Chapter 16
Laura
I’m up early. Five a.m. It’s the best time to get breakfast without getting in the way or answering any questions about why I’ve been hanging around the house for so long.
John comes in wearing his hi-vis. Mom packed him a big lunch last night, which will go in the chiller in his truck. He’s heading out for a while, I’d say. A few days at least.
“Hey,” he grunts at me while pouring himself a gallon of coffee.
“Hi,” I say, eating the yogurt that is going to make Serenity lose her shit later if I don’t go out to replace it.
“You can go back to school today,” John says. “You don’t need to hide out in the house anymore.”
“Oh?”
“That teacher fuck was waiting outside your apartment,” he says. “We beat the brakes off him. Nobody fucks with my family.”
I am seeing a whole new side of this man.
“You beat him up? He’s famous.”
“Yeah, famous people got ribs and balls too. And if he comes near you again, I’ll cut the latter off. So you can go to school, or go back to your apartment, or do whatever the fuck you want. He’s not going to bother you anymore.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Just know he’s not going to fuck with you.”
I am skeptical. I feel as though there’s nothing anybody could do to Sam to make him afraid. Sam doesn’t seem to have a sense of fear as far as I can tell. But I also know that John showing up probably means that Sam knows I’m here now.
“How bad did you beat him up? Did you kill him?”
“Nah. He’s too famous to kill. But we ran him off. Don’t worry.”
I do worry, but I appreciate the effort. “Thank you,” I say. “That was really nice of you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Go get back to living, okay?”
I go back to bed. That’s living.
A couple more days pass. I don’t go to class or work. I just don’t feel like it. I like being back home. Reminds me of when I was small and safe. I can’t be touched here. I know that, because Sam hasn’t come in through the window in the middle of the night like he did when I was in my apartment.
I hang out with my sisters, help Mom with the kids, and just generally let the notion of making something of myself slide away. I feel a bit seedy most days too, though I put that down to the fact my whole life has fallen apart.
“Get up,” Serenity says, sitting heavily down on my bed one afternoon. She’s looking at me very expectantly, and she’s carrying a brown paper bag in her hand.
“What do you want?”
“You haven’t gotten your period,” she tells me.
I lie there still for a second, processing that statement, and trying to work out how invasive it is.
“How do you know that?”
“Because you always cry the days before it and then you go to bed with a hot water bottle, and you were crying at cute animal reels the other day, but you haven’t started hitting the Advil. You’re late.”
Serenity surprises me. I thought she was too busy guarding her closet against Eva to notice a detail like me not being on my period.
“I got you this,” she says. She hands me the paper bag.
I open it, and there’s a pregnancy test inside.
“No,” I say. “I can’t be.”
But I know I can be. I haven’t been thinking about it, because thinking about it is fucking terrifying on so many different levels.
“Go take it,” she says. “I won’t tell Mom.”
Sometimes she seems so grown up. Other times she talks like we can still be in trouble with Mom. I’m twenty years old. She’s eighteen. We’re both adults who are technically allowed to be pregnant if we want to be.
Do I want to be?
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I should wait a few more days. It might be too early to test right now.”
“When was your last period?”
She’s not going to give up on this. She’s going to badger me and talk about it, and by the time she’s done I know I’m going to have suffered way more than I would have if I’d just gone ahead and done as she demanded in the first place.
I go to the bathroom, open the test, and desecrate it according to the instructions. One line is not pregnant. Two lines is pregnant. I put the little cap on and I know that I can’t look for three minutes.
I glance at one minute.
There are two lines.
There are two. Fucking. Lines. And they only get darker. And darker. Okay. Maybe this one’s broken. Maybe it’s a false positive. It’s probably a false positive.
There’s another test in the box.
I take it again. I don’t know how much pee I’ve got on tap, but it’s enough for a second go.
It’s positive again, somehow even faster than last time.
I come out of the bathroom, and walk straight into my hyper curious sister, who takes one look at me and gasps with excitement, grabbing me by the hand and dragging me back into her room.
“Oh, my god!” Serenity squeals. “I’m going to be an aunt!”
“Shut up!” I say. “Mom will hear you.”
“Who is the dad? Is it Dave? He’s such a fucking idiot, but he might be a decent dad, maybe.”
“It’s not Dave,” I say.
She thinks about that for less than two seconds, and comes to the obvious conclusion.
“Oh, my god, is it the old man who came to the house?”
“He’s really not that old.”
“Oh, my god, it is!”
She should work in criminal justice. She’s worked it all out within seconds.
“You have to take vitamins,” she says.
I’m not thinking about the practicalities at this moment.
“You can share my room, but you have to get up with the baby at night. You’re not going to tell him you got knocked up, right? That would be so gross. He’s too old to be a dad.”
Another fear hits me. If Sam finds out I am pregnant, he will lock me up and never let me go. I am certain of it. And if I can be kidnapped by randoms, then the baby could be too. What the fuck am I going to do?
“Ugh! I’m so jealous!” Serenity exclaims. “You’re going to have an actual baby. I should get pregnant too, then we can have babies together.”
“Serenity, please don’t.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t like me taking the attention. I’d probably have a cuter kid than you,” she says. “But yours will be cute. You’re pretty, and the guy, I guess would have been hot when he was a reasonable age.”
“He’s in his thirties,” I say. I don’t want to defend Sam, but Serenity is acting like he’s practically dead.
“His late thirties,” she says with a tone so damning I can’t help but laugh. This is all so fucked. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Fortunately, at that moment, Mom calls for help. The kids are having a day off school for one reason or another. Strike, maybe, or some kind of teacher only day. Anyway, they need to be watched because they have a habit of getting into everything and anything.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table with the kids and Mom, having some snacks and forgetting about my worries.
Dinner is being made. The little kids have some plain spaghetti to tide them over, but we’re going to be having meatballs for the main event.
Mom is telling me about a video she saw online, one I’m pretty sure I’ve seen, but hearing her describe it is fun.
“Look what I found!”
Eternity throws the pregnancy tests on the table. She’s gone through the trash in the bathroom and identified some objects she hasn’t seen before. Now she wants us all to weigh on what they are.
My mom stares, then looks up at me and my older sisters. “Which one of you…” she says. “Eternity, wash your hands. Now.”
She gets up and helps Eternity wash her hands. Meanwhile, the tests just sit on the table, way too close to the chips. “Which one of you?” Mom repeats.
“It’s me, Mom,” Serenity says. “I’m pregnant.”
Mom swings around fiercely. “You better be fucking kidding me…”
“They’re mine,” I say, intervening in Serenity’s silly little joke before my mom goes through the roof. “I’m pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant?” My mom stares at me. Sasha gets up, goes to the pantry, and starts putting chocolate cookies into her pockets, because she knows nobody is paying any attention to what she is doing right now.
Mom releases Eternity, who climbs up onto the table, noting that Sasha is eating. The twins are unmoved by and disinterested in this revelation. They are also fist-deep in spaghetti. I wish I could be as unbothered, but my solving problems by diving into spaghetti days are probably over.
“You were going to finish school. You were going to…” Her voice cracks a little. I know she’s trying to fight disappointment. My mom is thirty-eight. She got pregnant with me in her last year of high school. She always wanted more for me, and I always wanted to do more for her.
“I’m still going to do all of that, Mom,” I promise her. “Don’t worry.”
“Yeah! I’ll babysit!” Eva offers.
“No. I will babysit,” Serenity replies.
“Well, I’m not babysitting,” Mom says. “You knew better than to do this to yourself.”
That hits me right in the gut. I didn’t do it to myself. It was done to me. On fucking purpose. And now it’s my fault?
I turn around and leave the room.
I can hear my mom calling John as I go. She has him on speaker phone, so I can hear their conversation.
The sound of the road comes through loud on her phone.
“John! It’s Laura. She’s pregnant!”
“She’s pregnant!” Bracken shouts, because everyone’s shouting the word pregnant and Bracken has absolutely no intention of being left out of the fun.
“She’s what?” John’s voice crackles, half-broken over a dodgy line.
“She’s pregnant!”
I turn around in the doorway, because I want to hear his response.
Everyone, right down to the little ones, is now looking at me like I’ve done something horrendous. The word pregnant is getting seared into the babies’ heads right now, and not in a good way.
“What?”
“Pregnant!” Mom enunciates clearly at the top of her lungs.
The line goes dead. Maybe he went through a tunnel.
Everyone is just staring at Mom and me now. Except for Eternity. She’s mashing spaghetti into Bracken’s hair.
There’s a heavy silence, and I can’t help but fill it. I’m not going to act like I did something wrong.
“Do you really want everyone thinking that being pregnant is such a bad thing?”
Mom opens her mouth and I know she’s going to argue by the way the lines between her brows deepen and her upper lip pulls back. But she stops herself.
“I was already scared,” I say. “But this made it so much worse. I don’t have to be here if you don’t want me to be. I can just go…”
She takes a breath. Her eyes fill with tears, and she approaches me, arms open as she realizes, no doubt, that she’s reacting the way her parents reacted when they found out she was going to have me. It was not a good time. I spent the first six months of my life in a leaky trailer, so I’m told.
“No,” she says. “No, baby, come here.”
She wraps me in a tight hug, and we both start crying. This isn’t what we planned, but life hasn’t been what it was planned to be for either of us.
“It’s going to be okay, baby,” she says. “You’re going to be a mom, and I’m going to be a grandma.”
“Yay! I’m going to have a baby too!” Eva chimes in.
“You are not!” Mom and I say at the same time.
“Okay,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Dinner. Let’s eat. The meatballs are going to be cold.”