Nicolette
The whole rest of the day, I stayed in bed. Part of me wished Charlie would come back, insist I talk to him, insist I come out with the whole sordid story. I could almost picture myself smiling ironically, telling him I came from a little town called Carlsbad on the west coast of California. He’d probably think that was rich – I didn’t know where he was from, but mentioning California always made people a little excited.
Instead, I took a long shower and tried to read some of the magazines my landlord had left lying around the cottage. They were all old and dated, things like Glamour and Cosmopolitan from three or four years ago. I blinked as I flipped through one of them. There was an article: “How to Keep Your Man Happy!” and I felt my lips twist into a bitter, ironic grin as I read through the list of items. They were all things like: “Lose weight! Give good blowjobs! Always remember to ask how his day went!”
If I hadn’t done all of that and more for Jack, I’d be dead on my feet.
My lower belly ached, and I realized that sooner or later, I was going to have to make a decision about the baby. I pulled out my phone and started looking up clinics. After working at Stephens & Coolidge for less than a month, I only had a couple hundred dollars saved up. But that had to be enough for something, right?
Finally, I found a Planned Parenthood on the outskirts of town and made an appointment for the following weekend. The girl I spoke with on the phone sounded friendly and confident, something that somehow made me feel worse about the whole damn deal. How was I going to walk in there, a baby in my belly, and tell them to get rid of it? How was I going to manage that?
The rest of the week passed in a blur. I went to work – Brenda was nosy as ever – and tried to keep my head down. It was as hard as ever to stay focused, and sometimes I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to. After all, I wanted all of this to be over. Sometimes, I found myself crying in the bathroom for hours at a time. This is all my fault, I’d tell my swollen-eyed reflection, biting my lip and glaring fiercely at myself. And if I hadn’t been such an idiot, I never would have wound up with someone who beat me black and blue.
Finally, Saturday morning rolled around. Fall was coming to Durango. It felt different than it had back at home. Crisper, chiller. I realized that if I stayed in Durango for the winter, I was going to need a lot of new clothes. Coming from California, I hadn’t even brought closed-toe shoes. As I glanced up at the grey sky, I felt a shiver of hesitation.
The clinic was on the outskirts of town, in an office park with a red brick exterior and a flat, sloping roof that was typical of the Colorado architecture. As I parked the car, I glanced around, half afraid that Jack would be there, waiting for me with a gun in his hand, ready to threaten me.
There was no one there, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.
“Hi there,” a receptionist said brightly. Her nametag read ‘Clarice.’ “Do you have an appointment with us?”
Without speaking, I slid my ID across the counter. “I do,” I said. “My name is Nicolette…Nicolette McDonald. I called on the phone, earlier this week.”
“Okay,” Martha said. She handed me a clipboard stacked with papers. “I just need you to fill these out, and then someone will call you back.” She smiled at me.
I walked over to one of the unoccupied chairs, tucked my purse between my legs, and started filling out the papers. There were more than I expected – in addition to a medical history, it also asked about my sex life. Number of partners, times I’d been tested for sexually transmitted infections in the past. I blushed, not wanting to reveal everything. Even though there was a sign on the wall that read: “This is a safe space,” I didn’t feel safe. I could only imagine Jack storming inside with his angry biker men behind him, ready to kidnap me, kill me, and leave me in a ditch somewhere on the roadside.
They took forever to call me back. I’d been sitting for an hour, so long that my ass was numb. More than once, I’d contemplated leaving. Finally, a nurse in blue scrubs came out. She was wearing a friendly smile, and had long blonde hair pushed back with a pink barrette.
“Nicolette? We’re ready for you,” she said with a kind smile. “Come on back.”
I felt another sharp wave of nervousness as I stepped up and followed her into a back room.
She pointed towards a chair where a paper gown lay. “Go ahead and get changed,” the nurse said. “I’ll be waiting on the other side of the door. Just holler when you’re ready.”
As soon as she left the room, I pulled my clothes off quickly and tried to wriggle into the paper gown. It was cold and scratchy against my skin, and I shivered, hopping up onto the examination table and crossing my legs. My pregnancy bump felt bigger than ever.
The door swung open and the nurse came back in. “Hi,” she said kindly. “I’m Linda. I’m a nurse practitioner. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about why you’re here today?”
“I’m pregnant,” I said miserably. “I don’t know what to do.” I looked down at my lap. “I’m twenty-two, and I ran away from an abusive relationship in California. I…” I trailed off. Tears came to my eyes and I found myself wiping them away before I knew it. “And I don’t really believe in….um….in getting rid of it, but I don’t want to be a mother,” I confessed. “Maybe I can have it and give it away for adoption? But I don’t think I can have this baby,” I added. “I’m not in a good place to be a mother right now.”
I glanced down, afraid Linda would judge me for not wanting a baby. After all, all women wanted babies, right? And because I didn’t, I was some kind of a freak, right?
“Let’s go over some basic things, and then we can talk about your options,” Linda said. She gently took the clipboard from me and started thumbing through the papers. “I see you’ve never been tested, or had a Pap smear?”
I shook my head, letting my brown hair hide my face. “Jack wouldn’t let me,” I mumbled. “My ex, I mean. He didn’t want me getting tested. He…. he said I could lie about sleeping with other men that way, and that I wouldn’t catch anything from him if I stayed faithful.”
Linda let out a low whistle. “Well, that’s factually not true,” she said in a light voice. Her face had dropped the hopeful smile, but she didn’t look unkind. “Let’s keep talking. Have you ever been to a gynecologist, Nicolette?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said softly. “I haven’t.”
Linda nodded. “Well, you’re going to have a Pap smear today,” she said. When she saw my wide, horrified eyes, she smiled. “STDs can cause a lot of trouble for a pregnancy, and we’re going to test you and make sure you’re free and clear. As well as a Pap smear, that’s normally part of your first prenatal visit, anyway.”
“But I don’t want this baby,” I added, my voice rising high to a fevered pitch. “I don’t want this baby! I don’t want to keep it!”
Linda nodded. “I know,” she said. “But this is all part of the procedure. We need to make absolutely sure you’re safe before we begin any kind of process, okay?”
I bit my lip and nodded. “Okay,” I said softly.
“Go ahead and lie back, put your feet in the stirrups,” Linda said. I followed her instructions, but felt her cold hand on my knee a second later. “Go ahead and scoot down more,” she said. “I need to be able to see.”
I was burning with shame and embarrassment. As many times as Jack had looked at my pussy, I’d never had anyone’s face this close before. Aside from Charlie, I thought. And when he was licking me. The memory made me burn bright with shame and I clamped my legs together even more fiercely.
Linda let out a little laugh. “You’re going to have to relax, Nicolette,” she said calmly. “This will all be over in a minute. You’re going to feel a little bit of pressure,” she added. “It might sting, but it’s not going to hurt for long.”
There was a sharp pain deep inside me, like I was being scraped. I yelped and dug my fingers into the sides of the fake leather examination table.
Linda sat back. “Okay, we’re done,” she said. “I’ve got everything I need for your tests.” I watched as she put two cotton swabs into two vials and marked them with my name. “Now, I’m going to give you an ultrasound. Do you have any idea when your last period was?”
I shook my head. “It was always irregular,” I confessed. “I don’t know. Maybe four months ago? Five?”
Linda frowned slightly. She let me put my legs together, then gave me a sheet to cover my lap while she pulled my shirt up to expose the slight bump on my belly. I cried out in surprise as she squirted cold gel onto my belly, and rubbed it around with a plastic device that was hooked to a cord. She reached up and flicked a switch on the wall, making a screen come to life with grainy, weird-looking images. “This is your baby,” she said, moving the device around. “Can you see it?”
I closed my eyes. At first, I didn’t want to look. But then I finally opened my eyes and gazed at the picture. It didn’t look like a baby. It looked like a blob in a bigger blob. But the more I stared, the more I thought I could start to see features. “What is it?” I asked softly. “You’re not saying anything. Is that bad?”
Linda made a little noise and pursed her lips together. “Unfortunately, Nicolette, you’re over twenty weeks pregnant.”
“So? Can’t I still have an abortion?”
“Well,” Linda said slowly. “In Colorado, abortion is legal until the twenty-sixth week. But at Planned Parenthood locations, we don’t perform abortions after the nineteenth week. That’s considered a health risk to the mother, and it’s an inpatient procedure at a hospital.” She glanced down at me. “You would need insurance, and a good hospital appointment.”
I bit my lip. “I don’t have insurance,” I confessed. “I…I don’t have the money for any of that.” Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked. “It’s not that I think abortion is right,” I said. “I just…I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Linda switched off the monitor. “Would you like to think about adoption? We have some paperwork, and you could do some reading, then come back in and speak with one of our counselors about the matter at hand.”
I nodded, feeling numb. “Okay,” I said softly. “I guess I can do that.”