THE OTHER JANES
by Catherine Snyder
Catherine: My mother calls on a Wednesday, wanting to know: Is this the motherfucker?
It’s July of 2023. We’re in different time zones. Outside a movie theatre in Connecticut, she presses the phone into her cheek, struggling to breathe. She is sixty-four (a record-holding rower in her Orange Theory class; ranks restaurants based on their red wine glass; left hand-written love notes in my lunchboxes). The newest Mission Impossible throbs through the concrete walls behind her. Somewhere inside the theatre, my father is still sitting in the dark.
On my coast, the sun beams on. Between Zoom calls I’ve been watching the window for a celebrity sighting of my favorite fat bluebird. I’m twenty-eight (adjunct instructor on a small university campus; reliant on an app to keep my houseplants alive; addicted to the off-brand sea-salt caramels in Act III of the TJ Maxx checkout line). For just one more moment before I answer my mother’s question, I might even fancy myself a grown woman.
Look at my text, she says. The last message between us is a screen-shotted comic strip from her Facebook feed the day before.
I didn’t get anything, Mom.
Shit. I imagine her picking at a popcorn kernel in her teeth with a candy-apple manicure. Here, try now.
Her message bounces between satellites—then the blue bubble comes through. It’s an article from NBC: Pediatrician charged with sexually assaulting female patient. The photo is a close-up of an older white man in a crisp white shirt in front of a whitewashed wall. A tight frown, bullfrog eyes. Something in my hippocampus snaps like a rubber band.
Did you get it, Catherine? Is that the motherfucker? Is it? *1
*1 You should tell them now: he did not touch you.
I once read that it takes seven years for all the cells in a human body to die and regenerate. I used to close my eyes and try to feel it happening: each cell dying like a distant star in my microscopic supernova. This has become my ‘apple a day’: since I last saw the Motherfucker, I have died a billion cellular deaths, entirely regenerated almost twice over. Decidedly, biologically, I am not the same physical person I was in that room. After all that molecular reincarnation, trying to recall the details is like peering through frosted glass.
Now, new, I Google the pediatrician’s name for the seventh time today. A dozen different doctors with the same name Brady-Bunch on my results screen. I regard them through cheap blue-light glasses I bought mid-pandemic: studying each face, I try to imagine that it was him who told me to take off my clothes and lie on the table, in the same trivial tone as if he were asking me to close the blinds, pass the salt, please hold. If I look long enough at the Google Image doctors, they’re all guilty of something: their eyes glint, the shadows under them deepen, their smiles sharpen at the corners. How could I know for sure that it’s him, after all this time? Is that the motherfucker? Is it?
Because I am a modern macabre woman, I learned about false memories through a study mentioned in one of my true crime podcasts. On Day One, researchers told the participants that they had forgotten a core memory or life event: this is the implantation. At first, the participants vehemently denied that the forgotten event had ever occurred—but after only a few days, they started to remember whatever incident they’d supposedly blocked out. The false memory grew like a weed in the gray matter, rooting deep wherever it found a crack. By the end of the study, the participants had seemingly recovered key details around the alleged incident, vivid and complete and fully embedded in their identity. Only on the last day were they told that it never actually happened—that the memory was a plant—and the test subjects were left incomplete again, a brief but crucial sense of self uprooted.
I’m afraid of the human brain: its ability to redact critical moments, project meaning onto stranger’s faces, conjure false memories and cement confirmation biases. All these defense mechanisms are betrayals of trust, mutinous cells hijacking the whole. But now, when I look at the pediatrician’s mugshot—at the sinking of his jowls, at the fraction of space between the inner corners of his grey eyes—it’s the rest of my body that responds. I feel as though everything I’ve ever eaten was rancid, like I’ve gorged myself on something foul and it’s too late to throw it all up. His silhouette sharpens behind the frosted glass, and I can almost feel the exam table paper crinkling under my bare, blushing skin—and doesn’t that count for something? *2
*2 He did not touch you.
The first time I told my sister Emily what had happened that day, the doctor for the Olympic gymnastics team has just been arrested. We were in college, ditching campus. Emily (puts hot sauce on her popcorn; identifies actors with uncanny precision; cries for minor characters in Pixar movies) had just returned from studying abroad. The streetlights were glowing a mystical orange and her proximity felt especially precious. Watching the yellow line slither in our headlights, I told her everything I could remember about the Motherfucker. She listened, loving and livid, tracking the unsteady rhythm of my voice like a finger on a pulse.
After that I sometimes blurted it out when I felt weepy or uninteresting or close to someone.
Soon after the pediatrician’s arrest, the lead detective on the case goes on air to urge any other potential victims to come forward. This is when I finally tell my fiancé the full story. While I talk, Ryan dispenses tissues like he’s putting out a fire. He has little red needles in his arm from the molting cactus I refuse to throw out. When I’m finished, he says, Thank you for telling me. We got this.
Before I call the sergeant, I call both my parents and all four of my siblings. The men in my family are the hardest to tell (aren’t sisters and daughters supposed to be bodiless?). My brother Jake is thirty-three (a workaholic co-addicted to weed and Haribo gummies; color-codes his T-shirts and lines up the folded corners of his couch blankets like Monk). When I tell him how I’m hesitant to identify the Motherfucker—didn’t he listen to that true crime episode?—he says: What are you worried about, Cat? Putting the WRONG pedophile in jail?
Caitlyn is thirty-five (an Anglophile who smokes a pack a day; has never lost a court case in her nine years as an attorney; writes admittedly very good Harry Potter fan fiction while the rest of the world sleeps). She is my lawyer before I decide I need one. This is going to be difficult, she warns, exhaling a Marlboro Red. But you need to write it all down.
I sometimes fancy myself a writer. My MFA degree is framed over my dresser like a dead relative. I have already left a paper trail of sorts: in the years since the incident, I have written about it in a handful of scrap documents that never saw the light of day, poems too cringey to be properly cathartic. I don’t usually write about myself in the first-person (doesn’t everyone hate the sound of their own voice?), but when I sit down to type my statement, it’s simple because it’s true. There’s no moral or epiphany or resolution, and even with the eroded details, I know the ending by heart.
July 17, 2023
Hello Sgt. ______,
I used to be a patient at _______ Pediatrics—I’m 28 now and I currently live in Oregon. At the time that these events occurred I lived in Connecticut. I recently learned that you arrested Dr. ______ for the sexual assault of a young woman last week. This news was both validating and upsetting for me, as I had a very violating experience while I was a patient at __________ Pediatrics. *3
Please bear with me, as some of the context around the event has become murky during the years I was trying to forget it (I’m told this is common). For example, I don’t remember the exact date of the incident, although I’m sure the date could be determined from my medical records. I know this would stick out as an anomaly in the records, because my primary physician was female, but on that particular day I saw a male doctor because my primary physician was out (Dr. _____). I was between the ages of 16-17 and I believe I was at ________ Pediatrics for an annual physical. Dr. _____ asked my mother to wait outside (she waited in the car). He then told me that I was at an age where I needed a “new kind of exam.”
At this time I had never seen a gynecologist before, nor had I ever received any gynecological exam, and I was unfamiliar with the normal procedure for that type of examination. There was also no one else in the room, no nurse or any other type of chaperone, which at the time I did not know was unusual—but having seen many other doctors since, I know this is highly unusual for a male doctor and a female patient, especially when the female patient is not clothed (and underage). I believe he did examine my breasts and my abdomen (including lower abdomen) before telling me to take all my clothes off (including my underwear) and lie on the table. *4
I was extremely uncomfortable (I remember hesitating to undress, but he assured me that it was fine). He then sat at the end of the table (but kind of a weird distance away, farther than I now know would be appropriate to perform an examination, but still close enough that he could see everything clearly). He then told me to configure myself into several compromising positions. I was incredibly nervous, but he assured me that this was a “normal” procedure (I remember he used the word “normal” several times). He did not write anything down, but he did repeatedly adjust his pen in his front pocket—looking back, I am very concerned that this was some type of camera. *5
He told me to lay on my back and stick my legs directly up in the air together (he sat will full view, but did not touch me). He had me hold my feet up in the air in a V. I had to squeeze my knees to my chest while on my back, and again on my side. I had to roll onto my stomach (with my knees tucked underneath). For all of these I had no clothes on, and he kept fiddling with his pen without writing anything down. *6
He never touched me during the latter half of this “procedure”—he just looked at my body and provided “feedback” (“everything looks good, everything looks normal”). Let me be clear: I have visited several gynecologists since this happened, and no gynecological exam I’ve received since has resembled this experience. No gynecologist or primary care provider has ever asked me to get into any of these positions and hold myself open in such a compromising way. *7
This incident has haunted me for years. I first told a friend about it shortly after it happened and she agreed that it sounded wrong—but since the doctor did actually not touch me intimately I did not know if the incident could be classified as assault. I believe Dr. _______ knew that I would be too confused about the nature of the exam to know that it was wrong and that he had taken advantage of me from a position of power. I have written about the incident a few times over the years to try and process what happened, so there is written record of this long before now. *8
Two years ago, my mother requested my medical records from _______ Pediatrics so that we could determine when it happened and who was responsible. However, I decided not to sign the paperwork to release the records because I feared I would not be believed (especially since no one else had come forward). *9 When I saw the article detailing Dr. _______’s arrest—and more importantly, his photo—I felt physically sick. I have also been feeling incredibly guilty that I did not speak up sooner, and that he has been free to abuse other girls all this time. *10
I would like to speak to you about all of this at your earliest convenience. Thank you for your time.
*3 Are you being dramatic?
*4 Did you misunderstand, somehow?
*5 Are you doing this for attention?
*6 Shouldn’t you be embarrassed?
*7 Does this even count as assault?
*8 Is it too late for all this?
*9 Why should anyone believe you now?
*10 Were you complicit in their abuse by staying silent?
Catherine: The sergeant doesn’t ask me to repeat anything I’ve already written down, and I’m so grateful for it that my chest aches. He doesn’t ask me why I haven’t reported the incident until now, and I hope that my reasons are more obvious and forgivable to him than they are to me. At one point, he actually apologizes—I’m so sorry this happened to you—and it’s pure oxygen to hear him say that it happened, that I was right about the wrong. *11
Can I ask—is it still assault even if he didn’t touch me?
The sergeant clears his throat. Well, since he touched you in any way during the examination—even if it was all routine procedure in the beginning—all contact was perverted by his intent to sexually exploit you at the end. So, yes, I would classify it as assault.
For years I have wanted this: an indisputable definition, validation. *12 I ask: And were there other girls?
Of course there were. The day the Motherfucker “examined” me, there was already a complaint in his personnel file: a mother had reported his disturbing behavior to the practice on behalf of her daughter—and the practice did nothing. Since his arrest, four women have already called in to share their stories. I feel sick again, hearing how similar they are to mine: unwarranted vaginal exams for UTIs, for recent sexual activity, for no reason at all other than being “old enough now.” Pants pooled on the floor, unsolicited compliments directed at tan lines, tattoos. Directives given; devouring eyes. Clinical reassurance that everything was routine, perfectly normal. All of us between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, girls stretching to fill women’s bodies as fast as we could manage.
The Motherfucker’s bail is set at $100,000.
*11 You were not raped.
*12 And so now you feel—what?
Anonymity is a right that the last of us fought for. When the Motherfucker touched her, he wasn’t even wearing gloves—a boldness endorsed by the many conquests of his fifteen-year façade.
When she filed her complaint under the pseudonym “Jane Doe,” he filed a motion to unseal her identity. He already knew who she was, but wanted to see how compelling she was on the stand. And so Jane—who had flinched when his gloveless fingers reached between her legs—was examined again before the trial had even started. The judge ruled in her favor.
It feels surreal not to know who the other Janes are beyond this intimate nightmare we separately shared. They are the only people who might feel some shade of what I’m feeling, yet I have no way of ever reaching them. I want to know: do they, too, feel subsequently incomplete when someone adores them completely? *13 How long did they wait before letting someone touch them for the right reasons? Do they ever feel so many things at once that they wind up feeling nothing, the way too many colors become white?
I wonder what they’re like, outside of all this. So I rehearse conversations with them in my head: introductions and weather reports, cordial compliments and book recommendations. I try to imagine the tenor of their voices, give them freckles on their cheekbones and in their irises, bangs they’ve been at war with since middle school. I picture the shoes they slip on when taking out the trash, the ironic coffee mugs they stuff with bouquets of pens, their postures when they have to stand too close to a man in a train car.
How could I ever apologize for the confidence my silence gave him?
*13 How much of who you are can you blame him for?
Jane (the gynecologist): Let’s say one of us finds herself in an ochre phase. Jane is thirty-four (pours potato chips onto napkins to better assess her options; tells telemarketers to have a good night; reads the synopsis for her Abuela’s favorite telenovela before their Thursday calls) when she opens her closet to find a gradient of yellow, like the surface of Mars. I imagine her running her fingers over the swatch of fabrics— fleece and waffle and chiffon—wondering when she’d started floating around like a bee with pollen stuck to its ass.
Perhaps this Jane is married, and her marriage is warm the like the seat-heater he puts on for her in all weather. She is a mother, and Georgia’s hair is so soft and fine at just three years old that Jane sometimes wonders if she could round her own cheeks and blow it all away, like a dandelion.
And let’s say that when the NBC article catches up to her, she and Georgia are at the zoo. (Maybe, years ago, Jane set a Google Alert for the Motherfucker’s name.) They’re in the reptile exhibit; the humid, manmade cave reeks of wet soil and decaying foliage. (Now, her phone buzzes in her pocket.) Jane parks the ochre Bugaboo chariot in front of the skink terrarium. Georgia’s palms suction to the glass like starfish. (The banner above the article says breaking news.) Georgia misidentifies each scaled creature lying languidly under a heat lamp. Ralph! Dog! Frank! Bird! (Of all the eyes she’s met through glass today, his are the most amphibious.)
When she was seventeen, the Motherfucker had slung a stethoscope over his neck, pressed on her abdomen, and tutted his tongue when his fingers sank too deep. Assuring her that it was only necessary, he watched as her knees trembled when her underwear slipped below them. Arms at her sides, she’d gripped the edges of the exam table as she laid back. When asked to hoist her legs, the crepe paper had stuck to the backs of her thighs. Beside her, there had been a framed photo of zebras *14 on the wall.
It would be poetic, but not impossible, for Jane to grow up to be a gynecologist. Even though the Motherfucker’s head was once square between her knees, there is cucumber water in the lobby of her office. She keeps the air on 70. The patient gowns are silky and have snap buttons. On the Motherfucker’s table, she’d kept thinking, This is not how it’s supposed to be—so now the tissues in her exam room are lotion-infused, and the speculum is never cold. In her office, there is no white paint. The walls are various shades of sherbert: lavender and peach and magenta. A different Georgia O’Keefe print in every room. When asked how she came to this profession, Jane cites the vagina jokes a male comedian told when she was in middle school—back before she’d ever held a hand mirror between her legs, before she’d ever stood a chance. For years the shame grew like a cactus in her brain, never watered but never withered.
Now the light of her phone feels extraterrestrial in the dimness of the reptile exhibit. She reads the article again, and each time there are new sensations, internal collisions. Jane wheels Georgia out of the artificial cavern as though it’s on fire.
They burst through the heavy glass door. Outside, the sun beams on. Children shriek. Two crows battle over corndog crumbs on the concrete. When Jane’s eyes adjust, they lock with those of a female silverback settled into the nearby corner of her enclosure. She is hunched but haughty, staring back at Jane with a sober, unimpressed air. While Jane watches, heaving, the gorilla steadily chews her thumbnail, stopping only to assess her progress through her lashes. From under the awning of her stroller, Georgia offers the ape a cheddar Goldfish, not yet comprehending her own cruelty.
What else can Jane do but breathe until she’s able to do it without concentration? When she can smell the shit again, she knows she’ll make it to the car.
*14 Or was it the lions?
Catherine: Because the Motherfucker saw patients at two pediatric offices, I’m told to file a report with the other precinct. The sergeant arranges a time for one of their officers to call me. When no one reaches out, Caitlyn (my sister-lawyer) is both professionally and personally pissed. She calls the officer directly and we wait, trading breaths over the line as it rings.
When the officer answers, his exhaustion is palpable. In his district, my written statement is inconvenient. Insufficient. The officer’s words—not really a crime *15 —fly like a hornet into my ear, sting repeatedly. Even if an assault had occurred, the statute of limitations would have expired—child endangerment might stick, maybe, but it’s all up to the prosecutor’s investigator, who will call me when they see fit (if at all).
This conversation is closer to what I had always feared from law enforcement, and I am both venomous and validated. My “examination” was not routine procedure, but perhaps this dismissal is.
My experience is unsurprising, unoriginal, lived and told a thousand times—incomparable to the horror experienced by women whose bodies were physically, explicitly, undeniably, illegally invaded by a man’s. After all, he didn’t touch me *16 —my violently-bare body was just stupid and obedient, vulgarly butterflied on the exam room table. This is all perfectly normal.
For a month or so, my mother calls me every day. We obsess over the criminal case, conspire about the civil. She wants me to walk her through everything one more time. She wants to call the pediatric practice again. We crusade over long distance lines, cursing the opacity and glacial pace of the judicial system. Even when she calls under some other pretense—wedding planning, hometown gossip, when I’m coming home, butt dials—her voice hovers in a new octave.
She was waiting for me in the car that day. I do not begrudge her for it—why shouldn’t she have trusted him? Though I had never seen the Motherfucker before, he was both of my brothers’ primary care doctor. She’d known him for years. We hadn’t been warned. It was a different time; the Me Too movement hadn’t happened yet. She did not know what was happening inside, and for years I did not tell her. I didn’t tell her because I didn’t understand what he’d asked me to do, or why I did it. I didn’t have the words, or the evidence. I was mortified to have obliged so easily.
In some parallel universe, I will always be in the exam room, and my mother will always be waiting in the car. We have broken each other’s hearts, and though we forgave each other instantly we will always be sorry.
*15 If you weren’t assaulted, what language do you have the right to use?
*16 But didn’t he?
Jane (the avenger): Perhaps ROY G. BIV is the only man Jane has ever loved. This time she’s a fine-line tattoo artist of the most Millennial breed (monsters, monsteras, matcha lattes). When her friends double-tap her fresh ink Instagram posts, she imagines them searching for potential under their own arm hair while they shit in their corporate office bathrooms. She may not have gone to RISD, but her work does exactly what great art should: gets under people’s skin.
Imagine she stumbles upon the Motherfucker in an article in her Facebook feed, among more benign ghosts. It’s like looking at an x-ray of an old break that never healed right: the damage has always been there under soft tissue and cartilage, aching with certain movements—and now she’s faced with the phantom responsible for the pain. Because the silence had been like acid on her naked body, Jane had made small talk while she stepped out of her clothes and spread her legs for her “examination”: A-are you from around here? We just m-moved from Chicago. My mom got a new job. She’s in advertising. Have you ever s-seen the commercial for Flamish’s Furniture? He’d replied, You have lovely skin.
So it’s this Jane who finds the Motherfucker’s address, gets in her car, and drives there. It’s an hour away. Cattails bow low along the highway. The sun beams on. She ignores a call from her twin sister Alice, who would tell her to turn around. (Once, when testing their twin telepathy from the respective tiers of their adolescent bunk bed, Alice had correctly declared that Jane’s elbow was itchy; when Alice broke her ankle playing soccer in seventh grade, Jane’s had ached from miles away.) Had she answered when Alice called, Jane might have driven to Alice’s apartment instead of to the pediatrician’s house. They might have debated superior pasta sauces while the water boiled. But she didn’t, and they don’t, and now Jane’s knuckles are white against the wheel. *17
Speaking of white, there’s a carton of eggs in the passenger’s seat. Jane hasn’t egged a house since childhood, but she didn’t come all this way to talk. She doesn’t fantasize about amends—she envisions shells shattering against windows; broken, ochre yolks oozing off the shingles and squelching onto the lawn. She imagines the Motherfucker squinting out into the night, only to be smacked by the hardest, fattest shell against his creased forehead, where it would burst like a pasteurized meteor against the surface of an alien moon.
It’s twilight and Jane will be thirty years old in two weeks and there are white Grecian columns on either side of the Motherfucker’s front door. A gold knocker shaped like a fucking anchor. Below the warm glow of the windows, cerulean hydrangeas erupt like domesticated fireworks. The solar panels are a surprise (do creeps care about the environment?), but it’s the mailbox that wrings Jane’s heart out: little handprints, blue and pink and purple, smacked greedily all over its white aluminum surface in an assault of color.
Jane parks across the street. The crickets sound their tiny alarms from between blades of meticulously-cut grass. Through the windows, she zeroes in on the distinguishable artifacts: a patterned green armchair; a towering fiddle-leaf; a grand piano propped open like a corpse awaiting autopsy; a curtain of rainbow beads pouring over the upstairs window *18 —and a dinner table, tall candles, four people. A woman with chunky librarian glasses and chin-length black curls; a girl with a painstaking braid draped over a pale pink hoodie; another with a ponytail and a high school sports jersey; an older man in a checked shirt, white hair.
Jane reaches into her glove compartment and unearths a nearly mummified joint. She flicks the lighter and shields the flame. The stale smoke invades her as she studies the man’s silhouette, wondering if this is the posture of a pervert. His ears bob against his skull as he chews. How can he eat, now that his last victim has come forward? How can his family stomach his presence now that they’ve seen his face—the one they’ve memorized over how many years—under such hideous headlines? Do his daughters believe him when he denies what he’s done? Would they believe her—Jane—if she were to ring the doorbell now?
Her stomach floats around her torso. What could she even say to make another body understand? The day the Motherfucker assaulted her, Alice had been in the next exam room. Though Jane had always wondered what her twin sister felt on the other side of the wall, she’d never asked, and never told, either. They had peeled off into separate timelines the moment Jane unzipped her pants at his command. What she feels most acutely now—more than the singular shame of that deathless moment—is her irrevocable aloneness.
So, what happens now? The sky dims. Peepers jeer from the nearby marsh. Fireflies float down onto the pediatrician’s street like dying stars, and Jane watches shadows flicker inside the house. Doesn’t Jane know these people from somewhere? The mother could be the receptionist at her hair salon; the elder daughter looks like Alice’s childhood best friend. The family eats, laughs, clears the table with a quiet camaraderie. Jane feels childish as she lifts the top of the carton and stares down at the neat, nestled rows of colorless eggs. They are not enough. *19 Before dawn, all dozen of her biodegradable “fuck yous” would be swept away by the rain or the Motherfucker’s state-of-the-art sprinkler system. How much more of her will he take?
In the dark corridor between streetlights, Jane slinks across the street. The air is too warm and too wet. Mosquitos touch down expertly, extract. She pries the mouth of the finger-painted mailbox open and shoves her neutralized arsenal down its throat. In the morning, the family will find the carton of eggs on top of their crisp bills and shiny catalogues and wonder where it came from. Perhaps it will be the last silly, mundane mystery they all ponder together.
*17 Unlike you, this Jane rations her candor, values her privacy.
*18 These hung in your childhood bedroom: up close, the iridescent beads smelled like a factory.
*19 It could have just as easily been a gun.
Catherine: In September, our pantry is invaded by sour War Heads—a supersize bag of green and yellow with a puckered cartoon face. When I ask Ryan about it (devout Linkin Park fan; calms our dog down by letting him sniff unreachable things; still winks at me from across the room), it turns out they’re for me. He read online that sour candy can shock the system out of a panic attack, and so he ordered in bulk. His thoughtfulness, in all its neon packaging, almost induces an episode.
Just the other night I spilled 36 chocolate-covered almonds on the floor and wept on my knees as I begged our dog not to eat them. Lately my panic attacks have been coming on like high-stakes hiccups: clumsy, unpredictable, and seemingly unstoppable. By the end I am something like a hooked fish, ugly and gaping and silently suffocating. Once I can breathe again, I am humiliated.
By now the virtual wellness checks have all but stopped. In the night I lie awake, thinking about whitewashed walls, gray matter and gray areas, cell regeneration. I am in some kind of legal purgatory: the police never contact me again, and Caitlyn tells me that it could be anywhere from two to five years before the Motherfucker is on trial. Meanwhile my meltdowns are getting more embarrassing, and I’m too lazy to read The Body Keeps the Score, no matter how many people recommend it to me.
So I bite the bullet and find a therapist and tell her where it hurts. She has distractingly luscious hair and convinces me that I need to take deep breaths and hold them in (not just when I’m smoking weed). She’s nice and knows a lot of handy statistics and can sometimes label what I’m feeling when I can’t—but I wince any time she compliments my character. She might not know it yet, but I’m not that great a person. For example, when I was in elementary school, my siblings and I saw the movie Tuck Everlasting and I took every word to heart. At recess the next day, I coaxed my three best friends into drinking from a muddy spring between the roots of an old oak tree. One by one they knelt in the mud and slurped dutifully from the stagnant, iron-brown water. They wiped their mouths on their sleeves like vampires and looked to me, waiting. Aren’t you gonna drink? I shook my head. I’m never gonna die, I assured them (like an asshole). *20
While we’re at it, when I was eleven, Emily came home from her eighth grade semi-formal in tears because no boys asked her to slow dance. Later, when she hurt my feelings (I don’t even remember how), I hissed, This is why none of the boys wanted to dance with you.
And just this past Christmas I rediscovered one of the diligent apology letters my little brother Luke wrote to me when we were little. Next to an elaborately drawn heart, he’d scrawled in crayon: I luv u and I’m sorry I am the scum of the earth.
Where do you think he got that from?
*20 Why can’t you let this kid off the hook?
Jane (the evolved): Maybe Jane is a massage therapist (owns an elderly dachshund named Ruth; graduated to nicotine patches; started opening her bananas from the bottom since she saw monkeys do it in a documentary), and being abused by the Motherfucker is not the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Maybe the memory of her “exam” is like a moldy fruit that rolled underneath her bed a long time ago. She does not crave the taste of that particular trauma, the way one might look through old photos post-breakup, or bite down on a sore tooth—and when, in the years since, she has stumbled upon the memory while looking for other things, she left it there to rot.
Imagine that.
Catherine:
March 25, 2024
Hi Sergeant,
I hope you’re well. We spoke last summer following the arrest of Dr. [NAME].
I know you may be limited in what information you’re able to share with me, but I’m wondering if there has been any progress in the case? As I’m sure you can imagine, this has been on my mind, and if there’s anything I can do/anyone else I can speak with to help build a case against him, please let me know.
Thank you.
[The Sergeant never responds.]
My mother first requested my medical records from the pediatric office six years ago. *21 The practice informed us that medical offices, like the human body, clean house every seven years. Shortly after the Motherfucker is arrested, Caitlyn requests my records again, to no avail. A full year after the arrest—without warning, explanation, or apology—Caitlyn receives a manila envelope in the mail. Inside are my medical records, sent from someone at the pediatric office. There is not even a note.
It’s a Saturday. On the other side of the country, I am headed to Portland with my now-husband Ryan and our two best friends for a concert. The music is blasting and we’re going a little too fast, and I am happy in that ethereal way one can only be when driving with old friends. We’re playing trivia with a crinkled booklet from my friend’s glove compartment, lingering stubbornly in the animal category: What animal has the best eyesight? What do you call a baby weasel? How long is the gestation period of an elephant?
Somewhere between Mount Hood and Sandy, Caitlyn texts Ryan: I have some updates about Catherine’s case. Is now a good time to call?
My husband embodies the Sour War-Head and asks, Can it wait?
*21 Tell them again how he didn’t touch you.
When I answer Caitlyn’s call on Sunday, she gives me the news, good and bad.
The Good News (all things considered): It’s all there, in ink. I did see The Motherfucker, only once, on March 20 th , 2013. According to the paperwork, I had come in with mild symptoms of a possible UTI (the only abnormality being frequent urination). The initial report reflected only a urine sample and an abdominal exam, but at some later point, the doctor himself went into the system and added the words: “genital exam.”
To hear this information—this objective, documented truth—is both painful and relieving, like popping a blood blister on my left ventricle. Still, I sit with the words genital exam for a moment, wondering what they are. An admission of guilt? A rational explanation? And why did he write it down? Does his documentation of the exam corroborate its necessity? Of course not. Here is what I know now, with absolute certainty:
1. There was no chaperone present. Even back then, conducting a genital exam in a pediatric office—let alone by a male doctor on a female patient—was illegal, and the medical records confirm that it was only me and the Motherfucker in that room.
2. A genital exam is, by definition: “a physical examination of the female reproductive organs. It includes inspecting the external genitalia and performing an internal exam, which may involve palpation and the use of a speculum.” *22
3. My symptoms did not justify a genital exam. For what it’s worth, I still don’t remember this particular UTI, but I’ve had a couple since. For the first one, I was able to get antibiotics via a 5-minute telehealth appointment, without ever being seen in person. For the other, which was more severe, I went to the hospital—and even then I was never asked to undress in the presence of anyone else.
4. It was not a medical examination. The doctor hunts in the gray area. My “exam” did not resemble anything close to a gynecological visit (which I’ve been enduring annually for many years now), but he knew I had nothing to compare it to. He understood my innocence and exploited my trust.
The Bad News: On March 20th, 2013, I was newly eighteen years old. Had I been seventeen when he abused me, I could still bring a case against the Motherfucker (there is no statute of limitations for minors)—but since I was a legal adult, I’m no longer able to bring a case against him.
Most of my friends and family share the same theory: that he targeted almost and barely-legal girls to soften any charges against him if he ever got caught. If they’re right, then he is cunning, and his victims are calculated based on punitive action alone. But I wonder: what if the predator is just desperate to see himself as a good guy, even still? He has daughters, after all. If his targets were eighteen, then he never had to think of himself as a pedophile. To be an abuser of women, rather than an abuser of girls—wouldn’t that be such a relief?
*22 In other words: he touched you. Of course he did.
Catherine (Jane): Then I have a good day and I wonder, why am I still writing about this? After all, it was so long ago. So many women go through so much worse. But is it greedy, or naïve, to want something good to come out of the worst thing I’ve ever experienced? I read a quote from Zora Neale Hurston and pocket it like a permission slip: If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. *23
For over a decade I have regarded my body with resentment and repulsion. I wrote sad and stupid poetry, confused desire for greed, spun OCD nightmares about dust bunnies and crooked picture frames, undressed only in the dark, wept in the parking lot of every gynecology office I set foot in—but I also did other things. I put my feet up on friends’ dashboards, cried over boys I thought I loved and girls I thought hated me, spent too much money on candles and takeout, regretted sunburns and tattoos, fell in and out of love, learned to whistle—and in all that time, the Motherfucker was abusing other girls.
I know it’s not my fault that it happened to me. But had I reported him that day, could I have protected the other Janes? *24 I know their stories aren’t mine for the telling, but I am less lonely when imagining them.
Before I hung up with the sergeant (the only time we ever spoke), I asked him to tell Jane Doe that I had called. He promised, but only as a reflex. I wanted him to tell her that there were more of us coming forward. I’d like to tell her myself that I’m sorry *25, and that one day—supposedly after seven years—she will be an entirely new person, even if it still hurts.
After finally speaking out ten years later, most days it feels like wasted breath. As of now, there’s no resolution. I have considered forgiving the Motherfucker, but can’t really imagine it. *26 The case against him is still in preliminary hearings. Justice is pending, and I am on the outskirts. If given the opportunity, I will testify on Jane’s behalf, speak at the sentencing, support her case in any way I can—but it seems that my experience is not enough to be of legal value. The prosecutor has been given my statement and medical records and phone number and has never tried to contact me.
According to the law, there were two adults in that exam room on March 20th, 2013. But let me remind you: it was a pediatrician’s office. My mother drove me there that day. The band-aids in the cabinet had cartoons on them. And I’ll never forget that, next to my underwear, there were children’s books on the floor.
*23 Yeah, but she didn’t mean you.
*24 You were a kid.
*25 You don’t blame the girls before you.
*26 Forgive yourself first.
About the Author
Catherine (“Cat”) Snyder is a writer of fiction & nonfiction from Chester, CT. She currently lives in Bend, OR where she teaches Writing & Literature at Oregon State University-Cascades. She is one of five siblings and enjoys long hikes, good food, and bad puns.
