The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(9)
But even if I can lie to her, I can’t lie to myself; I’m really dying, or I’m pregnant—and I don’t want to be either of those things.
Knowing your time on this planet will be brief is kind of like taking a trip: you’re not going to house hunt or attempt to make anything meaningful, but you’ll splurge on good restaurants and have a lot more pina coladas at noon.
Honestly, dying young is not all bad. People will still talk about how pretty I was at the funeral, for instance, and I will never have to worry about outliving my retirement savings, not that I’d ever have put money away in the first place.
Okay, I guess the silver linings are limited, but I can deal with that as long as I’m not leaving someone behind. I don’t want to subject anyone to what I went through when my mom died, what my cousins went through when their mom died.
And that’s why I finally take a pregnancy test—many hours after Gemma dropped me off—and burst into tears at the sight of two identical pink lines; because I’m okay with dying, but I can never be okay with saddling a kid with the grief that follows.
“You appear to be about sixteen weeks along,” says Julie, my ob/gyn, the next day.
Sixteen weeks. It’s somehow worse than I was expecting to hear, though I know it’s dated back to the last period, not conception. I’m just a lot further into the stupidest mistake of my life than I imagined.
She continues sliding the transducer over my stomach. I make a point of looking at her, not the screen, because I don’t want to get attached to the sight of something I might not choose to keep. “Due October eighth. I assume you haven’t had a period for a while.”
I shake my head, stunned. I thought it was stress. I just…I don’t understand. “IUDs are foolproof.”
“Only if they haven’t fallen out.”
I blink at her. “Without me even noticing?”
She hitches a shoulder. “Well, it’s out, and you didn’t notice, right? It’s rare, but it happens.”
Only me. This could only happen to me.
She hands me a paper towel. “You didn’t have any nausea? Fatigue?”
I assumed it was cancer so I ignored it. Yes, I just spent three months studying metastatic melanoma, while perhaps ignoring something just as bad inside myself. Sometimes even I am shocked by the insanity of my thought processes.
I wipe off my stomach while she puts the transducer back. “I was busy. I just thought it was stress.”
“Is the father in the picture?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, which comes across better than “not if I have anything to say about it.” God, why of all people did it have to be Graham?
She meets my gaze and her shoulders sag. I know exactly what she’s about to ask.
“Do you know what you want to do?” She says it as if she already knows the answer and she probably does. Our residencies overlapped and I’ve never exactly hidden my priorities. Only professionalism is keeping her from saying, “you can’t bring a baby to Burning Man, FYI. You can’t bring a baby on a surfboard.”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “The timing of this…could not be worse.”
I’m starting a new job Monday, and I have no savings, nor any family who’ll help out. I also decided long ago that a child wasn’t in the picture.
When I leave the appointment, I wander listlessly around Brentwood. A child doesn’t fit in with my life plans. Hell, it doesn’t even fit in with my plans for the next year, which include surfing in Costa Rica this December, Carnival next February, and trying a jetpack once I find a place that will allow me to do so.
I’m all for people not being pregnant if they don’t want to be pregnant. The problem is…I’m not sure I’m one of those people.
Yes, I wrote it off, but right now I’m remembering who I once was: the little girl who used to pretend her Barbies were pregnant, who’d already chosen her future children’s names and occupations. Of course, I also thought I’d be married to JC from NSYNC when it happened, but even so…it was mostly about having kids.
For a full decade, I spent every lonely Christmas—half the day alone with my mom, half the day with my dad—dreaming of the big family I’d have as an adult. I’m not sure how I managed to forget all this until now.
Except I guess I didn’t forget. I just put it all out of my head because I knew, even as a fifteen-year-old, that it would be a selfish thing to do. I’m about to turn thirty, only a few years younger than my mom when she died, and she was doing everything right. I don’t have any siblings, my father is old, and Graham is awful. So what happens if I have this kid and the O’Keefe curse strikes again?
I go into Malia Mills and think about how many bikinis I could buy for the cost of a crib. I go into Goop and try to convince myself I’d rather have a Mara Hoffman dress than a stroller.
And then I walk outside and some little kid with a British accent is saying, “very clever, Mummy” as he swings his mother’s hand, and my eyes fill with tears. Maybe it’s simply because I didn’t get knocked up by a Brit and my kid will never have a cool accent. But it’s mostly because I want that. I want a kid placing his little hand in mine, his trust absolute. I want to care for someone other than myself, and I want it so much more than any purse or shoes or trip I’ve ever lusted after.