The Midwife (16 page)

Wilbur grabbed a stack of old newspapers off a folding chair and dropped it on the table of the booth. “Brought these to wrap the candles and jams,” he said. “Be careful not to pop the tops.” Ducking low, he grabbed a box of plastic T-shirt bags and set it beside the newspapers. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the booth. “Well, I guess that’s it.”

“You going somewhere?” I asked.

He nodded. “But I’ll stick around until you’re comfortable, then come back to help load everything up.”

“Thank you,” I said, purposely meeting his eyes.

Wilbur avoided them and looked at the ground. “You’re welcome.”

My first customer came within seconds. She was a stout, middle-aged woman with sun-dried skin and high cheekbones offset by short, peppery hair. I wrapped her oatmeal-and-lavender bar and “Home Sweet Home” candle in newspaper, then slid them into the bag.

As I passed it to the woman, she reached out and clenched my hand. “You one of those girls?” she asked. Native American earrings trembled in her lobes. I could not have looked away from her gray eyes if I’d wanted to. She pressed my fingers and clarified, “The ones at that home for unwed mothers?”

Hope chose that moment to coo from the basket tucked against the table, giving me away. My face filled with so much heat, I was sure it would glow right through my skin.

“Jah,”
I said, retracting my hand from the woman’s grasp. Sweat moistened my palms. Below the table, I wiped them on my skirt. When would a simple exchange with a stranger stop feeling like a threat?

I tucked the woman’s twenty-dollar bill beneath the change compartment and crouched to check on Hope. She had fallen asleep
 
—one arm over her head, fingers unfolded
 
—and had found her thumb on the other hand without my assistance. Her cheeks were red; her mouth looked dry. I wondered if she was hot. I pulled the hat off her head and covered her ears with the blanket. Someone cleared his throat. I stood up and smiled.

“I’d like to buy this, please.” A tall, older gentleman
 
—bundled in a finely cut navy wool coat
 
—slid across the table a jar of blackberry preserves.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Let me wrap it.”

“It’s not a gift.”

“No, I just don’t want it broken.”

He nodded, curt.

Setting the jam on its side, I wrapped it and crunched the paper around the gilded lid and then wrapped the jar in another layer. I was about to wrap it a third time when he said, “I think that’s enough.”

My movements froze, but not because the impatient man had stopped me. A single word in the newspaper article had caught my eye; the tiny font magnified by the glass jar and then obscured by the dark purple jam inside it. The jar rolled as I slid the newspaper pinned beneath. The feather-light section A and B of the
Tennessean
flapped like wings, even though I seized the edges with trembling hands. I could barely read the words through my panic, yet the collage of them
 
—
surrogate, graduate student, Simms University, Dr. Fitzpatrick, alleged kidnapping
 
—told me that a nightmare had resumed.

“What’s wrong with you?” the man gruffed. “Here
 
—take the money.”

But I could not look up from the newspaper. I heard him slap the bill on the table and stomp away. The article, “Search Continues for Missing Surrogate,” was dated August 13, 1996
 
—a month and a half after I fled. If a newspaper in another state had carried the story weeks after
my disappearance, how much coverage had it received in Boston?

My mouth filled with saliva. Acid backed up my throat. Dropping the newspaper, I clamped a hand over my mouth. I searched the booth for a trash can. Nothing. I retched into an empty cardboard box. Looking up and dabbing my mouth, I saw Wilbur watching me. His satisfied expression seemed out of place, almost like a mime who had forgotten what face to display at different parts of the show. But when he noticed that I was looking at him, he frowned, stood, and came running over.

“My word . . . Rhoda? You okay?” Wilbur helped me into a chair and passed me a clean napkin from his jacket pocket. “What happened?” he asked. “Do you feel bad?”

I wiped my face and tearing eyes, buying time. I could not let him know what I had discovered.

I blinked hard, willing myself to appear strong, and stared right into Wilbur’s eyes for the second time since I met him. It was like looking in a dim pool; they didn’t reveal anything. Could he have seen the article? Could he have planted it there for me to find?

I shook my head, willing away the fears my paranoia had birthed.

“I’ll be fine,” I lied.

The afternoon after I discovered the article and the contents of my Pandora’s box unfurled, I took Hope upstairs and nursed her in bed. I awoke a few hours later,
sweat-soaked and screaming. Clutching Hope, I sat up and panted. Footsteps pounded up the staircase. The knob to my bedroom door turned. It did not budge. I had wedged the back of the rocking chair beneath the knob. “Open the door, Rhoda,” Fannie called, rapping knuckles on the solid wood. “Rhoda. Open the door.”

Shivering as my sweaty body cooled, I kept Hope close, who somehow remained sleeping. I removed the rocking chair from the door with one hand but held the chair in front of my body, blocking the entrance. Fannie had one crooked finger wedged in a brass candle stand. The candle’s faltering light etched furrows in her face. I saw the wiry gray hair that had escaped her
kapp
, the slump of her shoulders, the responsibility of so many lives dulling her eyes. At almost seventy, Fannie Graber was tired
 
—and far too old for this.

“Come on, Rhoda.” The head midwife sighed and pushed two fingers against her right temple. “You’ve got to let me in.” I knew Fannie was not just speaking of physical passage, but of emotional trust. I had let Fannie assist me in labor
 
—the most intimate act beyond conception. Nonetheless, terrified of being hurt, I continued to safeguard my heart
 
—letting Fannie see bits and pieces and yet never its whole, bruised entirety.

I hated that this had stifled our bond, for I loved Fannie. She was the closest thing to a mother that I had known in years, and yet drawing close to her made me feel like I was being disloyal to the mother who was only mine in memory, the woman who wore a crisp white apron
over my father’s worn bib overalls, her only adornment a checked handkerchief tied over her brunette waves and a lavish brand of department store perfume. I recalled the diamond crumb in her engagement band glinting as she sifted cocoa and confectioner’s sugar into a bowl that filled the morning kitchen with a decadent chocolate haze and the promise of an afternoon treat. I recalled peeking over the countertop and my mother passing me the glistening brown beaters, which I licked until my cheeks became an abstract canvas stamped with a wide white smile.

This was the mother I loved and remembered. However, I now had to make a choice as my little brother, Benny, had been forced to make so long ago: cling to a phantom memory or to the flesh-and-blood woman standing before me. The woman who had never abandoned me. The woman who loved me too. I exhaled and pulled open the door. Stepping to the side, I let Fannie pass. I touched the damp hanks framing my face. Jiggling Hope with one arm, I covered my mouth and began to weep.

Fannie set the candle stand on the seat of the chair, stepped toward me, and placed two papery hands on my cheeks. My tears dripped over her fingers. With one hand, I reached up and clasped hers, tilting my head toward her touch like a blossom toward life-giving sun. “You can’t live in fear, Rhoda,” she whispered, searching my eyes. “That’s no life at all.”

Fannie removed her hands from my face and ran a finger over the skin pulsing over the delicate fontanel of my daughter’s head. I drew Hope to my chest and turned away,
using my body to shield her own. Fannie stroked my forearm as if I were a runaway child or horse.

“It’s all right,” she soothed. “I won’t hurt her.”

Reluctant, I released my daughter into Fannie’s waiting arms. The old midwife looked up and smiled, cradling Hope against her. Joy roused her careworn eyes. The years slipped away like a shed skin, and I saw that though Fannie loved us Hopen Haus girls, our babies were why she remained.

“She’s perfect, Rhoda.” Fannie’s voice was hushed with reverence. She traced the spread fingers and tiny, matching nails of my daughter’s dimpled hand. “So incredibly perfect.”

I started sobbing then, sobbing so hard I clenched my sides, trying to keep my body from breaking apart. I did not open my eyes but felt Fannie wrap an arm around my back. She led me, blind and keening, over to the bed.

“My
meedel
,” Fannie said.
“Vas es letz?”

I could not reply. I could barely breathe. I heard water pour from the pitcher on the nightstand beside my bed. The mug touched my fevered lips. “Drink,” she commanded.

I drank the mug’s entirety and used the neck of my nightgown to wipe my face. Fannie took the mug. I opened my eyes and looked down at my sleeping daughter. “I know it’s wrong,” I said, “but I wish . . . I wish Hope
weren’t
perfect. If she weren’t perfect, I could keep her. But now that she is, I know she’ll get taken away.”

I reached for my child. Fannie leaned down and settled
her in my arms. The return of my familiar scent awakened Hope. Clutching the cotton fabric, she rooted groggily against my chest. I undid the two top buttons of my nightgown and let the babe suckle. I traced Hope’s button nose pressed into my pale flesh; the side of her rosebud lips perched in drinking; her heart-shaped face and pointed chin; her long lashes and fine, russet-colored eyebrows.

Even by the nebulous light of Fannie’s candle nub, and even taking into account how much infant features can change, I could see how closely Hope resembled her father, how closely she resembled her mother. If anyone ever doubted the credibility of my story, they only had to see Thomas and Meredith Fitzpatrick to know that it was true: the child I had given birth to was in no way mine.

“We’re not safe anywhere,” I said. It was both a grievance and a fact. I’d given up safety the morning I fled Boston. What amazed me most was that I knew I would do it all again.

Fannie shook her head and ran a hand over my cheek. “You know,” she said, sitting down on the mattress, which bowed beneath her slight weight, “Elmer and I did not always live in community. We did not always live in safety.”

“You didn’t?” I could not imagine Elmer and Fannie Graber living anywhere besides their tiny gray cottage with its cobblestone walkway and navy tin roof.

“No,” Fannie said, gathering the material of her dress. “When my eldest three children were just knee-high, Elmer and I went down to Paraguay as missionaries. Everyone
 
— my
familye
, his
 
—told us that what we were doing was foolish,
that we were risking so much to bring light to that dark world, but I knew those women needed me. And Elmer . . . Elmer wanted to share the gospel with them.” She swallowed hard and sat up straighter on the bed. “I knew it was dangerous. We
all
knew it was dangerous, but we went anyway. We knew that all could be lost
 
—our lives, our children’s lives
 
—but we felt called, and so we knew we had to go.”

Pausing, Fannie sighed. “We were there a year when our youngest, Lois, caught dysentery because she drank from an abandoned well. I tried everything to take care of her
 
—broth, poultices from the village. But without a hospital, I knew that it was soon going to be to no avail. It was not a pretty death, as most deaths aren’t, and for two days after she passed, I kept holding on to Lois because I felt if they took her dead body from my arms, that was the moment she would really stop living.”

I drew Hope close, recoiling at the mention of death when my own living, breathing child was in my arms. But out of respect, I said nothing, just allowed Fannie to continue her story.

“Elmer was finally the one who came and took Lois from me,” Fannie continued. “The monsoon season had come, and I just sat in our hut on the side of that rain-swept mountain
 
—knowing Elmer, right then, was trying to dig our daughter’s grave in mud
 
—and I wanted the rains to wash me over the cliff. I wanted to drink the tainted water and feel life ebbing away from me, too. But I couldn’t. For the sake of David and Levi and Elmer, for the sake of our ministry, I couldn’t. I had to go on.”

I opened my mouth to tell Fannie how sorry I was. Still shocked, no words would come. I just stared at the old midwife, not understanding how she could take care of daughters and bring daughters into the world when it seemed every one would be a reminder of the one daughter she had lost. “But . . . how’d you continue once your greatest fear came true?” I asked.

Fannie Graber leaned down. Her fingers shook as she touched Hope’s head. “Faith,” she whispered. “Faith got me through. Faith that one day he will ‘give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.’”