When She Woke Read Online Free PDF Page B

toward the door and felt a hand grip her arm.
    “Don’t be frightened,” he said softly. “I’m Raphael. I’m not going to hurt you.”

    It was an old man’s voice, weary and kind, and the sound of it reassured her. He let go of her arm, and she heard him move across the room toward the window. A sliver of light from outside appeared as he opened the curtain and peered out at the parking lot. He stood at the window for quite a while, watching. Finally he shut the curtain and said, “Come this way.”
    A beam of light appeared, and she followed it through the living room, down a short hallway and into a bedroom. She hesitated on the threshold.
    “Come in,” Raphael said. “It’s all right.” Hannah entered the room and heard him close the door behind her. “Lights on,” he said.
    Raphael, she saw then, didn’t look like a Raphael. He was overweight and unimposing, with stooped shoulders and an air of absentminded dishevelment. She guessed him to be in his mid-sixties. His wide, fleshy face was red-cheeked and curiously flat, and his eyes were round and hooded. Tufts of frizzled gray hair poked out from either side of an otherwise bald head. He reminded Hannah of pictures she’d seen of owls.
    He held out his hand, and she shook it automatically. Just as if, she thought, they were meeting after church. Wonderful sermon, wasn’t it, Hannah? Oh yes, Raphael, very inspiring .

    The room was empty except for two folding chairs, a large table and an ancient-looking box fan, which sputtered to life when Raphael turned it on. Heavy black fabric covered the one window. Hannah stood uncertainly while he opened a duffel bag on the floor, removed a bed sheet from it and spread it on the table. It was patterned incongruously with colorful cartoon dinosaurs. They jogged her back to her ninth birthday, when her parents had taken her to the Creation Museum in Waco. There’d been an exhibit depicting dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden and another showing how Noah had fit them onto the ark along with the giraffes, penguins, cows and so forth. Hannah had asked why the Tyrannosaurus rexes hadn’t eaten the other animals, or Adam and Eve, or Noah and his family.
    “Well,” said her mother, “before Adam and Eve were cast out of Paradise, there was no death, and humans and animals were all vegetarians.”
    “But Noah lived after the fall,” Hannah pointed out.
    Her mother looked at her father. “He was a smart guy,” her father said. “He only took baby dinosaurs on the ark.”
    “Duh,” Becca said, giving Hannah’s arm a hard pinch. “Everybody knows that.”
    Becca was Hannah’s barometer for her parents’ displeasure; the pinch meant she was on dangerous ground. Still, it didn’t add up, and she hated it when things didn’t add up. “But how come—”
    “Stop asking so many questions,” her mother snapped.
    Raphael interrupted Hannah’s reverie. “Sorry about the sheets. I get them from the clearance bin, and this was all they had. They’re clean, though. I washed them myself.”
    He opened a medicine bag, fished out a pair of rubber gloves and put them on, then began removing medical instruments from the bag and placing them on the table. Hannah looked away from their ominous silver glint, feeling suddenly woozy.
    He gestured at one of the chairs. “Why don’t you sit down.”
    She’d expected to have to get undressed right away, but when he’d finished his preparations, he drew up the other chair and started asking her questions: How old was she? Had she ever had children? Other abortions? When was her last period? When had her morning sickness started? Had she ever had any serious medical problems? Any sexually transmitted infections? Mortified, Hannah looked down at her hands and mumbled the answers.
    “Have you done anything else to try to terminate this pregnancy?” Raphael asked.

    She nodded. “I got some pills two weeks ago and, you know, inserted them. But they didn’t work.” She’d