IVY
A s a kid, I enjoyed my trips to the doctor. I was tiny and adorable. Geraldine dressed me in cute clothes. Nurses and other parents fawned over me throughout the visits. I was treated like a delicate flower. Everyone seemed to be working as a team to help me thrive. Geraldine smiled a lot during those visits. I liked how I made her happy.
By my teens, the visits were more like a chore. Geraldine barely smiled at all. No one thought I was cute anymore. Everything felt dour, and I began to sense I was a burden.
The long scar down my chest was no longer a reminder of how I fought to survive, like the doctors said when I was little. It was just something to hide.
Today, at the northside hospital, I felt shame when I revealed my scar to the doctor. Shay and Elle didn’t hide their shock. I shouldn’t have kept them in the room, but I’d never gone to the doctor alone before.
The doctor seemed tense around me. I thought I was doing something wrong. I eventually realized he was nervous around Shay and Elle. When the former began to tear up over my scar, the doctor mellowed out some.
In my head, the Reed family was a little rough around the edges yet totally normal. Except that wasn’t reality.
Clint was the boss of a motorcycle club. His dad rode with one for decades. These were dangerous people, even if they treated me with kid gloves.
The doctor’s office was located at the main hospital, so we were able to get tests done. I kept expecting to hear something bad, but no one said anything.
Since the doctor couldn’t go over the test results until after lunch, Shay, Elle, and I went to the hospital café to eat.
I felt like I weighed a million pounds. I could barely shuffle from one place to another. The wild voice in my head had been beaten into submission. I accepted how I would never be anyone except Geraldine’s defective daughter.
I tried to remember how it felt to ride on the back of Clint’s motorcycle. That memory seemed like a lie. Closing my eyes tight, I forced my brain to reach past the darkness clouding my every thought to the feel of holding onto Clint. I remembered how my skirt whipped around my thighs, and my legs got cold in the breeze. My cheek was against his leather jacket. The rumbling between my thighs awoke something exciting inside me.
Opening my eyes, I felt more grounded in the present. I found Shay and Elle watching me. We hadn’t spoken since the heart MRI.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled without thinking.
“Does it hurt?” Shay asked me, getting teary-eyed. “I don’t know why I was expecting a little scar. I guess because you were a baby when you had the surgeries. I don’t know how things work.”
“It doesn’t hurt. I often forget it’s there.”
Shay breathed easier while Elle’s gaze flashed between the two of us. She finally focused on me.
“If the doctor says you’re too fragile to carry a baby, I’ll do it for you and Clint,” she said and then added quietly, “I liked being pregnant with Sutter, and I want my brother to have everything he needs to be happy.”
“That’s generous of you,” I mumbled, feeling guilty for something that hadn’t even happened yet. “But what if the doctor says I’m too fragile to do other stuff?”
“Is that a real thing?” Elle asked Shay, who shrugged. “Can you be too weak for the beast with two backs?”
“First of all,” Shay told Elle, “I always love when you’re eloquent. Nicely done.” Elle smiled and gave a prom queen-style wave. “Secondly, let’s not worry about problems until they are in front of us.”
Elle shook her head. “Maybe it’s all this time at the hospital, but I want to flip out and be irrational now.”
“Well, your father has never been a worrier,” Shay said and smiled at me. “Ford isn’t a man who overanalyzes things. Sometimes, that’s the wrong move. But he doesn’t live his life stressed out. I think we should imitate him.”
I pictured Ford Reed in my mind. His son inherited many of his attractive features.
A sense of safety wrapped around me when I imagined Clint. His blue eyes were always so clear of fear or doubt. He wasn’t a man who flinched when life came at him.
Though I’d never be that strong, I could keep my eyes dry through the final part of our hours-long visit to the hospital.
Even when the doctor entered the room and took a long time looking over the test results, I refused to break down and cry. Instead, I focused on Shay holding my left hand while Elle held my right.
“Everything looks good,” the doctor announced.
“Define what you mean by ‘good,’ Doc?” Elle insisted, wearing that grumpy expression she used earlier on a rude nurse. “Do you mean she can live a normal life? Or do you mean she won’t die in the next day or two? Let’s talk specifics.”
The doctor didn’t react to the edge in her voice, yet he stared hard at me as if afraid to look elsewhere.
“You heart looks healthy. That doesn’t mean problems can’t arise in the future. You’re still young. But right now, based on the tests we ran, I don’t see why you can’t live a normal life for a woman your age.”
I’d been so prepared for bad news that his positive words didn’t register right away. Once the truth hit me, my mind flashed with hopes for my future.
“Who do I talk to about birth control?” I blurted out, jumping right to the point.
By the time we were back in Shay’s SUV, I had a prescription for pills and emergency birth control.
“You’ll need to be careful,” Elle told me as we drove back to the Reed family home. “These regular pills take a little bit to kick in. So, if you and Clint decide to start splashing jizz all over your lady cavern, you’ll need to take the emergency stuff to make sure you don’t create something that demands more care than a Chihuahua.”
Shay looked at me through the rearview and insisted, “And don’t try to be stealth with Clint. I didn’t raise him to think certain things were girl worries and other things were boy worries. He needs to help you keep track of everything, so getting pregnant is a choice rather than a mistake.”
“Hey,” Elle gasped, turning to her mom in the front seat.
“Oh, stop. You know you fucked up.”
“How can you say that? It was always my plan to get knocked up by a stranger in Mexico while wasted off my fucking ass.”
“Goal achieved then.”
Elle smiled back at me. “You should know that birth control works for a lot of things. My periods are great now. I’m less moody each month. It’s awesome, but I haven’t tested the pills for pregnancy. Meaning, even if you do everything right, shit happens. That’s why you need to be honest with Clint since you’ll both need to live with the consequences if the birth control doesn’t work.”
“It’ll work,” Shay said and smiled at me through the rearview. “Ford and I were together for five years before Clint came along. No oopsies. It was all by design.”
“Stop hassling me,” Elle grumbled.
“You know what you did, hussy.”
As the women laughed up front, I wondered about Clint. I hadn’t texted him all day except to respond to his messages asking if I was having fun. I didn’t want to lie, so I only told him that his mom and sister made me feel included and appreciated. I immediately felt stupid once I hit send since my words sounded so canned.
As Shay taunted Elle over her “booze baby,” I realized this family didn’t hold back. They loved to speak up and mess with each other. But they were also incredibly tight-knit.
My family was never close that way, despite us living together in the same house. Everyone was stuck in their own messed-up bubbles. We didn’t share our problems or goof around like Shay did right now with Elle.
I craved the closeness they shared. If I ever wanted to truly bond with these people, I had to speak up and stop behaving like a curious observer.