The Midwife (6 page)

Exhaustion escapes through the sieve of my lips. I pull Terese’s door so as not to awaken Luca. Passing through the dining room on my way to the kitchen, I see a radius of light cast by an oil lamp. Alice is seated at the table, hunkered over her own meal. From the way she pokes at the venison roast on her plate, I sense that she is not eating.

She has been waiting here for me.

I ask, “How are you, Alice?”

She says, “We’ve received a donation.”

“From whom?” Between monitoring Terese’s blood pressure and worrying over Star’s nicotine addiction, I have almost forgotten about the Channel 2 News story and the subsequent changes taking place.

Alice swallows a bite of food and grimaces. I decide to
bypass my stop at the kitchen and eat some of the tuna packs I hoard in my bedroom instead. “A crisis pregnancy clinic in Cookeville,” she says. “They saw the news story.”

I grit my teeth and then release my jaw in a sardonic smile. “I’m sure they did.”

“Don’t you even want to know what it is?” asks Alice. Not even
she
can modulate the frustration in her tone.

“Somehow I get the feeling that you’re going to tell me.”

Alice narrows her eyes. She takes a sip of water before saying, “It’s an ultrasound machine. An older model, of course. But they said it’s ours for the taking.” She pauses. “I thought Wilbur could pick it up?”

My heart is a hard fist knocking inside my chest. “So far we’ve managed just fine without ultrasound machines.”

“Fine?” Alice points a finger out through the doorway. Her gesture is ambiguous, but I know she means Terese and Luca’s room. The only private quarters in Hopen Haus besides Uriah’s attic, which Looper is occupying until Uriah returns, and the three of five upstairs bedrooms occupied by us midwives. Alice says, “I wouldn’t say that Terese is ‘just fine.’”

“An ultrasound machine couldn’t prevent preeclampsia.”

“No. An ultrasound machine couldn’t. But if we were better equipped, we could be giving Terese steroid shots in case of preterm labor and monitoring her platelet count and liver funct
 
—”

“It wouldn’t matter if we were given every piece of modern equipment in the world; we’d have no electricity to run it!”

“Yes, it
would
matter! These girls need more than what
we’re offering them. But you just want to keep hiding behind Mennonite ways, when they’re not even yours to hide behind!”

“Enough!”

Alice drops into the seat as if my words grabbed her shoulders and shoved her down. The plate rattles; the water lists in the Mason jar. I was so blindsided by anger, I didn’t even know until that abrupt movement that she had stood up.

I straighten my slumped back, humiliated by my roiling fury whose unseen source never dries up. I look down into Alice’s eyes, which shine with intimidation.

I say, contrite, “I’ll speak with Wilbur about it. You said the ultrasound machine’s in Cookeville?”

She nods.

“That’s on the way to Split Rock Community. Perhaps he can pick it up on a produce run.”

“So
 
—we’re going to get electricity?” Alice doesn’t look at me, but picks at the venison roast.

“I never said that.”

She stands again, this time to take her plate to the kitchen. The antagonist in me cannot keep from saying to her retreating back, “I noticed Uriah’s been spending too much time with Lydie Risser. When he comes home, I’d appreciate if you’d speak to him about it.”

Alice stops walking but does not turn. “He’s almost eighteen, Rhoda. I don’t have that kind of say over him anymore.”

“Then perhaps he should move out from beneath this roof.”

Alice clutches the swinging door that leads into the kitchen. She looks back at me and sighs, “Is this really about Uriah?”

“I don’t know.” I scan Alice’s face, trying to shift the attention away from me so I can conceal the jealousy I have always felt about her close relationship with her son. “Is there something else you’d like to talk about?”

Alice shakes her head.
Kapp
strings swat her softly in the face. She passes through the door. I watch the darkness of the kitchen swallow her whole before I turn and make my defeated way up the stairs. I yearn to open my heart to Alice and to Looper, and to this sheaf of hurting girls tucked in bunk beds beneath this roof. But I can’t. My eyes have tainted love until my mind views it as synonymous with pain. From the day my mother left until the day my second child was taken, I have used anger and inhibition to ward off anybody who might try to love me
 
—just to find out that I am wanting, and then leave.

Pressure stretched across my abdomen in a thin, taut band. When it snapped, I knew this was not Braxton Hicks or merely my round abdominal muscles trying to accommodate the expansion of my womb but a tidal-wave contraction threatening to pull me under. Letting the bowl float down into the water, I wiped the suds on the towel folded
over the spigot. Straightening my back, I breathed out through my mouth, trying not to panic. I walked over to the chairs circled around the kitchen table, dragged one across the linoleum, and sat down.

I was only at seventeen weeks. I had just started to feel the tiny fluttering kicks of the baby. Besides the bimonthly checkups, I rarely allowed myself to think about this new life cradled inside my womb. For ten minutes, I remained seated on the chair. I watched the clock embedded in the stove, as I had taken my watch off to do the breakfast dishes. When another contraction struck at eight fifteen, I folded my curved stomach over my legs and touched my forehead to my knees in desperate supplication. I cried out for my roommate, Jillian, although I knew she was gone. I cried out for our neighbors
 
—for
anyone
 
—but the small apartment just echoed with my own high-pitched keen of fear.

Sweating and nauseous, I stumbled into the living room with the beige walls and forest-green curtains that, in the ten years since the renovation, the sun had leeched to a dingy moss. I dug past the jumble of textbooks and paperback novels stacked under the coffee table and pulled my wallet out of my purse. I searched through the card section for the slip of paper Thom had given to me the day we heard the baby’s heartbeat. Another band of pressure pulled across my abdomen. I returned to the kitchen and sat on the pine chair again. But then I stood
 
—rocking back and forth, side to side
 
—gouging my nails into the back of the chair and swearing beneath my breath as if afraid someone could overhear.

Hunching over, I staggered toward the TV stand and dialed the numbers on the old rotary telephone. It rang three times before he picked up. “Thom,” I said. The
m
of his name was drawn out as another contraction hit.

A clipped female voice said, “This is not Thom. This is Meredith. Who is this?”

I turned my head and pressed my mouth into my shoulder, exhaling the pain through my nostrils. Meredith’s voice rose as she said, “Hello? Who is this?”

I was too concentrated to answer her. When the wave passed, I said, “Meredith, it’s Beth. I think I’m having preterm contractions.”

“Why don’t you call the fertility clinic?”

“It’s Saturday. They’re closed.”

For a moment, I thought I heard her sigh. “Right,” she said. “Tell me what you need. Thom’s not here; he’s out of town.”

“I can’t drive to the hospital like this,” I said.

Meredith paused. Then, “Where do you live?”

I gave her directions and hung up. Stuffing my backpack with a toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a nightgown in case I had to be kept overnight, I went to the bathroom to check if I was spotting. My legs trembled when I saw that I was not. Even though the debilitating pain was subsiding as quickly as it had hit, the fear of miscarriage saturated my eyes and turned my mouth dry. For four months, I had dissociated myself from this child. I knew this child would have to be given away, just as I had had to give my baby boy away, never to see
his beautiful two-toned eyes again. But for this moment, this child was sheltered inside my body
 
—
thriving
inside my body
 
—that was giving forth life, even when I felt so barren.

Stroking my stomach, I tentatively began to sing the lullaby the Mennonite midwife Deborah Brubaker, who had helped birth my son, sang to me. Of course, I did not know how to speak Pennsylvania Dutch. But a few of the phrases had withstood the test of time, as had the memories I had tried to suppress, and yet still held so dear:

“Voo bisht un anna gay glay birdie? Voo bisht un anna gay glay birdie? Ich bin zu my bahm um gay. Ich bin zu my bahm um gay. Ich bin zu my bahm um gay. Glay madly. . . .”

As my voice warmed up, I felt the grip on my womb relaxing. The muscles of my jaw, which I had not known I had clenched, began to unwind.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, my voice shaking as tears of relief trickled from my eyes. “You’re okay. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I won’t let it.”

Someone knocked. Staggering to my feet, I left the bathroom and put my overnight bag on the recliner. “It’s open,” I called.

Meredith stepped over the threshold into the apartment. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Better,” I said. “The contractions have stopped.”

She smiled. “Braxton Hicks, then.” Satisfied with her conclusion, Meredith turned and surveyed the apartment. Through her eyes, I saw the sagging Goodwill sofa, the rickety coffee table and bookshelf, and my roommate’s
juvenile cat posters taped haphazardly to the walls. All seemed to declare how small my work stipend actually was.

“You live here by yourself?” Meredith asked.

“No,” I replied. “I have a roommate, but she’s visiting friends.”

“Do you ever leave? Visit friends?”

“Not often. I’m busy with my thesis.”

“Yes. Your thesis.” Meredith stared at me. “What’re you doing it on again?”

My mind went blank. Finally, I just relied on my elevator speech and said, “Viewing the practice of traditional surrogacy as a form of open adoption, where the surrogate mother could still be involved in the child’s life
 
—” I swallowed. “This would help surrogates who experience remorse after giving the baby up, like with the Baby M case.”

Meredith turned toward the door. “I guess it’s good we did gestational surrogacy, then,” she said. “So you have no biological rights to our child.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, deciding it was safer to say nothing.

“Well,” Meredith continued, “I guess I’ll be going
 
—since you seem fine.” She paused, hand on the knob. “Or do you still need to go to the hospital?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to go.”

Meredith’s eyes widened. This was not the answer she’d anticipated, nor was it the answer I had expected to give. But I could not risk this child’s life for the sake of convenience. Even though it was her offspring that I carried,
my maternal instinct had sprung up as I folded myself in that pine chair sitting on the scuffed linoleum floor. That pain was real, and I had studied enough to believe primal instincts needed to be followed more closely than we gave them credit. A small part of me also wanted to see if Meredith cared enough to reschedule one afternoon in her life when I had rescheduled a year of mine.

I picked my book bag up from the recliner.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

Meredith left, clearly expecting me to follow, which I did. Digging into her purse, she found her keys and unlocked the passenger door before going around and unlocking the driver’s side. Swinging my book bag to the floor, I clambered into the butter-leather seat. Meredith shifted into drive and tapped the gas. I watched her from the corner of my left eye. Everything about her was polished, clipped, painted, or tanned. Looking at her was like looking at a cascading stream turned into a dam, forest turned into structure, sediment turned into oil. It was as if she had taken one source and turned it into another. It was more commanding, some might even say more beautiful. But I wondered what Meredith looked like before money became her power.

“You too hot?” she asked, turning a vent in the walnut dash toward me.

I was shocked by her thoughtfulness. Her hands clutched the steering wheel again, her layered gold rings clattering on her fingers. On her right hand a vintage,
dime-sized cameo was trimmed in delicate filigree, which seemed out of place with the rest of the collection.

“Where did you get the cameo?” I asked.

She adjusted the ring with her thumb and cruised through a yellow light without braking. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Thom’s mother,” Meredith explained without looking at me. “The ring’s been in the family forever. Someday I’m supposed to pass it down.”

I remained quiet as I contemplated the fact that Meredith was sentimental enough to wear a rather gaudy heirloom that had been in Thom’s family. How could I ever understand this woman, whose character was a shifting amalgam of warmth and reserve? Though rarely glimpsed, was the former side the reason Thom loved her?

Meredith interrupted my thoughts, as if she could read them. “You know Thom didn’t want to be a research professor?” Her words lifted up at the end like a question, but she was giving me a statement. She was telling me the life history that only she, as his wife, knew. The life history that, as his student, I would never know.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“He couldn’t do it,” she said. “I put Thom through four
years
of medical school, and he couldn’t figure out until residency that he wasn’t going to be an OB/GYN.” Meredith shook her head and passed a white sedan, although it was a no-passing zone.

“Why didn’t Thom
 
—I mean, Dr. Fitzpatrick
 
—want to be an OB/GYN?” I asked.

“You can call him Thom,” Meredith said, smiling
at me, though her eyes were cold. “I’m sure you do at school.” She smoothed her hands on the steering wheel and looked in the rearview mirror, then back to the road. “Thom
did
want to be an OB/GYN. But he wanted to be a father more. My career was taking off by that time, and Thom knew I didn’t want to give it up to become a nanny. He also knew his hours would be sporadic as a doctor
 
—making it difficult to spend time with our children
 
—so he became a professor instead.”