Chris and Nikki weren’t attending the exact same elementary as I had but one close. Here, they apparently collected all the children in the yard and playground area in front of the school to wait for their parents if they weren’t taking the bus. I found a parking spot and came out of the car. I leaned against it and looked into the sea of kids, running around and playing. I spotted Chris and Nikki immediately. Nikki was on the ground with a couple of other girls. They looked like they were talking. Chris was standing talking to just one kid, another boy, with his back against the building, the way I was leaning against the car.
Ronnie went up to the building to get them and talk to their teacher. It was at a time like this when a cigarette to smoke would have come in handy, just to keep you busy and help you look like you weren’t just standing there watching the kids for no reason. It was a little strange being back in an elementary school and having a legitimate reason why I was.
The last place a guy who looked like me was expected to be was at an elementary school.
“Glad that’s over,” someone said from beside me. I looked over and saw this guy. He looked a little older than I was, and he was standing against his car the way I was. The guy was just dad all over. He was wearing a t-shirt and new looking jeans. He had the body of a guy who was fit but didn’t have a lot of spare hours a week to put into lifting. “Your kid transfer in for their first day too?” he asked.
Oh... he thought I was like, a dad too.
“Uh... yeah. This was their first day. They used to go to school in the Bay,” I said carefully. How much was I supposed to say to this guy? He was clearly just someone’s dad, waiting to pick his kids up from school. And he thought I was too.
“Huh, you move bases?” he asked. In a place like this, military kids were all over the place. Nikki and Chris were military kids, in fact. SEAL pups. He probably thought they had transferred out of school in the Bay to here because my military career behooved us to move around a lot. At least it was a better assumption than the real reason why they had had to transfer out of their school back in Berkeley.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, not bothering to deny it. The lie was harmless.
“It’s a great school, my son’s back for his fifth year but we just transferred his little sister over too. I’m Greg, by the way,” the man said, smiling at me and reaching out to shake my hand. I smiled back and shook it. This was hilarious. “What class is yours in?”
“Uhm, there’s two of them. Twins, they’re in third grade.”
“My wife’s getting the kids. She has me on baby duty,” he said, pointing to the car. Its windows were rolled down and apparently there was a child in there. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded in response and kept watching the crowd. Both the kids had spotted Veronica and had run up to her. They were walking on either side of her talking to her, what seemed to be at the same time. Chris saw me first and waved. I couldn’t help smiling. I waved at him.
“Is that them?” Greg asked, seeing Veronica and the kids. “They look like their mom.”
There were a lot of jumps that this guy had made for no discernible reason. Okay, maybe I could see why. A man, woman and two kids together at a school? That read family, wherever you were. Chris and Nikki though, they did not look like Veronica. They had olive skin that had tanned brown over the summer from their Mexican dad. The only thing they had in common was blonde hair, so maybe that was what was fooling him. Veronica had become their mom, and I had become their dad. We were probably also a married couple in his mind already. Hopefully, he wouldn’t hear them calling me by my first name and have his nice little life he crafted for us totally exploded.
“Mm. It’s the hair,” I said, agreeing, because, why not? I should have said that I wasn’t their dad, or that Ronnie wasn’t their mom, but was it that serious? Laurie, their mom, had blonde hair, and that was where they had gotten it. Both of us were authorized to pick the kids up from the school; it wasn’t like they were being kidnapped. She was their legal guardian which was as close to a real mom as they had, given the condition of the woman who had given birth to them. It wasn’t a reach for someone who had no other information and the notion, honestly wasn’t that bad to think of. I could have corrected him, but I sort of didn’t want to.
“Hey man, I’ll see you around,” I said, shaking Greg’s hand again. I opened the car up. Veronica hopped into the passenger side, and both kids hugged me before going into the back.
“Who were you talking to?” Veronica asked.
“Just this guy. He thought we were their parents,” I told her.
“What did you tell him?”
I smiled to myself, looking over at her.
“The truth.”
21
Veronica
“Sorry, it’s a little cold,” the technician told me before squirting the jelly on my stomach. I knew it was cold. I had been in this position before, but the times I had been, it was to look at my unborn baby. This was the second time that I was having an ultrasound without being pregnant.
I wasn’t there because I thought there was a chance. There wasn’t. I knew that. That was why I had never asked Thad to use condoms when we had sex. Him coming inside me was literally like sprinkling seeds on concrete and expecting them to grow. Right after the D&C, I had asked the doctor first, when I could have sex and second when I could actually start trying for a baby again.
She had a great bedside manner and was being really nice and delicate about it. I asked her to give it to me straight. I suppose I knew on some level that it was going to be hard for me to get pregnant again, but I had to hear it from a professional, to really squash that last little ember of hope.
Apparently, my womb had gone through a lot of trauma. Unfortunately for me, the two miscarriages, one of which was incomplete, and the consequent D&C had fucked my shit up. Scar tissue. I had some, and that meant that there was a chance I would not be able to get pregnant, very easily. I held onto that ‘very easily’ guessing that it was alright if we didn’t use condoms. It had been.
That was both good and bad because, on the one hand, I hadn’t accidentally made Thad a father without his consent but on the other, my uterus was like overworked farmland. Out of commission.
I just needed to make sure. If there was any chance at all, then I didn’t have to pack it in and give up.
“Have you been trying for a baby?” the guy asked me.
“Has it worked?” I asked jokingly. The doctor joined us and took the technician’s place—the same woman who had done the D&C on me before. She made this small sound of like, disapproval looking at the image of my uterus.
“Bad news?” I asked.
“I told you that the chances of you getting pregnant were slim.”
“You said it wouldn’t happen very easily.”
“What I’m seeing here is a lot of scar tissue. This kind of adhesion build up makes it very difficult for egg implantation. Have you noticed any irregularity with your period?”
“I thought that was because I had just had the D&C and my body was going to need some time to like... reset or whatever.”
“Hm. If you are trying to get pregnant, it will not be easy. You will probably have to have surgery to get rid of some of the stuff even before you start hormone therapy or begin considering other options.”
“Another surgery?”
“Laparoscopy surgery. We would go in with cameras to see the extent of the adhesions then get rid of the worst of it to at least give you a shot at pregnancy.”
A shot. That was all I wanted because I didn’t want to go down without a fight. The doctor filled me in on the surgery. It was apparently super easy. It was minimally invasive; basically, they would go in through just these tiny holes, really small and look around to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be or in my case, see the extent of the damage and get rid of the worst of it.
Hearing the woman talk me through the surgery, I realized just how desperate I actually
was. She was presenting me with the option of elective surgery, and I was there really just waiting for her to stop talking so I could ask her when I could get it done. I was still insured under Michael’s medical cover; maybe he would let me keep it until it expired naturally. That was my spousal support right there—fertility surgery on his insurance company’s dime.
The notion gave me a lot more excitement than was maybe reasonable. It wasn’t an iron-clad certainty that anything like this would work but it was enough for me to have hope. I thought of how if I was to get pregnant now, it wouldn’t be with Michael’s kid. He had done this whole family health, genealogy, and history rundown for me, detailing his genetic history. Telling me all kinds of useless information like which one of his ancestors came from which part of which European nation.
Then some of the more important stuff like whether he had anything hereditary running through the family, like heart disease, or cancer. His family had neither. They didn’t even have depression or red hair. Nothing. He had asked me to present the same and had been sort of mean about Bart’s adoption, saying just horrible things about mixing ethnicities and asking whether there were other non-blood relatives I had who could have thrown their genetic illness in the mix.
God, the signs were there. He was a raging asshole. How did I not see it for this long?
When it was so hard to get pregnant the first time, he had a lot of questions about whether infertility was hereditary. It wasn’t, but he just made it my fault, no matter what. It was in the fact that it was my body that had this and that wrong that was making it hard, but it also wasn’t because it wasn’t like I had done it to myself. I had fertility issues, but it wasn’t like I had asked for it.
For real. Fuck that guy.
I had to get over it. I was trying to be Ronnie reloaded. Back again, newly divorced and better than ever. It was going to be hard but curling up and giving up was just letting him win. Where was Thad? Talking to someone would make me feel better.
It was a while till the kids had to be picked up. Maybe I could surprise Thad at his house with lunch or something, and we could bang. I didn’t want to bang, though, I mean I did, but I wanted to talk before we banged. He came over all the time whenever he wanted, so I could do the same, right?
I needed to make some girlfriends. Discussions of my uterus should for the love of all that is good and clean be kept from people who didn’t have them. There’s a lot going on down there and a shocking number of things that could potentially go wrong. He probably needed to know, though, right?
We were banging. If my fertility was important to anyone besides me, it was him.
When he answered the door, he didn’t have a shirt on.
“I brought pizza,” I said, holding the box out to him. He took it and kissed me before he let me in.
“Usually, the only thing delivery people bring is food. Is that the case today?”
I walked into his living room; he had been playing a video game of some sort. I knew nothing about games; I had never understood their appeal. He had been getting the kids into them though.
“It might be. I have no other friends in Monterey.”
“I think we’re a little more than that,” he said, sitting down and patting the couch next to him for me to sit. He pulled a slice out of the box and handed it to me, no plate.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked, putting my half-eaten slice back down in the box.
“What?”
“I went to the hospital today.”
“Why? Was something wrong?”
“No... well, yes and no.”
“Was it because of your surgery?”
“I haven’t had any complications or anything going on with that. I just had a couple of things I wanted... checked out.”
“Are you about to tell me that you’re pregnant?” he asked.
“No, I’m not. That was what I wanted to ask about, actually.”
“Why you aren’t pregnant?”
“Whether I could ever get pregnant, again.”
“Are you trying to? We haven’t been using condoms. I thought that was because you were on the pill or had something else you were using.” He had stopped eating and had turned on the sofa to face me.
“After the D&C, I asked the doctor whether I would be able to get pregnant again and to just tell me straight, be honest. Not give me any false hope. She told me I had a lot of scar tissue from the two miscarriages I had already had and since the second was incomplete, there was damage from that too. I just went again to... make sure. A lot of women also have complications after a D&C where there’s scar tissue growth. Basically, it isn’t a zero percent chance, but it’s pretty low. So low, I’d likely have to go through hormone therapy or IVF or use a surrogate if I want a biological child.”
“You can’t get pregnant?”
“Basically,” I sighed. I expected him to say something, to crack a joke at this point about how he was lucky because there was no way we could have an accident and get pregnant without wanting to be, but he didn’t.
“You really want a kid, don’t you?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“I’ve watched you with Nikki and Chris. I think you’d be a fantastic mother.”
Tears welled up in my eyes.
“Do you think... do you think I’m...” I couldn’t say it.
“What?” he urged gently.
“Do you think I’m like... I don’t know, broken, or worthless because I can’t have kids?”
“Did Michael used to tell you that?” he sounded angry.
I shrugged because I didn’t want to admit that what he said to me still had power over my thoughts and feelings. He reached for me, pulling me into his bare chest. I rested my head on his skin and my hand on his abdomen.
“You have to get him out of your head,” he said to me.
“I know... it’s just, the one thing I always wanted was to be a mom. When I lost that first baby, it nearly killed me. That was my baby. It was when Michael really became a dick too.”
“There’s still a chance for you, right? You can still get pregnant, with the hormone therapy and whatnot?”
“It’s really expensive, and there’s usually no guarantee that it would work but yeah.”
“You can still be a mom, then. You could always adopt too, right?”
“I could... if I did, I would want a biological child too, though... if I did eventually carry a pregnancy to term, I wouldn’t count on it to happen more than once.”
“You’ll get your baby,” he said. His hand was rubbing slowly up and down my arm, comforting me.
That was a loaded statement if I had ever heard one. He’d said it like he was going to carry the child for me and let me have it when it was born.
“There’s also this thing, this surgery they told me about today where they can go in with cameras and see the extent of the damage and take some steps to correct it,” I said.
“You want to get it done?”
I nodded against his chest.
“Who’s to say it would actually work, but if there is a chance, I don’t want to let it pass me by.”
“It’ll work out, Buttercup,” he said quietly. He kissed the top of my head. He wasn’t a doctor, but I believed him.
I used that night to write an email to Bart and to call my parents. Thad had come over and was watching a nature documentary on insects with the kids. It could never have been me. The sight made my skin crawl. They could watch for the next half hour but then would have to go to bed. I paced up and down the entryway, waiting for my mom to pick the phone up.
She finally answered.
“Veronica?”
“Hi Mom, how are you?”
The things I needed to say to her were, just so many. I needed to tell her about the divorce first and foremost. She would love that. I asked her about how dad was first before I laid it on her. She had a sober response, saying ‘it was about goddamn time’ but not in as many words. I also mentione
d that Laurie had come by and she had more or less asked, ‘Laurie who?’
“How’s Monterey? When can we expect you back?”
“It’s fine. I don’t know. I could organize something one weekend,” I said.
“You could have a break. Have some time to yourself.”
Time to myself. I wanted less of that. I agreed with her telling her that the city was great for kids. I felt too old to be as rudderless as I was. I didn’t want her knowing my prospects were sat currently at zero.
“How’s your friend? Thaddeus?”
I rolled my eyes.
“My friend, Thaddeus is fine, Mom.”
“The kids told us he was your boyfriend,” she said.
“Is that what they said?” I asked. I peered into the living room. Chris was on the floor watching the television by Thad’s knee, and Nikki had her head in his lap while she laid on her back across the couch. They all looked riveted. They made the most adorable picture.
“Are you going to deny it?” she asked.
“I’m going to choose to make no comment.”
“Veronica, you didn’t listen the last time you brought someone home, so I would hope you at least listen now,” she said. Oh shit. She was going to call me out on the past. She was going to bring up Michael. I didn’t want it but what did I have to lose at this point. He was gone.
“Our divorce is final. I don’t have to think about him anymore.”
“Thad seems like a very nice young man,” she started.
“I know, you were all over him when he came to visit.”
“He might be what you want right after your marriage, but further than that...” she trailed off, but I didn’t have to hear her to know what she meant.
“So, you disapprove?”
“I know what you want, Veronica. You want a family and a home. That man is a good man, but he isn’t the one who will give you that.”
Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2) Page 16