt too simple. I was sure that she was holding something back. “Are you sure?” I asked.
