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“This morning, and I’m serious.”
“Heh. Impressive. Like before work? Or?—”
“Holl, do you think you could be pregnant?”
The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but my entire body stiffened at the suggestion. “What? No, I . . .” My mind raced. I honestly couldn’t remember when I’d had a period last, but I knew it was before I’d begun seeing Oliver. Sleeping with Oliver. “Oh God.” A list of strange sensations and occurrences seemed to align themselves in my mind with a firm and almost audible click. I’d been nauseous. Food tasted funny and I didn’t want alcohol. I was pretty sure I’d missed a period . . . and Oliver and I hadn’t used protection after that first timebecause I’d been on the pill. “I’m on the pill,” I said, my voice a dull monotone as I tried to reassure myself.
“People get pregnant on the pill,” Delia said. “It happens.”
I stared at her, probing my body mentally, searching for some feeling that would answer the question with certainty. I could not be pregnant. It just wasn’t possible. Except that it was.
“I think I have a test,” she offered, her voice light and casual. “No reason to freak out until you know. Let me go look.” Delia disappeared to the back of the house and I sat back down at the table, watching her daughters sorting the rocks into piles as Olivia directed her older sister in proper microscope usage. God, I wanted that. But not now. My hand lay absently on my stomach, and I considered. Wouldn’t I know? Shouldn’t I feel something?
Delia returned with a box and handed it to me, and I took it to the bathroom, feeling dumbstruck. “Can I come?” she asked.
“To watch me pee on a stick?”
Her grin seemed out of place as she nodded, but I shrugged. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d been in the bathroom together.
We waited, sitting on the counter with the stick between us while Delia watched a timer on her phone. “One more minute,” she told me just as the sound of shrill voices erupted from the living room. “Mommy!”
She slid off the counter and went to the door. “Be right back,”she said.
Delia was gone more than a minute, mediating whatever battle had erupted between her girls, and I stared at the stick, afraid to pick it up and check. When she didn’t return for what seemed like an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. She returned to find me sitting on the counter staring at the plus sign that had appeared like a beacon of doom on the stick’s white screen.
This was not part of my plan.
Delia had been reassuring, but her words had felt hollow and sounded empty as I thought them over on my way home from the doctor’s office that Friday morning.
“Not everything in life happens because you plan it, Holl.”
“It could, if I wasn’t a careless moron.” I was crying, tears rolling down my cheeks as I drove to work after the appointment that confirmed my pregnancy, trying not to lose it completely. “This changes everything.”
“It will change things, yeah. But it will be okay, honey. Carl and I are here.”
“How am I going to tell Oliver?”
She paused, but then she said, “You just tell him.”
“But what if?—”
“There’s no what if. You tell him. Either he can handle this or he can’t.”
“I haven’t even spoken to him in over a week. To call him and just drop this on him . . .”
“Holland, can I tell you something?”
My silence must have seemed an assent.
“Some of the very best things in my life were unplanned.”
“This is not the time to be cryptic.”
“Carl and I weren’t even engaged when we found out Gigi was on the way.” When she stopped speaking, the silence on the line seemed to echo my surprise.
“Seriously?”
“But our marriage, and her birth? The best things I’ve ever done.”
