I was nauseous and cold on the bed. The pink-and-blue patterned curtains were pulled around me, but I could still hear all the hospital noise, doctors being paged, various beeps and dings from machines.
A woman flicked the curtain and poked her head in. A different nurse, I assumed, or maybe a shift change.
“Can I come in?”
I looked around to make sure she was talking to me. A curtain wasn’t a door. I honestly had zero expectation of privacy in an emergency room.
“Sure,” I responded.
“I’m Pearl Fleming.” After she said her name, I zeroed in on her. She wasn’t wearing scrubs, but instead a comfortable-looking pantsuit and pumps. Everyone else was in sneakers or clogs.
“Hello?”
She flicked at the badge on her lapel. “I’m a social worker here at East Jefferson. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
Despite the chill in the hospital’s air, I was starting to sweat.
“Oh…okay.”
“Where did you get these bruises?”
“Bruises?”
“There’s a handprint on your left arm. A bruise ringing your right. There’s also bruising at the top of your thighs. Not to mention the very deep cut in your foot. That’s a hell of a complicated fall for Thanksgiving. Where were you today?”
“Just home with my parents. My sister and her kids flew in from Dallas. Her husband didn’t come.”
“Did you get those bruises there?”
“No, of course not. We ate turkey and dressing like always.”
“Neither of the people you came in with hurt you?”
“God, no. They work for my family. They live in a house out back. They’ve been with us forever. I…I…they…”
She held up her hand to stop me.
“The hospital calls me in when there is a suspicion of domestic problems or a crime has potentially been committed. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No. We broke up in the spring. He’s in Boston now. It’s why I came home after college.” I knew I was talking too much as if words could hide what the bruising on my body couldn’t.
“Where do you work?”
“I’m okay. I’m…”
Social Worker Fleming waved her hands in a way that let me know I didn't have to answer anything that made me uncomfortable. Just thinking about New Day and Seth Collins made me twitchy. The thought of the future beyond this moment had me shivering, and not because of the cold air.
“Where do you live, then? If you were home for the holidays?”
“In Baton Rouge. I got a job in the summer and moved there.”
Fleming smoothed her clothes, then sat down on the edge of the narrow bed, fitting herself in the space between the plastic guardrails.
“I’m going to ask you a question—” The social worker held up her hand at my immediate and negative reaction. “Before I ask you, there are a few things I want you to consider. First, if you need a place to stay tonight or for a few weeks, that’s something I can provide. If you need a restraining order against someone, I can help you get that as well. If something happened to you, you can tell me and what you say will be confidential. I can't tell anyone without your permission.
“Whether or not it's a crime or you choose to prosecute would be a different discussion entirely. But if something did happen to you, then I would like to invite a doctor in here, a completely different team of doctors and nurses, actually, so that they could gather evidence.”
I closed my eyes after the word evidence left Fleming’s lips. Parish police. Gritty stationhouses. Lineups and courtrooms like I’d seen time and again on television did not paint a pretty picture.
“There would be no pressure to do anything with that evidence,” Fleming continued even though I couldn't meet her eyes. “If we don’t do a thorough examination now, though, then your options down the road may be severely limited. Do you understand everything that I’ve just said?”
No matter how hard I tried to stop it, I could feel my face crumbling in on itself like one of the rotten crabapples that would collect under the tree outside of my senior dorm room.
“I was…he…raped me.” Tears clogged my throat. It took a lot of swallowing before I was able to continue. Fleming didn't huff or do anything but wait patiently. My mind started Monday morning quarterbacking…thinking of ways I could have made the evening go differently. “I made a mistake by offering him that drink.”
“You have to know that a crime committed against you was in no way your fault.”
That shifting of responsibility had been drilled into me over the last four years. I could wear what I wanted. Drink as much as I wanted. Walk stark naked into a room full of drunk and horny frat boys and I had the right to be left alone. Any woman knew better than that feminist rhetoric, though.
We were solely responsible for our own safety. Men could maybe control themselves, but they didn't.
“He must have thought it was more than it was. But I thought since he was married, he wouldn’t think that way.”
“Only he is responsible for what he did.” It was the same drumbeat I’d heard in women’s studies classes. I still didn’t believe in the rhythm.
“I can’t press charges,” I whispered. “He’s my boss.”
“What were you doing with your boss on Thanksgiving?”
“We’re not having an affair or anything like that,” I was quick to point out. “He kind of works for my dad. He left a message when I was at my parents' house that there was a work emergency, so I went back. He told me what I needed to do and then I asked him to leave and he did.”
I wanted to go back to that moment when I thought I'd achieved freedom from jeopardy. When I thought I'd dodged a bullet. Not the moments after when it became crystal clear that I'd underestimated the danger to me.
“Then what?” Fleming wasn’t letting me stay in that space too long.
“Then…” I had to stop because fear washed over me, then a wave of adrenaline. I wanted to run and puke all at the same time. “Then…he came back.”
Fleming patted one of my hands with hers. The touch was so tender that I wanted to cry all over again for an entirely different reason.
“Will you allow us to do a sexual assault kit?”
“But you won’t tell anyone?” I lowered my voice. This may be confidential, but I could still hear the squeaking of soles on the linoleum as the curtain swished with the human movement. “I don’t have to do anything with it, right?”
“No, of course not. I just want to preserve your choices in the future.”
“Can you go out in the waiting room? There’s a Black couple there. Creole, actually. Sorry. I…it’s just that they carried me here. I want them to go home. Tell them I just have to stay for stitches and that I’ll get a cab home. They’ve worked a long day and there’s no reason for them to stay around for this.”
“Let me set things up with the nurses, then I’ll speak with them. You won’t regret this.”
Pearl Fleming was a liar.
I regretted the decision the moment a woman came in with a big tray of zip-top baggies, paper bags, medical swabs, and a huge speculum. The stirrups from under the bed were pulled out. I had to stick my normal foot into one and my throbbing left foot into the other. I had to scoot down on a bed where the rough sheet only emphasized the cold, unforgiving plastic underneath.
I regretted opening my big mouth when a woman with the bedside manner of a statue swabbed at my mouth and brutally scraped under my fingernails. When she pulled through my hair with the kind of cheap plastic comb they used to sell at the counter of Woolworth’s, I wanted to scream.
I regretted everything I’d done over the last months when a doctor didn’t so much as announce he was slipping the heavy, freezing metal instrument into my private parts. I didn’t know until then that cold could burn.
The flash from the camera was the worst. No one had taken pictures of my nude body since I was a baby that I could remember. This woman held the camera close to me.
Flash.
One bruise was captured.
Flash.
Another was memorialized.
Flash.
Someone would have a picture of the handprint on my left arm, the black and blue and yellow marks on the other.
It was more than an hour and a half before the ordeal was over. Only then did the original emergency room doctor and nurse come back. They were noticeably subdued when they added the promised topical ointment, then injected something that made me more numb and colder than I’d been before if that were even possible.
It was nearly one in the morning when all was said and done. After some consultation just outside of my hearing, I was admitted to the hospital. Someone gathered what was left of my stuff that hadn’t been bagged and tagged as evidence and rolled it and me to a single room. I got an extra blanket, someone turned up the heat, and despite the light and noise, I fell into a deep sleep.