After (3 page)

The man speaks over his shoulder to the dark-eyed man. “Where do they want her—trauma side or OB? Did they say?”

Before the dark-eyed man supplies an answer a woman appears at Devon’s side, and the gurney stops. She’s wearing sky blue scrubs and one of those doctor things around her neck—a stethoscope—and a frown, an irritated, weary one. The skin of her face is that permanent sort of gray from being too tired too often.

Quick talking shoots back and forth between the woman and the dark-eyed man like the give and go on the soccer field before a goal.

“She’s fifteen,” the dark-eyed man says. “Adolescent pediatrics?”

“But she’s hemorrhaged.”

“Right, they don’t normally handle that—”

Devon can’t keep up. She drops her head, rests her cheek on her shoulder.

And that is when she sees them. Black straps, three of them. One across her chest, pinning her arms to her sides. Another across her thighs. The last one across her shins, near her ankles.

Thoughts start to pull together in Devon’s mind, and an uneasiness creeps over her.

The woman points behind herself, down a hallway to the left. “One of the OB exam rooms around the corner on the end. I’ll call Dr. Klein to examine her.”

The gurney rolls again, away from the sliding glass doors. On the right sits a large blue desk with phones and monitors and people bustling, people in scrubs—green, blue, white, multicolored. On the left the gurney passes partitions, curtains from ceiling to floor separating them. Inside one, Devon glimpses a woman sitting in a chair, holding a wad of gauze to her head, crying.

Devon turns her eyes away, looks instead at her own arm. A clear tube is there, jabbed into her wrist and taped in place. She follows the tube upward to where it ends at a small bag of clear liquid, hanging from a metal hook way above her head. Almost level with the man’s dark eyes.

Something clicks in Devon’s mind, and she knows exactly where she is. She’s watched hundreds of scenes just like this one from her spot on the couch at home. People scurrying, wearing scrubs, stethoscopes around their necks, charts under their arms, tension in the air.

Panic spikes through Devon’s brain, panic so startling she can’t contain it.
They’ll know. All of them, they’ll know!
She whips her head from side to side, bucking against the straps holding her down. “NO!” she hears her own voice yelling. “No! Let me out of here!”

The gurney rolls faster. It makes an abrupt right turn, rushes down another hall. The man at Devon’s feet is running. The dark-eyed man looks down at Devon once, his eyes wide with alarm.

“I want out of here! Take me home!”

The gurney flies through a doorway and halts abruptly. The dark-eyed man yells at the other man to slam down the brakes. Then he leans over Devon, panting softly. “You’ve got to calm down,” she hears him say. “You need help, and we’re here to do that. We’re not going to hurt you. . . . ”

“No!” Devon squirms under the straps. “Let me out!”

A squat woman in light green scrubs rushes into the room, a taller one in white right on her heels. One of them yanks a green curtain across the door, then each takes a side of the gurney.

Devon is trapped, bodies on all sides.

“Don’t touch me!” Devon kicks, struggling to free her feet so she can run. “Let me go! I want to go home!” A sharp pain rips through her, deep between her legs and across her gut. She opens her mouth and gasps with the sheer violence of it, and for one long heart-stopping moment she’s absolutely silent.

Then her scream rolls out of the room and floods the hallway outside.

“That’s enough of that!” the tall woman in white shouts into Devon’s face.

This woman is serious; she’s someone important, Devon can tell. Devon bites down on her lip, cutting off her scream.

“You need to get control of yourself,” the woman continues, pulling back from Devon slightly, her voice a little less harsh. “You are accomplishing nothing with your behavior. Except, perhaps, arousing my ire.” The woman nods at the other in green, then turns her full attention back on Devon. “Now. I know this is a little scary, so we’re going to give you a mild sedative to help you relax.”

Devon shrinks into the gurney; her eyes shift to the woman in green moving closer. Between the woman’s plump hands is a long needle, pointed upward. A tiny spray squirts from its tip.

“No,” Devon whimpers. “No . . .”

The woman in green smiles down at Devon. Her face is round and pleasant featured, but her eyes are wary. “I’m not sticking
you
, sweetie. This goes directly into the IV.” She disappears behind Devon, reaching for the clear bag above her. “You’re going to feel amazing in a few seconds.”

Almost immediately, a coolness snakes up Devon’s arm, then across her chest. She wilts into the gurney, the pain in her groin, the fear in her mind, melting away.

The woman in white seats herself on a stool, leans toward Devon. She lets out a small puff of breath. “Much better, huh?”

Devon says nothing, just stares at the woman, sort of mesmerized by her, by her glasses in particular—tiny rectangles of thick black plastic. Tacky on some people, but on this woman, they work. The white she is wearing, Devon realizes, is actually a white lab coat over layers of stuff—a black sweater and a white blouse under that—as if she had bundled up for the snow, which is rarely necessary along Puget Sound unless you are skiing at Snoqualmie Pass or climbing Mount Rainier. This woman has an interesting, intelligent face—not young and not old. And her blonde hair is pulled back into a hastily formed ponytail, escaped wisps falling everywhere.

“Well, just so you know who you’re dealing with,” the woman says, “I’m Dr. Klein.”

Devon says nothing.

The woman in green moves around from behind Devon. “And I’m Cheryl. Nurse.” Cheryl bends down and removes the straps holding Devon to the gurney. “Now that you’re all nice and quiet, I think we can get rid of these.” She smiles down at Devon, as if to add, Right? But instead she only says, “They were necessary for your transportation over here in the ambulance.”

“We’re going to take your vital signs next,” Dr. Klein says then. “That would be your blood pressure, pulse, and temperature.”

“You’ve had a physical before, haven’t you?” Cheryl moves to Devon’s left, holding up a blood pressure gauge and carefully straps it around Devon’s biceps. “For school or sports or something?”

Devon nods slowly, watching Cheryl work. She feels the band tighten, squeezing, her pulse pumping hard against the pressure. Her brain feels tingly. Devon shuts her eyes and stops her mind from traveling back to that last physical, the one she had back in September for soccer.

“Well, good,” Cheryl says. “Then this is nothing you haven’t seen before.”

There’s a space of quiet between them, then Dr. Klein says, “So. What happened today?”

Devon doesn’t respond right away. Then she shakes her head and whispers, “Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Dr. Klein repeats, letting the word sort of marinate in the silence. She takes a deep breath. “Well, that’s not what I heard.”

Devon opens her eyes. She feels the fear building back up inside her despite the artificial calm from the sedative.
What has she heard?
The nurse sticks a thermometer in Devon’s ear, but Devon shrugs it away before it beeps.

“I’ve heard,” Dr. Klein says steadily, “that you’ve lost a
lot
of blood.” She indicates somewhere below Devon’s waist. “No, I can
see
that you’ve lost a lot of blood. Your blood pressure is dangerously low, your pulse is dangerously accelerated. We don’t know about your temperature, because you didn’t allow us take it just now, but your skin feels hot to the touch and clammy. You passed out before the paramedics even arrived at your house.” Dr. Klein raises her eyebrows, little curves above those thick black rectangles. “That’s not ‘nothing.’ You are in bad shape, Devon.”

Devon?
How does she know her name? Devon’s heart hammers in her chest, echoes through her ears.

“The blood seems to be coming from your vaginal area.” Dr. Klein pauses. “Can you tell me about that?”

Devon’s eyes dart around the room, looking for the two men who’d brought her to this place. They are nowhere. The man with the dark eyes, he left her. She looks over toward the door, toward the green curtain pulled across it. And her mom?
Where is she?

“Devon?” Dr. Klein presses. “Can you help me out here? Shed some light on this for me?”

Devon shakes her head fast. “No. I . . . don’t . . . can’t . . .”

Dr. Klein presses her lips together. “Okay.” She reaches into a pocket of her white coat and
thwaps
a latex glove over each hand. “Cheryl and I”—Dr. Klein stands and Cheryl moves closer—“are going to pull your sweatpants off now.” Dr. Klein nods at Cheryl quickly. “Very carefully—”

Two sets of hands reach for Devon’s waistband.

“No! Please!” Devon is breathing hard and fast. “I don’t want—”

“I’m just going to take a little peek to see what’s going on—”

“No!” Devon pushes herself up on her elbows, pulling her legs in protectively. “Don’t touch me. . . . Don’t . . . ”

“We’re not going to hurt you, Devon,” Dr. Klein says, sliding around the gurney to Devon’s right side. “We just need to look—”

“No! You can’t . . . you can’t make me do this. . . .”

Dr. Klein leans closer. “Listen to me, Devon. You are in an examination room at Tacoma General Hospital’s ER. You were brought here in an ambulance. I am Dr. Laura Klein, the physician on duty. I don’t care about
why
you’re here. I don’t care about what part you may or may not have played in being here. That’s history. It’s done, it’s over, and no one can change it. All
I
care about is your health. And you’re in very dangerous shape right now, in danger of possibly
bleeding
to death. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

Cheryl steps closer to Devon, rubs her back softly.

Dr. Klein adjusts her glasses. “And I’ll be damned before I’m going to have some foolish girl die under my care. I want to be able to go home tonight and crawl under my blankies and sleep well. So, don’t make this harder on yourself—or
me
—than it needs to be.”

Devon hugs her legs to her chest, her arms shaking. She can feel the needle from the IV tugging at her wrist. “You can’t make me do this,” Devon whispers.

“Now, I want you to lie back down,” Dr. Klein says, ignoring Devon’s protest, “and Cheryl and I are going to remove your pants—”

Cheryl gently unwraps Devon’s arms from around her legs and slowly pushes her down onto her back. Dr. Klein steps forward, reaches for the waistband of Devon’s sweats.

“No . . . doctor . . . ” Devon pleads. “I want to go home.” Devon reaches down and clutches the elastic waistband with her fingers.

“Don’t do this,” Dr. Klein says. “Don’t make this ugly.”

Cheryl plucks Devon’s fingers from the waistband. At the same time, Dr. Klein tugs the sweatpants down over Devon’s thighs, off her legs.

“Okay, I’m going to remove your underpants now.” Dr. Klein nods at Cheryl. “I’ll have to cut them off.”

Cheryl hands Dr. Klein a small pair of scissors, and Devon hears two quick snips. Devon squeezes her eyes shut as the doctor pulls away the soaked fabric and carefully pushes Devon’s knees apart, spreading her thighs.

Devon is too weak—too sore—down there to resist much. She turns her face into her shoulder, whimpering softly.

“You’re doing fine,” Dr. Klein says, lowering herself to the stool at the foot of the gurney again. “Now I’m just going to take a quick look.”

Dr. Klein’s rubbered fingers gently probe toward Devon’s private place, spread its skin apart.

Devon bites her lip.

“Oh,” Dr. Klein says suddenly. “The umbilical cord. It’s still here, Cheryl.” She takes a deep breath. “She’s shoved it up inside herself.”

“So, the placenta hasn’t been delivered,” Cheryl states matter-of-factly.

Devon raises her head, her heart pounding.
What?
She looks between Cheryl and Dr. Klein. They are staring at each other, both thinking hard.

“We’ve got to get her to the Birthing Center’s OR immediately,” Dr. Klein tells Cheryl, her voice tense.

“Yes,” Cheryl agrees.

“Devon”—Dr. Klein is standing now, leaning forward—“we’re going to move you—”

Devon shakes her head. “No.”

“You have something inside of you that we have to remove or you could die—”

“No!” Devon screams, pulling her naked legs toward herself.

“Devon! We know you’ve just delivered a baby—”

“NO!”

And with her thighs, Devon thrusts up and out.

Devon’s right knee connects solidly with Dr. Klein’s face.

The black rectangular glasses clatter to the floor.

Two police officers lock Devon in the back of a squad car that smells of sweat and filth and stale cigarette smoke.

But first they handcuffed her. They walked into the hospital room where she’d lived for the past three days, sitting under the sheets with the two white pillows supporting her back. Devon noticed how they wouldn’t look directly into her eyes when they told her to stand, cuffing her right there beside the bed. Matt Lauer was left giggling with some sitcom star on the TV in the corner of the room when they escorted Devon down the quiet hallway with all the nurses watching.

The squad car drives the two blocks up Martin Luther King Way and turns left. Devon knows the street; during the off-season she’d sometimes jog this very route coming out of Wright Park. From her seat, she can hear the dispatcher over the police radio, a sudden static spurt before the voice. The two police officers sit up front, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups.