“Yeah, I get that,” said Rodger, as he turned into their doctor’s parking lot. “But! Hey! As you said, it’s a morbid thought. Take comfort in the fact that you guys would be fiscally solvent and dismiss that worry from your brain. We have other stuff to worry about.”
“Wow, you are just fantastic at knowing exactly what to talk about as you lead your pregnant partner into the doctor’s office,” Melissa grumbled. But as Rodger gave her a hand to hold and a shoulder to lean on as they slowly walked inside, she squeezed his elbow gently and looked up at him with a confiding, happy grin. He returned the smile.
“I’m happy you’re here,” she said, softly.
“Wouldn’t be anywhere else,” said he.
They filled out the requisite paperwork and sat in the waiting room for a bit, working through various magazines which were several months out of date and commenting on the status of the slowly peeling wallpaper which seemed to be omnipresent in every doctor’s office Melissa had ever visited. After a time, a smiling nurse in pink scrubs opened the door and called their name. They were rushed to a large doctor’s room with one window and three chairs. Melissa took the one in the middle of the room. Rodger sat in the one next to it, and they waited patiently for their doctor to appear, which she shortly did.
“So, we’re here to find out whether it’s a boy or a girl today,” said the doctor. She smeared clear jelly on Melissa’s exposed stomach and waved a grey ultrasound wand around. Melissa flinched a bit; it was cold.
At first the doctor held the monitor away from them. Melissa assumed that this was safe, that this was standard protocol; just in case there was something wrong, it made sense that the doctor would want to see it first and be able to translate results before the prospective parents went berserk. So she contented herself with watching the micro-expressions rushing across their doctor’s face. As the doctor’s eyes flitted across the screen, Melissa thought she might have detected the briefest of an eyebrow raise; perhaps the slightest tightening of the lips. But perhaps she was overanalyzing things. Ultimately, she thought that their doctor would be an extremely good poker player.
“Well,” said the doctor, finally, after several extremely long minutes. Melissa noticed that Rodger’s hands on hers again featured white knuckles. “A few points. Firstly and most importantly, it appears that everyone’s healthy and developing as expected.”
Melissa felt Rodger’s relief before she felt her own. An exhale, a loosening of the iron fingertips.
All Melissa had just heard was that there was good news and that there was bad news, even though that wasn’t what the doctor had said at all. She smiled perfunctorily and asked the doctor to continue. Even though she was thrilled that her child was doing well, she wanted to know if there was another shoe to drop before she relaxed, content that everything was going according to plan.
“I do have some news for you, however,” the doctor continued.
Rodger’s fingertips tightened again. Melissa braced herself.
“As it turns out, there’s more to the concept of ‘everyone’ than we may have thought,” the doctor said conversationally. “I’m seeing two little people in there,” she said, in a disarming change toward informality and familiarity, gesturing toward Melissa’s belly.
Melissa began to see stars. Rodger’s mouth fell open.
After a few seconds, Melissa had regained her powers of speech. “Twins,” she said, weakly.
“I believe so,” said the doctor, staring at the screen for another moment before smiling gently and turning it around to face the young mother and father. “See, here…”
And with her index finger she pointed out the pixels on the ultrasound screen which were to be their children. Which currently were, Melissa realized. She felt her stomach, which seemed (irrationally) much larger than it had been a moment before.
“Looks like you’re going to have one of each, in fact,” said the doctor brightly.
Melissa raised her eyebrows. “Really,” she said.
“Yes, really. Look here,” said the doctor. “A boy and a girl.”
She turned to Rodger and Melissa, clearly intuited that they were spinning out of control, and tactfully handed a box of tissues to Rodger. “I’ll give you two a moment alone, and then I’ll send in one of my nurses. She’s a mother of twins herself, and I know she’ll be more than happy to help you guys out with any resources you may need. You’ll find that there’s a whole community around families with multiples. It’s going to be fine. Above all, remember that.” Melissa smiled up at the doctor to thank her for her comforting words and then, once the door had clicked shut and she and Rodger were alone—except for the children; but then, Melissa had long since realized that she would never quite be alone ever again—she turned to him.
He had a bit of a goofy grin on his face.
“You’re loving this,” Melissa said, amazed.
“Well,” said Rodger. “It’s a bit of a puzzle, but look at it on the bright side; we’re going from having not much time to put together a family to having a full one very quickly. It’s a very economical way of going about things.”
“Yeah, economy is going to be our strong suit going forward because of this,” Melissa said absently. Two! Two babies! That was one for each of them.
At least it wasn’t triplets. Then they would have been outnumbered…
“We can manage two,” Melissa said automatically. “We can do it. We can make it happen. We have money and things. We can get it done.”
“Yeah, we can,” Rodger said cautiously. Later, Melissa would remember this: he’d spoken cautiously. Rodger! Cautiously! How had he suddenly become the cautious one?
“Don’t just jump straight to pragmatism,” he said with a tiny smile. “Talk to me! This is scary, this is new—what are you feeling?”
Melissa noticed that he was smiling, that there was warmth again in his hands, that he appeared to be completely fine with the situation.
“Are you scared?”
“Yeah, but being scared is kind of my thing,” Rodger pointed out. Melissa couldn't disagree with him there. “Plus, you’re the one who’s going to have to carry around twins. Before they’re born, that is. After they’re out of you I can help. But you’re going to get huge.”
Melissa shoved him over.
“That is so not the thing to say to someone who just found out that they’re carrying double occupants,” Melissa grumbled. But she found she was smiling.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Well, I suppose it’s a rather pointed answer to the conundrum we were discussing earlier,” said Melissa. “We were talking about whether we wanted a boy or a girl, and whether we’d be secretly or not so secretly disappointed with one or the other, right? Well, now we’ll have both.”
“More pragmatism.”
“It’s how I’m coping,” said Melissa, laughing. The fact that she was carrying not one, but two completely healthy babies was beginning to set in. It was a wave of simultaneous relief and surprise.
“I suppose—I’m happy,” Melissa said tentatively, trying out the sound of it, seeing if it felt right. It felt strange. But then, since she'd become pregnant, everything felt strange. Sleeping felt strange. Sitting felt odd. Everything in her was simultaneously squished and bloated. She turned to Rodger. “Are you?”
“Excessively so,” he said dismissively. “Let’s get pictures from the doctor, shall we? And make sure that she’s given us all of her recommendations for how you’re going to be the healthiest mom on the planet over the next month on our cruise. I wonder if anything will change because you’re carrying twins?”
Nothing had; the doctor, upon returning to the room, merely wished them both to have a good time, and asked just that both be careful about undue stress for Melissa, and to avoid extreme physical activity.
“So no jumping off cliffs for you,” said Rodger, helping Melissa back into the car.
Melissa closed her eyes. Twins. Two of everything. She’d
wondered if she was getting a little big for someone who was only so far along in terms of pregnancy. Rodger had been right; she was going to get ginormous.
“Wasn’t going to do that anyway,” she said comfortably. As he got in the driver’s seat of the car, she turned to him. “So I suppose we’re headed to the Caribbean now?”
“That we are,” said Rodger. “Are you excited?”
“I think that I’m going to get on board and take a nap.” That was one thing she was excited about: sleeping. She’d been having a hard time sleeping as of late—of course she had; pregnant women tended to have difficulty sleeping. But she’d also heard that sleeping on cruises was exceptionally exquisite—the rocking of the boat and the humming of the motor and everything acting as a somniferous type of cradling. She couldn’t wait.
“Great. You nap, and I’ll do a quick run around to get us all oriented and all that.”
“That sounds perfect,” Melissa said. She thought dreamily of the next thirty days and of how completely slow, safe, and relaxing they all would be.
***
Expectations set the boundaries of what's going to happen, and more often than not life decides to laugh at those with expectations simply by exceeding them. It's tough to say whether the expectations themselves cause this, whether those with expectations subconsciously destroy them, or whether there is a sentient other who is privy to our expectations who takes joy in shattering them. In any case, Melissa’s experience of the cruise was neither safe nor slow, and could only be called relaxing in the most generous of terms.
What she hadn't realized was that Rodger had booked them on a carnival cruise. And when a carnival is on a cruise ship, the simple fact of the matter is that, however much one might hate carnivals—and Melissa very, very much hated them—there was no way to escape, except for going overboard; and it was stressed to Melissa during the safety orientation that this was not a viable option.
Glumly she sat on the deck watching as a clown tried to make magic happen for a young family who was sitting just next to her. They'd known which cruise they were signing up for. The young boy was watching in amazement as the clown pulled kerchief after kerchief out of his sleeve.
Melissa sighed and pulled up her laptop. She had an idea that she wanted to write a story about a mother having twins for the first time. It was going to be vaguely autobiographical, of course. She'd always liked the sorts of movies which could say, at the end, that they were based on a true story. Well! She could say that her book was based on a true story; and if it were optioned for a movie, that the resulting film would be based on a story which was itself only bound to be proximately true.
She’d likely have to come up with a better subtitle for it, though. She also needed to come up with the angle at which she’d tell the story, so it wasn’t just a completely accurate rendition of her life. She didn’t want anyone in her past or present to be identified, for one thing.
Rodger had accompanied her throughout the the safety demonstration in which they'd learned what to do in the case of a fire or a crash or in any one of innumerable unlikely situations; and then he'd gone off to power-walk around the deck. They'd found, much to their chagrin, that the cruise they'd been told they were booking—a sophisticated, quiet adults-only cruise through crystal-blue waters—was one which only docked on an island three days into their month; in order to get to it, they had a connecting sail (as it were) on a carnival cruise. Rodger had gone in pursuit of more information and an upgrade to a quieter corner of the ship, if any such thing existed. Looking around, Melissa thought, likely not. There were children running around, screaming and giggling and crying, everywhere!
It wasn’t that Melissa was opposed to children—quite the opposite, in fact. Obviously! She was providing free room and board to two of them. However, she'd been looking forward to enjoying this last bit of non-parent time. This cruise had been booked specifically so that she and Rodger could take a last breath of fresh air before diving into the business of childrearing, which she'd heard had its own manifold shares of utmost smelliness.
She shook her head.
A waiter was walking nearby. He walked over to her and politely asked if there was anything he could help her with.
“Yes, please,” she said. She thought a moment and then requested simply that two cups of water be brought over, and then asked the waiter if he'd seen anyone who looked remotely like her husband wandering around the ship. He shook his head sorrowfully and said that he hadn't. Melissa couldn't fault him for this. It seemed that there were hundreds of people on the ship.
After he brought back her waters she stared at the long line of the horizon just before her. That was the good thing about being on a cruise ship, she thought. No matter how crowded the ship was, no matter how many people were rustling around her, she could always see the sea. She knew that there was some chemical, biological reason by which just seeing the sea, the line where the blue of the sky intersected with the deeper blue of the water, physically calmed you.
She drank her water and watched the rocking waves and sat back in her chair. The children and the clowns had gone to another deck. She began to feel herself drift away…
“Hello,” Rodger said, plunking himself down on the lawn chair next to hers.
“Tell me some good news, Rodger,” Melissa said. She looked at him expectantly.
“Well, as they said, we’re stuck on the carnival cruise until we aren’t,” Rodger said cheerfully. “Which, for those of us counting—which, I know we definitely are—will be in about three days. There’s good news and there’s bad news, further to that.”
“Do tell.”
“Well, the good news is that there’s free 24/7 entertainment on this cruise.” Rodger carefully looked at the ceiling as he spoke.
Melissa leaned back in her chair. “The bad news is that it’s all clown and carnival themed entertainment, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Melissa closed her eyes briefly. Well, it was only three days. And she’d been a librarian. One of her jobs as a librarian had been to coordinate the summer programs for the local children, and those had always been at least a little bit obnoxious. She'd noticed that children tended to like obnoxious things, for some reason.
“Well,” said Melissa slowly, “I suppose it’s good practice for having children ourselves.”
“What, you think Daphne and Xenophilius are going to like clowns?”
Rodger grimaced. Melissa sat up and looked at him in amazement.
“You haven’t named our twins Daphne and Xenophilius.”
“No, I haven’t. That tense implies that the naming has already happened. I’m just floating fantastic name suggestions.”
“Can I have input into the naming?”
“That’s a silly question,” Rodger said wisely, leaning back into the chair next to her and winking. “Their names are fifty percent up to you.”
“So I have veto power?”
“Ultimately, yes.”
“Well. Veto, and veto. Both of those are gone.”
“You can’t just do that!”
“Ah, my friend, but that is the power of the veto.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Well, I want to name a kid Geraldine.”
“Veto.”
“See? You like it now.”
Chapter 10
Three days later
After three days of hiding from the clowns—Rodger and Melissa had learned the general rotation of the 24/7 parade which tramped throughout the decks, and were often able to pre-empt any participation in their Audience Participation Mandatory shows by simply being always a deck ahead of them—it was time to transfer to the more adult-appropriate ship.
As they were in their stateroom packing their things, Rodger looked wistfully at an itinerary of the events which would be happening later that evening.
“Look, Melissa, there’s a Magical Maniacal Jamboree happening later tonight,” he said mournfully. “We’ll
miss it.”
“Rodger, we’re going to get on our next cruise and be set for the next twenty-odd days. Everything’s going to be fine. And you’re going to love the next cruise. All those adventures you’ve planned!” Melissa paused midway through folding up a shirt. “What adventures, exactly, have you planned?”
“Well,” said Rodger, looking at the ceiling, “A lot of cliff jumping. Don’t worry! I’ll be safe! I promise. But then I’m also going jet-skiing at least once, and scuba diving in both shallow water and in incredibly deep water. That’s probably the most dangerous thing I’m doing, actually,” Rodger said thoughtfully. He zipped up his suitcase and sat on the bed.
“Well, is an instructor going along with you?”
“Very much so, I wouldn’t be allowed to do it otherwise,” said Rodger. “And other people and couples as well, I imagine.”
“Right, well, okay,” Melissa said. “As long as you come back alive, that will be quite enough.”
“I’ll do more than that,” said Rodger. “I’ll come back with impeccable stories. You’ll be fascinated, I promise. And then, next time we do a cruise, you’ll want to come along with me on my expeditions.
Melissa threw him a look. “Next time we do a cruise, we’re going to have a tiny set of humans running round us to take care of,” he said.
“Right,” said Rodger. “But there are always kid’s programs and things.”
They wavered a bit on this, and then wheeled their bags out of their room after checking one last time that they hadn’t left a phone charger anywhere in the room.
The transition to the second cruise was easier than Melissa could have possibly imagined. It seemed that money really did grease wheels. Rodger ran in front of her to confer with the staff in low voices before doing that suave thing that wealthy gentlemen always seem to know how to do—the palming of a dollar bill in the course of a justifiable, natural-seeming handshake. Melissa had often tried to do this with her sister in the past. It was much harder than it seemed. Either that, or it came innately to those inhabitants of the upper financial echelons and she naturally wouldn’t know how to do it.
Be My Bride and Have My Baby Page 10