What if something’s wrong? What if the coffee did something? What if the diet?—
A big, warm hand wraps around mine.
Magma steps up and folds my hand into both of his, and just like that the spiral loses half its power. He’s been like this since the two pink lines. He left for an hour yesterday and came back with three different pregnancy books and a box of apple danishes.
“I’ve got you,” he says quietly.
“I know.”
Robyn wheels the machine closer. It looks like a very serious computer strapped to a cart, a keyboard covered in more buttons than a cockpit, a big monitor tilted toward the bed, and a smaller screen facing her. There’s a wand attached by a coiled cord, resting in a holder on the side, and a white bottle sitting in what looks like a tiny slow cooker.
“Gel warmer,” Robyn says when she catches me looking. “You’re welcome.”
She hits a switch and the machine hums to life, the monitor glowing gray-blue in the dim room. She folds the top of my gown up and tucks a paper drape into the waistband of my tights and underwear, pulling them down a little and leaving my belly bare. Magma’s thumb strokes over my knuckles, over and over, a slow rhythm. When I glance up at him, he gives me a small nod, calm as anything, but he’s holding my hand a fraction too tight, and his knee is bouncing. He catches me noticing and stops the knee. Ten seconds later it starts up again.
“Warm gel, coming in,” Robyn says, and squeezes a line of it across my lower belly. It’s the temperature of bathwater. Then she picks up the wand, presses it into the gel, and starts to move it in slow sweeps, her eyes on the screen, one hand working the keyboard without looking. The picture on the monitor is a gray wedge of static, shapes blooming and vanishing, and she’s frowning in concentration, tilting her wrist, pressing a little deeper just below my navel.
The static shifts. A dark shape opens up, and then another one right next to it.
There are two babies as clear as day.
They are side by side, each with a rounded head and a body and arms and legs. All of it.
“I’m seeing double,” Magma says. His hands have gone very still around mine.
“It’s twins!” Robyn yells, so loud that anyone in the corridor definitely heard her, secret room or not.
She looks at us with big eyes, moving the wand over my belly, checking one side and then the other, as if the picture might change if she comes at it from a new angle.
“Yep.” She nods like a mad person, grinning so hard her cheeks must hurt. “It’s twins. There are two sacs, two babies.”
“Twins,” I repeat, because apparently that’s all I’ve got.
“Twins,” Magma says.
“Twins!” Robyn says a third time, and then we all lose it.
I’m laughing and crying at the same time, which is becoming my signature since finding out about this pregnancy. Magma leans over the bed and wraps his arms around me, dodging the gel and the drape, and I hug him back with both arms around his neck, and he’s shaking.
Robyn is crying and smiling so hard at the same time that she has to wipe her face on her shoulder because both her hands are busy.
I can’t believe this is my life.
A few days ago, I was miserable. I sat at my best friend’s wedding convinced that the male I loved wanted someone else, planning out my future as the fun spinster aunt who drinks too much at family functions and owns increasingly elaborate cats. I thought I was alone. I felt alone all the way down to my bones.
Today has a very different outlook.
“It looks like we get to have our messy family sooner than we thought,” I tell Magma, still holding him close, my lips near his ear.
He makes a sound against my shoulder that isn’t quite a word.
Then Robyn adjusts something on the keyboard, and a sound fills the room.
A heartbeat. Fast and galloping and loud and true. It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in my life.
Magma lets me go, slowly, and turns to the screen. The beat is up there too, a small flickering pulse in the chest of the bean on the left, matched to the rhythm pouring out of the speakers.
“That’s Baby A,” Robyn says softly.
