The Numbers Game

by Danielle Steel

  “I know.”

  “Can you find out how pregnant you are?” She nodded.

  “I’ll see a doctor at Planned Parenthood.”

  “We have to figure this out,” he said, and stood up. He wanted to be alone to digest what she had just told him. He didn’t want to do it with her right there. “How could we be so stupid?” He had tears in his eyes too. “I love you,” he said miserably, “but we’re not ready for this, either of us. I don’t want to leave you now, but I can’t cancel the trip. My parents already paid for it.” And there were four boys from his class going with him. The trip had been planned for months and his parents would have a fit if he didn’t go. “Go to the doctor tomorrow. Do you want me to go with you?” he offered, and felt sorry for her, and for himself too.

  She shook her head bravely and looked up at him as she stood up. “I’ll call you after I see the doctor.”

  They walked out of the coffee shop together without saying a word, each of them lost in their own thoughts and fears. They could feel their world crashing around them. They felt like they’d been shot out of a cannon into an adult world neither of them was prepared for. Tim walked her to her car and kissed her cheek as she got in, but he didn’t put his arms around her. He looked as if he was afraid to touch her now. As she drove away, she saw him standing there with tears rolling down his cheeks, and she was crying too.

  Chapter 2

  The doctor Pennie saw at Planned Parenthood the next morning told her that she was fourteen weeks pregnant. He explained to her that according to Connecticut law, an abortion could be performed until “viability,” as late as twenty-four to twenty-eight weeks, but that he personally did not agree, and wouldn’t perform an abortion after fourteen weeks. So if she wanted an abortion, she’d have to see another doctor. She heard the heartbeat on the fetal monitor, and she saw the baby on the sonogram screen. Everything looked normal, except for the fact that she was seventeen, Tim was eighteen, he was leaving for college soon, and they weren’t married. She called Tim as soon as she left the clinic, with a bottle of prenatal vitamins in her purse. The doctor had been very matter-of-fact. Pennie had lied and said she was eighteen, and she and her boyfriend were engaged, as though it mattered.

  She told Tim the news, and they agreed to meet again at a park where they went for walks sometimes. Both of their homes felt off-limits now. At the park, they were on neutral ground.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked her as they sat on a bench and stared at the ducks in the pond. There were children scattering food for them, with their mothers hovering nearby.

  “I don’t know. We don’t have a lot of options,” Pennie said softly. “The doctor I saw won’t do an abortion, as pregnant as I am now. And seeing the baby on the sonogram, I couldn’t have gotten rid of it anyway.” He nodded. He had thought about it all night. He could think of only one solution that was acceptable to him.

  “We have to get married, Pen. You can’t do this alone, and I don’t want you to. If you’re three months pregnant, it must be due around Christmas. I’d like to do the first term at Stanford, and then I’ll apply for a transfer to Connecticut College. I could go to school here, and my parents will help us out.” He had planned it all the night before, unable to sleep.

  “I can’t let you do that. You’ve wanted to go to Stanford for as long as I’ve known you. I’m not going to ruin your life. That’s what happened to my parents, and they were older than we are. I don’t think they’ve ever been really happy. They had to get married. I won’t do that to you.” She felt lifeless as she said it, but she loved him too much to rob him of his dreams.

  “And what would you do? Drop out of school? Not even finish high school?” He sounded angry at her for the first time, and at himself for their stupidity. One foolish moment was about to ruin both their lives. “It’s our baby. We have to step up to the plate. We both have to go to school. We’ll just have to ask our parents to help us. I can get a part-time job and work at night.” His mind was racing. “We can get married now. I’ll cancel the trip to China, then I can stay with you till August. Just as I said, I’ll do the one term at Stanford, and transfer back here.” It was the only plan he’d been able to come up with the night before, if she decided to keep the baby. And now she had no choice. “Is it healthy? Does it look okay?”

  “It looked fine,” she said somberly. This was not a happy event in her life. She felt like she was trapping him into marriage and she didn’t want to do that to him, and steal his future. She was not going to blow his dreams to smithereens, even if he was willing. And her own dreams were dead now.

  “Did they tell you the sex?” She shook her head. He was curious about their baby.

  “They did a bunch of blood tests which will tell us.” He nodded. It was suddenly all too real. They weren’t breaking up after all, they were getting married and having a baby.

  “I’m not going to marry you, Tim, it’s not fair. This isn’t your fault. It’s my fault too. Don’t cancel the trip to China. I’ll see you when you get back. I have to go to camp anyway.” She had signed a contract for the summer job. And she’d promised.

  “You can’t go now,” he said, frowning.

  “Yes, I can. I have to. I can’t cancel at the last minute.” It was her first real summer job, and she needed it for her college application, although she probably wouldn’t go to college now.

  “Won’t it show by the end of the summer?” he asked innocently.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. I can hide it and wear baggy clothes and tell them I’m getting fat. I don’t know if they’ll let me come back to school if I’m pregnant. I can go to public school this year if I have to.” She had thought of that too. The consequences were already far-reaching. And she knew her parents would be furious if she had to leave her school.

  “This is so fucked up, and not how it should be,” he said as he ran a hand through his hair and stared at her. “I’m sorry, Pennie.”

  “Me too. We’ll figure it out. When are you going to tell your parents?”

  “Tonight. You should too. They have a right to know what’s going on. And we need their help. I don’t think I should go to China, but if you’re going to camp anyway….” His voice trailed off. There was so much to consider. And at Christmas, they would be parents, whether married or not.

  They sat on the bench for a long time, and then walked for a while. They both had a difficult task to face that night. Pennie was dreading telling her parents, and so was Tim with his. Their lives had been shattered in a single instant. Their parents had warned them for three years not to let something like this happen and now it had.

  “I don’t think you should transfer back here,” she said generously. “If we stay together, after the baby is born, maybe I could move to California with the baby.” It was a whole different scenario from what he’d planned for his college life. Instead of spreading his wings, she had clipped them. He was trapped.

  After she left him, Pennie drove home thinking about what she would tell her parents, trying to guess what they would say. It wasn’t going to be easy for her or for them, or for Tim and his parents.

  Her mother had just come home with the boys when Pennie walked in. Eileen told her that her father was having dinner in the city. Pennie knew she’d have to wait until he got back, which was better anyway, since Seth and Mark would be in bed by then, and hopefully asleep.

  She went upstairs and lay down on her bed, thinking about Tim and their baby. She could just begin to understand now how her parents must have felt when they found out about her, and for the first time she felt truly sorry for them. Almost as sorry as she did for Tim, and herself. She stayed in her room and skipped dinner that night. She told her mother she’d had something to eat with friends, and Eileen was glad she had gone out for a while. She had been moping around the house since she and Tim had broken up. Meeting up with her friend
s was a good sign. In a week, she’d be at camp, too busy to think about him.

  Pennie was in her room when she heard her father come in. The front door slammed and the boys had gone to bed an hour before. She peeked out and saw her parents come up the stairs, talking. If he’d had dinner with clients, she knew he would have had a few drinks, which might help. She had been rehearsing what she had to say all evening. She waited until they got to their bedroom, knocked on the door, and walked in two minutes later.

  “Hi, can I talk to you for a few minutes?” she said, as her father put an arm around her and gave her a hug.

  “How’s my girl? What did you do today?”…Had a sonogram…saw my baby…went for a walk in the park with Tim…she thought, as she gave him a wintry smile. Watching her, Eileen could already sense that something was wrong. Pennie looked serious, even more so than she had since she and Tim had broken up.

  “Come on in,” her mother invited her, and Pennie sat down nervously in a big comfortable chair, as her parents watched her.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said softly, as they approached. Her father still looked jovial, her mother was studying Pennie’s face, looking for clues about what would come next.

  Her mother sat down on a small settee, and her father in the chair facing hers. Neither of them was prepared for the bomb she dropped on them a minute later.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said in barely more than a whisper. This was harder than she’d thought it would be. For an instant they just sat and stared at her, too stunned to react.

  “Oh my God,” her father said in a shocked voice, looking at her as though she had turned into a snake or grown two more heads. “Shit, Pennie, how the hell did that happen? Didn’t you two know enough to use condoms or take the pill or something? I assume it’s Tim’s,” he said to her, and she nodded.

  “Of course. We had a slip, I didn’t know till yesterday. I just found out.”

  “Well, you know what you have to do about it. You have to get an abortion. You can’t have a baby at your age,” he said, as though there was no relevant opinion on the subject except his own. He looked panicked, and Eileen looked devastated. It took her back instantly to when it had happened to them. Paul hadn’t left a second for her to speak since Pennie told them.

  “I don’t want an abortion, Dad. I’m more than three months pregnant. I saw a doctor today, and he won’t do abortions after twelve or fourteen weeks. I saw it on the sonogram. It looks like a baby. I can’t have an abortion, Dad.”

  “Does Tim know?” She nodded again. “What did he say?”

  “He offered to marry me, right away. I’m not going to do that,” she said quietly, and her mother thought she looked suddenly like a woman and not a child, as she listened to her. Pennie seemed different. Knowing about the baby had already changed her.

  “What do you mean you’re not going to do that?” her father asked, raising his voice.

  “I’m not going to marry him, make him leave Stanford, give up all his plans and dreams, to be a husband and father at eighteen. That’s not fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair,” Paul said angrily. “It was good enough for me, it’s good enough for him. Why does he get to follow his dreams, while you ruin your life and have an illegitimate baby?”

  “He’s eighteen, Dad. You were twenty-four. You were in business school. He hasn’t even gotten to college yet. And I’m not ready to be married with a baby either.”

  “You should have thought of that before you got into bed,” her father said harshly. “If you won’t have an abortion, you have no other choice except marriage.”

  “She has other choices,” Eileen spoke up in a clear, strong voice. “Do you want to give the baby up, Pennie?” Tears filled Pennie’s eyes, and she shook her head.

  “No, I don’t. I don’t think I could do that. I don’t think I could even have an abortion, after seeing the baby on the sonogram today. I guess I’ll have to have it the way I am. I can stay in school till Christmas, if they let me, or go to another school where they would. And if you help me with someone to take care of the baby, I could stay here with you and go to community college a year from now, instead of the schools I was going to apply to.” Bye, bye, Ivy League.

  “So he gets to go to Stanford, and you go to a second-rate school and get saddled with a baby at eighteen, without a husband or the respectability of marriage. Why the hell should he get away with that? I didn’t, and neither have a million other guys like me. If you play the game, you have to be willing to pay the price. If you’re having a baby, you need to get married, even if you get divorced later. He owes you at least that. This is his fault too. He can’t just waltz off, and you can’t let him off the hook. I’m not going to let that happen,” Paul said angrily. He was determined that Tim should pay the same price he had for his youthful mistakes.

  “She doesn’t have to get married if she doesn’t want to,” Eileen said firmly. She felt as though her own sins had been visited on her daughter. This was like a painful déjà vu of what had happened to them eighteen years before. But they didn’t have to resolve it in the same way. “What do you want, Pennie? In a perfect world.” But the world was no longer perfect, as Pennie had discovered abruptly the day before. Now it would never be perfect again. She would be doomed to a marriage like her parents’, where they loved each other but not enough to forget that they’d been forced into marriage eighteen years before, or to forgive each other for it. She didn’t want Tim to feel that way about her in twenty years.

  “Maybe we could get married one day,” Pennie said softly, “if we still want to. But I don’t want a baby to be the only reason why we do. He’ll hate me for it in the end.” There was silence in the room. No one denied what she’d said, which spoke volumes about her parents.

  “I don’t hate your mother because we had to get married,” Paul spoke calmly, “but it gave us a rough start.” And just when Eileen had wanted to go back to work again, she had gotten pregnant with the twins, and wound up in bed for months. “But we’ve done fine. Your mother and I love each other,” he said, without looking at Eileen. “You and Tim are young to get married. It’s going to mean a lot of sacrifices for both of you, but I think you should. He needs to make some of those sacrifices too. Not just you.” Paul was monumentally upset by her news.

  “People don’t get married because they’re pregnant in this day and age,” Eileen reminded both of them. “And I agree you’re too young. It will change your whole life. I think you should give the baby up,” she said, looking at her daughter with empathy, and thinking about her own experience. “Twenty-two was too young too, but it’s a lot different from seventeen. A couple desperate for a child could give the baby a wonderful home, better than you two could. The chances of a marriage working out at your age are slim. It’s hard enough when you’re older. As teenagers, it’s more than the two of you can cope with, or should have to.” She was deeply sympathetic and felt sorry for both of them.

  “Would you let me live here with the baby?” Pennie asked her with tears swimming in her eyes. “Even if we get married, if Tim goes to Stanford, I’ll need a place to live.” The tears spilled down her cheeks and her mother got up and went to put her arms around her. Pennie melted into her mother’s embrace and sobbed. Paul watched them, feeling helpless. He still couldn’t believe this had happened, and they had a grandchild on the way. He was forty-one years old, and not ready to be a grandfather yet. But more important, he was heartbroken for Pennie and that she had to face the burdens of marriage and motherhood so soon. He knew only too well what that was like.

  “Of course you can live here,” Eileen said, wiping the tears from her own eyes. She felt as though she had doomed her daughter by example with her own mistakes. “But I really think you should think about putting the baby up for adoption. Talk to Tim about it. I think he’d be relieved.”

  “I won’t do
that, Mom,” Pennie said, certain of it. She wasn’t going to give their baby away. She loved Tim too much to do that, and would love their baby too.

  “They have to get married,” Paul said, sounding angry again. They were a Greek chorus, telling Pennie what to do, neither of them with the answers she wanted. All she wanted was for them to be supportive of her, and help her with the baby as a single mother at eighteen. They weren’t prepared to do that yet, but Pennie hoped that eventually they’d come around, without trying to force her to do things their way. This was her first major adult decision, and she knew that it had to be her own, and Tim’s. Neither of them had been prepared for it, but ready or not, it was the hand they’d been dealt in a very grown-up, high-stakes game. Now they had to pay the price, or she did.

  Tim’s parents were more unified in their reaction, as they were in life. They had a good solid marriage, came from the same conservative upper middle–class background, and shared the same values. Bill and Barbara Blake were both furious about what had happened. They blamed Pennie for it, accused her to Tim of trying to entrap him, and his father flatly forbade him to marry her because she was pregnant. Tim’s mother wholeheartedly agreed.

  “You can’t marry her for that. What if she has a miscarriage two months later, then you’re stuck with her. How do you even know she’s pregnant? Maybe she’s lying so you’ll marry her.” Bill Blake took nothing at face value. He had never liked how seriously involved Tim and Pennie were at their age. Bill and Barbara were both in their early fifties. They had had trouble conceiving Tim, and Barbara had been a virgin when they married. The idea of Tim having a child out of wedlock was horrifying to them. But they didn’t want him getting married at eighteen either. Like Pennie’s mother, they thought that giving the child up for adoption was the best idea, and suggested it to him, to his dismay.