Righteous02 - Mighty and Strong (2 page)

Against this, he started with ninety-two thousand in student loans. The church had paid for most of his schooling at the University of Utah, before the government seized its assets. The rest he’d borrowed. The other residents were always talking about their student debt, some of which amounted to multiples of his own. On that score, it could be worse. A lot worse.

But so far as he knew, none of the other residents had a wife and three children to support, and a younger sister in Salt Lake to whom he sent another four hundred a month.

“You know this girl?” Janet asked. The nurse wore that end-of-shift look and Mountain Dew cans overflowed her trash.

He looked through the window at the girl sitting by herself in the corner. “Never saw her before in my life.”

No, but he knew the type. And she knew him somehow or she wouldn’t have asked for him.

“Looks like a polyg,” Janet said. “How old do you think she is? Twelve?”

“Hard to say, but definitely a minor. Any idea what’s wrong?”

“No, but I put in a call to the social worker, gave her a heads up. Kathy will be here until eight, just in case.”

“You’re thinking abuse?”

“Sure. Otherwise, why didn’t she come with her mother?”

He nodded, although he wasn’t so sure. Gentiles and mainstream Mormons considered polygamy abusive by definition. For his part, no judgments until he’d performed an examination.

Question was, would she blurt out how she knew Jacob? He’d just finished his internship and was starting his residency. Not sure he wanted the other residents knowing too much. He was a hard worker and conscientious. Too conscientious, maybe. He’d typed and retyped one single, unimportant line on his resume ten times. From lie to truth, back to lie, and finally settling on the truth. Anyone who knew what to look for would read that line and know things about Jacob he’d just as soon keep private.

“Give me a second,” he told the nurse. “I’ll see if I can get her to an examination room.”

Jacob made his way into the waiting room and crossed slowly until he reached the girl. She sat in the farthest place from the TV, and she was looking away from the magazine rack as well. Those two gestures told him a lot about her church.

Jacob pulled up a chair to bring him down to eye-level and said, “Hi, I’m Dr. Christianson. They said you were waiting for me.”

The girl kept her hands tight in her lap. A barely perceptible nod.

“What is your name?”

“Emma.”

“How old are you, Emma?”

“Fifteen.”

Didn’t surprise him. Of course she didn’t look fifteen. Girls raised under the Principle had a tendency to look younger until they were into their late twenties, maybe even thirties. Lack of makeup, maybe, and dressing as if ashamed of their bodies. That, and the way young girls in so many of these churches were urged to “keep sweet,” which encompassed everything from chastity to a naivety about basic biological functions.

When Texas raided the FLDS compound, rounded up the women and children, they’d been forced to backtrack from some of their allegations when it turned out that some underage mothers were really twenty, twenty-two years old.

“Before we go back, can you tell me what’s the matter?”

Emma shook her head. She blinked and Jacob realized she was on the verge of tears.

“Are you sick? In trouble in some way?”

No answer.

He tried a different angle. “Have we met before? Are you a relative of some kind?”

Still nothing. Maybe he should tell her he was off-shift and she’d have to meet with someone else. Let Maddox do it. She was good with children and Catholic, so no Mormon background or preconceptions. Maybe Maddox could draw her out. But Emma had asked for him specifically.

Jacob was in some danger. He couldn’t afford to have anyone at the hospital find out who or what he was. A word of dismissal and the girl would leave. He could go back, shrug his shoulders to the nurse, and assist on that orthopedic surgery he was due to scrub in for.

“Why don’t you come back to an examination room? Maybe you’ll feel more comfortable.”

At last, a nod. He led her to the back. Janet looked up from the computer, then handed him a chart with her eyebrows raised.
Get her paperwork.

No insurance, obviously, but there were other reasons to get the paperwork done in advance. He doubted Emma would cooperate.

Another nurse came with him into the examination room, a younger RN named Crystal. He almost sent her away, pulled the older, steadier Janet from her station.

Crystal was unfailingly cheerful, friendly, and hard-working, and had put herself through school working for Sanpete County as a nurse’s aide. And pretty. Jacob, thanks to his messy family situation, wore no wedding band. She’d tried to flirt for months, but when he refused to showed interest had set her sights on a guy in radiology.

For the most part, Crystal was great with patients. Chatty, sympathetic. Good traits for a nurse, who was the true caregiver in a hospital, while the doctors flitted from patient to patient. But in this case he wished he had the older, more motherly Janet by his side.

“Would you like to get her into a gown, Dr. Christianson?”

Emma eyed the hospital gown draped over Crystal’s arm with something like panic and Jacob shook his head. “Let’s get some history first, we’ll go from there.” He turned to Emma. “Go ahead, have a seat.”

The girl sat on the edge of the paper-covered examination table. She didn’t take her eyes from Crystal, who had noticed something amiss in the supplies by the sink and busied herself straightening up.

“I can’t,” she said in a tiny voice. “Not in front of…not while she’s…”

“Don’t worry about Crystal. She’s here to help. And it’s a good idea to have two people in the room. Helps keep you safe.”

“Safe from what?”

The confusion on her face made him hope it wasn’t what he’d feared. If her imagination couldn’t come up with a reason why it was safer not to leave a doctor alone with a young girl, maybe she hadn’t been abused after all. “It’s just a rule we have at the hospital.”

She shook her head. “I don’t care, I can’t.”

He sighed and took Crystal into the hallway. “You’d better stay out here.”

Crystal frowned. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I thought you said—”

“Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll pull the curtain around the examination table and turn on the light. Come stand at the doorway, quietly. You’ll get everything.”

“Ah, got it.”

Even with that, it took a few minutes for Emma to get it out. When she finally did, it was blurted, loud enough to make her and Jacob both flinch.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, I see.” He hesitated for a moment, wondering how to proceed. “Emma, are you married?”

“No, but that’s the problem. My mother said I needed to prepare myself, pray for the Lord to send me a husband in His good time, so that I’ll be a righteous vessel. I was hard-hearted and now the Lord is going to punish me. I think I’m going to hell.”

“You’re not going to hell. We all do stupid things, that’s what makes us human.” He pulled up a rolling stool and sat down. “Who is the father?”

“My big brother.”

Jacob’s mouth went dry. On the other side of the curtain he heard Crystal draw a sharp breath.

Emma didn’t seem to notice, or recognize that her admission meant she would spend the rest of her childhood as a ward of the state and probably send her big brother to prison. “Half-brother,” she continued. “From my mother’s sister-wife. I’ve got his seed in me. He’s sixteen.”

Okay, maybe not prison. He’d assumed the brother was eight or ten years older. But still, this sort of thing happened disgustingly often. Jacob had a niece who was also a half-sister once removed. He’d told his father again and again that you couldn’t keep moving half-siblings from state to state and then put them back under the same roof as teenagers. Father didn’t care.

So often, parental attention went to the youngest children and the older ones ran wild. Especially boys. Why bother? Not enough wives to go around, so most would be booted from the church at eighteen or nineteen. It was the perfect environment for dumb mistakes, for stronger boys to prey on younger, weaker half-brothers and sisters.

“How long since your last period?” he asked.

She blushed. “I-I’m not sure. I just want you to make it go away.”

He was even more taken aback by that. As grave a sin as fornication was, it was a shadow of abortion, which was the same as murder. Even Jacob, unchained from the most dogmatic teachings, couldn’t terminate a pregnancy for non-medical reasons. It was against hospital policy, anyway. Emma would have to travel to Salt Lake to get it done. He’d have to refer her, and he wasn’t sure if he’d need parental permission.

“Just to be clear,” he said, “you want to terminate the pregnancy?”

“Terminate? That means make it go away, right?”

“It means abort the fetus.”

“An abortion?” she asked in a strangled voice. “No, I don’t mean an abortion. That’s murder.”

“But do you have a rough idea of how long it’s been since your last period? Weeks, months?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“And you’re sure you’re pregnant?”

“Aren’t you listening? His seed entered me.”

Something about the way she said it sounded off. “Tell me how it happened.”

“We have a new mother and so they’re building more rooms on the house. They tore off the wall on my room and so me and two sisters moved into Ammon’s room. He’s my brother. The boys moved out, of course.”

“Go on.”

She wrinkled her face. “I told Ella to change the sheets—it was her laundry day—and she said she did. But when I got into bed, there was something sticky in it. I thought it was candy or something.” She gave a shudder. “The next day, my sister found an underwear catalog under the mattress and the pages were stuck together. She said Ammon had been abusing himself. Looking at the ladies and…
touching
himself.”

“It’s called masturbation, and it’s common for adolescents.”

“It’s a disgusting and pernicious sin.”

“We don’t need to talk about Ammon. Let’s move along to when you got pregnant.”

“But don’t you see? He left his seed on the bed and I slept on it. I wasn’t wearing any clothes. My mom told me not to sleep naked and I should have listened. Why didn’t I listen?” she asked in a groan. “It was a hot night. And his seed was right under my bum. I try to sleep with my legs tightly closed, but sometime during the night—”

“But that’s all?” Jacob interrupted. “You never had relations with Ammon? You never committed fornication?” He’d slipped into religious language and he corrected himself. “You never had sexual intercourse, I mean?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter. Sperms can swim, you know.”

“Emma, sperm are microscopic, and they’re not little heat-seeking missiles. Wherever they fall, there they stay, and they can’t live long in the open air.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I’m not pregnant?”

“There’s only one way to find out. We’ll get a urine test and perform a quick examination.”

“No, I don’t want to.” She stood up, looked around the room. “I just want to go now. Never mind, what I said. Just never mind.”

“Emma, you told us you might be pregnant. You’re only fifteen. There are people at the hospital whose job it is to make sure children aren’t being abused.

“I’m not being abused.”

“Emma, you’re a minor. If you leave, I’ll make a call and they’ll stop you on the way out. And then a social worker will come.” A bit of a bluff.

“And then what will happen?”

“You know who I am, so you know what happened to my church,” he said.

“They took all the kids out of Blister Creek.”

“And Harmony too, and White Valley. They returned most of them, but there were a few, the ones they thought had been abused, who they stuck in foster care. Raised by apostate Mormons and even atheists and other gentiles.”

Emma looked horrified. “You can’t do that.”

“Not if you’re not pregnant. Not if you haven’t been sexually molested.”

She sat back down. “What do I need to do?”

It took a good deal of coaxing to get Emma to agree to change into a gown, and Crystal came three times to the examination room before she’d actually done it. Once she was gowned, she peed into a cup readily enough and agreed to an examination. She no longer protested when Crystal was in the room.

Emma had apparently told the truth. The urine test came back negative and an examination revealed she was still a virgin and showed no signs of abuse. The blood test would confirm, he was sure, that she wasn’t pregnant.

When he finished, Jacob set the speculum in the tray, relieved. He pulled off his gloves and dropped them in the receptacle while Emma removed her feet from the stirrups. “I’ve got a couple of things I want you to read about sexual health.”

“Isn’t it bad to read stuff like that?”

“It’s never bad to know more about your own body. Your body isn’t bad, it’s not dirty or wicked. And always remember it belongs to you, not to anyone else.”

“Until I’m married, and my body belongs to my husband,” Emma said.

“Not even when you’re married,” Crystal said. “Don’t let any dirty old man tell you otherwise. And if he’s already got a bunch of other wives—”

“Listen to Crystal,” Jacob cut in before she could alienate the girl with a rant against polygamy. “She’s absolutely right. It’s your body. You decide if and when you get married.”

“I turn sixteen in October. Is that old enough?”

“No, it’s not. It’s healthier if you wait until you’re older and have a chance to learn more about yourself, make the choice on your own. That’s what the Lord wants, Emma. Do you understand me?”

A twinge of guilt. Why was he always telling people what the Lord wanted—when he had no idea, whatsoever—but couldn’t have been smart enough to tell a tiny lie on his resume to protect his wife and children? And he could see that Emma wasn’t buying it, anyway. She might make it to sixteen, but he doubted she’d make it to seventeen.

And now he’d outed himself to Crystal. He glanced in her direction, but if she’d thought anything of his tacit admission, her face didn’t show it.