No One Knows Us Here(32)

“Hello, hello!” he said in a jolly way, as if he was delighted to see me sitting there on his exam table. He ignored my coughing fit.

I looked up at him and cleared my throat. “I’m sorry.” I coughed again, more out of nervousness than necessity. “I’d like to request a woman doctor.”

He smiled and rolled a chair over to the foot of the exam table and patted my leg. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “I have a lot of experience with these exams.”

“I didn’t say I was worried.” I was more confident now. I had rights, after all. I didn’t have to do this. I could walk out if I wanted to. “I said I wanted a female doctor.”

He kept that smile pasted on his face. “I’m afraid we can’t help you there,” he said. “This is a private practice. My private practice.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to do. I could leave. I should leave. I didn’t have to put up with this. “I’ve never had a male doctor before,” I said, biding my time.

“I promise I’ll be gentle.” He rested a warm hand on my knee.

I shuddered. Sometimes it was difficult for me to know what was reasonable or not. I had a friend in college who claimed to look forward to her gynecology appointments. She had a handsome doctor—he could play a doctor on TV, she had said—and one time after the exam he’d told her that everything looked beautiful down there. She took it as some sort of high compliment. He would know, she’d told me.

Maybe I was the messed-up one. Maybe when you weren’t like me, having some dude rooting around in your uterus was no big deal. Maybe it was easy to lie back and open up. Just like that.

Was it so unreasonable, what Leo was asking of me? He just wanted me to get a clean bill of health. That was all. I chose this, I kept repeating to myself. This is just part of the job.

I asked the doctor what he planned to do to me.

“Just a standard pelvic exam,” he said. “Pregnancy test. The full STD panel. We’ll take a urine and blood sample before you go. And then in a couple of days, you can come back for that IUD fitting.”

I put a foot in each stirrup on either side of the exam table and lay down on my back. IUD fitting? Sure. Sure, I could get an IUD. Why not.

The doctor placed his hands on the insides of my calves. His hands felt warm against my cold skin.

“You’ve got to relax,” he said, trying to open up my legs. They were locked together at the knees.

I couldn’t move. I felt paralyzed, lying back on the table, like I was twelve years old again, trapped under the sheets pulled tight over my body and tucked over the mattress, so tight I could barely breathe. Jason’s hands ironing out the wrinkles, running over me, back and forth, back and forth.

Tears brimmed out of my eyes and flowed into my ears. I squeezed my eyes, tightly, pushing more tears out. I had to stop. “I can’t,” I said.

“Just breathe.” He had a soothing voice. Not very deep, but not nasally, either. Neutral. A nice, neutral voice. “Look above you. At the ceiling.”

I opened my eyes. It took a minute for my vision to adjust. I focused on the ceiling. It, too, was painted dusty rose. I imagined the doctor hiring a painting company to do the whole office and telling them to paint it a color ladies would like. This is what they came up with: dusty rose.

On the ceiling, right above my head, was a small white sign, about the size of a playing card. On it was the word BREATHE, written out in fancy calligraphy with a purple pen.

I breathed, and the doctor spread open my legs.

“Scoot down a bit, toward me. Yes. That’s good.”

I stared at the BREATHE sign, and I breathed my way through the entire exam. I heard him snap on his gloves. He squeezed some lube onto his fingers and slid them into me. With one hand inside and the other on my abdomen, he pressed, palpating each organ in turn. Certainly the doctor could see, just peering into my body like this, everything I had been up to these last couple of days. He would tell Leo all about it. They would probably get together over microbrews and talk about it. I’d had sex, and not with Leo Glass.

I’d had sex more than once. First in Sam’s bed. Once more before we got up in search of sustenance. Again afterward, on the floor. And again last night—or this morning, before dawn, when we were both half-asleep, and we reached for each other. Sam was behind me; I could feel him against me. He kissed the back of my neck and pushed down my underwear . . .

“That’s better,” the doctor said. “Nice and relaxed. I’m just going to insert the speculum—”

All the muscles in my body clenched back up.

“Whoa there,” the doctor said, chuckling softly. “As you were.”

I felt a cold steel finger pinch my cervix, and for a moment my vision went white from the pain. But it was only a moment. He slid the speculum out and dropped it onto a tray. The speculum looked like a metal duck head, covered in slime and blood.

The doctor patted my legs and said, “All done.”



“Take me home,” I told Alejandro, who was waiting for me in the parking lot. He started the car up right away, without saying a word. I wouldn’t have tolerated even one more errand, and he knew it. If he suggested so much as a quick detour to a drive-through Starbucks, I would have revolted. Unfastened my seat belt, opened the door, and jumped out of the moving car and rolled into the street, where I would be smashed flat in seconds.