Then the nurse took me into a room and I undressed and she put a robe on me and helped me up onto a table. She put my feet into the stirrups and tied a belt around my waist. “So you won’t fall,” she said. “It won’t take long. It only takes a few minutes.” She held my hand while the pills began to have an effect. The ceiling began to seem very far away and very pretty. The hum of a machine somewhere seemed like music. It seemed like Ravel. It was “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” but I wasn’t going to die. My daddy was in the other room. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me.

The doctor came into the room. He stood between my parted legs with a mask tied around his face. He spread my legs apart and put something cold inside of me and it hurt a very small bit for a second. The nurse squeezed my hand. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re doing fine.”

“It will only take a minute,” the doctor said. “Don’t move if you can help it.”

“You are doing a great service to mankind,” I repeated. “I think you’re wonderful. I think you are a wonderful man.”

When I woke up my daddy was with me and he took my arm and led me out into the hallway and down the elevator and we got back into a taxi and drove through the streets of Houston. The sun was brilliant. There was the sound of a million crickets in the taxicab. A million crickets in a million sycamore trees and all of them were singing. “I don’t have to have a baby. I don’t have to have a baby. I don’t have to die.”

Daddy took me to the hotel and put me into a bed and I slept for hours. Once I woke up in the night and he was sitting on a chair beside my bed. He gave me a drink of water and another pill and I continued to sleep until the sun was high in the sky and it was another day. There was a tray of food on a table beside the bed and Daddy brought it to me and fed it to me bite by bite. I got out of the bed and went into the bathroom to urinate. There was a wad of gauze inside me and I sort of remembered something about it.

“He said not to take that packing out of your body,” Daddy called out. It was the first time in my life he had ever referred to my body as anything but a tool to use for athletics. He came and stood by the bathroom door and repeated it in a gentle voice. “Sister, he left some packing inside of you and he said to tell you not to take it out.”