Obstetrix(8)

Despite that, I could do no less than my best.

Possibly I could do less than my best for Sarah, but she probably knew that, and anyway, she wasn’t my patient.

When I was done, Sarah helped Grace Lynn clean up and dress, and she gave Little Ozzy a bath and dressed him and put a little knitted blue hat on his head, and finally went and flicked the light outside a few times. That turned out to be the signal that her husband could come. He was a big man with a thick dark beard who was pleased to hear he had a son. “We’re calling him John,” he said.

“I think Grace Lynn wanted the name Ozias,” I said.

Her husband glanced briefly in my direction and said, “It’s a good thing it’s up to me, then.”

Grace Lynn stood, a little wobbly, and took his arm; the baby, well-wrapped now, was tucked into his other arm. And off they went to their house or hut or whatever it was they lived in.

The clinic was very quiet now, and Sarah stripped the bed down, disinfected everything, and made it up again with fresh sheets from a drawer. “Who does the laundry?” I asked.

“There are washers and dryers in the community building by the kitchen,” Sarah said. “Commercial-style. Hospital sheets get properly cleaned.”

“This isn’t a hospital,” I said. “This isn’t a safe setup for a C-section. Kidnapping me was a terrible strategy, even if I help you. That woman you mentioned, Joy, she’d be better off just spending her eighth month in some big city with a proper maternity unit.”

“That’s your opinion.”

“I mean, sure. It’s an informed opinion. You can hold a gun to my head and make me operate, if you want, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot turn this into a proper operating room.”

“People survived surgeries in the 1920s,” she said. “They survived surgeries in MASH units. You’re not being asked to do brain surgery or an aorta repair. You’re being asked to do a cesarean section, and this will be fine.”

“And anesthesia? You don’t think nitrous oxide is going to suffice for a cesarean section, do you?”

“Of course not. We have the equipment and medication for spinal anesthesia, and you—” She gave me a bright, satisfied smile that made me want to punch her in the face. “You know how to do a spinal. It was on your resume. You learned in Haiti. I asked you about it in your interview.”

The interview had receded into a drug-induced fog, but I remembered that question, and my answer. Which had not actually been, I can totally do a spinal, I absolutely learned how to do that.

But I could do a spinal; I had, in fact, done them during my rotation in Haiti. Also, spinals are pretty simple to do; if I refused to do one, the most likely outcome was that Sarah would do it instead, and that thought made me shudder.

She walked me back to my little cabin, and said, “You should probably get some real sleep. Breakfast is at seven, and you’ll be seeing patients starting at eight.”

I almost said that I might be seeing patients but that did not mean I would be treating patients. But we’d already established that I was not going to be able to sit on my hands if they put patients in front of me. And in any case, pretending that I was cowed and cooperative was more likely to give me an opportunity to escape than me being loudly defiant. I nodded at her stiffly and closed my door.

Inside, I was struck by a sudden suspicion, and went to the bathroom to check on the clothes I’d washed out and hung. When they kidnapped me, I’d been wearing my interview clothes: a wool-blend pantsuit in navy blue with a crisp dress shirt in coral, to make the outfit not look too funereal. The suit jacket had disappeared somewhere between Minneapolis and here, but I’d still been wearing the pants and the shirt, and had hand-washed both along with my bra, underpants, and socks. Every thread of clothing I’d meticulously scrubbed and hung up was now gone.

I sat down on my bed, breathless with a sense of betrayal that I recognized was, in fact, irrational. These people had kidnapped me. Why was I surprised that they had stolen my clothes?

I put on the pajamas they’d left for me, used the toothbrush they’d set out for me with the toothpaste they’d left in my bathroom, which was not the brand I used, and climbed between the covers. Normally I would read for a while once I was in bed. I pushed the thought away.

Staring up at the ceiling, I tried to put together what I knew. It was cold here—cold like Minnesota—and the trip had taken a long time, I was pretty sure it had been at least a day and a night. I kept thinking Idaho, but was I actually in Idaho? Hell, I might be in a state that had legal abortion and abundant obstetricians and this cult just wanted someone on-site. If you took a woman to a hospital, there were so many things the staff might report to the authorities, like if she was underage, or had injuries from abuse.

When will someone notice I’m missing? Will anyone notice I’m missing?

My dad would be concerned when I missed our Sunday phone call, but he did not even live in St. Paul, or anywhere near it. I hadn’t given him the numbers of any of my neighbors, in part because I didn’t much like my apartment and didn’t think I’d be staying. I had no coworkers and no boss.

And adults were allowed to disappear. Back in 2015, one of my cousins—a woman in her mid-twenties—had gone missing. My aunt went to the police. Turns out there isn’t a minimum twenty-four-hour wait, that’s a myth, but they do want some reason for concern beyond, “I can’t find her,” because for all they know, you can’t find her because she doesn’t like you and doesn’t want to talk to you. She and my aunt had just had a big fight, and she’d left and taken her purse and her car, and there was no particular reason to believe she was missing missing, other than my aunt saying she really didn’t think her daughter would do that and not call.