Chapter 3

Fred came into our lives screaming, half-naked, strapped to a gurney, and escorted by two cops and two EMTs. Pregnant. Craig, the Emergency Department doc on duty, told Sarah she was high, too. “Pregnant and stoned,” were his exact words, Sarah said. Bruised and with a cut lip. Her lab tests showed two STDs.

Turns out she was more than a little bit pregnant. She was three months along. Sarah by then was six months into her second pregnancy.

I wasn’t there. I was home with Susie and her puppies. Her time came after our dinner. Susie didn’t really need my help, except to ensure four-year-old Harper didn’t help Susie too much. Harper was beside herself because I wouldn’t let her touch any of the puppies. We watched Susie lick each one as it arrived. Harper, under protest, and I left Susie alone until she’d produced six squirmy little creatures.

“Why can’t I pet them, Dad?”

I gathered Harper for a hug.

“They’re very new, sweetie, and Susie has to be sure they’re OK. Besides, you don’t want to disturb them while they’re nursing. They won’t like that and Susie will growl and she might even snap at you. She loves you, you know that, but she’s protecting her puppies.”

“But...”

“Sweetie, you can’t touch them or pick them up yet, they’re not old enough. Tomorrow we’ll see if Susie is OK if you pet her and tell her how much you love her. Later on, she’ll be OK if you touch her puppies, but not for a few days. When Susie says it’s OK it won’t hurt the puppies if you touch them, very lightly, like this.” I touched Harper’s arm. “You can pet them a little, too, but just a little.”

Harper didn’t look satisfied, but she didn’t continue her protest. By then it was well past her bedtime.

“Come on, Harper, let’s get you ready for bed. We’ll read for a little bit, too, OK?”

“OK.”

On the evening of Fred’s arrival, Sarah was at the hospital to check in with her own ob-gyn, a late appointment but the only one she could schedule on top of her teaching load. A few months earlier she’d run a special seminar on writing for emergency department nurses and physicians. The patient’s chart is read by dozens of hospital staff, most of whom do not have any face-to-face interaction. The only thing they have is the written record on a screen.

Sarah’s editing stint earlier at a small publishing house made her the perfect candidate for the seminar. Over almost six weeks she saw every single physician and nurse in the department, including her friend from college who now directed the hospital’s emergency services.

“I’d just finished my appointment with Dr. Joe, late, when I heard screaming in the hall outside the emergency department,” she told me later. “Dr. Joe” is Yousef Mohammed Kahn, MD, a Stanford University School of Medicine graduate and rising star in the ob-gyn department at Kaiser. No one knows how to pronounce “Yousef” so he’d long ago switched to “Joe.”

“You had to find out, didn’t you, Sarah?”

She gave me her “what’s wrong with you” look.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Matt. Here’s this half-naked chick tied down, screaming her head off. Her language, my god. Better left unsaid. Her hair looked like every strand tried to get as far away from her as it could. It would be an insult to curls to call her hair curly. Her clothing was ripped top and bottom. I didn’t know the EMTs but the cops were Lieutenant Jim and Sergeant Nathan, they’re in your softball league, right?”

I nodded.

“Craig had his hands full, but that guy never loses his cool. He paged Dr. Joe, who was about six steps behind me, anyway. I’d been his last patient of the evening.

“I won’t even try to repeat what she said, much less her language, but in simple terms it was, what the f-- do you people think you’re doing? Let me f--ing go!’.” Sarah snorted. “It got pretty tiresome pretty quick.” She paused.

“What is it, Sarah?”

“I told Lieutenant Jim I wanted to take her to get some clothes and bring her home to stay with us for a few days after they’d finished checking her out. Jim said they’d need to keep her at least forty-eight hours and maybe up to seventy-two hours for a psych exam, but after that if the docs said it was OK and he was satisfied she wasn’t going to go bananas after someone, us or anyone else, with a knife, he’d release her in our custody.”

Sarah put her arm on mine.

“Jim said she’d been raped and physically assaulted. He didn’t get a coherent story out of her, but someone grabbed her just before she literally, I’m repeating exactly what Jim said, stepped in front of a bus. Is she suicidal is the question. She needs help, our help, Matt. I don’t think she’s dangerous. We don’t need to have her with us more than few days, for sure.”

“Yes, Sarah.”

She moved into my arms and kissed me. “Good,” she said. “Oh, and by the way, our baby’s fine. She’s on schedule.”

Fredericka, her real name, arrived with Sarah four days later via our local discount clothing outlet. Sarah had made it a condition of her stay for Fredericka to tell all. It took three more long days with us before she was willing to tell Sarah about herself. She spoke only to Sarah. She wouldn’t talk to me and seemed to make a point of not noticing me. It was a pretty sick and sad story, one that was almost as difficult for Sarah to relate to me as it had been for Fredericka to share with Sarah.

Even if she wouldn’t talk to me Fredericka didn’t object when sometimes I sat in a chair nearby with my coffee.

“I know I was a pain in the butt to my folks,” she began. “Not like my sisters who were perfect little angels. Bullsh--.”

“Hey, Fredericka, easy on the language, OK?” Sarah interrupted.

“Sorry. Anyway, I’d gone on a date with this guy. I’d met him through another group at school. They were sort of wannabe stoners, if you know what I mean. I didn’t do any of that crap myself, at least not back then, but I fancied myself a big rebel.” She shrugged and put her hands out in a ‘what can I say,’ kind of gesture.

“I did the whole anti-parent thing. Stayed out late, didn’t tell them where I was, cut classes whenever I felt like it, the whole bit. I sucked some cock but I didn’t actually f-- anyone. At first it was fun, you know? Didn’t take too long before it got kind of boring, but I couldn’t stop it. Had to keep up the look, right? My reputation depended on it.”

Fredericka squinted and shuddered.

“And then I met this other guy, never mind his name. He was a real stoner, I mean, he not only used the stuff but he sold it. He invited me out. Took me to dinner, then to the lake. He unzipped and told me to suck him. He didn’t like what I did so he raped me.” Another shudder.

“I mean, the guy was six feet tall and outweighed me by fifty pounds, at least. ‘Clean yourself up, bitch,’ were his words of love. He couldn’t even be bothered to take me all the way home. He left me near the center of town. I had to walk a mile. Shit. Oops, sorry, that just came out.”

Sarah leaned over to pat her shoulder. “It’s OK, Fredericka, it’s not your fault.”

“That’s what I told myself. It’s all BS. It was my fault.” She began to cry. Sarah held her while she twisted and turned, unable to stop shaking until she regained her composure. When her tears stopped, Sarah hugged her again.

“No, it’s not, Fredericka. It’s not.”

“Yeah, well, someone should have told my parents that.” Fredericka made a spitting motion. “When I turned up pregnant in a few weeks they threw me out. ‘Get the f-- out of here,’ were their kind words of farewell. I stayed with friends, the one or two I still had for a couple of days, but they couldn’t keep me. I ate from dumpsters, I’m not kidding, and I turned tricks, mostly oral. Guys may not want to make it with a strange chick, but they’re always willing to get their cocks sucked. I’m ashamed of that but I’m not ashamed of doing what I had to do to survive. I waitressed for some of that time in that diner on the other side of the highway, you know the place?”