Obstetrix(31)

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THAT WEDNESDAY, I WAS pulled away from wood sanding again because a woman was in labor: Donna, having her sixth child. She’d expected it to go very quickly, but the baby’s position was suboptimal and she was having back labor. Then we got word that another woman, Holly, was bleeding. Holly wasn’t anywhere near delivery yet—she was probably having a miscarriage.

“Why don’t you stay here with Sister Donna,” I said to Sarah. “I’ll go take a look at Sister Holly. Maybe she can just stay home, and I’ll keep an eye on things there.”

Sarah hesitated, looked at Donna, and then nodded permission.

I packed up the fetal Doppler and four tablets of misoprostol and went to Holly’s house. Her husband wasn’t there, of course. She had four children, and I saw them being hustled away by one of the teenage girls as I arrived. Natalie, the older woman from the mending circle who I had come to think of as Natalie, Killer of Fun, was making up Holly’s bed with waterproof sheets and spreading out a blanket on her sofa that was fleece on one side, waterproof material on the other. My father used one of those on his couch back when he had an aging dog that had started losing bladder control in his sleep.

Natalie had brought along a basket of sewing and she sat down while I asked Holly when the bleeding had started. I wasn’t sure if she was here as company for Holly or supervision for me. Probably both. I took out the Doppler to listen for a fetal heartbeat.

There was none; Holly was, in fact, miscarrying. She accepted the dose of misoprostol and settled down to wait. “You can go back to your other patient if you want,” she said.

“I’d like to keep an eye on you for a little while,” I said. “Sarah will send someone if she needs my help with Donna.”

“I’m probably just going to lie down and take a rest,” she said.

“That’s fine,” I said.

Natalie hummed a hymn, and we sat together for a while. I thought about stories I could tell Bethany when I finished with Star Wars. Should I go to Empire Strikes Back or try something else? What else did I remember well enough to narrate? Maybe The Princess Bride. Unless she’d already seen it, back before her family joined a cult.

As soon as it seemed reasonable, I excused myself to the bathroom. Anytime I was somewhere outside my own little hut, I tried to make a quick search of the bathroom in the hopes of finding a hidden cell phone. Just about the only thing people did alone here was visit the toilet, and they’d said Turkey “found a way” to look at porn—maybe there were phones hidden.

There was a medicine cabinet over the sink: no phone there. There was a bottle of zolpidem, a sleeping pill that could be habit-forming, and some everyday stuff like chewable antacids. The zolpidem had clearly been dispensed by Sarah; it was in a bottle that had previously held ibuprofen, with a hand-lettered label of instructions taped over top.

I turned on the water to disguise the noise and lifted off the top of the toilet tank. Toilet tanks were a classic hiding place for illegal drugs, and to my genuine shock, there was something in there, sealed inside a ziplock bag, and I started shaking with excitement as I tried not to drop the tank lid. But it wasn’t a phone. It was a book. I pulled out the bag, opened it, and took a look.

It was a romance novel called The Duke of the Duck Pond, sort of Regency-ish. I could tell from the cover and the spine that this book had been read over and over and over. I flipped through quickly but there were no notes or anything else inside. I had found Holly’s secret, but it wasn’t a secret I could use to get away; it was Holly’s Onyx Dagger. I was briefly tempted to take it to read myself, but my room was searched regularly. They’d probably find it and confiscate it before I could finish reading it, anyway.

I sealed it up in its ziplock bag and tucked it back in the tank, set the lid in place, and turned off the water. Natalie and Holly were both where I’d left them: Natalie on the couch, Holly in her bed.

The bright afternoon slowly wore on. I stared out the window at the distant mountains, thinking about romance novels. Back in Minot, I used to swap them with Sue, one of the labor nurses. She was more into the contemporary kind with good banter than the kind with bodices that could get ripped, although she’d happily read Regencies with good banter, as well. We’d switched to e-readers at around the same time, which unfortunately made it harder to share books. Sue had retired a couple of years ago, but came to my trial. “To glare at the witnesses against you,” she said, in the email she sent to let me know she’d be there. “You won’t see me because you’ll have your back to the people watching, so just know I’m there, glaring.”

As the sun dipped low, Bethany brought a basket to the house with dinner for all three of us, but she didn’t stay. Holly didn’t feel much like eating and after she reiterated three times that she didn’t want her slice of shepherd’s pie, Natalie ate it, saying she didn’t want it to go to waste. I drew the curtains and lowered the lights.

If I had a cell phone and wanted to hide it in this room, where would I hide it? Under the mattress was a terrible place to hide anything, if you expected someone to search. Under the bed was even worse, although maybe if you had children’s clothes stored in a box, as they probably did, someone could hide a phone under the clothes. There was a dresser against the wall: secured to the back of a drawer would actually be a good hiding place. Or secured to the underside of the couch …