The Baby Plan

by Kate Rorick

  “He’s on tour until the ninth, then he promised that he’d take me to Baja for Christmas. Maisey’s with her dad, so . . .” Sophia replied, letting the warm happiness spread across her cheeks. She wasn’t used to her personal life being on display at work. But Sebastian was just so effusive, so open with his emotions that it brought their relationship into the light. Besides, they’d met through the show—through Vanessa. So the fact that he sent her flowers at work every week to brighten up her Mondays, when she sometimes had a predawn call time, was just part of what made him him.

  “Baja is amazing this time of year,” Vanessa interjected. “I went there a few years ago, I have the best resort for you . . .” Then her eyes fell to the flowers.

  And the smile dropped from her face.

  “Shouldn’t those go to the office? A PA should be dropping them off, not some rando,” she said. “After all, we don’t want the unwashed masses to know that Billie gets a bloody lip, do we?”

  Billie was Vanessa’s character on Fargone, the hottest show on TV, now in the middle of its third season—and unlike most shows that premiered big, dropped a bit, and settled into a steady viewership, Fargone just kept growing. Vanessa’s character was a cult phenomenon. Billie was, supposedly, a superhero with impenetrable skin. Which would make a little blood coming out of her mouth quite the spoiler . . . if they hadn’t had Billie lose her powers in season one. And then done flashbacks in season two to when she was mortal.

  At this rate, it was more of a spoiler that Billie wasn’t getting a bloody lip during sweeps.

  But Vanessa was as protective of her character’s secrets as she was of her on-screen image. She never wanted to appear imperfect. Some people might dismiss this as vanity. But after working with actors and stars for the past decade, Sophia knew it wasn’t about vanity as much as it was about survival. These people lived off their faces. A bad photo could circulate for years, move them from being thought of as viable artists to has-beens, costing them work. So they had to be vigilant. Once you got past their fears about how they looked, most of them were really quite normal.

  Vanessa was, all in all, pretty normal.

  Except, that as the current cover girl of Entertainment Weekly, she had a little more power than most people . . . and sometimes felt the need to flex those muscles.

  “Usually the PAs do. That was the first time they didn’t go through the office,” Sophia said soothingly, trying to talk Vanessa down.

  “That is not professional,” Vanessa said. “I’m going to talk to Roger about it. And Sebastian. Let him know that the flower place overstepped their bounds.”

  Roger was the executive producer. He didn’t deal with flower deliveries. If he heard about this, Sophia would be the one getting called up to the office.

  Kip shot Sophia a look. Diva meltdown in three, two . . .

  “You’re right, Vanessa, I’m absolutely appalled. Let me talk to Shana in the office,” Sophia said calmly, referring to the highly efficient woman who ran the production office. “I’m sure this was a freak accident, and we’ll make sure appropriate measures are taken.”

  Vanessa looked from the flowers, to Sophia, deciding. And Sophia could tell that Roger was about to get a phone call . . . until, a short, confident knock sounded on the trailer door.

  “Come in!” Kip said with obvious relief.

  A set PA, a walkie at her waist and a headset in her ear, popped her head in. “Miss Faire, they’re ready for you on set.”

  With a metaphorical snap of her fingers, Vanessa shifted from petulant problem-solver to number one on the call sheet, the leader of the show. Her shoulders squared, she put her face forward.

  “Ready! Let’s go.”

  “Last looks!” Sophia stopped Vanessa, and inspected her makeup. Kip did a last-minute fluff on her long blond curls. Then they nodded, and Vanessa followed the set PA out the door.

  And Kip and Sophia slumped in relief.

  “That was close,” Kip said. “She’s in a mood today.”

  “Come on. She’s holding it together pretty well for someone whose movie opened at second at the box office last weekend.”

  “If it was first, she’d be a nightmare.”

  “Give her a break, okay?” Sophia said. “It’s got to be stressful.”

  Over the summer hiatus last year, Vanessa had done a supporting role in a little indie movie that got picked up at Sundance. Her role, while small, was critical, and she was even getting Oscar buzz.

  “Well, somebody is going to get fired,” Kip said, as he began sorting through his hairsprays, mousses, and teasing combs.

  “As long as it’s not you or me,” Sophia said grimly. “I’ll go down to the office, talk to Shana personally.”

  Chances were, there was some poor kid on his first job answering phones in the office who was about to have his or her Hollywood career cut short. But in this business, breaches of security were not tolerated—after all, how could you be trusted with intellectual property if you couldn’t correctly handle a flower delivery?

  Sophia took off her makeup belt—where she wore all the tools of her trade—and headed for the door. As she did, she passed the beautiful bouquet that was the cause of this little kerfuffle. And smiled.

  It was really hard to be mad at flowers.

  Especially considering the man who sent them.

  Still . . . “We should hide these. Vanessa will be back in for new makeup after this scene.”

  She passed the flowers to Kip, who buried his nose in them.

  “Okay, I don’t know what you’re on, but these do not smell like pennies.”

  “Says the man who is surrounded by hairspray all day.”

  “Seriously, maybe your allergies are kicking in.”

  “I don’t have allergies, Kip.”

  “Either that or you’re knocked up. My sister said everything smelled and tasted like fertilizer when she was pregnant.”

  Sophia shot Kip a look of mock horror. “Don’t even joke about that.”

  Kip held up his hands. Sophia blew him a kiss as she walked out of the trailer door.

  And then stopped herself at the bottom of the stairs. A memory washed over her, almost eighteen years old.

  Her body shifting, feeling weird in the mornings, and her complaining to her then-boyfriend that her chocolate ice cream tasted metallic.

  But no. It was impossible. She was about to get Maisey off to college. She and Sebastian were careful.

  Usually.

  She couldn’t be pregnant.

  Could she?

  IT WAS ALMOST ten hours later before Sophia could return to the thought Kip had annoyingly seeded in her mind.

  Once they wrapped for the day, all the frantic energy stopped, and would begin again tomorrow. And in that stillness she was left with the question that had been popping up in the background of her mind all day.

  So, on the way home, she drove by a CVS, and sunglasses low over her eyes like a scared teenager, she bought a two-pack pregnancy test.

  It was another twenty minutes before she got back to her apartment in North Hollywood, the CVS bag burning a hole in her peripheral vision the entire time. By the time she walked through the door, she thought she might be too nervous to pee.

  The apartment was dark and quiet. Briefly she worried about where Maisey was, then she remembered that it was SAT week, and Maisey had taken an after-school job helping the juniors with SAT prep. As the person who got one of the highest scores last year, the juniors (and their parents) no doubt thought she cracked the code.

  As far as Sophia could tell, the “code” her daughter cracked was constantly studying, and liking to learn.

  Sometimes she marveled at how it was possible someone as bright and inquisitive as Maisey could come from her.

  But at that moment, Sophia was glad she was alone in their cozy home. Because Maisey’s bright inquisitiveness would have her figuring out something was wrong before Sophia even had a chance to find out if something wa
s wrong.

  She hightailed it to the sole bathroom in the apartment, put the CVS bag on the counter. The room was a cheery yellow—Sophia and Maisey had done the tiles themselves when they moved in, put the shelves up above the toilet. The little improvements made up for the fact that the fan didn’t really work and the door never locked. But those things had never mattered. What mattered is that this place was Sophia and Maisey’s home, the first place they’d lived that had been just theirs.

  She took the box out of the bag. Let her eyes glaze over the instructions. There was no need for the printing to be this small, the instructions to be this detailed. There wasn’t a woman in the world who didn’t know how these things worked.

  Turns out, having not peed in three hours superseded any nervousness she might have had. And soon enough, she set the little saturated stick on the counter . . . and began to wait.

  The first time she had been pregnant, she hadn’t peed on a stick. She’d had no idea it was happening. It had been her mother who had figured it out.

  When Sophia was eighteen, she’d been . . . eighteen. Full of energy, of life, of that agitated need to go and do and be anything other than where she was. She’d had fun in school, but man was she glad when it was over. School for her had meant long stretches of boredom punctuated by high thrills of excitement. And most of that excitement had come courtesy of boys, and the drama that floated in their wake.

  And the most dramatic of all the boys was Alan Alvarez.

  They’d flirted most of their senior year. Hooked up a couple times. But once graduation and summer came, they never went a day without seeing each other. Usually, their days were spent in a heated ritual of absorbing each other, then fighting, then making up, then back to being wrapped up around each other again.

  She’d had boyfriends before. She’d never not had a guy hanging around, making her mother despair for her. But Alan was the first one that Sophia felt understood her. Her desire to burst out of the world. To just try everything.

  She had a job working at Sephora in the Sherman Oaks mall. She liked makeup, she always had. The one class she hadn’t gotten Cs in was art. And she was enrolled to go to community college in the fall—much to Alan’s mopey disappointment. He thought they’d grow apart, with her spending time with new college kids, not him.

  She spent a lot of time persuading Alan his fears were unfounded.

  And one of those persuasion times resulted in Maisey.

  Sophia hadn’t really had morning sickness. Just an aversion to some foods, including the metallic-tasting chocolate ice cream. And her body shifted and swelled, and one time, she slept through her alarm when she was supposed to open the store. And her mother, who did the shopping, noticed that she hadn’t used the tampons she bought last month.

  The doctor confirmed her mother’s suspicions.

  While her mother wept, and Sophia was numb, Alan was ecstatic. There would be no community college, no more fighting and making up—it was like this baby had made Sophia his now.

  His vow to take care of her, and their baby, had made Sophia feel safe for the first time since she went to the doctor.

  So, on her nineteenth birthday, four months pregnant, she and Alan Alvarez got married.

  But the gravity of a baby didn’t hit Alan the same way it hit her. He just thought it would grow and pop out and everything would be normal, but with a baby. But she was the one who felt every kick, every wiggle.

  And she was the one who ended up in the hospital with complications, afraid for her life and that of her unborn daughter.

  The marriage didn’t last long after Maisey was born. Alan, for all his promises, had refused to grow up. It only took one night of him coming home drunk at 3 AM for her to pack up Maisey and go to her mother’s house.

  Sophia, on the other hand, had grown up fast. She spent the day with Maisey, and her mom—a fucking saint—took Maisey at night while Sophia worked part-time at Sephora and took community college classes. She built herself up. By the time Maisey was in kindergarten, Sophia was getting work doing makeup for individual clients, Beverly Hills types who threw dinner parties. That led to her being hired on as an extra makeup artist a couple of days a month for a production house. That led to her getting in the union.

  And she never missed the drama. The desire to go and do and be anything other than where she was. Because she worked hard to make where she was great for her and for Maisey.

  And Maisey was an amazing kid. Smarter than Sophia had ever hoped to be. Fascinated by everything around her, wanting to learn. It took Alan several years before he realized what he’d missed out on, and still several more before he was mature enough to have a relationship with his daughter.

  He’d finally gotten his act together and remarried—this time to a very patient woman, and now had a couple of toddlers.

  Sophia never missed Alan. Never missed the fights, the way his personality would overwhelm her. She might occasionally miss the physical affection, but she never missed the dramatics that came with it.

  Men might screw up her life, but she’d be damned if she’d let a man screw up Maisey’s.

  So, while other women in their twenties were dating around, figuring themselves out, Sophia avoided men like the plague. Oh, there were a couple of fix-ups here and there that she felt obliged to not turn down, but they rarely warranted the price of the babysitter.

  Until Sebastian.

  She’d met Sebastian last year, at Fargone’s second season wrap party. Sebastian was the bassist in a band. Which would be trite, if the band wasn’t actually successful. They were huge in Europe, and had just started making waves in the US with a chart-topping hit over the summer. Once they conquered the LA music scene, they were poised to take over the country.

  Sebastian was a friend of Vanessa’s. Vanessa had been (and technically still was) married to the band’s lead singer, Deegan. In the messy ways of Hollywood, when the band got bigger—and she got her big break on the show—their lives took separate courses. But she claimed they were all still close. In fact, the band had shown up at the bar the Fargone crew had taken over in West Hollywood for their revelries, and proceeded to play a set—just for fun. Then, Vanessa had steered Sebastian directly over to Sophia.

  And it was like she was eighteen again.

  All those feelings—the being overwhelmed by someone, pulled into the undertow of their world, the giddy delight—it came back full force.

  And now, according to the piece of plastic she had peed on, the consequences of those full-force feelings were exactly the same as before.

  But this time, as the new information spread through her body like soda bubbles under her skin, she didn’t feel numb. She didn’t even feel worried.

  She felt . . . amazing.

  Warm laughter caught in her throat, tears in her eyes. She found herself sitting on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, and smiling.

  She was going to have a baby.

  Another beautiful baby.

  But before she could absorb the joy she was feeling, Sophia heard a door slam.

  “Mom!” she heard her daughter Maisey say, excitement ready in her voice. “I’m home! I’ve got NEWS!”

  “Uh—in here!” Sophia called back. Maisey was waiting to hear back from Stanford—she’d applied for early admission and checked her email about sixty times a day. So if Maisey had news, it might be the news . . .

  She scrambled to her feet, wiped the wet from her eyes. And her gaze rose from the pee stick sitting on the counter to her flushed reflection in the mirror.

  Her inquisitive daughter would know in half a second what was going on.

  “Give me a minute, okay?”

  But the warning came too late. Halfway through the sentence, the door to the bathroom that never really locked swung open, with Maisey talking a mile a minute.

  “So Haley from my lit class was saying that she already heard back from her early admission school, but she applied to NYU and I was thinking that
the East Coast probably got things done earlier than the West Coast, because California schools have a lot more to process but then I looked up the admission totals for NYU and I was like holy crap, and now I’m wondering if I emailed my application to the right person—”

  Abruptly she stopped. Sophia had moved in front of the pee stick, hiding it with her body, but Maisey wasn’t looking at Sophia or the counter behind her. She was looking in the mirror behind that.

  “Mom . . . why are you hiding a pregnancy test behind you?”

  Chapter 5

  “AND WHAT DOES FROST MEAN WHEN HE SAYS ‘good fences make good neighbors’?”

  Maisey’s gaze blurred, the lines of Robert Frost’s poem becoming nothing more than a swirl of ink on her desk.

  It wasn’t like she didn’t understand the poem. She’d read Frost in tenth grade—wrote a paper on him. For extra credit.

  And for fun.

  But with the AP tests coming up in the spring, Maisey was more than happy to review old material (although, it was only old for her. Most of her class didn’t read years ahead on the syllabus). And usually her hand would be up in the air, ready to set the record straight on Frost’s sense of irony, but today . . . in fact for the past couple days . . . it just didn’t seem to matter.

  What the hell was her mom thinking?

  Getting knocked up?

  There was a bowl full of condoms on their health teacher’s desk—she never grabbed any because her own sex life was nonexistent, but God, apparently she should have been taking some home for her mother!

  “It means, boundaries make people respectful, right?” Haley, who was celebrating her obviously miraculous early admission to NYU, said.

  “Hmm . . .” said their English teacher. “Is there maybe any other interpretation? Maisey?”

  “What?” Maisey’s eyes snapped front, and back into the present.

  “What did Robert Frost mean when he said ‘good fences make good neighbors’?”

  Maisey knew the answer, of course. But as she had been distracted, she hesitated. And that’s when the apparently unconscious form of Foz Craley jumped in.