The Midwife's Confession

“Sure,” Jenny said. She loved any excuse to drive now that she had her license.

Grace looked up from her phone. “Can you drop me off home first?” she asked Jenny.

“Don’t you want to see the babies?” Jenny asked.

Grace shook her head, but I knew it wasn’t the babies she didn’t want to see. It was the hospital. Tara had told me that Grace couldn’t even look at the road sign for the hospital these days without going pale.

“They need to go over this afternoon sometime,” I said, “so I’ll let you two work it out.”

“Okay,” Jenny answered.

I headed for the stairs and was halfway down them when I heard Jenny ask Grace, “What does he say?”

I stopped walking and stood still, snooping.

“Can’t miss it or she’d disown me,” Grace said. I pictured her reading the text message from her phone display. I could hear the smile in her voice. The hope.

Oh, Gracie,I thought.He’s eighteen and in college, honey. There’s no place for this to go.

Downstairs, I headed for our home office where the box of Noelle’s cards was waiting for me. The box was beginning to feel like another person in my house, a person with too much power for the space she took up. It was our last hope, that box. Nothing in Noelle’s house had given us answers. Tara and I had spoken with the staff at every single obstetrical office in a twenty-mile radius, and they all knew what we hadn’t known: Noelle gave up midwifery years ago. Few of them had seen her recently, so we didn’t bother asking if they knew she was depressed. Suzanne and the other volunteers were all coming to us with that question. Whatever had been bugging Noelle, she’d kept it to herself. I suspected that the box wasn’t going to give us the answer, either, but if I ignored it, at least it gave me hope.

No more excuses. I had time now. I was going to start digging.

Ted and I shared our home office. It was a big low-ceilinged room that the previous owners had added on as an in-law suite … for in-laws they must not have liked too much. The low ceiling was oppressive, but the space worked for us. Ted’s desk and office equipment were on one side, while my smaller desk was on the other. We’d had bookcases built into one windowless wall, and two long tables were set up in front of the windows where Ted could spread out his area maps. At that moment, Shadow and Blue were snoring beneath the tables. Before I’d opened Hot! I’d used my part of the office for household records. Now, I had my own filing cabinet devoted to the café. It was so wonderful how things had fallen together for me, and I’d started to feel as though my life was charmed. Now Sam and Noelle were dead and I was about to lose my grandpa, and I knew I would never have that everything’s-right-in-my-world feeling again.

I sat down in the armchair by the window and lifted a fistful of cards and letters from the box, but I quickly realized that a leisurely approach wasn’t going to do. In my hands I had a letter dated a month ago and another dated eight years ago. There was a copy of an email exchange between Noelle and another midwife. Two pictures of babies. A picture of a teenage boy. A birthday card from Jenny that I remembered picking out for her to send Noelle years earlier. It was as though Noelle had taken a giant Mixmaster to the box and scrambled the contents. I wished Tara had the time to help me. In thirty minutes, she could have this mess alphabetized and arranged by date.

I stood, cleared off one of the tables by the windows and began sorting the cards and letters and pictures and a few newspaper clippings. Ted still thought I should just toss the whole mess, but Noelle had kept these things. They’d been important to her. I wanted to try to feel whatever she’d felt as she dropped each of them into the box. Why did she keep them? Ted thought I was becoming maudlin, grieving over Noelle and worrying about my grandfather. He said I was obsessed, and maybe I was, but the box felt like my last link to one of my two best friends. These were the things she’d cared about enough to save.

If I approached the items chronologically, maybe I’d be able to follow what had gone on in her mind over the years. Maybe I could even write a minibiography of her. If we ever found her now-adult child, maybe he’d appreciate having that remembrance of his—or her—birth mother.

“Like you have time to write,” I said to myself as I neatened the stack of cards. Shadow lifted his head to look at me on the off chance I was talking about food.

I spotted the card I’d sent Noelle for her last birthday. Her very last birthday. I touched the card, heavyhearted, then pulled another handful from the box. There was a newspaper clipping from the year before about the obstetrical practices in the area getting rid of their midwives. I shook my head. That was why we thought she’d quit. She told us that, didn’t she? That she was getting out while the getting was good, when the truth was, she’d gotten out long ago. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked out loud.

My plan to organize the items chronologically quickly fell apart because so many of the cards and letters had no dates. So I stacked them according to type: cards in one pile, letters in another, printouts of emails in a third pile and newspaper articles in a fourth. Tucked in the bottom of the carton, caught halfway beneath the flap, was a valentine Grace had made for Noelle when she couldn’t have been more than four. I pictured Noelle holding the card above her trash can, then deciding to add it to this box of keepsakes instead.

I heard the girls leave the house and used that interruption to take a break. In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea and unwrapped one of the scones I’d brought home from the café, breaking off the corners to give to the dogs. Then I carried the scone and tea back to the office.

When I walked into the room, a little blue-and-white-checked note card on the top of a pile jumped out at me. I rested my mug and plate on my desk and picked up the card. When I opened it, I had to sit down in the armchair as it hit me: the card was from me, and it was ancient. Seventeen years old, to be exact.

Noelle,

Thank you for taking care of me. You seem to understand exactly how painful this has been for me and know just the right things to do and say to help. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Love, Em

I remembered writing the words a few weeks after my second miscarriage. My second baby lost. Ted and I had lived near the campus then, and Noelle moved in with us for a couple of weeks to take over everything. She cooked and cleaned and, most important of all, listened to me grieve. Ted had run out of words to comfort me by then; he had his own grief to deal with. Noelle knew how badly I’d wanted those babies. Little more than a year later, I’d be holding Jenny in my arms. She couldn’t make up for the loss I felt—the loss I still felt when I thought of those babies I never got to know—but Jenny brought me back to life.

I held the card in my hand for a while. What was the point of keeping it? Of keeping any of the notes written to Noelle? Yet I put it back on the pile. I didn’t need to make any decisions right now.

I sipped my tea as I read through some of the letters. They were filled with happy words of gratitude, the sort of sentiments you wrote when you were bursting with joy, and I needed to read them after being broadsided by my own sad old card. I held the stack of letters on my lap, scanning most of them, reading every word of others, turning each of them upside down on the arm of the chair as I finished with it.

I came to a nearly blank sheet of notepaper and it took me a moment to recognize it as Noelle’s stationery. There was a familiar, faint peach-basket-weave pattern to the paper. I hadn’t seen her stationery in years—did anyone still write letters by hand?—but I remembered getting the occasional note from her on this paper. There was only one line on the sheet.

Dear Anna,

I’ve started this letter so many times and here I am, starting it again with no idea how to tell you

That was it. Just that line. Tell her what? Who was Anna? I sifted through the letters and cards looking for anything from an Anna. There was a card signed by an Ana. All she wrote was, “Noelle, Our family adores you! Ana.” Spelled differently from the Anna in Noelle’s letter. No surname. No date. There was a picture of a little boy attached to the card with tape, and when I pulled it off I saw a name written on the back: Paul Delaney.

No idea how to tell you.

The letter was old. The peach-colored paper was soft with age. What could it possibly matter now?

I shrugged off the unfinished letter and continued making my way through the pile, nibbling my scone and sipping my Earl Grey. It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the stack that I found another partial letter Noelle had written, this one typed. It was a bit crumpled. I remembered needing to flatten it when I first stacked the letters. I read it, sucking in my breath and forgetting to let it out again, and I stood so quickly, so violently, that I knocked my cup of tea to the floor.

13

Noelle

UNC Wilmington 1988

The second day after the freshmen filled the Galloway dormitory, Noelle made her rounds, saving Room 305 for last the way she saved the blueberries for last in her fruit salad each morning because they were her favorite. She never felt anxious about those blueberries, though, and she was definitely feeling anxious about Room 305.

In the hallway, she heard laughter coming from the room even before she neared the open doorway. They were bonding, the two girls. Emerson McGarrity and Tara Locke. She knocked on the doorjamb, peering inside. The girls were sitting on the bed closest to the window, culling through a stack of record albums. They looked up at her and she knew immediately which one was Tara—the brown-eyed blonde—and which one was Emerson. Her hair was long, dark and curly. Noelle knew exactly how hard it would be to pull a comb through that hair.

“Hi.” She smiled. “I’m Noelle Downie, your Resident Assistant. I’m making the rounds to get to know everyone.”

The blonde hopped to her bare feet and held out a hand. “I’m Tara,” she said.

Noelle shook the girl’s hand, then turned her attention to Emerson, who had a stack of records in her lap and didn’t bother to get up. Noelle had to lean forward to shake her hand. “Emerson?” she asked.

“Right.” She had a nice smile, warm and encouraging, and Noelle had a hard time letting go of her hand.

“You want to sit?” Tara motioned to the desk chair and Noelle was surprised at her need to drop into it, her knees suddenly too soft to hold her upright.

“I could hear you two laughing like you’ve been friends for a long time,” she said. “Did you know each other before you got here?”

They laughed again and looked at each other. “It only feels that way,” Tara said. Of the two of them, she was clearly the more outgoing. You could see it in her bright eyes, hear it in the self-assured volume of her voice.

“We clicked right away,” Emerson said. “I mean, we talked on the phone once over the summer about what we were bringing and everything, but we didn’t know each other at all, really.”

“And then when we met yesterday it was like we’d known each other forever,” Tara said. “We stayed up all night talking.”

“That’s super,” Noelle said. “Doesn’t always work out that way.” Doesn’t always last, either, she thought. She hoped it did work out for these two. Already, she wanted everything good for Emerson. Her feelings scared her; they were so visceral, so deep. She had to watch what she said and did. She could lose herself too easily here in this room. She had to treat Emerson no differently than she did the other students.

She glanced at the dressers. Framed photographs stood on each of them. Testing her legs, she got to her feet and picked up one of a young man with dark hair so long it brushed his shoulders. He looked familiar. He had a symmetrically shaped face and that combination of blue eyes and black hair that was hard to forget. “Who’s this guy?” she looked from Emerson to Tara.