The Midwife's Confession

I nodded. “It sounds like she was planning to make this letter anonymous,” I said. “She just talks about the ‘extraordinary parents’ to reassure her—Anna—that her daughter was being taken care of, not that she planned to reveal who they were. So I don’t think she was going to reveal who she is…who she was…either.”

“What did she mean about the article in the paper?” Tara asked.

“No idea,” I said.

“What does Ted say?”

“I haven’t told him.” Maybe I never would. I’d thought of telling no one at all, trying to forget what I knew, but I couldn’t live with the secret. I couldn’t live with it alone, anyway. “What do we do with this, Tara? Do we ignore it?”

“I don’t think we can,” Tara said.

“Oh, Tara, this is horrible! Ted didn’t even want me to bring the box of cards home, and I wish now that I’d listened to him. If I’d just thrown it away, I wouldn’t know any of this.”

“But you do know. We know.”

“I hate this,” I said. “If we go to the police…I don’t want a media frenzy. And Noelle…her legacy. All the good she’s done. She’ll be dragged through the mud.”

“Look.” Tara leaned back in the booth. “We have very, very slim evidence here. And maybe she was writing a short story, for all we know. I think the first thing we should do is try to figure out who Anna is. If we discover there really is an Anna and this looks like something that really happened, then we can figure out the next step.”

I felt both relief and guilt that I’d dragged her into this. “I’m sorry I told you, Tara. It’s the last thing you need right now, but I didn’t want to be alone with it.”

“You’re not alone with it, sweetie.”

“So—” I turned the letter to face me again, the words blurring a bit in my vision “—how do we try to figure out who Anna is? Noelle said she read an article about her in the paper, so we could…I don’t know. Check old newspapers, I guess?”

“Maybe the baby that died—” Tara shuddered as she said the word “—maybe that was the last baby Noelle delivered.”

I felt a chill. “I have her record books,” I said. Could I be that close to knowing whose baby Noelle had dropped?

The waitress neared our table and I could see her checking out the uneaten food. “How are you doing over here?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” I said, and Tara made a little whisking motion with her hand that said, Please leave us alone, as clearly as if she’d spoken the words.

“I can read the last entry in her record books,” I said once the waitress was gone. “If it was a girl, well…” I looked at Tara and shrugged.

“If it’s a girl,” Tara said, “then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

18

Noelle

UNC Wilmington

1988

Noelle was happier than she’d ever been in her life. Her classes and clinicals were going well and she loved her work as a Resident Assistant. The girls on her floor turned to her easily with their concerns, and it wasn’t unusual to find her sitting with a group of them on the floor at the end of the hall, chatting about their boyfriends or their professors or their relationships with one another. The gathering had the feel of a mini support group, a relaxed get-together with meat at its heart. Noelle made sure everyone felt welcome, though. She didn’t want her end-of- the-hall group to turn into a clique.

The other RAs thought she was overly involved with the students. “You should just be there in case they need something,” they said, but Noelle felt protective of her charges. She wanted to be their safe harbor. The night one of them nearly died of alcohol poisoning, she wept because she should have seen it coming. But she did recognize another student’s bulimia, intervening before it was too late, and she counseled yet another girl as she decided what to do about an unwanted pregnancy—even though she was privately heartbroken when the girl decided to have an abortion.

All in all, she loved her girls. The fact that she loved one of them more than the others was something she was learning to hide.

She’d gotten her emotions at least somewhat under control when it came to Emerson McGarrity, doing her best to treat her like all the other girls on her floor. If anyone noticed that she paid a little more attention to Emerson, that she lit up each time she saw her, that she questioned her more than the other girls about her adjustment to campus life, her classes, her family, no one said a word about it, at least not to her. She no longer needed Emerson to know their relationship. Being close to her, being a part of her life, was enough. It was clear that Emerson knew nothing about her mother’s teenage pregnancy, and clear that Noelle’s existence had been swept under the rug. Noelle made a conscious decision to leave it there forever. She wouldn’t hurt Emerson or her family, but one way or another, she would always be a part of her sister’s life. She wouldn’t lose her now that she’d found her.

She was coming to like Tara, too. Tara’s exuberance was a good counterbalance to Emerson’s gentle, calm nature and she was far deeper than Noelle had originally guessed. For most of Tara’s life, her mother had spent her time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. It was not something she talked about easily, and Noelle felt touched when she finally revealed that part of herself to her. Noelle came to see Tara’s love of theater as her escape from a childhood and adolescence that had been difficult to endure.

There was, however, one small, niggling problem in Noelle’s life: Sam Vincent.

Plenty of guys on campus were intrigued by Noelle, but Noelle herself had been drawn— seriously drawn—to only two men in her life. Sam was number three.

She met him the second week of school when she stopped by Tara and Emerson’s room to offer them a couple of granola bars. He was there alone because Tara and Emerson were baking cookies in the dorm kitchen, and he was stretched out on Tara’s neatly made bed, writing something in a notebook. He looked up and gave her a quick, easy smile and that was all it took. The smile slayed her. She felt her internal organs melt and her heart thumped