Just Say [Hell] No

by Rosalind James

  “No worries,” he said. “Thanks for calling me.”

  He saw some of the tension leave her. “I thought you might want to ring her mum. I asked Ella, and she didn’t even answer.”

  “Not yet,” Marko said.

  “Her mum not likely to be helpful? Even now?”

  “Not so much. It’d be panic stations.”

  They waited in silence for a few more minutes, and when the technician came back and told them to follow her, it was a relief. But when she opened a door and Ella turned her head from where she lay on a table, the white paper crackling under her, he saw something in her dark eyes that made him forget about everything else. He took her hand, sat down in the chair beside her, and said, “Eh, laztana. It’s all good.”

  Her throat moved as she swallowed, and she gripped his hand hard. “’Sorry,’ she said. “This was meant to be the easy part.”

  “No worries.” He kicked the other chair to one side for Nyree and told the technician, who was busy at her keyboard now, “I’m Ella’s cousin, by the way. Marko.”

  The technician looked at him too hard and said, “Oh.” Flatly. As if she’d be stepping out into the passage and ringing up the Ministry for Vulnerable Children at any minute.

  “What?” Ella asked, roused into something approaching her normal self. “You think he’s the father? As if. He told you. He’s my cousin.” She didn’t add “Ew,” but Marko sensed it coming, and despite himself, he laughed.

  “Life returns,” he said. “Good to see.” He told the technician, “We’re ready when you are.”

  She looked affronted, but that was better than calling the police. Some more fiddling, and then she pulled up Ella’s gown and shoved the sheet down, exposing her belly.

  “Whoa,” Marko said. He hadn’t realized.

  “Yeh,” Ella said. “Big, eh.”

  “How far gone is she?” Marko asked the tech.

  She squirted some clear jelly onto Ella’s belly, spread it around with a paddle, and said, “That’s what I’m here to find out.” Snippily, like she still wasn’t convinced of Marko’s innocence, but he couldn’t be fussed about that.

  After that, she was silent, moving her paddle, then typing and clicking, until Marko said, “Fill us in here.”

  She didn’t look up, just said, “Hang on until I’ve done my job, please. This isn’t a video game. It’s a medical procedure.”

  “How long until you share?” Marko asked. “You’ve got an anxious mum on the table.”

  He heard Ella’s indrawn breath and squeezed her hand again. The word was a surprise, he guessed. But that was what she was, and the truth didn’t get any easier to handle because you didn’t look it in the face.

  The technician said, “I’ll share when I’m done. I’m not here for her amusement. Once you fall pregnant, it stops being fun and games.”

  Nyree was burning. She had her mouth open, and then she looked more closely at Marko and shut it again.

  Something was happening inside there. Like a tropical cyclone forming, when the air pressure dropped, the dark clouds coalesced, the wind began to whirl, and the forces concentrated and intensified. It was awesome, and it was a little scary, too. His face got harder, and so did his body. It was as if she could see every muscle standing out in stark relief, right through his clothes.

  When he spoke, though, his voice was absolutely controlled. Which made it even scarier. “We’ll take it as read that you’re not in favor of teen pregnancy,” he told the technician. “Yet it’s happened, and here we are. Why don’t you pretend that Ella’s as good as any other expectant mum that you’ve had lying on this table, and start treating her like it? I’m sure you can do that. You’re a professional.”

  The technician’s face reddened, her shoulders stiffened, and her mouth, already pinched, tightened more. “You’ve got a cheek,” she said, “telling me how to do my job.”

  “Yeh,” Marko said. “I do. I can step out that door and ask for the supervising radiologist, or you can change your attitude. I’m prepared for either one.”

  A long moment when everybody seemed to hold their breath, and then the technician said, each word as stiff as if she’d formed it out of clay, “I’m finishing up the measurements. When I’m done, I’ll go find Dr. Allingham, our radiologist, and share the results with him, and he’ll be along to tell you about them.”

  “Thank you,” Marko said. If it had been Nyree, she’d have added, “See how easy that was?” And possibly included a few extra words she had in mind. Marko didn’t. Probably just as well.

  A couple more minutes, and the technician stood up, said, “Dr. Allingham will be in shortly to talk to you,” and walked out.

  Ella expelled her breath in a whoosh. “Wow,” she said. It sounded shaky.

  “Bitch,” Nyree said. “Sorry. You could say that’s been stored up.”

  “Yeh,” Ella said. “She was. That was awesome, Marko.” She still had hold of his hand, or he still had hold of hers. And Marko’s hand around yours would feel like a safe place to be.

  “I don’t like bullies,” he said.

  “I wanted to ask her when she first had sex,” Nyree said. “Except that she’d probably tell you it was on her wedding night, and that her eleventy-seven perfect daughters are pure as well. Bet they’re not.”

  “Bet her husband’s not a happy man, either,” Marko said. Both Ella and Nyree laughed at that one, and it was better.

  When the doctor came back in with the technician, though, the mood got serious fast. He was genial, fortyish, and balding. Nothing wrong with him, but Ella went stiff with tension.

  “So,” he said when he’d shaken Ella’s hand, sat on his stool, and rolled up to the table. “We’ve got twins here, eh.”

  As bombshells went, it was a good one.

  “What?” Ella finally said.

  “Is that news?” the doctor asked. “Didn’t anybody tell you? Show you?” He glanced at the technician, and she opened her mouth.

  “No,” Marko said before she could jump in. “We didn’t have any information passed along to us.” He was holding Ella’s hand tighter. “It’s all good,” he told her. She was shaking a little, her hand moving in his as if the tension were spilling over now and she couldn’t hold it back anymore. “It was a baby, and now it’s two, that’s all. You’re still exactly as pregnant. It’s an on/off switch, eh.”

  The doctor said, “Let’s fill you in, then. Show us again, please, Carla.”

  The tech pressed her lips together tighter and got busy with the jelly and the paddle again. “Here,” she said. “A and B.”

  “You’ve got two fetuses,” the doctor said. “Baby A here, and Baby B nose-to-tail, see? Here’s one head, and over there…” The technician moved the paddle, and the image appeared on the screen. “Is the other one. This twin’s bigger, and more wiggly as well, I see. Arms and legs both moving. Got some personalities happening here, maybe.”

  “Oh,” Ella said faintly. “Is the little one all right?”

  “Not enough littler to be a major concern,” the doctor said. “It’s common for one twin to be a bit bigger. Especially where they’re sharing a placenta. Competition starts early, eh.”

  “Sharing a…” Marko said.

  “Identical,” the doctor said. “One placenta. Can happen the other way, where they each have their own, but usually, it’s one. It all depends on when the division happens—how many days after fertilization. Fortunately, each of them has its own amniotic sac. That makes everything less dicey.”

  Ella’s knuckles were showing white against Marko’s big hand. Marko’s voice was calm when he asked, “How many months gone is she, then?”

  The doctor looked at him over his half-glasses. “And you would be…”

  Marko didn’t sigh. “Ella’s cousin. Not the babies’ father.”

  “Marko Sendoa,” the doctor said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yeh. Consider me the family representative.”

  “We mea
sure in weeks,” the doctor said. “And we’re at fourteen weeks and three days. Forty weeks is a standard pregnancy. For a twin pregnancy, thirty-six is more likely. Forty weeks would put you at September tenth, and thirty-six at August twenty-seventh.”

  “Twenty-two weeks to go, then,” Ella said, while Nyree was still trying to do the math. “Or so. Five months, same as before, if it’s thirty-six weeks.”

  “You’re sixteen, it says here,” the doctor said. “Also good at maths.”

  He smiled, and Ella said, “Yeh. It’s my best subject.”

  “In school, then,” the doctor said. “That’s good. Have you considered your options? I’m asking because I have twins myself. I can tell you that they’re something to take on, and I haven’t done the hard parts. It’s not just the pregnancy. A baby’s not easy, and twins aren’t less than twice the work. They’re more.”

  “I was planning to…” Ella’s voice was wobbling again. “Have it adopted.”

  The technician muttered something like, “Thank the Lord,” which was an opinion that absolutely nobody needed, but Ella didn’t seem to hear, fortunately.

  Ella asked the doctor, “Would anybody want to… do you think they’d want both? Won’t the babies need to stay together, since they’re twins? Wouldn’t they be… sad, otherwise?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, his voice gentling. “It’s a special kind of bond, twins. Ours are fraternal, a girl and a boy, but close as peas in a pod growing up for all that. Identical—more so. They’d need to be together. And I imagine somebody would want them both.”

  “Can you tell what they are?” Ella asked. “Girls or boys?”

  “Not to tell you with any certainty. Fourteen weeks is early days. If you’re back again in a few weeks, we should be able to give you a better answer. All we need is one who’s not shy.”

  If you’re back again. “Thanks,” Marko said when Ella didn’t answer.

  The doctor patted Ella’s hand, said, “It’s your choice. Don’t let anybody make it for you. No wrong answers. Hang in there,” and left. A busy man who’d made some extra time.

  Marko squeezed Ella’s hand and looked at Nyree. It wasn’t a hard look to read. Help me.

  “What was the card of the day?” she asked him.

  His eyes lightened, and some of his tension eased. Even Ella looked interested. “The Fool,” Marko said. “Again. Short message with it this time. ‘The answer to the question is Yes.’ I may have had a different question in mind, though.”

  “Maybe we should have her do Ella’s,” Nyree said.

  Marko smiled. “Maybe so.”

  Nyree waited with Marko once more while Ella got dressed. When she came out, he asked her, “Riding home with Nyree? Or with me?”

  “I’d rather walk,” she said. “It’s not far.” Her face was shut down. Closed, and so was her body language.

  Marko looked at Nyree, and she said, “Quiet time, eh. Are you hungry, though?”

  “Yeh,” Ella said. “Starved.”

  “I’ll make you a toastie,” Nyree said. “For when you get home.”

  Ella took off, and Nyree got into her car. She had to drive slowly, because Marko was in front of her. Which was annoying, because she wanted to go fast. Preferably with the wind in her face.

  She rolled the window down and wished she had a convertible. Nobody in New Zealand had a convertible, for the obvious reason that if you did, there you’d be, rolling along enjoying your carefree lifestyle, when the sky would randomly decide to dump bucketsful of rain on you as punishment for the hubris of thinking you could have a convertible. At which point you’d have a smash, and your convertible would be gone.

  When she reached the house, she went into the kitchen and started working on that toastie. When Marko came in holding Cat, who’d accosted him as usual the second he’d walked in the door, she told him, “I decided to make a couple of these for us as well. If you don’t want yours because it’s not on the match day leadup diet plan, we’ll put it in the fridge and Ella can eat it later.”

  “I want it,” he said. “A chicken and veggie toastie isn’t pizza. Not quite, anyway.”

  “Sadly,” she said. “I guess we know why Ella’s been eating so much, anyway. Twins. Who would’ve thought? Awesome job on the tech, by the way.”

  “Yeh, well. There are times when it helps to be an intimidating fella.” He smiled, then. Sweetly.

  “What’s laztana?” she asked.

  “’Darling,’ I guess you’d say, in Basque. Seemed right.” He looked at the door, and Nyree could tell he was restraining himself from going outside to wait for Ella. But he did restrain himself.

  After a minute, when she’d laid the sandwich halves carefully into two pans with plenty of butter, she said, “I’d worry about her walking home, being alone with all that on her mind, but I think she’s wiser than she knows. Young, but not a fool, and not a coward. And sometimes, you need to walk. For ages, preferably. For me? Along the beach. Something about the sound of the waves and that ozone filling your head. Being able to let it all go.”

  He leaned against the cabinet, his ankles crossed, and gave her a look of frowning intensity, all black eyebrows and broken nose. When he spoke though, what he said was, “It’s the mountains for me. Running on a track only wide enough for one, with the kilometers rolling away behind you. Looking out on open space and no people, and the wind.”

  “Colder than the beach.”

  “It is that.”

  When Ella came in, she barely spoke, just fell on the toastie like a starving dog, then ate half of Nyree’s with a glass of milk. Finally, she sat back, sighed, and said, “I get so hungry that it wears me out. Even after I eat, I’m still tired just from being so hungry before. Guess that’s twins.”

  Marko said, keeping it calm, “Reckon it is. A bit like me as a teenager, too. Eating six thousand calories a day or more, and still so hungry that waiting for lunch was agony. We may need to talk to your school about you getting snacks. What do you think about calling your mum?”

  Ella stuck a fingertip into the crumbs left on her plate and put it in her mouth, and Nyree went to the pantry, pulled out a bag of crisps, Ella’s favorite snack, and handed it to her. There was a time for nutrition, and there was a time for comfort. “I guess I should,” Ella said after dumping out a pile and crunching a crisp between her teeth. “I texted Caro on the way home.”

  “Helpful?” Marko asked.

  Ella grimaced. “Not so much. Heaps of ‘Oh, my God’ and ‘I can’t believe it.’ Neither can I. But it doesn’t tell me what to do.” She sighed and pulled her phone out of her bag. “It definitely won’t help to talk to Mum. But I guess I have to.”

  “Put her on speaker,” Marko suggested.

  Ella did, and Nyree had the dubious pleasure of listening to escalation in action. Jakinda did her share of “Oh, my God” as well, following it up with, “You can’t. Absolutely not. You won’t be able to handle that.”

  Nyree hadn’t been sixteen for eleven years, but she remembered enough about it not to be surprised at seeing Ella stiffen. “I’ve handled it so far,” she said. “And I’m fourteen weeks in.”

  “Which is nothing,” Jakinda said. “How will you feel when you’re as big as a house and everybody at school is laughing? You think you can fix that by being in Auckland? Girls are the same everywhere. How have they been so far? Welcoming, are they? And I’m not even talking about giving birth to two babies and thinking you’ll give them away, easy-peasy, job done.”

  Ella’s face tightened more. “It’s not you, though, Mum. It’s me.”

  “Of course it’s me,” Jakinda said. “You’re my child. That’s how it is when you’re a mother. Everything you do affects me.”

  Nyree wanted to slap somebody again. Unfortunately, this person was at the other end of a telephone line.

  Marko stepped in. “Ella thought she should tell you, Jakinda. It’s been a shock for her as well.”

  “You can’t want
her there,” Jakinda said, shifting her focus just like that. “You have a match tomorrow. You’re meant to be preparing. How are you going to do that while you care for a pregnant teenager?”

  “The same way everybody does their job,” Marko said. “I’m not that fragile. There’s a switch you flip, and I’ll flip it, no worries. I have somebody here as well, helping out. Her name’s Nyree. She’s sitting here, so don’t say anything bad about her.”

  “What, some woman Ella doesn’t even know? And you think that takes the place of a mother? I’m coming up. I’ll leave work early tomorrow. Somehow. Ella’s going to need me to help her decide and cope.”

  “There’s the matter of that match you were talking about,” Marko said, his tone dry as the Canterbury plain. “I can’t collect you from the airport. Sorry.”

  “I’ll get there,” Jakinda said. “Somehow. I’ll text Ella my details.”

  Three beeps, because she’d rung off. Nyree and Marko looked at each other. Ella ate another crisp and said, “See?”

  “Well, yeh,” Marko said. “I do. Right. Time for Call Number Two. I’m ringing my mum.”

  Which was why, at four-thirty the next afternoon, Nyree was pulling up in front of Domestic Arrivals and stopping beside two women waiting on the pavement. One with a good-sized suitcase beside her, and one holding a tote.

  Nyree got out, but she let Ella lead the way. Ella hugged her mum, then the silver-haired woman whose bone structure and height, not to mention the calm in her expression and the directness in her blue eyes, proclaimed her to be Marko’s mother.

  Ella’s mum said, “Oh, my God. You’re bigger already,” and Ella said, “Yeh, Mum. That tends to happen. This is Nyree. My mum Jakinda and my aunt Olivia.”

  Nyree shook hands with both, eyed Jakinda’s suitcase, and said, “It’ll be a bit of a squash getting there, I’m afraid, but it’s not for long.” She opened the Beetle’s boot, jammed the suitcase inside, and thought, There’s Step One done. Also, That’s a lot of suitcase for two days. High maintenance much?