What Else Can I Do by Rebecca Shankula

1.

It’s January 2021 and I’m waiting to miscarry but it just won’t start. 

I’m early, nine weeks, and supposed to show up at the hospital for the D&C the next day There’s no need to get the show started on my own; it will happen all at once, without my help. But still, I want a head start, some sign from my body that she’s in on this, too. 

I know the drill because I’ve miscarried once before. I’ll be naked, drugged unconscious, then scraped and suctioned clean. Then I’ll wake up, and be watched until I’m allowed to go home.

But something on the print-out from my doctor’s office catches my eye. There’s a slot beneath my name that reads: DOCTOR. And then, beneath her name, another name—some other doctor I don’t know. 

I pause. I know I should be grateful to have two doctors. My last miscarriage left no time for forms and rehearsals—it was just rivers of blood in a bathtub, smash cut to the ER. “Do you know why there’s a second doctor listed?” I ask the woman calling to confirm the appointment.

She says the doctor is another OB at the practice I just joined. Just there to assist. To assist. The phrase shouldn’t have bothered me but it does.

I know it’s a luxury to be told what’s about to happen to you. To be assured it’s terribly, boringly common and you’ll be fine. To be given forms seeking your consent. To be lightly reminded what to pack and what to leave behind.

What is it to me that my doctor has back-up? It’s just protocol, not a tag-team. 

But the detail of the second doctor worked on me, dragging me somewhere I resisted. Because there was a reason it mattered. There was a reason I flinched at the thought of two people digging around inside me while I was out of my body.

The reason was that it had happened before.

2.

I was raped the first time in 2003, when I was twenty-three. It was stranger rape, as they say, to set it apart, shut the audience up: a man emerges from the dark and it’s terror, weapon, instructions, attack.

I was tired and drunk and before that thought I was having a pretty bad night.

He got me walking into my Brooklyn apartment building. I was tired and drunk and before that thought I was having a pretty bad night. The guy whose birthday I’d been out celebrating didn’t like me back, and I felt like a fool. And then I felt nothing except the compliance of shock: my rapist, from behind, pressing something into my right side. He told me what to do and I did it. I did it because I wanted to live—until later, when I wanted to die.

At the hospital, they cut off my underwear, swabbed and tweezed me because this was forensics, nothing personal. The definition of stranger rape, your vagina as random location. When you’re in the aftermath, it’s hard to conceive it’s all just beginning. After the hospital, some cop or another drove me to the station. It was light out by then and I was delirious from adrenaline. The male detectives took me alone into a room, then asked me if I made my rapist tea. If we’d watched TV afterwards. Since I’d been out drinking, they wanted to know how much I remembered leading up to the rape. They wanted to know if I was sure I hadn’t met my rapist out on the town. If I hadn’t just brought him home.

But it didn’t matter because that kit sang. His DNA was on file from a prior offense, and when they traced it to his doorstep, he told them what he must’ve thought might save him: that we knew each other, that it was consensual. 

He had the name on my ID and told the detectives that’s what people called me; but it wasn’t; he flunked. But so did I, because I couldn’t ID him—because I had no idea who he was. So there we were: proven strangers. The Assistant DA said it was better this way. An easier job for her. And so I left my body and testified at the indictment, and over a year later she called saying there’d be no trial. I wouldn’t have to relive it. He took the plea and got ten years, served seven. I didn’t really know then how rare that was, that I was, legally speaking, lucky. But the problem was it happened again, a year later.

---

It was a Wednesday, the first day in December, 2004. Dark very early. A quiet day after the company holiday party. I left my neighborhood bar for a reading at a Lower East Side lounge named after a sex act. I was there with two men I met through work, both a decade older and writers like I wanted to be. One taught a fiction class I took. He was sober and rounding forty,  wore leather and had guest starred on an iconic TV show. The other was an editor at a famous magazine. He bit his nails and didn’t like eye contact but did like Diet Coke and vodka; he was a ghostwriter, too, someone low-key and insidious, paid to sidle up next to you because you couldn’t tell your own story.

It must have been just after 9 o’clock. One moment I was saying hellos as the crowd ebbed around me and then it was morning, and I was naked in a place I’d never been. The night when I reached for it wasn’t there. In its place were singular flashes: a bathroom mirror; something in my mouth; someone on my body.

The editor was there next to me because apparently this was his apartment. I asked what happened and he told me a very short story. He said he and the teacher took turns with me in the bar’s bathroom. He said it wasn’t coordinated, that it just happened, like some bar fight I’d missed, like wild night, right?

Maybe it was because I’d been raped before & in such a network TV way that I just couldn’t immediately match this ludicrous story with its offense: that’s rape. Maybe it was just that I didn’t want to believe both of these men, who knew me, and knew I’d been raped, then raped me back to back, in alphabetical order, the way I’d see them listed years later in some anthology I’ll never read. 

I was told there were no drugs in my system, at least not by the time I was checked.

I got out of there, then went through the old steps: the kit, Plan B, anti-virals. I was told there were no drugs in my system, at least not by the time I was checked. Something could have come and gone, but without proof, the onus was mine, the warm toxic brew was mine and I drank it with raging immunity.

“Do you get amorous when you drink?” The detective asked when I decided to make a report. He seemed to feel bad for me or maybe he was just annoyed. He asked did I have emails, voicemails, anything to prove, well, their intent to rape me?  

Because when they’re not strangers, you knew them. And if you knew them, how could you not see this coming?

I thanked the detective, then quit my job and moved across the country. 

3.

I started over in LA, in another field, the soothing baroque marsh of reality TV, where there was no understatement, no innuendo or room for second-guessing. On camera and on command, everyone shouted who they were and what they were about to do.  

Six years later, I was living in New York again when the teacher sent me a friend request. I hit ignore. I hit what is wrong with you. I started a Google Alert for the other one and put it in a junk account.

I got married and changed my name. I avoided readings and stayed invisible. I hid behind my day job. I hid behind the story of the stranger rape, as if it were the only one, and in its long shadow my other shame grew.

---

And then it was the fall of 2017. My daughter had just started pre-school and I’d learned I was pregnant again.

I thought I was ten weeks along, but the sonogram had other news. The condolence was the  first blow.

“I’m so sorry—“ the clinician scanned, sweeping. “I don’t see anything in here that looks like a 10 week-old…” 

Inside me, the joystick turned, paused, took its time. I wanted it to be over but she just kept looking. I asked her to stop. I told her to stop. But she said no; she said she wasn’t done and I hated her for it.

The next morning, the doctor on call at my practice recommended I miscarry at home. I’d just started bleeding and could walk and talk so she seemed optimistic I’d be fine. Besides, she said, I didn’t want to risk scarring with a D&C. 

The internet had prepared me for what sounded like the worst period of my life, but I didn’t expect to feel the deadlift of early labor. Dilation. Intent. 

I could no longer sit up and was at the point where I wanted my mother.

At first it was slow and consistent, and then it was coming so fast I moved into the bathtub. Was this normal? I’d stopped asking my phone and by late afternoon I was fading and the place smelled like hazmat. My husband was watching our daughter and wanted me to eat something, but I could no longer sit up and was at the point where I wanted my mother.

We called the doctor again, this time on speaker. But I could only whisper so my husband took the phone and the doctor said to get me to the nearest hospital. My daughter set a Lego by my head as I bled all over the yoga pants my husband was trying to pull on me as the ambulance arrived.

The EMT said this happened to a friend of his. She went to bed with a fever and woke up in a blood-soaked mattress. I couldn’t nod but would’ve. Everywhere, all the time, women were waking up to small hells. 

The next morning I was sitting in a hospital bed getting a bag of blood. The D&C had done its job. “Hemorrhaging from an incomplete spontaneous abortion,” the report would read Unfinished business could kill you.

I went back to work and cried in the bathroom just once. I’d dyed my hair the color of bright urine but my coworkers were kind. I laughed too hard at jokes then flinched when someone said a story or plot beat “wasn’t viable.” I went back to interviewing people but couldn’t make them cry, and this was reality TV so it was my job—mining soft spots for something to pitch, inviting people to relive their traumas, knowing all that mattered was that the dam of emotion 

had burst on tape. If they cried, they’d deliver. They were bookable. They’d cracked and could crack again.

And then the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and rape was everywhere and so were the rapists. Named and unnamed. It was click after click of fresh horror. I’d been back to work a few weeks by then and was just starting to feel functional. I didn’t want to think about it but also couldn’t look away.

On the subway ride home, I stood and swayed, glued to my phone. A month ago I’d made the same commute holding the belly I was so certain was growing. It’d be months before I could stand to touch it again. Instead, I rode over the bridge, numbly tracking the day’s perps while The Boss from 1980 sang into my headphones on repeat:  

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/Or is it something worse 

My husband asked how I was doing with the headlines—and at first I didn’t get it. I was so attached to the story of the stranger rape that I’d trained myself not to identify with stories that fell outside its familiar, dramatic scope.

But the stories kept coming—from celebrities and acquaintances and everyday people, and I could finally accept that the second time was rape, and that maybe it had shattered me more. I could accept it, but what good was that? It still felt like losing the room — I was raped and then raped and then — 

Vanessa Veselka writes in her novel, The Great Offshore Grounds: 

“The word raped was too strong in the air for Livy’s comfort. 

‘Lower your voice. It’s not everybody’s business,’ she said. 

‘The hell it isn’t. They—’ Kirsten’s voice got louder. ‘They,” she waved her arm at the lunchtime rush, ‘get off too easily. It’s not your shame. It’s theirs. They’re the fucking rapists.’” 

For the first time, I tried writing about them. I used numbers, not names. I wanted nothing from them and it wasn’t my business what they might regret or not.

Name them, others urged. Draw blood.

I was tired of blaming myself. I was tired of trying to bat away the maybe imperceptible but constant hum of shame that followed me. But their names were triggers and their names were inadequate. They weren’t on any shitty media men list I ever saw and their jobs were long gone. Their names were chicken scratch in a book no one had written, that no one would write, because there were simply too many of them to record.

---

 For awhile I stopped trying to write about it. I tried other things. EMDR and EFT and soul retrieval and body work and past life regression and plain old talk therapy. But I’d never tried going back to the place where it happened, so that’s what I did.

It was a Friday in January and I was about to turn thirty-nine. We were leaving New York and my husband and I were on our last night out. It was warm so we decided to walk home across the Williamsburg Bridge, but instead I pulled him down and across Christie Street, right up to the entrance of the bar where it happened.

I knew the address by heart and had morbidly walked by it in daylight a few times in the fifteen years since.

They’d renamed it but this was the place. I knew the address by heart and had morbidly walked by it in daylight a few times in the fifteen years since.

We went inside and at once it was too much. I wanted to seem casual and tough but instead was full-body shaking. Somehow I’d expected it to be packed but no. It was dead. A greenroom for ghosts. My pulse ran untethered and my stomach hid in my womb. We went to the bar, where the young woman tending it took a veteran look at us and hung back just long enough before saying she made a great virgin hot toddy and would I care for one?

Yes, I said. But then I got up to find the bathroom. I wanted to see the place where it happened. So I wandered toward the back until I found it, but when I went in it felt off; something about the angles, or the mirrors. I asked the bartender if it had been changed at all, and she said yes; it had been moved and reconfigured.

She slid me the drink and asked if I was okay. But I was staring back toward the entrance, as if waiting for my younger self to walk through the door, oblivious to the men about to teach her what people meant when they said stranger rape wasn’t personal.

I heard my husband tell the bartender what amounted to: something bad happened here, and I saw the bartender nod. She took a breath and said, without prompting, that she worked with victims of sexual trauma; she knew things, too. She wasn’t my witness and I’d never see her again, but there was a recognition between us that buzzed like a cable no one bothered to bury.

We thanked her and left. The place wasn’t special; it was just another bar. The men who raped me weren’t unique. They were everywhere. Undercounted, overlooked, their names bled together and their names would not last.

4.

Your trauma comes back to you without your consent, a friend tells me. 

Perhaps it’s 2009 and you don’t have health insurance so you’re on your way to a charity clinic that finds abnormal cells on your cervix; perhaps they send you to a Long Island gynecologist who treats this sort of thing for them. Perhaps he asks, mid-exam, if you can cast his son in something. And the son, who somehow also works there, pops in to say hi and they laugh. Perhaps you call the charity clinic to complain and they say you’re “not the first,” and do nothing, and life goes on.

Perhaps you’re pregnant again after your first miscarriage, and at the hospital during delivery a young man comes in the minute your husband and doula leave to get coffee. Perhaps he says he must check your progress seconds before he’s checking your progress, as you explain you’ve just been checked, that there is no fucking progress and besides, you only picked your practice because it’s three women. And then it’s over and he leaves, it’s just a job.

Perhaps while you’re delivering the same baby someone stands in the doorway and you don’t have your glasses on so you can’t see what’s happening but you feel the presence. You’re pushing but it feels so weird to have this person just standing there unannounced so you shout to come into the circle already. And she’s a young woman, and this could be her someday, and it’s fine, you just had to make it fine by inviting her.

5. 

I try to focus on the cat calendar, and not the box of Kleenex sitting there like door number two.

It’s January 2021 again, my first ultrasound appointment. I try to focus on the cat calendar, and not the box of Kleenex sitting there like door number two. “Are you sure about the date of your last period?” the technician asks.

And I just know. It’s happening again.

 I have to answer, except I can’t form words so I nod. She needs to know what to tell the doctor. But I jerk at the other suggestion—that maybe I’m someone who has no idea what’s taken place in her own body.

I’m measuring small, she says. Silence, clicking; silence, typing. She says she’s afraid it doesn’t look good but also doesn’t want to get things wrong.. I’ll have to come back in a week. I can’t imagine waiting that long, and hide my face as she removes the wand and the screen goes dead. 

The next week I look away from the same screen as it confirms the diagnosis that never appears later in fine, ghostly print on the pregnancy test: spontaneous, abortion. It sounds almost beautiful, like an Olympic dismount backwards through time. No applause, just an ear tilted helplessly into the void.

---

The D&C by the two doctors is a success. I wake up in pain and start crying, and the man next to me is crying, too. We’re strangers and we’re wearing the same full-body bibs. The nurse who comes doesn’t speak, doesn’t have to. Everything has been thought of, everything scripted. She passes me Dilaudid and water and moves me along, and later I’ll get print-outs proving all of this happened, with witnesses to say so, and crackers, and juice. And then it’s time to go; someone wheels me out, talking softly about nothing, and we wait outside in the rain that’s finally come.

6. 

I knew I was supposed to be able to breathe or imagine my way through it, but I couldn’t.

A year later I’m back, and in labor. It’s a Sunday night in October and I can’t believe it; I can’t stop smiling. They wanted to induce me last week but my baby’s signs were fine so I said no; they didn’t like that, but I said give me the weekend. And here I am—5 centimeters. The hospital is quiet or maybe everyone’s drugs have kicked in. I’ll never forget the screams down the hall during my first delivery nearly a decade ago, the fear I felt knowing my cervix was only halfway there. It’s okay to give yourself a humane birth, my doula told me at the time, and she was right. I took the drugs then and they were amazing, and I could take them now but I pause. Maybe I’m an idiot or maybe I’m brave, but I’m also just curious about this rite I’ve passed over numbly twice before. Labor to me was always a mythic assailant, with me always straining to get a look, to ask why are you hurting me so much? I knew I was supposed to be able to breathe or imagine my way through it, but I couldn’t, and took the pain personally. But something this time is different. My nurse is amazing and about to retire; she arranges things so I can crawl on the floor or the bed or whatever. My husband is here, and one of my dearest old friends is my doula. She locks eyes with me above her mask, and doesn’t tell me I can do this—she tells me I am.  My contractions are shattering but they’re also my own. Each one is like lightning I’ve coaxed from the sky instead of the lab animal jolts I felt when I was induced. The doctor on call shows up when I’m 9 centimeters. We’re strangers but we know what to do. I get stuck at 9 and a half and she gets my permission to stretch my cervix the rest of the way. And then I’m 10, the most open I can possibly be, and now I’m the woman down the hall screaming, and then my baby is, too.