Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

  I ask Josh about the baseball game and what time he’ll be home. He’ll be there sooner than me. He’ll get the kids from Bea. We say our goodbyes, and Josh tells me, “Drive carefully.” I end the call.

  I’m driving through the intersection when my phone pings the arrival of a new text. I shouldn’t look when I’m driving, but I do. It’s from the same 630 number that’s been sending me threatening texts. Just seeing the number strikes terror into me. I pull over, into the parking lot of a golf course. My hands are shaking too much to drive. But also, I want to read the text without distraction. For a second I think of Josh. I picture him staring at the app on his phone, wondering why I’ve pulled off the road and into the parking lot. Does the app show enough detail for that?

  I take a deep breath. I warily read the text.

  I hope you haven’t forgotten about me. Because I haven’t forgotten about you.

  The emoji this time is the face screaming in fear.

  KATE

  11 YEARS BEFORE

  May

  Dr. Feingold’s office is located on the third floor of a medical professional building that sits adjacent to the hospital. The building itself is modern, full of natural lighting and glass. In the lobby, there’s a line waiting for the elevator, and so Bea and I take the stairs to the third floor. We say very little as we ascend the steep steps—conserving our breath for the climb—but I can tell from Bea’s silence that she wishes I’d change my mind.

  I’m dead set on this. I’ve decided. This is something I need to do.

  When we reach the third floor, we walk side by side down the hall. As we close in on Dr. Feingold’s office, Bea finally asks, “What do you hope to get out of this?” her words embittered and disapproving. She sets a hand on my arm and forces me to stop, to look at her, and I do.

  I can’t put it into words what I hope to gain without it sounding ignorant, and so I say nothing. In my silence, Bea asks, “You think he’s just going to come right out and tell you he did something to Meredith?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “Of course not.”

  “Then what?” she asks. “You’re going to ask him?”

  “Of course not,” I say again, trying to explain that what I’m hoping for isn’t a confession, but rather a hunch, some gut reaction, an inner voice telling me that Dr. Feingold did something to our friend.

  When we come to it, the waiting room is small but inviting. A receptionist takes my name. She hands me some forms and tells us to have a seat. The nurse, she says, will be with us shortly. I fill out the forms while I wait. I write down my name and address.

  Bea glances down at the paperwork as I do. She nudges me hard. “What are you doing?” she hisses beneath her breath, seeing that I’ve just left my real name and address. Bea rarely gets angry at me. But this isn’t anger. Our eyes meet and I see in them that Bea is scared. She’s worried I’m getting in over my head, like Meredith did. And now Meredith is gone. I didn’t think a fake name and address were necessary. It’s not like someone of Dr. Feingold’s pay grade deals with paperwork. But clearly Bea thinks it is.

  “Go get another form. Start over,” she says, but it’s too late for that because, a breath later, the door opens and a nurse comes for me, calling out my name into the waiting room.

  “Here,” I say, standing, and the nurse smiles at Bea on her chair, thinking Bea will stay in the waiting room and wait.

  But instead Bea stands. “Oh,” the nurse says. “Your friend can come, too, if you’d like.”

  “Yes, please. The baby’s father,” I say, “couldn’t be here.”

  I try my best to stay calm. I focus on breathing. Even though it feels like the truth is obvious, Dr. Feingold and his staff have no reason to believe my intentions for being here are anything but genuine. As far as they know, I’m an ecstatic new mom-to-be. And so I slap a silly grin on my face and follow the nurse back into the exam room, where I go blathering on and on about the pregnancy and the new baby and how excited I am to be a mom. I ask the nurse questions. Twins, I tell her, run in my family. Is it possible it’s twins? How soon would we know?

  She humors me. “Maybe,” she says, asking who in the family has twins, and whether my husband and I would be happy with news like that.

  “Of course,” I say. “Who wouldn’t be thrilled?” I tell her I’ve always wanted a large family.

  “Some women aren’t,” she says. She looks down at my hand when she says husband. I don’t wear a wedding ring. Bea and I aren’t married, not yet, though we have high hopes that one day soon gay marriage will be legal in our state. We talked about going somewhere else to get married, Massachusetts, maybe. But something about it didn’t feel right if our marriage wasn’t going to be recognized or accepted once we were back home. What I do wear is a promise ring. It’s dainty and thin. Some discerning person might see that Bea wears the same thing, a silver band with a delicate knot. We picked them out together, with a promise that when we could, we would get married.

  “It might be too soon to detect multiples by ultrasound,” she says. “But Dr. Feingold is the expert. He’ll know.”

  She takes my vitals. She asks for information, like the date of my last menstrual period, which I know because I did my research and knew this is something she would ask. I give a fabricated date, one that would make sense with me being newly pregnant, approximately five or six weeks along. At her request, I go to the bathroom and leave a urine sample.

  When I come back, the nurse is gone. A paper gown sits on the exam table for me. I change into it. Bea and I wait for the doctor to come.

  “It isn’t too late,” Bea says as I situate myself on the table, staring down at the stirrups, feeling sick to my stomach. I don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know what to anticipate, but I also don’t know how much it matters. Before too long the nurse will run the urine sample I’ve left for her. She’ll figure out I’m not pregnant. My time with the doctor will be short, before he delivers the bad news, I feign sadness, and Bea and I leave. But at least I’ll get my eyes on him before that happens.

  “We can still go,” Bea says. “We don’t have to do this.”

  “And what would we say?” I ask, thinking it would look strange if we were to suddenly leave.

  “That there’s been a family emergency.”

  But leaving isn’t an option for me. Not until I’ve seen and spoken to him. We’ve come this far.

  I close my eyes. I take a deep breath. “It will all be over in a few minutes. Nothing,” I say, “will go wrong. As far as he knows, I’m just another pregnant woman. Try and act normal,” I tell her. There are magazines on a countertop. I tell her to pick one and pretend to read.

  The knock on the exam room door is ungentle. Two quick cracks and then he lets himself in. My own gynecologist opens it an inch before calling into the room and asking if I’m dressed. Only then, when I tell her I am, does she come in. But Dr. Feingold doesn’t wait. He stands in the doorway, stern but smiling, the kind of smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. It’s insincere. He’s a tall man. He wears a white doctor smock over a pair of gray pants and a collared shirt. He’s about the age I pictured him to be, based on Jeanette’s description of him. She said that he was uncompromising. This made him older in my mind, old-school, someone who’s been around the block a few times and is set in his ways. He’s probably sixty-five, thinking about retirement, about becoming a snowbird, not wanting the Tebows’ malpractice case to be the low note he ends his career on.

  Dr. Feingold’s hair is graying and thin. He, himself, is thin.

  “Dr. Feingold,” he says. “And who do we have here?” he asks, meaning me, and it upsets me already that he doesn’t know my name, that he didn’t bother to look before coming into the room. He’s businesslike, clinical. My gynecologist is warm. I can’t say with any certainty that she remembers me from year to year, but she’s never g
iven me a reason to think she doesn’t. She sits down on her stool and chats awhile before starting her exam. She asks about my family. She asks about me. It’s like we’re old friends. Even as a vet, I let dogs sniff me before I start an exam. It’s our way of getting to know one another before I touch them.

  I tell him, “I’m Kate. And this is my friend Bea.” Bea sits on her chair. Her discomfort is palpable to me, though I’m not sure he notices because he never looks at Bea. Her hands are folded together on her lap and she’s clutching them so tightly that the skin has turned white. Bea hates the lack of control.

  “So you say you’re pregnant,” he says. He sees pregnant women every day. There’s nothing remarkable about it. Not for him, but for a first-time mom it’s miraculous. I try to remember this, to remember to be ecstatic, not scared.

  “I am,” I say, beaming. “I took three of those home pregnancy tests,” I tell him, elated, because any other woman in my position—having peed on three sticks and saw a total of six pink lines—would never have a reason to believe she wasn’t pregnant.

  “And?” he prompts about the home pregnancy tests.

  “All positive,” I say with a grin, setting a hand on my abdomen.

  He looks skeptically at me. “All of them?” he asks, eyes narrowing.

  “Yes, sir,” I say, shifting my eager demeanor. My smile melts away and I ask, “Is there a problem?” because he’s given me a reason to believe there is. I go with it.

  He says, “The test we ran was negative.”

  Silence falls over the room. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. In no way does he apologize for the bad news. He doesn’t break it to me lightly. He stands, watching me, waiting for me to say something in reply.

  “I don’t understand,” I say after a while, claiming ignorance and shock. My voice trembles because I’m scared. It has the desired effect. “But the tests I took at home...” I say, letting my voice drift, letting the doctor infer what comes next.

  He’s dispassionate. He lectures. “Sometimes we have what’s called a chemical pregnancy, an early miscarriage shortly after implantation, so soon in fact that women often assume it’s that time of the month,” he says, which strikes me as both an archaic saying and a chauvinistic one. I dated a boy in high school before coming to terms with my sexuality. All I had to do was be in a bad mood and he assumed it was that time of the month. He’d badger me about it. Once, after a fight, he gifted me with a box of Tampax. It’s just a joke, Kate, he said when I broke up with him over it. Can’t you take a little joke?

  “These women never know they’re pregnant,” Dr. Feingold says. “This could be the reason your home pregnancy tests were positive.” He asks if I had any bleeding following the home pregnancy tests, any spotting. I shake my head vigorously. I say no. “We’ll do a blood test to know for certain.” He tells me a blood test can tell us exactly how much hCG is in my system, if any. He tells me only pregnant women’s bodies make hCG. “No hCG, no baby,” he says, just like that. He shrugs as he says it, as if what we’re discussing is something far less consequential than a life. It doesn’t matter that my baby is fictional, that my baby never did exist. That doesn’t make it okay. Because to another woman, this moment means everything.

  “I wouldn’t worry yet,” he says, and though the words themselves are heartening in nature, meant to put me at ease, the delivery is anything but. His words fall flat; there’s no encouraging smile, not even a fake one. What Dr. Feingold wants, I think, is to forestall any emotion, for me to cry later, at home, alone. Because crying is messy. It’s not his cup of tea.

  “The blood test,” he tells me, “gets sent to the lab. Results will be back in a couple of days. Soon as the exam is through I’ll send the nurse back in for the blood. Now, let’s take a look,” he says, motioning for me to lie back on the exam table.

  My breath catches. Under my arms, I begin to sweat. I know that a pap smear and a pelvic exam are routine during a first prenatal appointment. I came across that when I did my research in preparation for the appointment. But I hadn’t expected it to get so far. With the pregnancy now nearly debunked, there’s no reason for Dr. Feingold to do this until after the bloodwork, until after we know for certain if I’m pregnant, which I’m not. The thought of this man touching me, of his fingers inside me, makes me nauseous. I think of Shelby being murdered, of her naked body dragged to the riverbank and abandoned there.

  Did this man do that to her?

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the results of the bloodwork?” I ask.

  Only then does he smile. It’s supercilious, predatory. “If I’m going to be your doctor,” he says, “you need to trust me. Okay, Katie?” he asks, and I mechanically nod, speechless, not able to correct his blunder. I’ve never been a Katie or a Katherine. I’ve only ever been known as Kate. It’s the name my parents gave to me, not the diminutive form of something else. “There are changes to the uterus when a woman is pregnant. These can sometimes be detected during a pelvic exam,” he says by rote, and though I know he won’t feel these changes, any mother-to-be, I think, would do whatever he asked to know if she was pregnant. Any mother-to-be in my position would be desperate for confirmation of the pregnancy.

  What choice do I have? I go to lie back, but then I stop myself. I sit back up, propping myself on my elbows. I have questions to ask, and if I’m going to ask them, I need to ask them now. As soon as Dr. Feingold completes his exam and comes back with the bad news—I’m not pregnant—my questions will be moot. No baby, no need for a baby doctor.

  “A friend of mine,” I say, speaking quickly now, letting my nerves get the best of me. “A different friend, not this one,” I say, about Bea. “She had a baby recently. It was awful,” I say. “The labor was long. The nursing staff went through three shift changes while she was in labor. She saw three different doctors from her medical practice in that time. It was impersonal, not at all what she imagined about giving birth to her first child. In retrospect, she wishes she had hired a doula. Someone who was there only for her. If she had it to do all over again, she would have hired one, she said. What are your thoughts,” I come out and ask, “on doulas?”

  Dr. Feingold steps back to the wall. There he reaches inside a box for a pair of latex gloves. He returns, standing before me, sliding the gloves onto his hands.

  I don’t see a doctor with gloves. I see a murderer hiding fingerprints.

  My heart beats hard. Dr. Feingold says, “Unlike your friend’s obstetric practice, I’m the only doctor here. If you’re pregnant, I will be the one delivering your baby. You can count on that. In my experience, with the right doctor,” he says, “a doula is unnecessary.”

  “Oh,” I say, trying to mask my shaky voice. I could be done there. I could let it go.

  But there’s more to say.

  “That surprises me,” I tell him, “because I’ve been doing research into doulas, just in case, you know. Just in case I am pregnant. I’ve been reading blog posts and stuff. Reviews. Some women really rave about the support and assistance hiring a doula can provide.”

  He says, “Doulas can be very expensive.”

  I say, “I’ve done the math. I think I can afford a doula.” Dr. Feingold smiles but he says nothing. I ask Bea to pass me my bag and reluctantly she does. She doesn’t know what I’ve done.

  I reach a hand inside my bag. I draw out a slip of paper where I’ve written names down. I hold the list out to Dr. Feingold. He takes it from me and has a look.

  “These were a few local doulas whose names I kept coming across in my research,” I say. There are three names on the list. Chloe Nord. Christine Frank. And Meredith Dickey. All three are local doulas. All three are spoken of highly on local moms’ Facebook groups, and would be the kind of women I’d look for if I was pregnant and seeking a doula.

  I refuse to turn and look at Bea, knowing she’s likely pissed. She’ll tell me this was too risky, tha
t I went too far, bringing Meredith’s name up. That I crossed a line.

  But I’m so close. I can’t let it go. I ask Dr. Feingold, “If I did decide to hire a doula, would you recommend any of these women?”

  Dr. Feingold takes a long look. He thinks, and I appreciate the attention he gives it, though I don’t think for a minute he’s being sincere. He’s thinking before he speaks, being extra cautious. He doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. He tells me, “If you felt the need to hire a doula,” he says, with the emphasis on if, “either of the first two would be good. But this Dickey one,” he says, tapping at the paper with his hand, and I think he’s going to trash-talk Meredith at first. “Meredith Dickey,” he says. “I don’t know her,” before passing the list back to me and getting on with his exam.

  He’s lying. A bald-faced lie. He does know Meredith.

  Dr. Feingold tells me again to lie down on the table. It’s stern the way he says it this time. Subconsciously I clutch the plackets of my robe together. My mouth tastes suddenly metallic. I lie down flat and defensive on the exam table, pressing my knees together.

  Bea sits unconsciously forward in her chair. The doctor, noticing this, says, “If you’d rather, your friend can wait outside.”

  It isn’t such an odd thing to say. If she was my friend, my platonic friend, I wouldn’t want her to see me naked. This would be awkward, Bea in such close proximity during a pelvic exam. This is awkward, but the idea of Dr. Feingold and me alone, with me naked, his hands inside me, makes my flesh crawl. Bea can’t leave.

  “My memory is rubbish,” I say, swallowing hard and scared, voice trembling. I can no longer control it. “I asked her to come along to remember all the things I’d forget to ask. She has three kids,” I say. “She knows a thing or two about being pregnant. This is my first,” I tell him, voice diminishing as I say it, taking on the somber tone of a woman who may or may not have miscarried.