Chapter 31: Dr. Singh

The paper gown tied in the back, which was a joke, because Rachel had nothing back there left to protect.

She sat on the exam table with her ankles crossed and her coat folded on the chair. The room on East 79th Street smelled like hand sanitizer and a lavender plug-in losing the fight. A poster of a uterus hung by the door, pink and cheerful, like it never ruined anybody’s Monday.

She had told Mrs. Ruiz she was going to the dentist. She had told Julian nothing. These days they talked through her door, mostly. Saturday he’d knocked on the guest suite, the one she’d been locking since the morning of the file, and asked if she needed anything from the pharmacy, because Delia had mentioned ginger. She’d said no. He’d said okay, and gone, and later there was a box of saltines on the floor outside her door. That was as close as he came to arguing with her now. Every time she pictured saying this out loud to him, her mouth filled with the taste of pennies.

Two hundred and sixty dollars, self-pay. Thirteen twenties, folded into her bra since the test.

The door opened without a knock. Dr. Amara Singh was small and quick, maybe fifty, reading glasses shoved up into a gray-streaked bun and a pen behind each ear.

“Rachel Moore.” She rolled her stool close. “Urine’s positive. Bloodwork will say the same. You knew that before you walked in, so let’s skip the part where we act surprised. How do you feel?”

“Like I swallowed a battery.”

“That’s the progesterone. Last period?”

“I don’t know.”

The eyebrows went up a quarter inch.

“I mean I don’t know-know. I’m irregular. Twenty-six days, fifty days, whatever it feels like. My mother used to say my body ran on Metro-North time.” Rachel heard herself and shut her mouth. You did not tell a stranger your dead mother’s jokes while the stranger was unwrapping a wand.

“Partners in the relevant window?”

“Two.” Rachel found a water stain on the ceiling tile shaped like Florida and stared at it. “October fourteenth. And November sixth.”

She waited for the look. The little pause, the pen that stops moving.

It didn’t come. Dr. Singh wrote it down the way she’d write down an allergy to penicillin. “Okay. Lie back. This’ll be cold. Everybody tells me to warm it up and I never remember.”

It was cold, then pressure. Then the monitor swung toward her: gray static, a dark bean-shaped cave, and in the middle of the cave something so small Rachel almost missed it.

A flicker. Fast. Like a moth batting at a porch light.

“See that flicker? That’s cardiac activity. It’s early for it, so we’ll confirm next time.”

Rachel didn’t breathe. She forgot how. “That’s… that’s it? That’s the whole…”

“That’s the whole person, for now. Smaller than a lentil. Busy, though. Look at it go.”

She had a plan. She’d made it on the M79 crosstown with her forehead against the window: get the facts, get the dates, get out, and don’t feel anything you can’t afford.

Instead she was crying sideways into her own ear, warm tears sliding into her hair, and the lentil kept going. It did not care whose it was. It did not care that its mother had slept on wet concrete a month ago with a Hefty bag for a pillow. It just kept going, as if it had somewhere to be and she was making it late.

Oh, no, Rachel thought. No, no, no. I love you already. That’s so stupid.

“You okay?” Dr. Singh passed her a tissue without looking away from the screen.

“Fine. Allergies.”

“Mm-hm.” Click. Click. The doctor dragged little crosshairs across the lentil. “Measuring five weeks and four days.”

Rachel ran the numbers so fast her brain squeaked. “Which date is that?”

“Neither. Both.” Dr. Singh finally looked at her. “Weeks count from a period you can’t remember. On a textbook cycle I’d put conception around the end of October. On yours? Anywhere from mid-October to the first week of November.”

“That’s my whole problem in one sentence.”

“I believe you. This early, the margin is a week either direction on a regular cycle. On yours, I’d give it more. If you ovulated late after the fourteenth, it fits. If the dating’s running fast and it was the sixth, it fits that too, with a squeeze. For the chart I’m calling your due date July twenty-first. Don’t plan a party around it.” She pulled her glasses down onto her nose. “I can make you a liar in either direction, Rachel. I won’t do that.”

“So when does it get clearer?”

“Honestly? Dating doesn’t get better with time. It gets worse. Later scans are for growth, not for calendars.” She peeled off her gloves. “If you need to know, there’s a blood draw from about nine weeks. Your blood, plus a cheek swab from the man.”

“From one of them.”

“From one of them.”

Rachel lay there with gel going tacky on her stomach and tried to picture it. Knocking on Julian’s study door with a Q-tip, after three weeks of talking to him through hers. Or asking Michael for anything. She’d rather lick the third rail on the 4 train.

Dr. Singh wrote a prescription for vitamins and told her to eat two crackers before her feet touched the floor. Then, capping her pen: “Is there anyone at home?”

“There’s a home,” Rachel said. “I’m working on the anyone.”

* * *

The nurse handed her the printout on the way out. A curling strip of three black-and-white pictures, glossy, still warm from the machine.

Rachel held it face-down against her palm like contraband. In the hallway she peeked. The little gray smudge. A white arrow somebody had typed in. BABY, it said, in all caps, with the confidence of a stranger.

She wanted to show somebody so badly her teeth hurt. She wanted to show nobody, ever.

She texted Tessa one word, confirmed, and got back eleven exclamation points and a CALL ME OR I’M COMING TO MANHATTAN IN MY SLIPPERS. She smiled for the first time all day.

The waiting room was carpeted in that hospital blue that hides everything. Two couples holding hands, a woman knitting something yellow. Rachel tucked the strip into her coat pocket, then took it back out, because the pocket felt too far away.

She was halfway to the door when she noticed the red.

Red coat, cinched at the waist. Red nails. Blonde hair piled up with sunglasses on top in November, because of course. A copy of Us Weekly open on a crossed knee.

Chloe Sutton looked up from the magazine.

Her eyes went to Rachel’s face. Then down, slow as honey, to Rachel’s hand. To the glossy curl of paper sticking out between her fingers.

Rachel didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Chloe didn’t say a word. She just set the magazine on the seat beside her, picked up her phone, and lifted it, unhurried, like a guest raising a camera at a wedding.