CHAPTER SIX | VANESSA
Three Months Later
“Do you want me to look first?” Summer asked, glancing up at me with an apprehensive look on her face.
“No!” I said quickly. “I’ll do it. Just…give me a minute.”
Summer groaned and crossed her arms over her chest.
“You can’t keep stalling,” she pointed out. “I don’t think you’re supposed to leave it that long.”
“Why?” I asked. “Do the results expire or something?”
“I don’t know!” Summer threw up her hands. “I’m just telling you what the instructions said!”
She reached down for the sheet of instructions that she had left unfolded on the bathroom counter. Her eyes scanned the page, navigating the cheerful pastel pink illustrations.
“Right here,” she said, pointing to a block of printed text. “It says you might get a false positive if you wait longer than ten minutes to read the results. See?”
She pushed the pregnancy test instructions towards me.
“Ok, ok…” I muttered, pushing them away. “Can I please just enjoy these last fleeting seconds of peace before my life is turned completely upside down?”
“Your life isn’t going to be turned upside down,” Summer said. “We’ll figure this out, no matter what. But the first step is finding out what that test says.”
I took a deep breath, then released it slowly.
Summer and I both blinked down at the white plastic wand that was resting, face down, on the bathroom countertop.
“It’s just like ripping off a bandaid,” Summer said encouragingly.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Except there might be a baby hiding underneath this bandaid.”
“Everything is going to be ok, Vanessa.”
It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way, I thought darkly to myself.
It all started with a missed period, a few weeks after Cassidy and Brady’s wedding. A few weeks after…that night.
That should have been my first clue, but since my birth control pills already gave me an irregular period, I figured it was no big deal.
Then the other symptoms started popping up: swollen breasts. My clothes didn’t fit quite right anymore. I couldn’t stop thinking about sex…and I also couldn’t stop thinking about food. Hunger would strike at the oddest hours: midnight cravings for potato chips, or an early morning hankering for fried chicken.
There was already enough evidence for Nancy Drew to crack the case, but I refused to put the pieces together. I was living firmly in denial. And then the nausea started.
I can’t live in denial anymore, I decided. I need to know…
I reached down and gripped onto the contoured handle of the plastic pregnancy test. Then I turned it over and blinked down at the results.
“What does that mean?” I asked, my mouth going dry. “What do two pink lines mean?!”
“Um…” Summer frantically reached for the instructions again, even though we both had already read them thoroughly…and we both already knew exactly what double pink lines represented.
She set the paper down slowly, then turned to me.
“It’s positive,” she told me. “Double pink lines mean that you’re pregnant.”
I blinked down at the test, staring at the two pink lines as if I could will them to dissolve and fade away.
“Holy shit,” I gulped. “I’m…pregnant.”
***
“You’re pregnant?!” Cassidy Laurent stammered, gawking at me in disbelief through the front door of my apartment.
I had delivered the news an hour earlier to my best friend via an emergency 911 phone call. Cass had been attending a Firehouse 56 company picnic at the time, but she had immediately dropped everything and rushed to be by my side.
Apparently the drive across Hartford hadn’t been long enough for the news to sink in: when I opened the front door to greet her, she looked like she had swallowed a brick.
I felt exactly the way that she looked.
“Come on in,” I said, ushering her into the apartment. She stumbled over the threshold and sank down onto the white canvas sofa.
“How is this even possible?!” she wanted to know, staring up at me.
“Well,” Summer said, taking a seat by Cassidy’s side. “When a man and a woman engage in an act called intercourse--”
“No,” Cassidy scowled, rolling her eyes at Summer. “I mean…how is this possible when Vanessa avoids men like the plague?”
“I don’t avoid men,” I said defensively.
“Oh, come on,” Summer said. “You totally avoid men! If they made a man repellent that you could spritz on like bug spray, you’d wear that shit like it was Chanel No. 5!”
“That’s…a little bit of an exaggeration,” I said, pinching my lips into a firm line. Then I added: “Clearly I can’t be avoiding them that much, if I’m pregnant.”
“Are you seeing someone?” Summer asked, sounding slightly hurt that she had been kept out of the loop.
“No,” I said honestly. “This was a one-time thing.”
“So…does that mean you do know who the father is?” Cassidy chimed in. I grimaced and rolled my head towards her.
“Of course I know who the father is!” my cheeks turned bright red. “There’s only one person it can be.”
“Ok,” Cass said eagerly, leaning forwards on the couch. “So…who is it?”
I sighed. Cassidy and I had been best friends since grade school. I had never made a habit of keeping secrets or lying to her, but there hadn’t exactly been an easy way to confess that I had gotten a little too friendly with the best man at her wedding. So, I had kept that indiscretion to myself.
But now, there was no way around it: the truth had to come out.
“Wait a second…” Cassidy blinked at me. “It’s not Josh, is it?”
I winced, wrinkling my nose and pinching my eyes shut so I couldn’t see the look of disapproval on her face. Then I nodded slowly.
“We might have run into each other after the wedding,” I admitted. That was technically true; I decided that I didn’t need to get any more specific about when after the wedding.
“I’d say you two did more than run into each other,” Cassidy chuckled dryly.
“Someone fill me in,” Summer said, clearly feeling left out. “Who is Josh, and why am I just hearing about him now?!”
“Josh is my husband’s brother,” Cassidy explained. “They both work at Firehouse 56, and Josh was the best man at our wedding a few months ago.”
Cassidy turned to face me, and then she added: “I knew that Vanessa and Josh were getting a little friendly at the reception--”
“Wait,” I stammered. “You knew?” My heart was pounding through my chest, and my cheeks were burning bright red. How much did Cass know?
“I didn’t know how far it went,” Cassidy said. “I just knew that you two seemed to…enjoy each other’s company.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I demanded.
“I was respecting your privacy,” Cassidy said. “I figured that if you wanted me to know, you would have told me yourself. And since you didn’t bring it up, I assumed that there was nothing to talk about.”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“There wasn’t anything to talk about…”
“Until today,” Cassidy added. I just stared down at the pink toes of my socks.
“Well as far as I’m concerned,” I said flatly. “There still isn’t anything to talk about. I got myself into this situation, and I can figure it out on my own. I’m not going to go running back to beg him for help just because I’m pregnant.”
“Vanessa, you can’t be serious!” Summer groaned disapprovingly. “It’s not about ‘begging for help.’ He has a right to know. This is his baby, too.”
I pinched my eyes shut and when I did, I saw a vision from my childhood flash across my eyelids:
I was ten years old. It was the first Christmas after my parents had gotten divorced. I hadn’t seen my dad in months, but he was supposed to come by the house so we could all eat Christmas dinner together.
I knew that I was supposed to hate him…but I couldn’t stop myself from missing him. I was just a kid, and he was my dad…he was my hero.
By the time Dad showed up, Christmas dinner had gone cold and untouched on the table. He was hours late, and he reeked of cheap beer and some other woman’s perfume. His hands looked strange and unfamiliar without his gold wedding band, and when I tried to hug him, he felt cold from being somewhere that wasn’t our home.
Mom had pulled me away and told me to go to my room, just like she had a hundred times before. I sat on my bed, but I could still hear them yelling through the walls.
I’ll never forget what I heard that night...
“She’s your daughter!” Mom screamed. “You can’t do this to her!”
“This is all your fault,” Dad screamed back. “I never wanted a fucking kid in the first place!”
“How can you say that about your own child?!”
“That child was a mistake. This whole thing was a mistake…”
I didn’t see much of my dad after that. Even all of these years later, those words still cut straight to my core. I pinched my eyes shut until the memory disappeared, replaced with fuzzy black nothingness.
“Vanessa?” Summer’s voice squeaked. “Are you ok?”
She gave my hand a squeeze. I opened my eyes and blinked a few times, adjusting to the light of the room.
“I know what it feels like to be unwanted,” I sighed heavily. “Whatever happens…I don’t want this baby to ever know that feeling.”
“Josh is a good guy,” Cassidy said gently. I knew she understood what I meant: I had confided a lot in her over the years, and she knew all about my parents’ divorce. “He’s nothing like your father,” she added in a soft voice.
“But he’d still see this baby as an obligation,” I reasoned, swallowing the lump in the back of my throat. “I don’t want to force him into something.”
“You don’t know how he’ll feel,” Summer chimed in. “You can’t assume the worst of him before you’ve even given him a chance to react.”
“You need to tell him,” Cassidy nodded, smoothing back a loose strand of hair that had fallen out of my messy bun.
I sighed heavily. I knew that Cassidy and Summer were right…Josh did have a right to know.
“I will,” I promised finally. Then I turned to Cass and added: “But I want him to hear it from me. Please don’t say anything to Brady?”
Cassidy sighed reluctantly.
“Fine,” she agreed. “I won’t mention it. But you need to tell Josh. And sooner, rather than later. If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s that nobody benefits from keeping secrets.”
I considered everything that Cassidy had gone through a few months earlier, when she had come clean about her secret marriage arrangement with Brady. I knew that she had a point…and I knew that telling Josh was the right thing to do.
But just because it was the right thing to do, didn’t mean that it would be easy...