Counting Backwards

7

Jessa

February 2022

As I waited for my grandmother to emerge from the apartment building on Eighty-Fifth Street, I pulled my wool hat down around my ears. The old puffer coat I’d grabbed that morning wasn’t much of a match for the frigid, damp air outside, and the rawness of it swept right through me, chilling me to the bone.

The day before, Gram had finally answered one of my calls, but only to insist that we needed to speak in person. Had this been a month earlier, I would have pushed back, telling her I could not possibly leave work in the middle of a weekday to meet, and that we should either speak by phone or wait until the weekend. But now, thinking of my dismal prospects of advancement at work, I sighed loudly. There was no use dwelling on the years spent sacrificing for a partnership position that was clearly never going to materialize.

“Hey now.”

I turned to see the doorman watching me. He was standing about ten feet away, next to the building’s revolving door.

“How about a smile?”

he asked. “It can’t be that bad.”

I considered the older man in his long green overcoat and matching cap, and I wondered if I should tell him that times had changed—that it was no longer polite to tell a woman to smile, that it wasn’t my job to decorate the city streets with a smiling face. But then something inside the building caught the man’s eye, and he began pushing the revolving door.

A moment later, Gram emerged in a thick cranberry-colored parka that reached nearly to her shins, along with a matching wool hat.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Gregory.”

The doorman nodded at her. “You need a cab today?”

“No thank you, Jonathan,”

she answered as her eyes landed on me. “I’m just going for a walk with my granddaughter.”

“Well, you button up now,”

he told her. “It’s a cold one.”

She nodded at the man and readjusted the knitted scarf around her neck as she made her way toward me. After a quick kiss on the cheek, she took hold of my elbow and directed us toward Third Avenue.

“You’re sure you don’t want to find a coffee shop or something?”

I asked, just as the wind picked up around us.

She shook her head. “I need the fresh air,”

she said, “and it’s better if no one can listen in on our conversation.”

“This sounds serious,”

I said playfully as we walked in tandem.

She shot me a stern look, effectively wiping the grin from my face.

“Yeesh, sorry,”

I said, feeling a bit like a reprimanded teenager. “What’s this all about?”

We turned north on Third Avenue, heading uptown. “The case I told you to look up . . .”

She trailed off, as if she’d forgotten what more she wanted to say.

Another senior moment, I worried. But then I noticed the way she was squaring her shoulders and raising her chin, like she was building up her nerve.

“There’s something I need to tell you. You talk about wanting to live up to your family’s legacy. Well, now’s the time you can. You should know about your great-grandfather’s connection to that girl, what he did for her.”

* * *

That night, I sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed surrounded by scattered papers. My computer was open in my lap as I clicked through the pages of yet another website about immigrants’ rights. I’d wasted too much time that afternoon thinking about how my great-grandfather wasn’t who I’d been led to believe but was, in fact, so much more. I’d always assumed I knew his whole story, all the ways in which he’d sacrificed to help others, but I’d only known one chapter of a much longer story. Now I saw with new eyes why my dad, who’d been so successful in corporate law, always put my mother’s family on a pedestal.

At the sound of the apartment door opening, I glanced at the bedside table. My view of the clock was blocked by an empty Chinese take-out container, but I knew it was nearing midnight. Reaching up, I removed the rubber band that had been holding my hair in a haphazard bun. Mascara had surely pooled beneath my eyes in tired smudges, and I had grease stains on my t-shirt from where I’d dropped a forkful of lo mein. I wondered fleetingly if any women had attended the client dinner from which Vance was now returning. All of them would have been more put together than what he was about to find waiting for him.

When he reached the bedroom, his eyes scanned the area. “It looks like a war room in here.”

In addition to the piles of papers and greasy take-out packages, there was an empty bottle of Diet Coke lying sideways in the middle of the carpet, a bag of Twizzlers open on a pillow, and a few fortune cookie wrappers by my feet.

“Yeah.”

I stood to start gathering up trash. “I guess I was kind of in the zone.”

The mess that had accumulated testified to how out of sorts I’d been, thinking about the innumerable ways I could screw up Isobel’s case. “No one ever said I did my best work on an empty stomach, right?”

I swiped at the duvet with my empty hand, wiping away stray crumbs.

“Yeah, but who are you and what did you do with my neurotic wife?”

he joked as he started to unbutton his dress shirt.

“Sorry. It’s been so busy at work with Hannity Blue,”

I said, referencing the corporate (a.k.a. paying) client who had been monopolizing my time for a securities litigation. Even with Dustin Ortiz doing more of the heavy lifting than I frankly would have expected from a reformed deadbeat like him, our whole team had been underwater with it. “And I have Hydeford in the morning. It’s like the more I learn about immigration, the more I realize I don’t know. The body of law is enormous, and it’s all really complex. Making heads or tails of it has been an undertaking for me.”

Vance shook his head slightly. “And you have an actual degree in the laws of this country. Imagine how confusing it must be for people who are trying to come here for the first time.”

“If you do absolutely everything right when you first arrive in the US, the rules are kind of clear,”

I said, pausing for a second to wonder if even that much was true. “But once you make one error as a noncitizen, even something small like failing to file a form on time, it triggers all these other laws that seem to have endless possible interpretations.”

“It couldn’t have been this complicated back in the ’40s when my grandparents came over, right?”

Vance asked as he sat on the edge of the bed and began removing his shoes.

One of the first things I ever learned about Vance was that his father’s parents survived Auschwitz as teenagers. It was because of Vance’s grandparents and the horror they’d experienced in Poland that he was so adamant about holding on to his Jewish heritage and raising his own kids Jewish. He’d told me as much long before he proposed. His grandparents were also the inspiration behind his podcast and the hours he spent recording episodes that helped reunite families with their heirlooms.

His entire identity was wrapped up in what his grandparents had suffered, in the stories they’d told him when he was a child. Over time, he’d shared some of the stories with me. I’d heard the bone-chilling account of how his grandmother had watched her own mother and sister get shot by a guard after they were caught reciting a Hebrew blessing over the body of a prisoner who’d died in her sleep. His grandfather, I learned, had been subjected to medical experimentation he refused to discuss, but whatever happened had left him with a significant limp for the rest of his life.

Normally, I was very attentive when Vance spoke about his family and how important they were to him. His attachment to family was one of my favorite things about him. But now I didn’t want to focus on his grandma and grandpa Singer, not when I’d learned only hours earlier that my own great-grandparents had lost so much as a result of Grandpa Harry’s efforts to help another person. I’d never known. I couldn’t say what trait motivated a person to put the needs of others so far before their own, but I hoped I’d inherited it too, that I could live up to that example.

I hadn’t decided yet whether I’d share the new pieces of my family story with Vance. My great-grandpa had risked his reputation to help a defenseless girl, and it had ruined him. Vance wouldn’t want to hear about anyone in my family being considered a failure, even if it was for all the right reasons. He’d only worry about how it would reflect on us, on him. Whatever fault he might find with what Grandpa Harry did, I didn’t want to hear it. So instead, I took my leftovers and the small pile of trash and carried them out to the kitchen.

When I returned to the bedroom, Vance glanced up at me from where he was still sitting on the bed, scrolling though his phone.

“There’s more to this pro bono case,”

I said, lowering myself onto the gray bouclé chair in the corner of the room. “I think some medical abuse might be going on inside the facility. I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

Then I spoke aloud the decision I had reached hours earlier: “But as Isobel’s only advocate right now, I feel like I need to pursue this some more.”

Knowing more of my own history had brought the situation at the detention center into clearer focus. The idea that a woman in custody had been subjected to a medical procedure without her full consent, and possibly for nefarious reasons, in the twenty-first century! It was almost too awful to consider. And now, given what Gram had shared, I felt enormous responsibility to help prevent such travesties from ever happening again. So consider it, I must.

“Wow, yeah, for sure.”

Vance nodded, but his gaze flickered away from me for a moment. I could almost see the gears turning inside his mind, searching for a reason to contradict me. “It sounds like a lot though, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t wait for my response. “You should probably bring in another attorney from your office to deal with this. It shouldn’t all be on you. Especially now, when we’re trying to keep your stress levels low, right?”

He tossed his phone onto the bed and pulled off his socks to begin massaging his left foot.

I watched him push his thumb into his arch, the way he did when his plantar fasciitis acted up. He closed his eyes for a moment to revel in the self-massage, and I took the opportunity to snarl at him. His continued insistence that I couldn’t handle the work I was doing was becoming intolerable.

Of course it all had to be on me, I wanted to say. I was Isobel’s attorney, and quite possibly her only advocate. If she’d been mistreated in custody, someone needed to stand up for her, just like my great-grandfather had done for the girl in that old case. I didn’t want to keep arguing with Vance, begging for his approval.

Mercifully, my phone rang, interrupting us.

“It’s Jiyana,”

I said, raising my eyebrows at the late call. My sister-in-law was one of those people who generally climbed into bed at the same time as her toddlers. “Hey, is everything okay?”

I asked as I picked up.

“Wendy just called in sick for tomorrow.”

Wendy was their über-reliable nanny, the woman who made it possible for Jiyana to work long hours as a social worker, earning overtime to help pay for their son’s fancy preschool. This was the first time I’d ever heard of the woman missing a day. “I would never normally ask. I know your job is so crazy, but I have this one meeting I can’t cancel, and Will has an on-site in Connecticut. Jonah can stay at daycare till six, but Kian’s pickup is at four. If you could just grab him and bring him to the apartment, Will can be back like ten minutes after you get there. Are you too busy?”

I clicked over to my calendar, doing some calculations in my head about driving time to and from Hydeford.

“Yeah, no. I can actually do it. I’ll be in Jersey all morning, but I can get back in time.”

“Oh my God, Jess. You are the ultimate lifesaver. I cannot tell you . . . I will repay the favor tenfold when you and Vance pop out a few little monsters of your own,”

she said with a laugh. “Any news on that front, by the way?”

I glanced over at Vance, who was still sitting in the same spot, waiting to finish our conversation. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel if he knew I’d told Jiyana we were trying. He loved how close she and I were, but with the whole thing becoming an increasingly sensitive topic, I didn’t want to ask now whether he minded.

“Hey, listen,”

I told her, “Vance is here waiting to talk to me, so I’ve got to run. But text me the details for tomorrow, and I’m on it.”

“You’re my hero. Love ya, sis,”

she said, ending the call.

I turned back toward Vance. “Auntie Jessa to the rescue?” he said.

I smiled. “You know it.”

“You see? Working less isn’t exactly the end of the world. If you cut back, you could spend your days relaxing, hanging with your nephews, putting your feet up somewhere.”

I could feel the disappointment settling over my face at his words, and he clearly saw it too.

“Look, all I was trying to say earlier is that you’re not the only person at the firm who could help this client of yours. Can’t you just think about it?”

“I’m so tired,”

I answered, shutting down the conversation before we started another shouting match. “Can we just get in bed?”

I twisted my neck to relieve the tension in my shoulders and stood.

Vance opened his eyes and cleared his throat, like there was something else he wanted to say—but I didn’t wait before moving to the bathroom and shutting the door between us.

* * *

The next morning, I passed through the metal detector and then waited for a beefy-armed officer to buzz me into the interior of the detention facility. He ushered me silently through the dusty gray hallways into the same meeting room where I’d sat with Isobel just a couple of weeks earlier. With little more than a grunt, the man promptly left me in the small space, and I presumed he was going to retrieve my client.

I remained near the open doorway, curious about the other parts of the facility. I wondered where Isobel was at that moment. Was she sitting in a cell, bored to distraction? Doing some sort of work program? Writing letters? I felt remorseful that I didn’t have a better understanding of what daily life was like for her or for any of the women incarcerated at the facility. While I waited, a sturdy-looking middle-aged woman in green scrubs and a tight blond ponytail came down the hallway, walking briskly past the door. She glanced at me but then looked away just as quickly as she hurried along. After she rounded the corner and disappeared from view, there was little else to look at besides the dingy concrete walls and dusty floor. I moved toward the table, pulling out one of the cold metal chairs. As I opened my notepad and flipped to an empty page, the harried woman in scrubs reappeared, poking her head into the room.

“Hey,”

she said, her voice quiet enough to suggest she didn’t want to be overheard. “You’re the lawyer for Isobel Pérez?”

“I am,”

I said cautiously.

“She’s been through a lot. I hope you’re able to help her.”

The woman glanced over her shoulder and then turned back to me.

“Oh.”

I was glad Isobel had at least one ally in the facility. “Yes, I hope so too.”

The nurse opened her mouth to speak again, but then Isobel and the guard rounded the corner. The woman nodded curtly before hurrying away. Given this guard’s surly behavior, I could hardly blame her.

I turned my attention to Isobel, offering a subdued smile in greeting as she approached. Her hair was pulled into two braids on either side of her head in a youthful fashion. She nodded back at me as they came closer.

When the officer left, Isobel pulled out the chair opposite me and flinched at the jarring sound of its legs scraping the floor.

“The joys of Hydeford never cease,”

she said sarcastically, taking her seat.

“I just have a few things I wanted to cover today,”

I said, regretting the businesslike tone to my voice. I felt a pull to act friendlier toward Isobel, like a girlfriend would. Maybe because we were so close in age, or perhaps because she seemed like someone I might know outside of the detention facility. I wanted to offer her a hug and ask how she was holding up. I wished I could put funds into her commissary account and ask if she needed anything from the outside, but all the paperwork I’d been given by Legal Aid made it very clear that lawyers were supposed to maintain arm’s-length relationships with their clients, never becoming overly familiar. My objective was to represent Isobel as effectively as possible, so I forced myself to remain professional.

Before the meeting, I had prepared a list of follow-up questions pertaining to Isobel’s initial arrest and her transfer from the New York City Field Office to the current facility. If we could demonstrate any irregularities in the earlier parts of the detainment, that would bolster other arguments as to why Isobel was entitled to a cancellation of the removal order. Even more important, though, was the question of whether Isobel’s constitutional right to equal protection had been violated during her time in custody. But first, I needed to know something else entirely.

“Before we get too deep into procedural details,”

I started slowly, “I wanted to ask you something about a comment you made last time we were together.”

I noticed myself fidgeting with the pen in my hand, twirling it between my thumb and forefinger. At least I’d remembered not to bring my monogrammed pens this time. I placed the pen down on my notepad. “You’re not obligated to talk to me about this, and it won’t impact your immigration status in any way, but I’d like to hear a little more about your hysterectomy.”

Isobel’s head cocked to the side in question.

“My hysterectomy?”

she repeated. “Why?”

“Well . . .”

I was suddenly reluctant to confess my concerns, wondering if both Gram and I had just been wildly off base in our suspicion. But then I thought of my great-grandfather again. “I just want to make sure you’ve been receiving appropriate care while in custody.”

“Yeah, okay,”

Isobel said with a shrug.

We were both silent for a beat as I waited for her to say more, but she only raised her eyebrows expectantly.

“Well,”

I started, reminding myself not to put words into my client’s mouth, not to create my own narrative. “Do you remember what the doctor said about why you needed surgery?”

Isobel lifted her hand, tilting it back and forth in the air as if to say her memories were only so-so. “I mean, I’d just had a little cramping and some spotting or whatever. My cousin in Queens, she told me once about her period getting weird as she got older and how her doctor gave her some hormone medicine that fixed her up good. I didn’t expect anyone to start talking about surgery to me. I can’t really tell you every last detail of what they said, just that they convinced me it was the best thing for my health. I couldn’t get, like, a second opinion or anything, so I figured I’d better just do it and take care of myself.”

“Is it possible the doctor told you before the surgery that you would be having your uterus removed?”

She shook her head as her lips twisted.

“No, definitely not,”

she said. “That’s something I’d remember. When I woke up, it was all over, and they never said anything about my uterus. The only thing they bothered to tell me before I went under was to count backwards from ten.”

Her words hit me with a jolt, triggering a memory I couldn’t quite grasp. I shook away the feeling so I could stay focused on Isobel.

“You’re absolutely certain?”

I asked. “There was nothing else?”

“Look,”

she said, her voice taking on an edge. “I’m not an idiot. I may not have a college education or whatever, but I know where babies grow. If Choudry or that nurse said anything about taking a piece out of me that I wanted to keep, I would’ve objected. If I’d understood beforehand that there was even a chance the doctor could decide to remove my whole uterus, I would’ve waited to see if the cramping and whatnot would get better on its own.”

Her gaze shifted to the empty wall behind me, her focus intent, as if she were watching a movie of her memories on that wall. Through the silence, I could hear the ticking of the clock mounted in the corner of the room. A door clanged shut somewhere down the hall.

Finally, she shook her head. “Like I told you,”

she said, “when I woke up from the anesthesia, it was done.”

She lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, her eyes finally coming back to mine. “What could I do?”

“Did you talk to anyone about it?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, that nurse you were just talking to. Her name’s Fern. She helped take care of me while I was recovering. It was pretty brutal for a few days there. They just sent me back to my cell all bandaged up. Fern brought me Tylenol at least, though it didn’t help much. Aside from her, I just talked to Denise, one of the other inmates. She’s about my age and can’t have kids anymore either.”

“But the procedure was necessary for your health?”

I said, willing that much to be true because the alternative was still unthinkable.

“I mean, that’s what the doctor said. I had cysts or something.”

“Did you sign anything before the surgery?”

“Sign anything?”

She thought for a minute. “Maybe?”

She shrugged again.

When I heard the question in her voice, my heart sank. She should have been informed, clearly and explicitly, about not only the reasons for the procedure, but also the risks of possible side effects and complications. Especially regarding something as permanent as the removal of her reproductive organs. One hardly needed to be a board-certified physician to know that much.

“Would you be willing to give me permission to ask for a copy of your medical records? Just to make sure everything they did was medically necessary. We could have another doctor take a look at the records. A second opinion after the fact.”

“I can’t pay for that,”

she said as she shook her head. “And it won’t do any good anyhow. It’s not like they can put the uterus back in now.”

“No, no cost to you. Not a penny.”

I didn’t know how much the firm would allow me to spend on this case, but this was something I needed to pursue, even if I paid out of my own pocket.

“Yeah, whatever,”

she said again. “I don’t mind you trying, but good luck getting anything. Everything takes forever in this place.”

She was probably right, but I would at least file the request. Maybe the records would show that the doctor had actually saved Isobel’s life but had done a bad job of explaining things afterward. Whatever I found, it wouldn’t change Isobel’s future or the feats of which her body was no longer capable.

“What about your friend?”

I asked. “You said her name is Denise?”

Isobel nodded, her braids moving up and down against her shoulders.

“Has talking to her been helpful?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, yeah.”

She shrugged again. “She lost part of her fallopian tube, and they didn’t know it had to be taken out until the surgery already started, so we had kind of a similar experience. A surgery with a surprise ending. I guess they just do things like that when you’re a prisoner.”

“Wait.”

I sat up straighter. “She had the surgery while she was in custody? Did the same doctor do your procedure?”

Isobel nodded. “Dr. Choudry. All of us get taken over to that same clinic to see the gynecologist over there. Pinelands Women’s Health, it’s called.”

Two cases having such similar outcomes was a flag of the brightest red. If nothing else, the incidents clearly indicated that the facility was providing inadequate medical counseling.

“Do you think your friend would be willing to speak to me about her experience?” I asked.

Isobel looked away and began chewing on her thumbnail.

“Just a conversation,”

I said. “Nothing more than she’s comfortable with.”

Isobel let out a long, slow breath.

“I mean, I can ask her,”

she answered on a shrug.

“Great, okay.”

I figured it was best to close the topic for the day and move on to questions about the specifics of her arrest, as I’d originally planned. Over the next hour, I collected pages of details about her detainment, including facts I thought might truly be helpful in obtaining the cancellation we sought.

After I packed up and headed out to the parking lot, where my car was now covered in a thin layer of snow, I finally let my mind run free. So many questions were nagging at me. Was my own struggle to get pregnant skewing my perception? I hoped so. It would be much better to discover that I was deeply self-involved than to confirm incarcerated women were being subjected to unnecessary, nonconsensual gynecological procedures. And by federal authorities at that. I groaned aloud as I tossed my tote bag to the passenger seat and settled in behind the wheel.

As I turned on the wipers to push the snow off my windshield, I thought again of what Gram had shared with me. Her family had given up so much to protect just one girl—and I resolved in that moment that I would find out what was really happening to the inmates at Hydeford and do whatever it took to help them. I pulled out of the parking spot, heading back toward Manhattan and my nephew’s preschool, my thoughts already racing toward my next steps.