Page 31 of The Best Worst Thing

Heartbeats

You really don’t have to do that,” Valerie said from her living room sofa, where she was lying with her feet propped up on a few throw pillows. “They’re just going to mess it up again in the morning.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” Nicole said. She was on her hands and knees, stacking a few board books on the curiously sticky ottoman Valerie used as a coffee table.

She placed an abandoned snack cup atop the books, then squished a blinking, LED-lit minifootball in the palm of her hand. “It kind of helps with all the …”

“Anxiety?”

“Yeah,” Nicole said. “Something like that.”

Tomorrow was the big day—the ultrasound.

A milestone Nicole had never made it past. She’d been pregnant four times in the last few years, but every pregnancy had been marred from the start.

There was always something: sluggish betas, blood clots, bed rest. And then, when seven weeks rolled around—or when the bleeding finally got bad enough that she could beg her doctors to see her sooner—Nicole would slide into a paper gown, sink into the examination chair, and wait for the words she already knew were coming.

She’d just lie there, eyes half closed, as Gabe’s grip on her trembling hand grew a little weaker and the doctor pushed on her stomach a little harder.

They’d pause, they’d purse their lips, and then they’d turn the screen to Nicole and say, very quietly, that there was no baby to see. That there was no heartbeat to hear.

“It’s going to be okay,” Valerie said. “I really believe that everything bad that’s going to happen to you has already happened.”

Nicole forced a smile. “I sure hope so.”

Valerie nodded, then glanced at her phone while Nicole headed into the kitchen to start the dinner dishes.

From time to time, as Nicole wiped down the counters or hushed the whistling kettle, Valerie would call out from the couch for Nicole’s opinion on crockpot chili or belt bags or melamine cereal bowls.

“Oh, don’t let me forget,” Nicole said, wandering back into the living room with their steaming mugs, then sitting at the foot of the sofa, sorting a bin of magnetic tiles by shape and color. “I promised Mason I’d do one last monster check before we went to bed.”

Valerie, who was rewinding their episode of Grey’s Anatomy to a few minutes before they’d nodded off last night, pressed play. “He’s walking all over you, you know.”

“Not at all,” Nicole said, stacking a red triangle with its mates.

“I get it. When I was a kid, Paige and I would stay up way too late reading Goosebumps, and then whenever someone would walk down the hall or the house creaked kind of weird, I’d jump into her bed with my eyes closed while she did a full inspection of our upstairs. ”

“Even though she was younger?”

“Yeah.” Nicole snapped the lid onto the now-organized bin and pushed it under the boys’ activity table. “Paige is fearless. She came out that way, I guess. Giving zero fucks.”

Valerie laughed, then pointed Nicole—who was already covering her mouth—toward the swear jar on the kitchen counter. She got up and shoved another dollar in it. Since Nicole arrived yesterday afternoon, she’d already paid out six bucks to Valerie’s church’s after-school program.

“What about you?” Valerie said as Nicole finally holed up on the other side of the couch. “What were you like as a kid?”

“Kind of serious. I liked rules. I liked things being just so.”

“Sounds like you two needed each other.”

Nicole, nodding, reached for a throw blanket as they settled into their evening.

They sipped Valerie’s antinausea ginger tea, snacked on her antinausea ginger chews, and scrolled through their glowing phones.

The television talked and the dishwasher hummed and from down the hall, Carson’s white noise machine whirred.

Inside Valerie’s happy home, everything was quiet, cozy, and calm.

Things were fine. Good, even. For the past day or so, things were really okay.

After all, when Nicole had touched down in Norfolk, she’d had one goal: to make Valerie’s life as easy as possible.

And so far, she’d done just that. She made heart-shaped pancakes, she vacuumed an absurdly high-pile shag rug, she watched the first twenty minutes of Cars seven times.

She did a Costco run, she finger painted, she took the boys to the very crowded, very humid Virginia Zoo.

She folded laundry, she played hopscotch, she showed Valerie how to avoid turning her bathroom into a crime scene every time she injected herself with progesterone.

She even ordered pizza with pineapple on it.

But inside, the truth clawed at Nicole’s organs like a rake. And every time Valerie puked or her sons threw their sticky hands around Nicole’s bug-sprayed legs or Grey’s Anatomy showed another wide-lens shot of the goddamn Space Needle, her secrets scraped a little deeper.

“What do you think of these?” Valerie said, handing her phone to Nicole. “I thought the blue would look really nice on Gabe.”

On Valerie’s screen, a trio of smiling models donned heather-navy T-shirts with white lettering printed across the chest. Mama. Dada. Pod. Nicole’s throat burned as she scrolled through the carousel images.

“I thought we could maybe wear them to the second ultrasound?” Valerie said.

“When we graduate to my regular OB’s office?

The nurse coordinator—you remember Maria, she’s so nice—said she’d take some pictures for us.

I could do a letter board, that could be cute, or whatever you want.

You guys could use it for a holiday card, or put it on Instagram, or we could just give it to the clinic, or even make a scrapbook, or … ”

“Uh, totally. Yeah.”

“What size is Gabe? Large, right? He looks so tall in pictures. Your baby, or babies, they’re going to be so gorgeous. All my friends joke about it, how—”

“I need to tell you something,” Nicole said.

Valerie cringed. “Oh my gosh. That was so selfish of me. I shouldn’t be taking any of this pregnancy from you.

This isn’t even about me. This is your time, I know that.

We don’t have to get the shirts. We don’t have to do anything.

I don’t have to be involved. I’m sure you have your own announcement planned, or something for the podcast. I know you took a break from recording, I—”

“It’s not you. It’s … about me. About me and Gabe.”

“What? What do you mean?” Valerie fanned her face, then put a hand on her heart. “Is Gabe okay? Are you okay? Oh my gosh, I’m going to have a heart attack. What’s wrong?”

Nicole closed her eyes. She could explain everything.

She could tell her the whole story. How the night she’d laid eyes on Gabe, she knew exactly the kind of man he was.

That when she approached him, it was only to tell him to leave her roommate alone.

To tell him he was too old, too rich, too obnoxious to be here. She was a little drunk. Really drunk.

How he’d said, “Your accent is the hottest thing I’ve ever heard.

” How she said, “Are you exoticizing my Northern Cities Vowel Shift?” How he said, “Yeah, definitely,” then bought her every drink the bartender could think of—because she was a kid, because she didn’t have a drink yet—until she’d sipped them all and picked a favorite.

How she settled on a Jack and Coke and he leaned into her a little more and said, “That’s a very trashy drink order, Nicole,” and she turned toward him another inch and said, “How many girls have you fucked this week?” and he fingered the rim of his whiskey and said, “Honestly, three,” and Nicole narrowed her eyes and bit her lip and said, “Separately or all at once?” and he grinned and looked right at her and Nicole looked right back and she knew exactly what was standing there—a liar, a cheater, a status-obsessed, smooth-talking, money-hungry, beautiful piece of shit—and so she rolled her eyes and clutched her phone and found her friends and walked away.

And sure, she was a little giddy, and sure, she might’ve looked back and caught him staring right at her, but that was only natural.

That was only because it felt good when a guy like that fixed his gaze on you, decided you were special.

There was nothing more to it. It was just a little moment at a bar.

Just a blitz of attention. Just a buzz of electricity, a few too-fast beats of her wide-eyed heart.

But then he found her. The next day, Gabe Speyer came and found her. Twenty-four hours later, she was putty in his hands.

“Nicole?”

“I …”

There was no easy way to say this. There was no backstory, no context, no perfect first year that could cushion the blow of the mess they’d made. Valerie deserved the truth. And Nicole was going to give it to her.

“Gabe’s having an affair,” she said.

Valerie’s mouth fell open. “No, he’s not.”

Nicole hugged her elbows. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know until after the transfer. I would’ve never put you in this position, I promise.”

Valerie was pale. Her gaze, lost past the piles of toys and the tower of half-opened Target boxes and the semipetrified, make-your-own-slime experiment the boys had abandoned midafternoon.

In the background, the television murmured, its melodrama playing on a loop as reality sunk its teeth into the world Valerie had welcomed Nicole into with open arms.

“Please don’t hate me,” Nicole said.

Valerie closed her eyes. Nicole’s heart sank. Every time she thought it couldn’t possibly break again—because what was left to shatter?—it found a way to surprise her.

It was a foolish organ, wasn’t it?

So desperate, so hopeful.

So eager. So stupid.

Nicole put her head in her hands.

“I know I don’t deserve this baby,” she said. “I know we don’t. You can tell me that we don’t. I’ll spend forever trying to make this right.”

“Why are you apologizing?”