When You Least Expect It

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Why me?”

  “You’re a professional writer.”

  “I write science fiction,” I pointed out. “Did you want a few space aliens or genetic mutants worked into the profile?”

  “No. I want you to make us sound amazing, like the sort of parents any pregnant woman would be thrilled to hand her baby over to,” India said.

  “So I shouldn’t mention the S&M dungeon in the basement?”

  “And no smart-assery.”

  “That’s not even a word.”

  “See? I didn’t know that. That’s why you have to write it. Just talk about what great people we are.”

  “Are we?”

  “Yes, goddamn it, we are.” India smiled. “And make sure you include something about Otis.”

  Otis, who was lying under the dining room table at India’s feet, thumped his tail when he heard his name.

  “What about him?” I asked doubtfully. Otis was known for two things—his ability to fall asleep on his back with all four paws sticking up straight in the air and a startling enthusiasm for eating his own shit. I couldn’t imagine either one would hold much sway over potential birth mothers.

  “The idea is to make us sound like the all-American couple. Otis is a selling point; he makes us look nurturing. We need to talk everything up—our house, our jobs, our friends, our family.”

  “Our family? Am I allowed to lie?”

  “No. But we can package creatively,” India said. “It’s a fine line. You don’t want to exaggerate too much, but you want to make sure we sound like the perfect couple to hand a baby over to. So focus on how kind and loving we are—”

  “Kind and loving? This morning you said something about wanting to rip my face off.”

  “You forgot to buy coffee! And we were entirely out! You know I can’t function without coffee. And you can’t hold anything I say while in a state of extreme caffeine withdrawal against me,” India exclaimed.

  “You probably don’t want to put your insane caffeine addiction in the profile, either. It’s not pretty.”

  “Yes. Just put in warm, fuzzy things, like our Christmas traditions and stuff like that.”

  “Do we have any Christmas traditions? Other than your mother getting drunk and losing track of when she put the turkey in the oven, which usually ends up with someone getting food poisoning? Then there’s that time she set the Christmas tree on fire,” I said. Both India and I snorted with laughter at the memory.

  India’s mother, Georgia, had insisted on tying real candles to the boughs of the tree, in an attempt to re-create an authentic Dickensian Christmas. The fact that the tree was artificial didn’t in any way dampen her enthusiasm for the project. Moments after she lit the candles, the tree went up in flames, with noxious, carcinogenic clouds of black smoke billowing out until I sprinted in with a fire extinguisher. No one was seriously hurt, although Georgia’s eyebrows were singed off. For weeks after, she went around with a pencil-drawn arc over each eye that gave her a permanently startled look.

  India suddenly stopped laughing and her face crumpled with worry. “Oh, God. What woman in her right mind is going to give a baby to us?” she said plaintively. Tears sparkled in her eyes. “We have no experience with babies! And our families are insane!”

  I gathered India in my arms. She felt soft and warm pressed against me. My heart cracked open.

  “We’ll be great parents,” I said firmly, stroking her hair. “And somewhere out there, there’s a woman who will see that.”

  “Do you really think so?” India asked. She leaned back and looked up at me. The tears had smudged her mascara and left red streaks on her cheeks.

  “Yes,” I said. “And when we find her, we’ll just make sure that she never meets our parents.”

  Three

  LAINEY

  In the bathroom of the tiny apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Lainey Walker stared at the home pregnancy test stick she’d just peed on.

  “Shit,” she said, and grabbed the box to read the directions again. A straight line meant the test was negative, a plus sign was positive. She looked back at the test stick, praying that this time she’d see a straight line. The plus sign was still there, an unmistakable bright blue.

  Lainey let out her breath in one long stream. “Well, isn’t that just fucking great.”

  Lainey tossed the stick in the small plastic garbage can by the toilet and then sat back down on the closed lid of the toilet. There was no way she could have a baby. Not now. Not when she was so close to getting out of here, to putting her big plan into motion.

  She’d thought it through carefully. First, she’d get together as much money as possible. Second, she was going to move to L.A. And third, she would get cast in a reality television show, which would turn her into a star. She wasn’t even going to bother trying to get into movies. It was impossible to break into the business that way, unless you had an in. And since Lainey didn’t have a daddy who was a director or a boyfriend who was a producer, she knew it was next to impossible to land a commercial, much less star in a movie.

  But reality shows were wide open. You just had to know how to package yourself and look amazing in a bikini. Lainey had decided she was going to nab the role of the Girl Next Door. At first, she’d thought she’d go for being the villain—it was a flashier role that would get more attention—but then decided she didn’t want to get typecast so early in her career. The villains became Internet jokes; the Girls Next Door landed jobs co-hosting The View.

  But first Lainey had to find the right show. The survival ones were out—she didn’t have any survival skills, and besides, those people all started looking nasty once they’d spent a few days away from makeup and hair conditioner. The talent shows, where you had to dance or sing, wouldn’t work since Lainey couldn’t do either.

  Her best bet was probably one of those looking-for-love shows, where a group of women competed for the attention of some walking, talking Ken doll. The only real problem was that you started as just one of a group, so you didn’t get any real screen time until you made it into the top three or so. But Lainey was convinced that she could make herself stand out, especially if there was a chance to appear in a bikini. She just needed a shot—one shot—and she’d make it work. And it was now or never. Lainey was already twenty. The way she figured it, her prime bikini years were numbered.

  But a baby was definitely not part of the plan. She stood and leaned toward the mirror over the sink, puffing her cheeks out to see what she’d look like fat.

  Gross, she thought, blowing the air out. There’s no way in hell that’s going to happen.

  And there was also no way in hell she was going to pay for an abortion out of her L.A. fund. She tossed her long dark hair over her shoulders and marched out of the bathroom, down the short dingy hallway and into the tiny living room. Travis was sprawled on the couch, watching an episode of The Simpsons and breathing loudly through his mouth.

  When they’d first met—at the gym, both waiting for the leg press machine—Lainey had thought Trav was hot. Sure, his features were a bit too thick to be considered handsome—his nose was wide and his lips were fleshy—but his ripped arms and perfectly defined abs made up for it. And even if he wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, Trav took care of himself and made a good living as a salesman at the local Toyota dealership. This was a stark contrast to her previous boyfriends, so Lainey had been willing to overlook his less-than-sparkling intelligence.

  But that was before the steroids. One of Trav’s bodybuilder friends had gotten him started. The drugs made Travis’s chest and arm muscles pop out like a superhero’s, but they also gave him a cavemanlike brow ridge and caused an ugly rash of acne to spread over his face, shoulders, and back. Lainey had thought that the side effects might be a deterrent to Trav’s continued juicing, but he seemed almost fascinated with his zits. He’d spend hours staring into the bathroom mirror, squeezing them until green pus erupted out. It was revolting. Even worse, he was irrita
ble all the time and picked fights with Lainey for no reason. And he never wanted to go out anymore—all he did was go to work, go to the gym, and then return home to zone out in front of the television. Lainey was fed up with him.

  And now the dumbass had gone and gotten her pregnant.

  “I need to talk to you,” Lainey said.

  Trav didn’t look up from The Simpsons. “What about?”

  “Turn the TV off.”

  Trav didn’t respond, nor did he turn the TV off. He didn’t even lower the volume. Her irritation boiled over into hot anger.

  “Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you,” Lainey said.

  Travis finally looked up at the word asshole, his expression sullen. “What?”

  “Do you remember when you told me that I wouldn’t get pregnant? I told you to pull out, and you said you didn’t have to because that steroid shit meant you couldn’t get me pregnant.”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “So your great plan didn’t work out so well. I’m pregnant.”

  Travis looked at her blankly. Lainey closed her eyes and shook her head. He was even dumber than she’d thought. She wondered if he’d always been this stupid, or if the steroids were melting his brain.

  “Preg-nant,” she said, sounding the word out.

  “No way,” Travis said, and the color drained from his face. “Dude. What are you going to do?”

  What are you going to do. Very nice, Lainey thought. Not that she’d expected a marriage proposal, but still. A little fucking support would have been nice.

  “I’m going to get rid of it. Obviously.”

  As the specter of fatherhood faded, Travis looked relieved. “Good,” he said, his eyes drifting back to the The Simpsons.

  “Oh, no. You don’t get off that easily,” Lainey said, crossing her arms. “You’re paying for it.”

  This did get his attention. “How much?”

  Lainey shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think it’s around …” Lainey paused. She was about to say six hundred, which is what she knew for a fact one of her co-workers had shelled out for her abortion. But Lainey was pretty sure Trav wouldn’t insist on coming to the clinic with her, so she could probably get away with inflating the figure. “Eight hundred,” she said instead.

  “Eight hundred? Are you kidding me?”

  Trav used to buy Lainey things all the time. He’d even surprised her on her birthday with a Dooney & Bourke purse she’d been drooling over. Now, he got pissy if she asked for twenty bucks to pay for takeout. She knew he made a good living, but from what she could tell—and she’d made a habit of monitoring his bank account—he was spending over a thousand dollars a month on his drug habit.

  “This is all your fault,” Lainey snapped. “If you wore a condom, like I told you to, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I don’t like condoms. Why can’t you go on the Pill?”

  “I tried the Pill. It made me gain weight.”

  Travis glared at her. “What if I don’t have the money?”

  Lainey crossed her arms and stared him down.

  “How much do you think eighteen years of child support is going to cost you? You know they deduct that straight from your paycheck, right? Doesn’t leave a lot of money left over for your drugs, or gym membership, or your entrance fees to those stupid bodybuilding competitions.”

  Trav’s face was no longer pale. Instead, it was slowly turning a mottled shade of red.

  “Why are you being such a bitch?” he demanded.

  “Why are you?” she retorted. “I know steroids shrink your dick, but I didn’t know they turned you into a whiny little girl.”

  Travis stood suddenly, his shovel-like hands clenched into fists. Lainey wondered if he was going to hit her. She wasn’t afraid. He had slapped her once, and she’d responded by first kneeing him in the groin and then, when he was doubled over with pain, clipping him in the jaw with a neat right hook.

  But Trav didn’t hit her. Instead, he spun around and punched the wall, leaving a dent in the drywall. He let out a roar of pain and shook his hand. “Shit! That really fucking hurt!”

  Lainey rolled her eyes and turned away. What an idiot. “I’m calling the women’s clinic. The sooner I get this taken care of, the better.”

  Lainey’s eyes fluttered open. Where the hell was she? And what was that smell? It reminded her of visiting her grandmother in the nursing home before she died, a depressing combination of bleach and urine. But then the fog began to lift, and piece by piece, it slowly came back to her.

  She’d been at the clinic. Sitting in an exam room. They’d given her a flimsy paper gown that gaped open, covering nothing. After the doctor examined her, the nurse came in to draw blood. The last thing Lainey could remember was watching the tip of the needle prick through the thin skin of her inner arm, and the blood bubbling up into the needle … and then everything had gone black and fuzzy.

  Lainey lifted her head and glanced around. She was still there, in the clinic, in the same exam room she’d been in when she met with the doctor. She was also still wearing the paper gown, although someone had laid a scratchy yellow blanket over her.

  Lainey felt a tightness on her arm. She looked and saw there was a Band-Aid there, holding down a cotton ball. She picked at the Band-Aid, but it stuck to her arm hair. There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Lainey said.

  The door opened, and a middle-aged woman with a kind face and short dark hair speckled with gray came in.

  “How are you feeling?” the woman asked her. “I’m Rosemary. The nurse had to go see another patient, but she asked me to keep an eye on you. Should I call her back?”

  “I’m fine,” Lainey said, not entirely truthfully. She was still pretty woozy. “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” Rosemary said. When she smiled at Lainey, the edges of her eyes and mouth creased up like the folds of a fan. “You don’t have to get up right away. Feel free to lie there as long as you want.”

  “It’s okay,” Lainey said, swinging her legs off the cot and sitting upright. “You’re not a nurse?”

  “No, I’m a volunteer counselor.”

  “Are you here to counsel me?” Lainey asked. Her chin lifted defiantly, as though daring Rosemary to try.

  “If you want to talk, I’d be happy to listen,” Rosemary said. She gestured toward a task chair that was floating adrift in the middle of the exam room. Lainey shrugged. Rosemary seemed to take this as acquiescence and sat down, resting both feet flat on the floor and folding her hands in her lap.

  “Look. I’ll just tell you up front: I want to have an abortion. You’re not going to talk me out of it,” Lainey said.

  Rosemary looked surprised. “I’m not here to talk you out of anything. I support every woman’s right to make choices about her reproductive health.”

  “Oh,” Lainey said, her indignation deflating. “Then what do you want to talk about?”

  Rosemary smiled. “It doesn’t work that way. I’m here to listen, if you’d like to talk.”

  Lainey shrugged again. “There’s no point.”

  Rosemary nodded, but didn’t say anything. Lainey waited for some sort of reaction, and when none was forthcoming, she began to talk again, just to fill the silence.

  “I don’t want kids. I definitely don’t want one now, and maybe not ever. And besides, my boyfriend is sort of a jerk. He wasn’t always, but lately …” Lainey trailed off. She was pissed at Trav, but even so, she didn’t want to get him in trouble for his illegal steroid use. She picked at the Band-Aid, but it stayed firmly in place.

  Rosemary nodded. “Have you discussed your decision with your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah. Trust me, this is what he wants, too.” Not that his opinion counts for anything, she silently added. She wrapped her arms around herself, pressing them tightly across her stomach. Then, wondering if that would bother the baby, she released them. Was the baby big enough to feel something like that? she wondered. It was a weird th
ought—that pressing her own arms over her own stomach would affect someone else. No, that was stupid. The baby was probably too small to feel anything.

  “Do you have a good support system?” Rosemary asked. Lainey must have looked confused, because she added, “Your mother, a sister, a close friend?”

  Lainey made an irritated sound in her throat. She didn’t need a support system; she needed an abortion and a bus ticket to L.A. “Look, just so you know, I don’t really do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “The touchy-feely, talking-about-my-feelings crap.”

  Rosemary laughed. “Okay. I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

  Lainey stood, wanting to change out of the paper gown and into her real clothes, and then to get the hell out of there. “I should get going. Am I all done here?”

  “The nurse practitioner is going to want to talk to you to make sure you’re feeling well enough to leave. Then, just make an appointment on the way out,” Rosemary said. She reached into her pocket and handed Lainey a business card. She wrote a phone number on the back. “Call me if you change your mind about wanting to talk.”

  “Sure,” Lainey said. She took the business card, fully intending to throw it out as soon as possible.

  “I can’t believe you’re pregnant,” Flaca said. She was sitting on a faded floral upholstered chair with her feet propped up on the coffee table, while Lainey painted Flaca’s toenails dark blue.

  Flaca Reyes was roughly as wide as she was tall, with massive breasts, long, shiny dark hair, and tattoos covering both arms. Lainey had spent much of her childhood at Flaca’s house, escaping first her parents’ escalating arguments and then, after her dad moved out, her mother’s spiral into alcoholism. Flaca was one of eight siblings, and although she’d complained bitterly about the lack of space and privacy while growing up, Lainey had envied her. Some of the best moments of her childhood were spent sitting at the Reyeses’ kitchen table, eating Mrs. Reyes’s empanadas hot from the pan and listening to the good-natured arguments breaking out between Flaca and her siblings.