“Just a neighbor, helping out,” Noelle’s mother said quickly. A few years earlier, she’d spent several days in jail for midwifing and Noelle knew she didn’t plan to go again. Daddy’s girlfriend, Doreen, had stayed over while her mother was gone. Doreen was a maid, her father had explained to her. Noelle might have been only nine years old but she wasn’t stupid. Her father eventually divorced her mother and married Doreen. Noelle hated that woman. Doreen had stolen her father. Stolen her mother’s husband. “Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me,” her mother said to her later. “Just don’t ever.” And Noelle swore up and down that she never would and she thought for sure that she was telling the truth.
It was nearly dawn by the time they walked home. Their pace was slow and easy, and for a while neither of them spoke. The buzz of the cicadas had given way to a peaceful quiet that enveloped them in the darkness. Every once in a while, Noelle could hear the call of a bird from deep in the woods. She loved that sound. She’d hear that same bird sometimes when she wandered outside in the middle of the night.
They turned from the lane onto the dirt road that led to their house. “How did you know how to do all that?” Noelle asked.
“My mama,” her mother said. “And she learned it all from her mama. There’s no big mystery to it, Noelle. Doctors today would like you to think that there is. They make you think you need drugs and C-sections—that’s surgery that cuts the baby out of you—and all sorts of sophisticated interventions to have a baby. And sometimes you do. A good midwife needs to know when it’s safe for a woman to have a baby at home and when it’s not. But it’s not rocket science.”
“I want to do it.”
“Do what? Have a baby?”
“Be a midwife. Like you.”
Her mother put her arm around Noelle’s shoulders and hugged her close. “Then I want you to do it the right way,” she said. “The legal way, so you don’t have to hide your light under a bushel like I do.”
“What’s the legal way?”
“You become a nurse first,” she said. “I never took that step. I don’t think it’s necessary. Harmful even, because they indoctrinate you with the idea that more is better when it comes to having babies. But North Carolina’s got its laws and you need to do it legally. I’m not having a daughter of mine spending time in jail.”
Noelle thought back to Bea’s steamy little room where her mother had done nothing but good. “That Bea girl,” Noelle said. “She’s only a couple of years older than me. If I had a baby, I’d want it. I don’t understand not wanting your own baby.”
Her mother didn’t say anything right away. “Sometimes not keeping a baby is the loving choice,” she said. “Sometimes you know you don’t have the money or the support to give a baby a good chance in life and then letting the baby go to a good family is the right thing. That girl—” her mother drew in a long breath “—she’ll have to decide for herself. The baby being black makes it harder to find adoptive parents for it, so I do hope she decides to keep it and maybe her mama can help out with it. But fifteen is just plain too young. So do me a favor and don’t get pregnant until you’re a lot older than that.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t even want to kiss a boy, much less make a baby with one.”
“That’ll change.” Her mother was smiling. Noelle could hear it in her voice.
The sky was beginning to pink up with the sunrise. The dirt road was visible now beneath their feet, and ahead of them Noelle could make out the corner of their house beyond the woods.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Noelle,” her mother said suddenly, her voice so different it might have been another woman speaking. “It’s something I should have told you long ago, but with your father leaving and everything…it just seemed like too much of a burden to give you.”
Noelle felt the muscles tighten in her chest.
“What, Mama?” she asked.
“Let’s sit out in the yard while the sun comes up,” her mother said. “I’ll make some tea and we’ll have a good talk.”
Noelle slowed her footsteps as they turned into the gravel driveway, not sure she wanted to hear whatever it was that made her mother sound so strange and different. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d left the house that night as one person, but would be returning to it as another.
She was right.
5
Tara
It seemed like only a few weeks since I’d sat in this same church for Sam’s memorial service, and I’d had to force myself to come today. Emerson and I had planned the service in a daze. Em had asked me if I wanted to sing, which I did occasionally at weddings or receptions, but I’d said absolutely not. As I listened to one of my fellow choir members sing Faure’s
Noelle’s mother sat to my left. I hadn’t seen her in about a year, and at eighty-four she was showing the early signs of dementia. She’d forgotten my name, although she remembered Emerson’s and even Jenny’s, and she certainly understood that Noelle was gone. Sitting next to me, she pressed one crippled fist to her lips and shook her head over and over again as if she couldn’t believe what was happening. I understood the feeling.
Grace sat on my right next to Jenny, Emerson and Ted, twirling a strand of her long hair around her index finger the way she did when she was anxious. She’d pleaded to stay home. “I know it’s hard,” I’d said to her that morning. I’d sat on the edge of her bed where she had cocooned herself beneath her sheet. Her blue-and-green polka-dotted comforter lay in a heap on the floor and I had to stop myself from picking it up and folding it neatly on the end of the bed. “I know it reminds you of going to Daddy’s memorial service, but we need to be there to honor Noelle’s memory,” I said. “She loved you and she’s been so good to you. We need to be there for her mother. Remember how important it was to have people come to Daddy’s service?”
She didn’t respond and the hillock her head formed beneath the sheet didn’t move. At least she was listening. I
