“It hasn’t been routine for Tamara. And I don’t see how the decision of how to proceed could be routine. This is a pretty unique case.”
Rice gave a shrug. He didn’t disagree, but he had a mulish expression that clearly indicated he didn’t concede the point, either.
“Normally, we are aware of such things on admission. French’s pregnancy was a bit more of a surprise…”
“I don’t understand why it wasn’t discovered earlier.” Mrs. Henson’s voice was perfectly even and polite, but Tamara watched Rice’s face carefully for signs of anger. He wasn’t used to having his or the facility’s judgment questioned. And Mrs. Henson wasn’t exactly an authority. He didn’t answer to her. “Why was I the first one to suspect the truth?”
“Physically, French has hidden the signs well. Even though she is small, the pregnancy isn’t obvious even at this advanced stage.”
“And other signs? There were none?”
There was silence around the table as the facility staff looked at each other, each weighing their responses. It was Dr. Sutherland who broke the silence.
“Tamara told me some time ago that she experienced hallucinations and disordered thinking when she was pregnant before. I perhaps should have twigged to that when she began having… episodes… on her return to the facility after the prison breaking. But the connection is very unusual. Pregnancy triggering psychosis is not something you hear about every day. There are other, more common triggers like stress and trauma.”
Mrs. Henson raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.
“Pregnancy tests are not something that we do routinely,” Rice said, his words clipped. “If an inmate requests one or suggests that she might be pregnant, then of course we would follow up. But Tamara never said anything.”
Tamara pressed her lips together and stared at the opposite wall, feeling their eyes on her.
“Tamara is in denial,” Mrs. Henson said. “This is very traumatic for her.”
“I’m sure it is.” Rice’s tone indicated he couldn’t care less about Tamara’s feelings, “and on that note, perhaps we could move forward instead of harping on the fact that none of us—” he looked at Mrs. Henson and repeated it, “none of us saw the signs any earlier. Now that we know about Miss French’s condition, we need to make some decisions.”
“I want you to get rid of it,” Tamara said. “Why is that so hard? Why can’t you get just rid of it, like last time?”
“This late in the pregnancy, it is not recommended. Physically and emotionally, it is much more difficult.”
“I don’t care,” Tamara insisted. “You think it’s harder on me to get rid of it than it is to walk around with it inside me messing with my brain?” Tamara saw the fetus coiled in her brain instead of her belly. That was how it felt. Like the alien being was growing in her brain, taking over her thoughts. She clenched her fingers around handfuls of hair, pulling on it violently like she could rip the foreign creature out of her head with the roots of her hair. It hurt, but she didn’t care. “I want it out of me!”
“It won’t be much longer,” Dr. Eastport repeated what he had told her in the infirmary. “We’re talking a matter of weeks at this point. It is an ethical gray area. I, for one, would not be comfortable with terminating such an advanced pregnancy.”
“It’s my choice! It should be my choice!”
“It’s not that cut and dried with a minor in custody,” Rice said. “We have to determine what is best for you.”
“I know what’s best for me! You just don’t want to do it!” Tamara looked at Mrs. Henson fiercely, waiting for her to speak up and defend Tamara’s rights. But she didn’t. She looked pensively at the table in front of her and said nothing. She, too, thought it was a bad idea. Tamara should have expected it. Mrs. Henson fostered teen moms. She was used to helping teens who wanted to keep their babies. She didn’t understand how different it was for Tamara.
“I have concerns about Tamara’s treatment here,” Mrs. Henson said. Everyone turned their heads to look at her, frowns and puzzled expressions. “The issue isn’t just the failure to detect her pregnancy or deciding on the best course of action.”
“What are you talking about, then?” Rice asked. “Surely you don’t think Miss French has been maltreated.”
“I’m talking about her medical treatment plan. The meds… are not right. Sometimes she can barely hold a conversation. You’ve got her so drugged up she can barely walk by herself. Does she do anything during the day other than lie in bed?”
Rice looked at Dr. Sutherland for his response.
“Tamara is being treated with powerful antipsychotics in an effort to control her delusions and violent behavior. Unfortunately, they do have a sedating effect.”
“Are they working?”
Dr. Sutherland’s eyes slid over to Tamara. “It’s hard to judge,” he temporized. “She has had several incidents, even on the protocol. I would increase the dosage, but obviously we can’t do that. Right now it’s a waiting game. Wait a few weeks to see if she will stabilize. Switch meds and try something else. There are no quick solutions.”
“So if they’re not working and may take weeks or months to figure out, why even bother? Once she has the baby, the psychosis will disappear on its own, won’t it?”
“There’s no guarantee of that. It could be a temporary effect of the pregnancy, or it could have triggered a permanent shift in her brain chemistry. I’d rather not lose the time in treating her.”
“What about the effect of the medication on the fetus?”
“Most antipsychotics are considered safe during pregnancy. And if not… that ship has sailed. The fetus is far more susceptible during the early stages of pregnancy. Stopping medications now would not make any difference to its development.”
“But to be safe… don’t you think it would make more sense to discontinue them until she’s no longer pregnant?” Mrs. Henson looked at Rice. “Especially since they’re not working.”
Rice tapped his fingertips together. “While she is still having some… delusions, there has been a noticeable reduction in the frequency of her violent and oppositional behavior. I wouldn’t want to lose the progress that has been made.”
“Do you think she’s had fewer incidents because it is working or because of the sedation effect?”
Rice looked at Sutherland, then over at Eastport. Neither of them jumped in to help him. “It could be in part due to the sedating effect. Impossible for us to know until we’ve had more time to tweak it.”
Tamara shifted restlessly. She had cramps and she had to pee. But a trip out to the bathroom and back would sap all of her energy and she’d miss whatever they wanted to say behind her back. It was bad enough to have them talking about her like she wasn’t even in the room. She tried to ignore the discomfort and stay focused on the conversation.
“So you know she’s still having mental problems, but you’re going to keep her on a protocol that isn’t working because it keeps her quiet. Does that about sum it up?” Mrs. Henson challenged.
“That’s an oversimplification,” Sutherland interjected. “The sedating effect of the antipsychotics might have some benefit in this case, but we are looking for something that is going to help her long-term. Until we can find the right combination of drugs, that’s the best we can do.”
“So you’re using them as chemical restraints.”
“That’s inflammatory,” Rice growled. “We are helping Miss French the best we can. Are you thinking about what damage could be done to her or the baby if she gets into an altercation in this condition? I remind you we’ve had plenty of experience with pregnant inmates, and the results of a physical fight can be very disturbing.”
Mrs. Henson sat back, thinking about this. Tamara shifted again, putting a hand under her abdomen and trying to relieve the pressure.
“The solution is easy,” she said. “Just end it. Then you don’t have to worry about me getting hurt and I can go back to normal and
not need the meds. I won’t get into fights because this stupid brain will behave itself.” Tamara ground her knuckles into her temple, as if she could force it to reset by sheer will.
If only she could.
“Our decision is final,” Rice said. “You will not be getting a late-term abortion.”
Tamara’s fists clenched. She glared at him and tried to judge whether she’d have enough time and energy to get across the table to either get her hands around his neck or punch him in the face. He sat there looking smug, his eyes cold as ice.
“Stand down, French,” Buxton warned, moving closer.
Tamara threw a look at him. His jaw was clenched. He was ready to jump the instant she moved. She unclenched her fists and slouched back in her seat. Buxton relaxed noticeably, but he didn’t go back to his previous position. He hovered close by, watching for any wrong move.
Back in her room, Tamara just floated for a few days. They brought her her meals and her meds and she mostly lay in bed, with no motivation or energy to do anything else.
Brinkley couldn’t talk her into coming out of her room. The nurses encouraged her to get out and walk, but she had no desire to. Everything was so screwed up.
But she wasn’t finished. They hadn’t defeated her. Tamara still had some control over her own life.
She started cheeking her pills. Since she had been taking them for weeks without any problems, the nurses didn’t suspect anything and never checked to see if she had swallowed them. They didn’t search her room and find her little stash.
In a few days, she started to get back some energy, and that made staying in her room and pretending she was still taking her pills an exquisite torture. Lying in bed, feeling like she was going to jump out of her skin with restlessness and anxiety every time anyone walked by her room. She picked up one of the paperbacks that Mrs. Henson had left for her, but she was finished that within a few hours. She read each of the books she had available, and read them all again, and again.
She didn’t have a fully-formed plan. The first part had just been to get off of the pills. She couldn’t think straight until she did that.
But the longer she lay there, hand over the baby bulge, thinking of the thing growing inside her, the angrier she got. She hadn’t chosen to get pregnant. She had done everything within her power to stop it. Juvie was preventing her from getting rid of it. They wanted that thing to grow inside her.
She didn’t know why they wanted her to have the baby. Maybe that had been the plot right from the start. That was why Vernon and Sly had taken her. They had colluded with juvie administration to let Vernon escape and to take Tamara with them. To get her pregnant. The nurse must have been in on it too, giving Tamara something other than the real morning-after pills to make sure she got pregnant. And juvie made sure she didn’t discover the pregnancy until too late. Now they were letting it grow inside her, forcing her to carry it to term.
She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what they wanted with the baby. Did they want to do something to it? Or was it supposed to do something to her? Or maybe they wanted to watch her with the baby, make her take care of it, and see what she would do. See if she would be a good mom or if she would do something terrible. Maybe they wanted to set her up so they could keep her in prison for the rest of her life.
However long that was.
But she could outwit them. She could wreck their plans.
She just had to decide on the best way. She had the pile of pills. She didn’t know if there were enough to do the trick. If one dose was enough to sideline her, to make it so that she didn’t have the energy to do anything but lie in her bed, would two doses put her in a coma? Would there be enough to kill her? She had more than that, but she worried that it just wouldn’t be enough. Would she go to sleep, only to wake up with a headache, maybe in the hospital? She knew of other girls who had tried taking pills. Tried and failed.
There were other ways. Without the antipsychotic drugs in her system, she was able to think and she had more motivation and energy to act.
28
SHE DIDN’T COUNT on the fact that other methods might be just as capricious as an overdose. She had seen other hangings in juvie and they had all been successful. She thought she had done everything right. She had carefully tied and retied the knots, testing them to make sure they were tight and wouldn’t slip. She timed it carefully.
But not carefully enough.
She blacked out, thinking that she had been successful and everything was going to go as planned. But the shout of the nurse who had entered her room unexpectedly rang in her ears and she only swam in the mists of darkness for a short interval before she started to resurface.
“French. French!”
She tried to keep her eyes closed, to fall further into that welcome darkness, but someone kept slapping her cheeks, calling her insistently. She had to open her eyes. She had to rejoin the real world.
“Oooh…”
“Come on,” the guard shook her shoulder. “Wake up.”
“Nooo…”
The nurse and the guard hovered over her, scowling and concerned. Tamara fingered her bruised throat.
“Why?” she whispered.
“Why did we cut you down? What do you think?”
“No… why did you come in?”
The nurse shook her head. “Coming to check your blood pressure. Why would you do something like that? How could you be so stupid?”
Tamara groaned. Her whole body hurt. Her neck and throat hurt from the makeshift noose, but the rest of her body did too. Like she had been battered and stretched and thrown to the side of the road. Her head pounded and she could feel her pulse throbbing inside her throat.
The nurse unbuttoned Tamara’s uniform. She put her stethoscope on Tamara’s chest and listened to her heartbeat and her breathing. She moved it down to Tamara’s belly and held it still for a long time.
“Is it dead?” Tamara asked. But she knew it wasn’t. She would know if it were dead.
The nurse looked at the guard as if needing permission to answer Tamara. He gave a shrug.
“Good, strong heartbeat,” she advised. “Is that why? You wanted to kill the baby? You didn’t care that you would kill yourself too?”
Tamara nodded.
The nurse tsked and went on examining Tamara. Tamara closed her eyes. Maybe she should have tried the pills. But even if she had… the nurse would surely have known there was something wrong when she came in to take Tamara’s blood pressure anyway. It wouldn’t matter which method she chose, it wouldn’t have been successful. There were other ways. She had lived in juvie for three years. She could be creative.
The squeak of wheels signaled the arrival of a gurney. Tamara looked at it through barely-cracked lids.
“Don’t want to go.”
“Too bad. You try to hang yourself, you get a trip to the infirmary. You get put on watch. You get extra sessions with Dr. Sutherland. You already made your choice.”
Tamara grunted.
“You want to get on under your own power or do we need to lift you?”
Tamara slid off of her bunk. With the nurse steadying her, she walked over to the gurney and got on. She rubbed her throat.
“It hurts.”
The nurse and other staff were unsympathetic. Tamara closed her eyes as they pushed the gurney back to the infirmary.
Dr. Eastport clucked and fussed over Tamara like a mother hen. “Oh, my dear,” he murmured. “Why would you do this to yourself?”
Tamara held the ice pack he had given her in place over her bruised throat, even though it made her shiver. Dr. Eastport said if her throat swelled up too much, they would have to put a tube down her throat to help her breathe and she didn’t want to have to go through that.
“I’m not going to let it grow inside me,” Tamara said. “This thing.”
“It’s not a thing, Tamara,” he pushed a stray lock of hair away from her face. “It’s a baby. I know you don’t want it, and once you
deliver, you never have to see it again, but you’re going to have to hang on a little bit longer.”
“No.”
One of the infirmary staff wheeled a machine into the room.
Tamara eyed it. “What’s that?” She turned the ice pack to get a colder section onto her neck. Were they already getting a respirator set up? A crash cart? In spite of her brief period of unconsciousness and the soreness of her body, she was feeling okay. Not like she was going to suddenly stop breathing.
Dr. Eastport didn’t answer. He just busied himself with the new equipment. In a few minutes, he turned back to her, and she watched as he pulled back her robe to squirt cold jelly onto her lower abdomen. She had a sneaking suspicion she knew what he was going to do. Dr. Eastport put the transponder to her stomach and moved it around, his movements probing, watching the screen on the machine rather than what he was doing. Tamara watched him searching through the blobs of light and darkness. That was in her. All of that darkness. It was no wonder the pregnancy clouded her mind.
Dr. Eastport held the transponder still, pressed into Tamara’s abdomen, and pointed at the monitor. “There he is. There’s the baby, Tamara.”
She didn’t want to look, but was drawn toward the shifting pixels. She could make out the little form curled up inside her like a cat in a basket.
“And listen to this.” Dr. Eastport turned up a volume dial and Tamara could hear the rapid beating of the little heart.
She put her hand over her slick belly, beside the transponder, feeling the mass under the skin. She dug in her fingers, imagining herself reaching in through her stomach to tear the intruder out. The invader who had taken over her body and her brain. Dr. Eastport abruptly pulled the transponder away and put it on the side of the cart. He pulled Tamara’s grasping fingers away from her body.
“No, Tamara. Don’t. Don’t hurt yourself. It’s going to be okay. Don’t try to hurt yourself.”
Tamara pulled back, but he didn’t release his grip.
“I want it out,” Tamara insisted. “I’ll take it out myself!”
Tortured Teardrops Page 32