Yes. Yes I had, I remembered with a whole-body shame flush. I’d worn them both, laughing like an Arkham-level maniac astride him.
In the morning I was dog-sick and alone. He’d left a note on the pillow—You’re amazing. Can’t wait for the prequel—and a phone number with an area code that for sure was not Virginia. It was probably fake, and anyway, I was flying home to Norfolk in a couple of hours. I couldn’t call and try to un-one-night-stand him with some legit dating. I’d thrown the note away, and with it any chance I had of finding him. Batman wasn’t going to be a factor.
I got dressed, but I didn’t go to Margot’s office. I sat staring at a wall covered with smiling rabbits and baby deer in cotton candy colors. The raccoons all looked so smug, like they were laughing at me.
And why not? Unplanned pregnancy is tragic when the mom is a kid herself, but at my age some elements of comedy crept in. Shouldn’t I by now know better than to drag an anonymous Batman back to my room by his utility belt? Shouldn’t I at the very least understand the proper workings of a condom? People might not say it to me, but they’d say it to each other. They would think it at me, really loud.
And my parents! I dropped my face into my hands, cringing at the thought of their reaction. They were suburban Methodists, both originally from very small towns, the poster couple for conventional. I could picture my mother tutting and hand-wringing, while my stepdad, Keith, stood awkwardly behind her, trying to give me money. Plus, telling Keith was tantamount to telling Rachel, and that would be the worst.
My stepsister had never had a fender bender, much less an accident involving reproduction. She had made herself a family in perfect order, as if it were as simple as a playground song: First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Rachel with a baby carriage. I couldn’t even get step one right.
The last thing I wanted was for Rachel to know that I had fetched up pregnant. She would be so irritatingly sorry for me. She would make excuses for me to our parents. We can’t blame Leia, I could hear her saying. She must be so lonely. Otherwise she’d never have engaged in such a desperate, tawdry incident with an unfindable Batman. And the worst part was, she would genuinely be trying to help me. Rachel always helped me, sometimes so relentlessly that I wished I had a safe word.
There was a quick tap at the door, and Margot stuck her head back in.
“Do you have your pants on? You’ve been in here a while,” she said.
Behind her, through the open doorway, I could hear children playing in the waiting room. Little piping voices. The bang of plastic toys and thumpy feet. I had barreled through that crowd of small, sniffling humans and their mothers on my way in. It was all mothers, though presumably each child had a father. Someplace. I had barely noticed the children, eager to get back here and let Margot correct the home kit’s obvious mistake. But I heard them now.
Through the thin wall, in the room next door, a baby burst into a noisy squalling, rich with outrage. My head tilted toward the sound.
“What’s wrong with the baby?” I asked.
Margot shrugged, tucking the ends of her jet-black bob behind her ears. “Poor little ’roo, he’s getting vaccinations.”
She came all the way in to close the door, but I could still hear him. He sounded so affronted. Thirty seconds ago he’d been as innocent as the pink rabbits on the wallpaper. He hadn’t even known that things could hurt. Someone should have warned him that the world had jabby things in it and that adults would stick them in his blameless thighs. On purpose.
But even as I thought it, he began to quiet. He must be in his mother’s arms, being bobbled and soothed, already forgetting. A real, live human baby. I put one hand on my belly. It felt soft, a little rounder than I would have liked, no different from usual. Yet inside, secretly, it was not the same. In the mortifying shock of being pregnant, I hadn’t thought about getting a baby. But that was pregnancy’s endgame, after all.
“It’s going to be okay, you know,” Margot promised. She sat down beside me and put her arm over my shoulders.
“It’s so weird to think that sex actually works,” I said.
“Reproduction” was a high-school-textbook word. It was like photosynthesis or oxidation, just another process that I’d had to memorize to pass biology. Now here was biology, being true and relevant, working as intended in the darkness at the center of my body. If all went well, a whole and separate person would enter the world. A tiny person, made inside myself. My person. My son or daughter.
“You want to talk about your options?” Margot asked, but I was already shaking my head back and forth.
“I’m thirty-eight years old, Margot,” I answered, slow and serious. “Aren’t I running out of options?”
Margot was my friend. I could see her wanting to tell me that it wasn’t true. But she was also a doctor, and I was dead single and a year and change away from forty. I’d walked away from every man I might have married. No, I’d run. The playground song in my head went, First comes love, then comes hideous betrayal, then comes endless regret requiring expensive therapy. It was a terrible song. It didn’t even rhyme. But it was mine, and I hadn’t made a family, even though I’d wanted one.
I still did. I wanted to fall in love, marry a dork like me, make more dorks. I wanted game nights, summer nerdcations to Ren fairs and Orlando, a better reason than my own sweet tooth for baking Yoda cupcakes. I had imagined what it would be like to leap in and make a life with someone. Make babies that were a blend of us. It must be a kind of magic, to create a kid with my husband’s nose and my own deep-set eyes.
This kid, though? He might be born with Batman’s nose, but how would I know? I couldn’t remember Batman’s nose. This kid would be biracial; he could get my deep-set eyes, but we still wouldn’t look like family to my racist neighbor. Or to anybody’s racist neighbor, actually, and the world was full of them. I’d be raising him all alone, too. I wasn’t exactly living the dream here.
It didn’t matter. No matter how embarrassing the origin story, no matter the potential hazards, a tiny piece of family had crash-landed in my uterus.
“I’m making a baby,” I told Margot, and I sounded terrified.
Even so, underneath the shake in my voice, I heard joy. Margot must have heard it, too, because she grinned and hugged me tighter.
“Yeah, you are, Mama,” she said, and wrote me a prescription for prenatals.
For the first few months, I kept it a secret between me and Margot and my ob-gyn. I bought a book called Late Bloomers: The Pregnancy Handback for Women Over 35, and it advised me not to tell, at least until I’d gotten through the first trimester. That made sense to me, and not only because telling everyone would be uncomfortable and I actively dreaded telling Rachel. I had another, deeper reason. At my age pregnancy was classified as high-risk. I had extra doctor appointments and tests, and in my heart I didn’t trust that it would stick. This didn’t feel like something I would get to have.
So I worked, I hung out with my friends, I put out cat food for the wary stray who lived in my backyard. I went to church and hosted Tuesday game nights. I took out the recycling. It all felt exactly the same as the thousands of times I’d done this stuff unpregnant. I missed having a glass of wine with dinner, but Night of the Bat aside, I wasn’t a big drinker. I wasn’t nauseous or any moodier than usual. I didn’t find myself salting my ice cream or eating sidewalk chalk. Another few weeks and I had to move into my fat jeans, but that was no big deal—it happened every Christmas.