"Then we are officially in this together and the cosmos will have to deal with the both of us."
"What if it's negative."
She softened. "Then it's negative. Either way, you find out today. You can't keep walking around in maybe-land. Maybe-land is making you sleep on a couch and not eat lunch. Maybe-land has gotten its hours."
I went into the bathroom.
I will spare us all the technical specifics of peeing on five sticks while a pregnant woman talks to you cheerfully through a closed door about the time her cousin tried this maneuver and ended up doing it on her own hand. I lined them up on the edge of the sink. I sat down on the cold tile with my back against the tub and I stared at the bath mat. Tessa came in and sat down next to me without asking, the way she had been doing since we were nineteen and I called her crying from the bathroom of a frat house, and slid her hand into mine.
"Three minutes," she said.
We sat.
I thought about Oliver, about the seven-thirty breakfast and the boy who already knew everything about fractions. I thought about my yellow house with a sign in the yard. I thought about how I’d probably have to move states to find another teaching job if we couldn’t take down Darren Beauford. But mostly, I thought about three men I was supposed to be done thinking about.
"Time," Tessa said.
I closed my eyes.
"Open them, you coward."
I opened them.
Two pink lines. Two pink lines. Two pink lines. Two pink lines. And, on the generic-looking-woman one, in case you were wondering, two pink lines.
Five for five. Apparently the universe had decided subtlety was for cowards.
The sob that came out of me was an ugly one. It was the kind that pulls out of the part of you where you keep every feeling you have ever buried and refused to look at since middle school, and it brought all of them up with it on the way out. Tessa scooched in tight and wrapped her whole self around me, and I cried into her shoulder, and her shoulder cried right back, because she was already a mess just on principle.
"Okay," she breathed me through it. "Okay. Okay."
"I don't know how to do this."
"You know how to do this. You've done this. You did it harder than this and alone. You're not alone now."
"I am, though. The dads of this baby think I'm a—"
"Stop." She pulled back and put her hands on my face. Her eyes were wet and her mascara had given up the ghost. "Listen to me very carefully. You are not alone. I'm seventeen weeks now. You are pee-stick weeks. We are officially pregnancy twins. Do you understand what that means."
"It means our hormones are about to start a small war and nobody's safe."
"It means," she said, "I am going to put on so much weight that my husband is going to have to use a forklift to romance me, and you are going to throw up in five different parking lots, and we are going to do every single revolting beautiful insane minute of it together. Side by side. Twin to twin. And god help anybody who tries to come between us during the third trimester, because I have already started doing the rage push-ups."
A laugh came out of me. A wet stupid honking laugh with tears and snot. It was the first real laugh I'd produced in six days. It tasted like medicine.
She cackle-snorted, which made me cackle-snort, which made her cackle-snort harder, which made me laugh so hard I genuinely worried about the integrity of my bladder, which felt deeply ironic given that I had just used it five times in a row.
We sat there on her bathroom floor for a long time. Two women, five tests, a tile imprint forming on the back of my thighs, my best friend's hand on my stomach, my hand on hers. Pregnancy twins. The smallest most absurd most life-saving piece of solid ground I had stood on in a week.
I was not okay. I would not be okay for a long time. But for the first time since the driveway, I knew with bone-deep certainty that I was not going to crumble.
I was going to figure this out.
I just had to do it like I did everything else, which was badly and chaotically and with one extremely committed snort-laughing maniac in my corner.
And whatever was waiting for me out there was going to have to come through her first.
That wasn't the whole truth, though. The whole truth was that I would have given anything for it to be one of them next to me on this bathroom floor instead. And I was ashamed of that, in a deep ugly place, because they had not earned the right to be missed and I missed them anyway. Three men who had failed me, and a body that was making a fourth person inside it, and the loneliest part of the whole thing was that I couldn't even admit out loud who I actually wished was here.
