Suspicious Minds (Stranger Things Novels #1)(78)

“Terry, babe, you can’t worry about that lab. You’ll have to stop going!”

Terry plopped onto the edge of her own bed. “Look…Can you just make an appointment with your doctor? I’d just rather go there than to mine.”

Stacey nodded. “I’ll call first thing tomorrow.”

“Will you make it under your name?” Back to impersonating Stacey, briefly.

“Sure, now that I know why you’re so paranoid. Pregnancy hormones.” Stacey paused. “You should know that my doctor’s an old creep. I’m pretty sure he felt me up once.”

Given the creeps she’d been around in the lab…“I’ll live.”

Stacey came over and pulled Terry back up and into a hug. “Andrew is going to be thrilled. He’d have asked you to marry him before he left if he knew!”

“I know.” He’d be the only thrilled person.

“That would’ve made everything easier. This isn’t good,” Stacey said, pointing out the obvious. “It’s going to screw up everything.”

Terry should’ve agreed. She’d thought the same thing, after all. Instead, everything within her rejected the suggestion. Maybe it was Ken’s saying the baby was a girl. Maybe it was knowing she had to be stronger now.

“No, she’s not going to screw up anything. She’s going to be perfect.”

“Like I said, pregnancy hormones.”





1.


Stacey’s doctor’s exam room might have struck Terry as cold and clinical if she didn’t have the rooms at the lab to compare it to. Since she did, the fact that there were paintings of old-fashioned doctor’s bags and Norman Rockwell prints on the walls made it feel practically homey. The gown fabric was thicker. A box of tissues sat on a counter with jars of tongue depressors and cotton balls and Dum-Dums lollipops. A poster with the words THE HUMAN BODY on the wall depicted a man’s body with the organs and skeletal system diagrammed.

Guess he won’t be showing me where the baby is on that, Terry thought.

A petite nurse had weighed her and given her a disapproving scowl when she said why she was there, then told her to change into the gown. She’d had Terry pee into a plastic cup and taken it away. “We use Wampole’s test here,” she said. “It’s faster than the others. I’ll be back in two hours with the results.”

And so for two hours Terry had waited on a crinkling paper sheet for the official verdict to come. She wished she’d asked for a newspaper, so she could read the latest developments around the Kent State shootings. A protest had gone badly wrong; four students had ended up dead, nine injured, after guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds into the crowd in thirteen seconds. There was no real indication of what had provoked the troops to shoot.

Life could end so quickly.

The door finally opened and the doctor came in, followed by the nurse.

“I understand you’re a friend of Stacey Sullivan’s.” The doctor frowned at her. His mushroom cloud of gray hair frizzed around his head, Einstein-like. He raised his hands to pull a pair of gloves on, and Terry noted that his hands were huge with hairy knuckles. She really hoped he didn’t attempt to grope her.

“That’s right.”

“The Sullivans are good people.” He paused to make a teeth-sucking noise. “Stacey’s a smart girl—too smart to get into trouble.”

So Stacey’s doctor was, in fact, a total creep of all different sorts. Good to know. “Does that mean I am—in trouble?”

“Yes.” He gazed at her balefully. “And I really shouldn’t be seeing you without an adult or the father present. But then I guess if the father was present you wouldn’t be here.”

“He was deployed to Vietnam before I suspected. We’re in a serious relationship.”

“Unless you’re in a married relationship, you shouldn’t be in the state you’re in now.” He nodded for her to lie back. “Let’s see how bad this situation is.”

Charming.

She regretted coming here for a second, imagining their family doctor and how sympathetic he’d always been. Even just a fever was treated as cause for ice cream as soon as the girls felt strong enough for it. He’d even come to her parents’ funeral.

Nervously, Terry scooted back and reclined on the table. She should be used to being poked and prodded at the mercy of doctors but…this was different. She’d done the math from various dates, and she could be very far along or not far at all. She and Andrew usually used protection, but a couple of times she’d been fairly certain of her cycle and they’d been careless.

The nurse lifted her ankles and popped her feet into two cold metal stirrups at the end of the exam table. A sheet was placed over her lap. And then Terry closed her eyes and tried to be somewhere else while the doctor did the extremely unpleasant exam.

“Why are all the tools so cold?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm,” the doctor said in answer and sucked his teeth again. “You can sit up, miss.”

God, what a bedside manner.

“Well?” Terry prompted.

“You’re well into your third trimester.”

The nurse gave her a disappointed look, as if Terry had engineered all this.

But Terry was in shock. She hadn’t expected this. She did the math in her head—November. All the way back in November. When Andrew had come to the dining hall in his mask…That had been one of the careless nights, after she’d bailed him out.