Tell No One Read Free

maybe she was facing me.
    I might have blinked—I’m really not sure about that either—and when I looked again, Elizabeth was gone.
    My heart slammed into my throat. “Elizabeth!”
    No answer.
    The panic rose. I fell off the raft and started swimming toward the dock. But my strokes were loud, maddeningly loud, in my ears. I couldn’t hear what, if anything, was happening. I stopped.
    “Elizabeth!”
    For a long while there was no sound. The cloud still blocked the moon. Maybe she had gone inside the cabin. Maybe she’d gotten something out of the car. I opened my mouth to call her name again.
    That was when I heard her scream.
    I lowered my head and swam, swam hard, my arms pumping, my legs kicking wildly. But I was still far from the dock. I tried to look as I swam, but it was too dark now, the moon offering just faint shafts of light, illuminating nothing.
    I heard a scraping noise, like something being dragged.
    Up ahead, I could see the dock. Twenty feet, no more. I swam harder. My lungs burned. I swallowed some water, my arms stretching forward, my hand fumbling blindly in the dark. Then I found it. The ladder. I grabbed hold, hoisted myself up, climbed out of the water. The dock was wet from Elizabeth. I looked toward the cabin. Too dark. I saw nothing.
    “Elizabeth!”
    Something like a baseball bat hit me square in the solar plexus. My eyes bulged. I folded at the waist, suffocating from within. No air. Another blow. This time it landed on the top of my skull. I heard a crack in my head, and it felt as though someone had hammered a nail through my temple. My legs buckled and I dropped to my knees. Totally disoriented now, I putmy hands against the sides of my head and tried to cover up. The next blow—the final blow—hit me square in the face.
    I toppled backward, back into the lake. My eyes closed. I heard Elizabeth scream again—she screamed my name this time—but the sound, all sound, gurgled away as I sank under the water.

1
Eight Years Later
    A nother girl was about to break my heart. She had brown eyes and kinky hair and a toothy smile. She also had braces and was fourteen years old and—
    “Are you pregnant?” I asked.
    “Yeah, Dr. Beck.”
    I managed not to close my eyes. This was not the first time I’d seen a pregnant teen. Not even the first time today. I’ve been a pediatrician at this Washington Heights clinic since I finished my residency at nearby Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center five years ago. We serve a Medicaid (read: poor) population with general family health care, including obstetrics, internal medicine, and, of course, pediatrics. Many people believe this makes me a bleeding-heart do-gooder. It doesn’t. I like being a pediatrician. I don’t particularly like doing it out in the suburbs with soccer moms and manicured dads and, well, people like me.
    “What do you plan on doing?” I asked.
    “Me and Terrell. We’re real happy, Dr. Beck.”
    “How old is Terrell?”
    “Sixteen.”
    She looked up at me, happy and smiling. Again I managed not to close my eyes.
    The thing that always surprises me—always—is that most of these pregnancies are not accidental. These babies want to have babies. No one gets that. They talk about birth control and abstinence and that’s all fine and good, but the truth is, their cool friends are having babies and their friends are getting all kinds of attention and so, hey, Terrell, why not us?
    “He loves me,” this fourteen-year-old told me.
    “Have you told your mother?”
    “Not yet.” She squirmed and looked almost all her fourteen years. “I was hoping you could tell her with me.”
    I nodded. “Sure.”
    I’ve learned not to judge. I listen. I empathize. When I was a resident, I would lecture. I would look down from on high and bestow upon patients the knowledge of how self-destructive their behavior was. But on a cold Manhattan afternoon, a weary seventeen-year-old girl who was having her third kid with a third father