The Mountain Midwife

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “This just shouldn’t be so for a woman who works too much, especially this late into your pregnancy. But I could use you for a model patient.”

  “What can I say? I have a great midwife and a supportive husband.” Stephanie slipped her feet back into her Manolo Blahniks and smiled with complete serenity. “I am so blessed.”

  “Do you have names picked out?” Ashley didn’t want to let Stephanie go for some reason.

  Stephanie emitted an explosive, “Ha. We have too many names picked out. I want Isabelle, if it’s a girl, and Colin wants Susan. No one names their daughter Susan anymore, but it’s his mother’s name, so he’ll probably get his way.”

  “And if it’s a boy?” Ashley made notes on Stephanie’s chart.

  “We have about five names picked there. Fortunately, we like them all, both of us.” Stephanie stood and drew on her coat. “I’ll see you next week.”

  She left, making a wide berth around Mary Kate, who was just getting out of her car, as though she smelled bad. Mary Kate didn’t. She just looked poor, her car a far cry from Stephanie’s Lexus.

  Before Mary Kate came in, Ashley glanced at her phone. She had it on Mute, so she hadn’t heard if any messages had come through while she was with her patients. She had two, one from Jase saying they still had not located either the black F-150 or Racey Jean Davis. The other was from Hunter, impersonal and informative.

  STAYING HERE FOR A FEW DAYS. MAKING ARRANGEMENTS FOR HER CARE. THX FOR HELP.

  LET ME KNOW WHAT I CAN DO TO HELP, Ashley responded in kind.

  She hit Send just as Mary Kate reached the door. The sight of her face drove thoughts of Hunter out of Ashley’s head.

  “What’s wrong?” She drew the younger woman into the house with an arm around her shoulders—her heaving shoulders. “What’s happened?”

  “Boyd.” Mary Kate sobbed into Ashley’s shoulder. “They took him away from me.”

  CHAPTER 25

  HUNTER DROVE WITH care through snow that would have been nothing to blink at if not for the winding twists of even the state road. He kept his speed down and distance between himself and any vehicles he encountered, mostly tractor-trailers flying by as though they were racing on a sunny speedway. Remembering Ashley’s adage with a smile, he let the trucks go ahead of him going downhill and got ahead of them going up. Twice he passed the entrance to Sheila Brooks’s house—if it could be called a house. Finally, he managed to find the narrow opening between the trees and pulled into the drive.

  The night was quiet, eerily so. Not even the wind blew now that the snow had begun. The snow itself fell in silent puffs, building up on the graveled driveway and the roof of the ramshackle home. Not even the dogs barked off in the woods.

  He caught the scent of wood smoke, so at least a fire was burning, and light from the TV shone through the sheer curtains over the front window. Grocery bags in one hand and duffel bag in the other, Hunter walked to the house and knocked on the door.

  “Jeremiah, that you?” the smoked gravel voice called.

  “No ma’am, it’s—” He took a deep breath to get out the name he had despised all his life. “It’s Zachariah.”

  No response came, but a few moments later, just as Hunter was about to knock again, the door opened. Sheila stared at him, eyes wide. “Didn’t think you’d be coming back.”

  “You’re my mother. I couldn’t abandon you.” He stepped over the threshold.

  Sheila still held the door, her face working. “Even though I abandoned you?”

  “You had good reasons.”

  Far better reasons than why the McDermotts had lied to him.

  “I’m just glad I learned about you.”

  Before it was too late.

  Eyes watering, Sheila closed the door behind him and shot the dead bolt. “Whatcha got there?”

  “Some food. I thought you might want something hot like soup on a night like this.”

  She cast a glance at the duffel. “I mean that.”

  “I’m going to stay with you for a while.” He offered her a sheepish smile. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Then she tottered back to her chair and sank onto the worn cushion.

  She was blinking hard, but a few tears managed to escape down her cheeks. Hunter hesitated a moment, torn betweeen going to her and leaving her alone. In the end, he decided her pride would want him to leave her alone.

  “I’ll just take this stuff into the kitchen.” He hefted the grocery bags and crossed to the trailer section.

  Ashley had been right. Cupboards and refrigerator were nearly empty. Hunter put things away, then set about finding pans for heating soup. He made himself coffee and fixed his mother a cup of tea. While those heated and brewed, he peeked down the hallway. Yes, two bedrooms. One was obviously Sheila’s. The other was generic—a neatly made bed, a dresser clear of anything on top of it, a closet empty of all but a battered pair of winter boots. The dresser contained the remnants of a man’s clothes—an unmatched sock, a clean but stained T-shirt, a wool sweater in a virulent shade of green. Hunter set his duffel on the dresser, then returned to the kitchen to serve the food.

  A cookie sheet served as a tray, and he took bowls and cups into the living room. The news was on the TV, mostly talking about the snow moving east by morning, accumulation only enough to be troublesome, maybe six to eight inches. Sheila sat wrapped in her afghan, her hands folded on her lap. She glanced up at him and half smiled. “Virginia McDermott raised you right, I see.”

  “I learned to fend for myself a long time ago.” He set the tray on her knees. “It’s just canned soup. I’m not much of a cook.”

  The soup at Ashley’s had been homemade, a memory that set up a longing inside him.

  “But it should nourish you.”

  She was far too thin.

  “I’ll build up the fire again.”

  “You’re going to join me?” Her tone held hope and command.

  “I am.” Hunter added logs to the fire, then took his own bowl to a seat on the sofa.

  “And stay?” she asked, crumbling saltines into her soup.

  “And stay.”

  “How long?”

  “I can leave tomorrow if you like.”

  “But when do you like?”

  “I’d like to stay as long as I can. As long as I’m needed.”

  Justin wasn’t happy about going to Arizona Thanksgiving week, but he was willing under the circumstances. “You’ll get bored here,” Sheila said.

  “I have books. I can feed your chickens. I’ll find a way to entertain myself.”

  And so he did. Sheila slept a great deal, sometimes in her chair, sometimes in her room. She ate little, half a cup of soup, a quarter cup of oatmeal, a glass of milk. She didn’t talk much, and, too often, pain etched lines in her face that looked like fissures. She spoke little, but occasionally, Hunter caught her looking at him with a half smile and softness to her eyes.

  That look warmed his heart. He was making her happy. He wasn’t sure he had ever made anyone truly happy.

  He wished he had made Ashley happy. Their last conversation had held contention he never intended yet knew he had perpetrated. His excuse that one couldn’t shake off over thirty years of one way of thinking and life experience in so short a time. He had grown up with all sorts of paradigms that were wrong and not even known that they were. Normal, he supposed, but not something he liked about himself.

  During the next few days, he had a great deal of time to think about how to go forward with Sheila Brooks, his mother, with his father, with the rest of his family—with Ashley. He wanted to go forward with Ashley. On a long walk in the snowy woods, stunned by the beauty and isolation of the area, he thought about Ashley a great deal. She never truly left his mind, and alone with God and nature, he took the time to examine how he felt about her.

  He didn’t know her enough to think he loved her, and he knew that the potential, the near certainty that he woul
d love her, was obvious. Yet she had a future plan that wasn’t compatible with his life. He lived in northern Virginia and she would be in Richmond, if she didn’t get into a DC med school. Besides that, med school was difficult, time-consuming. It wasn’t a time to start a relationship or build one up. And they wouldn’t have this next year with her life down there in the mountains and his up in the city. A future between them was impossible.

  “But I don’t want it to be, God.” He cried the words aloud in the woods.

  When his words seemed to echo back to him, he realized that he hadn’t heard the dogs since the afternoon he and Ashley had paid a visit. Cautiously curious, he walked in the direction from which he had heard the barking. With some hunting around, he found where they had been chained up, a place lousy with dog droppings, and beyond a screen of some kind of shrubbery, he spotted a trailer. No one had been there since the snowfall. Not a footprint, save for some small animal tracks, marred the pristine white covering. Someone had taken the dogs away and stayed away. Knowing that they might come back anytime now that the roads were clear, according to the news, Hunter returned to the house.

  Sheila sat slumped in her chair, her head tilted against the wing of the back.

  “Would you like some lunch?” He spoke softly in the event she was deeply asleep.

  She didn’t respond. “Sheila? Mom?”

  Hearing Ashley’s soft voice in his mind, he added, “Momma?”

  Sheila didn’t respond.

  Sickness crowding into his gut, he leaned down and touched her hand where it curled around the edge of the afghan. It was warm. A pulse beat in her chest, but it was thready and slow.

  ASHLEY WANTED TO sleep. By Tuesday, she was so exhausted she thought she might just fall down in the middle of her driveway and not be found until she had petrified. But instead of curling up beneath her comforter, she stood in the hospital emergency room holding Rachel’s hand while the younger woman wept over the loss of her baby.

  “It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault,” Rachel kept sobbing. “You told me to quit smoking.”

  “We don’t know that’s why you miscarried.” Ashley knew her soothing words fell on deaf ears. “Lots of women miscarry.”

  She had to stop herself from saying, “In their first trimester.”

  Rachel was in her second.

  “But I’m not healthy.” Rachel had been chastising herself since she called Ashley at three o’clock in the morning. “I could have done more to be healthy.”

  “We can all do more to be healthy, and even healthy women have miscarriages. We don’t know why most of the time. What’s important for you to do is grieve this loss and remember you still have a baby at home and you can have more in the future.”

  More than likely. Nothing seemed to be wrong with Rachel.

  Ashley wished she had more words than the usual platitudes. No matter how much she read and how hard she tried, everything she said sounded trite in moments like this. Part of her held on edge, coiled tight against the possibility that Rachel would claim if she had gone to a doctor, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe not. Ashley doubted it. When a body rejected a fetus, doctors weren’t any better at stopping it than were midwives.

  She remained with Rachel, letting her talk, letting her cry, giving her that all-important human contact, until the doctor showed up to evaluate whether Rachel needed to be admitted to the hospital. She would probably be sent home, but for now, she waited in her cubicle with Ashley handing out tissues and comfort as best she could.

  She had been doing that a lot this week. Mary Kate’s news had shocked her, though, upon reflection, she should have seen it coming. She didn’t know what to say, so she held Mary Kate as she sobbed out her story of how someone from the hospital had contacted protective services, who learned about Mary Kate’s living conditions, how her son was too often left in the care of a woman who drank too much, often while watching him, and how Mary Kate’s car didn’t have a car seat.

  “It’s not my fault he got sick. I gotta work and didn’t know Momma let the fire go out.” Mary Kate sobbed against Ashley’s shoulder. “And now they’ll take this baby too.”

  Ashley stroked Mary Kate’s back and tried to think of a solution. None came to mind. The truth was, Mary Kate needed support she didn’t have and Ashley couldn’t provide it. The admission of that brought her sense of inadequacy rearing its Hydra head. This time she knew a medical degree wouldn’t solve the problem either. All the education and training in the world didn’t cure this kind of poverty.

  Feeling sick with every word, Ashley said the only thing she knew at the moment. “Mary Kate, right now you need to concentrate on being healthy for this baby you’re carrying.”

  She considered her lecture on how Mary Kate needed to stop working, then chose to save her breath. Mary Kate knew what she needed to do. She wouldn’t do it. And Ashley couldn’t make her.

  Once the younger woman had calmed some, Ashley took her blood pressure. It wasn’t as low as she liked her patients to display, and it wasn’t as bad as it might have been under the circumstances.

  “You seem to be getting better.” She wanted her words to encourage Mary Kate.

  She, however, simply began to cry again. “I gotta change my life, but I don’t know how I can.”

  Ashley was helpless. She had no idea what to say. Agreeing wasn’t the right move. If only she had a solution . . .

  “I’m praying for you.” That was the truth and the only thing she knew to say.

  “Thank you.” Mary Kate smiled through her tears. “When do you need to see me again?”

  “Next week.” Ashley glanced at her calendar. “Not Thursday. That’s Thanksgiving—” An idea slammed into her. “What will you be doing for Thanksgiving?”

  Mary Kate shrugged. “Sittin’ home, I s’pose. Lucy Belle will send home turkey and all the fixin’s with me, but I ain’t got no plans.”

  “Would you like to spend it with us?”

  Mary Kate stared at her. “You, Miss Ashley? You don’t want me with you and your family.”

  “Not my family, Heather. We don’t have any family around here right now, and we can cook for three as easily as we can cook for two.” She clasped Mary Kate’s hand. “We’d love to have you, and your momma, too, if she’s around.”

  “Not hardly.” Mary Kate wrinkled her nose. “She’s got a new boyfriend.”

  She didn’t elaborate. Ashley didn’t need her to. She had heard talk before. A new boyfriend meant lots of partying.

  “Then join us. I can come get you.”

  “Well, if it’s okay . . .” Mary Kate blushed and ducked her head. “I can bring the pies from the diner.”

  “Oh, please do.”

  Mary Kate had departed looking less mournful than when she arrived merely for a simple invitation.

  Ashley felt more mournful. She was alone for the rest of the day and the entire weekend. She had heard nothing from Hunter. She wasn’t sure she would. Their last conversation hadn’t exactly been warm. Yet her admiration of him, her feelings for him, deepened with the knowledge that he had gone to spend time with his biological mother. How amazing for a man like him to volunteer to spend time under such primitive conditions. She longed to see him again, talk to him about his feelings over everything that had happened to him in the past month. Just as well they were incommunicado. He would go north eventually, probably sooner rather than later. She was here for the next year—or forever if she couldn’t find someone to take over her practice. They could never build a relationship over the distance in miles and lives.

  Heart and time weighing heavily upon her, Ashley called Heather on Saturday to see if she wanted to get together. After shopping for a Thanksgiving feast, they bought a pizza and ate it and popcorn while watching two romantic comedies in a row. They had seen both films before but didn’t care.

  Ashley spent the night at Heather’s and went to church with her in the morning. Doubting she would get a call from
any of her patients, she wore a dress. She kind of hoped somehow Hunter would come into town. Ridiculously, she wanted him to see her in a soft-blue dress with her hair down.

  She saw Jase instead. Out of uniform himself, he stopped her in the vestibule to tell her how great she looked.

  Jase concluded his compliment with, “Dressing up for that guy?”

  “You are such a jerk.” Heather shot him a glare that should have withered him to the size of a toad and stalked off to talk to the pastor.

  Jase’s gaze followed her, his face taut. “It’s a pity she’s not as beautiful inside as she is outside.”

  “She is. She just covers things up,” Ashley said.

  Heather had been hurt so much as a child and now was on her way to self-destruction—or at least destruction of all that was good in her life.

  Jase snorted. “Haven’t noticed.”

  Wow, where had that hostility toward Heather come from? Ashley’s heart began to race.

  “Speaking of noticing things,” she said by way of changing the subject, “have you learned anything about that truck or Racey Jean Davis?”

  “We have a lead on the truck. You didn’t mention it was registered in West Virginia.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Nor did that friend of yours.”

  “It was pouring down rain and everything was all over mud.” She laid a hand on his arm. “Let me know when you learn something, won’t you?”

  “I will.” He squeezed her hand and strolled from the church. Briefly he stopped to say something to the pastor or Heather or both, but Heather turned her shoulder to him in a way too obvious for anyone to miss. Jason laughed and swung out the front door.

  And Ashley’s stomach rolled. Bile burned in her throat. She was crazy to be thinking in the direction she was. Yet she recalled how Heather had said something about a patient getting in an accident . . .

  Not sure how—or if—to broach the subject, Ashley was quiet as they drove back to Heather’s. Heather, of course, noticed.