flung it open harder than I thought I could, and it hit the wall, one of the panes of glass shattering as it crashed into the plaster. “Do not bring that woman in here,” I said slowly, ignoring the shards on the floor.
Victor caught me as I tried to step outside and wrestled me back into the room and onto the bed, elbowing me in the stomach, forcing me to lie down. I sucked in my breath sharply from the pain.
“Jessie.” His voice was unyielding. “You have to get well. Please. I can’t have you like this! I can’t. I need you well again.”
I looked up and saw the doctor, a white woman, standing in the door frame with Trieu. She had seen everything.
“You must not be feeling well,” she said in French, coming into the room as Victor stepped away from me. She was perhaps in her fifties and wearing a simple blue cotton shirt and gray trousers. She was the kind of woman one would call handsome. Authoritative. She also looked like the kind of woman who would regard me as a fascinating specimen to test her pet theories on. Victor stood back to make room for her.
I watched her warily. She smiled at me as if she hadn’t witnessed an unseemly scene between husband and wife. She plopped her black medical bag on the bed and opened it.
“I want to do a full physical check, but first, Madame Lesage, let me administer something to make you a bit drowsy. I think, more than anything, you need a good night’s sleep.”
She pulled out a small brown bottle shaped like a beaker, with a cork stopper and a brown-and-gold label. I recognized it at once. Somnifen. I sat up and knocked the bottle out of her hand with all the force I could still muster. It fell to the floor with a loud clink but did not break.
“Absolutely not,” I barked, my eyes fixed on hers, my heart racing furiously. “I’ve had that before. I’ll never take it again. You need to leave.”
“Jessie!” Victor exclaimed, rushing back to the bed. “She is not going to leave.” His shirt was stained with sweat under the arms and at the collar. My heartbeat slowed as I looked at him. My husband who had left France because I’d wanted to, who had been faithful to me throughout our marriage. What had I done to him? But what had he done to me? He’d made me see those men, in various states of death. He’d made me complicit in the decisions he made on the plantation by inviting me into his work, but only partially. He’d said I had enormous influence over him, but he hadn’t let me influence how he treated the insurgents he’d dug up. Michelin decisions were family decisions, he always said. His uncle knew about everything that happened on the plantation. But that moment had very much been his decision. He could have given those men jail sentences instead of death sentences. He hadn’t.
This was not how it was supposed to be, I thought, tears streaming down my face. The colony was to be a fresh start, not a place to fall apart. I looked up at Victor, his sad, broken expression.
And yet—Victor would always win. He was rich and he was a man. In every instance, I was the one who depended on him, not the opposite. That was just the way it was in the world of women. Especially for poor women. Especially for mothers.
“Fine,” I whispered to the doctor. “You can examine me. But don’t bring that anywhere near me,” I finished up, eyeing the bottle on the floor, thinking of all the barbiturates the Swiss had pushed in me. This woman surely wanted me in a corpse-like state, too.
Victor managed a half smile. “I’ll be downstairs,” he whispered and closed the door behind him.
The doctor took out a watch and checked my blood pressure with her contraption, staring at the second hand as she did. It was a cheap-looking watch that I wouldn’t have trusted to time a pie in the oven with. Then she put a stethoscope around her neck and started listening to my heart.
“Your husband says you don’t remember very much from the party last night,” she said calmly. “And that the things that you do remember perhaps occurred slightly differently than the way you think they did.”
“I don’t remember much,” I replied, shuddering at the stethoscope’s cold, metallic touch. “But what