The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [72]
As if through a thick fog, Andrea was beginning to understand. “So . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“So just in case, I bought a home pregnancy test kit the next day. Actually, I ended up buying three of them, each from a different manufacturer. All the results came out positive.”
“Oh, God.”
“That was a week ago,” Paisley said. “At least it proves the damned dumb doctor was wrong when he pronounced me sterile.”
Paisley’s lip began to tremble. She spoke softly, ignoring the fat tears that ran down her cheeks. After all her yearning for a child, what if Eddie Logan, her nerdy neighbor, turned out to be the father? She couldn’t possibly have an abortion. She wouldn’t. She could only hope to carry the baby to term. It was her old hope, her only hope, skewed beyond recognition. Her face collapsed into a posture of pure misery. Andrea had never seen her so agitated, not even during the crisis with Courtney when Paisley had hotly insisted the girl was going to heal. Andrea was frightened at first, of what must be the almost incoherent tangle of Paisley’s thoughts. Then she’d thought, almost with gratitude, My turn to be strong.
“First things first,” Andrea said. “You haven’t been to a different doctor?”
“I swore off doctors after the last one.”
“I’ll find you someone else.” Andrea reached across the table and squeezed Paisley’s hand. “Someone good.”
They went together for the appointment. Paisley was a wreck. “Even if everything turns out to be all right, nothing is all right,” she said. “How can I live with a new baby, and with Mason, knowing what I know? What if the kid looks like Eddie?”
“Eddie is so nondescript no one will notice,” Andrea assured her.
“The kid will be related to Max and Rachel. The kid will be living across the street from its—”
“Half siblings,” Andrea supplied, a concept so bizarre that both of them laughed, or coughed, it was hard to tell which. Andrea pulled into the doctor’s parking lot. Paisley walked in as if at attention.
The new doctor examined Paisley and then ordered an ultrasound. Andrea was allowed to sit in and hold Paisley’s hand.
Twenty minutes later, in the doctor’s office again, he gave Paisley a due date.
“Are you sure?”
“The fetus is small, but the measurements are usually pretty accurate. Plenty of time to do more testing later.”
The two women looked at each other, bewildered. According to the doctor, Paisley was nearly at the end of her first trimester of pregnancy. If that was true, it wasn’t her out-of-sync hormones that had kept her from having periods after her miscarriage. It was the fact that she must have gotten pregnant right away, that first month after the miscarriage. “I didn’t think there was any point using birth control if I wasn’t going to conceive,” she whispered to Andrea.
Back in the car she said, as if still in disbelief, “I was nauseated even before the afternoon with Eddie. Maybe that’s because by then, I was already pregnant.”
“Well, of course, you were,” Andrea said.
But for a long while, Paisley didn’t allow herself to believe the child was Mason’s and not Eddie’s. There was the slimmest possibility it wasn’t. Tests could lie. More amazing yet, it seemed incredible she’d gotten through the perilous first trimester of a new pregnancy without knowing about it or having the slightest problem. She was in a constant state of apprehension for the next six months.
“All this worry isn’t good for you,” Andrea told her, fearing that what had started as clinical depression had now morphed into an equally debilitating anxiety.
“Relax, Paisley,” Andrea kept insisting. But Paisley didn’t, even after Melody made her appearance, a healthy full-term baby, several weeks too early to be Eddie’s child. “But not definitively early,” Paisley fretted.
But gradually the evidence began to seem irrefutable. Melody was born with Mason