His Lifelong Pleas Got Nothing novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Night Walk-In

Tillie reaches a Providence clinic at midnight, the night doctor shows her the healthy heartbeat, and he asks who told her the wall was thin when no chart says so.

The last bus into Providence left me at the curb outside the women's clinic a little before midnight.

It was the one on Thayer Street where I had spent Thursday afternoon.

The front doors were locked, but a light was on in the side entrance, with a sign that said NIGHT WALK-INS.

I rang the bell and stood there holding my own paper.

A nurse in lavender scrubs let me in and looked at my shoes.

They were wet, and the heels were gone from walking the last stretch to the bus stop.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"I had one Thursday. I'm eleven weeks. I left my husband's house tonight."

I said it flatly, to see if I could.

She didn't ask anything else.

She put me in a chair, gave me tea in a paper cup, and went to find the doctor on call.

He came out of a back room a few minutes later, rubbing his eyes.

He was in navy scrubs with a white coat over them, a broad man with short brown hair and a day of stubble.

"Mrs. Salisbury?" he said.

Nobody had called me that in six years.

"Tillie," I said. "Salisbury is my name. I mean, it was."

"Sam Burdick," he said. "I saw your results this morning. You're the Thursday walk-in."

"I need you to check the baby. Tonight. Please."

He looked at my wet shoes and my open coat, and then he looked at my face.

"Come on back."

The room had a narrow bed and a screen on a cart.

I lay down, and he warmed the gel in his hands before he put it on me.

I was shaking, and I could not make it stop.

"Take your time," he said. "I've got all night."

The screen flickered gray, and then there was a shape.

It was small and curled, and in the middle of it a light was beating.

"There," Sam said. "That's your baby. A hundred and sixty-two beats a minute. That is exactly what I want to see."

I started to cry, and I did not try to stop that either.

He handed me a box of tissues and turned the screen a little so I could see.

"Head. Spine. Arms. This one is doing well, Tillie."

"Four others didn't," I said.

"Tell me about those."

So I told him.

I said it in order.

Four pregnancies, six years. Each one read by Mr. Faulk at the family table at eleven weeks. Each one ended the Monday after, at a private clinic the family doctor ran.

I said that after the fourth, my husband told me the doctor had told him, in a hallway, that my uterine wall was as thin as paper, and that one more pregnancy would make me bleed out.

Sam had stopped moving the probe.

He didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then he adjusted the screen and made a measurement, and another one.

"I want to see something," he said. "Hold still."

He moved the probe low over my stomach and pressed the button three times.

Then he leaned in to the screen and read the numbers off it.

"Your uterine wall is eleven millimeters, and it's uniform. That's normal. Your thin-wall diagnosis, whoever made it, is not something I can see."

"The doctor said it was."

"Was that doctor an OB?"

"I don't know," I said. "He's the Huntington family doctor. He's been their doctor for thirty years."

"Did he ever show you a scan with a measurement on it?"

I thought about it.

I thought about six years of Mondays.

"No," I said. "He told Bancroft. Bancroft told me."

Sam wiped the gel off me with a paper towel and gave me his hand to sit up.

His hand was warm and dry, and he let go as soon as I was sitting.

"Tillie, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it carefully."

"Okay."

"Did you ever sign a consent form, or see a single page of your own records, from any of those four?"

I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

The nurse had come to the door with a clipboard. Sam took it from her without looking away from me.

"Because I put in a records request for you on Thursday afternoon, after your scan," he said. "To the hospital and to that private clinic. Nothing has come back from the clinic. From the hospital, one page came."

He held up the clipboard.

"I need you to tell me who told you your wall was thin, Tillie. Because it isn't in any chart I've been sent."

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