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“An important one?”
He laughed. “Depends on who you ask. If dad were here, he would say they are all important.”
“Thankfully, he’s not then. Listen, I want to go camping. Do you still have all your gear and stuff? I want to backpack and stay the night somewhere. Maybe two nights.”
“For real?” Adam asked.
“For real.”
“All right man,” he said. “I can skip this meeting. I will be home in an hour, start packing up your shit.”
“Will do. Oh, Rica is coming too.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. You want me to call and invite Matt? I think he could use some fresh air and so could Will. Though if we invite the kid, we’d have to make it an easier trip. No 10-mile hikes with packs.”
“Sure, let’s invite Will too,” I said with a grin. “I haven’t spent much time with him lately. We’ll save the grueling backpacking trip for another time and do something a little more kid-friendly. Got any ideas for places we can go with just a few day hikes, nothing too serious?”
“Do I have any ideas? Ha! I’ve only been planning camping trips in my head all day every day for the last few years.”
“And here I thought we paid you to actually do work.”
“Hey, I get my work done, then I daydream about what peak I’m going to climb next. It’s actually not a bad system.”
“But an even better system would probably involve less daydreaming and actual hiking, yeah? So, let’s go!”
“I’m going, I’m going!” Adam laughed, then informed me that he had some loose ends to tie up at work but that he would pick me up by 3. From there, we’d head to Matt’s house, get him and Will onboard, which neither of us thought would be too hard, and by that night we’d be sleeping under the stars. I clicked my phone off and patted Rica on the head, who had just lumbered over to the couch, her chin dripping from all the water she had just drunk.
“You want to go camping?” Her ears perked up. “I thought you might. Let’s go pack up some food for you, yeah?”
She ran alongside me as I began gathering things for the two of us, and sighed a sigh of relief. “This is going to be good,” I said.
To her and to myself. “This is just what I need.”
ChapterNineteen
LILY
Iwas cycling through my phonebook trying to find someone I could call whom I thought would actually make me feel better about everything, but came up short.
I had been living in denial land for the last week, pretending like the conversation I had with the doctor on the phone the other day had all been a dream. It was working, more or less, except for the fact that I was starting to experience pretty severe morning sickness and body aches, centered mostly around my chest and back. Also, I had taken three at-home tests to date, and all three of them confirmed exactly what the test results from the doctor’s office said. It was time to face the music.
I was pregnant.
I thought it was impossible, and yet here it was for me, spelled out in black and white. Or, really, it was spelled out in pink—double pink lines to be exact. All the at-home tests came up with double pink lines. And I was freaking out. I spent every night since I got the call from the doctor trying to figure out how this could happen, and on Friday afternoon while I was doing yet another internet search at my desk instead of working, I finally got somewhere.
St. John’s Wort.
I had been taking a supplement of St. John’s Wort that my mom sent with me when I left their house in Riverside. She was worried about me starting a new job and about me having residual sadness from my breakup with Brett, and a friend of hers mentioned that she takes St. John’s Wort for mild depression and anxiety. I took the bottle to appease my mother, who had been going on about the supplement for weeks at that point. Even though I really didn’t think I would need it, nor did I really believe in its effectiveness, I took a pill every single day just so I could tell her that I was doing it and make her feel better whenever she called.
Whether or not it was doing anything for my anxiety, I couldn't say, but what I did learn was that the plant that the supplement was derived from was known to make birth control pills less effective. It came up on a list that I found online, a list that informed me that when you’re taking St. John’s Wort, you’re supposed to use a backup contraceptive besides the pill.
Of course, no one told me thatbeforeI got pregnant.
So, it was done. I had a baby inside of me, and it was definitely David’s, and I had no idea what I was going to do about it. Things weren’t supposed to happen this way. I had a plan. I was going to get married, then buy a house,thenhave a kid. More importantly, I was going to have a kid with a man who actually loved me, not a man whom I had slept with a couple of times before he started completely ignoring me.
How did everything get so messed up?
I put my head down on my desk after reading as much as my brain could take at that moment about St. John’s Wort and sighed. It didn’t matter now how I became pregnant, it was done. I had to start looking toward the future instead of being angry about the past. Which meant I had to start thinking about what the hell I was going to do. Did I want to keep the baby? When should I tell David? What would I say if David didn’t want to keep the baby?
