Chapter 22 Emily
EMILY
A little over a month after Emily’s first visit to Dr. Stone’s office, she was once again called to the infirmary.
She’d known this was coming—Dr. Stone had said the exams were “routine”—but still found herself dragging her feet up to the second-floor corridor, nauseous after a breakfast of runny eggs that did nothing to quell her nerves about the appointment.
There was a lineup of five other girls ahead of her and, frowning, Emily took her place at the back of the queue.
She leaned against the whitewashed brick wall and pressed her weight into it in an attempt to ease the ache in her back.
Her exhaustion drove her to sleep each night, but the mattress was still atrocious.
Movement helped, and at least there was no shortage of that at the Mercer, worked off their feet as they were.
Emily was just beginning to wonder how long she was going to have to wait to see Dr. Stone when a wail sounded from the psychiatric ward down the hall. All six of the women’s heads turned, though there was nothing to see.
“Stop it! I don’t want it! I said I don’t want it!” the voice shrieked, and Emily’s stomach jolted. It sounded like Annie. A matron responded gently with something Emily didn’t catch, and Annie began to moan and cry. Emily was next to tears just listening to it.
“It’s just one of the Blues,” a woman in line said. “That Crazy Annie, who killed her kid. Don’t know why they don’t just keep her drugged.”
Emily opened her mouth to retort, but at that moment Dr. Stone’s office door opened and the rude woman was admitted. The girl who had just emerged was hugging herself, clearly upset. Her eyes were bright, nose red. She was in Emily’s domestics class.
“Are you all right?” Emily asked her as she passed.
The girl looked up. “I don’t know what she did,” she said, eyes watering now. “I don’t feel right. Down there.” She flushed as her gaze flashed down to her legs. “I don’t…I don’t know.” She shuffled off and around the corner as Emily’s trepidation increased.
Annie’s crying had subsided, and Emily hoped she would see her at dinner, find out what happened. She’d seemed fine at breakfast.
The wait for her turn with the doctor felt both painfully slow and too short.
Each of the girls ahead of her came out of the office looking shaken, and Emily caught herself tapping the wall in anxiety.
Even the rude woman who had disparaged Annie kept her eyes downcast as she passed, hurrying around the corner and out of sight.
Emily’s heart hammered as the door opened and the nurse beckoned her in with a stiff hand.
“Clothes off, gown on, up on the table,” she said dispassionately. Emily’s legs felt as though they belonged to someone else, but she summoned all the courage she could, and complied. As she climbed up, she spotted a red hair on the sheet at the head of the table.
It did not belong to me, nor the patient who had vacated the infirmary before me.
I plucked it off and tossed it to the floor with a grimace.
Evidently, the sheets were not changed between patients, which caused me no small amount of disquiet.
Were the doctor’s tools sanitized before and after procedures, or was that process similarly unsanitary?
Dr. Stone emerged a moment later from the office at the back of the infirmary. Remembering her first pelvic exam, just the sight of the woman sent Emily’s pulse racing. She struggled to calm it.
“Lay back, Radcliffe,” Dr. Stone said, sitting down on the short stool and rolling it over toward Emily’s feet with a rattle. Emily did as she was told, fighting every instinct she had to kick the doctor in the face and run for it.
“What’s the exam for today?” she asked instead, as politely as possible.
“These are routine exams to ensure the health and well-being of the prison population,” Dr. Stone declared in a deadpan voice.
It was a rehearsed line, a politician’s lie, regurgitated so often that it had lost all trace of believability or meaning.
I still did not understand why the pelvic exams were routine, but the moment before my genitals were at the mercy of this doctor was not the time to question the procedure.
But how I would come to wish that I had, in fact, protested.
Emily took a deep breath and pressed her feet down into the stirrups, tensing the muscles in her legs to keep her knees from snapping shut. She stared up at the ceiling, willing her heart rate down as she clutched the edges of the bed.
Without warning, Dr. Stone began poking around.
Emily bit down hard to avoiding demanding what, exactly, the doctor was looking for, or doing.
Other than occasional trips to her family doctor for a cough that persisted, a tetanus shot, or remedy for an earache, Emily had had very little experience with medical professionals.
She’d heard her mother talk about how she’d been treated at the hospital when she gave birth to a stillborn at seven months, a couple of years before Emily and Eleanor arrived.
The day after she laboured her dead child into the world, she’d been sitting up in her hospital bed, staring blankly at her own feet with swollen eyes when the resident and a gaggle of medical students that resembled a hockey team came through her ward on their rounds.
“That one aborted,” the resident had said, throwing a thumb in Bess’s direction before moving on to the next bed. They’d never even let her hold the baby, didn’t tell her what had gone wrong. It was a boy, was all they’d said. Don’t fret so, Mrs. Radcliffe. You’re young, you’ll have more.
She’d made Emily’s father drive her to a different hospital when she gave birth to Emily and Eleanor, but was still separated from her babies, where they were poked and prodded in the nursery by a similar group of medical students while she waited anxiously on the other side of the window, unable to hold her own children until the men had finished with them.
Without warning, a stinging sensation tore through Emily’s vulva. “Ouch!”
“You’re done, Radcliffe,” Dr. Stone said as, to Emily’s horror, she set a syringe down on the metal tray beside the bed.
“What was that?” Emily demanded, feeling the blood drain from her face.
Doctor is evil…
“I said you’re done. Get dressed.” Dr. Stone stood and walked back into her office without another word. Emily sat up and shot a look at the nurse standing by the door.
“What was that? What was in that syringe?” The nurse didn’t respond, wouldn’t look at her. “What was it?!” Emily shouted.
But the nurse was already rolling the tray away and opening the infirmary door for the next patient.
Two weeks later, Emily felt the sores.
“Good Christ,” Emily swore, closing her eyes against the burning pain and itching.
She was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling with her legs spread open for some relief.
It was noisy in the corridor, as it always was in the evening around this time, when the inmates had completed their work and were granted a bit of free time before lights out.
The previous day was Wednesday—her weekly bath night—and she’d been awkwardly semi-crouched beside the old copper tub, wiping herself dry, when she paused.
A wave of cold came over her, though the bathroom was damp and stuffy from the bath and the summer heat.
She fingered the bumps between her legs.
There were at least six of them that she could feel, and as she let out a shaking breath, they began to burn, whether from the coal tar soap or the abrasion of the towel, she didn’t know.
But she was certain that whatever these wart-like lesions were, they were the result of the injection by Dr. Stone.
Had the syringe been contaminated with something?
Was she having some sort of allergic reaction?
“Hey,” she heard from her cell doorway now, and turned to see Lizzie leaning casually against the frame, long dark hair falling over her shoulder.
Emily cleared her throat and sat up, wincing as she shifted her weight onto her bum, squashing the bumps. Tears threatened.
“Do you want to come play crib—what’s wrong?” Lizzie asked, suddenly concerned.
Emily met her friend’s eyes, unsure what to say.
“What is it?” Lizzie asked again, coming to sit beside her on the bed with a creaking of springs. Someone shouted out in the hallway, laughed.
“I…” Emily began. She knew Lizzie was a mother, and probably knew more about women’s bodies than she did, but one didn’t speak about such things. Then a shooting pain forced the words out.
“There’s something on my…my nethers. Bumps or something.” Her face burned with mortification. “They hurt, and itch. I don’t know what it is. It just started yesterday, and it’s getting worse.”
Lizzie made a face. “Sounds like VD, Em.”
Emily stared. “VD?”
“You gotta go see Dr. Stone to get it treated.”
A sickening swoop struck Emily as a memory crashed over her.
Venereal disease.
The Female Refuges Act…
“I can’t leave until it’s gone.” She was panicking, recalling the clause about inmate releases being delayed if they had VD.
She’d wondered briefly how it would spread in a women’s-only prison, but hadn’t given it a second thought.
How naive she’d been. “They can keep me here!” Her voice rose with her dread, cresting together like high tide. “By law, they can!”
Lizzie frowned. “I heard somethin’ about that.
Some girl a few years ago said she got it off the tools in the infirmary, said she’d never been with anybody.
Sounded a bit made-up to me, but the warden told her she couldn’t leave until Dr. Stone cleared her.
I guess they claim we can contaminate the public or some shit,” Lizzie said, rolling her eyes.