·her daddy says he don't know where we gonna go·

[❀ Melíssa]

      Tony Streun climbed the stairs in the apartment his fiancée Natalia shared with her sister and cousins. The first floor had been deserted, save for a plastic bag from Duane Read that lay in the front hallway. When he reached the second floor, he heard weak sobbing coming from the bathroom, the door open wide. “Hello?” he called out, not wanting to walk any closer or intrude in case it was one of the other girls.
      The sobs stopped abruptly with a gasp, which was followed by a series of murmurs. Rain Feldman, his former step-sister and soon to be cousin-in-law, came to the doorway. “Tony,” she addressed him somberly, and then glanced back into the room, a question on her face. When she turned back towards him, she gestured, “Come on in.”
      As he reached the door, he froze. Four female faces stared at him; Rain right next to him, Tyler O’Malley sitting on the countertop, Stormy Feldman on the edge of the tub, and Chelsea Urban on the floor in front of the toilet, next to her sister. The only one whose eyes were not on him was Natalia, because they were locked on the debris scattered around her legs.
      “I feel like I’m facing a firing squad,” he attempted to make a joke. The only response was four pairs of eyes meeting each other, looking down at Natalia, then back at him. “Or not. What’s going on?”
      Wordlessly, Natalia extended one arm out to him, a plastic stick in her hand. Under the steady gaze of everyone else in the room, he closed the distance between them and took it from her, studying it. “A plus sign? I don’t know what that – ohhhh.” He looked around the other sticks near his feet and dropped to his knees in front of Natalia, picking up the other tests and examining the results. More plus signs, some with two lines, one that very clearly stated, ‘pregnant’. The pace of his breathing increased with each stick as he realized what was happening, until he came to one that had a minus sign. This he held up, eyebrows raised.
      “I peed on that one,” Tyler said.
      When Natalia finally looked up a met Tony’s eyes, his felt his heart shatter into a million pieces. Her tears had left graying mascara trails down her cheeks, and her eyes were rimmed with red. Through the haze, Tony was still able to see all the emotions as they flew by: anger, fear, despair, a twinge of excitement. This changed everything.
      Chelsea cleared her throat. “We’ll leave you two alone,” she squeezed her sister’s hand as she stood up, touching Tony’s shoulder as she passed. “We’ll be downstairs,” she nodded to her bandmate and cousins, and they filed out behind her silently.
      Alone with her fiancé, Natalia shook her head slowly. “I don’t want this, Tony. I really don’t. Not now. I’m supposed to be focused on my career.”
      Not having fully formed an opinion, he had no input on that. “What… what do you want to do?”
      “Honestly? I want to have an abortion,” she bit her lip. “Please don’t hate me for that. I just...we're not ready. I'm not ready,” she covered her face with her hands.
      “Shhh…” Tony pulled her hands away and slid his arms around her. “What do we have to do first?” he whispered against her hair. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
      “I have to go see Jolene,” she referred to Tyler’s mother, the official doctor of the Siren Call Records family. “She can tell me how far along I am and what my options are.”
      “Okay. Okay. Do you want me to come?”
      “That’s what got us into this.”
      It took a moment for her deadpan answer to sink in, and he laughed as he processed the double meaning. Kissing her forehead, his ran his fingers through her hair. “Should I rephrase the sentence for you? Do you want me to accompany you to see Jolene?”
      “Yes.”
      “And after we talk to Jolene, then what?”
      “Then… she can refer me to someplace safe and reliable, and then none of us ever talk about this again.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “This wasn’t supposed to happen for at least ten years. Maybe never.”
      “Maybe never?” he repeated.
      “Well, I haven’t really decided on whether or not I ever want kids.”
      Tony stiffened. “Shouldn’t we have discussed this before we got engaged? I mean, that’s kind of a big deal.”
      “We never even talked about getting engaged! You just sprung that on me,” an accusatory tone slipped into her voice as she lifted her head back up.
      “You didn’t have to say yes.”
      “Until right now, I had no reason to say no!”
      “I can understand not wanting this kid now, but, ever? Why not?”
      Her voice was quiet. “The same reason as now.”
      “Because of your career?” he sputtered. “You would choose the band over starting a family with me?” He dropped his arms from around her and started to get to his feet.
      “I never made a decision on that! We obviously would have had to talk about it and decide what we both wanted. Chances are I’d probably want to have a least one kid with you.”
      “Chances?” he took a step back.
      “You’re not understanding me,” Natalia rose and followed him.
      “I think I understand just fine. There is a ‘chance’ that we’ll have kids, which means there’s a ‘chance’ that we won’t,” he made angry air quotes with his fingers. “How will you do it Nati? Stay on birth control but tell me that you stopped, and just play dumb when you don’t get pregnant? Get your tubes tied or whatever?”
      “No, I would never lie to you about something like that!”
      “Whatever. I have to get out of here. Call me when you want to go to the doctor,” Turning his back to her angrily, he stormed from the bathroom and down the hall, passing the other girls at the bottom of the stairs on his way out the door. Avoiding their eyes, he knew they'd huddled there once he and Natalia had started raising their voices, and he wasn't going to stick around to hear the insults they would undoubtedly throw around to cheer her up.

_______________________________________

      “Excuse me?” both Richard Urban and Kevin Streun boomed at the same time as Oliver Urban’s eyes narrowed at Tony. As Natalia and Tony looked around the table, they were met by four shocked expressions, and three sets of sympathetic eyes.
      Unable to tear her eyes away from her mother, Natalia slipped her right hand into Chelsea’s lap before repeating the announcement. Her left hand was already entwined with Tony’s. “We are going to have a baby,” she willed her eyes not to brim with the same tears that were flooding to her mother’s.
      Kevin pressed his fingertips to his temples. Tatum glanced around at her various family members. She also reached out to her side to take her sister’s hand. Sénia squeezed back, several salty tears silently spilling over her lower lashes. Richard, seated on the other side of Sénia, glared at Tony, simmering only when he heard Natalia’s whisper of ‘Daddy?’, a name she hadn’t used in ten years. It pulled him back from his place of rage.
      Stormy Feldman, who was seated on Tony’s left side, rose to her feet and looked at Chelsea, who also stood. “We’ll let you talk about things,” she beckoned to Oliver as well, who made no move to leave. “Come on,” she hissed at him, as Chelsea punched him in the shoulder and pushed him from the chair.
      Once they were alone, Kevin spoke first. “And you’re absolutely positive there aren’t any alternatives that you want to consider?” The statement caused a variety of reactions. Tatum rolled her eyes, Richard growled under his breath, Tony stared defiantly at his father, Natalia looked down at her plate, and Sénia stared at her daughter before nudging her sister.
      “Yes,” Tony responded for both of them. He spun the engagement ring around and around Natalia’s finger nervously. “We have thought about all the options, and this is the one we’ve chosen to take.”
      Leaning close to her sister, Tatum listening carefully to the words her former stepson used and studied her niece’s face. There was definitely something they weren’t saying. “We’ve all been there,” she murmured to Sénia, quietly so Richard wouldn’t hear. “I know that face.”
      “When are you due?” Sénia asked, and Natalia provided a date that was barely six months away. “Oh. You waited a long time to tell us.” She didn’t mean for it to sound like an accusation, but it came out that way.
      “We only recently found out. And we didn’t want to say anything until we were sure,” the answer came from Tony again.
      “Sure of what?” Tatum asked.
      “Like I said, we thought about all the options we had,” his voice took on a harder edge. “We weren’t going to tell you until we decided there was actually something to tell.”
      “Does this affect the wedding at all?” Richard ignored what Tony was implying.
      “Yes,” Natalia began. “We actually want to push it back. Our engagement isn’t really public, I mean, yeah, we all know that the wedding is a long time coming, but no one else does. If we move it up, then it looks like some shotgun wedding ‘cause I got knocked up. TMZ would have a field day.”
      “Sweetheart, please don’t worry about what the media makes of this,” sighing, Richard felt his grip on fatherhood slipping. Between Chelsea and Natalia, would he ever be able to protect his daughters from the world? He decided that Madalynne was going to become a nun.
      “But I have to, and you know it. It’s not just me that I have to think about, it’s Chelsea and Tyler too. If things get out of hand, if it has any kind of negative impact on the band… I’m not going to risk hurting them.”
      Tony cleared his throat. “With all due respect to all of you, what it all comes down to is this: We’re both adults now, and we started making plans for a future together a long time ago. Now, while this a major curveball and certainly not something we accounted for, it’s really just a part of the very thing we’ve been doing for a couple years now, starting a life together. We’re not coming to you to fix something or decide if we made the right choice, we’re coming to you simply to share the news,” he took a deep breath, and Natalia continued where he left off.
      “We’re going to need your help, support, and of course all the advice in the world, but right now we’re still processing how this will change our lives. For now we want to keep things very quiet. Obviously everyone who was in this room knows, so do Tyler and Rain. No one else. It’ll be okay if River knows, but that’s it for right now. Everyone is sworn to secrecy. When we’re ready, we’ll tell everyone else, the boys, Maddie, Gramma, Grandpa, all the rest.”
      “Well said,” Tatum applauded, and then met the stares of her sister, brother-in-law, and ex-husband. “What? They know what they want to do, they have a plan, and we have to respect that. They are not children anymore. Tony, Nati, congratulations. You’ll be fine parents, and you have all of us here for the times when you’re not. Sis, let’s go outside. Kev and Richard, time to bond again,” she referred to the years they spent as brothers-in-law.
      As Tatum dragged Sénia out to the pool area, away from the house, Tony and Natalia looked at each other and rose from the table. Richard and Kevin stared at the seats that their offspring had left vacant.
      “I don’t even really know what to say,” Kevin said.
      “I don’t think we’re supposed to talk. I’m supposed to kill him, lock her in a tower, and then you and me are supposed to fight.”
      “Damn. Don’t have that kind of energy. How about this? I need to go home and stare at a blank wall, preferably in the dark, and think about all this, just…” shaking his head, Kevin had no words, “absorb all this. We’ll get a drink and duke it out another day.”
      “Fair enough,” Richard stood, shaking Kevin’s hand. After he walked him to the door, he pinched the bridge of his nose and stomped off toward the office, shouting for Oliver to join him.


      “Oh my god,” Sénia moaned as she landed on one of the lounge chairs, her hands tugging at her hair. “She doesn’t want it.”
      “I think you’re right,” Tatum sat across from her. “The ‘yay’ emotion was completely absent, and like I said, I know that face. I had that face. You had that face,” the sisters had each taken the other to the clinic in the past. “But… you also had the face again when you found out about Richie, remember? The shock factor is way too strong at first. Sometimes it takes awhile to sink in.”
      “Tat, she never once said she was having that baby with any spark of joy. Do you think that he – no. He wouldn’t force her to keep it. And she definitely wouldn’t let anyone force her into anything.”
      Tatum was thoughtful. “She still has time, if she doesn’t want to. But, she’s also far enough along that it gets complicated – the procedure itself and the emotional toll. Think about how tough it was for you. You were at what, five?”
      “Six.”
      “And mine was eight. Nati’s gotta be at least twelve. They said they just found out, so she could have been close to twelve already. Would you be able to do it then? I wouldn’t.”
      “No. Not by then.”
      “And look, I was seventeen, you were eighteen, my guy wasn’t even a boyfriend, just some dude, you’d only been seeing yours for a few months, Dad had just left, Mom wouldn’t get out of bed, George and Nordin had just moved out, Jeffrey was just starting school and we were the ones taking care of him,” Tatum listed the calamities that had occurred during the year they’d each experienced accidental teen pregnancies. “But those two are older than we were, even if it’s only a couple years, and they’re already in a committed relationship, so kids were bound to happen with them at some point anyway.”
      “And they have us.”
      “Exactly. They’ll be fine, just like I told them. Even if this isn’t what they really want, they’re going to adjust, with our help, and everything will work itself out.”
      “I’m holding you to that. You don’t have a stash on you by any chance, do you?”
      “Are you serious?”
      Sénia's voice lingered on the 'Y' as she answered, “Y-yes.”
      Her laughter coming out with a squeal, Tatum reached in her pocket, producing a joint from a metal business card holder. “Almost thirty years I’ve been trying to get you to smoke with me, and you start now?” she flicked her lighter.
      “If you tell anyone about this, my children will find themselves mourning the loss of their Aunt Tatum,” Sénia took a long puff before handing it back.
      “Okay, you haven’t changed at all.” Tatum crawled onto the chair with her twin, and the two leaned their heads together, smoking at staring up at the sky all night.


      Tony and Natalia slipped up the stairs to the above-garage apartment. Once inside her room, Natalia paused and leaned her head against the doorframe. “Mom and Aunt Tat can tell.”
      “So what?”
      “They’re going to hover.”
      “They’re gonna hover anyway,” Tony brushed her hair off her face. “Look, you can’t… if you keep being mopey, if you keep thinking about much you wanted to have an abortion rather than a baby, people are going to start thinking I forced you.”
      “It’s just… guilt, I think. That I was so agaisnt it. Your face when you saw the sonogram…”
      He sucked his breath in through his teeth. “I didn’t mean for you to see that. Babe, if you made your decision based on that – ”
      “I didn’t. But at the same time, how could I not? You looked like you’d just seen – I don’t even know what. An angel maybe. How could I take that away from you after that?” she closed her eyes. “It gave me a lot to think about.”
      “Okay, I’m going to ask you this one last time.”
      “Here we go.”
      “I’m serious. I promise I won’t ask again, but I need you to answer this with complete honesty,” he took her face in his hands and peered into her eyes. “You’re not having this baby just for me, right? You’re not doing it because you think it’s what I want.”
      “No. Now you never get to ask again.”
      “Then what changed your mind? You never really explained.”
      “Well, first off, it is what you want, so it’s not that I just think you want it. I had to take that into consideration. Before the appointment, this was my issue, my problem to deal with and figure out how to fix and get out of. Afterwards, it really hit me that we’re in this together. And then I realized that this,” she touched her stomach, “is going to become a baby. Our baby. And at the risk of sounding like that spineless Twilight girl, once I added you to the equation, it made all the difference. If you were no one important to me, I would have done what I needed to do in a heartbeat. But we have each other to lean on. I mean, I’m not ready by a long shot, you’re not ready, but we have so many people we can go to for help, and we’ll make it work.”
      Smiling so hard it made his face hurt, Tony kissed his fiancée hard. “I can’t believe you’ve admitted out loud that we’re gonna be okay,” he shook his head ruefully. “Stubborn woman. I love you,” his hands slid down to either side of her just-forming bump. His eyes sparkled, “We’re having a baby.”
      For the first time since she watched the first plus sign appear, the tears that rolled down Natalia’s cheeks were fueled by happiness as she nodded. She pulled his arms all the way around her as she kissed him again, and again and again. “We’re a family.”