Page 72 of A Love So Hard

“You want me in there while you pee on the stick?” I asked not sure I wanted to watch my own daughter pee. I’d seen enough of that when she was little.

“Yeah, you could just turn around while I do it. I can’t. I don’t… Oh God! Momma, I can’t be pregnant!” I could hear the panic in her voice and I slid up the bed beside her spooning her and pulling her close to the heat of my body. She was shivering, and I knew it wasn’t because she was cold. I ran a hand over her silky dark brown waves and then kissed her head.

“I promise you, everything will be okay. I will be here with you, no matter what. Do you understand that? No matter what! You will have me by your side. You will not be alone.” She turned in my arms then, tears sliding free and running rivers down her pinked cheeks. Then she wrapped her arms around me too and held on for dear life.

“You are the best mom in the world, you know that, right?”

“Of course I do!” I teased, trying to lighten the situation. “You know what that means though?”

“What?”

“That means you learned from the best, so if that test says what I think it will, everything will be just fine.”

She gave me a small smile. It wasn’t much, but it was something. “I think he hates me though. You’re right, I never really lied to him, but…”

“You didn’t exactly tell the truth either. Omissions are still lies,” I confirmed.

“I know that now,” she admitted. Then she huffed out the biggest sigh I’d ever seen come from such a tiny body. “I knew that then too, I just… I wanted… I needed to be someone else. I needed to escape.”

“I know, baby. I know.” And I did know. I needed to escape my life too; only it wasn’t so easy when you were older. There was no hiding from the things in your life that still needed doing. Work, kids, eating, sleeping. I know. I tried hiding. Turns out all it got me was looking like the undead, and not the attractive vampire kind either. No, I looked like an episode of that popular TV show where the corpses are still trying to call around when most of the meat on their bones is missing, dragging broken legs behind them, and jaw unhinged apparently. At least, that was the image conjured the night I’d been compared to a zombie. Yeah, okay, so I had dwelled on that a little too long. Whatever.

“Come on, Anna, let’s get you in there so we can figure out if our family is growing.” Then I stopped myself. “Oh, um, I mean shit!”

“What?”

I looked my daughter in the eye then. “You have choices, you know. You’re young. I won’t make that decision for you, but considering the circumstance, if you don’t want to raise a baby…” I just left it hanging in the air.

“Momma, I am young, but you just told me you’d be there for me. I have support. I’ll have extra love for a baby if there is one. Even if the father doesn’t want anything to do with it or me, it’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. I couldn’t give up my baby for adoption after carrying it, I don’t think. I remember hearing all the stories you told about Toby and me when you were pregnant with us. You loved us before you ever saw us,” she stated.

“That’s true,” I agreed, because it was very true.

“And I couldn’t. I mean, you told me there were consequences to my actions. A baby is a consequence and I need to take responsibility for that. It might be different if I was on my own and couldn’t take care of it, but you said I have you,” she said the last a little unsure of herself.

“You will always have me. No doubt, you’ll have Ever there for you as well.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she mentioned quickly.

“Why?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Evan is Deck’s best friend,” I explained.

I tried to hold back the cringe, but knew I hadn’t succeeded when she gave me that ‘I told you so’ look. “Well, that will complicate things for Deck and his friend, I’m sure, but your sister would never turn you or your baby away.”

“You sound so sure of that.”

“I am sure of that. After everything she’s been through, she would never ostracize her family.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

I climbed off the bed then. “Come on, let’s go see to this so we can be sure so we don’t plan for something that may not actually be happening.”

It took three days to get Anna in to see the doc to confirm that the home tests she had taken were accurate. They were indeed. She was measuring in at about nine weeks and we actually got to hear the baby’s heartbeat too. Once we left the doctor’s office I took her to her favorite little shop to grab a frozen yogurt.

“That was amazing,” she beamed at me across the table after staring into her bowl of mush for a bit. My girl enjoyed mixing several flavors then slathering them with the different candy options before stirring them into what amounted a frozen yogurt shake-like mess filled with candy. It was her one major indulgence in life, so I let her have it, especially considering how hard today had been and was shaping up to be.

I smiled back. “That was something else, for sure,” I told her. “I remember the first time I ever heard that sound.”

“With Toby?”

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