The nurse stares strangely at Mia as she weighs her and gets a height. She eyes poor Mia like she’s a celebrity of some sort, instead of the victim of a horrible crime. “I saw you on TV,” she says. The words come out sheepishly, as if she isn’t quite sure whether she said them aloud or managed to keep them in her head. “I read about you in the paper.”
Neither Mia nor I am quite sure what to say. Mia has seen the collection of newspaper articles I clipped during the time she was away. I tried to hide them in a place where she wouldn’t see, but she did anyway when she was looking for a needle and thread in my dresser drawer, to replace a button that had fallen from a blouse. I didn’t want Mia to see the articles for fear of what they might do to her. But she did nonetheless, reading each and every one until I interrupted her, reading about her own disappearance, about how the police had a suspect, about how, as time went on, it was feared she might be dead.
The nurse sends her to the bathroom to urinate in a cup. Moments later, I meet her in the examination room, where the nurse takes Mia’s blood pressure and pulse then asks that she undress and put on a gown. She says that Dr. Wakhrukov will be with us in a few minutes and as Mia begins to undress, I turn my back.
Dr. Wakhrukov is a somber, subdued woman who must be approaching sixty. She comes into the room quite abruptly and says to Mia, “When was your last menstrual period?”
Mia must find the question terribly odd. “I...I have no idea,” she says, and the doctor nods, remembering only then, perhaps, of Mia’s amnesia.
She says that she is going to perform a transvaginal ultrasound and covers a probe with a condom and some sort of gel. She asks that Mia sticks her feet into the stirrups and without an explanation, she plunges the device into her. Mia winces and begs to know what she’s doing, wondering what this has to do with her overwhelming fatigue, with the listlessness that makes it nearly impossible to rise from sleep in the morning.
I remain silent. I long to be in the waiting room, beside James, but I remind myself that Mia needs me here and let my eyes wander around the room, anything to avoid the doctor’s very intrusive examination and Mia’s obvious confusion and discomfort. I decide then that I should have told Mia about my suspicions. I should have explained that the fatigue and the morning sickness are not symptoms of acute stress disorder. But perhaps she wouldn’t have believed me.
The exam room, I find, is as sterile as the doctor. It’s cold enough in here to kill germs. Perhaps that is the intention. Mia’s bare flesh is coated with goose bumps. I’m certain it doesn’t help that she’s completely nude with the exception of a paper robe. Bright fluorescent lights line the ceiling, revealing every graying hair on the middle-aged doctor’s head. She doesn’t smile. She looks Russian: high cheekbones, a slender nose.
But when she speaks, she doesn’t sound Russian. “Confirming the pregnancy,” the doctor states, as if this is common knowledge, something Mia should know. My legs become anesthetized and I sink my way into an extra chair, one placed here for elated men who are soon to be fathers.
Not me, I think. This chair is not meant for me.
“Babies develop a heartbeat twenty-two days after conception. You can’t always see it this early, but there is one here. It’s tiny, hardly noticeable. See?” she asks as she turns the monitor to Mia. “That little flicker of movement?” she asks as she points a finger at a dark blob that is practically still.
“What?” Mia asks.
“Here, let me see if I can get a better look,” the doctor says and she presses on the probe, which delves farther into Mia’s vagina. Mia squirms in apparent pain and discomfort, and the doctor asks her to hold still.
But Mia’s question was something other than what the doctor interpreted it to be. It wasn’t that Mia couldn’t see where her finger was pointing. I watch as Mia lets a hand fall to her abdomen.
“It just can’t be.”
“Here,” the doctor says as she removes the probe and hands Mia a tiny piece of paper, a whimsy of blacks and whites and grays like a lovely piece of abstract art. It’s a photograph, much like the one of Mia herself long before she became a child. I clutch my purse in my shaking hands, ravaging its insides for a tissue.
“What’s this?” Mia asks.
“It’s the baby. A printout from the ultrasound.” She tells Mia to go ahead and sit up, and pulls a latex glove from her hand, which she tosses into the garbage can. Her words are lifeless as if she’s given this lecture a thousand times: Mia is to come back every four weeks until she reaches thirty-two weeks; then biweekly and a few weeks later, every week. There are tests they need to run: blood tests and an amniocentesis if she wants, a glucose tolerance test, a test for Group B Strep.
At twenty weeks, Dr. Wakhrukov tells Mia, she can find out the sex of the baby if she’s interested. “Is that something you might want to do?”
“I don’t know” is all Mia manages to say.