Counting Backwards

9

Jessa

March 2022

As I waited on the small love seat in Dr. LaRusso’s Upper East Side office, I checked my phone for a third time. Vance had warned me that he might be late, but I felt uncomfortable sitting there all alone on the floral upholstery, wondering about my fertility, and maybe my entire future, without anyone beside me. I couldn’t help imagining myself sitting in the same spot again and again, month after month and year after year. If we kept trying and failing to conceive, eventually Vance would tire of waiting. He’d want to pursue other options, and if I didn’t capitulate or surrender to a time frame he deemed reasonable, he would leave. I felt certain of that. And I’d be on my own, abandoned once more.

I was catastrophizing again. I knew that. After all, I was the one intent on carrying a biological child, not Vance. Sure, I might consider adoption down the road, but not yet, not by a long shot. So instead, I was seeing this horrible montage in my mind, picturing myself growing older, my curls graying, my forehead filling with wrinkles, and in every mental image, I was alone. I tried to shut down my spiraling thoughts, to shoo them away like gnats buzzing around my head, but it didn’t work. I had to remember that Vance wasn’t only with me to have children. Calling on an old tactic, I imagined myself writing a list, scribbling out the things he loved about me, the reasons he would stay: my ambition, my dependability, my devotion to his family. Even my organizational skills. It dawned on me that the list I was creating didn’t exactly scream deep, burning love, but I liked that Vance appreciated traits of mine that I appreciated in myself. And of course there was more between us.

I released a long breath, trying to reset. At the opposite end of the room, two women sat together. One of them had a large pregnant belly and was resting a magazine on her baby bump as if it were a tabletop. How nice it must be, I thought, to experience the bodily changes that come with pregnancy.

On the end table beside me, some plastic dispensers held pamphlets for the taking. I pulled out the closest one and opened the front flap. Inside was a list of facts about fertility and medical obstacles that people might face when trying to conceive.

Common factors in infertility include: a woman’s age, ovulation disturbances, cervical anomalies, tubal disease, fibroids, and uterine abnormalities.

The list went on and on. My heart sped up as I read further and thought about all the different ways I might be defective. Even without him sitting next to me, I could hear Vance admonishing me for thinking of that word. “Not defective, Jess,”

he would say, dismissing the idea. “Just tense and impatient.”

Then he would laugh, always so sure that everything would just magically work itself out.

It was no wonder he felt that way. Golden boy Vance, who could somehow sweet-talk his way into a pair of sold-out concert tickets or flash a single dimple and end up with upgraded seats on a fully booked flight. He’d gotten us this coveted appointment with Dr. LaRusso in the same way. If he actually showed up in time for this appointment, I knew he’d waltz right in, totally sure that any fertility issues I had could be easily remedied.

What he hadn’t suggested—wouldn’t suggest—was that maybe he was the problem. Low sperm count could also cause male infertility. Maybe an STI he never knew about or even a genetic condition. As I skipped down to the bottom of the page I was reading, the pamphlet seemed to hear my thoughts and couldn’t wait to contradict them.

Infertility is considered a “couples’ problem,”

but the cause can be traced to the female in more than half of all cases.

I snorted a little too loudly at those words, and the women across the room looked up at the noise.

“Sorry,”

I mumbled sheepishly, returning my attention to the pamphlet.

I wished I could pick apart that statistic in the leaflet and question whoever had compiled the information. Was anyone accounting for the fact that women were probably much more likely to seek treatment for infertility than men? And how could you even call it a “couples’ problem”

when so many of the people seeking reproductive assistance were single?

Despite the umbrage I felt looking at that page, the idea that my empty womb was somehow my fault felt the most logical, the most obvious. I liked to remind my work associates of Occam’s razor, the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

The door from outside pushed open just as a car on the street honked. I looked up to see Vance walking in, and my whole body relaxed at the sight of him. Before I even stood to greet him, a nurse appeared at the other end of the room.

“Jessa Gidney?”

she called. Her chipper voice was teeming with optimism, an emotion I wished I, too, could feel. Yet as I stood from my seat, nothing but dread pushed me forward.

Dr. LaRusso was an affable man in his late fifties, which Gram always said was the perfect age for a doctor. Old enough to be experienced but still young enough to give a hoot, as she put it. He had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a nose that was slightly too large for his face.

After the examination, I changed from the paper gown back into my work clothes. Vance and I were shepherded from the exam room over to a carpeted office, where the doctor was already seated behind a desk.

“Sit, please,”

he said, not looking up from the folder before him. He was making notes on the paper inside.

We settled quietly into the plush armchairs opposite the desk. Vance reached for my hand and gave it three quick squeezes.

I turned toward Vance, taking in his burgundy V-neck sweater, his black slacks, and the subtle dark circles beneath his eyes. Most days, he wore a suit to work. He felt that being dressed formally allowed him to project the right image when interacting with clients. Today’s more casual attire meant something else was going on at work, something keeping him at the office instead of going out entertaining. Normally, I would have known exactly why he was too busy to meet with clients, what deal was heating up, and why he hadn’t arrived home before I was sleeping. I realized this with a pang of guilt. I’d gotten so wrapped up in my pro bono case that the only personal issue for which I had any bandwidth remaining was our effort to conceive. Each time he brought up anything else, I found myself tuning out. I squeezed his hand back. He deserved better than what I’d been giving him.

“Right,”

Dr. LaRusso said, finally looking up at us. He smiled broadly, straight white teeth on display.

“I have several pieces of good news,”

he started. “First, plenty of healthy couples devote six, nine, ten months to trying to conceive before it actually happens. And longer. A delay of a few months is not a medically significant phenomenon. Many of my peers won’t even meet with couples until they’ve been trying for at least a year. Second”—he held up two fingers—“is the fact that physically, Jessa, you seem to be shipshape. We’ll have to wait for the blood work to come back, but on initial examination, you present as perfectly healthy. Though you’re in your thirties, you’re still young enough to carry multiple children to term without issue. The ultrasound revealed no causes for concern. The fact that your period arrives regularly and without excessive pain is also a promising sign.”

“What about the miscarriage?”

I asked, referring to my pregnancy the year before.

The doctor nodded like it was a wise question.

“There’s always the chance that a miscarriage could result in uterine scarring, which could complicate later conceptions—but initial testing doesn’t seem to indicate that’s the case here. We can conduct more specific explorations, but I’m not seeing anything to warrant it. At least not yet.”

“So what’s the bad news?” I asked.

“Not bad news,”

the doctor said, “just a to-do list.”

His eyes shifted to Vance. “When the cause for lack of conception is not obvious at the initial stages, sometimes we have to do more digging. I think it’d be worthwhile for you, Vance, to get checked out. A semen analysis is quick and easy. Given the relatively brief time you’ve been trying, I’m not overly concerned. But if you’re feeling impatient, gathering information in the meantime won’t hurt. If everything looks okay with the sperm concentration and motility, we can take it from there.”

Vance sat up straighter in his chair.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the blood work to come back first? Couldn’t this be a hormonal imbalance or something?” he asked.

I fought the urge to smack him. Why couldn’t he even imagine that he might be playing a part in this—some role other than just the supportive husband? And honestly, was he even doing that?

“Certainly,”

Dr. LaRusso said. “It’ll only be a couple of days for the bloods. By the time you get an appointment for the semen analysis, you’ll have heard from me about those results anyway.”

He opened a drawer from his desk, pulled out a card, and offered it to Vance. “Here is the doctor I recommend for male fertility exams. She’s excellent. Unless you have someone else you’d rather see.”

Vance looked down at the card and swallowed. A vein in his jaw had begun to pulse, and his visible distress took me by surprise.

Dr. LaRusso seemed to notice Vance’s change in demeanor as well.

“I don’t want you two to worry,”

the doctor said. “You are at the very beginning of the process, and science in this area has come an incredibly long way. We will work through this as a team, leaving no stone unturned. You understand?”

He gave us another big smile, waiting for each of us to nod in agreement.

After collecting our things, we left the quiet confines of the medical office and emerged into the afternoon commotion of Seventy-Ninth Street. We made our way through the damp wintry air toward Third Avenue, where we would each take different subways back to our respective offices.

“So that was good, I guess?”

I asked as we walked, wrapping my arm around Vance’s elbow and inching closer to him.

He kept his lips tight and shook his head.

“What’s wrong?”

I asked. “The news was positive. Shouldn’t we be happy that he couldn’t find anything the matter with us?”

“With you,”

Vance shot back. “He couldn’t find anything wrong with you.”

He kept his eyes trained straight ahead as we walked. “But now I’m supposed to get put under a microscope too?”

“What’s the harm in a quick check, just to make sure nothing’s amiss?”

I couldn’t imagine the fertility exam for men being anywhere near as intrusive as what I’d been putting myself through. As far as I knew, all they needed was a sperm sample, and Vance could take care of that on his own.

“Jessa, there’s nothing wrong with either of us except for your glaring lack of patience or, I don’t know, your intense and debilitating fear of your own inadequacies.”

“Wow, Vance. You’re so opposed to a urology visit that you’d prefer attacking me? Why did you even go to the trouble of making this appointment today if you were just going to be a jerk about the whole thing?”

He stopped walking and turned toward me, dislodging my hand from where it’d been wrapped around his arm.

“Jessa, I made the appointment because I’m tired of you freaking out—not because I thought anything physical needed attention. I’m just fed up with your constant fixation, and maybe I was also trying to do something to help you. Like if a doctor told you that you’re fine, you’d give it a rest and calm the fuck down. But now this doctor has gone and opened a whole can of worms, and this time the focus is on me. So, what? Now you want me to go down to that office, whack off into a cup? What if I bump into someone I know there? What am I supposed to say?”

“If you bump into someone? That’s what you care about? What people will think? Really, Vance?”

The worst part was that I wasn’t even surprised. It always came back to appearances with him. He must have heard the defeat in my voice because he reached out for my hand and lowered his volume again.

“No, all I’m saying is I just don’t see why we’re going for test after test, putting ourselves through the wringer like this. This is supposed to be a fun and exciting time for us. It’s only been six months, Jessa!”

“Right . . . ,”

I started. “And nothing we’re doing on our own is working.”

I felt my eyes fill with water. Vance saw it too, and his voice softened.

“Look,”

he said, “I want you to be happy. I know how important this is to you. I thought I could suck it up and jump on the medical intervention bandwagon—even though six months is really no time at all.”

He looked back toward the door of the doctor’s office. “But, Jess, you’re sucking all the joy out of this process, making it so clinical. Then each month you get upset that we failed. Talking about failure over and over makes me feel like such a loser.”

“I never said—”

“You can’t even get a diagnosis of infertility until you’ve been trying for a year,”

he interrupted. “Why can’t we just keep living our lives, and if you get pregnant, great, and if not, maybe one day we find another way to build a family?”

Was he trying to goad me? After all the years I’d waited to have my own family again. To hear an echo of my mother in a baby’s laughter or look into a child’s face and see the same shade of hazel I remembered from my father’s eyes. I longed for the joy of having a shared history with a child, teaching them about my parents and my parents’ parents and grandparents. What an amazing experience it must be to forge those common connections with mini versions of ourselves. He knew how important it was to me to try for that.

“You know I want kids,”

he said. “But . . .”

He trailed off as he looked away, his gaze moving toward the traffic light at the corner, where a few pedestrians huddled around a coffee cart.

As I waited for him to find the words, I wondered how we could possibly be so out of sync with each other. I had only a few real goals in my life, but they meant everything to me. Making partner clearly hadn’t panned out. Was Vance going to take this away from me now too—the family I’d been pining for ever since my teens?

Finally, he looked back at me. “I feel like it’s killing everything else between us. Why am I not enough for you, just on my own? Was I always just a means to an end?”

“A means to an end?”

I repeated, my head rearing back in surprise.

Vance’s phone chimed from his pocket. He didn’t reach for it, but he glanced at his watch with a harried expression.

“Look, I have to get back for a meeting. The Plantico deal is turning into a disaster, and I have to prep for Florida in the morning. Let’s table this.”

He stepped toward the subway entrance.

“No.”

I grabbed his arm. My voice sounded desperate even to my own ears. I had forgotten that he was leaving for Tampa in the morning.

He was right. The attempted baby-making had damaged other parts of our relationship, all the little things that had been good before. I wondered for a split second if he was right about the other part too—that he was simply the man I’d chosen to be the father of my children, that my love for him wasn’t real. Had I just been auditioning men to play a role in the manifestation of some vision I’d concocted as a child? But no, that was ridiculous. I loved so much about Vance, and he should know that.

“Please, you can’t just say something like that and then leave.”

He glanced in the direction of the subway before answering.

“I just hate that this conception thing is taking over our whole marriage, okay? We don’t talk about anything else anymore. I miss us.”

“But this is all about us. Us, and our next stage as a family.”

Even as I argued, I knew that at least some of what he was saying was true. I had retreated from him recently.

He looked back at me for a long moment, then just sighed.

“I don’t know, Jess. Things are changing between us. You used to come to me for help, but lately it’s like you’re going rogue on one thing after another. I tell you to dial it back at work, and you ignore me. I tell you to stop with the pregnancy tests, so you go behind my back. This isn’t who we are. I don’t understand why you’re not listening to me anymore, why you . . .”

He trailed off for a moment. “I guess I just miss being your partner.”

Partners. Was that ever what we’d been? I saw us more as president and vice president—a team, for sure, but not the same. I’d always appreciated Vance’s confidence and ability to take the lead on major decisions, shouldering that burden of being in charge. Maybe he just didn’t like his VP stepping out of line, and I bristled at the thought. But then I reminded myself how well our dynamic had once worked. I could be doing better too.

He sighed again as he studied my face a moment longer. “I really have to go,”

he said. He leaned down to give me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. Then he turned toward the subway, leaving me to stare at his back as he descended into the underworld.

* * *

The next morning as I drove south on the Jersey Turnpike, I was still thinking about our conversation. After so many years of being in sync and happy, I was allowing my obsession with having a baby to damage everything that had been good between us. I wondered if I was putting even more distance between us by not telling Vance what Gram had shared with me about her childhood. But there was no reason he needed to know. Gram had been visibly distressed when she told me about how her family had to change their last name and move to a new town all because her father had risked his reputation to help somebody. All these decades later, it was still hard for her to confront what her family had been through in the name of standing up for what was right.

I took great pride in coming from people with such strong principles. But I could already hear Vance in my head, arguing that Grandpa Harry should have done things differently, that he could’ve achieved the same results without losing everything he’d worked for. Even if that wasn’t true, Vance was always so sure he knew better than everyone else. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to find fault with Grandpa Harry or his actions. Didn’t everyone have secrets they never shared with a spouse anyway, hidden gems they wanted to keep for themselves? I was sure I’d read something like that in one of those Esther Perel books on relationships. This new tidbit about my history felt like something Gram had gifted to me, a fragile but important point of pride that I could savor on my own without having to open myself up to Vance’s negativity.

When the blocky concrete facade of Hydeford finally appeared up ahead, I had to force away my personal frustrations so I’d be able to focus. I cleared my throat and coughed intentionally, envisioning the negative energy that was festering inside me floating away like helium balloons released into the wind.

Cutting through the red tape to make this appointment had taken several days, so I wouldn’t squander the opportunity. I’d finally found information on the friend Isobel mentioned in our last meeting. After reviewing the files, I now knew the basic facts about Denise Agbar. A twenty-six-year-old woman from Cameroon who’d been in the US since age eleven, Denise had become known to immigration authorities nearly two years earlier when she made a 11 call during a domestic dispute. The situation between Denise and her boyfriend spun out of control, and when the police arrived, both Denise and her partner ended up getting arrested. The charges against Denise were ultimately dropped, but because of her status as undocumented, she was transferred to ICE custody and had been at Hydeford ever since. Currently, she was awaiting the outcome of her appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

The process of admission for visitors to Hydeford was beginning to feel routine, and I was able to get quickly situated in the meeting room. When the male guard arrived with Inmate 541, as he’d called her, I was struck by how young she looked. Maybe it was the woman’s wide, alert eyes as she entered the room. She was slender and tall with dark skin and glossy hair twisted into a low bun at the base of her neck.

“You’re Denise Agbar?”

I asked, wanting to confirm before the guard left. I noted that she was also in the powder-blue uniform, indicating the lowest threat level.

Both she and the guard nodded.

“Ring when you’re finished,”

the guard said as he walked out and closed the door.

“Thank you for meeting with me,”

I began, taking my seat and motioning for Denise to do the same. As she settled into the chair opposite me, she leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I hope Isobel explained why I wanted to talk?” I asked.

“Yeah. She filled me in.”

Denise’s words held barely a trace of her ancestral country, no French or Cameroonian undertones. Her voice was filled with oppositional notes, like she was preparing for a fight. “I mean, I think it’s great that you want to talk about it, try to help or whatever. But there won’t be anything you can do. Nobody’s gonna care about what’s going on up in here. So I’m not really sure it’s worth putting myself at risk.”

“At risk? I’m sorry—I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, everything has a cost, right? I speak up about what happened to me, next thing I know, my commissary account might get zeroed out. Most likely, I get booked on the next flight to Cameroon. I keep quiet about it, keep my head down, maybe things’ll go better for me. I got all my family here, both my parents, two sisters. I’m not looking to cause myself any trouble before I get myself back to them.”

Denise’s words stopped me short. Retaliation? Sudden deportation? Was she for real? I didn’t want to make things any more difficult for the women in this center.

Before I could formulate a response, she continued. “And anyway, it’s not like it can be undone. The procedure can’t be reversed.”

“If you don’t want to file a grievance, then why’d you agree to meet with me?” I asked.

She shrugged and glanced away, like she wasn’t so sure either. Or maybe she just didn’t want to say.

“Look,”

I began, slowly parsing through my own thoughts as I spoke. “What if you just tell me what happened to you? We don’t have to do anything with the information unless or until you’re comfortable. But I can’t know for sure that I can’t help you unless you share your story with me.”

Denise’s eyes came back to rest on me, but she didn’t answer.

“I’m legally bound to keep everything you tell me in confidence unless you expressly allow me to share it. This would just be talking. Just between us. Nothing more.”

She pursed her lips like she was truly considering her options, making me think she actually did want to share her story but was scared of the consequences. That would explain why she had agreed to meet; she wanted to do something, but only if she was safe.

“Maybe we just start with the facts,”

I offered, positioning my memo pad between us. “Then we can discuss how to handle things.”

“And you can’t tell anybody what I say?”

she asked.

“Attorney-client privilege. I’m not allowed to reveal anything at all.”

After a few more moments of silence, she rolled her eyes and began talking.

“So, I was having some bleeding, right?”

I nodded.

“It was just spotting, but it started happening more and more, like at the wrong time of the month. So I told one of the nurses in the infirmary. I guess I was scared something was the matter with me, you know? They took me to that Dr. Choudry over there at Pinelands, the clinic they take us to. We went over in a transport van, in a group. We’re all cuffed and whatnot, waiting in the van.”

She swallowed audibly and shifted in her seat.

“When it was my turn, they brought me to the room, took my cuffs off. The doctor didn’t even look at me or make eye contact. Just told me to undress from the waist down and get on the table. No robe or anything. And then without saying anything else, the doctor just went right in and did an internal exam. Nobody told me what was about to happen or nothing. All of a sudden, I just got someone sticking that wand all up in my business without lube on it or anything. So I start saying, ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ because, well, you know . . .”

She trailed off, suddenly a little shy.

I nodded, thinking about how invasive those transvaginal wands could be even in the best of circumstances. Maybe she saw some level of understanding on my face, because she nodded slowly and then continued.

“I was about to start kicking to get myself out of there, but then the doctor showed me the screen and pointed at something. I don’t know. It all just looked like black-and-white clouds on that ultrasound monitor. But the doctor said, ‘There, that’s a cyst. That’s what’s causing your trouble.’ Said my uterus needed to be scraped, a D&C. I forget what it stands for, but I knew it was what they do for abortions sometimes. That freaked me out a little, so I wasn’t sure. But the doctor said if I did the procedure while I’m in custody, the government would pay for it. If I waited until I got out, I’d have to pay on my own. The nurse said I’d better make arrangements quick so the cyst didn’t get worse and cause me more trouble. I was scared, so I said, okay, fine. They could do what they needed to do.”

“And did they explain to you that they might do more than just remove the one cyst?”

Denise shook her head. “Nah. It was much more like, ‘Hurry, hurry, sign this.’ They got me all worked up about how I couldn’t pay for the procedure on my own, so I signed everything they put in front of me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“Before the procedure, did they warn you of risks or complications?”

“Nah,”

Denise said again. “Just put a mask over my face and told me to start counting backwards from ten.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

“When did you find out they’d done more than the D&C?” I asked.

“Well, when I woke up from the surgery, the nurse was there, and she said . . . She told me . . .”

Denise paused and turned her dark eyes toward the wall beside her.

“It’s okay. Take your time.”

“No.”

Denise shook her head and wiped at one eye with the heel of her hand. “Now that I started getting on about it, I have to get it all out because they did me so wrong.”

I was sorry we were in such a sparse room. Had we been at my office, I would have pushed a box of tissues across the table toward her, offered her a glass of water.

“When I woke up after the anesthesia, the nurse told me the surgery went well. I was real groggy, so they told me to just stay where I was. After a while, the two of them came back to tell me it was time to get ready to go. The nurse said I’d have pain for a few days but not to worry, that it was normal because they had to fix my fallopian tubes. And then Dr. Choudry came in and said, ‘Your fallopian tubes were blocked, so I had to remove parts from each. You won’t be able to get pregnant naturally anymore, but that’s one less thing for you to worry about now, isn’t it?’”

“Oh my God!”

The words escaped me before I could stop myself.

“I did some looking online. Maybe I could still try to have a baby with IVF, but the chances aren’t great with the fallopian tubes damaged.”

She shook her head as she wiped away the wetness on her cheeks again. “And how would I ever find the money for that anyhow? There’s no point even thinking about it.”

I was intimately familiar with the difficulty of the IVF process and its middling odds of success. One more topic I hadn’t yet discussed with Vance. But I was also well aware of the high cost and the fact that it would be prohibitive for many.

“I always thought I’d have a big family. Now I’m going to have to tell any man I meet up front that I can’t ever have kids. How do you think that’s going to go?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “I never would have said yes to that part of the surgery. How’d they just go in and do that?”

She threw her hands in the air in a gesture of defeat.

It was hard to sit across from the willowy woman and just watch her cry, but I could only imagine how much harder the situation was for her. I was irate thinking about what this Dr. Choudry had done.

“If you’d like to pursue a claim,”

I started, “at least we might be able to change their practices going forward—so they don’t do something like this to anyone else.”

She snorted as she ran her wet hand against the leg of her cotton uniform, wiping the tears into faint lines on her pants.

“Yeah, it’s a little late for that. Saving people,”

she said, shaking her head. “It’s not like me and Isobel were the only ones. There’s plenty of others.”

“Wait, what?”

I hoped I was misunderstanding.

She sighed. “Look. Some of the other girls already tried to speak up, but they’re gone now. Back to their countries or whatever. My whole life is here, so I’m just going to keep my mouth shut. You can’t guarantee nothing happens to me, right?”

“You mean like sudden deportation?” I asked.

Denise nodded. “One woman, she filed a grievance. She was on an airplane back to Honduras the next day. The very next day.”

“That can’t be, that can’t . . .”

I struggled to digest what she was saying. I blinked several times, hoping that would help me see things more clearly. “Denise,”

I finally began, taking a deep breath. “If you’re telling me there’s a pattern here, if it’s not only you and Isobel but other women in the facility too . . . If you’re telling me that those women who’ve spoken out are being retaliated against, we need to do something. We have to fight for your rights and the rights of every other woman in this detention facility, possibly every woman in federal custody.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

She held up her hands as if to push my words away. “This isn’t Erin Brockovich. We’re not doing that. These are our private lives, our health. Most of the women here won’t even want to tell you about their private business at all. Never mind filing claims or whatever.”

“That’s exactly it though. Just because you’re in here doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to make your own medical choices. You’re telling me that a doctor performed a life-altering procedure on you, without your consent, and that the same thing has happened to other women in this facility. Don’t you see?”

I was getting frustrated with her unwillingness to cooperate, which I knew wasn’t fair of me. I glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of Grandpa Harry and trying to be the very best version of myself.

“If there’s a true pattern here,”

I continued carefully, modulating my tone in hopes that she would see me as the ally I was aiming to be, “the doctor or the facility, whoever is pulling the strings, is forcing involuntary sterilization procedures on women who aren’t in a position to resist. It’s a blatant violation of your rights, and there’s probably some ghastly agenda behind the whole thing that needs to be stopped.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want. I’m not looking to be part of some political movement.”

She started pushing her chair back from the table. “The idea sounds great and all, to maybe speak up and help make sure this doesn’t happen to anybody else, but I’m not doing that. I’m telling you, a girl speaks out, they get rid of her. Everyone I care about is here in the US. I’ve got nothing in Cameroon.”

“We can take steps to protect you,” I said.

She was halfway out of her chair, but at my words, she hesitated.

“If they try to deport you, I can file for an emergency stay,”

I rushed. “If a whole class of women are alleging the same kind of abuses, they can’t deport you all. Doing so would basically be admitting their guilt. And you can be anonymous on the complaint!”

I realized. “We’d just list you as ‘Jane Doe,’ and we wouldn’t have to use your name at all. Not anywhere.”

She looked back at me for a moment and then settled back into her seat.

“If they try to deport you for speaking up,”

I said, keeping my voice firm, “I will move heaven and earth to protect you. I promise you that.”

She brought her hand to her mouth, rubbing her bottom lip, but her eyes didn’t move from my face.

“Look,”

I tried again, “do you think you could just ask around, see if some of the other women might be willing to come forward? Anonymously, or with the power of a group together?”

She finally began nodding slowly.

“I guess I could talk to some of the others, the ones that are still here. But I’m not promising anything. It’s not up to me to decide what they want.”

After the guard came back to retrieve Denise, I took a moment to jot down a few more thoughts. As I stood and collected my things, the blond nurse I’d seen on my last visit rounded the corner holding a clipboard. She slowed her pace as she reached me.

“Hey,”

she said, glancing behind herself and then scribbling something onto a paper on the clipboard. She tore the note from the clipboard, folded it quickly, and thrust it out toward me.

Before my brain could even catch up to what might be happening, I took the crumpled paper from her. I looked down at the note in my hand, where a name was scrawled in blue ink. When I looked back up, the nurse was already scurrying away, continuing down the hallway as if the interaction had never happened.