“My rat died too,” Georgia said. “Well, she wasn’t exactly mine, because she was the class rat, but she was living in my room, and she died. It was very, very sad.”
“I know,” George said. “Gladys.”
“Excuseme?” Scarlett said. “Thepoint?We’re not talking about rats!”
“We’re talking about being sad that somebody died, though,” George said. “So that’s the same.”
Finlay said, “But it isn’t cancer, Mum? You’re not going to keep being ill?”
“No,” Skylar said. “I promise. I’m healing right this minute, and I’m going to be fine.”
“I still don’t understandhow,”Scarlett said. “And Finlay doesn’t either. If he doesn’t know, it’ll make him more worried.”
“OK,” Skylar said. “Give me that pad of paper and a marker, please.”
What did she do then? She draw the outline of a woman’s torso, that’s what, and sketched in the reproductive organs. Not what he would’ve done, but what did he know?
“These are the ovaries,” she said, “and these long things are the fallopian tubes. An egg—that’s the woman’s part of starting a baby—comes out of one of the ovaries once a month and travels down the fallopian tube to the uterus, which is here in the middle. The egg’s the same idea as a chicken egg, but much, much smaller, and with no shell. If it’s fertilized by a sperm from a man, it becomes an embryo, which is sort of the combination of the mum and the dad, which is why you look like your mumandlike your dad, because you have both halves in you. Again, like a chicken. If there’s a rooster around to fertilize the egg, it can grow into a baby chick. Otherwise, it’s just an unfertilized egg, and we eatit. But a mammal grows inside the mum’s body, not outside with a shell. The uterus is a very soft, warm place where the embryo can grow. When a woman isn’t pregnant, it’s about the size of a pear, but it’s a pretty amazing organ, because it can grow big enough to hold a human baby, and then shrink again once the baby’s born.That’swhen the mum looks fat, Georgia; once the baby starts growing bigger.”
“But how does it getout?”Georgia asked.
“Here.” Yes, she sketched that in, too. “There’s an opening in a woman’s body—and a girl’s body, too—called the vagina, and it does a couple of things. It’s how all the tiny sperm from the dad get inside—they swim up to the uterus like a race, and the fastest one fertilizes the egg—and it’s also where the baby comes out of when it’s born.”
“Oh, gross,” Finlay said. “I didn’t want to know allthat.I just wanted to know that you weren’t dying!”
“I want to know, though,” Georgia said. “Because Skylar is a very good teacher, and I like learning new things.”
“I already knew,” Olive said, “so I don’t care.”
“But what happened to you?”Scarlett asked. “How come it didn’t work?”
“Because once in a while,” Skylar said, “your body gets mixed up. The egg got fertilized while it was still up in the fallopian tube, here on my right side.” She circled a spot on the drawing, then touched her own side. “Right here. But instead of traveling down to the uterus after it was fertilized, it burrowed in right where it was instead. It grew there over some weeks, at least as much as it could, but the fallopian tube isn’t like the uterus. It can’t expand, so the embryo couldn’t grow past a certain point. It would never have become a baby.” Her voice shook a bit on the idea. ‘Potential’ could be a bloody sad word. “But it kept getting bigger anyway, until it made me hurt enough that I knew something was wrong. Your dad got me to hospital, the doctor took it out, and nowI’m getting better.” She set her marker down. “No cancer, no illness, and no worries. I’ll be fine.”
“But how did the part from the dad get there?” George asked. “Our Dad died already.”
Scarlett said, “Because the dad wasn’t him. It wasourdad.” She looked at Zane. Accusingly, possibly. “You.”
“Yeh,” he said. “Me.”
“No,” Georgia said, “because Daddy never said we were going to have another baby. He would’ve said.”
“Oh, my God,” Scarlett said. “You’re such achild.”
“But Iama child!” Georgia said. “I’mfive.I don’t know how to be a grownup!”
“Well, you see,” Skylar said, “the pregnancy was hiding. I didn’t know it was there, and neither did your dad.”
“But—” Georgia began.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Scarlett said. “They had sex. Obviously. It wasn’t safe sex, because if you have safe sex, you don’t get pregnant.”
Duncan said, “Dad said we weren’t supposed to talk about that.”
“Except that wehaveto talk about it,” Scarlett said, “because they made a baby.”
“But thereisn’ta baby,” Georgia said.
Scarlett slapped her forehead, and Skylar actually laughed. Until Scarlett said, “So it’s better, I guess, that that happened. If you didn’t want to have a baby.”
