Chapter Twenty-Four

Sophia

This cannot be happening. I’m staring at the doctor open mouthed while the rest of the room rotates around me like a washing machine on spin cycle. I feel sick to the very pit of my stomach and totally numb. It’s a joke, it’s got to be.

Out of the words he says to me, I catch: “almost twelve weeks. It’s not unusual”, and, “not everyone starts to show at the same time”, which are snippets of a one sided conversation I can’t fully concentrate on.

From time to time I look down at the analysis sheet he’s handed me, the numerous leaflets for someone in my position, the piece of notepaper he’s jotted down a telephone number on and the ultrasound picture of what’s growing inside me.

“Are you alright, Sophia?” he asks, when he’s finished talking and I’ve done nothing but stare at him like he’s telling me I’ve got a week left to live, tears streaming down my cheeks. I came in here expecting to be told I had a virus, or some kind of persistent stomach infection, not this. Anything but this.

“I’m pregnant”, I say, the words so foreign to me it sounds like someone else is saying them.

The doctor regards me for a while, leans back in his seat, with his arms folded across his chest, and beams a smile over his desk at me.

“If there’s anything else I can help you with”, he says.

I leave his office in a daze and sit for a while in the reception area, before the idea of what this means for me and Ryan long term becomes far too overwhelming and I barely make it to the restrooms in time before I puke.

I’m almost twelve weeks pregnant, which means that this baby belongs to—. Fuck. I don’t even want to think about it. I can’t believe this is happening to me right now. Everything else in my world is going so well, and now this. Less than a week into our marriage, and I’m fucking pregnant, with someone else’s baby.

There is a person I don’t recognize staring back at me from the bathroom mirror, with trembling hands and skin so pale I can almost see through her. I splash cold water on my face and neck, rinse my mouth out and try as best as I can to calm my nerves, before I make my way outside and begin to walk back towards the apartment, head spinning.

I’ve got a hundred and one questions I should go back in and ask the doctor, but my head is such a mess, all I want to do is get as far away from here as I can and try to forget about what he’s just told me.

If I pretend it isn’t happening, maybe it’ll go away, because right now I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to handle this. Getting married is a big enough life changing event without being pregnant too, especially when the father isn’t actually my husband.

My parents are going to freak when they find out, and as much as I can hide being married for as long as it suits me, there is no way I’ll be able to hide this in a month or two when I’ve swollen up to the size of a balloon and it’s pretty clear it can’t be anything else. No wonder Marshall thought I was getting fat with this thing growing inside me.

I get back to the apartment, but can’t convince myself to go inside, because there is no way I can face Ryan right now without a plan of how I’m going to handle this. I’m a decent actress but everyone has their limits, and I know for a fact that when Ryan looks at me with those gorgeous blue eyes, and I can’t help but start crying in front of him, he’ll know exactly what’s up. I need to prepare myself for that moment, which is why instead of going inside, I text Alice to come down and meet me in secret.

Ryan knows I went to the doctor’s this morning, but he doesn’t have a clue yet what it was for, so I send him a message as well, just so he doesn’t think anything is up.

I feel like I’m doing something wrong by not telling him the truth immediately, but it’s not like I’ve got much choice either. It’s not everyday that the woman you’ve just got married to, and the girl you happen to be falling in love with tells you she’s carrying someone else’s baby and before I do all of that I need a little perspective. I need to think carefully about what this all means as well before I decide whether I’m going to tell him at all, because if it’s something I decide not to go ahead with, maybe I won’t even need to.

The door swings open behind me and I see Alice emerge, before she bounces happily down the exterior steps and then slows her pace when she sees me.

“Oh, that bad?” she asks, drawing up alongside me. “What’s happened?”

I don’t even know how to begin. It’s a very simple word, but because it has such massive repercussions, I can’t even think how to say it out loud. Instead of speaking, I begin to cry, and I don’t think it’s just to do with the fact that being pregnant isn’t what I expected to be right now, it’s that if Ryan found out, or even worse, if he found out it wasn’t his, he might not want to be with me any more. The other thing is, he might think I knew before we got married, and chose not to tell him so I’d still get my share of his inheritance money.

“Come on, it can’t be that bad”, Alice says, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me into her. “Is it Ryan?”

I shake my head, my tears staining her top.

“You want to come upstairs?”

I shake my head again.

“You want to go for a walk?”

I nod.

“Okay, I mean, it’s not exactly the best weather for a stroll, but, whatever”, Alice says.

I peel myself away from her and catch her eye, looking away almost immediately afterward for fear she’ll be able to read my mind. I’m going to tell her, because I need her advice, but I don’t want her to see it through me.

“I went to the doctor”, I say, as we begin to walk, figuring if I tread carefully around the bombshell it won’t be so bad when I finally detonate it.

“I know that part”, Alice says. “Why don’t you skip to the part about why you’re crying. Oh fuck, Sophia”, she says, her hand on my arm to stop me suddenly. “You haven’t got cancer have you?”

I shake my head.

“Thank God for that”, Alice says, and we begin walking again. “That would have been a really shitty way to start your marriage.”

If this wasn’t such a shock, I could have gone home, pretended like nothing was wrong and got on with a very normal day, but because being pregnant is such a head fuck for me and so completely out of the blue, because I’ve been on birth control for the last year and I don’t want anything to fuck up my relationship with Ryan, because we live together, and the closer we get to each other the harder it is to hide secrets, and because I’m just not strong enough to do it alone, I just can’t now.

The moment I step in the apartment Ryan will know something is up, and I’ve got to get it clear in my head how I’m going to handle it for when I absolutely can’t avoid it anymore. I have a number of decisions to make. Either I keep the baby, and Ryan and I have to incorporate that into our marriage, I get rid of the baby and tell Ryan I’m doing that, or I keep this between myself, my doctor and my best friend, and I tell him absolutely nothing at all. If I do that, though, I have to lie to him for the rest of our relationship, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. On the other hand, if I tell him, I risk losing him completely.

I pause at the end of our street, turn towards Alice and take a deep breath. “I’m pregnant”, I say, as though it were nothing at all, the words still as foreign to me as they were a couple of hours ago in the doctor’s office this morning.

Alice wears a grin of disbelief before the shock hits her. “You are what?” she practically screams.

I hold my arms loose at my side, my mind so consciously on my belly I feel like it’s going to light up like a beacon. “Almost twelve weeks.”

Alice laughs nervously before her eyes race down to my belly and back up again to see if I’m acting out another part. “You have got to be shitting me”, she says. “This is a joke right?”

I shake my head, tears racing each other down my cheeks.

“But you and Ryan”, she begins, her mind churning to work it all out. “Oh, fuck. Who then? Jack?”

“I don’t know what to do”, I confess.

“Oh, fuck”, Alice says, her eyes going back to my belly. “I thought you’d just put on a bit of extra weight, you know, too many croissants or something. I mean, I know I’m bad with the yogurts but you do eat a lot of chocolate after all. I didn’t want to say anything and it’s not that noticeable anyway, just a little bit maybe, but hardly at all. Fuck, Sophia”, she says, her eyes as wide as dinner plates, “I can’t believe you’re pregnant.”

“Me either”, I say, as though we both might be talking about someone else.

“Are you sure you’re sure, though? Those tests can be completely wrong sometimes”, Alice asks.

“They did an ultrasound.” I dig the image out of my bag and show it to her. “That’s pretty conclusive.”

Alice turns the ultrasound around a couple of times until it’s up the right way, holds it up against the light for as long as she deems necessary and then hands it back to me.

“I thought you were on birth control?”

“I was”, I say. “It obviously didn’t work.”

“Can that happen?”

I hold the ultrasound up to her as proof. “Apparently so.”

“Fuck”, Alice says, the end of the word disappearing into a laugh of absolute disbelief.

“I can’t believe this is happening”, I say. “I can’t believe Ryan and I are going so well and now this.”

We begin to walk again, silent for a moment while the news sinks in.

“I can’t believe you're pregnant”, Alice says after a while, still shaking her head in disbelief. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know”, I say. “I haven’t really had much time to think about it. I couldn’t go upstairs and pretend nothing had happened.”

“I thought that’s what you’re making a career out of doing”, Alice says.

“It’s totally different”, I say. “I can’t hide this from Ryan, it’s too big. Now that I know, he’ll be able to tell something is up. I have to tell him, maybe even if I decide to get rid of it.”

Alice pauses again. “You’ll probably have to tell Jack too.”

“It’s so fucked up.”

“It’s so fucking unlucky. I thought birth control was like ninety nine percent effective.”

“Well you’re looking at the one percent”, I say.

“What if it comes out with defects?” My eyes flash to Alice’s quickly for confirmation of what she means. “You’ve carried on taking the pill haven’t you? I mean, what if you’ve somehow damaged it.”

“The doctor said it wouldn’t have an effect”, I say.

We walk on in silence a little bit further. “Are you going to have it?” Alice asks me after a while.

“I have no idea”, I say. “I’m twenty three years old, Alice. I didn’t come to America to get married and I certainly didn’t come here to have a baby.”

“At least you’ll have the money to look after it”, Alice points out. “That’s way more than a lot of families.”

“And what if Ryan doesn’t want to look after someone else’s baby? And why did it have to be Jack? Of all the times for the birth control to fail, it had to be with him.”

“To be fair, Jack’s exactly the kind of guy who probably won’t want anything to do with it anyway.”

The idea of having a long term relationship with Jack as mutual parents sends a shiver down my spine, but then I’m not exactly cool with abortion either. This thing is twelve weeks old and I’ve got a fucking photograph of it in my handbag. It’s not the size of a grain of rice anymore, it’s a real person with a real head and body and it’s growing every second. As much as I absolutely hate the idea of sharing anything at all with that asshole, Jack, especially a baby, I don’t know if I could bring myself to get rid of it, even if Ryan didn’t want it either.

“Think of the positives as well”, Alice says.

“What positives?” I say, unable to see any right now.

“It’s going to make your inheritance and visa claim much more straightforward. I don’t think there’s a judge in the whole of the States who would deny your claim if they came around for a visit and saw that you were pregnant.”

“With someone’s else’s baby”, I point out.

“Yeah, but they don’t know that do they? Until that baby is born, which will be well after you and Ryan have claimed the full amount of that inheritance, you’ll be seven months into a real relationship and your visa for indefinite leave to remain will have already been granted, they won’t have a clue who the daddy is.”

“This isn’t a game, Alice”, I remind her. “This is a fucking baby. This is going to change my life completely. It’s going to ruin my career, and it might ruin my relationship with Ryan.”

Alice puts her hand on my arm to calm me down. “You don’t know that”, she says.

I feel like crying. “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

“Come on”, Alice says. “You’ve got to try and look at the positives. You’re pregnant, but that doesn’t mean your life is going to end. Plenty of people bring up kids and have full time careers, and most of them won’t have the kind of money you are going to have access to. The only bitch is that it isn’t Ryan’s kid, but if you want to keep it and he has an issue with it, the guy is an absolute jerk. To be honest, I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

“I don’t know what to do”, I confess, feeling absolutely hopeless.

“That’s why I’m here”, Alice says. “And if you choose to have this baby, that means that I’m practically automatic godmother by the way.” If I didn’t feel so exhausted I might have the energy to laugh at that. “You need to tell him, either way. It’s a no-brainer. It may not be his kid, but he is your husband and it doesn’t take a genius to know how he feels about you, believe me.”

“He’s going to freak out”, I say.

“You don’t know that”, Alice reassures me. “And anyway, as difficult as it is, he deserves to know.”

We’ve walked to the end of the street, across another and up into the park. It’s a horrible day to be outside, and much colder than it has been for a while. Spring is taking it’s time to warm up and summer looks like it’s never going to come. It’s a horrible day to find out I’ve got a baby growing inside me.

We sit down on an empty bench and I’m staring at kids playing around in the playpark without even realizing the irony.

If I thought I understood shock when Ryan asked me to marry him, now I know what it truly means to have your world turned upside down. Can I be that person, pushing that child on the swing? That mother making sure her baby is warm enough inside the stroller? Can Ryan be the dad carrying the kid on his shoulders? Laughing with them, disciplining them, educating them about how the world works? Our parents don’t even know we’re married yet, no one but Alice and Alex and the panel at the city clerk’s office do.

“It’s supposed to be pretty amazing”, Alice says, following my line of sight. “Once you get past the diaper changing, the sleepless nights, the breast feeding and the painful miracle of childbirth that is.”

“You’re such an asshole”, I say, this time unable to hold myself back from giggling a little.

Alice links her arm in mine and pulls me into her. “I’ll be there for you”, she says. “And the rest is more than worth it.”

“I’m absolutely terrified”, I admit, my eyes going down to my belly. “Can you believe—?” I lift my top a little, make an O with my hands and place it over my belly button. “There’s a person inside here, growing inside me?”

“I can’t believe there’s a person inside there still with all that post performance drinking you’ve been doing. He must be as strong as an ox.”

I drop my top back down, suddenly feeling like the worst mother in the world. “I didn’t know”, I say guiltily. “The doctor said it was healthy.”

“He’s probably just immune like Jack”, Alice says.

“What if he turns out like him?” I suddenly think.

Alice shakes her head. “Impossible. Not with the two best parents in the world, he won’t.”

We sit for a while in silence, watching the bigger kids run around the playpark, while the smaller ones either sleep in their strollers or sit quietly in their mother’s arms. I still have no idea how I’m going to tell Ryan, and I’m still in shock, denial and utter disbelief, but now that I’ve actually made it somewhat slightly real by telling Alice, I already feel a whole lot better than I did this morning when the doctor told me in the first place like it was nothing more than the common cold.

“Thank you”, I say, taking Alice’s hand.

Alice shrugs. “That’s cool”, she says. “I mean, I don’t feel like I’ve done much, but I’m glad you don’t look like a crying ghost anymore.”

“What was Ryan doing when you left?” I ask.

“Practicing his lines for that frozen foods commercial”, she says. “He tried to rope me in but I wasn’t having any of it. I think he misses you.”

“I’ve been out of the house for a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, but he’s in love with you”, Alice says, making her voice sound intentionally cute. “And he’s like a wickle puppy without you.”

I push her away. “He’s not in love with me”, I say defiantly.

Alice rolls her eyes. “You two are as bad as each other. I don’t know how I put up with it really.”

“We’ve been married for less than a week”, I say, “we are not in love with each other.”

“You should spare a thought for me. Thank God I’m not there most of the time, with you two literally hanging off each other.”

I can’t help but laugh and it makes Alice laugh too, pulling her out of her over the top performance. “Sorry it’s so unbearable for you”, I say. “I’ll make sure we turn the heat down when you’re around next time.”

“You just need to get going on the inheritance application and find your own place so I don’t have to see it”, Alice jokes.

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone”, I say.

Alice rests her head on my shoulder. “I’ll still see you, I hope.”

“Life changes so fucking quickly, doesn’t it?” I say. “One minute I’m fresh off the plane from France, the next I’m married, pregnant, and about to inherit half a million dollars. It’s crazy.”

“What’s crazy is this weather”, Alice says. “It’s supposed to be sunny right now.”

I have to laugh again. “No, what’s really crazy is that I’ve finally found someone I want to be with. Even without the money, I might have still said yes.”

“That is crazy”, Alice says, and then, a little while later, “see, I knew you were in love with him.”

“Maybe just a little”, I admit.

“I can’t believe you’re pregnant”, Alice says again, almost to herself this time.

“Will you stop saying that!?” I say.

“Sorry, it’s just—. If it was going to be anyone, I never thought it would be you.”

“I never thought it would ever be me either”, I say, “but it is, and now I’ve got to work out how to deal with it.”

“Ryan’s going to make a great dad”, Alice says. “You can just tell.”

I let that statement hang in silence because I’m not sure of the best way to respond. I’m sure the last thing Ryan expected when he asked me to marry him was for there to be a secret baby in the bargain too.

We sit in silence watching the kids play as the reality of this new world order sinks into me. I’m twelve weeks pregnant and no matter what I decide to do with the baby, I’m going to have to tell Ryan as soon as I pluck up the courage to go home, and Jack as soon as I work out how to get in contact with him. I’m not looking forward to either of those events, but I’m not able to avoid them either.

When we’ve watched one set of kids do a full circuit of the play equipment and another group has come in to replace them, and we’ve been out here so long that my nose is numb from the biting wind, Alice takes my hand in hers.

“Ryan’s going to wonder where you are”, she says.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to go back yet”, I say, a sharp stab of fear ripping through my gut. “One thing is being pregnant, the other is telling my husband about it.”

“You could pretend it’s his”, Alice offers.

“Babies don’t grow that quickly”, I say, “not even in New York.”

Alice shrugs. “You can barely tell, you know”, she says, her hand on my belly. “I mean, maybe a bit but not much. If he doesn’t realize something is up, maybe you can get away with not telling him right away.”

I take a deep breath. Sooner or later I’m going to have to face this, and as much as it terrifies me, I’d actually much prefer to just to get it out of the way quickly.

“Will you be there with me?” I ask. “Just in case Ryan does a freak out.”

“What do you want me to do?” Alice asks, “lock the doors and get the police on standby?”

“Just be there in case he runs away”, I say. “I might need you to comfort me afterward.”

“I can do that”, Alice says. A little while later she’s up on her feet. “Ready?”

I look up to her and shake my head. “No”, I say, but take her outstretched hand anyway.

“Good”, Alice says, pulling me to my feet. “That makes the two of us.”

On the way out of the park I catch eyes with a young mother holding hands with her toddler, her coat stretched tight over a little bump of her own, and I find myself moving my hands instinctively to my own belly, perhaps as a subconscious sign of solidarity. The woman smiles at me briefly, her cheeks a little red from the wind, before she disappears towards the play area. I’ve been so focussed on Marshall’s production, on looking for other work, on enjoying my last few months here if it doesn’t come, on my visa situation, and for the last few weeks the marriage with Ryan, I just had no idea what was going on with me. I don’t even remember skipping a period, or perhaps I remember it and just put it down to stress, or the puking at work that I put down to nerves, and the weight gain to overeating. And now someone I don’t even know glances at me for a second and she can tell immediately.

“It’s like a sixth sense”, Alice says, having seen it as well. “Pregnant women just know. You’ll have to get used to that, of course.”

She puts her arm around me, and we walk the rest of the way back to the apartment like that in thoughtful silence, my new status not only as a pregnant women but a pregnant wife unable to fully escape me.

At the front door to the block of apartments, I pause briefly, right on the edge of running away, before I take a deep breath, clasp Alice’s hand tightly and head inside, my mind focussed on just getting inside the apartment before my body wins the battle, turns me around again and takes me as far away from here as possible.