Open Wide... for Murder
Open Wide…for Murder: My Dentist is in Jail for Double Homicide - a personal account of the start of my childhood dental trauma through a satirical lens.
Cold, frosty air began fluttering out of the plastic exhaust strapped to my mouth, the kind of cold that feels like someone’s blowing winter into your skull. I was told to “breathe deeply” as laughing gas crept into my soon to be limp 9 year old body. Impacted teeth, tiny jaw, two teeth that “needed pulling.” No consent. Just direction from the hydraulic woman summoning metal tools like she was calling spirits, assisting the oversized former-football-player-slash-cosplaying-murderer looming above me.
And look, I always knew something was off about Dr. Peterson. Not in a “this man is a murderer” way, but in a “this man definitely eats rotisserie chicken in his car at 9AM” way. A looming creepiness. A slick smile. An oral fixation that made me, a literal child wearing orthodontic headgear, feel like I was being inappropriate.
He had watery brown eyes that never blinked at the same time. He talked like someone who thought fluoride was a personality trait. He wore a weird crossover sneaker loafer, as if he might need to sprint at any moment… which, in retrospect, he did.
“You can trust him,” they’d say. “He gives to charity.” What they never clarified was what charity, which, considering the later murder charges, may have been a red flag.
His breath seeped out from the edges of his mask, musky, humid, a moral deposition leaking into the room, telegraphing that even his bones didn’t trust him.
“Open sesame, sweetie,” he squawked.
A bead of sweat fell from his forehead directly into my eyeball. It burned like holy water on a demon. I gagged before he even touched me, which sadly did not stop the squash sized fingers shoving themselves into my petite, panicked child mouth.
I went to rub the sweat-violation out of my eye, but the assistant caught my hands mid-air.
“There, there,” he murmured. “I’m just getting started.”
(A line previously used in a much less ethical way.) If you can say child dental work is even ethical.
My hips swiveled as I squirmed, sinking deeper into the armed dental chair. My elbows tucked against my ribs. I was holding onto myself like I knew if I let go, my soul would slip out and escape through the ceiling tiles.
If only I’d known I could simply… get up. Walk away. Wobble exit out of this dental hell like a newborn deer deciding to say ‘no thank you’ to life.
Instead, the plastic gas mask was slapped back onto my face, a cheeky little snap against my skull, as the assistant popped it into place and declared,
“She’s a gagger.”
Food was meant to enter my mouth, not leave it, and certainly not be joined by his fingers, but sure enough, before my ribs could reconfigure themselves, he was back. Shooting saline into my gums while simultaneously vacuuming it out with the mechanical sucky straw. This was my only relief. I clamped onto the suction tube like a newborn on a bottle. It drained the metallic clank and rubber taste from my tongue and briefly restored my will to survive.
“Can I see my—” gag “—my mom?” I tried to ask. He finally withdrew his blue gloves from between my teeth.
“Kendra, get her mom.”
“Can’t we do this another day?” I begged, fully ready to negotiate like a tiny, nauseous lawyer.
“We need to get these teeth cleaned and pulled, honey.”
And that was my cue to begin wailing. Not crying— wailing, like I was mourning myself in advance. My mother watched this unfold, sighed the sigh of someone underpaid, and called my father. Moments later, truly just minutes later, blue lights flickered across the waiting room windows, which is never a comforting sight unless you are a child who knows those lights belong to your dad, the man with a badge, a gun, and the emotional bandwidth of a taxidermy’d goldfish who has been out of water since 1992. By this point I was stress-guzzling a cream-soda Dum Dum lollipop, my emotional support stick, chewing the paper stick like it contained electrolytes. The lobby’s soundtrack was just me, pen clicking adults, and the wooden toy bead maze that every dentist office bought in 1997 and has never once been cleaned.
Then came the jingling. A tall man in a navy police uniform walked in, radio static whispering like an omen. The entire room paused. He scooped me up effortlessly.
“Daddy,” I breathed, clinging to him like a wet, injured koala. My calf wrapped around his gun holster, honestly way more comforting than the latexed assault my molars had just suffered. He carried me monkey style straight past reception and into Dr. Peterson’s lair. I began to cling and squirm simultaneously.
“My man!”
“The big guy!”
“Once a quarterback, always a—” I muffled my face into the radio receiver.
They did a bro handshake that made me want to file a formal complaint. I continued to press my ear to my dad’s radio because I needed a distraction from the fact that I was being returned to the scene of the crime. A dispatcher crackled, a woman’s voice fizzled, beeped twice and a half.
“10-4,” Dad muttered back into the static.
My stomach dropped like it was evacuating my body. I knew this meant he’d be gone in ninety seconds, off to patrol instead of rescuing his distressed dental hostage.
“Tori, you mustn’t give Dr. Peterson any trouble now, okay? This is important for your health.”
I gulped. The taste of latex and childhood despair rose like a ghost in my throat. I gagged and sprinted to the bathroom. I vomited violently with the door wide open, only half making it into the toilet.
“For Christ’s sake! He beckoned and barked at the dental assistant. I stood, weepy, wheezy, tragic, and fainted like the Victorian child I was in spirit.
Later, wrapped in shame and paper towels, I whispered, “I don’t like him.” My dad shrugged. “Well, you don’t have to like him. He’s your dentist, not your friend.”
“If he’s going to put his fingers repeatedly in my mouth, I’d prefer to like him,” I said, with the conviction of someone who’d already lived too much of life and wasn’t nine years old.. “I can’t help I have a bad gag reflex.” My father frowned and scowled, and told me not to talk like that.
I visited Dr. Peterson for several more years, puking on him many times in the midst of his version of child teeth health rituals that left me teary eyed and with an eerie feeling and almost never allowing him to complete a full teeth cleaning. One day my mom told me she had found me a new dentist. And years later, Dr. Peterson aka Dr. Barton Corbin would admit to shooting and murdering his wife in 2004 and his girlfriend 14 years earlier.
Returning home from my visit, I told my husband, something is "off". I felt a dark energy. He called me crazy; until his evil side hit the news. Always trust your gut, it's our inner compass. Even at 9....you were spot on.
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