Callie
I lay there in the gray morning light of Tessa's guesthouse, barely able to move, my lower back screaming protest chants in three different languages after a night on the pull-out couch.
I was staring at a stucco ceiling that wasn't mine, in a living room that wasn't mine, listening to the small careful sounds of my son being awake in the bedroom that was his now because I had given it to him because Oliver needs some semblance of structure not to feel like his life is spiraling out of control again due to the actions of his highly unpredictable mother.
Six days. It had been six full days since my whole life imploded in a single morning, and the part that I'd been turning over and over like a smooth stone in my pocket wasn't the firing.
It wasn't even Darren's smug puckered little face.
It was three grown men in my driveway who'd seen me at my actual best for two months.
Who had been inside my house and my body and my kid's life.
Who had told me, more than once, that they had me.
And who, when push came to shove, had taken one single look at a giant friendly bearded man giving me a hug and immediately decided I was a slut.
I rolled onto my side and felt the couch spring give me a stern personal warning.
I had spent the last six days trying to be furious about it and I just kept landing on hurt.
I wanted to hate them, but I hated myself more because I missed them.
I couldn't believe it. The bastards didn't even ask.
They didn't even ask. They had spent two months getting to know me, and the second they had to choose between trusting what they knew and trusting their own worst instincts, they had picked the worst instincts and never even paused.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw little floating zigzags and did the inventory again, because apparently that was just my new morning routine, like a sun salutation but for emotional damage.
The yellow house was on the market. I'd had to call my realtor on Monday morning and she'd been very kind, which somehow made me cry harder than if she'd been brisk and businesslike.
The house I had paid off in July. The house I had thrown every spare dollar at for three years because I wanted Oliver to grow up knowing that no man, no judge, no boss, no act of God could take a roof off his head.
I had killed that mortgage. I had stood on the porch and cried about it like a maniac.
Three months later I had no job, no savings, and a beautiful little yellow house that did not pay for groceries. Which, as it turns out, you still need.
I had been so smart. I had been so careful. I had been a woman with a plan. And my own plan had turned around and chewed off my fingers.
The other inventory item was that I was homeschooling Oliver now, because nothing in this world was going to make me put my eight-year-old back under Darren Beauford's roof.
We had been working through second grade math at the guesthouse kitchen table all week, and my brain was about to implode from all the fractions.
The final inventory item, which I would not be thinking about this morning thank you very much, was that I was probably pregnant. I had not taken a test because taking a test would make it real, and I had used up all my real for the month.
The bedroom door clicked open. Oliver appeared in the doorway in his blue dinosaur pajamas, hair sticking up in five directions, holding his book.
"It's seven twenty-six," he said. "You're not up. That's two minutes off the schedule. I'm flagging it."
I sat up like a woman pulling herself out of a swamp. "I'm up. I'm up. Breakfast in four minutes. I have not failed you."
"You haven't failed me yet today," he corrected, and walked off toward the kitchen.
I made him breakfast and we sat across from each other at the little guesthouse kitchen table that wasn't ours, and I drank a coffee I could not really taste, and watched him eat in his careful Oliver way, and the love I felt for this small particular human went through me like a hot wire, the way it always did.
"Math?" I said.
"Math."
I pulled out the worksheets I'd printed at the library the day before.
He uncapped his pencil with ceremony. We worked through about fifteen minutes of fractions in which I learned that my son has been quietly understanding fractions for at least two years and was being polite about letting me explain them, which is somehow harder than it had ever been when he was just one of twenty-two kids in my class.
As his teacher I could be a teacher. As his mother trying to be a teacher I could be neither correctly.
Then, without looking up from his page:
"Mom. When am I going to see Noah and Beth and Emma again?"
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
I had been waiting for this question. I had rehearsed twelve different answers in twelve different shower-mind monologues. None of them came out of my mouth.
"Soon, baby," I said. My voice sounded weird and bright, like a song from a commercial. "Soon."
He looked at me with that flat level Oliver look that has been reading my face since he was two years old. "Returning to school would offer me appropriate peer interaction and access to specialized curriculum I cannot replicate at this kitchen table." He paused. "I miss them, Mom."
It was the gentlest, most reasonable knife anyone had ever put into my chest. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, and could not produce a single word, so I just nodded and squeezed his hand and watched him go quietly back to his worksheet.
Twenty-three minutes into fraction worksheet number two, the guesthouse door blew open without a knock.
"GOOD MORNING TO MY VERY BEST FRIEND AND HER VERY BEST KID." Tessa swept in with her hair in a giant bun on top of her head, holding a brown paper bag the size of a small toddler. "Today's the day. Get up. Vaughn is twelve seconds behind me and he's coming for the boy."
"Tessa."
"Don't Tessa me. You have been telling me you'll take a test tomorrow for six tomorrows in a row. Today is no longer a tomorrow. Today is a today."
The blood drained out of my face and pooled approximately in my left elbow. Oliver looked up from his fractions with mild interest.
"Mom," he said. "Aunt Tessa is using her loud voice. Why is she holding a paper bag."
"Adult business, my man," Tessa said. "Boring. You'd hate it."
The screen door creaked and Vaughn filled the doorway, all of him, looking like a tattooed mountain in a flannel. "Hey buddy. There's a bread emergency down at the pond. The ducks have started a small political movement. I need backup."
Oliver looked at me. He looked at Vaughn.
He looked at his worksheet with the studious squint of a man weighing whether emergency duck politics outranked second-grade math, and apparently they did, because he marked his place with the gentleness of a librarian retiring a rare manuscript, closed the book, stood up, and announced, "Finally.
Something is happening." Then he walked over to Vaughn, who held out one massive hand like he was inviting a small dignitary to dinner.
Oliver took it. The screen door slapped shut behind them.
I was alone with my best friend and a bag full of pee tests.
"Now." Tessa grabbed my wrist and physically hauled me off the kitchen chair. "Bedroom. March."
"I'm not ready."
"You've been not ready since pancakes, twin. Move."
She dumped the bag on the bed I wasn't sleeping in. Five boxes. Five different brands. CVS. Walgreens. First Response. ClearBlue. Some off-brand one with a generic-looking woman on the front that I sincerely hoped was at least eighty percent reliable.
"I went scientific," Tessa said. "Three different drugstores so the cashiers wouldn't piece it together.
I have been carrying these around in my trunk for three days waiting for you to be ready.
You are out of ready. Now please go pee on all of them at once.
You can use a cup if you want, that's how I did it. In retrospect, the cup was a lot."
I picked up the First Response box. My hand was shaking.
"What if it's positive."
"Then we are officially in this together and the cosmos will have to deal with the both of us."
"What if it's negative."
She softened. "Then it's negative. Either way, you find out today. You can't keep walking around in maybe-land. Maybe-land is making you sleep on a couch and not eat lunch. Maybe-land has gotten its hours."
I went into the bathroom.
I will spare us all the technical specifics of peeing on five sticks while a pregnant woman talks to you cheerfully through a closed door about the time her cousin tried this maneuver and ended up doing it on her own hand.
I lined them up on the edge of the sink.
I sat down on the cold tile with my back against the tub and I stared at the bath mat.
Tessa came in and sat down next to me without asking, the way she had been doing since we were nineteen and I called her crying from the bathroom of a frat house, and slid her hand into mine.
"Three minutes," she said.
We sat.
I thought about Oliver, about the seven-thirty breakfast and the boy who already knew everything about fractions.
I thought about my yellow house with a sign in the yard.
I thought about how I’d probably have to move states to find another teaching job if we couldn’t take down Darren Beauford.
But mostly, I thought about three men I was supposed to be done thinking about.
"Time," Tessa said.
I closed my eyes.
"Open them, you coward."
I opened them.
Two pink lines. Two pink lines. Two pink lines. Two pink lines. And, on the generic-looking-woman one, in case you were wondering, two pink lines.
Five for five. Apparently the universe had decided subtlety was for cowards.
The sob that came out of me was an ugly one.
It was the kind that pulls out of the part of you where you keep every feeling you have ever buried and refused to look at since middle school, and it brought all of them up with it on the way out.
Tessa scooched in tight and wrapped her whole self around me, and I cried into her shoulder, and her shoulder cried right back, because she was already a mess just on principle.
"Okay," she breathed me through it. "Okay. Okay."
"I don't know how to do this."
"You know how to do this. You've done this. You did it harder than this and alone. You're not alone now."
"I am, though. The dads of this baby think I'm a—"
"Stop." She pulled back and put her hands on my face. Her eyes were wet and her mascara had given up the ghost. "Listen to me very carefully. You are not alone. I'm seventeen weeks now. You are pee-stick weeks. We are officially pregnancy twins. Do you understand what that means."
"It means our hormones are about to start a small war and nobody's safe."
"It means," she said, "I am going to put on so much weight that my husband is going to have to use a forklift to romance me, and you are going to throw up in five different parking lots, and we are going to do every single revolting beautiful insane minute of it together.
Side by side. Twin to twin. And god help anybody who tries to come between us during the third trimester, because I have already started doing the rage push-ups. "
A laugh came out of me. A wet stupid honking laugh with tears and snot. It was the first real laugh I'd produced in six days. It tasted like medicine.
She cackle-snorted, which made me cackle-snort, which made her cackle-snort harder, which made me laugh so hard I genuinely worried about the integrity of my bladder, which felt deeply ironic given that I had just used it five times in a row.
We sat there on her bathroom floor for a long time. Two women, five tests, a tile imprint forming on the back of my thighs, my best friend's hand on my stomach, my hand on hers. Pregnancy twins. The smallest most absurd most life-saving piece of solid ground I had stood on in a week.
I was not okay. I would not be okay for a long time. But for the first time since the driveway, I knew with bone-deep certainty that I was not going to crumble.
I was going to figure this out.
I just had to do it like I did everything else, which was badly and chaotically and with one extremely committed snort-laughing maniac in my corner.
And whatever was waiting for me out there was going to have to come through her first.
That wasn't the whole truth, though. The whole truth was that I would have given anything for it to be one of them next to me on this bathroom floor instead.
And I was ashamed of that, in a deep ugly place, because they had not earned the right to be missed and I missed them anyway.
Three men who had failed me, and a body that was making a fourth person inside it, and the loneliest part of the whole thing was that I couldn't even admit out loud who I actually wished was here.