Then I burst into tears.
Stupid pregnancy hormones.
* * *
They only kept me for a few hours more, letting me rehydrate with their nifty little needle in my vein, then sending me home with a prescription for anti-nausea meds and some prenatal vitamins.
Shit. Prenatal. It was really happening. I was really going to be a mom. Or was I already a mom? I sure as hell already felt protective of the little sea monkey curled up somewhere between my hip bones.
I took an expensive-as-hell cab back to my apartment and climbed the stairs, thankful that Shane had thought to bring my purse to the hospital. After losing my keys eighteen million times, I’d finally gotten into the habit of keeping an extra house key in my wallet.
When I got inside, something was off. It took a second before I realized it was the scent of lemon. What the heck?
Shane had cleaned up the bathroom.
Oh my God.
I sat down heavily on the sparkling-clean toilet and chastised myself until the tears I felt coming to the surface subsided. It was such a nice thing for him to do. But I couldn’t let myself think that it was done out of anything but kindness…or guilt. Guilt was probably the reason.
I grabbed my phone out of my purse to call him, but stopped short when I saw that my mom was calling my silenced phone. Shit! Anita must have opened her big mouth.
“Hey, Ma!” I answered cheerfully, shuffling toward my bed and crawling between the—did he wash my sheets?
“Hey, baby! Whatcha doing?”
“Not much, just hanging out at home.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I was pretty sure that she knew I was pregnant, but she wasn’t going to ask. I swear, she and Aunt Ellie had perfected the whole you-know-I-know-but-I’ll-wait-until-you-tell-me-as-long-as-you-tell-me-right-now routine. They’d caught many a child with that strategy as I grew up, kids who’d been impossible to understand and less trusting than an antelope surrounded by Siberian tigers.
Yes, I had a thing for exotic animals as a kid. Sue me.
My aunt and uncle had found out pretty early in their marriage that they couldn’t have children and, being the awesome people they were, had immediately decided that they wanted to open their house and their lives to foster children. It couldn’t have been easy—hell, I’d seen firsthand how not easy it was—but they’d never once faltered in what my aunt later told me they’d felt called to do. From the time I was two years old, I’d had cousins coming out of the woodwork—quiet, loud, calm, destructive, sad, and angry cousins. Some didn’t last long; most didn’t last long. But there were two that my aunt and uncle had been able to adopt—Trevor and Henry—and a few who’d stayed in touch even after they’d gone. Shane had been one of the foster kids who had seemed to hold tight to Ellie and Mike Harris’s family, even though he’d been one of the oldest ever to be placed with them.
When I was five and Trevor came to stay with Aunt Ellie and Uncle Mike, my parents had some sort of epiphany. Less than a year later, our family had also started taking in kids who for one reason or another needed a place to stay. So, for the first time in my life, I had siblings. Loads of siblings. Siblings I had to say good-bye to far more often than I wanted. Then out of nowhere, in the middle of a heat wave during the long days of summer, came a pair of brothers that my parents would eventually adopt—which meant I got to keep them forever. My twin brothers, Alex and Abraham, stepped onto our front porch when I was eight and they were ten, and they never had to leave again. And thank God, because four years later my trusting and forgiving nature had trapped me into a situation that could have turned out very badly if Bram and Alex hadn’t chosen that exact moment to find me outside with our newest foster brother.
After that, my parents had never again fostered any children older than me and had refused to take in any more boys. They’d let their guard down, too, and I don’t know if they’ll ever forgive themselves for that. My parents took in their last foster child when I was seventeen, and that’s when I met Anita. She didn’t want to be adopted, even though legally my parents could have, but she’d also never left. She stayed with my parents for her last two years of high school and had moved into the garage apartment so she could attend college after that.
With all those children and all their problems, my aunt and mom had become interrogators that would make the CIA look up and take notice. They’d seen everything and heard everything, and no attitude or personality could withstand them when they had their minds set on something. Unfortunately, that also meant that I’d be telling my mother whatever she wanted to know.