The Midwife (5 page)

My vision shifted back to Dr. Hancock as she guided the wand back and forth, harder and harder. The dimples around her mouth deepened. I knew for what she was searching, and my own frenzied heartbeat began to pound throughout the room. Thom moved closer and met my eyes. I saw the fear in them that something was wrong; something that, with our medical knowledge, we still had not foreseen.

“Let me get Dr. Chun,” Dr. Hancock said. “He can always find them in a heartbeat.”

Thom and I had long crossed the point of lightening tension with humor. We did not smile in return. Thom resumed pacing as we waited; he hadn’t made one return trip when he asked, “You haven’t spotted, have you?”

My mouth was too dry to speak. I shook my head.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said after four lengths of pacing. Thom nodded at his own reassurance. Walking over to the window, he split the blinds to peer down at the parking lot. Dr. Chun came in and smiled at me, then saw Thom near the window. Thom turned to face him. I saw that, despite his words of comfort, Thom’s skin was as white as the doctor’s coat.

“Nervous, Dad?” Dr. Chun quipped, coming over to the examining table. He kneaded my womb, then rolled the sonogram wand to the left and waited a moment to distinguish my rapid heartbeat from that of the heartbeat
of someone beyond me. “There it is,” he whispered. My eyes were focused on Thom. The doctor glanced over his shoulder.

“Hey, Dad,” Dr. Chun said, “I think she wants you closer for this.”

Thom left the window and walked over to me without lifting his eyes to my face.

“It’s okay,” I said, looking at the sweat rimming his hairline and his fingers tugging at the cuffs of his oxford sleeves. “Your baby’s going to be okay, Thom. I’ll make sure of it.”

Taking off his glasses, he wiped his eyes and reached across the examining table to take my hand. I closed my eyes and turned my head toward the wall. Tears saturated the hair at my temples and leaked to pool in the whorl of my ears. And all the while, the room flooded with the sound of my heartbeat mingled with the heartbeat of the child who was Thom and Meredith Fitzpatrick’s.

But who could never be mine.

A lone cricket chirps in a darkened corner of Hopen Haus, and even
he
sounds stifled
 
—parched. The log-and-chink walls push in close. I cannot breathe around the aroma of cedar chips lining my dresser drawers and the mildewed rafters crisscrossing overhead. I know this panic attack is
due to more than just temperature. It’s because of Ernest Looper’s disquieting presence.

I pad barefoot down the stairs and go out to the east porch, expecting to find him. But it is almost midnight. The steps are empty; the swing, still. And then I hear music coming from the barn. The few dandelions that have escaped the goats’ insatiable mouths rub their feathered heads against my legs as I cross the yard. Loosening some bobby pins shackling my
kapp
over my bun, I tug out a few face-framing strands. But my hair is burlap-brown needled with silver
 
—nothing like Alice Rippentoe’s halo of curls.

I used to be relieved that these cape dresses and
kapps
buried every hint of femininity as if beneath a shroud. I had never cared for my appearance, and now it no longer mattered what I looked like.What was important was how well I could care for others. Yet walking down the hill toward this man whose presence once filled up my days but who now only consumes my past, I find that the shapeless dress reminds me that I am indeed a woman. And that when I lost my daughter, I let my dreams go with her.

Looper’s headlights pierce through the barn slats, illuminating the bats swooping after prey. His truck radio is playing “Hotel California.” His dogs must smell me because they begin to bark. My pulse quickens. After our altercation on the porch three hours ago, I am not sure how Looper is going to receive me
 
—or if he is going to receive me at all. I tell myself that I am being foolish
 
—a woman on the cusp of menopause acting as infatuated with Looper
as sixteen-year-old Lydie Risser is with Alice’s eighteen-year-old son. And though Looper and I are far removed from the summer that both united and tore us apart, I cannot help remembering how it felt to be not just his carpooling friend who proofread his love letters but the girl he finally saw.

The tinny rasp of metal upon metal boomerangs across the night as Looper wrenches bolts free and then tightens them again. I come around the corner of the barn. The dogs stop barking and amble over with wagging tails and eager grins. Peering around the worn brown hood of the Chevy, Looper smiles and points to the exposed engine.

“A beaut, huh?” His casual manner puts me at ease. But I should have known; Looper’s never been the type to rehash old wrongs.

I pick my way around scattered lug nuts and coated blue cords peeled down to shredded copper. Recalling the interior of his Firebird, I remember that Looper’s never been the cleanliest of men.

“Wouldn’t know much about trucks,” I say, “seeing as I haven’t driven a car in the past eighteen years.”

Looper tosses the wrench into a worn metal box and uses both hands to slam the truck hood. I step back as dust rises from the vehicle in a plume. “Forgot about you being Mennonite.” He grins, grime filling in the crow’s-feet framing his green-gold eyes. His nails are ragged and filled with dirt; his T-shirt, grease splattered and torn, revealing a patch of skin far paler than his arms. His hair is thinner. He even seems shorter, somehow
 
—not like the
six-foot-two, chiseled quarterback with the string of high school girls who were my archenemies and his pep team.

“What happened to you, Looper?” I ask and then wince at my implication that who he has become is not enough.

Looper bends to gather up the scattered tools and chucks them with a clang into the box. Snapping the lid, he hefts the toolbox onto his truck bed and looks at me. “You.”

“What?”

“You,” he repeats. “
You
happened to me.”

“You mean, when I left?”

Looper climbs up into the driver’s side of his truck. He uses the shoulder of his T-shirt to wipe his neck and hands. “The first time, when you left for college? Or the second time, when you left for good?”

“I didn’t leave a second time, Looper. I just never came back home.”

“You know what I mean.”

Wanting to sprint out of the barn, I walk on flat, dirty feet over to the buggy we should have sold two years ago when Hopen Haus auctioned off the horses we couldn’t afford to keep. But somehow the buggy has remained: a mannequin for a gossamer gown embroidered with spider sacs and dust. Picking up a horse brush rusting red on the barn floor, I swipe the seat of the buggy and climb inside.

“So,” I ask, now that I can’t see him answer, “what did I do to turn you into a drifter who trades family for dogs?”

“Hey,” says Looper. “Keep my dogs outta this.” But his words lilt with a smile.

The Eagles sing the longest refrain. The dogs pant.

Looper makes a noise in his throat that is half clearing, half groan. “Guess after you left,” he says, “I thought I’d just wait ’round for you to come back. But then years passed with me just waiting, and you never did come home. I got married, then divorced. No kids, just the dogs. Worked at Winningham’s for a while, and every couple months or so, your dad would come in there needing a trowel or a plumb line.”

Stark images of my father, Oscar Winslow, puncture through my cache of suppressed memories and imprint themselves on my heart: wavy brown hair tumbling into eyes as deep as wells; broad shoulders and back, which his job as a stonemason have formed into an immovable boulder; large hands as hard and dry as the mortar he mixed. He used to dare my brother, Benny, and me to prick his scaly palms with sewing needles and swear
 
—with tears in his eyes
 
—that he couldn’t feel a thing.

Every few years, the manual labor would pinch his wedding band around his finger like a vise, and Benny or I would be enlisted to smear his fingers with Crisco to try and work the ring free. But as soon we did, our father would go to Crescent Jewelers in La Crosse and replace it with a new one. Otherwise, he never took the ring off
 
—even though his high-powered equipment could have snagged that dull gold band and stripped his finger right down to the bone.

I ask, steeling myself for the worst, “How is he?”

“Fine,” says Looper. I close my eyes in relief. “I mean,
he can’t get ’round as fast as he used to. But he’s still as ornery as they come. Goes into the American Café for his paper and coffee every morning, and then heads out to the job site to work like a man half his age.”

“And Benny? Married? Kids?”

“Two,” Looper says. “Kids, that is. Only one wife.”

I smile. My only sibling, my brother, shall forevermore be Benny
 
—the twelve-year-old with a farmer’s tan, buckteeth, and tousled brown hair sticking out from beneath a baseball cap, which is exactly how he looked when I left him. I cannot picture him capable of becoming the parent I have always wanted to be and yet
 
—having birthed two children
 
—could never attain.

Is it because he was too young to remember our mother’s abandonment, while I am still living in the ruins of her devastation?

Swallowing hard, I ask, “Has anybody heard from my mom?” The title of the woman who birthed me, but who stopped being my mother the day she drove out that dusty farm lane, tastes like corroded metal on my tongue. The barrier between us will not allow me to read Looper’s eyes. However, in the answering silence, I know that this time my mother has not just been located, but that something has happened. And that all hope of reconciliation is truly gone. How could I have believed that the energy sustaining my thirty-year-old anger would have kept my mother alive? How can I now mourn her passing when, for years, I ached for her return so much that I wished for some kind of absolution, even if that meant her death?

“When?” The word scrapes up my throat.

“A little over a year ago . . . around Christmas,” Looper replies, as if afraid to hurt me. He should know that
 
—like my father’s calloused hand
 
—I cannot feel the hot needle of his revelation poking into my flesh. I do not let myself feel anything. I
can’t
let myself feel anything, just as I can’t let anyone in. Tightening my jaw, I remind myself that there’s no need to mourn my mother’s passing because my mother became dead to me when she left. The alternative
 
—believing she had simply chosen to stay away
 
—was too heartrending to bear.

“Ya know, Beth, your mom never gave up on finding you,” Looper adds. For comfort, I suppose. And I wonder if he’s lying. “She wanted me to tell you that. She made me promise that I’d always keep looking, that I would find you for her
 
—though even before she died, she kept thinking you’d come walking right in to say your good-byes.”

“She’s the one who walked out first,” I snap, the pain flaring from that old desertion as from a phantom limb. “And she
sure
didn’t say good-bye then!”

Looper doesn’t respond. The barn is silent except for the radio and his panting dogs.

Staring sullenly at the opposite side of the buggy, I envision the framed picture my father used to keep on the nightstand next to his alarm clock and watch. It captured my mother in a time when she was not my mother, Mrs. Winslow, but a high school student named Sarah Graybill. In the picture, as older pictures always go, my mother looked far more accomplished than I had felt at eighteen.
She wore a floral blouse with a sweetheart neckline and a glinting silver cross. Her brown hair was stiff and smooth like fondant icing. Her wine-colored lipstick contrasted perfectly with her pearly white teeth.

I had talked to that picture on the morning of my first period; on the day Mrs. Looper took me to get my first training bra at Sears; on the afternoon I saw Ernest Looper, who was in tenth grade with me, kiss Chelsea Robbins before saying, “Get in here, kid,” and driving me home from school. When I was the same age as my mother in the picture, I had stood before it dressed in my prom gown with the uneven hem that I had stitched myself. I had asked the picture if I was pretty. My mother had just stared at me in silence.
She
was so beautiful and perfect, I felt that I could never measure up. Was this the reason she had left? Not knowing the answer, I then stretched myself across my parents’ bed
 
—that my mother was not there to make
 
—and cried.

“Were Dad and Benny with her when she . . . passed?” I whisper.

“Yeah. They were there,” he says. “Your dad actually let her come home, no questions asked. It was real touching to watch how things got healed between your parents, especially in the end. That’s when Ben flew in with his wife
 
—and kids. It was hard for him to see your mom like that. But I could tell he was glad he came.”

Only now do I cry. My father and brother got the moment of closure for which my barren soul has always longed. Yet what would I have said to my mother, if given
the chance? Would I have screamed at her? Sobbed on her lap like a child? Would I have lied and told her that I forgave her, just to let her rest in peace? No, I realize; I would have told the truth.

“I think it’s best I wasn’t there,” I murmur.

Wiping tears from my face, I step out of the buggy and see Looper put a folded envelope back into his pocket. Looking up, his eyes bore into mine with anger and compassion and every word he seems to think but does not say: How much has changed since I’ve been gone. How hypocritical it is for me to judge my mother, when at twenty-three, I disappeared without a word just as she left us all those years ago.

But when I fled Boston with the Fitzpatricks’ child in my womb, my mother’s memory was the reason I could not return home. So I instead entered a strange land called Dry Hollow, knowing full well that I was hurting Ernest Looper and knifing open my father’s old wounds while trying to avoid confronting and healing my own. I did this knowing I was leaving my little brother behind. Yet I told myself he would rather cling to a phantom mother, anyway, than to the flesh-and-blood sister who for five years before her own child’s conception had raised him as her son.