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Most of the women waiting for their appointments were pregnant. I figured that wasn’t my mother’s condition, though honestly, she was only forty-two, still perfectly able to have children.
Oh, man. Maybe she was pregnant but there were complications. Or maybe she just wasn’t sure how to tell me she was starting a new family with her new husband. Maybe she thought I’d feel left out.
I frowned. No. That theory didn’t seem to fit. As I watched her chat quietly with the receptionist and then fill out a clipboard full of forms, I recalled every awful word I’d said to her lately and wondered how I was going to make things better between us. Was there still enough time to prove how much I loved her?
After she handed the clipboard back, she came and sat next to me. I had the sudden urge to reach for her hand and hold on for dear life. But I kept my fingers tightly clenched in my lap, praying everything was okay. My mom was okay. Life was okay. I just had to breathe. Relax.
When the nurse opened a door off to the side and poked her head out, I nearly began to cry. But she called another name besides my mother’s. It took my brain a moment to register the name she called was mine.
“Grace?” the nurse repeated, her brow puckering with confusion.
Mom had already pushed to her feet and paused to look expectantly down at me. “Well, come on.”
What?
I’m not sure I spoke aloud or not, but no one answered my question.
I blinked up at Mom, then swiveled my gaze back to the waiting nurse. I waited a beat, expecting someone else named Grace to get up and disappear behind the mysterious door, but when no one did and my mom even reached down to grasp the sleeve of my dad’s logging coat, I finally stumbled upright.
Mom let go of me and led the way to the opened door and the smiling nurse.
Inside, a hallway loomed forward with a dozen closed doors branching off in both directions. The moment felt so surreal, I expected the walls of the hallway to slant off to the side any moment, giving me a distorted view of the world.
But everything remained normal, all too clearly normal. The nurse kindly introduced herself to me as Sheila before she asked me to step to the side and sit in a chair to be weighed and get my blood pressure taken.
I didn’t ask questions, I numbly sat, obeying without thought. Finally, I raised my eyes to my mother. As Sheila strapped the chilly cuff around my arm, reality slapped back into me. Mom had brought me to a gynecologist’s office. Mom, who had just discovered I’d been kissing a boy and thought I had “befriended” three more, had gone behind my back and tricked me into coming to a freaking OB-GYN.
As the sphygmometer cuff increasingly tightened around my bicep, my blood pressure no doubt inched higher and higher. Sheila asked me to stay still and relax. I don’t think I moved a muscle; I was too petrified with shock—devastating, unreal, coma-inducing shock. After frowning at my results, Sheila took my blood pressure one more time before she finally jotted down the results.
Then she led me down the hall that still refused to morph into some wonky Twilight-zone walk of horror and showed me and Mom into a room with an examining table set in the corner, though obviously still the centerpiece of the tiny chamber.
I avoided the table and took the chair probably meant for Mom, leaving her to stand awkwardly by my side, readjusting her purse to cover her waistline.
“So what’re we doing here today?” Sheila asked as she followed us into the room, gently closing the door behind her. After she flipped open a file, she slipped a pen from her pocket and lifted her face with a smile.
The smile slipped a little as she looked at me. I could only guess how awful I looked, my face probably some pasty shade of gray, my shoulders drawn in and hands tightly gripped in my lap. The nurse glanced questioningly at my mother.
Mom pursed her lips tight before saying, “I want to get her checked for every STD out there and make sure she’s not pregnant.”
A squeak of sound left my mouth. But honestly, I could not believe my mother had just said that aloud…to a complete stranger.
It’s hard to describe the feelings that roared through me. I think I’ve blocked most of the experience. I remember lifting my hands to cover my face, trying to shove the squeak back inside my mouth, but I’d already let it out and it gained Sheila’s attention. Her eyes went sympathetic.
She sat in the doctor’s rolling stool in front of me and softly asked, “Have you become sexually active, Grace?”
My face flamed so hot, probably going from stark white to violent red in a nanosecond.
“No,” I gasped, utterly appalled anyone would even dare to ask me such a thing. My lips trembled.
She must’ve sensed I was on the edge of a breakdown because she glanced at my mother once before turning back to me. “Would you be more comfortable if your mother stayed in the waiting room?”
Mom huffed, looking like she wanted to argue. I had the urge to say I’d be more comfortable if I stayed in the waiting room, or better yet if I went home, far, far away from any of this. But she was being so nice I just couldn’t get snarky. So I shook my head. I really didn’t care what my mother did at this point. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would make me feel better.
Sheila nodded. She asked me a few questions, jotting down my answers. Then she rose, offered me an encouraging smile, and said the doctor would be with me shortly.
Shortly took another fifteen minutes. In that time, the patient room echoed with an eerie silence as both Mom and I refused to say anything to each other. Frankly, I couldn’t even look at her. I mean, honestly, how could she do this do me? Why? Without even talking about it with me first.
I didn’t even know who she had become.
