Obstetrix(38)

Bethany was focused on me rather than Sarah, and her eyes shone with hero-worship. I had to admit, if I’d gotten to watch someone get a stuck baby out back when I was thirteen, it would have made an impression on me, too.

We sent Bethany to tell Vanessa’s husband when she was ready to go home, and then Sarah, Bethany, and I went up to the community house for our late dinner. Sometimes we’d take a light meal in the clinic if someone was in the middle of a delivery, but Vanessa had been in transition labor when the dinner bell rang, and I didn’t think she’d be up for smelling lasagna. Bethany had run up to tell the cooks to set plates aside for us to eat later. The community house was dark and quiet when we got there. Sarah flipped on the lights, and then we went into the kitchen to reheat our food and eat it.

I hadn’t spent a lot of time in the kitchen, and I glanced around as Bethany bustled around with the microwave, making my habitual set of assessments. Did I see a phone? (No.) A laptop? (No.) Any likely hiding spots for phones? (Plenty, but I couldn’t search with Sarah sitting right there. Or Bethany, for that matter.) Would anyone hide something here? (Maybe; it would be inconvenient, and you’d risk your phone being found, but on the other hand, if someone found it, they wouldn’t know whose it was.) Was there an obvious way to cause an emergency? (The stoves were all electric; it would be possible to start a fire, but not nearly as easy as it would be with gas. Also, again, not with Sarah right here.)

“Can you tell me what you did today?” Bethany asked, setting my food down in front of me.

I explained shoulder dystocia and the various ways to resolve it. Bethany listened with wide-eyed interest as I wished I had one of those models of a pelvis and a baby that childbirth educators sometimes used. When we were done eating, Bethany washed the dishes we’d used and Sarah dried them and put them away, and we walked Bethany back to her parents’ house, and the night guard walked me back to mine.

I lay in bed, thinking about how at home, in my real life, I’d have to do charting, now. If only they’d placed a fucking ad instead of doing a kidnapping. Wanted: ob-gyn to live on-site in rural Idaho. Payment: room and board. No insurance companies, no Epic Systems of any kind, and NO CHARTING EVER.

I mean, the “also, no books” would be a dealbreaker for a lot of people. Unless they wanted to raise the pay significantly.

No charting ever, though. I’d have considered it.



* * *



I HAD A VIVID dream that night. In it, I had taken advantage of a medical emergency—it wasn’t clear if it was an actual emergency or if I’d just pretended it was—to try to smuggle a note to an outside doctor, and the note had been found by Sarah. In the dream she came screaming out of the van that I’d sent the note, and I was grabbed by Ethan and dragged into that side room where they’d thrashed Holly for having a phone, and as I was bracing myself for a beating, they brought in Bethany and beat her instead, while I watched.

“If we thrashed you, you might be impaired when we need you to perform a surgery,” Sarah explained. “So Bethany gets your thrashing.”

In the dream, my screams mixed with Bethany’s, but I was fixed in place, the way you sometimes are in dreams, completely unable to move to stop them.

I jerked awake, the image of Bethany’s wide betrayed eyes still vivid in my mind, and sat up, terrified that I’d fall right back into that dream if I closed my eyes again. I went to the bathroom, wondering if this was a thing they actually did. Was it a thing I’d heard them mention doing, and forgot? Was my subconscious trying to remind me of something I’d actually heard about?

Sometimes husbands were beaten in their wife’s place, that’s what it was. Sarah had mentioned that, after I’d said Gwen needed to be excused from all physical punishments for several months—Brother Ken can do it in her place if anything comes up. Beyond that, my brain was probably just spinning horrors out of shadows.

I put on my coat and stepped outside in my slippers. It was a dark, clear, cold night, no moon and no clouds. I stepped away from the motion-detector porch light so I could look up at the stars, although the cold from the ground was seeping through the thin soles under my feet. I could spot the Big Dipper, and followed the pointer stars to the North Star, thinking about how, even if I could reliably navigate by the stars, I had no idea whether the nearest town was north, south, east, or west of here.

There was a drone somewhere overhead, I could hear it. I took my flashlight out of my pocket and blinked an SOS up at the sky, wishing I had learned enough Morse code to send a real message. Not that there was a particularly big chance that whichever farmer was using that drone to check on his herd would be looking for Morse code messages by flashlight. I blinked out SOS again anyway. And again.

I heard footsteps and wondered if someone had noticed my flashlight. I stuck it in my pocket as Ethan came around the corner. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m looking at the stars,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, and looked up. “Yeah, it’s a good night for it. Don’t get too cold, now.”

“I won’t.”

He went back to his post. I couldn’t hear the drone anymore, and my feet were getting very cold, so I went inside.

They were getting used to me. They were keeping a less-close eye on me. I might be able to just walk myself out of here when it warmed up. Maybe.