She sat down in the chair, not on the table. She crossed her ankles. And she smiled at me the way you smile at somebody at a party when you’ve already heard all about them.“You’re Vanessa?” she said. “Roy’s wife?”
There is a thing that happens in your body in a moment like that, before your brain has caught up. A kind of drop in temperature. I had a pen in my hand and I remember setting it down very carefully, like it was full of something.
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“I’m pregnant with your husband’s baby.”
She said it the way you order lunch. No tremor, no drama. She said it like she’d practiced it in a car.
“You need to divorce him.”
I Asked Her One Question and She Never Answered It, Which Is the Only Reason Any of the Rest of This Happened
The room was so quiet I could hear the ultrasound cart humming by the wall. There’s a fan in that thing that runs even when the screen’s off. I’d never once noticed it in nine years.I want to be honest about what I felt, because people assume it was rage and it wasn’t. It was something closer to vertigo — the floor doing a quarter-turn — and underneath that, almost immediately, this flat administrative voice in my head that said: you are a doctor and this is a patient and you are going to finish this appointment like a professional.
Twenty-two years of medicine gives you that voice. It’s the same voice that gets you through a delivery that’s going sideways. It isn’t calm. It just sounds calm.“How long have you been seeing Roy?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.“You need to divorce him,” she said again.
“How long?”“Long enough to know he doesn’t love you anymore.”
And that was it. That was all she would give me. I asked twice and got a slogan twice, and she sat there with her ankles crossed, watching my face, waiting for me to crack.
