The Midwife (24 page)

I turn my back on Lydie and gouge my nails into my palms, angry that I allowed her to go to Split Rock
 
—for her
dawdy
’s funeral or not. It was too close to her due date. I should’ve known better. If Lydie had been in my care
from the beginning of this complication
 
—and if I had remembered my birthing satchel
 
—I could have determined the baby’s position from the location of the heartbeat. There would have been ways to relax the womb and try to manipulate the baby into the correct position for birth.

Now it’s too late. Holding on to the edge of the bed, I reach out and stroke the bottom of the tiny, neonatal foot. My pulse thumps in my ears. I wonder if our intervention has come too late and the child’s already dead. Then the foot moves. The five perfect toes with their five perfect nails unfurl. The movement is so infinitesimal that it is like watching a flower bloom, one petal at a time. And yet the child is alive.

“Praise be,” Alice whispers. I look over and see her touching the back of her gloved hand to her lips, contaminating it without thinking. “Praise be,” she repeats.

Lydie stirs from her exhausted half sleep. “My
bobbel
. . . my
bobbel
all right?” she asks.

I give Alice a sharp look of reproof and say, “Change your gloves.” Then I soften my voice. “Yes, Lydie. Everything’s all right. We just think you might’ve been in labor longer than we anticipated. You can’t remember any time your waters might have broken?”

Charlotte moves to the front of the bed and brushes the hair back from Lydie’s brow. She brings over a glass of raspberry leaf tea and bends the straw to allow the girl to drink.

Lydie swallows and sinks into the pillow. “I’m not sure,” she rasps. “Might’ve happened in the bath
 
—” Her word becomes a soft moan as another contraction hits. Grinding
her teeth, Lydie rises and scoots up the mattress, trying to escape the pain. She breathes through it by mimicking Alice’s open-mouthed panting and then wrenches her body sideways. Charlotte darts over with an old milk pail. Vomit spews from between Lydie’s fingers and pings against the bottom of the tin.

“It’s all right,” Charlotte murmurs, rubbing Lydie’s convulsing back and holding the pail steady. “It’s all right,
liebe
.”

The putrid scent is exacerbated by the heat trapped inside the room. I stand and move around the bed to open the window and then remember that I can’t. I motion to Alice, and she lifts the window for me. Flecks of paint break free as her svelte arms heave and the old glass panes clatter upward. The room swells with the sound of bullfrogs croaking down near the pond; the steady tappity-tapping of a pileated woodpecker drilling for bugs; the jangle of the Gypsy goat herd’s bells.

Watching Lydie Risser in the center of the four-poster bed, curling her body around the clenching fist of her unborn baby, anger burns within me. How could Wilbur Byler have been so calloused
 
—so cruel
 
—as to steal Lydie’s childhood by making her with child herself?

I yearn to strike out. I yearn to banish Wilbur from Hopen Haus and from our lives forever, knowing the only way to do so is to involve the law that I have been trying to evade for eighteen years. The same law that Wilbur would use against me, by revealing how I kidnapped the Fitzpatricks’ daughter and hid in the very place meant to
keep others safe. I know bringing a suit against Wilbur for statutory rape is outside my jurisdiction, but would
he
know that? And would newly widowed Rebecca Risser be able to rise above her grief long enough to bring the suit against him that I cannot? Or would her pacifist beliefs force her to let him go? These questions have no ready answers, and so they are answers in themselves. I must notify the police of Wilbur’s actions in the hope that they will put enough fear into him that he will not repeat such a travesty. I do not dread the repercussions of my heedless past brought to light. I would not want to do it over, but I would do it all again. What I fear is how Amelia Fitzpatrick would be affected if she found out that her own parents did not want her until they knew she was not malformed.

But I know I will do anything within my power to ensure that what happened to Lydie does not happen again. Even if that means hurting my own daughter by revealing the truth behind the lifetime lie. I hear the crunch of gravel beneath tires and turn toward the window, though I can only see the shaded garden. I imagine that Wilbur Byler has just arrived. That he’s somehow learned of Lydie’s labor and has returned to ensure the safety of the life his selfishness has risked.

“Alice . . . Charlotte,” I say as I hear a vehicle door slam. “Will you be all right if I step outside a minute?”

Lydie is oblivious to anything but the compression of her womb. However, the two midwives look up. Sweat curls the silver strands that have come loose from Charlotte’s
kapp
. Alice’s cheeks are smudged with exertion.
Alice opens her mouth
 
—to ask me to remain, I’m sure
 
—but then she says, “Hurry.”

Downstairs, I cut through the dining room to intercept Wilbur Byler. My left hand is on the screen door handle, about to pull it open, when a flurry of movement in the yard catches my eye. It’s not Wilbur Byler’s silver minivan that has just pulled up. A black luxury car is parked in the driveway. Meredith Fitzpatrick is striding across the lawn. Thom is following in her wake.

He looks much the same as he did when I left my daughter behind in Boston. I do not remain focused on him; Meredith’s transformation requires more attention than that. Her khaki pants are rumpled. The collar of her shirt is flipped up into blonde hair that hangs as limp as curtain panels on either side of her face. The lines of Meredith’s face and body are just as symmetrical, but everything is softened, as if the woman I once knew and feared was nothing but a lump of malleable wax set too long beneath the sun.

Suddenly, Amelia’s back appears in my line of sight, her slim silhouette framed by the screen door, but she does not take one more step toward her mother.

My eyes dart to Meredith’s face, which is fitted with a mask of immense relief and rage. The aim of Meredith’s gaze does not take in Hopen Haus’s dilapidated state. It does not take in the gleeful chickens pecking the dirt her quick steps have tilled. It does not take in the shadow of the woman who hides behind this screen door. The screen door separating the woman from the daughter she
birthed
 
—the woman who is now watching the woman who wanted to take her daughter’s life claim her daughter again. No, Meredith’s gaze is focused wholly on her daughter, as it should have been focused all along.

Meredith marches up the steps. She is so near, I can watch the abalone buttons glint on the front of her shirt. I can hear the chime of sterling bracelets on her wrists. Meredith is so close that I can see the anger give way and tears rise in her eyes.

“Amelia,” she says. “Oh, sweetheart . . . I’m sorry.”

Amelia says nothing. She
does
nothing, until the three of us
 
—mother, daughter, mother
 
—are breathing together as one. Then Amelia opens her arms. Meredith closes her eyes and holds her daughter close. She buries her face in the red twist of Amelia’s hair, crosses her arms behind that long back, and cries. I watch the nodules of Amelia’s spine release, and I know that she begins to cry then too. After a while, Meredith lifts her head. She dabs tears with her knuckle so as not to pinch the delicate skin around her eyes. That’s when our eyes meet over her daughter and through my screen door. I press my fingertips to the dark mesh
 
—feeling a knife in my side
 
—and wonder if this is as close to a reunion with my daughter as I will ever come.

My dad jogs up the porch steps, having given us some space. Standing behind my mom, he wraps his arms around her
 
—and so holds me too.

The picture-perfect family,
I think.

“We’re willing to hear you, Amelia,” my dad says through the thin filter of my mom’s hair. “We talked, and we’re willing to hear you out.”

I let my parents hold me until I know I’m not going to break apart. Then I push free from them and search their faces, trying to see the strangers who could let their own daughter believe a lie. Wiping tears, my mom straightens her shirt collar. My dad reaches into his pocket and
passes her one of the million ironed handkerchiefs he started keeping around when I was a kid, constantly running across the playground with a split lip or scraped knee that he’d clean and patch with a Band-Aid and a kiss. I can’t remember my mom ever kissing anything but my forehead
 
—an affectionate gesture that was as dry as her love seemed to be.

But now my mom takes the handkerchief and thanks my dad. She won’t meet my eyes. I’m not sure if it’s because she knows something’s wrong, or if she’s just embarrassed that I’ve finally seen her cry. It would’ve helped our relationship if she’d allowed me to see this softer side of her from the beginning.

“What is it?” my dad asks. I’m not sure who he’s speaking to, until I look away from my mom and see that he’s looking at me.

I say, “Wilbur Byler told.”

The sentence sounds ridiculous, like I’m a toddler tattling on a friend. But the meaning’s not lost on my mom. “Told you what?” she says. I notice that she doesn’t try sidetracking me by asking who Wilbur Byler is, and that she tries to keep her expression blank. Still, I can feel the aftershock of my words rolling off her body in a wave.

“That you hired Rhoda Mummau to carry me,” I say, “because you couldn’t carry me yourself. That she kidnapped me, and you came down here to take me back.”

Frowning, my mom turns and walks down the porch. Her gaze is fixed on the pond, but I have a feeling she’s not seeing anything except the day she reclaimed me.

My dad moves forward, as always trying to patch the hole left by my mom’s absence. He opens his mouth to speak. Then stops. He looks over my shoulder for a long time before saying, “Try to understand, Amelia. We kept saying we’d tell you when you were older. . . . But then we told ourselves you just didn’t need to know.”

My breastbone aches from the violent drumming of my heart. “So you just decided to send me down here?” I fling out an arm to take in the yard, with its ancient trees I had admired and now just see as paper and dust. “To see if I’d figure everything out?”

Placing his hands on my shoulders, my dad just stares at me. Our eyes mirror each other’s rich green until his pupils expand and the color gleams with tears; I refuse to cry. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We hurt you, Amelia. . . . We hurt you by trying to keep you safe.” His fingers tighten on my shoulders. He stares at me for a moment before spinning my body away from his and facing it toward the door. My eyes flicker at being maneuvered like this. And then I see the outline of a tall woman standing behind the screen door in a cape dress and
kapp
. Rhoda Mummau, Hopen Haus midwife. My birth mother. My kidnapper. Her strong hands
 
—that have been taking care of my baby and me for a month
 
—are knotted against her chest. I can see how they shake every time she breathes.

Are my parents now just going to turn me over to her? Are they going to switch ownership like I’m really nothing more than a piece of luggage?

The head midwife doesn’t push the screen door, and I
don’t pull it open. Through the separation, I can see that I do not know her, and I don’t even know myself. We’re like unrelated family or acquainted strangers: a contradiction of terms. The hush of an entire buried lifetime is broken only by our breaths. Then the heavy air is cut in half by Lydie’s animal-like cry. Rhoda turns toward the sound, and seeing her distraction, my body hums with the urge to flee.

Twisting out of my dad’s hold, I bolt down the porch steps and lose a sandal. I kick the other one off and continue running. My parents call my name, again and again, but over this I can hear another name: “Hope! Hope!”

My ears ring. I stop and stand frozen on the lane. Turning, I squint against the coming night and can see the shape of my parents. Then I see Rhoda, standing alone, leaning on the porch post like it can keep her from falling. One hand is still pressed against her chest. The other hand’s outstretched toward me.

“Hope!” she cries again.

My name was Hope. . . .

Swallowing tears, I turn and keep running down the lane.

The Fitzpatricks and I watch Amelia’s red hair stream and her legs flash white beneath her dark cape dress. Then Meredith strides across the porch and clasps my arm. I look
away from the lane and down at her hand, with its network of fine blue veins and bones.

“Go to her,” she says. I look up and see desperation carving lines between Meredith’s eyebrows and along the dour rim of her mouth. “Fix this.”

I jerk my arm out of her grasp. Meredith Fitzpatrick is ordering me about just as she did when I was her gestational surrogate and Thom’s graduate school pawn. I’m neither now, so she has no right to treat me this way.

Sensing my anger, Thom puts an arm around his wife’s shoulders and pulls her back. “Beth,” he says, not even faltering over the use of my pseudonym, “you heard us try to talk to Amelia. She won’t listen to us. She needs someone from the outside. Someone who can tell her how much we need her with us.”

Someone from the outside?
Is the woman who felt Amelia leap inside her womb truly from the outside? Laughter spews from my mouth
 
—a harsh, sarcastic sound. Thom winces. Meredith’s eyes glint like lapis.

“You want me to tell your daughter that you have always wanted her, when you are the very ones who wanted to take her life?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Meredith hisses. “We want her now.”

“It
does
matter,” I snap, my chest heaving. “Despite the love I poured into Amelia
 
—despite everything I tried to give her in those months before you separated us
 
—she felt your rejection in my womb.”

Meredith steps back, cowering in her husband’s leashing
embrace. “I didn’t know,” she cries, her words muffled by the handkerchief pressed against her lips. “I didn’t know I would love her in the end.”

I stare at this beautiful, broken woman and can feel the specter of wrath leave my body
 
—a specter that has possessed it since Amelia was taken from me. I would never have had a second chance at motherhood if Meredith Fitzpatrick had not wanted her child, so I should be grateful to this woman who has destroyed my life. I should be grateful for the time my daughter and I had together, even if it was shortened by Meredith’s decision to take her back. And because I truly love my returned child-turned-woman, I do not want to punish her in an attempt to punish her mother. I don’t want her to be lonely like I was. Like I am. I want her to know she’s loved.

“That’s where we’re different,” I rasp, but I reach out to touch Meredith’s hand
 
—an olive branch gesture, a bridge traversed. “You loved Amelia in the end, but I loved her from the start.”

My back stiffens as I hear someone coming down the lane. “I don’t want to talk to you!” I scream. “
Neither
of you!” The footsteps stop. Curious, I turn from the fence post. Wiping my face, I murmur, though it’s no apology, “Thought you were Mom or Dad.”

The wind blows, shifting branches and covering Rhoda in the moonlight falling through the trees. Her head is bowed, her
kapp
glowing silver. Finally, she looks up. Her face is twisted with pain. “I used to be your mom too,” she says.

Her words throttle me, making it difficult to breathe. I turn toward the fence post again. I don’t know what to say or think. It was easier to do both when I knew nothing, and now I know why my parents hid the truth from me. It wasn’t just because they didn’t want me to know; it was also because they didn’t know how to explain.

“I don’t remember you,” I say, but the honesty burns. “I don’t even remember my name.”

The midwife steps closer. I flinch, waiting for her hand on my back, but she doesn’t touch me. Finally, she says, “I just wish you could remember how much you were loved.”

“Is that why you took me?” I ask.

She says nothing for so long that I am forced to face her again. The midwife’s eyes are closed, tears threading the strands of her lashes. Then she opens them. This time she does reach out. Her fingers are calloused, but her touch is featherlight against my cheek. “Yes,” she says. “I took you with me because I loved you so very much.”

On the hill, my mom calls my name. The midwife drops her hand from my cheek and peers into my eyes. “Your parents love you too, Amelia. Please try to listen to them. It will be easier for you both if you can hear each other out.”

My mom’s getting closer, her footsteps careful as she
picks her way down the path. “Amelia . . . ?” she says. I can hear the worry in her voice. We don’t have a lot of time.

“But why’d you name me Hope?” My throat narrows around that simple word.

The midwife smiles and looks away. In her profile, I can almost see the woman beneath the sadness. And I let myself wonder how different my life would’ve been if she had raised me instead of my parents. The thought isn’t as scary as it was at first.

“Because you were my hope,” she whispers. “And you always will be.”

I stare at the midwife, my mind struggling to understand that my entire life, I have been not only loved . . . but wanted and claimed. Even fought over. In the distance, on the hill, I hear someone striking the triangle that hangs on the porch of Hopen Haus. The midwife tilts her head toward its noise, listening. Then she turns to look at me before stepping into the shadows, allowing my mom to take her place once again.

When I crest the hill
 
—my side aching
 
—I see Thom and Looper out in the yard, pacing like anxious fathers awaiting news about the birth of their daughter or son. Behind them, Alice stands on the porch. An oil lamp is at her feet and her arm poised to clang the triangle again. I step out
from behind the oak tree, and she murmurs, “Thank God.” I know by the break in her voice that she has not said this in vain.

“How’s Lydie?” I ask.

“Not good,” she says. “The fetal heart rate keeps dipping.”

“How low?”

Pausing, she says, “Sixty-five.”

Through the dimness, I search for Dr. Thomas Fitzpatrick’s eyes. He falters in his pacing, probably wondering if the woman who has despised him for so long actually wants whatever knowledge he has to give. “Any complications?” he asks, walking toward me.

“The baby’s breech,” I say. “A foot’s already birthed.”

Alice adds, “And the mother has a fever. Her water broke without her knowing, and we think she’s been in labor for twenty hours . . . perhaps more.”

I turn toward Alice. “How high’s the fever?”

“A hundred and one.”

“Infection,” Thom says, and though I know it’s true, I wish he hadn’t voiced it aloud. “Did you give her penicillin?” he asks.

“Amoxicillin,” Alice says. “Lydie’s allergic to penicillin.”

He asks, “How far’s the hospital?”

Alice shakes her head. “She’s progressing too fast. The baby will be birthed before an ambulance can come out.”

Thom’s already moving past me. “May I see her?” he says. Alice looks askance. “I studied to be an OB-GYN,” he adds.

Alice’s expression does not change. Then, resigned, she picks up the oil lamp at her feet. Her skirt swishes as she stands, the wick’s flame illuminating the liquid length of her frock. Shielding the globe, Alice turns toward him. “Follow, please.”

I am taken aback by Alice’s authoritative manner, but I am feeling so poorly that I do not care. Thom goes inside but holds the screen door open. I walk toward him and, before I enter, glance down at Looper, still standing in the yard. “Don’t let Wilbur Byler set one foot in this place,” I say. “Get Uriah to help you. Call the police. . . . We must keep Lydie safe.”

Looper stares at me before looking at the door. I can see his comprehension dawn. He glances at his boots and nods. “Tell her I’m praying,” he says.

“I will.” I turn toward Dr. Fitzpatrick. “I think we need all the prayer we can get.”

When Thom and I enter the room, Lydie is slumped on the edge of the bed, her small hands opened on either side of her body like wilted tulips. Charlotte takes a tin from her birthing satchel, twists the lid, and kneels before the girl. Propping Lydie’s shoulder with one hand, Charlotte massages salve into Lydie’s skin, and the pungent scent of willow bark oil permeates the room.

Lydie groans as another contraction crescendos. Though her forehead is a colorless marble, her cheeks are rouged with fever. I am alarmed by her lethargic manner, and
when I look over at Thom, I can tell that he feels the same. A gust blows through the open window, and the kerosene light hooked from the beam overhead sputters and flares in its netted bulb.