9. Haley
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Haley
“Did you eat anything this morning?”
I stared out the passenger window of Megan’s car, watching the strip malls blur past. “I had tea.”
“Tea is not food, Haley.”
“It had honey in it.”
“Honey is also not food.” Megan glanced at me. “You look like death, by the way. Just so you know.”
“Thanks. That’s exactly what I needed to hear on my way to my first prenatal appointment.”
“I’m your best friend. It’s my job to tell you when you look like a corpse.” She reached over and squeezed my knee. “We’ll get breakfast after. Waffles. The big fluffy ones with the strawberries.”
“I don’t know if I can eat waffles.”
“You can watch me eat waffles. That’s almost the same thing.”
I laughed. It came out weak, barely a sound at all, but Megan grinned like she’d won a prize. She’d been doing this since I showed up on her doorstep. Keeping things light. Making jokes. Refusing to let me sink completely into the pit I’d been circling for days.
“You didn’t have to come with me, you know.” I picked at a thread on my sleeve. “I could have done this alone.”
“Absolutely not.” She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re not sitting in some doctor’s office by yourself while they poke at your uterus. That’s not happening. I’m your person. This is what persons do.”
“Persons isn’t a word.”
“It is now. I just made it one.”
“You can’t just make up words.”
“I can do whatever I want. I’m driving.”
The clinic was in a medical complex on the other side of town. Megan pulled into the parking lot and found a spot near the entrance, and I sat there for a moment with my hand on the door handle, trying to convince myself to move.
“Hey.” Megan’s voice was softer now. “You’ve got this. It’s just an appointment. They’re going to tell you everything is fine, and then we’re going to eat waffles, and then we’re going to go home and watch terrible reality television until we both fall asleep.”
“That sounds like a perfect day, actually.”
“It’s going to be a perfect day.” She got out of the car and came around to my side, opening the door for me. “Now get your ass out of this car and let’s go see your baby.”
The waiting room was full of couples.
I noticed it the second we walked in. Every chair seemed to have a woman with a belly and a man beside her, holding her hand or rubbing her back or flipping through one of the parenting magazines on the side table.
Happy couples. Excited couples. Couples who were doing this the way you were supposed to do it.
I felt every single one of them like a bruise.
Megan signed me in at the front desk and led me to two empty chairs in the corner. I sat down and stared at my hands, trying not to look at the pregnant woman across from me, the one who was far enough along to look like she might pop at any second.
“First one?”
I looked up. The woman was smiling at me, her hand resting on her enormous belly.
“Is your husband parking the car?” she asked.
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. The question was so innocent, and I had no idea how to answer it.
“No husband,” Megan answered before I could. “Just us. We’re the package deal.”
The woman nodded and went back to her magazine.
I bit down on the laugh that was trying to escape, because the other option was crying in a room full of strangers.
God, this is going to be the rest of my life, isn’t it. Doctor’s appointments and school plays and birthday parties, and every single time someone’s going to ask where my husband is. Every single time I’m going to have to explain, or deflect, or watch Megan jump in and save me.
A name on a form with a blank next to “father.”
That’s what my kid was going to have. A blank space where a person should be.
Megan squeezed my knee. “Hey. Stop spiraling. I can hear you spiraling.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
“Haley Shaw?”
I looked up. A nurse was standing in the doorway with a clipboard.
“That’s you.” Megan stood up and pulled me to my feet. “Come on. Let’s go see what’s cooking in there.”
“Please never refer to my pregnancy as ‘what’s cooking’ again.”
“No promises.”
The exam room had posters on the walls showing the stages of fetal development. I changed into the paper gown they gave me and sat on the exam table, feeling ridiculous and more nervous than I’d ever been in my life.
The tech who came in was older, maybe sixty, with gray hair pulled back in a practical bun.
She had the kind of face that said she’d done this ten thousand times and still meant it.
She introduced herself as Linda and didn’t ask about a father, didn’t make any assumptions, just talked me through what was going to happen and where to look on the screen.
“This gel is going to be cold.” She squirted it onto my stomach. “Everyone always jumps a little.”
I jumped a little.
“Told you.” She smiled and started moving the wand across my belly, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
Megan was standing at my shoulder, holding my hand hard enough to bruise. I didn’t tell her to stop. I needed the pressure. I needed to feel anchored while I waited to find out if the life growing inside me was actually okay.
“There it is.” Linda pointed at the screen, at a tiny blob that didn’t look like much of anything. “You see that little flicker right there?”
I saw it. A tiny pulse of movement in the middle of all that gray.
“That’s the heartbeat. Let me turn up the sound so you can hear it.”
She pressed a button and the room filled with noise. So much louder than a thing that small had any right to be. A rhythm. A drumbeat. The sound of a life that didn’t exist a few weeks ago and was now real and undeniable.
“Good strong heartbeat.” Linda nodded at the screen. “Hundred and sixty-two beats per minute. Right where we want it.”
That’s mine.
That’s actually mine.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I just lay there staring at the screen, at the tiny flicker, at the proof that this was real.
“That’s your baby, Hales.” Megan’s voice cracked somewhere above me. “That’s your actual baby.”
I watched the little pulse on the screen and felt everything shift. The fear that had been wound tight in my chest for days finally loosened its grip.
For the first time since the office, since the bathroom, since all of it, I felt like I might actually be okay.
This is the thing I chose. Not the thing that happened to me.
Whatever came next, whatever battles I had to fight with Caleb and Diane and all the lawyers they could afford, this baby was mine.
I was choosing it.
“Everything looks perfect.” Linda wiped the gel off my stomach and handed me a tissue. “I’m printing you some photos to take home. First appointment souvenir.”
She handed me the printouts a few minutes later. Small black and white images with my name and the date printed in the corner. I held them the whole way out of the clinic, gripping them like they might blow away if I loosened my fingers.
In the car, I was still staring at them.
“You’ve looked at that thing forty times.” Megan started the engine.
“I’m allowed.”
“I’m just saying.” She glanced over at me. “At some point it’s going to have to leave your hands.”
“Not yet.”
She pulled out of the parking lot. “So. October baby. That means you’ll be huge all summer. In the heat. That’s going to be fun.”
“Thanks for that.”
“I’m just preparing you for reality. You’re going to be sweaty and uncomfortable and you’re going to hate everyone, and I’m going to be there the whole time bringing you ice cream.”
“That actually sounds okay.”
“It’s going to be great. We’ll get you one of those little portable fans.”
My phone buzzed in my purse. I pulled it out and saw the name on the screen.
James.
Megan’s eyebrows did a whole sentence without her saying anything. I could practically hear her thoughts from the driver’s seat, but I ignored her and answered.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” His voice was warm, and I felt my shoulders relax without meaning to. “How’d it go?”
“Good. Heartbeat’s strong.” I looked down at the printout in my other hand, at the tiny blur that was somehow going to become a person. “Due in October.”
“October.” A beat of silence on his end, and I could picture him processing, doing the math, figuring out timelines. “Okay. Good.”
And he meant it. I could hear him mean it. The word wasn’t just filler. He actually cared about the answer.
“Listen, I sent an agent over to Megan’s.” His voice shifted into that practical tone he used when he was trying to help without making a big deal about it. “Figured you’d want to start looking at places. Get locked in before the baby comes.”
“James, I don’t think-”
“Don’t worry about the deposit. Same company my agent uses. Deposit’s on me.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the seat. This man. This impossible, generous, infuriating man.
“James, I can’t let you do that.”
“It’s my niece or nephew, Hales.” He said it simply. “Least I can do.”
“That’s too much. I can’t just accept-”
“Come on.” His voice lightened, a hint of teasing creeping in. “Long as you don’t trash the place entirely, I get the deposit back. Low risk.”
I was laughing before I meant to. The sound surprised me, the first genuine laugh all day. Megan shot me a look from the driver’s seat but didn’t say anything.
“Okay. Fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I traced my finger along the edge of the ultrasound photo. “Thank you. For helping out.”
“Anytime, Haley.”
I hung up and slipped the phone back in my purse, still feeling the warmth of his voice in my chest. Megan was watching me at the red light, her eyes flicking between my face and the road, not saying a single word.
From Megan, that said everything.
“What.”
“I didn’t say anything.” She turned back to the windshield, her lips pressed together like she was physically restraining herself.
“You’re doing the thing with your face.”
“I’m driving, Haley.” But she was smiling, that knowing smile she’d been giving me since seventh grade, the one that meant she saw right through me.
I turned to the window so I didn’t have to see it.