The Midwife (19 page)

The staircase creaked. I looked up. Fannie was descending the steps as if the nodules of her spine could not withstand more pressure.

I pushed against my chest, forcing words to exit my windpipe that terror had sealed shut but for a rind’s width of breath. “What is it?”

Fannie paused. The old midwife looked down at me. Tears filled her eyes and then the grooves on her face, water in an ancient riverbed. “I’m sorry, Rhoda,” she rasped, pressing a knuckle to her mouth. Fannie descended the steps and reached across the landing to take my hand. “I’m so very, very sorry.”

I wrenched my fingers free and gripped my upper arms, shaking. “What happened?”

“Hope’s parents are here.” Fannie glanced behind her, up at the steps.

I reared back as if I’d been struck by those cruel words
 
—wasn’t
I
her parent?
 
—then I hurled my body forward.

Fannie blocked my path, her weak body fortified by a stronger will. “We must be rational here, Rhoda.” The midwife seized my shoulders, and her eyes bored into mine.
“They have papers. They have a lawyer. They told us they won’t press charges if you let Hope go quietly.”

I felt such an acute sense of betrayal, my cheek stung with a Judas kiss. Since the evening I had allowed Fannie to cross the barrier around my heart, I had confessed everything. Everything about my childhood when I’d been forced to take the place of the mother who had abandoned us; about the child I had conceived out of wedlock with my longtime friend, and how
 
—in a way
 
—I had left both him and our son; about my infatuation with my married graduate school professor and the tainted reasons for which I’d agreed to bear his child; about running away because I loved the child, but also because I was weary of being alone.

I had said all of this in the hope that pouring my darkest self out to Fannie might absolve the magnitude of my guilt and, in compensation, keep Hope from getting taken away. But now, all of that was gone. My Hope, my faith in the Creator whom I’d just started to believe in, my trust that life could be good again, my trust in my adopted family, my trust that this remote place could become my sanctuary where
 
—if I never stepped beyond its boundary
 
—nothing could ever go wrong.

I heard a murmuring sound. Turning, I expected to see the Fitzpatricks. Instead, I saw Alice Rippentoe leaning against the dining room wall, her infant son nestled against her chest. Her eyes were closed, but her lips moved in prayer. Breaking Fannie’s hold, I marched toward Alice. My entire body tingled and hummed with an energy that could
kill, kidnap, or maim to protect my daughter, whom the courts would never grant as mine.

“Don’t you dare,” I seethed. “Don’t you
dare
pray for me and my child when your child’s still in your arms.”

Alice opened her eyes and shielded her son, Uriah, from my fury. Disgusted, I pivoted and maneuvered around Fannie Graber without meeting her saddened gaze. I charged up the stairs and flung open my bedroom door.

Meredith and Thomas Fitzpatrick and an older man in a pin-striped suit looked up at my entrance. My eyes frantically scanned the room. Thom was standing behind the rocking chair, his face white. Meredith was beside the bed. A suitcase was on the mattress, its dark mouth gaping. The well-dressed stranger was standing in the center of the room
 
—his shoulders hunched, his raked steel-gray hair flush with the dried lavender hanging from a beam on the ceiling.

But Hope was not there.

I walked into the room. The tautness was as palpable as trip wire.

With a jerk, Meredith zipped the suitcase closed and strode over to her husband. The dresser top revealed what she had taken. The missing objects were now just cutout shapes in the dust: a circle for the small container of grape-seed salve I massaged into Hope’s skin after her baths; a rectangle for the mother-of-pearl comb I used to brush Hope’s fledgling hair; a square for the stack of laundered cloth diapers piled with shiny, tangled pins.

The stranger stepped forward, acting as a barrier
between the Fitzpatricks and me. His height only added to his imposing appearance, making him seem larger than life, an otherworldly judge. A detective, I thought
 
—or the Fitzpatricks’ lawyer. Neither was good.

“I’d advise you not to interfere today,” he said. “The Fitzpatrick family has every right to press charges, and if you fight back, that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

My heartbeat was a sharp staccato against my ribs. “Where is she?” I whispered. Stumbling over to the bed, I unspooled Hope’s yellow blanket from the quilt. It floated in the air like a contrail of sun. I pressed my face against it, breathing in her scent. “Tell me where she is!”

No one spoke.

My legs buckled, kneecaps ramming the hardwood floor. Clutching the blanket, I lifted my gaze and traced my eyes over the indentations in the mattress where my daughter and I slept. Someone crossed the room. The floorboards groaned as the person knelt beside me.

“Get up, Thom.” Meredith’s strident voice cut the room. “She’s making enough of a spectacle as it is.”

Thom began to rise. I pivoted and threw my body over his feet. “Please!” I stared up at him. His features were made indistinct by my horror. “
Please
 
—don’t take her from me!”

Startled, Thom tried to move. “McClintock, Meredith
 
—help me here.”

Solid hands gripped my shoulders. Meredith tried peeling my fingers off her husband. The face of her cameo ring winked at me like an eye. “Let go,” she commanded.
I wondered if she wanted my daughter or if she was punishing me for having wanted Thom.

Spent, I released him. He staggered backward and I collapsed. I heard the suitcase handle click. The wheels rolling across the floor. A volley of heels. Footsteps made a reluctant report.

“Come, Thom,” Meredith said. “Leave her.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

The door closed.

I spread my hands over the icy floor, seeking my daughter’s lost warmth, and wept.

Hopen Haus had long settled with the sounds of sleep. But I continued staring up at the ceiling, my eyes burning into the darkness like coals. I had braced the door shut with my rocking chair, and Fannie had stopped knocking at midnight, finally surrendering to the fact that this time I would not let her
 
—or anyone
 
—in. My milk let down again; each release was more painful than the last. It was ten minutes after Hope’s two-o’clock feeding. The sixth one she’d missed. The concept that Meredith would be the one meeting Hope’s needs did not devastate me as much as the fear that Hope’s needs would not be met. Was my daughter hungry? Was she crying, wondering why I would not come
 
—wondering why I had abandoned her the same way my mother had abandoned me?

I knew the contracts I’d so thoughtlessly signed the previous fall abolished all legal rights to Hope, who was then
just someone else’s child and the means to the completion of my degree. Plus, I remembered in the
In re Baby M
surrogacy case that the only reason Mary Beth Whitehead was granted visitation rights by the New Jersey Family Court was because Baby M was, genetically, half Mary Beth’s. Hope was entirely the Fitzpatricks’ in kinship and on paper. And on paper was the only thing that mattered
 
—regardless of the way I had carried, birthed, and sustained the child for the past fourteen months through my own flesh and blood.

I took the rocker from beneath the doorknob and went downstairs. Fannie was seated at the head of the dining room table. A mug was clamped between her hands. In the candlelight, her Plain dress and wizened features made the old midwife appear like a person of history carved in stone. Fannie looked up. Her eyes were as raw as mine. “Saved some
esse
for you,” she murmured. “It’s cold, but it might still taste
gut
.”

The nonchalance of her words penetrated me to the core. I did not know how to discuss food when my child was gone, due at least in part to my own lack of diligence. But for Fannie’s sake, I walked over to the sideboard and picked up the utensils and white ceramic plate. I sat across from her and flicked the cloth napkin open on my lap. The table was cleared and spread with a crisp tablecloth. The centerpiece was a quart jar filled with berried holly branches. I was facing the kitchen, and though it was dark, above the swinging doors the suspended copper pots gleamed. Hopen Haus was oddly quiet for the mass of girls
inhabiting it. The lack of noise was almost disturbing
 
—as though Fannie and I had awoken from a nightmare only to find ourselves the lone survivors after a plague.

Fannie took a sip of tea. I knew it was cold. “Would you like to go somewhere for a while?” she asked. “Have some space?”

I speared pasta with my fork but looked at the bite with repulsion. “I don’t need
space
,” I said. “I need my daughter.”

Fannie reached across the table, placing her hand on top of my own. “Of course,” she said, and then looked down. “I know how you feel.”

The fork clattered to my plate. “No,” I snapped, withdrawing my hand. “You don’t
know
how I feel. You lost a daughter, but she wasn’t taken from you. There’s a difference.”

Fannie’s tender eyes felt like the harshest rebuke. A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed onto the black waistband of her dress, darkening it like ink. It was probably three o’clock in the morning, and she hadn’t changed her clothes. I doubted she had taken time to go home since Hope was taken. For a moment, I wanted to go over and rest my head against Fannie’s bosom. I wanted to become that daughter who had died so young; I wanted her to become the mother I’d never really had. How could I compare the pain of our respective losses as if it were a competition? The far more important truth was that through our mutual loss, we had gained each other.

I hung my head and pushed the plate away. Wiping my
fingers on the napkin, I reached across the scarred kitchen table to take Fannie’s hand again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how you lost your daughter; she’s still not here.”

The old midwife nodded but said nothing.

“Is Wilbur in town?” I asked after a moment. “I need a driver.”

Fannie’s eyes clouded with confusion, then worry. “
Ach
, Rhoda,” she said. “You must remember that fighting back is not our way.”

“So you want me just to turn the other cheek? I’m sorry, but I have no more daughters to give!” I swallowed hard, trying to quell my emotions. But it was no use. At the mention of my child, my breasts stung. I picked up the cloth napkin and pressed it against my chest with both hands. My tears began to stream as my milk continued to let down. “I cannot,” I sobbed. “I cannot just
wait
here while my daughter’s being raised by someone who didn’t even want her to survive!”

Fannie nodded and reached across the table. “I know you can’t,
meedel
,” she said, pressing my hand with her parchment fingers. “I don’t think I could respect you if you could.”

I push through the swinging door after talking to Star and almost smack right into my roommate, Lydie. “Excuse me,” she says, arms crossed over her stomach. “May I speak with you?” I nod and slide the tray onto the dining table. Turning, I see that Lydie’s holding out a letter. Curious, I take it from her, but the two pages are written in German, the same language she used to write that letter to Uriah Rippentoe. Annoyed because I still don’t know what’s going on between the two of them, I try to hand the letter back. But Lydie’s now staring at the bows on her funny lace-up boots. Her braided pigtails bob as she seems to search for words.

“My
dawdy
’s sick,” she says. “
Mamm
said it’s time to come home and make amends.” Lydie’s voice sounds like she’s about to lose it. But when she glances up, her eyes are dry.

“Thought you were shunned or something.” This comes out nastier than I mean it to. Of course, Lydie doesn’t notice. She just refolds the letter and slips it into her apron pocket.

“Mennonites don’t shun,” she says. “But I was too afraid to go back . . . before.” Moving closer, she takes my hand. “Will you go with me? I . . . I can’t go alone.”

I take my hand from hers and fold my arms. I haven’t come to this hillbilly village to spend time with a sixteen-year-old Mennonite girl who sometimes seems like my grandma and sometimes like my kid. I have come to Hopen Haus to have room to breathe and
 
—without my mom constantly breathing down my neck
 
—to find out who I am. But even if Lydie’s backward ways drive me up the wall, what can it hurt to go on a trip for a few days? It’s not like I could put my baby in danger by going someplace else, and a break from Hopen Haus might be nice, though I don’t know how fun it’s going to be to stay at a Mennonite community. Plus, it’d be good to avoid Uriah, who I’m becoming obsessed with, now that he’s making a point to avoid me.

“When you want to leave?”

“Wilbur Byler’s already here. The letter was written two days ago. For all I know
 
—” Lydie takes a breath
 
—“my
dawdy
could already be dead.”

“Let me pack a few things first.” I squeeze her hand to make up for my snarky comment earlier. “Then I’ll come right down.”

I cross the dining room to climb the steps. The head midwife and I meet in the middle of the staircase. Rhoda Mummau doesn’t say a word, and for some reason, I feel so
uncomfortable that it’s all I can do to hold her stare. “I’m sorry, Amelia,” she says, balling her hand at her waist. “It’s just that
 
—” She looks away. Then she looks back at me and asks, “How are you?”

“Fine, thanks,” I say quickly and pass, thankful to escape her. At the top of the steps, I grip the railing and look down. Rhoda Mummau is still watching me. Sadness tugs at her features. Meeting my eyes again, the midwife turns and goes down the stairs.

Opening the door to our bedroom, I see sun beaming in through the window, as straight as a spotlight. It exposes the rusty bunk beds covered in these ancient ragbag quilts that are beginning to smell like Grandma Sarah’s perfume that I sprayed over everything to make it smell like her, my home. Stuffing my overnight bag with a change of clothes and a tank top and shorts, I sling it over my shoulder and hurry toward the door. Then I remember where I’m going. A Mennonite community probably wouldn’t care for my skimpy tank top and pound’s worth of jewelry. Peeling off my rings, I stride across the room and spill them across the dresser. I grab a sweater and go back downstairs to meet Lydie, waiting by the door.

The morning after Hope was taken, Wilbur Byler parallel parked between the lawyer’s office and the emporium. He
shut off the truck engine, tapped the steering wheel with his thumbs, and opened his mouth. But then he closed it. Taking his cap from the dusty dashboard, he pulled it on. “I’ll be at the diner,” he said.

I nodded but had to wait five minutes before I found the willpower to get out of the truck. The wind painted the cape dress to my quivering legs as I walked down the sidewalk toward the lawyer’s office. Outside, a sign reading
Williams, Attorney at Law
swung and screeched from two lengths of weathered chain. I pushed open the door and a bell chimed above it. I knew hiring a lawyer to argue on my behalf would only be wasting what little money and time I had. But logical or not, I could never forgive myself if I did not try.

Behind a desk, the secretary’s Timex swished around her wrist as she continued stamping checks resembling Monopoly money and tapping them into a pile. Then she glanced over her glasses
 
—giving my Plain garb a thorough once-over.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

I forced a smile. “Yes. I’d like to speak to Mr. Williams. Do I need an appointment?”

“My word
 
—no,” she said, and then rolled her chair out from beneath the desk and stood. “Just let me tell him you’re here.”

I nodded and went to stand in the waiting area. The coffee table in the center was crowded with dusty, dog-eared magazines that were at least three years old.

“Mr. Williams said to come on back,” the secretary called.

In a trance, I walked to the end of the hall. A nightlight glowed shell-pink inside an opened bathroom on the right. Breathing hard, I knocked on the office door.

“Come in,” a voice said.

I opened the door and saw a barrel-chested man sitting behind a desk that took up three-fourths of the room. He pointed to the chair across from it. “Have a seat,” he said.

I sat.

Mr. Williams loosened his tie and interlaced his short fingers. He leaned his shoulders forward. “Yes?” he prodded.

I pressed my kneecaps to keep my legs from jumping; Mr. Williams must not be allowed to realize how near hysterics I was. “Last year,” I began, “I was hired as a wealthy family’s gestational surrogate, but when an amniocentesis showed the possibility of the child having a chromosomal abnormality, the family wanted to do one more test and then
 
—if it came back with the same result
 
—abort the child. I had already fallen in love with the little girl, so before they did the second test, I fled down here to a Mennonite community in Tennessee. But I suppose the Fitzpatricks
 
—that’s the name of the family who has her now
 
—got wind of the fact that the child was healthy, so yesterday they came down here with their lawyer and took her back.”

Mr. Williams winced. “Let me make sure I’m following you,” he said. “You kidnapped a child who has
no
biological connection to you?”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“There’d have to be. If I understand correctly, you’re lucky they just took the child and didn’t throw you in jail.”

“What if the biological mother never wanted the child?” I shrilled. “What if she’s just using the child as a way . . . a way of punishing me?”

“Punishing you for what?” Mr. Williams said gently. “Was everything aboveboard?”

“Yes,” I murmured, looking down. “There were plenty of contracts.”

“I’m sorry, Miss . . .” He paused as he waited for me to provide a name, but I did not know which one to give.

“Rhoda,” I said after a pause. “Rhoda Mummau.”

“I’m sorry, Rhoda, but I’m just going to tell it like it is.” Mr. Williams patted the pocket of his dress shirt and tugged out a pack of cigarettes. Tapping a stick, he looked at me. “You mind?” I shook my head. He continued. “I’ve dealt with a lot of custody cases
 
—” the cigarette nodded between his lips
 
—“and I’ve seen them drag on for years and years.” Flicking out his tongue, he picked off a piece of tobacco lint. Then he lit the cigarette and took a long draw, expelling a wreath of smoke toward the ceiling. “By the end,” he said, “the child’s old enough to understand what’s going on, and regardless of the verdict, he
 
—” Mr. William pointed the cigarette at me
 
—“or
she
feels guilty because she doesn’t know who she’s supposed to belong to. Or who she’s even supposed to be.”

He tilted his head, a curled coxcomb of hair dangling over his left eye. He brushed it impatiently aside. “You read your Bible?” he asked, then stopped and smiled at my
kapp
.
“Of course you read your Bible. Believe it or not,” Mr. Williams said, “even lawyers crack their Bibles from time to time, and I often thought these custody battles remind me of the quandary with King Solomon. You know, where those two women claim the same child, and the one who’s really the mother gives her rights up so the child can survive?”

I nodded and thought of the title of my master’s thesis: “Solomon’s Choice: Finding an Ethical Solution for Remorseful Surrogates.” I realize now, having felt the full cleave of maternal separation, that I’d had no idea what I was talking about back then.

“Rhoda, the question I want you to ask yourself is
 
—” Mr. Williams rested his cigarette on the ashtray without scrubbing out the butt
 
—“are you the kind of mother who would hurt her child just to retain her rights?”

Looking down, I clenched my hands in my lap. The pattern on my cape dress blurred. My throat thick with emotion, again I just shook my head.

“I didn’t think you were,” he said. “But please, Rhoda, if you ever need anything . . .” Mr. Williams patted the pocket of his shirt as if searching for a card, but I just heard the crinkle of the cellophane wrapping his cigarettes.

I stood from the chair and pulled my dress free from a cut in the vinyl. “Thank you for your time,” I rasped, knowing that I had to leave now or cry in front of him.

It wasn’t until I was standing on the cracked sidewalk with the lawyer’s sign creaking in the wind that I knew I could never take the Fitzpatricks to court.

But neither could I walk away. Not yet. I would push against every door, legal or otherwise, until I knew that nothing else could possibly be done
 
—even if that meant entering back into the
Englischer
world I’d sworn I would leave behind.

I open my eyes and see a circle of my foundation smeared across the van’s tinted glass. I glance over at Lydie to see if she’s slept too. But she’s just staring at Wilbur’s head, with its wiry brown hair sticking through the back of his baseball cap. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Lydie whispers.

The diesel passenger van chugs up the road winding through what Lydie told me is the Cumberland Mountains. This bluish mist covers the vehicle, making it almost impossible to see farther than the low lights. I look at the floorboard scattered with hamburger wrappers and at the windows smudged with fingerprints from hundreds of passengers who’ve ridden in here before us. I thought I’d like getting away from Hopen Haus, where nothing seems to happen besides the midwives’ OCD baby monitoring and this ton of mind-numbing chores. But it didn’t occur to me that Lydie and I were leaving a place of safety until we’d already gotten past Hopen Haus’s boundary walls. Now I’m not sure it was such a good idea.

The van shoots through the rest of the mist. Wilbur switches his low lights to bright and says, “Must feel strange, Lydie. You heading back home.” These are the first words he’s said since we climbed in the vehicle, which seems funny, since I’ve seen him chat it up with Looper and Rhoda. Not to mention that friendly heart-to-heart with Uriah out in the springhouse. In the rearview mirror, I watch Wilbur search my roommate’s face. Lydie nods, but her eyes stay on her lap. She twists her fingers together before reaching over and grabbing mine.

Her small palm is sticky with sweat. At first, I feel awkward, but then I remember that Lydie’s as innocent as a kindergartner and should be treated like one. So I let her hold my fingers. As I do, I wonder what it would be like to have a family member
 
—a mom, a sister
 
—who was as close to my heart as the reach of a hand.

I mean, when I was growing up, Grandma Sarah insisted that I hold her hand whenever we were at the playground, the mall, or the zoo, and there were all these strangers around. She also hugged me so hard whenever she came and left for the day that my back would pop, and she would say, “I love you so much; I could just squeeze the puddings out of you!”
 
—which was kind of a weird thing to say, if you think about it. I could tell from this, and from all these cookies she baked and these awful scarf and glove sets she knitted, that Grandma Sarah tried her very best to make me feel like her real grandchild and not just her babysitting charge, even insisting that I call her “Grandma” and not Miss Sarah like my mom wanted. And though I knew Grandma
Sarah from the time I was born, she
was
getting paid to take care of me.

Clearing my throat, I say mostly just to fill up the quiet, “I had this project in preschool. We . . . we were supposed to bring in something from when we were babies: hair from our first cut, the outfit I wore home from the hospital, a picture of my mom pregnant. But she had none of this. Not a thing. My mom seemed really mad when I asked her too. Like it was
my
fault or something that she didn’t have this stuff around.”

Lydie whispers, staring out the window, “I don’t have any pictures from when I was a
bobbel
, either.”

“But you all don’t believe in taking pictures,” I say. “It’s different with the
Englisch
. If I was, like, the fifth kid or something, it would’ve been different
 
—it would’ve made sense that my mom was too busy to keep up with such things. But I was their first kid. Their
only
kid. I guess my mom just didn’t care enough to record anything. Or maybe she just didn’t care, period.”

“
Ach
, Amelia,” Lydie says. “I’m sure she does.”

I shrug with the same I-don’t-care attitude that drove my parents nuts when I lived at home, which is only a cover-up for the fact that I take everything really hard. All of a sudden, I want to put my head on Lydie’s knees and bawl my head off over this feeling of abandonment I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. Then the hair on my neck stands up, and I blink away tears and look up into the rearview mirror, aware that Lydie’s not the only one listening. Wilbur’s doughy hands are still throttling
the steering wheel. His diesel passenger van is still zooming along ten over the speed limit. But under the curled brim of his red cap, his flat eyes are watching me. And I know he’s seen everything, heard every word I said.