The Midwife’s Playlist: A Now Entering Hillford Novel

by Lennox, Piper

  His eyes, faded from the gunmetal gray they were at birth, flutter open and closed as he fights sleep. They’re a steely, deep blue now, like Caroline’s, but the shape looks more like Ford’s.

  The few times I let myself think about our baby, when I was struggling to accept that I was pregnant, I imagined an eerily generic child. Baby doll face, china-like and expressionless, with hair I didn’t know the color of and eyes that took on every hue, except ours.

  Maybe it would have looked a little like Bentley, though: Ford’s eye shape, but my eye color. Head filled with hair so thick, it looks strange on a newborn. This tiny, chubby fist, wrapping around my finger like it’s supposed to be there.

  “Easton?”

  I hurry to wipe my eyes without waking Bentley, then call out, just loud enough for Mom to hear, “Yes?”

  “Honey, are you all right? You’ve been up there for almost an hour.”

  I look at the clock; there’s no way it’s been that long. But sure enough, the clock has tripped ahead, and the sky’s changed color.

  “Caroline’s here for Bentley, by the way,” Mom adds, “but she’s staying for dinner.”

  My feet freeze after I stand, the chair spinning against my legs. Relax, I tell myself. It’s not Ford. His sister’s tough to face too, just by association, but I might as well get used to that: she’s not leaving Hillford.

  Besides that, I like Caroline. She has the same sweetness and strength to her that her mother had, a heart you just feel drawn to. When I come downstairs with Bentley, she rises from the couch and smiles so brightly, it almost feels like I’m looking at Mrs. McLean again.

  Dinner is more enjoyable than it’s been in a long time. Whether it’s because Mom and Dad aren’t bickering or just the excitement of company, I can’t tell. Maybe it’s that a weight, one I didn’t even know I still carried, is off my chest.

  Even the food tastes different to me, the flavors deeper. Dad asks me to put on some music, so I choose something from a movie soundtrack with lots of full sounds: strings and drums and a rich bass, to match the way the evening feels.

  When it ends, though, the peace slips. I’m stuck thinking about Ford all over again. He’s out in the garage; I hear the unmistakable sound of the door being thrown open, even though no one else seems to.

  Caroline hugs us all goodbye. I kiss Bentley on the forehead and echo Mom’s insistence that we’d love to babysit again, anytime.

  Grandma is on the porch in her rocker when I bring dessert: low-fat vanilla yogurt and cinnamon, in a little glass dish. She makes a face and sets it on the table with her tea. Mom refuses to make her simple syrup anymore, so it’s loaded with Splenda.

  “All this fake sugar, that’s what’s going to kill me.” She grimaces through another sip and tells me to take a seat. I pick the metal glider, tracing the yellow-and-green daises on the cushion with my pinky.

  “Honey, you look exhausted. Did you sleep well?”

  “Not really,” I admit. “I had weird dreams all night.” That’s putting it mildly. One was so vivid—a high-definition replay of my fight in the car with Ford, merging with one of the accident—it woke me up, literally clutching my chest. I’d never felt my heart beating so hard, not even when those things happened in real life. I guess sometimes the memory is even worse.

  “That Caroline’s a sweet girl,” she says, and I nod, glad she didn’t ask about my dreams. “Bless her heart, she’s going to have a difficult time with that baby.”

  “Why do you say that? He’s so easy.”

  “You can have the easiest baby there is,” Grandma says, shutting her eyes while she rocks, “but when you’re as young as she is, you’ve got so many odds stacked against you, you feel like you’ll never get past them. She will, of course. But she won’t see that for a while.”

  I look at her. In as many ways as she’s embraced old age—house slippers twenty-four-seven, unapologetic opinion-sharing—she’s also held on to a few things I’m not sure I’d bother with, if I were her. Dying her hair its old shade of chestnut brown, for one, with bi-weekly touch-ups, and putting on full makeup and jewelry like she’s headed for church, every day of the week. Slippers and all.

  “You and Caroline have that in common, I guess,” I say. “You were a teen mom, too.”

  Eyes still closed, she nods. “Your uncle Dennis wasn’t an easy first baby at all, with the colic. But even if he had been, I still would have waited that ten years to have your mother like I did. It was just too much. I had to learn how to be an adult, wife, and mother all in the same year—and without my husband even living there.” She shakes her head, like she can’t believe the strength of that girl she used to be. I can’t, either.

  “How did you stay with Pawpaw? In those early years?” I hook my heels on the sling rod of the glider. “How did you go into that so sure of yourself, when you didn’t even know how your lives were going to turn out?”

  “Nobody knows that.” Grandma laughs, cracking one eye at me. “Can’t predict the future.”

  “You know what I mean. He got his draft letter before you were married, so I guess...I’m wondering why you said yes. You knew he was going to leave.” I pause. “Didn’t you ever think, ‘I shouldn’t do this, it’s going to be too hard’?”

  “No. I thought, ‘This is probably going to be hard. I’m going to do it, anyway.’” She rocks a moment, thinking, before looking at me again. “But if I’d known just how hard it would get, I probably wouldn’t have married him. I had no idea, the low points we’d reach. And I’m so glad I didn’t know. My fear of the bad didn’t get a chance to make me miss all the good.”

  I stop rocking the glider. The wind picks up, seeming to come from nowhere, and pushes it again.

  “You’ll figure it all out one of these days, April.”

  The glider freezes. I freeze.

  “Actually, Grandma,” I stammer, “I’m—”

  “Easton. I know.” She smiles at me as the sun shifts, catching in her hair like a halo when she laughs again. “I was just teasing, sugar.”

  The structure drains out of my body; I flop against the glider and give a loud sigh, as annoyed as I am relieved.

  Then, because I can’t think of any reason not to, I laugh with her.

  Twenty-Nine

  “Is she pregnant?”

  Bram blurts this, in his usual tactless fashion, as soon as Tanner asks us to be his best men. All three of us. Even me.

  Tanner puts some salt in Bram’s beer, just to piss him off. “No. The hotel had an earlier opening, Milena wanted it...so. Here we are.” He pauses. “She said a fall wedding would be better, anyway.”

  “I mean, sure,” Hudson says, “if you’re just looking at the weather. But this fall versus next summer? You’re okay losing an entire year of planning time?”

  “It’s not really up to me. Milena’s doing most of the planning.”

  “More important question,” Bram half-shouts, but quiets before he goes on, “is if this has anything to do with Skye Michaels being back in town.”

  Tanner loses his patience. Fast. “No,” he snaps. “Skye and I are done. We’ve been done. We were never together in the first place, when you get right down to it.”

  The three of us exchange a look. We know this isn’t true, but don’t see much point in saying it, apparently.

  The celebration picks up after another round, when we start discussing tux options, bachelor party dos and don’ts—all of which I’m positive Bram will try to reverse—and the surreal fact that one of us is actually getting married.

  When Bram and Hudson go up to order three shots and a soda, respectively, I can’t help myself: I have to ask Tanner what I’m sure all of us have been thinking the entire night.

  “So...you’re really done with Skye?”

  Tanner shoots me a look, but not as severe as the one he gave Bram. He knows I’m genuinely asking, not giving him shit.

  “Yes,” he says, “I am.” He spreads his hands on the table
top. “I mean...it’s been years, you know? My life is totally different today than it was when I knew her. And that’s another thing: I knew her. Past tense. Now...I don’t know her any better than she knows me.”

  I finish my beer and slide the glass in the ring of moisture it left. “Do you think people really change that much in a few years?”

  “Yep. I do.” It’s weird: he says it like that fact has left him bitter, but I repeat it silently to myself and feel better than I have all day. People really change.

  “We live in a Hillford bubble, where high school sweethearts are normal, and people get second chances left and right—but that’s not how things work for everyone. Outside of Hillford, actually...it’s not how they work for most people.” Tanner looks out the tinted windows of the bar. The lampposts are on, with the string lights between them swinging in the wind.

  “Eventually, you’ve just got to accept whichever group you belong to. Skye and me? We’re in the ‘most people’ category. High school’s over. No second chances. We’re like...like you and Easton, that way.” He looks back at his beer, sliding it from hand to hand. “We’ve got to move on.”

  I nod. He’s right. Everything he’s saying makes perfect sense.

  Except for the part about Easton and me.

  Because if moving on means losing her permanently, going from “knowing” to “knew”…I don’t want to move on. I can’t.

  “How are things not different, this time?” Hudson’s words stagger back to me. No amount of beer and jukebox music can cover them.

  “Hey—you mind if I head out?”

  Baffled, Tanner watches me slide out of the booth. “No,” he says, “but we’ve still got a pitcher and a half. If you leave, it’s just me and Bram left to finish.”

  We look to the bar, where Bram is hitting on some girl in a birthday tiara who couldn’t look more bored. He’ll be back in the booth in no time, shrugging off her rejection and licking his wounds.

  I laugh. “Something tells me you won’t have any problems finishing them.”

  As I join the foot traffic of Main Street, I notice something strange: there’s foot traffic. Vehicle traffic, too. I’d thought the crowds were rare—a festival here and there, or big boutique sales—but it looks like sleepy little Hillford...isn’t so sleepy, anymore. I wonder when it happened.

  But I’m learning change is like that. Easier to notice once it’s finished, or at least been happening for a while.

  It was stupid of Easton and me to think we could jump right back into our old roles, but get new outcomes. We got caught up in familiar songs and scents, places and colors. Thought we could make it work on nothing but good memories and forward momentum, never looking back at the things that damaged us. Obviously, we were wrong.

  Maybe we thought we could rewrite those pieces of our stories and songs that we didn’t like—the parts that still hurt. We were wrong about that, too.

  Maybe, when you look at then and now...things aren’t all that different between Easton and me.

  But she is.

  And so am I.

  If I’d listened to my fear of the bad more than the possibilities for the good, I wouldn’t be a midwife.

  People say they’re called to careers like these, knowing from childhood what it is they were put on this earth to do. I wasn’t one of them.

  When a career counselor at school asked what my post-graduation plans entailed, I fumbled. My spot at Hawkins-Bell College was confirmed, but which program I’d enter was still a mystery.

  Majoring in history had promise; I loved biographies and documentaries. And living in an old Virginian town like Hillford, I’d have no shortage of job options. Historic mansions, city landmarks, and genealogical records stretching all the way back to the first tobacco farms meant I could advance to some kind of Council position, if I wanted.

  But I didn’t want that. It was one thing to learn about the past for fun, now and then—but dredging up ancient history on a daily basis? Yeah, time would prove I wasn’t so good at that.

  City planning. Art. Even music—none felt right. I started gathering my stuff in the middle of the advisory meeting, when my counselor stopped spewing ideas and sat back, defeated. Looked like it was nothing but Gen Ed for me.

  “Oh, they have nursing coursework. Wow, even a midwifery program! Who knew.”

  My sneakers whined on the tile as I pivoted back. “Midwifery?”

  “Mm-hmm. You know, helping women through pregnancy, coaching them in labor—catching babies.”

  It wasn’t until the accident, when my entire life turned into a question mark, that I even remembered that meeting. That phrase.

  Catching babies. As though children were bouncing into this world at full-speed and needed wrangling, or tumbling among the rest of us from above, in need of a safe place to land.

  The first birth I attended took place in a pool, at the clinic where I was training. It sat just inside the city and saw a healthy mix of socialites, suburbanites, and rural women ranging from small-town, like me, to living in complete isolation in the middle of nature, way back in the mountains.

  The mother was held upright by her partner in the pool. She sobbed her way through the final pushes, pleading with us to call an ambulance; she was convinced she couldn’t do this, even when the other students and I assured her we could see the head.

  The midwife stopped coaching her to push, suddenly, and ordered the woman to catch her own baby.

  “You need to know you can do this—if you reach down and feel right now, I promise: you won’t doubt yourself anymore. Because you’re already doing it, he’s already here. He just needs someone to catch him.”

  The woman’s lips were pale, shaking. She pursed them. I braced myself for more wails or screams.

  Instead, she nodded.

  She leaned against her partner and pushed again.

  Reached down. Felt her son’s head.

  It was an incredible, warm rush through my veins, the first time I delivered a baby—but it was nothing like what I witnessed at that birth. A mother, catching her own child. Being their very first skin-to-skin contact. Cradling them the instant they left their safe havens and entered this big, open world.

  Few of my clients are interested in the idea, and I’ve learned to stop trying to sell them on it. Either they love it or think it’s impossible. Most of the time, even if they want to do it, they get too wrapped up in the pain to remember.

  So instead, I catch them. But I never hold them for long. A few seconds and off they go, placed on the mother’s chest where they belong. I don’t mind. I’m just the conduit.

  I didn’t feel called to be a midwife. It felt like I stumbled into it entirely by accident, the idea planted by nothing more than a phrase I liked from some exasperated guidance counselor, desperate to put that note in my file that said she had, in fact, provided me with some guidance. It wasn’t part of my plan.

  But once I was there, in the middle of it all, it felt like it had been.

  I knew from the start there were dangers, risks. A lot of girls in my first semester weren’t there the next, and even fewer in the third.

  Yes, we feared the bad. I still do. It feels like there are so many more ways to lose a child than there are to catch one.

  But I don’t listen to the fear. Because I know, for every risk that something will go wrong, there are thousands of opportunities for things to go incredibly right.

  For reasons I haven’t figured out, though, I never carried this philosophy into the rest of my life.

  I almost did, when it came to Ford. Every time I gave in and stopped fighting that need for him. All the nights I touched the bruises and wounds, those hideously-colored shapes on the most beautiful, broken boy I’d ever known.

  When I walked away last night, I did exactly what I always coached my clients not to do: give in to the fear.

  There’s a moment in almost every birth when doubt takes over. It’s when the possible seems impossible. And by all
accounts, it should be: your body is doing something it’s never done, pushed to limits it’s never known. No biology textbook fodder about the brilliant design and adaptability of the female body can help. You just have to push through and see for yourself.

  That’s my favorite part of being a midwife: convincing women that somehow, if you just take that leap of faith, the impossible will begin to happen, right in front of your eyes.

  Thirty

  It’s been seven years since I made one of these things. It must not be like riding a bike, because clearly, I’ve forgotten.

  I ruin about four pieces of newspaper before I subject my ego to a YouTube tutorial. As I watch, following along with nothing but the pool of light from one of Dad’s old work lamps, I hear her. The sound of her wishing her family goodnight, and them calling it back to her. The clatter of their kitchen door.

  It sounds like her footsteps pause somewhere along the fence. The garage door is halfway open; I huddle closer to the work table and pause the video until she passes.

  Twenty minutes and several paper cuts later, I pile everything in a box and shove it aside. Now I’ve got a way to get her attention.

  I just have to figure out what on earth I’m going to say, once I have it, and how to prove I really mean it. An action that’s louder than the words.

  “What are you doing?”

  I jump, cursing with a sigh of relief when I see it’s just Caroline. She ducks under the half-open door, baby monitor in hand. “What is all this?”

  My ego gets its second beating of the night when I confess, refusing to meet her eyes, “I, uh...I’m trying to win Easton back.”

  “Win her back? When did you lose her?”

  I didn’t lose her. I gave her up. Again.

  But this time, I’m not going to wait six years to try and fix it.

  “Long story. Come on, help me think of something.”

  “Well, I kind of need to know the full story, if you want me to help.” She hops up on the other end of the table, swinging her legs as I turn on the radio to cover our voices. “Did you guys get in a fight?”