Chapter 51
THE AWKWARD FACTS OF LIFE
Zane wanted to jump in here, but he couldn’t, could he? This was up to Skylar.
She was still hesitating when Scarlett said, “How did you get leave, Dad? The All Blacks don’t give leave for things like somebody being ill. Only when somebody dies.”
“I knew it,” Finlay said. “Mum’s dying, isn’t she?”
“No,” Scarlett said, “the person has to actually be dead. So he couldn’t have got leave for that.”
“But he couldn’t have got back on time anyway!” Finlay said. “Not from Fiji, when Mum wasn’t even out of hospital yet!”
“Yes, but he’d only have been one day late,” Scarlett said. “And it’s been three days. So how?”
How indeed? He had no clue how to answer this.
Skylar came to the rescue once again. Or maybe not, because she said, “It wasn’t cancer. It was a pregnancy.”
The kids all looked at each other. Then Scarlett said, “You had an abortion?”
“No,” Skylar said. “I had an ectopic pregnancy. The fertilized egg implanted in the wrong place, where it couldn’t grow, so it had to be removed.”
Scarlett said, “How would that happen? We learned about pregnancy in school, and the egg always goes to the same place. To the uterus.”
“Oh, gross,” Finlay said.
“You were the one who wanted to know,” Scarlett said. “And it’s how you were born. If it’s how you’re born, how can it be gross? You grew in your mum’s uterus, and then you came down out of her—”
Skylar said, “All right. That’s enough of that. We don’t need to go into all that now. People aren’t interested in that.” She’d been looking tense, though, and now, she was trying not to laugh at the revolted expression on Finlay’s face, so that was better.
Duncan said, “I’d like to know how people get born. They never tell you stuff like that in school.”
“Yes, they do,” Scarlett said. “They just haven’t told you yet, because you’re not mature enough.”
“I am so,” Duncan said. “Anyway, why would you have to be mature just to learn something?”
Olive said, “They tell you in books, too.”
“What books?” Duncan said. “Not in the books I read.”
“I want to know too,” Georgia said. “We learned about how rats get born, but not about babies. Are you going to have a baby, Skylar? You aren’t fat enough, I don’t think.”
“You don’t get fat straight away,” Scarlett said. “The baby grows, like I said. But the whole point is that she isn’t going to have a baby. She was going to, but it was growing in the wrong place.”
“Oh,” Georgia said. “But where did the baby go?”
“It died,” Scarlett said.
“It did?” Georgia looked stricken. “Were you very sad, Skylar? If a baby died, I would be very sad.”
“I’d be sad too,” George said. “We had a cat before Snowball, and it died. A baby would be even sadder.”
“My rat died too,” Georgia said. “Well, she wasn’t exactly mine, because she was the class rat, but she was living in my room, and she died. It was very, very sad.”
“I know,” George said. “Gladys.”
“Excuse me?” Scarlett said. “The point? We’re not talking about rats!”
“We’re talking about being sad that somebody died, though,” George said. “So that’s the same.”
Finlay said, “But it isn’t cancer, Mum? You’re not going to keep being ill?”
“No,” Skylar said. “I promise. I’m healing right this minute, and I’m going to be fine.”
“I still don’t understand how,” Scarlett said. “And Finlay doesn’t either. If he doesn’t know, it’ll make him more worried.”
“OK,” Skylar said. “Give me that pad of paper and a marker, please.”
What did she do then? She draw the outline of a woman’s torso, that’s what, and sketched in the reproductive organs. Not what he would’ve done, but what did he know?
“These are the ovaries,” she said, “and these long things are the fallopian tubes. An egg—that’s the woman’s part of starting a baby—comes out of one of the ovaries once a month and travels down the fallopian tube to the uterus, which is here in the middle.
The egg’s the same idea as a chicken egg, but much, much smaller, and with no shell.
If it’s fertilized by a sperm from a man, it becomes an embryo, which is sort of the combination of the mum and the dad, which is why you look like your mum and like your dad, because you have both halves in you.
Again, like a chicken. If there’s a rooster around to fertilize the egg, it can grow into a baby chick.
Otherwise, it’s just an unfertilized egg, and we eat it.
But a mammal grows inside the mum’s body, not outside with a shell.
The uterus is a very soft, warm place where the embryo can grow.
When a woman isn’t pregnant, it’s about the size of a pear, but it’s a pretty amazing organ, because it can grow big enough to hold a human baby, and then shrink again once the baby’s born.
That’s when the mum looks fat, Georgia; once the baby starts growing bigger. ”
“But how does it get out?” Georgia asked.
“Here.” Yes, she sketched that in, too. “There’s an opening in a woman’s body—and a girl’s body, too—called the vagina, and it does a couple of things.
It’s how all the tiny sperm from the dad get inside—they swim up to the uterus like a race, and the fastest one fertilizes the egg—and it’s also where the baby comes out of when it’s born. ”
“Oh, gross,” Finlay said. “I didn’t want to know all that. I just wanted to know that you weren’t dying!”
“I want to know, though,” Georgia said. “Because Skylar is a very good teacher, and I like learning new things.”
“I already knew,” Olive said, “so I don’t care.”
“But what happened to you?” Scarlett asked. “How come it didn’t work?”
“Because once in a while,” Skylar said, “your body gets mixed up. The egg got fertilized while it was still up in the fallopian tube, here on my right side.” She circled a spot on the drawing, then touched her own side.
“Right here. But instead of traveling down to the uterus after it was fertilized, it burrowed in right where it was instead. It grew there over some weeks, at least as much as it could, but the fallopian tube isn’t like the uterus.
It can’t expand, so the embryo couldn’t grow past a certain point.
It would never have become a baby.” Her voice shook a bit on the idea.
‘Potential’ could be a bloody sad word. “But it kept getting bigger anyway, until it made me hurt enough that I knew something was wrong. Your dad got me to hospital, the doctor took it out, and now I’m getting better.
” She set her marker down. “No cancer, no illness, and no worries. I’ll be fine. ”
“But how did the part from the dad get there?” George asked. “Our Dad died already.”
Scarlett said, “Because the dad wasn’t him. It was our dad.” She looked at Zane. Accusingly, possibly. “You.”
“Yeh,” he said. “Me.”
“No,” Georgia said, “because Daddy never said we were going to have another baby. He would’ve said.”
“Oh, my God,” Scarlett said. “You’re such a child.”
“But I am a child!” Georgia said. “I’m five. I don’t know how to be a grownup!”
“Well, you see,” Skylar said, “the pregnancy was hiding. I didn’t know it was there, and neither did your dad.”
“But—” Georgia began.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Scarlett said. “They had sex. Obviously. It wasn’t safe sex, because if you have safe sex, you don’t get pregnant.”
Duncan said, “Dad said we weren’t supposed to talk about that.”
“Except that we have to talk about it,” Scarlett said, “because they made a baby.”
“But there isn’t a baby,” Georgia said.
Scarlett slapped her forehead, and Skylar actually laughed. Until Scarlett said, “So it’s better, I guess, that that happened. If you didn’t want to have a baby.”
Skylar didn’t answer right away. She hesitated, then looked at Zane. “Jump in any time here.”
He didn’t want to jump in. He did anyway, because he could hardly leave Skylar to handle this alone, could he? “It was an accident,” he said. “An accidental pregnancy, but accidents happen. That’s why you should pay attention in health class. And practice safe sex,” he decided to add. “Eventually.”
“Oh, man,” Finlay said.
“So if the egg had been in the right place, Skylar,” Scarlett persisted, “in your uterus, you would’ve had an abortion?”
“What’s an abortion?” George asked.
“When you don’t want to be pregnant,” Scarlett said, “so you make it go away.”
“I don’t know,” Skylar said. The woman really did have mana. He’d have been pulling out the ‘adults don’t talk to kids about sex’ card long ago. Whereas she went on to say, “I may well have. Raising a baby isn’t easy. Not when you already have three kids, and you’re a single mum.”
“But it would’ve been Dad’s baby, too,” Scarlett said. “It wouldn’t be just yours.”
“The mum gets to say,” Zane said, “because it’s her body.” He was on Team Finlay here. He didn’t want to have this discussion. Not when he and Skylar had barely had it.
“But what would you want?” Scarlett asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s never going to be an easy conversation, or an easy decision. That’s why it’s better not to have to make it.”
“You realize,” Scarlett said, “that you’re being kind of a bad example.”
“Oh, I realize,” he said.
“I still think it’s sad that there wasn’t a baby,” Georgia said. “It would be fun to have a baby at our house. Babies are cute.”
“They’re heaps of work, though,” Scarlett said.
“They poo in their nappies for ages,” Finlay said, “until they get potty-trained. And your parents talk about potty training, and your grandparents talk about it, and the baby talks about it, and everybody who comes to your house talks about it. Sometimes they tell you to show the baby how to go in the potty, and then you have to talk about potty training.”
“Babies can’t talk,” George said.
“It’s not a baby then,” Finlay said. “It’s, like, three years old.”
Skylar had both hands on the table, Zane suddenly realized.
She’d gone paler, too. Too much time sitting up, and probably being emotional, however much she tried to pretend she was fine.
He said, “Well, that’s cleared the air, anyway.
And now I’m going to help Skylar back to bed.
Then I’m going to clean that bath, and after that, I’ll get you and Finlay to help me make lunch, Scarlett, and set up that grocery delivery account. Let’s put those new ideas to the test.”
Stupid hormones. Stupid weakness. It had been a laparoscopic surgery, and there was no reason she should still be this tired.
Her skin was tingling, though, and she was getting a bit lightheaded.
She was glad of Zane’s arm as he took her back to the room.
He also put the throw over her once she got there, and made sure the remote and her glass of water were on the nightstand.
Not that she wanted to watch TV. She wanted to put in an earbud, listen to an audiobook for about five minutes, and fall asleep.
She roused herself enough to say, though, “You did well. That wasn’t easy.”
“No.” He sat on the bed beside her and stroked her hair. She loved it when he did that. “So did you. When you started with the diagram …” He shook his head and laughed a little. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, she’s such a natural-born teacher. And she’s got mana to burn.’”
“Mm.” His voice was nice. Deep and smooth. Like a chocolate river, she thought hazily. I’d like another baby, she thought, halfway between waking and sleep. Yours. Sometime.
“Me too,” he said, so he’d heard her thought. Or something. His weight was warm beside her, and she wished he’d stay. He wouldn’t, though. He couldn’t. Pity.
Never mind. She’d have a rest, and then she’d …
She didn’t finish the thought.