Dammit.
An older woman in pink scrubs walked into the room, staring down at a manila file in her hands as she moved. I recognized her as Glinda Mallory, one of the ladies from Nan’s church group. She flashed me what passed as a professional smile. There was little warmth in it.
“How are you feeling, Miss Ford? Do you know where you are?” She moved right to the second question as if she didn’t give a shit about the answer to the first. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tried to push me back down onto the exam table, but I dodged her. She reached for my face with one of her gloved hands, and I raced for the other side of the room, my head throbbing. “I can’t care for you if you won’t let me touch you.”
“You examined me while I was unconscious, right? You lifted my shirt up, saw what I had going on under there? Does it look like being touched has worked out for me?”
She closed her mouth and shook her head.
“I’ll be okay, really. Thank you for wanting to help.” Oddly, I was trying to comfort the nurse who should have been comforting me. “Do you have anything for the pain?”
I held onto my head with both hands in an attempt to gain some balance. I didn’t know if she knew what just happened here, but I suspected that, as the nurse at the Sheriff’s station, she knew enough not to ask.
She pulled off her gloves and tossed them in a red trash bin. “It isn’t advisable to take pain killers while pregnant, you know.”
She was just full of information I didn’t need or care about. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when I’m having a baby. For now, can I get some sort of drug to take the edge off all this? My ribs are fucking killing me.”
She grabbed her file and sat on a short rolling stool using her feet to wheel herself over to me. “I had suspected you didn’t know, but it’s proper procedure before administering any sort of narcotics to an unconscious person to test them for conditions such as pregnancy.” She didn’t even give me time to process that information before adding, “Do you know who the father is?”
“I’m sorry. What are you asking me?” I was trying to process the information, but between her cold distance and my throbbing head and ribs, it was difficult to understand her coded message.
“You may want to alert the father before you make any hasty decisions,” she added while scribbling on her clipboard. “You can always come see the ladies group at the church. They are really good at handling cases like yours.”
Cases? Like mine?
“Father?”
“Yes. As in father of your unborn child. You’re pregnant, Miss Ford.”
My chest tightened, the pain increasing with each breath as they got shallower and shallower. I couldn’t hold air in my lungs. The room started to spin. The nurse came and went in my line of site. Seconds earlier, I was holding my head in order to ease the ache. Now, I was just trying to hold my shit together. I had to think.
Jake and I were careful. We used condoms.
The only thing Owen had used was me.
My life was more than just a single disaster. It was many disasters, all happening at the same time. It was a tsunami after a hurricane after an earthquake happening in the middle of a tornado, while a wildfire blazed in a circle around me. I waded through the wreckage of one and right into the next.
I was pregnant, and Owen was the father.
***
Two minutes can be a lot longer than most people realize.
Two minutes was all it took for me to move from liking Jake to loving him.
After I was released from the jail on my own recognizance, pending Bethany's decision to send me to prison or not, two minutes sitting in front of that plastic fucking stick was torture.
I’d decided to take a home test to see if the nurse had lost her goddamned mind, or if I’d lost mine. I lifted it from Sally’s Corner Store on the way back to Jake’s apartment. But I left the exact amount of money for the test on the shelf where I found it, right after I’d shoved it into the front pocket of my hoodie. I wasn’t ready for the town to know something I wasn’t sure of myself.
After counting down the ticks on the second hand of the old wall clock above the desk, I took a deep breath. I was probably just over reacting. I was sure I was going to laugh about how stupid I was being in just a few more seconds. I knew the universe was cruel, but I didn’t think it could be this ridiculous.
I didn’t think that, after everything I’d already dealt with, I could actually be carrying my rapist’s child, too. I was only seventeen. I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure existed.