The Midwife's Confession (5 page)

“This one, maybe.” He nodded toward the one closest to her and she dipped the washcloth into the water, then wrung it out in the sink and carried it back to the bedroom.

Her mother partly unfolded one of the sheets and slid it under the girl’s bottom. Then she took the warm washcloth and held it to the bizarrely stretched skin that circled the baby’s head. Noelle leaned down to whisper in her mother’s ear, “Is this normal?” She pointed between the girl’s legs and her mother brushed her hand away.

“Completely normal,” her mother said out loud, and Noelle knew she was trying to reassure the girl at the same time she answered the question. “Why don’t you go help the boy?” she suggested.

Noelle shook her head. “I want to stay here.”

“Then get a chair.” She nodded toward the girl. “Let her hold your hand.”

Noelle dragged a straight-backed chair from the living room to the side of the bed. The girl was gripping the edge of the mattress with her fist, and Noelle awkwardly pried her fingers loose and then pressed them around her own hand. The girl squeezed her fingers hard. Tears ran down the sides of her face and tiny dots of perspiration covered her forehead. Her skin was lighter than James’s, and even with her face contorted with pain, Noelle could see how pretty she was. And how scared.

She reached forward, wiping the girl’s tears away with her fingertips. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Bea,” the girl whispered. “I’m dyin’, ain’t I? This baby goin’ kill me?”

Noelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “My mother—”

Bea interrupted her with another scream. “I’m splittin’ apart!” she yelled.

“No woman’s ever split apart, darlin’,” Noelle’s mother said, “and you’re stretching just like you’re meant to do.”

“My thing’s burnin’ up!” Bea said. She let go of Noelle’s hand to reach between her legs. Her eyes widened as she touched whatever was down there out of Noelle’s line of sight. “Lord Jesus!” Bea said. “Lord Jesus, save me!”

“Yes, Lord Jesus,” Noelle’s Jewish-Lumbee-Dutch mother said with a laugh, probably using those words together for the first time in her life. “Your Lord Jesus is right here with you, darlin’, if you need him to be.” She lifted her head. “Noelle, you want to see this baby come into the world?”

Noelle stood and walked to the end of the bed. The dark circle had grown even larger and she held her breath, wondering how her mother was going to get that baby out of skinny little Bea. All of a sudden, Bea let out a yelp and the dark haired, dusky-skinned head popped from her body.

Noelle gasped with amazement.

“Beautiful!” her mother said. “You’re doing beautifully.” She held her hands above and below the baby’s head, not touching it, not touching Bea, just holding her hands there as if supporting the head in midair by magic. The baby’s head turned to the side and Noelle could see its tiny face, all scrunched up as if this being-born business was as much work for him or her as it was for Bea. Suddenly, the little squinty eyes and blood-streaked lips blurred in front of Noelle’s face and she realized that for no reason she could name she was crying.

All at once, the baby slipped from Bea’s body into her mother’s hands.

“A precious boy!” Her mother wrapped the squawking infant in a towel and rested him on Bea’s belly, the movement so quick and easy that Noelle knew she’d done it hundreds of times before.

“I don’t want this baby,” Bea moaned, but she was lifting the corner of the towel, touching the damp hair of her son.

“We’ll see about that,” her mother said. “Right now we have a little more work to do down here.”

Noelle watched as her mother cut the cord and delivered the placenta, answering her questions and explaining everything she was doing. Her mother was not the same woman who made their dinner each night, who cleaned their house and fed the chickens and grew tomatoes and mowed their scrawny lawn. In that room filled with animal cries and sweat and blood and air too thick to breathe, her mother became someone else—someone mysterious, part sage, part magician. She was beautiful. Every line in her face. Every gray thread in her hair. Every swollen knuckle in the hands that had brought the baby into the world with such ease and grace. Noelle knew in that moment that she wanted to be like her. She wanted to be
exactly
like her.

The rescue squad came way too late to be of much use, and the atmosphere suddenly shifted in the little house. There were pointed questions. Shiny medical equipment. Sharp needles and bags of liquid hanging from poles. A stretcher on wheels.

Bea was afraid. “Don’t be.” Noelle’s mother squeezed her hand as two of the men in uniforms moved her from the bed to the stretcher. “You did a perfect job. You’ll be fine.”

“You deliver the baby?” one of the men asked her mother.

“She a midwife,” James said, and the rescuer raised his eyebrows.

“Just a neighbor, helping out,” Noelle’s mother said quickly. A few years earlier, she’d spent several days in jail for midwifing and Noelle knew she didn’t plan to go again. Daddy’s girlfriend, Doreen, had stayed over while her mother was gone. Doreen was a maid, her father had explained to her. Noelle might have been only nine years old but she wasn’t stupid. Her father eventually divorced her mother and married Doreen. Noelle hated that woman. Doreen had stolen her father. Stolen her mother’s husband. “Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me,” her mother said to her later. “Just don’t ever.” And Noelle swore up and down that she never would and she thought for sure that she was telling the truth.

It was nearly dawn by the time they walked home. Their pace was slow and easy, and for a while neither of them spoke. The buzz of the cicadas had given way to a peaceful quiet that enveloped them in the darkness. Every once in a while, Noelle could hear the call of a bird from deep in the woods. She loved that sound. She’d hear that same bird sometimes when she wandered outside in the middle of the night.

They turned from the lane onto the dirt road that led to their house. “How did you know how to do all that?” Noelle asked.

“My mama,” her mother said. “And she learned it all from her mama. There’s no big mystery to it, Noelle. Doctors today would like you to think that there is. They make you think you need drugs and C-sections—that’s surgery that cuts the baby out of you—and all sorts of sophisticated interventions to have a baby. And sometimes you do. A good midwife needs to know when it’s safe for a woman to have a baby at home and when it’s not. But it’s not rocket science.”

“I want to do it.”

“Do what? Have a baby?”

“Be a midwife. Like you.”

Her mother put her arm around Noelle’s shoulders and hugged her close. “Then I want you to do it the right way,” she said. “The legal way, so you don’t have to hide your light under a bushel like I do.”

“What’s the legal way?”

“You become a nurse first,” she said. “I never took that step. I don’t think it’s necessary. Harmful even, because they indoctrinate you with the idea that more is better when it comes to having babies. But North Carolina’s got its laws and you need to do it legally. I’m not having a daughter of mine spending time in jail.”

Noelle thought back to Bea’s steamy little room where her mother had done nothing but good. “That Bea girl,” Noelle said. “She’s only a couple of years older than me. If I had a baby, I’d want it. I don’t understand not wanting your own baby.”

Her mother didn’t say anything right away. “Sometimes not keeping a baby is the loving choice,” she said. “Sometimes you know you don’t have the money or the support to give a baby a good chance in life and then letting the baby go to a good family is the right thing. That girl—” her mother drew in a long breath “—she’ll have to decide for herself. The baby being black makes it harder to find adoptive parents for it, so I do hope she decides to keep it and maybe her mama can help out with it. But fifteen is just plain too young. So do me a favor and don’t get pregnant until you’re a lot older than that.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t even want to kiss a boy, much less make a baby with one.”

“That’ll change.” Her mother was smiling. Noelle could hear it in her voice.

The sky was beginning to pink up with the sunrise. The dirt road was visible now beneath their feet, and ahead of them Noelle could make out the corner of their house beyond the woods.

“There’s something I need to tell you, Noelle,” her mother said suddenly, her voice so different it might have been another woman speaking. “It’s something I should have told you long ago, but with your father leaving and everything…it just seemed like too much of a burden to give you.”

Noelle felt the muscles tighten in her chest.

“What, Mama?” she asked.

“Let’s sit out in the yard while the sun comes up,” her mother said. “I’ll make some tea and we’ll have a good talk.”

Noelle slowed her footsteps as they turned into the gravel driveway, not sure she wanted to hear whatever it was that made her mother sound so strange and different. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d left the house that night as one person, but would be returning to it as another.

She was right.

5

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina
2010

It seemed like only a few weeks since I’d sat in this same church for Sam’s memorial service, and I’d had to force myself to come today. Emerson and I had planned the service in a daze. Em had asked me if I wanted to sing, which I did occasionally at weddings or receptions, but I’d said absolutely not. As I listened to one of my fellow choir members sing Fauré’s
Pie Jesu
in her beautiful soprano, I was glad I’d passed. My voice would never have made it past the lump in my throat. Not here, where the memories of Sam’s service still hung in the air of the church. And not now, when I still couldn’t believe our Noelle was gone.

Noelle’s mother sat to my left. I hadn’t seen her in about a year, and at eighty-four she was showing the early signs of dementia. She’d forgotten my name, although she remembered Emerson’s and even Jenny’s, and she certainly understood that Noelle was gone. Sitting next to me, she pressed one crippled fist to her lips and shook her head over and over again as if she couldn’t believe what was happening. I understood the feeling.

Grace sat on my right next to Jenny, Emerson and Ted, twirling a strand of her long hair around her index finger the way she did when she was anxious. She’d pleaded to stay home. “I know it’s hard,” I’d said to her that morning. I’d sat on the edge of her bed where she had cocooned herself beneath her sheet. Her blue-and-green polka-dotted comforter lay in a heap on the floor and I had to stop myself from picking it up and folding it neatly on the end of the bed. “I know it reminds you of going to Daddy’s memorial service, but we need to be there to honor Noelle’s memory,” I said. “She loved you and she’s been so good to you. We need to be there for her mother. Remember how important it was to have people come to Daddy’s service?”

She didn’t respond and the hillock her head formed beneath the sheet didn’t move. At least she was listening. I
hoped
she was listening. “It wasn’t for
Daddy
that people came,” I continued. “It was for
us,
so that we’d feel their love and support and for people to be able to share memories about—”

“All
right!
” She snapped the sheet from her head and pushed past me out of the bed, her hair a tangled mane down her back. “Do you ever stop talking?” she said over her shoulder. I didn’t criticize her for her rudeness. I was too afraid of pushing her even further away.

I noticed now that Grace was clasping Jenny’s hand between them on the pew and I was glad to see her comfort her best friend that way. Jenny looked even paler than usual. She’d already lost the little bit of tan she’d gotten over the summer, while Grace’s skin still had a caramel glow. Jenny had inherited Emerson’s too-fair skin and Ted’s thin dark hair, which she wore in a sweep across her forehead that nearly covered her left eye. She was cute and I loved her to pieces, but to my biased eyes, she nearly disappeared next to Grace. When I saw them together at school, I couldn’t help but notice the way the boys reacted to them. They would approach Grace and Jenny with their eyes glued to my daughter…until they all started talking. Then it was as though a magnet pulled them toward Jenny and my quiet child became invisible.

But Cleve had chosen Grace, not Jenny. Cleve was a hand some boy, the son of a white mother—Suzanne—and a black father, with killer blue eyes and a smile that could nearly make
me
weak in the knees, and I knew Grace thought she’d found The One. Now Jenny was seeing a boy named Devon, and Grace had to be feeling very alone. Father gone. Boyfriend gone. One inadequate mother remaining.

Ian sat in the pew behind us. He’d been the one to tell Emerson and me about Noelle’s will. He’d known of its existence for months because he found it while going through Sam’s files, but of course he’d said nothing to me about it and I’m sure he never expected it would be needed so soon. The will was fairly recent, written only a couple of months before Sam’s death. I was frankly surprised that Noelle had drawn up a will at all; she was never the most organized person. But I was even more surprised that she’d turned to Sam for it. True, she’d known Sam as long as she’d known me and they’d always been good friends despite a rough patch now and then. But the contents of the will were such that she’d had to have been uncomfortable talking to him about it, and I’m sure he felt a little awkward hearing her wishes.

In her will, Noelle had named Emerson her executor. I felt hurt when Ian told me. I couldn’t help it. Emerson, Noelle and I had always been very close. A threesome. I’d sometimes felt a little left out but I’d convinced myself it was my imagination. Noelle’s choice of executor told me I’d been right all along. Not that anyone would
want
the work involved in being an executor, yet I couldn’t help but wonder why Noelle didn’t have us share the job. Did Sam even think to suggest that to her?