Castle of Water: A Novel(60)
There was something else, though. One concern that she did not share at all with Barry. A small but pesky worry that traced its origins not to any romantic, sea-swept encounter beneath Polynesian stars, but rather to a drab and cheerless waiting room in the H?pital Saint-Louis.
The Centres de Dépistage of its free STD and sexual health clinic, to be precise, where, exactly four months before the Cessna took its plunge, she had sat amid the stale periodicals and almost palpable regret, waiting for the nurse to call her name. To say the experience was unsavory would be an understatement—it was absolutely humiliating. But with their joint bank account and her birth control pills both thoroughly depleted, she didn’t have much choice. étienne had suggested borrowing a few thousand francs from his parents until their new architecture firm was up and running, but Sophie Ducel, with the defiant pride of the French southerner, had staunchly refused. She’d been keenly aware, in that way only daughters-in-law ever are, of their quiet displeasure when the announcement had been made that their brilliant son with the “de” in his surname was marrying a swarthy cassoulet eater from the Hautes-Pyrénées. And although she had forgiven them for it, she had never forgotten it, and she’d be damned if she was going to beg those parigots for a single centime. Of course étienne said that she was being ridiculous and that she was imagining things. To which she responded that she certainly had not imagined the joke his mother made about their whole apartment smelling like Piment d’Espelette. To which étienne responded with an exasperated groan. Fine, they would figure out some other way to get by until the first clients came.
And when it came to completing her examen gynécologique and refilling her birth control pill prescription, that other way was the bleak waiting room of Saint-Louis. Sophie did her best to hide her face behind a rumpled Paris Match and tried to avoid eye contact with the other patients—a number of whom she recognized from the late-night street corners of Strasbourg–Saint-Denis.
“Sophie Ducel,” a nurse at last called out into the waiting room. Merde. Sophie set down the magazine, gathered her coat, and followed the nurse down a corridor of twitching fluorescent lights, right into the doctor’s office. She had prayed not to get the stubbly internist with the liquor-laced breath, and in that regard, at least, she was lucky. The attending physician was a matronly woman clad crisply in white.
“Bonjour,” she greeted Sophie, her eyes never leaving the open file she held in her hands.
“Bonjour,” Sophie replied, taking a seat on the examination table.
“I have all of your test results here. Everything came back normal.”
“That’s good news.”
“Yes, it is. And I have your prescription as well. It should last for six months, and if you need a refill this time, all you need to do is call.”
“Thank you.”
The doctor extended her hand with the slip of paper. But when Sophie reached over to take it, she sensed a hint of resistance. An afterthought, something remembered. “Just out of curiosity,” the doctor added. “Are you planning on having children anytime soon?”
The question caught Sophie off guard; she folded the prescription into the pocket of her jeans and settled back on the crinkled paper of the examination table. “To be honest, I haven’t given it much thought. Maybe in a few years. I don’t really know.”
The older woman nodded wisely, smoothed out a crease in her white doctor’s coat, and took off her glasses. “Be sure to talk to an obstetrician before you do.”
“Is there some kind of problem?”
She removed a printout from the file and showed it to Sophie. “Your uterus is slightly bicornuate. Do you see the shape?” She pointed out the abnormality with a ballpoint pen, haloing the grainy image in a circle of bright blue.
“Yes. But what does that mean?”
“It’s fairly common, and usually it’s nothing to worry about. But in some cases, it can cause complications for the baby.”
“Complications?”
“Breech births, preterm delivery, even malformations. But those are all relatively rare. Just make sure you mention it.”
“Okay, I will. Thank you.”
“Of course. Have a good day.”
The soles of Sophie’s Adidas squeaked across the sterile linoleum and out the rear exit onto rue Bichat. The temperature had fallen, as had dusk; she could see her pale breath against the gray-pink sky. She turned up the collar of her winter coat and fixed her wool Saint James cap on her head, suppressing as she did an involuntary shudder. Well, what did it matter? she thought to herself. I’ll have plenty of time to worry about that when the time comes.
She did not tell étienne then because the time had not yet come, and she did not tell Barry even when it did. She thought about it—in fact, she almost mentioned it in the panic that followed their first night together, and she came close again when she told him she was carrying their child. But in both cases, she ultimately chose not to. They already had enough on their plates with simply staying alive, and besides, the doctor had made it sound inconsequential enough.
So Sophie kept that secret. Not because she didn’t want Barry to know, but because she knew there was no way to manage that parcel of information. In all likelihood, there was nothing to worry about. And in the event that there was, there was absolutely nothing either of them could do.