The Midwife (8 page)

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.

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 with 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.

Spring light slanted through the rectangular window. Dust motes sparkled and fell like stars. In that moment fraught with an intimacy I had desired yet did not deserve, the emotion I felt was not jealousy that he was Meredith’s husband or anger that this child I carried was not mine. Instead, I just felt wonder that I had been gifted with this child at all. My gratitude for someone whom my body would usher into the world, but whose life I could never fully claim, let me understand the beautiful sacrifice of true maternal love.

The force of the office door opening flapped the papers scattered across the floor. Thom’s wife stood in its gap, staring down at her husband and me embracing. Her blue eyes glimmered. Her lips were hard pressed like marble. She had enough dignity not to say anything, but before I could explain what she thought she had seen, Meredith pivoted on her heel and stalked out of the room. The door remained ajar. The misaligned papers became still. If not for the trail of her citrus perfume, I would have thought I had dreamed Meredith Fitzpatrick’s startling presence.

I stood from the chair with my hand still holding my stomach.

Thom rested his hands on my shoulders and eased me back down. “Don’t,” he said. “Please
 
—let me take care of this.”

I didn’t know how he would, though. As I stood staring
at Thom’s shoeprints marring the papers of my thesis, I no longer believed the argument I had spent months backing up with primary and secondary sources. There was no ethical solution when a surrogate fell in love with the child a contract prevented her from claiming. There was no ethical solution because there really was no choice. The child was never the surrogate’s, even if the surrogate’s heart belonged entirely to the child.

I did not know where to go once I had signed into the fertility clinic, aware of Meredith Fitzpatrick’s eyes burning into my back from her chair along the left-hand wall. I had not seen Meredith in the two weeks since she entered her husband’s office and found Thom and me embracing. And I knew she did not want to see me. I knew that if she could extract this child without causing it harm, she would. But she couldn’t, so she had no choice but to be civil, although I am sure everything inside her itched to paint her handprint across my face.

Thankfully, Dr. Hancock and the genetic counselor, Dr. Michaels, came into the room as soon as we were called back.

Dr. Hancock smiled before pulling up the swivel chair. Dr. Michaels remained standing with her back against the wall. Everything from Dr. Michaels’s cardboard expression to her stoic voice seemed an attempt to observe us from the shadows or to become a shadow herself. I noticed this because I often made the same attempt.

“Why don’t you all take a seat?” Dr. Hancock asked, indicating the three padded chairs she must have brought in specifically for our visit.

She continued to watch us long after we were settled. In that moment, I understood that she was not just being reticent; she was trying to calculate her words. “It seems . . . ,” Dr. Hancock began, then paused to clear her throat. “There’s something wrong with your child, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzpatrick. For the past two weeks since Dr. Michaels and I’ve been monitoring your surrogate, Beth
 
—” Dr. Hancock nodded at me
 
—“we’ve noted the high level of alpha-fetoprotein in her blood; the excess of amniotic fluid; the coarctation of the aorta
 
—a narrowing of the exit vessel from the heart. Although the baby did fine during the stress tests, the traces of trisomy 18 and 21 convey to us that your daughter might have a chromosomal abnormality.”

Meredith inhaled, as if extracting whatever oxygen there was left in the room. “Like Downs?” she asked.

“We’re not sure,” Dr. Hancock admitted. “Sometimes everything we look at can point to a certain condition, but when the child’s born, everything is fine. Other times, we will monitor mother and child and only discover a chromosomal abnormality once that child’s born.”

“What do we do now?” Thom asked. With a PhD in obstetrics, he must’ve known the answer. But as a father, he was baffled . . . stunned.

Dr. Michaels stepped from the shadows. The fluorescent lighting glinted off her beige hair.

“In a few weeks, we could do another amniocentesis,” she said. “To make sure we haven’t made a mistake. If the results are the same, we could do a D and C, which is
 
—”

“I know what a D and C is,” Thom snapped. His face softened. “Sorry. You just don’t have to explain.”

Meredith turned to her husband. “I don’t know. You might, but
I
don’t.” She faced the doctor again. “And I’d like to.”

Dr. Hancock continued the conversation where Dr. Michaels had been cut off, and I imaged that this tag team was accustomed to dealing with parents whose underlying tensions erupted during stress. “D and C stands for dilation and curettage,” she said. “It is the most invasive of the procedures, as it would completely remove the fetus from the uterine cavity
 
—”

“Hold on,” Thom interrupted, shaking his head as vehemently as Meredith was nodding hers. “This is a decision that will have to take time.”

Meredith said, “Just like deciding to have this child took time?” I looked over. Her legs were crossed, arms folded. Her blue eyes shot ice.

“We will not discuss this now,” Thom said.

Meredith turned back to Dr. Michaels. “We want another amniocentesis.” She waved toward the calendar tacked to the wall. “Put us on your schedule or whatever you do.”