The Midwife

by Jolina Petersheim

  “How long have you been cutting?” I ask, recapping the syringe and cleaning the area of the shot.

  “Dunno,” she replies.

  “How long have you been bleeding?”

  “Dunno,” Star slurs again. “Awhile.”

  I trace the scars on Star’s forearm. I turn the arm over to expose the paler flesh lacerated with angry red stripes running parallel to the sunken purple veins. I say, “You’re lucky you didn’t nick one.”

  Star drops the back of her head against the bedroom wall and rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “Lucky?” she says. Gravity pulls tears down her face. “Lucky woulda been the other way around.”

  Once Star is stabilized, I leave the bedroom and take a right. I enter the holding cell of the walk-in linen closet, where I often trap myself until my tears of anger have fled. After my entire life was taken, except my chance to bring new life into the world, I could separate myself from the child I carried so that it did not remind me of the child I had lost. But the more time that lapses since my womb was full only to become barren once more, the more certain I am that I will never again have the chance to hold a child—my child—in my arms. And this makes it harder and harder to distance my heart when I feel a baby thrashing inside the cocoon of a womb, like a butterfly trying to strengthen its wings.

  Often I can relinquish my desire to nurture that unseen being if I know the mother whose stomach stretches drum-taut beneath my hands also longs for the day her child unfurls into flight. But sometimes, as that child thrashes, the mother’s body locks up as if every kick to her ribs is a personal assault. This is when I desire to take that child and raise him or her as my own. Yet my becoming a parent is a hopeless case, and not just because I am a single woman who works a nonprofit job. I know no court would ever allow a woman to adopt a child when, out of desperation, she once kidnapped one.

  Someone knocks and then rattles the doorknob like she’s trying to break in. I clear my throat and cull the tears from my cheeks with my palms. “Who is it?”

  “Lydie.”

  I turn the lock and open the door partway, splitting the globe of light from the lamp the young woman carries. Her lashes fan against the scald of my stare. I blink as well and look over at the shelf; the checkered pattern on the sheets transforms into a watery fusion of remorse.

  “You all right?” she asks. When I don’t answer, Lydie brushes a lock of damp hair with a trembling hand and says, “It’s Star.” It takes seconds for me to remember what has happened and who I am now supposed to be: not an abductor on the run, but a midwife and mother in a home for unwed girls. “I’m not sure if she’s asleep, or . . . if she’s passed out again.”

  I suck stale air in and expel it through my mouth, trying to bring myself back to the present and finding it a fight. Pulling the closet door, I pivot on the grit beneath my heel and follow the beam cast by Lydie’s lamp. As we draw closer to the bedroom, reality clamps its ragged teeth, and the venom of panic courses through my mind. Lydie gives me wide berth as we enter and holds out the lamp. Across the floor, I see evidence that Star’s bleeding has resumed.

  My heart throbs. I kneel down and press two fingers to the side of Star’s neck. Her pulse is weak. Oh, God, what was I thinking by leaving her unattended, even for a moment?

  “Lydie,” I say, “please wake Charlotte and Alice and tell them to come.”

  Her eyes waver in the lamplight before she nods. I hear her feet flit down the hall. Fervent knockings and harried whispers are exchanged. Seconds drag past like hours as Star’s pulse beneath my fingertips slows to a crawl. Two sleep-creased faces appear in the doorway, the brass oil lamp in Alice’s hand polishing the silver coronet of Charlotte’s hair.

  “How is she?” Charlotte asks.

  “Not good. Her PPH won’t stop even with Pit. I need help moving her downstairs.”

  Alice and Charlotte look down at Star; then they look at me. I know we are all thinking the same thing: Star’s a large girl awake, but now that she is unconscious, her body somehow weighs more.

  Alice says, “What about Looper?”

  I look over my shoulder at Alice. I had forgotten that his reappearance in my life was not part of my dreams. “Yes. Looper. Get him.” I flutter my hands at Alice, who bolts out the door.

  Charlotte and I heave Star into a sitting position. Soon, Looper—his sandy waves matted, striped nightshirt askew—steps barefoot into the bedroom and squats before us.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  I repeat what happened, and Looper slips an arm around Star’s shoulders. Her head lolls to the side, and I support the prickly spears of her hair with my hand. With a grunt, Looper lifts Star’s upper body while Alice and I support the legs. He walks backward out of the bedroom, careful not to trip on her soiled robe that sweeps the floor like a train. A slipper thwaps to the floor. Alice sidesteps it and looks over at me.

  “You think . . . ?” Her mouth hedges over words.

  I snap, “What?”

  “Should we take her to the hospital?”

  Charlotte bunches up the bathrobe and holds it with one hand while supporting Star’s lower back with the other. She won’t meet my eyes. I know she also fears that Star may need more medical attention than we can give her here.

  “Looper,” I say. He squints at me while adjusting Star’s weight in his arms. “Can you drive?”

  Looper stirs as I brace myself on the arms of the vinyl chair and lower my body into the seat. “What’d they say?” he asks, stretching out his right knee, frozen stiff from the football injury he received the same night as the ’89 homecoming crown.

  “If the D and C goes well,” I say, “they’ll release Star in a few hours.”

  “Will she come back to your place?” Looper asks.

  “She has no choice.”

  “No family, you mean?”

  I pause. “’Least none she’s willing to call or talk about.”

  Looper scratches his hair. In the lull, he looks down the curved length of chairs and whispers, pointing. “What’s her story?”

  In my sleep-deprived state, even tilting my head to the right is exhausting. But I do it. I see that Alice is curled beneath the sleeping bag Looper must have brought in from his truck while I was busy admitting Star to the emergency room. Even with her pink bow mouth open and her prayer kapp askew, Alice is exquisite. Her eyelids skate restlessly over dreams. Her lustrous skin is haloed with escaped blond curls. Looper’s interest in her causes envy to take easy root in the acidic soil of my heart. I feel worn out, sour, and about a thousand years old.

  “Her story’s like most, I suspect.” I wince at the superiority in my voice that I have not earned. “She got pregnant. The father didn’t want anything to do with the child, so she came here, and the community took her in.”

  “Yes,” Looper says, “she told me about Uriah.”

  “Hmm.”

  I watch the bustling nurses’ station. Looper’s eyes scan over me, trying to decipher the reason for my aloof response. For the first time since he came, I am grateful these challenging years have not allowed for womanly pampering. The emotions igniting my skin cannot escape through the sun-coarsened layers.

  “What’s her story?” he again whispers.

  I roll my head toward Looper and see that he is pointing at me—asking me for my story. I look away and close my lids down hard.

  What he does not know is that this version of my story for twenty-some years has never been told. That this story is not just my story but his story too.

  “We were so young, Looper,” I whisper. “Your dreams—I didn’t want you to give them up by having to support a child.”

  Looper’s eyes are again on my face, and this time no layers of sun-coarsened skin can prevent the heat of my vulnerability from seeping through. I can’t look at him; I am too scared to see our life history displayed across his face. “You saying that . . . that . . . ?” His words cling to false starts and ellipses, but the tears coating his v
oice tell me that he has already guessed the answer to the question he won’t allow himself to speak.

  “Yes,” I say. “I conceived that summer.”

  “Did you . . . ?”

  “I had the baby, if that’s what you’re asking. But I didn’t keep it. I couldn’t.”

  Looper takes his bearded face in hard-skinned hands. His back begins to quake, but I do not reach out to him. I find comfort in the fact that finally someone can help shoulder the loss I have been carrying on my own. I dig into my birthing satchel for a Kleenex, but find only individually sealed alcohol wipes. Tearing the package, I pass one to him.

  He shakes it open, wipes his face, and looks over. His eyes are raw. “Girl or . . . boy?”

  In that briefest hesitation, I see what he would have hoped.

  The soft syllable stings. “Boy.”

  I remember how my own father had confronted me about my pregnancy before I had even contemplated telling Looper, the father, about it.

  “Your mother looked just the same with you,” he’d said, almost sadly, taking off a work glove to brush his thumb against my cheek. “That’s how I could tell.”

  I had flinched at his touch—and at his words, since I did not want to look like my mother. My father’s eyebrows lowered. His dark eyes grew moist. “Beth,” my father had continued, his voice hoarse, “keep the baby. I’ll help you.”

  I knew this offering was meant to soften my mother’s absence that, despite his best efforts, my father’s stable presence could never really fill. But I was unable to reach for the offer of support he was extending like an olive branch—or even to feel that I was worthy to accept it. I still don’t fully understand my reasoning at the time, but somehow my mother’s desertion made me certain I had to give my own baby up for adoption. She had not loved me enough to be a part of my life, so how could I possibly love my own child enough to be the mother it would need? That, more than fear or inconvenience, was the reason I could not keep the baby.

  This was the reason I didn’t tell Looper about the child. This was the reason I packed that night and left for college the next morning, although I still had two weeks left until classes started. But as I drove out that dusty farm road, with the sun’s rim nourishing the cornfield’s stalks, I glanced over at the Loopers’ red mailbox and wondered if I was making a mistake. I knew Looper would take care of me and the baby. But would that only be out of obligation, which would leave him feeling trapped in the end? The two of us had never discussed love or future plans despite the passion of that summer, and I feared if I demanded more from him, he would turn his heart away, leaving me as broken as when our romance began. And yet I yearned to know the truth: was I just one last high school fling to be discarded when Looper’s adulthood loomed, or did he want me with him, always? I didn’t know the answer that day I left, driven by the grief my mother’s abandonment had started all those years before. To this day, I still don’t know, and I wonder if I ever will.

  “A boy,” Looper says now.

  I blink and look down at my calloused hands in the lap of my cape dress.

  “I wish I’d known.” Drawing his legs back, he hunches his shoulders around his body.

  I can feel him retracting from me—from the mother who took his son—and I don’t blame him. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love. I have lost not only my family but the two children I birthed only to give away. I should have learned from when my mother left: you should never give your heart to someone who can never fully be yours.

  6

  Beth, 1996

  The silence remained deafening, even as we listened to the water trickling over the fountain near the fertility clinic’s reception desk, to the nonsensical chatter of a baby in his car seat. I reached up and massaged the tense muscles of my jaw. One after another, expecting mothers were called back. And then, finally: “Bethany Winslow?”

  I nodded and stood. Thom and Meredith stood as well. An overweight female technician with a sleek ponytail and tinted glasses led us down the hall. In the ultrasound room, I lay back on the metal table. Everything then proceeded as it had before: the warm gel coating my stomach, the swivel of the ultrasound wand. I thought my own heart would stop beating until I heard the roar of the baby’s heartbeat.

  Meredith and Thom crowded around the computer monitor. Though I couldn’t see the screen, I knew what the technician would be doing. She’d measure the amniotic fluid cushioning the child’s expanding frame. She’d measure the circumference of the stomach, the length of the limbs, and the dimensions of the brain, the kidneys, and the four compartments of the heart.

  During all of this, I remained silent, as did the technician. But inside, I felt like I was screaming—dying. I knew that as the technician measured, Thom was tallying everything up in his mind and finding that this child of my womb—but of his flesh—was wanting. Still, he did not say a word.

  “See that?” the technician said. From the examination table, I watched the technician scribble the computer cursor across the pad. “It’s a girl.”

  Meredith breathed, “A girl.”

  Thom put a hand on the back of Meredith’s neck, where her curled blond hair brushed golden skin. I watched her lean toward him. My heart felt so hollow, it ached. I looked to the wall as longing pooled in my eyes.

  The technician stood and moved back from the computer screen as Dr. Hancock, the reproductive endocrinologist, came into the room. At her appearance, a wash of adrenaline slid down my shins to course in my feet—making it difficult to remain still, making it difficult not to run. Dr. Hancock greeted us, working her fingers into a pair of sterile gloves. From the instrument tray covered with a blue plastic sheet, she removed a syringe, swabbed a cool circle on my stomach with an alcohol wipe, and injected my skin with a local anesthetic. The technician got on the other side of the table and maneuvered the ultrasound wand so Dr. Hancock could extract the fluid without harming the baby.

  The anesthetic must not have deadened the area completely. I felt a dull prick and I closed my eyes. Orange bloomed across my vision like a warning flare. Everything inside of me wanted to protect this child from the risks surrounding the amniocentesis procedure, yet this child was not mine to protect.

  Dr. Hancock must have felt how rigid my body was becoming. She placed a hand on my goose-bumped flesh. “You’re doing great,” she said.

  She pulled back on the plunger that filled the syringe with clear, amber-colored amniotic fluid. Swabbing my stomach with iodine, she placed a Band-Aid over the invisible puncture.

  “See?” She smiled, tapping the side of the syringe with a gloved finger. “It’s really as simple as that.”

  I stopped outside Thom’s office door, which was propped open with a dense, leather-bound book. Moving closer, I crouched and squinted at the symbols embossing the border: the rod of Asclepius, an hourglass, a beaker, an antiquated microscope, an apothecary’s mortar and pestle. Inside this, the cover read: You can do nothing to bring the dead to life, but you can do much to save the living from death. I cupped the swell of my womb. A forewarning?

  Thom’s chair creaked as he sensed my presence and turned. “Hello, Miss Beth,” he said.

  I stood, heart pounding, and the blood in my body sank to my feet. Pressing my temple, I was halfway to Thom when the room curtained to black. The first draft of my fifty-page thesis fluttered from my hand to carpet the office floor. I heard Thom bolt from the chair and stride across his office toward me.

  “Miss Beth? Beth?” His voice seemed far away.

  I was opening my mouth to reassure him when another surge of vertigo struck. Thom placed a hand on my lower back and guided me over to his chair. My weakened state made the foot in distance seem like the other side of the room. I sat and Thom knelt before me.

  As he did, I was reminded of that late afternoon in the darkened office when I’d told Thom about my son. With my eyes clenched shut, I could see everything. And I knew it was not Dr. Thomas Fitzpatrick I’d fallen in love wit
h that day. It was the fact of somebody finally hearing my story, and through its telling, the deepest, darkest parts of me finally being seen.

  “What is it?” Thom asked, taking my cold hand in both of his. “What do you need?”

  I opened my eyes and breathed through my mouth, waiting for the wave to recede. “It will pass,” I promised. “It just takes time.”

  “You mean this—” He pointed to my folded-over stomach; the nausea that I’m sure cast an olive hue over my sallow complexion. “This has happened before and you didn’t tell me?”

  “You had enough to worry about already. Meredith thought—”

  Thom stood. “My wife knows about this?”

  Hiding my face, I murmured, “I had pains when you were gone. I needed help. Meredith took me to the hospital. She . . . she took care of me.” It seemed like the smallest gift I could offer his wife, when I had taken so much from her already. For deep below her self-protecting armor, I imagined that Meredith Fitzpatrick was like any other woman, and therefore grieved over the loss of being able to bring new life into the world while I did so effortlessly.

  I sat upright as the baby moved. Thinking the vertigo had returned, Thom knelt again. He scanned my face, and then my body. “What can I do?” he whispered.

  I could see the worry wrinkling his brow, and that is why I took the hand he had not extended and placed it on the lower portion of my womb. “Right there,” I commanded, pushing my hand down on top of his. “Wait.”

  We stared into each other’s eyes without blinking or breathing. The baby moved again. She gently somersaulted in my stomach as if to reassure us that, whatever the test results that hung in the balance, she was going to be all right.

  Thom said, “That was the baby?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “That was your baby.”

  I reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. He leaned forward and cupped his cheeks before resting his forehead on my lap.