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I laid my head on the pillow behind me and closed my eyes. Taking slow, deep breaths, I tried to control the rush of adrenaline and fear that was coursing through my body.
Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
“Well, usually, when two people have sex—”
“But we used condoms, and I’m on birth control!” I shouted, louder and more harshly than I meant to. The nurse beside me jumped. The doctor, seemingly unphased at my outburst, continued to move the remote of the ultrasound machine around on my belly. The heartbeat faded away, and then reappeared.
“Yes, but your chart says you had a round of antibiotics a few months ago, for a minor infection. Is that correct?”
“Yes, so what?”
“Antibiotics render your birth control useless. Your pharmacist should have mentioned that when you picked it up.”
Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
I listened to the heartbeat in shock.
I waspregnant.
What was I going to do? I was still a freshman in college. My parents were going tokillme. Hadn’t that been the last thing mydad told me when he’d dropped me off?Try not to fuck this up, Maria.Like he was issuing me a challenge.
A challenge I failed.
I am so screwed.Tears burned my eyes.I took a deep, shaking breath and tried to steady myself.
“It’s totally up to you how to move forward,” the doctor shrugged, his whole demeanor nonchalant. “You’re at about eight or nine weeks right now, it looks like. You have a few more weeks to decide if you want to terminate.”
Terminate. There was something about the word that made me wince, despite my situation. Still, the doctor had a point. I had my whole life ahead of me. My parents would murder me. I could use my scholarship money for the semester to pay for the treatment, work some extra hours at my part time job to make ends meet, and this would all be behind me before I had time to really suffer the consequences.
“Yeah… I—”
The doctor turned the screen of the machine around, and my eyes fell on the tiny blobs in front of me.
Plural.
“Looks like there’s two,” the doctor said. “Same amniotic sac. Identical twins.”
I stared at the blobs, the sound of the heartbeat filling the room. The weight of it hit me like a brick wall.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“You have a lot of options, Miss Steel. You can terminate, but you’d have to terminate both. You could also carry to term and put them up for adoption. It wouldn’t be hard to find someone to adopt two babies from a healthy mom, and you could return to your life with some normalcy, save a nine-month hiccup.”
Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
“I can’t.”
“It’s okay,” the nurse said. “Like the doctor said, you have options—”
“I can’t.” I laughed, shaking my head.
Always make the choice you know you’ll regret if you don’t.
Would I regret keeping the children I was carrying? Maybe. But I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would regret ending their little heartbeats even more. That sound would haunt me forever if I knew my own decision caused those heartbeats to stop.
“I… I’m going to carry. I don’t know if I can keep them… but I’m not going to terminate. I can’t.”
The doctor said something about scheduling appointments, and prenatal vitamins, and regular checkups, and some other stuff that I didn’t really hear. The only thing I could hear was the sound of those two little heartbeats, strong and slightly syncopated against each other, echoing through my head for the rest of the night.
