The Boss (46 page)

"You and cake." I laughed to myself, even
though the thought was horribly depressing, in my frame of mind.
What would my mom say? What would my super Catholic family think of
me?

"And if you decide to keep it, I'll help you
pick out the color for the nursery. Provided, of course, that you
find an apartment with a room you can make into a nursery." She
took a sip of her tea, making a face at what I assumed was the six
pounds of sugar she'd nervously dumped into it. "I mean, you can't
keep it here. No pets allowed, it's in the lease."

The door opened, and Deja stepped in, Holli's
keychain dangling from one hand, a plastic bag in the other. "Okay.
I have the test. Are you going to do it now, or in the
morning?"

"What's the difference?" How I managed to
stop myself from lunging across the room and snatching the bag from
her hands, I would never know.

"Well, they say you're supposed to take them
in the morning, because that's when the highest concentration of
hormones is sitting around in your pee." Deja held the bag out to
me. "But I figured you'd want to know right now, so I got a two
pack."

"How much do I owe you?" I went for my purse,
and she shook her head.

"Just go take the test, okay? We'll figure
that out later."

That's code for, “I'm not going to ask you to
pay me, because you just lost your job," but I wasn't in the mood
to be particularly prideful at the moment.

I took the bag into the bathroom with me and
ripped the box practically in half to open it. My hands were
shaking, which didn't make it easy to get the foil packet undone.
When I held the damn thing, it seemed utterly wrong that I should
be so terrified of a tiny chunk of cheap plastic. This stupid
little thing held so much power over my life. My entire future,
possibly.

I sat on the toilet and tried to figure out
what angle would work best. Unlike most men I'd ever met, women
don't generally have a bizarre childhood history of peeing on
things, so I'd never had any practice. Then, I had to overcome my
nerves to actually get things flowing. I managed to force a few
drops, and peed on my hand.

"You have to be fucking kidding me," I
muttered under my breath. It was hard enough taking a pee test at
the doctor's office, and that little plastic cup was a much bigger
target.

I looked at the sink. The gleaming porcelain
cup we used as a toothbrush holder tried not to make eye contact
with me.

"Sorry, Holli, I'll buy you another." I
emptied our toothbrushes into the sink then sat back down,
positioned the cup between my legs, and urged myself to relax.

I didn't get much, but I hoped it would be
enough. My heart in my throat, I dipped the cotton-ish tip thing on
the end of the test into the bottom of the cup.

Watching the test saturate and the wet mark
creeping through the little plastic window was not unlike watching
a car accident from the sidewalk. I knew what was going to happen,
but I was powerless to stop it from happening as the horror
unfolded before my very eyes. As my urine washed across the test
strip, there it was, clear as day. Two bright, unmistakable pink
lines. It didn’t even need a few minutes to develop.

"No." I shook my head and set the cup on the
floor. At least I had the presence of mind to put the cap back on
the test, so it wouldn't dribble as I shuffled, my pants still
around my ankles, to the torn instruction sheet on the floor. I
compared my test with the diagram, certain I'd made a mistake
reading it. But there it was. One line for negative. Two for
positive.

I really was pregnant.

My ears were ringing. I looked up at my
reflection in the mirror, my eyes wide, my face pale. I looked back
at the test in my hand, and flung it to the floor in disgust.
"You're a liar!"

Holli knocked on the door. "Soph! Are you
okay?"

I slid down the wall and covered my face with
my hands. The door opened just a little bit. "Soph?"

"I'm not okay." I wiped my tears from my
cheeks on the back of my hand. "I'm pregnant."

"Oh, honey." Holli sounded just as upset as I
felt. That added guilt to my reaction. Could I be any more
dramatic?

Okay, so I knew that having unprotected sex
wasn't a great idea. I'd done it anyway. But this wasn't the
worst-case scenario. I could fix this.

I stood up, dumped the cup into the toilet,
flushed, and said, "I'm pregnant, and we need a new toothbrush
holder."

"Yuck. I'll give you a minute." Holli closed
the door, and I welcomed the space. I just needed to think.

There was a fucking baby in me.

Jesus Christ.

A real baby? Like a rip out of my vagina
Aliens-
style baby? What was I going to do about that?

I thought about the pictures in Neil's
kitchen. Emma with her puppy. The first day of school. Neil had
obviously been a part of her life. He didn't want to have any more
kids, though. I had no doubt he would financially support me if I
chose to keep it, less doubt that he would walk away from me and a
baby without providing emotional support, as well. But when I tried
to imagine what life would be like living on Fifth avenue with a
baby and a nanny while my older, more successful husband made
billions of dollars... the picture didn't look appealing.

I liked my apartment. I liked my room. I
liked my bathtub. And I really, really liked not having a human
being I didn’t even know using me for life support.

But it was a baby, right? It was
our
baby, half me, half Neil. Shouldn't that magically undo all my
worries? Shouldn't I be happy that I made a baby with the guy I
loved? Didn't everyone want this?

Was I supposed to want this?

I put our toothbrushes in the medicine
cabinet, washed my hands then stepped out of the bathroom. Holli
and Deja were waiting in the living room, and I held up one finger
to stave off their questions. "Wait. I just want to try Neil one
last time."

In my room, I opened my recent calls. Ten of
them so far. I was looking a little obsessive. But I was pretty
sure he would understand, once he knew what they were all about.
This would be the last call tonight.

"Neil... I really need you to call me." I
took a breath, and I knew he would hear my teary snuffling. "It's
super important. I... I don't know what to do. I just really need
to hear your voice."

Okay.
So
not my best moment.

Hopefully, pathetically, I took the phone
with me into the living room
. He said he was sick. He's probably
in bed right now.
That didn't make me feel better.

"Are you okay?" Deja asked as I entered the
room.

I nodded. "I'm in shock."

"I understand that, believe me."

Holli's head whipped up to look at her with a
bad attempt at disguising her curiosity.

Deja sighed. "Yes, I got accidentally
pregnant once. It's not something I put on my résumé."

"What did you do?" I asked, because I knew
Holli wouldn't, and I really needed to hear someone say they had
all the answers.

"I had an abortion." Deja shrugged, her wide
eyes bouncing between me and Holli. "What? It's no big deal. I was
at a party, I'm pretty sure someone put shit in my drink, and then
next morning I'd woken up and I’d had sex with this guy."

"That’s not sex," Holli said gently. "That
sounds more like you got roofied and raped."

"I know," she said, looking slightly
embarrassed. "And I’ll talk to you about it later. This isn't the
rape conversation, it's the Sophie is pregnant conversation. I'm
trying not to steal her thunder."

I laughed at that. I don't know why. "Sorry.
It just strikes me as totally insane that we're having this
discussion."

Deja gave me a closed-lip smile of sympathy.
"You're going to be okay. You have somebody to go through this with
you. Mr. Elwood isn't going to leave you stranded."

"And while we both think it's creepy and
weird that you have a boyfriend we have to call 'Mr. Elwood,' I
agree with Deja," Holli said with a decisive nod. "He's going to
support you with this, no matter what."

As if on cue, my phone buzzed. "It's him." I
didn't leave the room to take the call. I didn't figure I would be
breaking the news to him over the phone. I would wait and do it in
person, tonight, if he let me. "Neil?"

"This is Emma."

I frowned. "Emma... what are you - "

"Dad is in the hospital." There was a faintly
hysterical quality to her voice. "They just gave me his things, and
I saw you'd tried to call him."

"In the..." Wait, this was all wrong. I was
the one having a crisis. We could only have one crisis at a time.
"What happened?"

She made an impatient noise. "I don't know.
He was unconscious in the back of the car when Tony found him.
Look, are you going to come down here? You've been calling all
night, you must have been worried."

I had been, but for reasons I didn't care to
discuss with her at the moment. "Which hospital? I'll be there as
fast as I can."

"Presbyterian, east sixty-eighth."

"Is he okay?" Of course he was okay. It was
impossible for Neil to not be okay. It just couldn’t happen.

"I don't know, I haven't seen him. He wasn’t
awake when the ambulance arrived. Now I'm waiting for the bloody
doctor to come out and bloody talk to me," she snapped impatiently.
"I'll know more by the time you get here. Come through the
emergency entrance, I'll wait for you there if I can."

She hung up without saying goodbye, and I
numbly hit the disconnect button. I stared back at Holli and Deja,
a paralysis of fear and disbelief leeching the blood from my veins.
"Neil had some kind of collapse. He's in the hospital."

"What?" Holli squeaked. "What the hell is
going on, Soph?"

"I don't know." I reached for my purse,
dropped my phone into it, grabbed my keys and headed for the door.
I wanted to say something else, but I just couldn't. "I don't
know," I repeated, and then I dashed out the door.

Every step I took down the stairs jarred all
the way to my skull. H
e’s okay, this is nothing, he’s fine
,
tumbled through my mind. This wasn't happening. This wasn't my
life. I wasn't pregnant. My boyfriend wasn't in the fucking
hospital. None of this was real.

But it was. Disturbingly, awfully real.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

True to her word,
when I got to the hospital Emma was waiting by the emergency room
doors, bundled up in her winter coat. Her eyes were red, like she
had been crying.

"Is he okay? Is Neil okay?" I asked, as if
she wouldn't know whom I was there to see.

"They've moved him to a room, I can take you
up." She gestured to the automatic doors behind her, and we went
inside.

With every step I took, my nerves gripped my
stomach tighter, twisting it into knots.

"Visiting hours are over, but since he was
just admitted they said they'd make an exception," Emma said
quietly in the eerie silence of the elevator.

"Thank you for calling me." I wanted to hug
her. The thought that Neil could be in here for days without me
knowing made me panicky, even though it hadn't happened. “Do they
know what’s wrong with him?”

“Um…” Emma’s gaze darted away, her brow
wrinkling in concentration. “They’re running some tests.”

I had the feeling she knew more than she was
saying. Then again, I was pretty paranoid at the moment.

We stepped out of the elevator, and I
wrinkled my nose at the hospital environment. The quiet,
interrupted only by soft, far away beeps. The suspiciously clean
smell even though you knew the place was crawling with germs.
Someone had made a bag of popcorn in the break room; as we passed
by the open door, the scent wafted out to mix with the sharp,
unnatural odor of disinfectant, and I gagged.

A nurse was standing outside one of the
rooms, writing in a patient chart. She looked up, slightly annoyed,
and said, "Visiting hours are - "

"We have permission," Emma said
authoritatively, and she led me past the nurse. I envied people who
could do that. Just walk around a hospital like they owned the
place. Emma was far more comfortable here than I was.

Neil was in a huge corner room. The lights
were low, and the curtain around his bed was pulled when I peeked
inside.

"Come on," Emma said gently. "He was awake
and talking to me not long ago."

I knew I probably wasn't her favorite person.
I couldn't blame her. But she'd taken the time to call me, and she
was being so kind, despite her discomfort around me. At that
moment, I had to really fight my urge to hug her.

"Dad?" Emma pushed back the curtain a bit.
Neil was lying flat in the big, weird hospital bed. There was a
heart monitor on, beeping steadily, and two big bags of clear fluid
hanging from an IV pole next to him. He opened his eyes just a
little, then a bit more, then squinted at us, and I realized he
probably wasn't wearing his contacts.

"It's me, baby," I went to his side and
leaned down, brushing my lips across his forehead. "What the hell
happened?"

"Oh, Sophie." He half-laughed, half-wept, his
arms coming up to hold me. I stepped quickly back, so he didn't
tangle me in his IV tubing. He dropped his arms and rubbed one hand
over his face. "They've given me enough sedatives to kill a whole
pack of elephants."

"He's had a spinal tap," Emma explained. "And
painkillers for the headache."

"Oh my god, why didn't you tell me you were
so bad? I never would have let you leave by yourself, if I had
known." I sat down in the armchair beside his bed and took his
right hand, the one that didn't have a bunch of tubes in it.

"I didn't know I was." He blinked a few times
as he remembered. "I didn't feel all that bad until I woke up in
the emergency room. My god, I'm so relieved you're here."