Chapter 12 Tessa
The week before Thanksgiving, a client's carrier came in smelling like the inside of a carrier. I put my hand over my mouth and walked out of my own exam room.
Marisol came around the corner with a chart.
"You okay? You're gray."
"I skipped breakfast."
"You skipped breakfast Thursday too," Marisol said. She did not push it, because she was a person of tremendous discretion. That was the most irritating thing about her.
I finished the appointment and did not smell one thing. I had stopped breathing through my nose entirely, a workaround I had apparently been running for two weeks without deciding to.
At five o'clock I sat down at the desk with the appointment book and my phone and did the math.
Then I did it again, because I did not trust arithmetic I did not like.
Nine weeks. Nine by the way it's counted, which is not from the night. It's from before the night. Everybody in medicine knows that and still has to say it out loud to themselves in a lobby at five in the afternoon.
Then I called Violet.
"Can you come here?"
There was a pause. "I'm getting my keys," Violet said. "I'm walking to the car. I'm in the car. Do you want to tell me now or when I get there?"
"When you get there."
"Is anyone dying?"
"Nobody's dying, Violet."
"Okay. I'm going to the pharmacy on Federal first," she said. She hung up before I could answer. That woman had been six steps ahead of me since we were nineteen.
She came in at six-forty with a paper bag and her coat still on.
"I got three. Two brands and a third that was on sale, which I understand is not how science works, but I felt it was thorough. I also got crackers, a ginger ale and a bag of little oranges, because I panicked in an aisle." She put the bag down. "Here or at the house?"
"Here. The house has a broken thermostat and my brother has a key."
The clinic supply sink was between the sterilizer and the shelf where the fluid bags lived. It was stainless steel with a wide lip, and a mirror somebody screwed to the wall in about 2004. I'd cried in that room twice, both times in 2017.
I lined them up on the lip of the sink. Violet started a timer. We stood under a fluorescent tube with the sterilizer ticking as it cooled.
"Three minutes," Violet said.
"It says two."
"The other one says three. We're going with the longest number in the room."
"That's not how any of this works."
"Tessa Anne, I've waited my entire adult life for exactly these three minutes and you are not going to shorten it. Do you want me to talk or not talk?"
"Talk."
So she talked. A foster named Kimberly, a rash, forty-one volunteers, a dog in Arvada with a name she disapproved of. I stood with both hands on the edge of a supply sink and heard about six percent of it. At some point she stopped. Neither of us said anything and the sterilizer ticked.
"Forty seconds," Violet said. "I'm going to hold your arm."
She held my arm.
Three of three. They were not shy about it either. There is a version of this where it's faint and has to be taken to a window. This was three tests on the lip of a sink announcing themselves like a fire alarm.
Violet put both hands over her face and made a sound like a kettle.
I did not make any sound at all. I looked at three pieces of plastic and did the only thing my brain had available, which was inventory.
Five bottle babies. A lease on the land that renews in August and a man named Grant Fessler with nice shoes. $1,100 of parvo on a credit card and an equipment payment sixty days out. A twenty-one-year-old brother who thought I had it handled, because I'd made a career out of him thinking that.
And a man on a one-year contract with an out at the deadline who had already left once.
"Say something," Violet said.
"I'm running the numbers."
"Say a human sentence."
"I can't," I said. "There isn't one."
At the time every single one of these felt like a plan.
"It could be phantom," I said.
Violet took her hands off her face.
"Pseudocyesis. False pregnancy. It's a hormonal event. The animal shows every clinical sign, mammary development and nesting. They'll mother a shoe and there is nothing there."
"Tessa."
"I've treated it four times this year."
"Tessa Anne Reeves."
"It's a documented condition."
"In dogs," Violet said. "It's a documented condition in dogs. You are not a dog. You are a thirty-one-year-old woman standing in a supply closet. There are three tests on that sink and none of them are for dogs."
"You don't know that. That one might be."
"I bought them at a Walgreens."
"There's a wolf sanctuary in Montana," I said.
Violet stopped.
"I'm sorry?"
"Outside Missoula. I went for a conference in 2019. They were understaffed. They said if I ever wanted a change. Four animals and a fence and no clients. Nobody calls. There's no lease. There's no man from Apex in a quarter zip."
"You want to flee to a wolf sanctuary."
"I'm saying it's an option that exists."
"You would not last nine days without a client to be rude to," Violet said.
I put my hands flat on the counter.
"Okay. Here's a real one."
"Oh good."
"We have a whole system for this. We place forty animals a year with people who did not plan to have them.
" I was talking fast, which she would have clocked.
"There's an application, a home check and a two-week trial.
Then there's a foster contract with an option to convert.
There's a support line and a supply stipend and a check-in at thirty days.
And it works, Violet, because nobody is asked to decide everything on day one. "
Violet looked at me for a long moment.
"You want to foster your baby."
"I want the paperwork," I said. "I want somebody to hand me a form with boxes on it and a two-week trial."
"Human children do not come with foster contracts."
"They should."
"They very much should," Violet said. "And they don't. I need you to sit down, because you've gone a color."
I sat down on an upturned bucket.
She sat on the floor across from me with her back against the fluid shelf and said nothing for a while. For her that was an act of enormous violence against her own nature.
"Talk to me," she said finally.
"I was twenty-two. He was twelve. Mom died in March. I had a semester left and a clinic going under and a twelve-year-old boy who had stopped talking. I drove I-25 twice a week for two years, with him asleep in the back seat and a cooler of vaccines in the footwell."
"I was there for most of it."
"And I don't regret an hour of it. People always think there's a regret in there and there isn't. He's twenty-one and he's alive and he's employed and he stands up straight. I did that. It's the best thing I've ever done."
"Nobody ever asked me," I said.
Violet went still.
"Nobody ever sat down across from me and said, Tessa, do you want this life or a different one?
There was no form. There was no two-week trial.
There was a phone call and a funeral and then a Tuesday.
On the Tuesday I just started doing it. I've been doing it nine years and nobody has ever once asked me. "
"Tess."
"And now something's asking," I said. "It's the first thing in my entire adult life that has actually asked."
Violet reached over and put her hand on my ankle, because that was the part of me she could reach.
"What do you want," she said.
"I don't know."
"That's allowed."
"I know it's allowed. I'm a doctor. I know exactly what all of this is and what the options are.
I've said the words out loud to other people in rooms." I put the heels of my hands against my eyes.
"I'm not asking anybody what to do. This is mine.
I'm going to work it out in my own time and by my own arithmetic.
I'm not going to be talked into one thing by anybody, including you. "
"I heard you," she said. "And for the record, I wasn't going to."
"You were going to say something."
"It's not what you think," Violet said. "I was going to say you have spent nine years being the person who does the hard part alone, and that I've watched it. And that if you tell me to go home right now, I will go home. And also that I'm not going home."
Two things I decided that night, sitting on a bucket.
Eli cannot know yet. That's not forever.
That's until I know what I'm doing. The second my brother knows he will build his entire life around it inside a week, the way he does.
He will drop shifts and be here every night.
I've spent nine years keeping that boy's life from being a support beam under mine.
He gets to be twenty-one a little while longer.
And Beckett has to be told.
I did not want that one. I turned it over about nine ways looking for a version where I didn't. I found four.
Every one of them was me deciding on my own what somebody else is allowed to know about their own life.
That is the exact thing that was done to me in a gravel parking lot when I was twenty-one. I will not be that.
So he gets told, when I'm ready and not before, in a room I choose.
That's the deal I made with myself on a bucket at nine at night.
Violet left at ten. She hugged me too hard, twice. She stood in the lot with the car door open and said, "Text me when you're in bed." I said, "I'm not going to." She said, "I know, but say you will." I said, "I will."
Then I went back into the supply room, because I had left three tests on the lip of a sink like an idiot. The last thing this building needed was Marisol finding that at seven in the morning.
I picked them up and stood there holding them and did the math again. Not the backwards math, the other one.
Nine weeks now, which made it the last week of June.
June. I stood in a fluorescent supply closet in a building with my mother's name over the door. It landed on me sideways at nine forty at night. I had to put a hand on the shelf.
I put my other hand flat on my stomach, which was a stupid thing to do. There was nothing there yet and nothing to feel. I knew that better than almost anybody alive.
I did it anyway. I stood there a while like that.
It was dread, about eighty percent of it. The other twenty was something I had no intention of naming in a supply closet.
Then I went out through the lobby to lock the front.
There was a bag on the ledge under the mail slot with a container in it. The container was cold. There was no note on it and there did not need to be.
I stood at my own front door with a bag of soup in one hand and three pieces of plastic in the other. I said out loud, to a lobby with six empty chairs in it, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."