The Midwife

by Jolina Petersheim

  “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.”

  “But the two of you . . .” I paused, not knowing how to continue and wishing I had never begun.

  “We never had children?” Meredith supplied.

  I focused on the sprawling hospital buildings coming into view.

  Meredith said, “Thom made the assumption that if he promised to stay home with the children, then I would promise to have children.” Her laughter did not escape her lips. “He should not have assumed. I could not put everything on hold and go on a three-month maternity leave. My business was just starting up.”

  “So,” I said, “the surrogacy kind of works in your favor? You can just go about your life without morning sickness or doctor’s appointments and let Thom take it from there?” I no longer cared that I was teetering on the brink of rudeness. Meredith made this child I carried sound not like a miracle, but like an inconvenience. If not for Thom, I knew I could not give this child to such a driven woman, who had allowed her job to overtake her life.

  Meredith maneuvered her car into a space wedged between two vehicles and shifted into park. She flicked off the key. The classical music faded. “I do not think
surrogacy works in anyone’s favor,” she snapped. Jerking the keys out of the ignition, she cracked open the door and grabbed her purse. Bending, she met my eyes. “Except, of course, maybe yours.”

  She slammed the car door and stalked off toward the hospital. Once again, I had no choice but to follow. As I did, I wondered if Thom had preceded me in Meredith’s anger, and if this child in my womb would trail in my wake.

  A Filipino man with salt-and-pepper hair in a shoulder-length braid came into the room. He carried a manila envelope I assumed held the paperwork I had completed in the hospital lobby. Sitting on the stool beside the examining table, his pristine sneakers squeaked as his heels propelled him across the tile.

  “You’ve had an ultrasound before?” His teeth gleamed in his tanned face. The computer monitor was tilted just beyond my line of vision, but I saw his fingertips were poised above the keyboard.

  “Not here, but yes.”

  “How many weeks are you?” he asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  A pause as he typed it in.

  “This your first child?” He looked up, waiting.

  I cleared my throat that was blocked with emotions and replied, “No. I . . . I’ve carried a child to full term before.”

  When he finished typing, he came over and stood before me. I had tugged my sweatpants down below my hip bones and pulled up my T-shirt. He squirted some of the warmed ultrasound gel on my stomach and rolled the wand that looked like a deodorant stick.

  “Have you felt the baby move?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Not too often, though,” I said. “Just started to feel her in the past two weeks.”

  He rolled the ultrasound wand lower. It seemed he was trying to manipulate the baby. He didn’t know that I knew a little about the medical profession, and I didn’t tell him. I wanted to be like any other patient, allowing him to reassure me when I was afraid that something was wrong.

  Fear grew in the silence until it became a steel trap bracketing my chest. “I had some pain this morning,” I whispered. “And I just wanted to make sure that everything’s all right.”

  The ultrasound technician didn’t look at me. He removed the wand and wiped the gel off my stomach with a wet cloth. He gave me a hand and boosted me into a sitting position. It was not the weight of the baby I carried, but the weight of my apprehension, that made me weak. “I’ll be right back,” he said, patting my knee.

  The computer screen flooded the darkness with a square pool of light. I stared at it and wondered if we had come this far only to have lost the child I’d just allowed myself to love. The terror I’d tried to keep at bay made me want to reach out to my mother, whose absence hurt as much now as it had when she had left. I even wanted to call Meredith and tell her to come back to the hospital. After pacing in the lobby and chain-sipping Diet Cokes for half an hour, she’d said she could not wait any longer. She’d given me the number to her portable phone and then walked out through the automatic doors without asking if I would be okay.

  Although she was the least maternal person I had ever known, I wanted a face that was familiar to me, and it only seemed fair that the mother of this child should also have to hear these words. That the mother should help me grieve—that she should grieve too.

  The door the ultrasound tech had shut opened again. I felt like a caged animal, blinking in the crackling fluorescent lighting after an older gentleman flipped the switch. He had white hair receding in a horseshoe shape and dangling pink earlobes. His smile was kind, as were his eyes. Taking the swivel stool the technician had occupied, he hitched up the material of his dress pants and placed his large feet at forty-five-degree angles. His shins were bony and covered with socks made of heavy gray wool. The leg hair was white.

  “Miss Winslow,” he said. I raised my gaze. He did not even deliberate if I was married or not, as I must have seemed so alone, sitting there in my sweatpants with the university logo and my eyes huge in my unwashed face. “I’m Dr. Carmichael.” He reached out his steady hand with long, tapering fingers that felt like chilled candlesticks.

  Did he think the exchange of physical touch would make the words easier to bear?

  “I’m sure you know that my being called in here is not a good sign,” he continued, “so I’m not going to make it worse by beating around the bush.” He smiled. For an irrational moment, I wanted to assault him for his joviality at such a serious time. “There’s some residual swelling on the baby’s brain, and one of the upper ventricles does not seem to be developing. These two things combined with the fact that there’s not a good flow through the umbilical cord . . . well, it makes us worry that there might be something wrong with your child.”

  “It’s not my child,” I whispered, tears flooding my eyes. The second I uttered those words, I realized that Meredith did not have to know that something was wrong. In my opinion, she did not deserve to know, as she could not take a few hours out of her Saturday to sit in a darkened room with a scared woman who was contracted to bear her offspring. Because of her apparent apathy, I did not want to tell Meredith anything. But it was not only Meredith’s child I carried. It was Thom’s child too, and for him I asked, “What’s the next step? And how long ’til we know something for certain?”

  Dr. Carmichael slipped on the reading glasses hanging down across his lab coat from a chain. With his left hand tilted at an odd angle, he scrawled something across my file and said, “I would like to schedule you for an amniocentesis and an MSAFP, which is—”

  “Maternal serum alpha-fetoprotein screening.”

  The doctor looked up from my file. The blue eyes peering above his bifocals brightened. “Actually, yes,” he said. “We’ll check your fetoprotein levels to make sure the fetus does not have a neural tube defect, such as spina bifida or anencephaly. High levels of AFP may also suggest esophageal defects or a failure of your baby’s abdomen to close. However—” he glanced over his glasses and smiled again—“as you might know, the most common reason for elevated AFP levels is inaccurate dating of the pregnancy.”

  “That wouldn’t be the case here, Dr. Carmichael,” I said. “I am a gestational surrogate. I know the exact minute this child was conceived.”

  “Ah, I see,” he muttered. He had not heard me the first time. “Low levels of AFP and abnormal levels of hCG and estriol may indicate that the developing baby has some type of chromosome abnormality. But these are all just precautions, so we can know for certain that your child—or their child—is fine.”

  I ran a hand over my stomach, which was as hard as an unripened fruit. The T-shirt covering it was still smeared with the gummy ultrasound gel. “Thank you for being honest,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome.” Dr. Carmichael looked over his glasses and paused a moment before saying, “But I know if I were the parent of a contracted baby, I’d also want the surrogate to be honest with me.”

  5

  Rhoda, 2014

  At the knock, I get out of bed and whisk the shawl off the back of my desk chair. Spooling it around my shoulders, I pull open the door. I see a pale girl with wet hair dripping across the front of her floor-length nightgown.

  “Lydie?” I ask. “You all right?”

  She shakes her head. “I think . . . I think Star’s hurt.”

  I step back inside my bedroom. Holding the fiery stub of a match, I lift the oil lamp’s glass and touch the flame to the wick before snuffing the match out. I adjust the wick and bring the lamp closer. “What happened?” I ask.

  Turning from the light, Lydie shakes her head. “I don’t know. When I came back from my bath, Star had locked me out. But . . . I heard her moan.”

  Passing the oil lamp to Lydie, I grab the birthing satchel I keep beneath my desk. Then, without speaking, the two of us hurry down the hallway. The lamp sloshes light across the log-and-chink walls. Our matching white nightgowns float around our ankles.

  I rap my knuckles on the door to the bedroom Lydie shares with
Star. “It’s Rhoda,” I say sharply. “What’s wrong?”

  Silence.

  I hang the satchel over Lydie’s other arm and motion for her to move. Twisting the doorknob hard to the right, I shove my shoulder into the door, displacing the ancient hook lock along with my shawl. The tang of metal and sweat assaults my senses. My eyes struggle to see in the dim light. Once they do, years of experience are overtaken by uncertainty. But only for a moment. I reach for the lamp, and Lydie wordlessly passes it to me. I set the lamp on the floor, where it illumines the scene. Lydie gasps and clamps a hand over her mouth. I hear her nostrils pump in and out with fear.

  Star is tucked into the space between the dresser and the window on the left-hand wall. Her knees are pulled up to her chest. Blood spreads from the seat of her pajama pants—soaking her multicolored slippers—and sheens on the hardwood floor. Even in the darkness, every color fades next to the garish spectrum of the girl’s purple hair contrasted with that waxing flood of red spilling from her womb. I have seen enough miscarriages to recognize postpartum hemorrhaging. If I cannot stop the bleeding, we will lose Star too.

  Lydie is so dazed, she is not even aware that I am asking her to give us space. I bracket her small shoulders and push her toward the door. As Lydie clings to the doorframe with her eyes wet and lips moving in silent prayer, I dig into my satchel for Pitocin. I insert the syringe’s needle into the vial and push down on the plunger. I turn the vial—attached to the syringe—toward the ceiling like a gun and extract all ten milliunits. Removing the needle, I set the vial down before flicking the side of the syringe to make sure the liquid is void of bubbles.

  I lean over Star and peel down the shoulder of her bathrobe. Lamplight casts shadows over the galaxy of tattoos and scars whittled into her right arm, which has always been hidden under long sleeves. Some of the scars have faded with time; some are as bright as if they were inflicted yesterday. Perhaps they were.

  I use an alcohol wipe to clean a circle on Star’s skin before jabbing her deltoid with the needle. Star’s sore eyes flicker open. They close again. Her chin dips onto her chest.