1. Zoe
1
Zoe
"My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on." – Joan Rivers
W hoever created the saying, “It can’t get any worse…” clearly needs to get an MRI and a CT scan, along with a full bloodwork and neuropsychological testing. Hell, let’s add a urinalysis, just in case as well. Because I swear, I see two pink lines but also, I shouldn’t be trusted with determining anything at this point since clearly my eyesight has left the building ever since I met Justin. No, scratch that. I am simply blind because there is no other explaining for how I got myself into this situation in the first place.
But those are two pink lines, right?
Well, ten of them from the five tests laid out in front of me, but I must be seeing double from so many lines. Yeah, that’s it. Those are not really two lines, just my shit eyesight. And the never ending throwing up is simply me still being disgusted with Justin’s betrayal two weeks later.
Two weeks. It has been two weeks since the night I swore to never stuff my intuition up my ass. Two weeks of having sleepovers with my toilet bowl and then piling myself up with so much work during the day that I simply didn’t have the time to go throw up some more.
But it was also two weeks of eye-opening and clarity that I have never had before. That next morning after the night I—and pretty much everyone else—found out about Justin’s wife , life turned upside down.
My boss, whom I was slightly scared of, became my best friend and comrade in Justin’s betrayals, and I guess the sun does shine up on you when you are below the crap level because I could not be any more grateful for her. If not for Joy, I would probably still be wallowing in misery and participating in self-destructive thoughts like “what’s wrong with me?” or “why can’t nobody ever love me?” and so on.
But Joy put those to rest real fast.
She’s good like that. She knows when to yell at you until your brain cells snap back in place or shake you until you realize it wasn’t you. It was always him.
Justin is the issue here. He is the manwhore who could never have enough, and it finally caught up with him when over the last couple of weeks, the students he thought it was a good idea to sleep with, decided to come forward and do a little tell all.
Yeah, Justin Hunt is in deep crap now and it almost makes up for everything he has done. Him losing his precious status almost makes up for the fact that I was all but a toy to him. A pretty, willing distraction when he needed one. And not once did he try to contact me or offer a single explanation for anything.
Joy got one, but not me.
Because who am I?
Just some silly, little assistant he could use and forget.
No, I need to snap out of this! I need to remember what Joy said. “ Forget the asshole like dust under your bed. Sweep it and throw it away or else you will keep sneezing.” But it was much easier to keep on track when she was here, working alongside me. However, Joy had to leave a few days ago to go see her father who had been diagnosed with cancer—or that’s what she was told at least—and now I am all alone.
Well, it’s me, the toilet bowl and…ten pink lines.
See? Things could definitely get much, much worse.
A week later I can no longer pretend. I can no longer play the role of a na?ve, in denial girl, hoping that somehow five different brands of in-home tests were all faulty because my vomiting doesn’t cease its fit. My period is nowhere to be seen, breasts are slightly larger and hurt like a mother… And those ten pink lines turn into elevated hCG levels on the blood test I drew myself late at night when there was no one else around.
When not one soul could see me sliding down the wall as my tears ran down my cheeks. When no one could question why I smashed half of the glass tubes in the laboratory or why I cried out and kept asking the universe, “WHY? WHY? WHY?” nonstop.
Through my tear-coated eyes, I look down one more time to the paper clutched tightly in my fist where the simple, English, black letters on white, printing paper state one simple truth…
I am pregnant.
Very pregnant.
Very alone and pregnant.
Very screwed, alone, and pregnant.
I am pretty much every kind of pregnant except the happy and excited one, and I think that kills me more than the fact itself.
Becoming a mother never did make it to my life plan. It never seemed like an option with everything I want to accomplish, yet…
Yet before I even think of jotting down the pros and cons or do any of my regular pragmatic brain crap, my heart has decided to take charge and decide that I will have this baby.
And I will protect her or him with all I’ve got.
Despite the tears still making their exit, I let out a long shaky breath, look down at my still flat stomach and lay my shaky hand on top of it.
“It’s you and me, little one. Just you and me.” Strangely, talking to the tiny life growing inside of me—the one I never saw coming—fills my heart with a whole new emotion, one I don’t understand, yet it makes me smile. A small, unsure lift to the corners of my lips but a smile, nonetheless.
Gently, I draw the palm of my hand across my stomach. “I hope you are ready for this, bug. Because I am not sure I am.”
I don’t know what being a mom is, mine never bothered to show me.
But hell, I’ll crawl to the finish line, dragging myself there on sheer will if I must, but I will give this baby the best life I can.
After I finally sit down and write “the plan.”
So, I am giving myself another two minutes to pity little poor me, to pop the last balloons of illusion I’ve created, to cry and scream in the empty lab until I cut that crap right out. I am giving myself the last two minutes to allow Justin Hunt into my head. The very last two to send him to the lowest pits of hell for making me fall for him. Because he doesn’t deserve a second more.
“Deep breath in and out,” I instruct myself, and do just that. Then squaring off my shoulders, I step over the pile of broken glass, pull my chair out and get my notebook out.
My Life Plan two point oh
Stop crying.
Forget the asshole exists.
Call my dad.
Call Joy.
Schedule an appointment with an OB.
RESEARCH!!!
Live my best life as a single mom.
Give my baby the best life.
FORGET MEN!!!
There. Now, I can do it.
I know, what an “impressive” list, but I already had one of these made at fifteen years old, and I have crossed off nearly every point I had on there. I graduated high school with honors. I got into the best university in America. I work for the one of the most accomplished pathologists in the world and I even had that picture-perfect man…but look what it got me in the end…
A lab full of broken glass and a positive pregnancy test…
So, it’s time to try a different approach.
Call me a coward but it took me a few weeks to call my dad. Even now as my finger is hovering over his name a part of me is terrified of letting it slip and hit dial.
It’s not that I think he would yell at me. Not at all. It’s that I don’t want to be a disappointment to him after all he’s done for me. But every day that has gone by without me talking to him, has been killing me.
I take a deep breath and press on his name.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Zoe girl!” He greets me with excitement like he always had. “You need to call your old man way more often than this! I haven’t heard from you in a few weeks, and I was about to send out a search owl.”
I can’t help the chuckle that escapes me. “Dad, since when are there search owls?”
“Since my daughter forgot me and I had to train one.”
“Mhh.” I roll my lips to stop the laugh. “And how is that going for ya?”
“Oh, it’s going great. Beth knows your scent and I had her find that shirt you left the last time you were home and she brought it to me. Well, she pointed her beak that way, so you better watch out.”
Beth is my dad’s twenty-year-old owl who has no interest in flying, let alone chasing his missing daughter across the country, but that is why I love him. Kevin Holsted is ridiculous and hilarious and so loving, this world doesn’t deserve him.
And neither did my mother.
Well, that woman didn’t deserve anyone, if we are honest here, so it’s no wonder both my biological sperm donor left her, and my stepdad—who I consider my father—did too.
No, Kevin is not the man who I share a DNA with, but he is the one who’s always been more of a parent to me than anyone else, and I think him seeing how my mother treated me was what made him snap, pack his and my clothes, and leave her when I was sixteen.
I still remember that day and I can still feel the sting of my cheek where she slapped me.
Life with Kelly Jones-Holstead was hard but not in the physically abusive way. No, up until that day, she never touched me like that. It was always her words that did the trick.
My mother is a demanding, cold, overachieving bitch and she never did anything to hide that fact. And everyone in her life was supposed to live up to her standards; if we didn’t, she made sure we knew how displeased she was with us.
My biological father left when I was a newborn and apparently, it was my fault because based on her words, I cried too much as a baby and he couldn’t listen to it anymore…
Like I said, she wanted everyone to live in her form of perfection and somehow, she was lucky to find Kevin when I was around five years old, and that man took all her shit until that one day.
He helped me with homework so she wouldn’t yell at me if I got a bad grade. He covered for me when I wanted to go hang out with friends instead of studying like she preferred I do twenty-four-seven.
Even when I was six years old.
He was the man who taught me how to ride a bike, swim, cook and drive a car. He was the one who signed me up for dance and showed up for the competitions because mom always thought it was a waste of time and I should just do more Spelling Bees.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed school, and I was good at it, but not to the manic point she wanted me to.
In all honesty, I think Dad stayed with her for as long as he did because of me. Because he knew she would ride me to death if he wasn’t there, but eventually, even his angelic patience ran out and thank God for it. I was legally his daughter by that time, so we finally left and never looked back.
Sucks that same can’t be said about all the trauma she left me to deal with.
“I think you should give her a little break in training and all since here I am, calling you.”
“Fine, fine, we will stop for now. But stay vigilant. Beth will come for ya.” This time I do finally let out a loud laugh and he joins in on the other end.
“Oh God, thank you for this, Dad. I really needed a good laugh right about now,” I admit to him, wiping the tears off my eyes.
And just like that all the humor is gone as if he can sense why I am calling. “Zoe? What’s going on, honey?”
Shit, I had this whole plan of what to say to him—yes, I wrote out another list or ten in the last two weeks—but now my smile is replaced with those tears I promised not to have anymore, and my words get lost.
Damn it, I keep deviating from my plan. I keep messing it up because I cry way more than I should and I still think about the bastard when I shouldn’t at all.
But how could I not when he didn’t even bother to say “Hello” to me when we crossed path in the hallway the other day. No, he was just casually walking with a suitcase in his hand—he must’ve just come back from seeing Joy in Loverly Cave—and all I got from him was a nod.
A nod!
After a year of what I thought was a loving relationship. It has been over a month since the awards ceremony and all I got was a nod.
I almost let it go. I almost kept walking in the other direction when my pathetic heart decided to give him one last chance. I turned around, and looking at his retreating form, I said, “I’m pregnant.”
Justin stopped dead in his tracks, freezing right there on the spot before slowly turning to face me. A part of me—that desperate one—wanted to believe he would react somehow, I don’t know, positive? Maybe he’d be happy?
But once again, I was proven wrong when the bastard opened his mouth. “And what? Need me to pay for the abortion?”
There. That was that final snip.
“The only thing we will abort are your balls. Want me to pay for that?” I told him with a deep sneer he’s never seen on my previously docile face.
“So what do you want from me? Be a daddy? Sorry to break it to you, but I’m not interested,” he said with that sweet disgust.
The blood in my veins was reaching a dangerously high level, threatening to claw his lying tongue out but I still managed to say, “The only thing I want from you is a signed document saying you give up any and all rights to my baby.”
“I knew you were smart,” he answered with a patronizing smile. “I’ll send it your way by the end of the day. In return, you’ll send one that says your offspring won’t come after me at any point in life.”
My offspring. My .
At least there was one thing already that we shared with my baby. Both of our sperm donors were useless assholes.
I walked away from Justin, sending him the document he wanted, and in return got one I requested that same minute. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I could do this alone and keep the job I loved so much without being affected by seeing him day-to-day and I kept selling that delusion to myself because I was a strong, independent woman but damn it, it still hurts so fucking much.
It hurt when he dismissed his child this easily. Discarded her just like me.
Strong women can hurt too. We can feel too much too. We can be in pain and dying on the inside with none-the-wiser, and that’s what I am doing right now.
“I-I am okay now.”
“What does ‘now’ mean? When were you not okay and why haven’t I heard about it until now ?”
I take a deep breath and decide to just spit it out. “I’m pregnant.”
Silence.
“Dad?” I ask, worried. I should have FaceTimed him. That way I would at least see it if he had a heart attack from my news, but instead, I’m left in the dark and the longer the silence stretches the higher my panic levels are rising. “Daddy, please say something!”
He clears his throat. “You are pregnant.” It’s not a question, more of an amazed statement like I have just told him the best news ever. “You are not joking right now like I was about the whole owl search rubbish, right? You wouldn’t do that to your old man.”
“Nope, I am not joking in the slightest.”
“Oh, thank the Lord,” he exhales loud enough for me to hear it over the phone. “Zoe girl, how dare you tell me that I’m going to be a grandpa over the phone when I can’t hug you right now!”
“Um, well frankly I had no idea you would react like…that.”
“And how else am I supposed to react when my daughter gives me the best news ever?”
“I don’t know, maybe tell her she’s an idiot? Or tell me how irresponsible I am or ask what I was thinking…or hell, ask me about the father of the baby? Aren’t you mad that I am not married and having a baby?” I fling my arms up and down while pacing around the airport—I’ll get back to that—spilling all the insecurities that have been building up in my head over the past few weeks.
“First of all, my daughter could never be called an idiot. And I mean, ever !” he deadpans. “Secondly, if you wanted to be yelled at, I can send you your mother’s phone number. She was always good at yelling for no reason because there is none here. And finally, I assumed he was not in the picture since you’ve never told me about him. You tell me about all your boyfriends, and I don’t care to know about your one-night stands or whatever it is you kids call it these days.”
Great, let’s add shame for lying to my dad to the ever-growing list of my fuck ups because I never did tell him about Justin.
That should have also been a warning sign to me. The fact that I didn’t want to introduce Justin to him should have made me realize my instincts were telling me something. It was as if my brain was left on an island, lighting up SOS signs with fire and all that stuff and I kept flying over it without notice.
“I was seeing someone for a while, Dad, I just never told you about him since he was my boss. Well, my boss’s boss and I didn’t know how to explain that.”
“I think you did it fine just now,” he grumbles, clearly not happy I kept it from him. “So, is he or is he not going to be a father?”
“No. He is not.”
“Does he know?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And he asked if I needed him to pay for the abortion.”
Silence echoes through the phone with only dad’s harsh breathing on the other end. After a few beats, he says, “He doesn’t deserve to be in your life then.”
“No. He doesn’t.”
“But maybe keep the door open if one day he realizes his mistake?”
And I wonder where I got my hopeless heart from. Dad and I might not share any blood, but I certainly do take after him.
“Dad, you know how you wish my mom never happened in my life?” I ask but keep going without his answer. “Well, I wish for this baby to never know that lying piece of garbage. The only good thing he did was show us all his true colors.” I’m fuming now, but I’ll take anger over tears any day.
“That’s not the only good thing,” Dad says. “He also contributed his particles to my grandchild.”
“Daaaad,” I groan because leave it up to him to snap me out of my rant just like that. “You are well over the blushing age. You can use the word sperm .”
“I prefer particles because I don’t like to think about some bastard with my little girl like that, okay? Let me be happily oblivious.” Little girl being a twenty-nine-year-old woman. Sure.
“Sorry to disappoint but that’s called delusional.” Right at that moment, a loud voice speaks, announcing that my flight is about to be boarding.
“Where are you?”
About that…I ended up calling Joy before my dad which was a good thing, seeing as she curbed my panic from seeing that damn paperwork Justin sent me. She could sense something was off and told me to come to her. Not asked. Joy doesn’t waste time like that. Nope, it was an order that I gladly took.
I didn’t tell her about my pregnancy when she asked what was wrong, but I could hear her loud and clear without having her tell me that we would be discussing whatever this was as soon as I landed.
“In an airport.”
“Why?”
“I am going to see my boss. She’s in California now.”
“Okay, and when are you coming back?”
“In a week.”
“Great, then I’ll see you in a week.”
“What? You’re coming for a visit?” I ask, now excited to be coming back to Chicago because I don’t see my father enough. He is up in our hometown in Oregon, and unfortunately, it is not as easy for us to make it over to one another with my crazy work schedule.
“No, honey, I’m moving to Chicago.”
“What?” I screech.
“I can’t be the best grandpa across the whole country now, can I?”
“Dad, you don’t need to do that. At least not yet. How about we talk once I’m back, and you wake up on the rational side of the bed?”
“Now who’s the delusional one?” I can hear the smirk in his voice. “Rational was never my thing.”
We say our goodbyes and he promises me to not make any life-changing decisions without us talking about it first, and for the first time since I read those test results, I feel something change in me. I am still scared but I’m no longer destroyed over what Justin did.
Maybe him severing that last cord between us did the trick. Maybe it was my dad’s support.
Or maybe…it’s this weird, giddy feeling I’ve had in my gut ever since I bought this ticket.
The feeling of rightness.
As I hear my boarding group being called up and get into my seat, I feel almost excited for this new chapter in life. Something is calling my name in Loverly Cave, and I can't wait to explore it.