Page 50 of Unexpecting

This couldn’t be happening. I started counting on my fingers again, but that was too complicated so I rolled out of bed and grabbed the calendar I have stuck to the wall in the kitchen. It’s July 4, Independence Day for ourneighbours the Americans—and isn’t that ironic that my independence might well disappear today?

Okay, I said to myself, let’s see about this. I flipped back a month. Last Tuesday was that red-letter day when David rocked my world and told me he was gay. The day before that was when I went out with Morgan—good thing I wasn’t drinking too much, but what about the Canada Day party and drinking all those margaritas?

Okay, no sense getting upset over nothing. I didn’t even know if I was pregnant. Even so, my heart was racing and my hands were jittery. It was the week before Morgan and Anil broke up that I had sex with J.B. It was the night of the wedding. How could I have forgotten about that? Not that I forgot about it; I just didn’t think it was worth remembering. Of course it was worth remembering because it was—never mind.

Could I have gotten pregnant by having sex? Duh. Did we use contraception? Yes. I went scurrying for my purse, where I keep my container of pills. If I started them on… when I opened the little pink lid, I found to my horror there were three still in their little nests, and I took a deep breath. But I couldn’t seem to remember having a period in the month of June. I must have… no, I remember I had it during the Victoria Day long weekend, because I was still with Mike then and he had talked about going away, and I put the kibosh on it because I knew he would want sex and… but that was like six weeks ago! And if there were three pills left, it meant sometime during the month I forgot to take three of my pills. I forgot one again last night, so at least four times…

How could I be such an idiot? I’m thirty-five years old. You’d think I’d have my menstrual cycle figured out by now.

But J.B. and I used a condom. I’m sure of that, because he didn’t have one and I had to go rifling through my bedside table to find one. I remember there were two in there. I hit the drawer and started pulling things out, trying to find the other condom. Not that I felt like having sex now or ever, but I wanted to at least check out that the condom was worthy of protecting me from getting pregnant with J.B.

Here—purple foil wrapper. Expiry—March 2009. 2009! That couldn’t be good.

I sat staring at the numbers on the back of the wrapper. Maybe the one we used was more recent, but the dread deep in my stomach didn’t think so. So I had sex, possibly not as protected as I would have liked—as J.B. would have liked… There might be a little chance I could be pregnant.

How would I tell J.B.?

But first I had to check if there was something to tell him. I jumped out of bed again and grabbed one of the pregnancy tests I bought when I first thought of having a baby. Actually, I bought two, thinking I’d probably never believe the first one. Okay, I bought three. They were all lying in a Shoppers’ DrugMart bag under my sink. I opened the first box—I’d already ripped it open and read the instructions several times in preparation for this moment, so I was good to go. I just had to hold the end of the stick under my urine stream for a bit, and wait until either a plus or minus sign popped up. Sounded easy enough. Then I grabbed the second box. What if the first one said I was not when I really was? Then I’d have to go through this whole rigmarole again to find out the truth. Then I’d have to wait until I had to pee again. Or what if the stick said I was, and I really wasn’t? To make sure, I decided to use both at once, just to make sure. Pee on one, then pee on the other. And just to make sure the test was absolutely positive—not positive, accurate, we didn’t know if it was positive yet—I grabbed the third and prepared to pee like I’d never peed before.

″Libby,” I whispered into the phone four and a half minutes later. “I’ve got pluses. Three pluses.”

“What are you talking about?” I could hear Madison yelling something in the background. “Maddy, stop,” Libby responded, not moving the phone so it was as if she was yelling at me. “What’s a plus?”

″On the pregnancy test I have in my hand,” I told her, enunciating every word. “I didn’t even have to wait the five minutes, the plus just popped right up after a minute, but I waited to see if they went away, but none of them did, and now I’m sitting here with these pee sticks in my hand, all with the blue plus on them—”

″Yeah, there’s ones with the plus and the minus, but—wait a sec! Did you do a test? Why? And it’s positive?”

″I think so. I did three, and they all say the same thing. The blue plus.”

Libby started to laugh with delight. “Oh, my God! You really did it! You’re pregnant! But when did you get pregnant?”

″I think I am. I did the test three times. It was all in the same pee, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Should I do another one?”

Libby was still laughing, but I thought it was at me now. She said, “I think that’s overkill. My doctor told me there’s not a lot of false positives, so if one says yes, it means yes. I think you’re pregnant! But when? And who? I didn’t think you were going—” She stopped, and it was as if I could actually hear the wheels turning in her head. “Who? That Mike guy?”

″No, thank God.”

″But who…?”

″I had sex with J.B. the night of Ethan and Darcy’s wedding.” I whispered my confession. “I think I…”

″Oh, oh, uh-oh. It’s his? J.B. got you pregnant! Did he mean to get you pregnant?”

″I don’t think so.” I was still whispering, even though Libby was yelling loud enough that anyone standing beside me could hear her.

″What’s he going to say? You are going to tell him, aren’t you? You have to tell him. It’s not right if you don’t tell him—that’s not nice at all, and he might be upset when you do tell him, but I’m sure he’ll be so pissed if you don’t and he finds out later, but I guess you could tell him it was someone else’s, or that you went to get the donor stuff, but everyone knows you’d tell the world if you’d gone and done that—”

I’d never realized how obvious it was that Libby and I are sisters.

″I have to tell him.”

″I guess you better. Go tell him.”

″Now?”

″Yes. Then call me back and tell me what he says.”

I forgot all about Morgan asleep on the couch as I ran up the two flights of stairs, tripping several times, once dropping my precious pee sticks on the stairs. I hope that doesn’t leave a pee stain, I thought to myself, then started giggling uncontrollably. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant! I’m so excited. And nervous and scared and just freaking out in general. Or I was about to freak out. I thought I was still in shock. I was pregnant without even trying to get pregnant, which meant this was totally meant to be, sort of like the fate thing I thought with David, only this was real fate, not some make-believe fantasy I couldn’t get out of my mind. I was pregnant! Really pregnant!

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