Free The First Time by Joy Fielding Page A

breathe.”
    “You’re breathing fine, Mattie. Just stay calm. I’m taking you out now.”
    Mattie felt the narrow table on which she was lying start to move, propelling her, feet first, out of the monstrous MRI machine. She tried to suck in the surrounding air, but it was as if someone were standing on her chest in stiletto heels. The heels dug into her thin blue hospital gown, piercing her flesh, puncturing her lungs, making even shallow breathing painful, almost impossible.
    “You can open your eyes now, Mattie.”
    Mattie opened her eyes, felt them instantly fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” she told the female medical technician, who was small, dark, and alarmingly young. “I don’t think I can do this.”
    “It’s pretty scary,” the technician agreed, gently patting Mattie’s bruised forearm. “But the doctor was pretty anxious for the results.”
    “Has someone called my husband?”
    “I believe he’s been notified, yes.”
    “What about Lisa Katzman?” Mattie propped herself up on her elbows, inadvertently dislodging the pillows that had been placed on either side of her head. Pain, like thousands of tiny daggers, shot through her joints. There wasn’t a part of her that didn’t ache. Damn airbag almost killed me, Mattie thought, manipulating her sore jaw.
    “Dr. Katzman will be waiting for you when we’re finished in here.” The technician, whose name tag identified her as Noreen Aliwallia, managed a small smile as she repositioned the pillows.
    “How long will that be?”
    “About forty-five minutes.”
    “Forty-five minutes?!”
    “I know it sounds like a long time—”
    “It
is
a long time. You know what it feels like inside that thing? It feels like being buried alive.” Why am I giving her a hard time? Mattie wondered, longing for the sound of her friend Lisa’s reassuring voice, the voice of calm and reason that had soothed her since childhood.
    “You were in a car accident,” Noreen Aliwallia reminded Mattie patiently. “You lost consciousness.You suffered a serious concussion. The MRI is to make sure there aren’t any hidden hematomas.”
    Mattie nodded, trying to recall exactly what the initials MRI stood for. Something about magnetic imaging, whatever that meant. A fancy name for X rays. The neurologist had already explained it to her when she’d regained consciousness in the emergency room, but she was only barely paying attention, her mind trying to come to grips with exactly what had happened. Her head was pounding, her mouth tasted of dried blood, and she was having difficulty remembering the precise order of things. Everything hurt, although they told her that, miraculously, no bones were broken. Then suddenly she was being wheeled into the basement of whatever hospital she was in—they’d told her which one it was, but she couldn’t remember—and this young woman, this x-ray technician with the mellifluous name, Noreen Aliwallia, who looked like she was fresh out of high school, asked her to lie down on this really narrow table and put her head inside a coffinlike box.
    The MRI machine resembled a large steel tunnel. It took up most of the small, windowless room, whose dingy white walls were void of adornment. At the entrance to the tunnel was a rectangular box with a circular hole. Mattie had been given a set of ear plugs—“It gets a little noisy in there,” she was told—and pillows were placed on both sides of her head to keep it still. A buzzer was placed in her hand, to use if she felt she was about to sneeze or cough or do anything that might disturb the operation of the machine. If she moved at any time during the procedure, Noreenexplained, the X ray would be ruined, and they’d have to start over from the beginning. Close your eyes, Noreen had advised. Think pleasant thoughts.
    The panic started almost as soon as Mattie’s head was fitted inside the box, and the top of the box was extended past her face to her chest, so that even with her eyes