I ALWAYS FEEL LIKE I HAVE these little paper gowns on backward. Is this right? Sitting on the examination table, I peer down at my breasts and panties peeking through the open panels. I can’t believe I did this. How did I miss this appointment? I mean, I know how it happened. The tour. My collapse. Our vacation to Bora Bora. The new phone and my screwed up calendar alerts. I’ve had a lot going on, but to let my birth control shot lapse? And by five weeks?
While I was reading through the offers and projects Bristol sent me, I noticed an email all the way at the bottom of the pile about my missed doctor’s appointment. If I’d had my old phone, I would have gotten the reminder call. I would have seen the appointment alert. But I didn’t. And now Rhyson and I have been having unprotected sex for the last five weeks.
The hormone stays in your system for a while. I’m sure I’ve dodged the bullet. I haven’t had any symptoms. No fatigue or morning sickness. Nothing to indicate anything will come from this oversight except a lesson learned. It can’t. I tell myself all these things as I sit and wait for the doctor to come in. I’m so close to doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do. What are the odds that something else will slow me down? That through my own negligence, I will slow myself down?
My phone lights up beside me on the table.
Rhyson: Everything okay? Has the doctor seen you yet?
I smile and dial him.
“Hey,” he answers right away.
“Hey. I peed in a cup and the nurse took my blood pressure.” I swing my legs hanging over the table’s side. “So just waiting for the doctor. What are you doing?”
“Working on some tracks for Kilimanjaro.” I hear him still clicking away on the keys while we talk. “There’s a song they’ve been doing on the festival circuit that could be great for their album, but needed some tweaks.”
“Cool. Thanks for bringing me. I’m sure you had better things to do than sit in a waiting room full of women. Is anyone giving you trouble?”
“Nah.” He chuckles and lowers his voice. “I did have one elderly lady tell me I looked a lot like that folk singer Rhyson Gray.”
“Folk singer?” I bend at the waist to laugh, clutching the maybe-backward panels together over my naked chest. “What are you, John Denver now?”
“A few people recognized me and asked for autographs, but it hasn’t been that bad. I’m wearing my cap.”
“Which is, in your mind at least, like a cloak of invisibility.”
“You can’t deny its effectiveness.”
“Oh, yes, I . . .” My words peter out when the door opens and Dr. Allister walks in. “My doctor just came in, babe. I’ll be out soon.”
“K. Love you.”
“Love you too.” I smile at the doctor and bite my lip. “Sorry. I know I’m not supposed to be on my phone. Just checking on my fiancé out in the waiting room.”
“Rhyson Gray is in our waiting room?” Dr. Allister’s eyes light up behind her blue-rimmed eyeglasses. “He may need a security escort to get out. Our receptionist is a huge fan. Would he like to wait in a private room? Would that be easier for him?”
I process that she knows who I am, and therefore knows who my fiancé is before answering her question.
“He’s fine, but I’d like to get this shot so he can leave before people start posting pictures of him to Instagram.”
Dr. Allister’s smile fades a little. She takes the seat facing the table at the end with the dreaded stirrups.
“Kai, about your shot.” She glances down at her clipboard and then back to me, watching me carefully. “You do realize you were overdue, right?”
“Yeah. I was on tour and out of town and then got a new phone.” I wave my hand to dismiss all my excuses. “Sorry. You don’t want to hear all that. Yes. I was a little past due.”
“Five, almost six weeks, past due.” Dr. Allister licks her lips and leans forward. “It’s standard for us to do a pregnancy test before administering the birth control shot.”
The fear I’d barely allowed myself to consider stares back fully-formed at me from behind Dr. Allister’s shiny lenses.
“No.” I grip the little paper gown in my fist until I’m sure I’ll tear it “I’m not . . .”
“Pregnant, yes.” Dr. Allister’s kind eyes run over my face, which must be drained of all blood.
“But the hormone—”
“The efficacy of the hormone is drastically reduced after even two weeks past the shot, much less nearly six, Kai.”
“I just . . . I didn’t . . .”
I run a trembling hand through my hair. It’s still a little damp. Rhyson and I shower together most mornings. Have sex in the shower most mornings. Had sex this morning. I press my eyes shut and swallow back tears. How could I have been so careless?
“Could there be a mistake?” I ask desperately. “I mean, maybe there’s been a mistake. I feel great. No symptoms whatsoever.”
“Your urine test shows hCG levels.” Dr. Allister shakes her head. “That’s the hormone we’re looking for when a woman is pregnant.”
“But I . . . you’re sure?”
“Yes, we’re sure.” A smile softens Dr. Allister’s expression. “I’d like to do a transvaginal sonogram. That might make you more . . . certain.”
“Like an ultrasound?”
“A little different. Not the jelly on the belly thing.” Dr. Allister stands. “Slightly more intrusive, but it will help us determine how far along you are.”
As soon as she says “how far along you are,” I have visions of people walking up to me in grocery stores and in Starbucks, touching my swollen belly and asking when I’m due. This can’t be happening.
“I’ll get a technician in here to get it going.”
Things are moving at warp speed, but I slow down long enough to think, to remember that Rhyson is in the waiting room. He has literally been having dreams about our unborn daughter for months. He should be here. Despite the dreams, neither of us imagined it would happen this quickly. We just got engaged last week.
“I need to call my fiancé.” I grab my phone, take a deep breath and dial Rhyson.
“You ready?” he asks after not even a full ring. “That was quick.”
“Um, yeah.” I chew at the corner of my lip. “Could you come back here to examination room 4C?”
In the silence, his immediate concern reaches through the phone and wraps around me.
“Is something . . .” He clears his throat. “Are you okay, Pep?”
“I’m fine.” I brighten the words to dispel his worry. “Could you just come back?”
It seems that I’ve barely hung up when the door swings open and Rhyson pokes his head in. I motion for him to step all the way into the room. He crosses the small space, butting his knees right up against mine and taking my hands in his.
“What’s going on?” Concern darkens his silvery eyes to slate. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I just . . .” My glance drops to my hands linked with his in my lap. “The doctor just told me . . . I’m . . . I got a new phone.”
He blinks at me several times before sputtering.
“What the—what the hell, Pep? You called me into the lady doctor’s office to tell me you got a new damn phone?”
“Lady doctor?” An ill-timed giggle pops out of my mouth. “I haven’t heard . . . I guess she is a lady doctor.”
“Pep, for God’s sake. What is it?”
“I got a new phone.”
“Not this shit again.” He tips his head back and heaves a longsuffering sigh.
“Let me tell you this my way.”
“Your way is agonizingly slow. Meanwhile, I’m picturing a tumor the size of a watermelon on your ovaries. Spit it out.”
“Because of the phone thing I missed my emails and voice mails,” I rush on to say before he can interrupt again. “And I missed my appointment.”
“Okay. You told me that.” He squints at me, confusion all over his face. “That’s why we’re here, right?”
“I missed my shot, Rhyson,” I say meaningfully. “You know. My birth control shot. By almost six weeks actually.”
“Six weeks.” I can see the facts connecting in his head before his eyes meet mine. A question is already forming there, but he doesn’t ask the real question.
“So we’ve been having unprotected sex for six weeks. Is that what you’re telling me?”
I nod, licking my lips and fidgeting with the edges of my paper gown.
“I’m pregnant,” I whisper, afraid to raise my eyes. In case he’s angry. In case he’s as thrown as I am.
An almost undetectable sound from the air conditioner fan is all I hear for a few moments. When I finally look up, Rhyson’s mouth is hanging open and his eyes are fixed on my stomach.
“You’re . . . you’re . . . what?” He sounds almost breathless.
“I’m preg—”
The rest of the word doesn’t make it past my lips. Rhyson snatches me off the table and holds me so tight that if I had stuffing it would all be squeezed out of me. My feet dangle inches above the floor.
“Rhyson, baby, put me down,” I mumble into his neck.
He sets me on my feet and pulls back to peer into my face. There is no anger or disappointment or uncertainty.
“This is amazing.” He shakes his head, a dazed look still in his eyes. “I can’t believe this. Oh, my God, Pep. Can you believe it?”
No, I really can’t, but Dr. Allister’s light tap on the door comes before I can respond.
“Okay to come in?” she asks. Her eyes flick to Rhyson, widening a little with recognition. “Mr. Gray, hello.”
“Hi.” Rhyson studies the cart the nurse rolls in behind the doctor. “I hear we’re having a baby.”
“I believe you are.” She extends her hand. “Dr. Allister, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you.” He returns the handshake and offers that famous devastating smile. “Rhyson.”
“Yes, well.” Dr. Allister flushes a little while she snaps on rubber gloves. Always a comforting sound. “Let’s take a look.”
I smile weakly and lie back on the table when she instructs me to.
“I’m going to do a transvaginal ultrasound. It’s the most accurate way to determine how far along you are,” Dr. Allister says. “Are you fine with your fiancé being present for that?”
Rhyson looks slightly panicked like I might actually ask him to step outside and he’ll miss something.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I find his hand and squeeze.
Rhyson smiles, shifting his eyes from me to the doctor and then to the machine with the flat screen mounted on it.
I lie back and rest my feet in the stirrups. This should be incredibly awkward with Rhyson in the room, but he’s near my head, holding my hand. His eyes never leave the screen even though there’s nothing to see yet.
“You’ll feel a different kind of pressure than with a typical pelvic exam,” Dr. Allister says. “This probe will be moving around to get shots of what’s going on inside.”
The probe is a bit uncomfortable, but not too bad. It just takes a few seconds to get used to. A grey mass appears onscreen.
“Here’s what we’re looking for.” Dr. Allister points to a dark blob in the grey sea of my uterus. “This is the gestational sac. The yolk sac that tells us for sure we’ve got a baby in there. About four weeks and a few days, I’d say.”
I glance from the blobby uterine world onscreen to Rhyson’s face. His expression is absolutely rapt, his attention fully taken by the little pouch our kid is living in.
“Is there a heartbeat?” Anxiety tightens his expression. “Shouldn’t we hear a heartbeat?”
“Too early for that.” Dr. Allister types in a few notes. “Next appointment maybe.”
Rhyson releases my hand he’s been clutching this whole time to aim his phone at the screen and presses record.
“We’ll give you a 3D picture, Mr. Gray,” Dr. Allister assures him.
“I just want my own.” He shakes his head dazedly again. “This is just . . . wow.”
Absolute awe and joy light up his expression. My emotions aren’t as straightforward. I do feel this incredible sense of connection with what looks like an ink blot in my uterus, but other emotions press in too. Fear. Disappointment. Maybe a little resentment. And, yes, guilt for even feeling anything less than the joy all over Rhyson’s face. There are women who have been trying to get pregnant for years. And here I wasn’t even trying, didn’t even want it yet, and I’m . . .
Pregnant.
Once the machine is wheeled out, and Dr. Allister and Rhyson leave so I can get dressed, I’m left with just the little square print out of my ink blot. This little blob growing for the last few weeks inside of me just turned my life upside down, and I had no idea.