The Midwife (2 page)

I saw you that day we came to Tennessee to take your daughter
 
—and their daughter
 
—back. The Fitzpatricks carried the child out to the rental car and placed her like a bundled heirloom in my arms. She was half-asleep and fragrant from her nap, and she yawned and cuddled right against my chest as if she had always been there. Thom and Meredith went back inside to gather the rest of her things, and that’s when you crossed the yard and looked at the car
 
—and it seemed that you were looking right at me.

I could feel your eyes boring through the tinted glass and seeing the woman who had abandoned you holding tight to your child. I wanted to go to you. I hope you know this. I wanted to ask your forgiveness, but I was still too afraid. I could barely recognize you beneath your Plain clothes, and I could see in your bearing that you were stronger than before.

What if you hated me? You had every right. It was better not to know.

So I remained silent. I remained a coward. I locked the doors and kissed the child’s warm forehead. I pressed my back against the seat and breathed. I watched you walk up those porch steps like a lamb to the slaughter. Inside the house, I knew, you would learn that you would never see your daughter again. . . .

Nine minutes after the chapel bells heralded the first academic session, Dr. Thomas Fitzpatrick came into the department. His glasses were snow-spotted and the toggles of his peacoat off by one. Keeping my fingertips on the keyboard, I watched him walk the length of carpet down to his office. Then I looked at the computer screen.
Winslow, Beth (1995)
, it read.
Solomon’s Choice: Finding an Ethical Solution for Remorseful Surrogates. Master’s Thesis, Simms University.
My heart beat double-time with the computer cursor’s pulse. From the cabinet, I took Thom’s favorite cup and saucer, poured water from the kettle on the hot plate,
dolloped the PG Tips with cream, and carried it down the hall.

I pushed the door open farther and stood in the entrance, waiting. Located near the radiator, Thom’s office was humid. It smelled of thawing wool and frostbitten winter. Gold-embossed collector’s editions from Gray’s well-known
Anatomy of the Human Body
to the rare
A Discourse upon Some Late Improvements of the Means for Preserving the Health of Mariners
were stacked in teetering heaps throughout the room. From experience, I knew they were organized in a labyrinth only Thom could traverse.

Wall-to-wall shelves were bookended with souvenirs from Meredith’s and his trips overseas: an urn filled with pottery shards gathered from shores whose waters harbored a flooded Grecian city; a child-sized drum, its top stretched taut with buckskin; an aboriginal mask whose mouth gaped into a yawn. Despite these variegated treasures, the books were the only things Thom was particular about. The only things he did not want touched.

Thom had shed his coat. Beneath it, he wore the tweed blazer with the stamped brown buttons and worn leather patches on the elbows that always made him too hot during his animated lectures. His yellow scarf hung from the back of his swivel chair and coiled up on the floor. A cup and saucer with cream skimming the surface of yesterday’s tea sat like a paperweight on the notes scattered across his desk. Thom’s desk, the rolltop slid back, was centered beneath a rectangle window that was flush with the ground outside the basement offices and whose ledge was piled almost to
the top with snow. This allowed just enough natural light to reveal the floating dust that permeated the air in the ancient brick building.

“Dr. Fitzpatrick?”

Thom’s head came up. His fountain pen paused on a note that, even after a year as his graduate assistant, I still could not decipher. Swiveling his chair to face me, he blinked, his great mind awakening from some cerebral dream. “Hello, Miss Beth,” he said. His British accent was distinct, even after twenty years in the States.

Crossing the room, I set the saucer beside the one I had brought yesterday and took one step back. Then I looked at the pennies glinting in my polished loafers and said, “I just came to tell you that . . .” I paused. “The second beta test doubled to 437. We still need an ultrasound to confirm the heartbeat. But it looks like you and Meredith . . .” The words faltered behind my smile. “You and Meredith are going to have a baby.”

“A baby?” Thom stared at me a moment
 
—apparently captivated by the news we had so long anticipated
 
—and then squinted at the calendar above his desk. I could see the date, circled in red, when my twenty-two-year-old uterus had received one grade A and two grade B fertilized embryos belonging to Thom and Meredith. “That’s wonderful. What are you
 
—” he calculated the days by tapping his fingertips on his thumb
 
—“fifteen days post transfer?”

I nodded.

“It will be around September, then?”

“Yes.” I swallowed. “Mid-September.”

He said, “Meredith and I were married in September.” I had a hard time envisioning the woman, who had participated in the IVF with an air of martyrdom, as a younger, blushing bride. He continued, “You have any idea what it is?”

Even after the procedures that let me stand in my professor’s office with his child tucked inside my womb, the intimacy of our conversation felt wrong. He needed to be having this discussion with his wife, Meredith, who was already back at work, despite the surgery that had reset the reproductive schedule of the affluent Fitzpatrick lives.

“No idea,” I lied, when I already sensed a girl. “How’re you going to tell Meredith?”

“Not sure.” He sighed. “Take her out for dinner?” Thom was silent, contemplating this. Then he picked his glasses up and hooked them behind his ears. “A baby,” he repeated with that same whispered awe. The tortoiseshell frames pushed up on his cheeks as he smiled. “How’re you feeling?”

I ducked my head. “Really, Dr. Fitzpat
 
—” My cheeks flushed. “Thom, I mean.” I dared to look up now that his glasses were in place; a barrier between us, transparent though it was. “I’m fine. I’ve done this before.”

“I forget sometimes,” he admitted. “But promise you’ll let me know if you’re feeling any nausea, and we’ll cut back on your hours or divide your work load with Suzanne.”

I nodded and broke eye contact. I did not want Thom to see my confusion surrounding the dynamics of our relationship, which was quickly becoming so hard to define. I pointed to the fresh cup of tea I’d set beside his desk.

He took an obligatory sip and dabbed the side of
his mouth with the back of his hand. “Perfect,” he said. “Thank you.”

Tears needled my eyes. Hair brushing hot cheeks, I collected yesterday’s cup and saucer and left his office without letting the painted knob catch. Taking a seat at my desk, I stared at the computer screen and typed:

This year, over four hundred babies were born to surrogate mothers within the United States, and many of these children will never be held by those who carried them. Although many options exist for the creation of a family, such as foster care and adoption
 
—

Breathing hard, I held Delete until the page went blank, turned off the computer, and cradled my face in my hands.

This is a business transaction,
I told myself.

That is all.

As I sat across from Thom and Meredith Fitzpatrick, I had to wonder how they had come to this place. Not to the restaurant with its mahogany tables and menu whose only entry I could pronounce was
hors d’oeuvres
, but how they’d come to be married that fall day a few years after my birth. Albeit unversed in the psychology of marital relationships, as I’d never been married myself, I at least knew the rule that opposites attract. Perhaps Thom had once been as drawn to Meredith’s domineering personality as she’d
been to his passive one. Yet I had never seen a couple who seemed so far apart, and here I was six weeks pregnant with a child who would make them a family.

“You won’t drink, will you?” asked Meredith, watching me over her glass of wine that probably cost more than I spent on a week’s worth of groceries.

I shook my head, clearing my throat to reply, “No, ma’am,” as anything else would sound rude to someone accustomed to subservience.

Thom’s laughter was too brittle to cover his frustration. “Come on, Meredith. She’s already been through the screening process.”

“You’re exercising? Eating properly?” she continued, ignoring him.

Beneath the table, I placed a hand against my unsettled stomach. “Yes,” I replied.

Meredith leaned back as the waiter slid onto the table salmon ribboned across a bed of lettuce. “And you’re able to juggle pregnancy and graduate school?” She flicked open a napkin and draped it over her lap.

I said, “Yes,” and smiled at the waiter, who set before me a long wooden paddle with a browned artisan loaf and a small bowl of walnut pesto. Though it was meant as an appetizer, it was the only meal my stipend could afford. The Fitzpatricks had offered to pay for my meal, but I declined their offer out of pride. I didn’t want the division line between us to become nebulous with favors. “I haven’t had any morning sickness,” I continued. “And I didn’t with my previous pregnancy. So . . . I should be fine.” I hated
how inadequate I felt. Not like someone capable of safely bearing the Fitzpatrick’s child.

“Yes. About that . . .” Meredith set down her fork. “Why didn’t you want to keep the child?”

The ease with which she asked me, a complete stranger who happened to be incubating her offspring, such a personal question sucked the breath from my lungs. Closing my eyes, my mind reeled with the image of that precious baby in my arms, who had looked around the delivery room with the same remarkable, two-toned irises as his father. I recalled the blue cap I’d knitted during freshman biology peeking above the striped blanket. The petals of his tiny pink hand reaching out to twine the stem of my smallest finger. How the Mennonite midwife, Deborah Brubaker, had allowed me to nurse him as a wrenchingly beautiful gift to me.

After I’d signed the release forms that allowed the adoptive parents to pick my child up and take him away, Deborah had come into my hospital room and switched off the television. I had turned it to a morning talk show discussing the second anniversary of
In re Baby M
 
—the infamous custody battle that resulted in America’s first court ruling in favor of surrogacy. Surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead had been granted visitation rights to the child she had carried for William and Elizabeth Stern, known as “Baby M.” Whitehead had birthed the child and relinquished her as contracted, but twenty-four hours later, Whitehead demanded that she be given back by threatening suicide. Once the Sterns returned the child, Whitehead
had fled New Jersey, taking the newborn with her. The Sterns had tied up the Whiteheads’ bank accounts and issued a warrant to arrest Mary Beth and her husband.

From my rapt expression while watching the talk show, Deborah must have sensed the case was giving my eighteen-year-old heart foolish hope that, though my son’s adoption was closed, if I simply demanded he be given back as Whitehead had done, one day I could hold him again. Deborah had silenced my protests when the television screen faded to black and dropped the remote into the pocket of her scrubs. Then she’d crossed the room and held my forehead with one cool hand. At this foreign, maternal touch, I’d recoiled and buried my face in the hospital pillow. Deborah, as if sensing the deeper hurt beneath my loss, began to sing Pennsylvania Dutch lullabies until my angry sobbing and the contractions shrinking my vacant womb had ceased.

Thom’s steak knife clattered to his plate. I opened my eyes, drawn back to the present. “My word, Meredith,” he said from between his teeth. “This dinner’s to celebrate the pregnancy, not spring an interrogation.”

Meredith faced her husband. He stared back, unflinching beneath the wielded scalpel of her gaze. I then realized that Thomas Fitzpatrick might not be as passive as I thought. I wondered what else about him might not be as I’d thought. Wearing a black suit coat accented with brass cuff links and his unruly hair slicked with gel, he looked as refined and wealthy as his wife, not the prototypical absentminded professor with perpetually smudged spectacles and tea-splotched notes layering his desk.

“I just want her to understand how serious this is,” said Meredith.

I sat there stunned, wondering how she could say that
 
—how she could ask me these things
 
—when we had both endured the clinical and psychological screenings. When we had both received injections for the synchronization of our cycles, gone through the ovarian and endometrial stimulation, the monitoring, the egg retrieval and transfer. The entirety of the in vitro fertilization procedure had been invasive if not painful, and I was just at the beginning with thirty-four more weeks to go.

Thom said, “Her name’s Beth.”

“Okay, then. I want
Beth
to understand how serious this is.”

The harsh undertones in the way Meredith said my name drew me up short. I shivered, although she had reserved a table for us near the fire. I said, “I’ll take good care of your child.”

Her blue eyes ricocheted away from her husband and back to me. In them I read uncertainty, doubt, jealousy, and I found myself questioning what kind of mother she would make. But I wouldn’t let myself stop to think any further. I couldn’t. This was a business transaction, I reminded myself; that was all. With the money from their check, I could pursue my PhD in bioethics and say good-bye to Thomas Fitzpatrick and to the child of his that I had birthed.

Meredith picked her fork up and set it down again. Leaving her napkin draped across the seat, she stood and picked up her purse. “Excuse me,” she said.

Thom and I watched his wife stride across the restaurant in a pair of heels that glinted beneath her dress pants. He said, still watching her, “It’s not your fault, Beth.”

I looked down at the table. “Your wife’s protective. I think
 
—I think that would be normal in a situation like this.”

Across the restaurant, crystal rang in a toast.

“Hey
 
—” Thom reached across the table to touch the radial artery on the inside of my wrist. It thrummed to life. I could picture the warm blood rushing up through the vessels in my arm and pouring into my heart. “I hope you know what this means to me. To us.”