A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

“Yes, sir,” I say, shifting my eager demeanor. My smile melts away
and I ask, “Is there a problem?” because he’s given me a reason to
believe there is. I go with it.
He says, “The test we ran was negative.”
Silence falls over the room. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. In no way
does he apologize for the bad news. He doesn’t break it to me lightly.
He stands, watching me, waiting for me to say something in reply.
“I don’t understand,” I say after a while, claiming ignorance and
shock. My voice trembles because I’m scared. It has the desired
effect. “But the tests I took at home...” I say, letting my voice drift,
letting the doctor infer what comes next.
He’s dispassionate. He lectures. “Sometimes we have what’s
called a chemical pregnancy, an early miscarriage shortly after
implantation, so soon in fact that women often assume it’s that time
of the month,” he says, which strikes me as both an archaic saying
and a chauvinistic one. I dated a boy in high school before coming to
terms with my sexuality. All I had to do was be in a bad mood and he
assumed it was that time of the month. He’d badger me about it.
Once, after a fight, he gifted me with a box of Tampax. It’s just a
joke, Kate, he said when I broke up with him over it. Can’t you take a
little joke?
“These women never know they’re pregnant,” Dr. Feingold says.
“This could be the reason your home pregnancy tests were positive.”
He asks if I had any bleeding following the home pregnancy tests,
any spotting. I shake my head vigorously. I say no. “We’ll do a blood
test to know for certain.” He tells me a blood test can tell us exactly
how much hCG is in my system, if any. He tells me only pregnant
women’s bodies make hCG. “No hCG, no baby,” he says, just like
that. He shrugs as he says it, as if what we’re discussing is
something far less consequential than a life. It doesn’t matter that my
baby is fictional, that my baby never did exist. That doesn’t make it
okay. Because to another woman, this moment means everything.
“I wouldn’t worry yet,” he says, and though the words themselves
are heartening in nature, meant to put me at ease, the delivery is
anything but. His words fall flat; there’s no encouraging smile, not
even a fake one. What Dr. Feingold wants, I think, is to forestall any