CHAPTER FOURTEEN

JENN

April 17 Eleven months before Drowning

Rick sat beside me in the women’s clinic waiting room as I filled out pages and pages of forms. The room was decorated with giant framed photographs of mothers and babies and furnished with chairs and tables designed with simple lines and colors like an IKEA showroom. Rick was on his phone doing I don’t know what when I reached the personal and family medical history section. I glanced at him from the corner of my eye, grateful that he agreed to come to my first prenatal visit.

With reluctance, I returned to the form. My personal medical history was straightforward enough, but I knew nothing of my biological medical history. I didn’t know if I had a family history of female cancers or whether any woman in my line had lost children during pregnancy, or anything else. My child would know the history of at least one generation before her, something I’d never have.

Eventually, we were brought back to an area decorated, as the waiting room had been, with poster-size photos of babies and pregnant women. A young nurse took my weight and blood pressure, then led us to an officetype room, complete with bookshelves, a desk, and a couch. There we waited—me nervous, Rick looking bored—until a quiet knock sounded on the door. The knob turned, and the door opened, revealing a dark-haired woman who I guessed to be in her late fifties.

“Hi,” she said, entering with her hand extended to me. “I’m Tiffany.” This was the nurse practitioner I’d made the appointment with a month ago. The clinic was highly recommended online, but they also had a long waiting list, so I was in the middle of my second trimester—much later than recommended for a first prenatal exam.

“Jenn,” I said, shaking her hand and smiling. “And this is my husband, Rick.”

“Hey,” he said, putting his phone down and shaking her hand as he flashed a smile of his own. It was the first real energy or emotion I’d seen from him since we left the house. I took it as a hopeful sign.

“Nice to meet you.” Tiffany took a seat at the desk and went over my paperwork. She asked a few questions here and there, including why I had such a scant family medical history, though she made me comfortable even with that sensitive subject. She was kind and warm, and I felt instantly at ease. She consulted a small chart. “Looks like you’re about fifteen, sixteen weeks. Does that sound right?”

“Yes.” I reached over and took Rick’s hand in mine. For the moment, I felt as if we were on the same team.

She spent a lot of time talking with us, asking me about my nausea and other symptoms, wondering if I’d given any thought to a birth plan, what my hopes and desires would be in the delivery room. Many of the questions were things I hadn’t known to think about, and my mind began swimming.

“I don’t know,” I said more than once, and Tiffany assured me that I had plenty of time to make those decisions.

She shifted away from the computer and faced us directly. “If you don’t have any other questions—”

“I have one,” Rick interjected.

“Sure,” Tiffany said.

“Is it too late for an abortion?”

All air seemed to have been sucked out of the room; I couldn’t breathe. A flicker of shock passed across Tiffany’s eyes, but she recovered quickly, so fast that Rick might not have picked up on it.

“Here? Yes. A few states allow them later, but even then, we’re getting close to that line,” Tiffany said.

“So how much time do we have? I mean, hypothetically, if we went to another state where it’s legal longer?”

Rick’s question took Tiffany off guard. She glanced at me, then spoke with measured words. “Two weeks at most,” she said. “According to the date of Jenn’s last menstrual period, she’s between weeks, which gives you closer to ten days.” When she stopped speaking, an uncomfortable quiet fell over the room as if the gravity had been turned up.

“Gotcha,” Rick said, leaning back, seemingly satisfied.

Tiffany glanced between me and Rick a couple of times before putting her hands together and standing. “Okay, well, we’ll do the standard first-visit exam in another room. Rick, you can go wait in the lobby for the first part. I’ll call you back in a few minutes. It shouldn’t take long.” She smiled warmly and went to the door, which she opened and held for us. Rick passed through and kept going, back toward the waiting room.

“Excited to hear the heartbeat?” Tiffany asked as she led me to an exam room.

“The heartbeat?” I said breathlessly. Of course I’d hear it. I hadn’t thought about what hearing that would be like, or really considered that it would be today. My eyes watered.

In the exam room, I expected Tiffany to give me instructions for undressing and putting on the gown or whatever came next, but instead, she gestured to a chair. “Have a seat.”

The look on her face had me worried. Did she know already that something was wrong with my baby? I sat on the chair, and she sat on the rolling stool.

“I have a question.” The concerned tone didn’t help my nerves.

“Yes?”

“I usually have the fathers come in for the whole exam instead of having them wait in the lobby during the first part, but . . . I wanted to be sure that you want him here. I don’t need to call him back at all. Your medical information is private, and we can keep it from him if you want us to.”

My brow furrowed. “Why would I want to hide anything from him?”

“Maybe you don’t. But part of my job is to keep a patient’s medical information private and to make sure my patients feel safe.”

“Oh,” I said, still unsure where she was going. “He’s on my forms as someone who can have access to my information, so . . .”

“Permission you can revoke at any time.”

Alarm raced through me like ice water through my veins. “Why would I want to?”

Tiffany licked her lips in thought and then scooted a bit closer so we could look at each other eye to eye. “Do you want this baby?”

“I do.” The words made my eyes burn. “More than anything.”

“Then I can safely infer that you won’t want to sign a consent form for an abortion?”

“That’s the last thing I want to do,” I said, my voice a whisper. I knew that with Rick, my opinion—my voice—meant little. If I was presented with a consent form with him at my side, I might find myself shakily signing it against my will.

“That’s what I thought,” Tiffany said. “The truth is that you could have one, no questions asked, for several more weeks. Longer in some states if you wanted to travel there.”

She lied to Rick for me?

“But I’m happy to tell him that your situation is one in which it wouldn’t be legal.”

“But—”

“And it would be the truth,” she said over my near protest. “Patient consent is required, and you don’t want to consent. That makes the procedure illegal. I’ll make sure you’re not put into a position to be pressured into it.”

The burning behind my eyes increased, and tears finally spilled over. I dropped my face into my hands. “Thank you,” I murmured, not knowing if she could hear or understand me.

Tiffany pulled two tissues from a box on the counter and handed them to me.

My breath hitched. “Thank you,” I said again.

She put a hand on my arm and looked me in the eyes. “We’ll get your baby here safely. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure of that.”