The Midwife's Confession (20 page)

“I’m Emerson’s grandpa,” he said. “Are they ready?” He had starbursts of laugh lines at the corners of each eye as though he laughed often and hard. He wasn’t laughing now, though.

Noelle’s mouth was dry as sand. She knew she should say something—
I’m sorry for your loss
—but the words wouldn’t form. “I’ll get her,” she finally managed to say. She turned around and saw Sam walking toward the door. “Tell Emerson her grandfather’s here,” she said, heading for the bath room. “I don’t feel well.”

She’d wanted to hug Emerson and Tara goodbye. Instead, she stayed in the small bathroom, sitting fully dressed on the toilet, waiting for them to leave. She heard muffled voices through the door. Voices belonging to her sister. Her grand father. She sat there alone as the sound of slamming car doors sifted through the screen of the bathroom window.

Still, she didn’t budge from the bathroom. She stayed there so long that Sam finally knocked on the door. “Noelle? You okay?” he asked.

She splashed water on her face and walked out of the room into the hallway. “I’m all right.” She didn’t look at him. She wasn’t sure what was written in her face, but she didn’t want him to read it.

“Tara and Emerson wanted to say goodbye.”

“I just…I was nauseous for a minute.”

Sam looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it’s only two,” he said. “It feels like days since that call came this morning.”

“I know.” She felt him staring at her. “I’m going to read in my room for a while,” she said.

“Sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Are any of us okay right now?”

He shook his head. “I guess not,” he said, but he was looking at her with a mixture of worry and curiosity, and she had to turn away.

She wanted to call her mother to tell her what had happened and yet she wasn’t ready. She would cry too hard and her mother would worry about her, but Noelle knew she would not be able to sympathize. Not the way she needed her to. Her mother already had such mixed feelings about Noelle’s secret closeness to her biological family.

She picked up the phone a few times and started to dial the number at Miss Wilson’s, but each time she put the receiver down again. Finally, she walked out to the beach where Sam was sitting in a beach chair, an open book resting on his bare thighs. She knelt in the sand next to his chair as if she were about to pray. She wrapped her hands around his arm, warm beneath her palms.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

He set down his book, and although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses she saw the concern in his face. “Of course you can talk to me,” he said.

She reached forward to lift his sunglasses to his forehead. “I can’t see your eyes,” she said. “I need to see them.”

He squinted, studying her for a moment. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head.

“Let’s go inside.” He handed her his book, then stood and folded his chair. He carried the chair in one hand and put his other arm around her shoulders as they walked back to the cottage.

Noelle’s throat felt tight and achy. Could she do this? Could she tell someone? Would she be able to get the words out?
Should
she?

Sam motioned to the rockers on the screened porch and they sat down. “Talk to me,” he said.

She opened her mouth, but her throat locked tight around her voice and she lowered her face to her hands. Sam pulled his rocker right in front of hers and she felt his hands on either side of her head, his lips against her temple. It was exactly what she needed. The comfort of a friend. The comfort of a friend she knew loved her.

She lifted her head, wiping her tears with her fingers, and Sam sat back in his rocker, unsmiling. He rested his fingertips on her bare knee as he waited for her to get her emotions under control.

“What I say now…” She shook her head. Tried again. “If I tell you something, Sam, can you promise me you’ll never tell anyone? Not even Tara. Not ever.”

He hesitated, a line of worry between his eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

Noelle licked her lips. “Emerson is my half sister,” she said.

The line in his forehead deepened. “She’s…” He cocked his head to the side as though he must have misunderstood her. “What are you talking about?”

“Her mother was my mother.”

“But I’ve met your mother,” he said.

“You’ve met my adoptive mother.”

Her meaning was slowly sinking in. He rocked back in his chair. “Holy shit,” he said.

“No one knows,” she said. “Only my adoptive mother and me. And now you.”

She explained everything. The file she’d found. How she’d felt when she saw Emerson’s name on the list of students at Galloway. How her mother made her swear she would never tell any of this to a soul.

“Was it legal?” Sam asked. “Your adoption?”

“Yes, although there might have been some…I think my parents got some preferential treatment because my mother was involved in my birth. I don’t know. At this point, it really doesn’t matter.”

“So you…
Shit
.” His eyes widened. “You lost your biological mother this morning and you can’t tell anyone.”

She felt her lower lip tremble. “Except you.”

“Your father,” he asked. “Do you know who…?”

She looked down at her knees where his tan fingers still rested against her fair skin and shook her head. “Some boy she met at a party,” she said. “I don’t even have a name for him.” She pounded her own knee with her fist. “That was my grandfather at the door earlier!” she said. “
My
grandfather. And I just stood there staring at him.”

“I’m so sorry, Noelle,” Sam said.

“I don’t exist for that family. I couldn’t say anything.”

“Maybe…” Sam looked through the screens toward the beach. “You know how sometimes women who relinquish their kids for adoption later agree to have the records unsealed if both parties want to—”

“She didn’t,” Noelle said. “I’ve checked. I’m just a giant hideous reminder of a mistake she made. That’s all right. I have a great mother, so I lucked out. But I thought I’d…” Her voice broke and she struggled to go on. “I thought I’d get to meet my birth mother someday,” she said. “I thought there was time.”

Sam stood and held out his hand. “Come here,” he said, and when she stood, he closed his arms around, holding her while she cried. There were men who would be afraid of what she’d told him, she thought. Men who’d fear that level of intimacy or who’d crumble under the weight of such a monumental secret. But Sam felt like a pillar beneath her arms. Someone she could lean on. Someone she could talk to about anything. Her biggest wishes. Her worst secrets. Someone she’d be able to talk to. Always.

They spent the next three days together in the cottage. Tara would return on the evening of the third day, though Emerson would stay with her relatives in California another week. Noelle would always treasure those three days with Sam—days of a friendship that deepened by the hour. The only difficult thing was that she knew there was only one Sam and he was not hers. She’d always thought she could live without a man, easily. This man, though, she was not so sure she could live without.

By the morning of the third day, she’d found her smile again. She and Sam had cooked together, gone out to eat one night, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs, swam in the sea and talked and talked and talked. The words felt like an aphrodisiac to Noelle, but she fought back the desire. He was not hers.
Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me,
her mother had told her.
Never,
she thought, lying in her bed at night, wishing Sam could be beside her.
Never.

“I want you to know something,” he said to her the night before Tara returned. They’d built a small illegal fire on the beach and were toasting marshmallows on bamboo skewers they’d found in the cottage.

“What’s that?” Noelle nibbled the gooey white candy from the skewer.

“That I love you.” Sam had his eyes on his skewer instead of on her. “But Tara is it for me. I think you know that.” He glanced at her.

She felt dizzy from the heat of the night as well as from his admission.

“I love you, too,” she said.

He nodded. That was no surprise to him. “You understand how it is with Tara and me, don’t you? Our history. And how we’ve always just known we’d be together.”

She nodded. “I love Tara, too,” she said honestly. “If I can’t have you, I’d want her to have you.”

“The sort of life I want, I can have with her.” He seemed lost in his own thoughts. “A normal, settled-down kind of life.”

She felt the slightest sliver of pain. “What am I?” She smiled. “A freak?”

He laughed. “You’re different, Noelle. Wonderfully different. You’re never going to want the big house and the white picket fence and the two kids and a dog.”

She wondered if that was really what
he
wanted. There was a very large part of Sam Vincent that was not a white-picket-fence sort of guy. But she didn’t want to hurt him or Tara, and debating the merits of a settled-down life with him could only lead down that path.

“Just be my forever friend, okay?” she asked.

He held his skewer in front of her, offering her the perfect golden marshmallow. “You’ve got it,” he said.

She slipped the marshmallow from the skewer with her fingertips and popped it into her mouth, feeling proud of herself for not asking more of Sam, proud of herself for not hurting Tara, not daring to think that forever was a long, long time.

24

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina
2010

Noelle’s house looked sad to me as I pulled into the drive way. The painters had scraped much of the blue from the front of the cottage and the siding was mottled and ugly. The sun had just risen, glowing pink in the windows. It was Saturday and I didn’t know if the painters were working today. I hoped not. I was here to work on the garden and I wanted the time to think.

Emerson had found Anna. She was the head of a missing children’s organization, which made her into a real human being to me, a woman who’d lived through an unimaginable horror and come out of it strong and determined. I’d felt sick to my stomach when Emerson called to tell me what she’d learned. With each new piece of information, this woman’s story was going to feel more real and our need to do something about it more inescapable. Emerson was coming over to my house that afternoon and we’d figure out what to do next. I knew she regretted ever opening that box of letters.

I got out of my van and surveyed Noelle’s front yard. It was a mess, overgrown and weedy. Noelle’d had no interest in yard work with the exception of the garden. Although I was in charge of that garden until the house was rented, I’d only had time to water it and pull a few weeds. Now, nearly three weeks after Noelle’s death, it needed some major attention. I pictured people driving by the decrepit house and yard, whispering to one another,
Something terrible must have happened here
. They wouldn’t know the half of it.

Emerson had left Noelle’s gardening tools in a large bucket on the back steps, but I’d brought my own. I sat on the steps, slipping on my kneepads and gloves as I looked out over the yard. It was small, the grass tired, the one tree stunted and scraggly. Someone had cut the grass recently; I could see the lines left by the mower. The yards on either side of Noelle’s bled into hers. It was a sorry sight. Except for the garden. The rising sun seemed to settle on that corner of the yard, lighting it up like a jewel.

Behind me, Noelle’s house felt so haunted that I shivered and got to my feet, walking away from it and toward the garden. If you have a friend, I pondered, a good friend, a woman you love, and you learn she’s done something abominable, do you stop loving her? In spite of everything we were learning about Noelle, I refused to forget what she’d meant to us. To
me
. I was haunted by the note she’d left behind in which her one request was to take care of her garden. I would do that for the Noelle I knew and loved. The Noelle who lied and deceived had not been well, and I blamed all of us for not recognizing that fact and taking better care of her.

The garden was laid out in a triangle, the sides about seven feet long, and it was bursting with color in spite of the fact that we were now into October. Containers of all shapes and sizes were filled with chrysanthemums that she must have planted right before she died. I got to work, cutting back the coneflowers and black-eyed Susans and Shasta daisies. I weeded around the impatiens. I’d brought a flat of pansies with me and I carried it from the van and planted them around the birdbath. I felt as though I wasn’t alone—the little bronze girl on her tiptoes was so real that I started talking to her.

“Look at these herbs,” I said to her as I weeded around the parsley. Noelle had tricolor sage and pineapple sage and rosemary. She had gorgeous Thai basil. I cut some of every herb to give to Emerson that afternoon.

I was deadheading the mums when I remembered a conversation I’d had with Sam not long before he died.

“What’s with Noelle’s garden?” he’d asked me in bed one night.

“What do you mean?” The question seemed so out of the blue.

“She was telling me about it.” Sam rarely had a reason to go to Noelle’s house. He’d probably never even seen her garden.

“Well, it’s tiny but beautiful,” I said. “She loves it and she has a real green thumb, though you’d never know it from the front yard.”

“She said she has a special birdbath.”

I described the birdbath to him and told him about the reporters who’d wanted to write about it and how she wouldn’t let them. It hadn’t struck me as strange that Sam asked me about the garden at the time. I figured Noelle had collared him at a party and talked his ear off. Now, though, I wondered if that conversation had taken place over lunch in Wrightsville Beach. Something about them getting together like that still upset me. Not that I thought they were having an affair—I couldn’t picture that at all—but I was bothered that neither of them had ever mentioned it to me. Ian was probably right that it had to do with Noelle’s will, in which case I suppose it made sense that Sam never mentioned it. Either way, I would never be able to know the answer. Maybe that’s what bothered me the most.