Chapter 21 Annie
ANNIE
The clinic smells like abandonment when I unlock the front door.
It’s not a dramatic smell. It’s not rot or mildew or something that requires a hazmat suit. It’s the quiet accumulation of days and dust, the stale breath of a place that expects people and didn’t get any. Staleness.
I wish things were stale. They’re anything but stale right now.
I step into the dim lobby, and the air hits my face in a damp sigh. The lights are off, the blinds are half-closed, and the sad ficus by the window has given up on impressing me—two crisp leaves on the floor like little green ears that didn’t want to hear bad news.
I lock the door behind me, check it twice, then stand with my hand still on the deadbolt, listening to the nothing of it all.
Three weeks. That’s how long I’ve been gone—how long Jaden and I have been posted in that medic tent instead of the business I’m trying to build.
The cleaning crew didn’t bother coming during the closure.
The AC didn’t run. The lobby holds a thin layer of dust that glitters faintly under the streetlight slats on the blinds.
Or maybe the dust is in my head.
I leave my bag on the front desk, flip on the lights in sequence, and the clinic wakes up awkwardly. I thumb the AC down, and the first cough of cool air smells like library books for some reason.
Brick fell.
The thought haunts me.
The crowd shrieked—an animal noise that always makes me hate them a little. The moment I heard the shriek, I knew. I knew it was him, and I knew it was bad.
I ran out there, but then he disappeared under bodies and movement and the long, sickening roll of a stretcher wheel. So I ran back to my tent to prepare, because I knew his life was in my hands.
My stomach roils when I think about it.
I kept my voice steady in the tent because that’s what my voice was trained to do, because the job does not make room for your heart when someone else’s head is being stubborn.
His eyes found me, and I watched the fog recede, inch by inch, and I listened to his stupid flirting because it meant he was in there, and it meant the bell in his head wasn’t so loud he couldn’t hear me.
That realization was a lifeline to him and to me.
I kept my hands steady, and I patched him up. He smiled like a man on his best behavior, because it doesn’t come naturally to him. Then he left.
And then I remembered my period is late.
The back half of the clinic is darker. I fish the keys out of my pocket by feel and open the lab door.
The room greets me in stainless steel and silence.
A counter, small sink, point-of-care analyzer with a dust film you can write your name on, centrifuge with its lid cracked the way I left it (need to replace that), and a sharps container that looks both threatening and comforting.
The fluorescent hum in here is different.
Pregnancy, serum. Two controls are still sealed in the side pocket.
Three test cartridges left. I take one and set it on the tray.
I sit on the stool and swab the crook of my elbow.
The tourniquet snap is too loud in the quiet.
I select a butterfly needle because I’m vain about my own veins and don’t want a bruise I can’t explain to Jaden.
The rest I do from muscle memory. I could recite the literature on hCG doubling times, thresholds, false positives. If I am pregnant, it’s extremely early, probably too early to tell. That’s not a comfort. Not when I need to know now.
He’s leaving in about a week.
Can’t afford to think about that now.
Instead, I stare at the centrifuge timer and count backward from sixty in fours, then sevens, then primes. Childhood habit. When the whine winds down, I open the lid, and everything is important and nothing is sacred. I work like I do for strangers—gloved, precise, efficient. Three minutes.
Three minutes to consider baby names and alternatives to pregnancy. To motherhood. To all of it. Three minutes to choose a new path in my life, or find a medical solution to my conundrum.
I look at the cheap little poster I taped above the sink the day we opened—Preventative Care Saves Lives—in that half-sincere, half-accusatory font that feels like it came with the frame. I’d meant it in the broad, good way. Come in before it’s an emergency, let me keep you from the edge.
It stares back at me like a scold now. When’s the last time you took your pill, Annie?
Two minutes.
I stand and pace a tight square because motion lies sweetly.
The plan—my plan—shows up like a ghost with a clipboard and starts reminding me of who I say I am.
Open a clinic where people really need one.
Sliding scale because people don’t stop being sick when they stop making enough money.
Build trust with the old ranchers who hate hospitals and would rather pull their own teeth and get on with the day than talk to some woman about their problems. Young mothers who don’t have time to schedule a day off from work.
Keep the doors open. Keep the lights on. Keep going.
That plan is hard. It’s expensive. A baby would blow the plan wide open, human dynamite.
I think of Brick’s face on the cot and my hands staying steadier than my heart. He makes me feel…not smaller. Not bigger. Just more like myself. How many people get to have that in their lifetimes?
It terrifies me how quickly I got used to having a person on the other end of the phone who answers when I write the truth in my worst shorthand.
It terrifies me more that I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say no to that feeling when the rest of my life asks me to.
It terrifies me most that I might not get to choose.
One minute.
My phone buzzes on the counter like it’s been waiting for me to look at it the entire time. I don’t. It buzzes again, insistent as a child tugging a sleeve.
Fifty-five seconds.
I check the message anyway, because I’m weak and want is a muscle that grows every time you let it flex.
Brick. Four texts.
You okay?
Ford says I scared you.
I’m fine. Head’s loud. Shoulder’s mad. Doc says 24 hours.
Tell me where you are. I’ll send lemonade.
I want to respond. I don’t. Not yet.
Thirty seconds.
I watch the countdown and think about next year’s vaccine ordering and the rude note insurance sent last month about “out-of-network considerations.” The way my mother used to say the word “grandchildren” like she was describing her own future plans instead of mine.
I think about my father’s hands on a steering wheel the summer he taught me to drive, the way he’d say “make your decision, baby” too gently for how hard that was.
Fifteen seconds.
The night I decided to be a doctor and not a poet or an anthropologist. Every version of me who packed a bag instead of packing a crib. The sound Brick’s voice makes when he says my name like it’s a thing he earned.
I hate that I remember all of it at once. It’s like crashing into my own memories in my head. Can’t avoid them. Is this what a panic attack is like?
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Positive.
The single word is small. The value below it isn’t ambiguous.
Positive.
I stand very still and let the floor move under me until it stops. Then I sit, because I’m not invincible and I would like not to faint in my own lab like a teenage melodrama.
Positive.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
My brain says the word like tapping a pocket three times to be sure I didn’t leave my keys on the counter. It doesn’t help.
The word doesn’t change. The number doesn’t take it back. The inverse logic of medicine—when you want a negative—plays a joke on the way my eyes want to see the result they asked for.
My chest tightens. It’s not a panic attack. It’s not anything that dramatic. It’s the simple, brutal narrowing of the world to two paths, neither of which looks like the one I sketched in the margins of the life I thought I’d get.
The feelings in my head, my gut, my heart all coexist with a cold little clarity that goes about its business. I am going to cry. Not now. Not in here. I promised this room I’d keep it for other people’s tears.
My phone buzzes again. Brick. Two more.
I can come to you. Just say where.
I keep thinking about your hands on me and not the other way around. Never mind. Ignore me. Head is loud. I’ll behave.
He doesn’t know the words that would unmake me right now. He could guess, and he might guess wrong, and I cannot afford to find out if he’s the kind of man who says, “We’ll figure it out,” and means it, or the kind who says it and thinks the figuring is my job.
He is kind. He is steady. He is not my plan.
Nothing about this is my plan.
I scroll to his thread and hover. My thumb shakes. I set the phone down again, like it’s burning me from the back, like letters can scorch through plastic and wood and into bone.
I stand up because sitting is a luxury I don’t deserve.
I walk to the lobby and turn the AC down three more degrees because I want to be cold enough to feel something besides the hot throb of blood in my ears.
The blinking message light on the landline stares at me like a wagging finger. I press play out of spite.
Three telemarketers. One patient rescheduling her Pap for next month. One man asking if we do DOT physicals and if we can “be cool about it” because he “doesn’t like doctors.” I delete them all with more force than necessary.
Back in the lab, I wash my hands again like it’s a baptism and not an obsession. I clean the counter twice. I clean the sink. I clean the place on the floor where nobody’s shoes have been in a month. I have never wanted a job I can fix with bleach more than I do in this minute.
My phone buzzes, and I don’t look. It buzzes again.
I’m not ready to talk to him. I need to choose the next step while I can still pretend the future is a single line that goes forward and not a web that catches you no matter which way you lean.
I am responsible for a clinic I promised to keep alive.
I am responsible for a nurse who trusts me.
I am responsible for a version of my life that makes sense to a girl who wrote preventative care saves lives on a sticky note and put it in the pocket of every jacket she owned.
“All I want to do is talk to someone.”
The words come out without a thought. Like my tears.
Admitting I need help has never been easy for me.
I’m not…I don’t like leaning on people. It feels like weakness.
And I know how stupid that is, that it’s rooted in insecurity, blah, blah, blah, but it feels like weakness all the same.
Plopping on the nearest stool and slumping against the table is all I have strength for while the tears glide down my face.
I’d rather do that here than on the drive home.
For a long while, I do nothing but listen—to the AC pushing the stale air into corners, to a truck downshifting outside, to my own breath finding a place to land.
Jaden will be at the tent. Mac will point her camera at a horse.
The announcer will find his vowels and spend them carelessly.
When I return, people will fall and I will put them back together, one strip of sterile tape at a time.
My hands will remember what to do even if my heart forgets how to keep a rhythm.
The phone lights up again—one long buzz that says a call I won’t take. It stops. A text rolls in five seconds later.
I’ll give you space, Annie. Just nod if you need anything and I’ll pretend I got your text.
It’s unfair that he’s that person. It would be easier if he were a piece of shit. Instead, he’s insufferably kind and terribly thoughtful and painfully wonderful. If he were a piece of shit, I wouldn’t have to consider his feelings in any of this.
But when has my life ever been that simple?
I tip my head toward the ceiling like I’m letting a little warm air off and then shake it once, small, to myself. No. Not yet. I text no words back. I keep my hands on my own problems.
“I don’t know what to do. It’d be great if someone came out of the woodwork and told me. Any takers?”
I wait a moment, but sadly, there are no goblins hiding in the shadows, no demons in the wood grain to sell my soul to for all the answers.
There’s nothing. Just me. And whatever is growing inside of me.
I lock the lab and flick off the lights down the hall one by one. The clinic shrinks back into its outline, the way a house does when the party is over. At the front desk, I pick up the stack of mail and carry it to my office. The door sticks from the heat, so I shoulder it open.
The chair groans when I sit, offended that I made it work after a long vacation. I drop the mail on the corner of the desk, and it fans out like cards. I don’t play.
My phone buzzes one more time and then gives up. The quiet that follows is so huge it makes my ears ring again. It’s not like him to text so much like he’s expecting a quick response—he knows I’m usually busy at the tent. But maybe that’s because he has the day off due to my order, so he’s bored.
Or maybe he went to find me and found Jaden instead, who told him I took the afternoon off for an appointment. That was all I said to Jaden on my way out—I have a doctor’s appointment. When he asked if I was okay, I merely said, “Bad cramps.”
That was all he needed to hear on the matter.
“Oof, say no more. My sisters had horrific cramps until they got on birth control or acupuncture. One had a hysterectomy—she couldn’t take it anymore.
I don’t blame her. They put me on one of those period simulator devices, and I have no idea how women live. Seriously, I will hold it down here.”
He’s going to make some woman very happy one day.
Brick texts again. A single word this time.
Safe?
I have no idea how to answer him, so I don’t.