Obstetrix(12)

Joy knew the exact day of conception. I gave her a list of things to watch for, and told her that we should plan on a cesarean delivery at thirty-seven weeks. “And again, you should have that at the nearest actual hospital,” I said. “Not here.”

“Again,” she said, “you’re all I’m going to get.”

She had the same high voice as everyone else, but with a weariness that made her sound much older than the rest.

As the door closed behind Joy, I felt the anger that I’d been stuffing down in favor of cooperation and survival burst through like stormwater cresting a levee. “That woman needs an actual hospital,” I said, furiously, to Sarah. “She needs a facility with a crash cart and bags of blood they can transfuse into her if she hemorrhages. If you people cared about Joy you would be planning a hospital delivery for her and not kidnapping an obstetrician.”

Sarah’s head went back; her eyes narrowed. For a second I thought she was going to slap me across the face.

She did not. Instead, she put on her coat and handed me mine. “You are clearly still tired from your long trip,” she said. “You’d better go lie down in your cabin. I’ll walk you over there.”

The lunch bell started tolling as we walked over. “I think you need rest more than food,” Sarah said, tilting her head with a faint condescending smile. “Go get some rest. You can join us at dinner.”



* * *



MY STOMACH GROWLED, BUT it wasn’t as if I’d never missed a meal. This was … kind of like the slap she’d held back from. A punishment, but more a warning than a serious punishment. A slap said, “I can hit you. I can do whatever I want to you. I have power over you.” So did depriving me of a meal.

I lay down on my bed—not that I was actually going to sleep, but there wasn’t really enough space to pace—and thought about the fact that there was a laptop computer in that little clinic of theirs, a computer kept under lock and key. Was there an Internet connection somewhere? Might there be times it was unattended? Sarah had put the key to the laptop cabinet in her pocket; could I get into it without the key?

In the late afternoon, there was a knock at my door, and when I didn’t immediately answer, the door swung open anyway. “Dr. Elizabeth,” someone called. It wasn’t Sarah’s voice.

I sat up. “What,” I said, repressing the instinctive question what do you need? It was two men. Probably not coming about a woman in labor, then; the gender divisions here had been pretty stark, so far.

“I’m Brother Elmo, and this is Brother Calum.” Calum: David’s brother, the biological father of Joy’s baby. Both of them looked young, not like children but young enough they’d probably get carded if they went to a bar. “Pastor has instructed us to show you something.”

“Is Sarah coming?” I asked, not moving.

“She’s busy.”

I grabbed my shoes and slid them on, then put on my scarf, coat, gloves. They hadn’t said where we were going, but they were both dressed for the cold. Brother Elmo, I noticed as I stood up, was carrying a hunting rifle over his shoulder with a padded sling. “What’s that for?” I asked.

“Someone spotted a bear sniffing around yesterday,” he said. “If we see the bear, it’s for the bear.”

There was not, in fact, a whole lot I could do about it if they were planning to murder me. I followed the two men out of my cabin and up the street, past the communal building, and then past the barn. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Not much farther.”

We ended at a tiny burial ground with white wood cross markers. “We haven’t lost a lot of people,” Calum said. “But the ones we did lose were mostly little ones. That was Sister Michelle’s.” He pointed at a cross. “That was Sister Holly’s.” Another cross. “We also lost Sister Ginny—she was a mother who was giving birth—and her baby too; they’re in the same grave.”

I started to relax, thinking that the goal of this trip was to persuade me that they had kidnapped me out of real desperation, but then Calum pointed to a final, unmarked grave.

“The doctor we had before, she chose not to save Sister Ginny. Brother Ethan, Sister Ginny’s husband, he shot that doctor when she said she wouldn’t help. Doc’s buried there.”

I stared at the grave. The wind suddenly felt very cold.

“You do realize that I could try to help a woman or a baby and they could still die,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts.

“You don’t see a grave for Sister Sarah here, do you? We don’t shoot folks for trying and failing. Doc Jana, she just wouldn’t even try. We can go back now, this is what we wanted you to see.”

They walked me back to my cabin, tipped their hats—literally, like characters out of an old western movie—and said, “See you at supper.”



* * *



THE MEAL THAT NIGHT was chili and cornbread. The chili was heavy on the beans and tasted more like ketchup than like chili. There was honey for the cornbread, at least. I looked around the room as I ate, wondering which person here was Ethan. How long ago he’d murdered the other doctor.

Pastor John stood up to read everyone a chapter from the Bible after dinner. Like the reading earlier, it was in the ornate, archaic language of the King James Version, and it took me a minute to recognize the story of the Prodigal Son. When he was finished, I tried to watch to see where the Bible went, and spotted it: it went into a locking box.