Second Chance Twins Read online

  “Twins tend to come early because of the extra strain they put on your body. And it’s not really early early; most kids are ready to go at thirty-six weeks and use the extra four weeks to fatten up and lose their fur—”

  “Fur?”

  “Not really fur fur, just peach fuzz to protect them from the amniotic fluid. It can get a little acidic—”

  “They’re going to be floating in acid?!”

  The doctor’s stomach growled again and she winced.

  “Tell you what. I’ll give you a present.” She wheeled her chair across the floor and bounced out of it to open a cupboard, then took two books from the top shelf and handed them to me.

  “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Twins, and Gestation in Humans. The first one’s written for moms and the second is written for doctors, but you’re smart and curious. I’m sure you’ll be able to get through it. Read up, enjoy, and whatever questions come to you while you’re reading, write them down, and we’ll have a nice long talk next time. Sound good?”

  “Yes,” I said gratefully as I took the books from her. “Thank you, Dr. Snow.”

  “You are most welcome. Now, I really need to get to that scampi before I collapse. I swear, my metabolism is convinced that I spend all my time running!” She hurried out of the room, waving merrily at us as she went.

  “Running her mouth, maybe,” Jenna grumbled.

  “You’re just annoyed because you hate doctors,” I said absently as I skimmed the back covers of the books. “I can’t believe she gave me homework.”

  “You seemed happy about it,” Jenna pointed out.

  “Oh, I am! I need these. I’m just surprised she had them on hand to give out.”

  The massive dump of information was slowly being sorted by my brain, kept apart from my emotions by a bubble of nameless anxiety. It was only after we were back in the car and on the road that the full weight of it all hit me.

  “I’m having twins.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s two babies, Jenna! How am I going to finish school with two babies? How am I going to work or live or anything? Remember that kitten I had? I couldn’t even keep my room clean with just a kitten to mess it up! Cats are clean creatures—way cleaner than babies—how am I going to keep a place sanitary with two babies and no sleep? I have to call Miles; he needs to know that it’s twins. He’ll change his mind—”

  “Drop the phone. Drop it. Now, Shelley!”

  I slammed the phone into my lap. I took a few deep breaths to calm down.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t call him. I’ll just get Nate again. I have to go out there. I’ll loiter around the office until he’s done for the day, then I’ll casually, accidentally-on-purpose run into him and say, hey! Thought you might like to know that the baby I told you about is actually two babies, and see if he can still brush me off in person! Ha! I wonder if he even really knows about it. I never actually talked to him, just Nate, and then he emailed me. But it’s just email; it’s not like nobody can type ‘sincerely, Miles Lane’ except—”

  “Shelley! Good lord, you’re as bad as Dr. Snow,” Jenna interjected. “Look, squirt, I feel your pain. I do. This whole thing sucks and it’s terrible and he’s terrible for not being around to see you through it. But look at it logically. Would he be sending you thousands of dollars a month if he had any interest at all in being involved?”

  “Maybe it was an impulsive decision,” I argued weakly. “Like, maybe he panicked and did the only thing he could think of in the heat of the moment?”

  “Even for a millionaire, that’s too much money to commit to on a whim. He’s not interested, honey. You’re not going to be able to force him to be a father to his kids or a partner to you. I hate to say it, but that’s just the way it is.”

  Anxiety and despair clutched at my chest, battling for dominance but only managing to get swallowed by each other.

  “Jenna, what am I going to do?” I whispered. “Five thousand a month might be enough to keep a roof over our heads, but it isn’t going to help me maintain that roof. Or sneak in a nap. Or make sure I’m getting enough to eat. Damn it, Jenna, parenting is a two-person deal for a reason!”

  My sister didn’t say anything. I didn’t expect her to.

  I pressed my forehead against the cool window and allowed the full burden of the situation to fall squarely on my shoulders. I was going to be a single mother. A young single mother with no degree, living on hush money. It was too much.

  “Gotta say, I never thought that you would be the one to live the soap opera life,” Jenna chuckled.

  “I know, right? I keep expecting Evil Miles to pop up and say that he’s really the father, and then Good Miles to show up and defeat him in a sword fight, only to succumb to a brain aneurysm.”

  “But the aneurysm doesn’t actually kill him, it just puts him in a really long coma while his evil business partner resurrects his twin,” Jenna added enthusiastically.

  “And then their mother shows up to declare that neither of them is the real Miles, they’re both evil clones!”

  Laughter felt good. Hanging out with Jenna felt good, too. For all the time I’d spent trying to get away from home and Mom and Jenna, they felt like anchors right now. I needed an anchor, or three.

  Reluctantly resigning myself to single parenthood, I invited Jenna up to my apartment.

  “What are you going to do about your degree?” Jenna asked.

  I paused. “Well…I have until April, right? If I double up on a couple of classes, I’m sure I can get enough credits to graduate by then.”

  “Right. You’re going to double up on classes when you’ve missed the last entire week because you can’t stop puking and sleeping long enough to go. Have you even been going to work?”

  “Sort of,” I mumbled. “I clock in and everything, but I spend most of my shift with my head in the toilet. It’s not pretty.”

  “Exactly. This isn’t going to be easy, Shelley.”

  “Well, hell, I didn’t expect it to be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this damn hard!”

  I burst into tears with no warning, another delightful little quirk of this whole pregnancy thing. I felt like my heart was breaking all over again.

  “I have to make a phone call,” I said between sobs. “Stay, have a drink. Have all the drinks. I can’t touch booze for like a million years.”

  Jenna gave me a worried look but took me up on the offer, pouring herself a generous glass of my favorite red wine.

  “You better not be calling Miles,” she said, giving me that over-the-glasses serious squint which made her look just like our mother.

  “Nope,” I sighed, wiping my eyes as I began to dial. “But this call could be just as bad. Hi, Mom?”

  Jenna’s eyes widened.

  “Shelley!” My mom sounded concerned. “How are you, is everything okay? Do you need money?”

  Why is everybody trying to fix my life with money?

  “No, I’m fine on money. Um…but there’s something I need to tell you, and a really big question I need to ask you, and I just…are you sitting down? Please sit down.”

  “Oh, no. All right, I’m sitting. What’s going on, Shell? You sound like you’re crying. Are you crying?”

  Her question just made me cry harder. I took a deep breath to calm my voice. It almost worked.

  “I, um…I made a mistake. A little, tiny, huge, massive, ridiculous mistake. I messed everything up.”

  “What happened, Shelley? Whatever it is, we can fix it.”

  I sobbed and sniffled, mopping my face with a tissue.

  “I’m pregnant,” I confessed in a sigh. “With twins, and the father wants nothing to do with us. I’m so sick—I didn’t know people got this sick—and there’s no way I can get my degree before the babies come, and the bar isn’t good for me with all the smoke and the unpredictable drunk guys, and I spend my whole shift throwing up anyway… Mom, can I come home?”

  I sounded like
a little kid to myself, calling home from summer camp. Might as well have been summer camp, for as long as I’d managed to make it on my own. I rolled my eyes at myself, disgusted with my own failure.

  “You? You’re pregnant?” Mom sounded shocked and hesitant, as if she were waiting for me to say April Fool’s.

  “Yes, me,” I said more forcefully than I had intended to. “Pregnant and unmarried and unloved and scared and I don’t know what to do and…I give up.”

  She chuckled sympathetically, which made me feel better.

  “All right, honey. You’re allowed to give up, and you can come give up at home. I’ll get your room ready. When do you want to come down?”

  “I don’t know,” I sniffled. “A month? No, six weeks. I have to give a month’s notice on the apartment and I don’t want to pay for time I’m not going to use. That’ll give me time to wrap everything up here and get down there before I turn into a whole planet.”

  “Planning always did make you feel better. Planning and reading. Do as much of that kind of thing as you can, okay? Trust me, it’ll help. I remember being your age, pregnant with Jenna…I completely forgot to do anything that made me feel calm and happy. I spent all my time feeling. Feelings are great and all, but they aren’t very good for your sanity. Protect your sanity, sweetheart, you’re going to need it. Twins! How exciting!”

  “You’re thinking about buying matching sets of cutesy baby things, aren’t you?”

  “What are grandmas for? Oh, grandma! God, that sounds terrible. We’ll come up with something else. I am entirely too young and spritely to be called that.”

  “You just used ‘spritely’ in a sentence. I’m pretty sure that means you’re older than dirt.”

  “A broad vocabulary never aged anybody,” she sniffed. “Now, go call your sister and have a good cry. I have preparations to make. Love you, sweetheart.”

  “Love you too, and I’m two steps ahead of you. I’ll see you the first of December.”

  “Can’t wait. See you soon, sweetheart.”

  I wiped my face again as I hung up the phone. The tears seemed to have a mind of their own, flowing as they pleased with no consideration for the actual intensity of my feelings.

  “Well,” Jenna said, raising her brows in surprise. “That went better than expected.”

  “Yeah, it did,” I replied, smiling through my tears. “It really did.”

  Chapter 7

  Shelley

  May in Monterey

  “Ugh, why is it so hot?” I lowered myself into the sturdy wicker patio chair with a groan.

  My mother chuckled softly and handed me a tall glass of lemonade.

  “Imagine if you were this far along in August! That was me with your sister. I thought I was going to die. I don’t think I spent more than five minutes a day clothed that whole month.” Her eyes glittered with mirth at the memory, but there was a touch of sadness to them.

  “You were my age when you got pregnant with her, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” she sighed. “Your dad and I had only been dating for a couple of months when I found out. I couldn’t even picture myself as a mother at that point. I was a lot like Jenna, you know. Like both of you, I suppose. I always had a plan. My life plan was broken down into yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily parts.”

  She gazed out at the fountain, the centerpiece of her garden, but she was seeing something else.

  “Did you ever get your plan back on track?” I asked hesitantly.

  She shot me an amused look. “Never. Once you bring another person into the world, you have to rewrite your plan from scratch. I intended to graduate at the age of twenty-five, then spend a year in Paris, and another in Milan. I really wanted to be at the heart of the fashion world, to swim in it until I understood every stitch and seam intuitively. Then, I would come back to the States, move to New York, and not stop working until I had my first show at Fashion Week.”

  “You sound like a whole other person when you talk about fashion,” I said musingly. “You must have been really passionate about it.”

  “Oh, honey, I was. Immensely. I gave myself a two-year buffer to succeed at my Fashion Week goal. Whenever I met that goal, I was going to come back here and open a business.

  “I had a whole line in mind for my big debut. I think I still have the sketches around here somewhere. The styles are hopelessly out of date now, of course, but back then, they were cutting edge. Huge shoulders, big pockets, lots of interesting patterns and shapes…” She trailed off into a sigh. “But your sister came along, and then you almost immediately after, and there simply wasn’t any room in my life for those things.”

  A lump rose in my throat and I had to fight back tears. I sipped my lemonade until my flaring hormones subsided and allowed me to wrestle my emotions under control.

  “Why didn’t you ever go back to it?” I asked. “Once we were in school, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “The economy started slipping. Your dad was having trouble making ends meet, so I had to take whatever job I could get. He got a promotion, I got a better job, and we were finally able to buy this house. Then, he got another promotion, and he was finally making enough to support us all on his own. We started talking about me going back to school to finish my degree.”

  She chewed her lip for a moment, looking somehow younger, as if her past self was reflected in her face.

  “Was that when…?”

  She nodded, smiling at me though she was holding back tears.

  “It got to be too much for him. He didn’t talk about things, you know. I didn’t find out until after that he had this passion built up inside of him, these plans and dreams. He wanted to travel the world, too—to design buildings in Tokyo and Rome instead of from his cubicle here. We could have worked something out together, if he had just told me…”

  She trailed off, swallowing hard against the tears. A few escaped anyway, leaving silver trails in her makeup.

  “Here’s to proud men who screw it up for all of us,” I said, holding my glass out.

  She laughed and clinked her glass to mine, then took a drink.

  “To proud men,” she agreed. “They’re kind of like kids. If you don’t take the time to listen to them when they want to tell you an hour-long story about the scribble they drew, they aren’t going to want to tell you about the cool things they did in school, or the problems they’re having with their friends, or that girl that they have a crush on, or that one time they smoked pot and freaked out. You have to lay the foundation of trust, no matter how stupid or infantile the thing seems.”

  “Is this a lesson on dating or motherhood?” I asked playfully.

  “Both,” she said with a grin.

  My belly seemed to roll in on itself, sticking out even farther until it bumped the table in front of me. My tank top rolled up to settle under my breasts, and I readjusted on the chair. Mom was eying my belly cautiously.

  “Was that the twins moving?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, still trying to find a comfortable position. “I’m not sure what that was.”

  “Hm.” She pulled out her phone and checked the date. “May first. You still have a couple of weeks left, don’t you?”

  “Technically, yes, but Dr. Snow said that they would probably come before the due date. I guess it’s a twin thing?”

  “Hm, I see. Well, it’s a good thing we have the nursery set up.”

  “Why? I’m not in labor.”

  As soon as I said that, my stomach did the thing again. Only, this time, it knocked the breath out of me.

  “Jeez, what is that?”

  “An envy-worthy contraction,” she said with a laugh. “Six minutes. We have some time yet. How do you feel?”

  “Like I need to take a walk,” I said as panic flickered through my brain.

  “That’s a really good idea. I’ll walk with you. Ooh! I can show you my new azaleas!”

  “I would really rather skip the botany lesson right now.” There was mor
e of a snap to my words than I had intended, and I bit my lip.

  Mom raised an eyebrow, but helped me out of the chair. As soon as I stood, another contraction hit. It crushed my spine like a steamroller, dropping me to my knees.

  “Oh, wow, okay, maybe we skip the walk and go straight to the hospital,” she said, kneeling beside me to rub my back. “That was…well, it was four minutes. They say not to go until you’ve had ten of them, three minutes apart.”

  “Yeah, let’s wait till then,” I said rapidly. “As soon as I get there, they’re going to strap me into monitors and make me lie down, and I really don’t think I can lie down right now. I really, really want to move.”

  “All right, come on.” She braced herself and helped me lift my considerable weight off the ground. “Take my arm; we’ll walk. No botany, I promise.”

  We walked—toddled, really—up the garden path, and she dialed a number on her phone.

  “Jenna? Your sister’s about ready to pop. We’re walking around the garden now, but these contractions are the real thing. As soon as they pick up a little speed, we’ll head to the hospital. Can you come now? Yeah? Great, see you soon.”

  I could feel them coming, now. A tiny, subtle spike of adrenaline hit the base of my neck a few seconds before my belly began to roll, letting me brace for the impact. I made it through my next contraction without breaking my stride, and the one after that. After several minutes, Mom frowned at me.

  “Maybe I should call your sister back,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s been ten minutes since your last contraction.”

  “I’ve had two since then,” I told her as the adrenaline hit. “And I’m about to have another one…now.” I breathed, letting my body tell me what to do. My mother looked at me slack-jawed and bug-eyed.

  “How are you doing that? Don’t they hurt?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “If I tense up at all, they do. I can tell they’ll hurt if I start to panic. I’m sure if they get any stronger they’re going to hurt. But right now, it’s just like doing slow crunches.”

  She shook her head as we rounded the back of the yard and shot me a playful look. “Ugh, you disgust me. I was screaming by the end of my first real contraction, and I didn’t stop screaming until Jenna flew out of me. I was a little better with you, but not much.”