He answered after several rings. I couldn’t hear my own voice when I spoke, but I think I said something about wanting to talk to him. My teeth were chattering and I might have been talking gibberish. When he spoke it was in a whisper.
Are you drunk? he said. What are you doing calling me like this?
I said I didn’t know. My lungs were burning and my forehead felt wet.
It’s only 2 a.m. here, you know, he said. Everyone’s still awake, they’re in the other room. Are you trying to get me in trouble?
I said again that I didn’t know and he told me again that I sounded drunk. His voice contained both secrecy and anger in a special combination: the secrecy enriching the anger, the anger related to the secrecy.
Anyone could have seen you trying to call me, he said. Jesus Christ, Frances. How am I supposed to explain if someone asks?
I began to feel upset then, which was a better feeling than panic. Okay, I said. Goodbye. And I hung up the phone. He didn’t call back, but he did send a text message consisting of a string of question marks. I’m in hospital, I typed. Then I held down the delete key until this message disappeared, character after evenly timed character. Afterwards I tucked my phone back underneath my pillow.
I tried to make myself think about things logically. Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no material reality. If I ever had been pregnant, then I was probably miscarrying anyway. So what? The pregnancy was already over, and I didn’t need to consider things like Irish constitutional law, the right to travel, my current bank balance, and so on. Still, it would mean that at some time I had been unknowingly carrying Nick’s child, or rather a child that consisted of a mysterious half-and-half mixture of myself and Nick, inside my own body. This seemed like something I should have to adjust to, though I didn’t know how or what ‘adjusting’ meant or whether I was being strictly logical about it any more. I was exhausted at this point and my eyes were shut. I found myself thinking about whether it had been a boy.
The doctor came back several hours later and confirmed that I had not been pregnant, that it was not a miscarriage, and that there was no sign of infection or any other irregularities in my blood work. He could see while he spoke to me that I was shivering, my face was damp, I probably looked like a spooked dog, but he didn’t ask me if I was all right. So what, I thought, I am all right. He told me the gynaecologist would see me when her rotation started at eight. Then he went away, leaving the curtain open behind him. It was beginning to get light outside and I hadn’t slept. The non-existent baby entered a new category of non-existence, that is, things which had not stopped existing but in fact had never existed. I felt foolish, and the idea that I had ever been pregnant now seemed wistfully naive.
The gynaecologist arrived at eight. She asked me some questions about my menstrual cycle and then drew the curtains closed to give me a pelvic exam. I didn’t really know what she was doing with her hands, but whatever it was, it was grievously painful. It felt like some extremely sensitive wound inside me was being twisted around. Afterwards I held my arms around my chest and nodded at what she was saying, though I wasn’t sure I could really hear her. She had just reached inside my body and caused some of the worst pain I had ever experienced, and the fact that she continued to speak as if she expected me to remember what she was saying struck me as truly crazy.
I do remember that she told me I needed an ultrasound, and that it could have been a number of things. Then she wrote me a script for the contraceptive pill and told me that if I wanted to I could run two boxes of pills together and only have one period every six weeks. I said I would do that. She told me I would get a letter about the ultrasound in the next couple of days.
That’s it, she said. You’re free to go.
My mother picked me up from the front of the hospital. When I shut the passenger door, she said: you look like you’ve been through the wars all right. I told her that if childbirth was anything like that pelvic exam I was surprised the human race had survived this long. She laughed and touched my hair. Poor Frances, she said. What will we do with you?
When I got home I fell asleep on the sofa until the afternoon. My mother had left me a note saying she had gone into work and to let her know if I needed anything. I was feeling well enough by then to walk around without hunching over and to make myself some instant coffee and toast. I buttered the toast thickly and ate it in small, slow bites. Then I showered until I felt really clean and padded back to my room wrapped in towels. I sat on the bed, water running from my hair down onto my back, and cried. It was okay to cry because nobody could see me, and I would never tell anyone about it.