The Midwife's Confession

He left me alone with the stranger upstairs.

3

Emerson

Noelle’s junker of a car sat in her driveway and I pulled in behind it. The light was fading, but I could still read all of her bumper stickers: Coexist, No Wetlands=No Seafood, Cape Fear River Watch, Got Tofu?, Bring Back My Mid-wives! Noelle’s passions—and she had plenty—were spelled out across the dented rear of her car for all the world to see. Good ol’ boys would pull up next to her at stoplights and pretend to shoot her with their cocked fingers, and she’d give them her one-fingered salute in return. That was Noelle for you.

She’d given up midwifery a year or so ago when she decided to focus on the babies program, even though it meant she’d have to live on her savings. At the same time, the ob-gyn offices in the area were making noise about letting their midwives go, so Noelle figured it was time to get out, though it must have felt like she was hacking off her right arm. Noelle needed ten lives to do all the things she wanted to do. She would never be able to fix the world to her liking with just one.

Ted and I had stopped charging her rent for the house even though between the teetering economy and the start-up costs of Hot! we weren’t exactly ready to put a kid through college. Ted had bought the dilapidated 1940s Craftsman bungalow shortly before we were married. I’d thought it was a lamebrain idea, even though the seller was practically giving it away. It looked like no one had taken care of the place since 1940, except to fill the front yard with a broken grill, a couple of bicycle tires, a toilet and a few other odds and ends. Ted was a Realtor, though, and his crystal ball told him that Sunset Park was on the brink of a renaissance. The ball had been right … eventually. The area was finally turning around, although Noelle’s bungalow was still a pretty sorry sight. The grill and toilet were gone, but the shrubs were near death’s door. We’d have to do a major overhaul on the place if she ever moved out, but we’d make a good profit at that point, so letting her live there for the cost of her utilities wasn’t that much of a hardship.

Ted wasn’t thrilled about the “no-rent for Noelle” idea in the beginning. He was feeding money into my café at the time and we were both biting our nails over that. I’d wanted to open a café for years. I fantasized about people lining up for my cooking and baking the way some women fantasized about finding Matthew McConaughey in their beds. The good news was that Hot! was already holding its own. I had a following among the locals downtown and even had to hire extra help during the tourist season. So Ted had come around, both about the café and Noelle’s rent-free existence on our property.

From Noelle’s weedy driveway, I could see the left-hand corner of the backyard where she’d planted her garden. She wasn’t much for fixing up the house and the rest of the landscaping was in ruins, but years ago she’d surprised us by planting a small masterpiece of a garden in that one corner. It became one of her many obsessions. She researched the plants so that something was blooming nearly year-round. A sculptor friend of hers made the birdbath that stood in the center of the garden and it was like something out of a museum. It was your typical stone birdbath, but next to it, a little barefoot girl in bronze stood on her tiptoes to reach over the lip and touch the water. Her dress and hair fanned out behind her as if she’d been caught in a breeze. People knew about the birdbath. A couple of reporters wanted to take pictures of it and write articles about the sculptor, but Noelle never let them. She was afraid someone would try to steal it. Noelle would give away everything she owned to help someone else, but she didn’t want anyone messing with her garden. She watered and mulched and pruned and loved that little piece of land. She took care of it the way other women took care of their kids and husbands.

The bungalow was a peeling, faded blue, like the knees of your oldest pair of jeans, and the color looked a little sick in the red glow of the sunset. As I walked up the crumbling sidewalk to the front porch, I saw a couple of envelopes sticking out of the mailbox next to the door, and even though the air was warm, a chill ran up my spine. Something wasn’t right. Noelle was supposed to come over for dinner the night before and bring fabric for Jenny, who was actually sewing blankets for the babies program, much to my shock. That wasn’t the sort of thing Noelle would forget to do. It bothered me that she hadn’t answered my messages. I’d left her one the night before saying, “We’re going to go ahead and eat. I’ll keep a plate warm for you.” I left the next one around ten: “Just checking on you. I thought you were coming over but I must have misunderstood. Let me know you’re okay.” And finally, one more this morning: “Noelle? I haven’t heard back from you. Is everything all right? Love you.” She hadn’t gotten back to me, and as I climbed the steps to the porch, I couldn’t shake a sense of dread.

I rang the bell and heard the sound of it coming through the thin glass of the windowpanes. I knocked, then tried the door, but it was locked. I had a key for the house somewhere at home but hadn’t thought to bring it with me.

I walked down the steps and followed the walkway through the skinny side yard to the back door. Her back porch light was on and I tried the door. Also locked. Through the window next to the door, I saw Noelle’s purse on the battered old kitchen table. She was never without that purse. It was enormous, one of those shapeless reddish-brown leather shoulder bags you could cram half your life into. I remembered Noelle pulling toys from it for Jenny back when she was still a toddler—that’s how long she’d had it. Noelle and that bag were always together. Auburn hair, auburn bag. If the purse was here, Noelle was here.

I knocked hard on the window. “Noelle!”

“Miss Emerson?”

I turned to see a girl, maybe ten years old, walking across the yard toward me. We were losing daylight fast, and it took me a minute to see the cat in her arms.

“Are you …?” I glanced at the house next door. An African-American family lived there with three or four kids. I’d met them all but I was terrible with names.

“I’m Libby,” the girl said. “Are you lookin’ for Miss Noelle, ‘cause she had to go away all of a sudden last night.”

I smiled with relief. She’d gone away. It made no sense that her purse and car were there, but I’d figure that out eventually. Libby had put one foot on the porch step and the light fell on the calico cat in her arms. I leaned closer. “Is that Patches?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Miss Noelle asked me to take care of her at my house this time.”

“Where did she go?”

“She didn’t say. Mama says it was wrong for her not to tell me.” She scratched the top of Patches’ head. “I take care of Patches sometimes but always in Miss Noelle’s house. So Mama thinks this time Miss Noelle meant she was going away for a long time like she does sometimes, but it was wrong she didn’t say when she was coming back and she ain’t answering her cell phone.”

What the hell was going on?

“Do you have a key to the house, Libby?” I asked.

“I ain’t got one, ma’am, but I know where she keeps it. I’m the only one that knows.”

“Show me, please.”

Libby led me across the lawn toward the little garden, our shadows stretching long and skinny in front of us. She walked straight to the birdbath and bent down to pick up a rock near the little bronze girl’s feet.

“She keeps it under this rock,” Libby whispered, handing me the key.

“Thanks,” I said, and we headed back to the door. At the steps, I stopped. Inside, I’d find a clue to where Noelle had gone. Something that would tell me why she hadn’t taken her giant bag with her. Or her car. That ominous feeling I’d had earlier was filling me up again and I turned to the girl. “You go home, honey,” I said. “Take Patches back to your house, please. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on and come tell you, all right?”

“Okay.” She turned on her heel, slowly, as though she wasn’t sure she should trust me with the key. I watched her walk across the yard to her own house.

The key was caked with dirt and I wiped it off on my T-shirt, a sure sign I didn’t care about a thing except finding out what was going on with Noelle. I unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen. “Noelle?” I shut the door behind me, turning the lock because I was starting to feel paranoid. Her purse lay like a floppy pile of leather on the table and her car keys were on the counter between the sink and the stove. Patches’ food and water bowls were upside down on the counter on top of a dish towel. The sink was clean and empty. The kitchen was way too neat. Noelle could mess up a room just by passing through it.

I walked into the postage stamp of a living room, past the crammed bookshelves and the old TV Tara and Sam had given her a few years ago when they bought their big screen. Past the threadbare brown sofa. A couple of strollers sat on the floor in front of the TV and three car seats were piled on top of some cartons, which were most likely filled with baby things. More boxes teetered on top of an armchair. I was definitely in Noelle’s world. On the wall above the sofa were framed pictures of Jenny and Grace, along with an old black-and-white photo of Noelle’s mother standing in front of a garden gate. Seeing the photographs of the children next to the one of her mother always touched me, knowing that Noelle considered Tara’s and my girls her family.

I walked past the first of the two bedrooms, the one she used as her office. Like the living room, it was bursting with boxes and bags and her desk was littered with papers and books … and a big salad bowl filled with lettuce and tomatoes.

“Noelle?” The silence in the house was creeping me out. A slip in the shower? But why would she have told Libby to take care of Patches? I reached her bedroom and through the open door, I saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her rib cage, still and quiet as though she were meditating, but her waxen face and the line of pill bottles on the night table told me something different. My breath caught somewhere behind my breastbone and I couldn’t move. I wasn’t getting it. I refused to get it. Impossible, I thought. This is impossible.

“Noelle?” I took one tiny step into the room as if I were testing the temperature of water in a pool. Then reality hit me all at once and I rushed forward. I grabbed her shoulder and shook her hard. Her hair spilled over my hand like it was alive, but it was the only living thing about her. “No, no, no!” I shouted. “Noelle! No! Don’t do this! Please!”

I grabbed one of the empty pill bottles but none of the words on the label registered in my mind. I wanted to kill that bottle. I threw it across the room, then dropped to my knees at the side of the bed. I pressed Noelle’s cold hand between mine.

“Noelle,” I whispered. “Why?”

It’s amazing what you can miss when you’re an emotional wreck. The note was right next to me on her night table. I’d had to reach past it to use her cell phone to call for help. The phone had been inches from her hands. She could have called me or Tara. Could have said, “I just did something stupid. Come and save me.” But she didn’t. She hadn’t wanted to be saved.

The police and emergency team poured into the room, taking up all the air and space and blurring into a sea of blue and gray in front of me. I sat on the straight-backed chair someone had brought in from the kitchen, still holding Noelle’s hand as the EMTs pronounced her dead and we waited for the medical examiner to arrive. I answered the questions volleyed at me by the police. I knew Officer Whittaker personally. He came into Hot! early every morning. He was the raspberry-cream-cheese croissant and banana-walnut muffin, heated. I’d fill his mug with my strongest coffee, then watch him dump five packets of sugar into it.

“Did you call your husband, ma’am?” he asked. He always called me ma’am, no matter how many times I asked him to call me Emerson. He moved around Noelle’s claustrophobic bedroom, gazing at another framed photograph of her mother on the wall, touching the spine of a book on the small bookcase beneath the window and studying the pincushion on her dresser as though it might give him an answer to what had happened here.

“I did.” I’d called Ted before everyone had arrived. He was showing a property and I had to leave a message. He hadn’t received it yet. If he had, he would have called the second he heard me stumbling over my words as if I were having a stroke.

“Who’s her next of kin?” Officer Whittaker asked. Oh, no. I thought of Noelle’s mother. Ted would have to call her for me. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t and neither could Tara. “Her mother,” I whispered. “She’s in her eighties and … frail. She lives in an assisted-living community in Charlotte.”

“Did you see this?” Officer Whittaker picked up the small piece of paper from Noelle’s night table with gloved fingers. He held it out for me to read.

Emerson and Tara, I’m sorry. Please look after my garden for me and make sure my mother is cared for. I love all of you.

“Oh.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Oh, no.” The note made it real. Until that second, I’d managed to avoid thinking the word suicide. Now there it was, the letters a mile high inside my head.

“Is it her handwriting?” Officer Whittaker asked.

I opened my eyes to slits as if I couldn’t stand to see the entire note again, all at once. The sloppy slope of the letters would be nearly illegible to someone else, but I knew it well. I nodded.

“Was she depressed, ma’am? Did you have any idea?”

I shook my head. “No. Not at all.” I looked up at him. “She loved her work. She would never have … Could she have been sick and not told us? Or could someone have killed her and made it look like suicide?” I looked at the note again. At all the pill bottles. I could see Noelle’s name on the labels. One of the EMTs noticed that some of the prescriptions had been filled the month before, but others dated back many years. Had she been stockpiling them?

“Did she talk about her health lately?” Officer Whittaker asked. “Doctors’ appointments?”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to wake up my memory. “She injured her back in a car accident a long time ago, but she hasn’t complained about pain from it in years,” I said. We’d worried about all the medication she was taking back then, but that had been so long ago. “She would have told us if something was wrong.” I sounded sure of myself, and Officer Whittaker rested a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“Sometimes people keep things bottled inside them, ma’am,” he said. “Even the people we’re closest to. We can never really know them.”