The Midwife's Confession

was something broken inside of me, even when I hid that broken ness from the rest of the world. She knew. When she got older and I told her about Lily, she finally understood. She seemed to feel the loss herself.

“You were a drug rep back then, right?” Tom asked.

“Uh-huh.” I closed my laptop. “I quit when Haley got sick.” My job had already been on the skids because I refused to travel once Haley was born and travel had been a major part of my work. All those trips to Wilmington. I’d once liked that city. Now I loathed it. “Bryan had just gotten out of the military and was working for IBM.”

“I don’t remember him at all,” Tom said.

“Well, he left right after she got sick. He couldn’t handle Haley’s illness.” On top of everything else, I thought.

“How long were you married?” Tom asked. I saw the ring on his finger. I couldn’t remember if he’d been married the last time or not.

“Six years.” In my mind I divided those years into three segments. There’d been two wonderful years when it was just the two of us. We lived on base at Fort Belvoir and I’d loved my job doing pharmacology sales. We’d been young, so much younger than we were now. Our relationship had an energy and a heat I could barely remember.

Then everything went south. Bryan was stationed in Somalia where he’d nearly gotten killed, Lily was born and I had a stroke and nearly died myself. A complete and utter nightmare. Bryan and I settled into a tense, suddenly loveless marriage and he went overseas again, happily I thought. I got pregnant with Haley unintentionally and against doctor’s orders on one of Bryan’s leaves, proof that birth control pills were not one hundred percent effective. Proof you could still make love when you felt dead inside. My pregnancy had all my health care workers in a tizzy, but my blood pressure behaved itself and I felt good and full of hope. For a year after Haley was born, there was a cautious joy in our house. Bryan left the military and took the job with IBM so he could stay closer to home. I remembered thinking he was guarding us, making up for not protecting us well enough the first time around. Our happiness was fragile and we were only beginning to trust it when Haley’s fevers began. Bryan’s retreat was so fast I didn’t see it coming. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. How he could leave Haley and me, cutting himself off from his child, was as unbelievable to me as it was unforgivable.

“He’s back now, though,” Tom said, “just when she needs him.”

I nodded. “You’re right,” I said, swallowing my anger. I would have to find a way to put the past aside.

I was back on my laptop twenty minutes later when Bryan walked into the room. He barely looked at me before heading straight to Haley’s bed. “How’s she doing?” He lightly touched her arm as he peered down at her face.

“She was asking for you when she first woke up,” I said.

“Really?” His glasses caught the sunlight from the big windows near Haley’s bed.

I couldn’t help it. I was touched by the emotion his voice carried in that one word. “Yeah,” I said. “So how did the interview go?”

He shrugged. “All right, I guess. Time will tell.”

I remembered the laughter in the background. I didn’t know why that bugged me so much. I’d been sitting with our unconscious daughter while he was laughing with some woman. So? I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted from him.

“When will they know her MRD level?” he asked.

“Probably not for a day or so.”

“You want to take a break? I can stay with her for a while?”

I looked at my sleeping daughter. If she’d been awake, I might have taken him up on the offer, but I couldn’t leave her when she looked so drained and weak. I’d let another defenseless child of mine out of my sight. I would never do it again.

The following evening, Jeff Jackson called with the results from Haley’s bone marrow aspiration. “The chemo’s not doing the job,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Shit.” I was in the cafeteria at Children’s catching up on email while Bryan stayed with Haley in her room. They’d been playing Bananagrams when I left them. I hadn’t expected the news so soon, and it was news I didn’t want to hear. “So we have to go forward with a transplant now?” I asked.

“We’ll start her on a maintenance level of chemo to hold her steady while we look for a donor. Her MRD’s higher than I’d like to see and we’ll have to move quickly to find a good match. I’ll have you meet with Doug Davis tomorrow. He’s head of the transplant team. He’ll fill you in on what it entails.”

“Will he test Bryan and me to see if we’re matches?” I asked. “Can we be tested right away?”

“I’ll let Doug go over all of that with you.”

“So—” I looked at my laptop screen without really seeing it “—is this ultimately good news or bad?”

“Neither,” he said. “It just is what it is.”

I loathed that expression. Imagine if I said it to the family of a missing child. Well, it just is what it is.

“I want a better answer than that,” I said.

He hesitated. “I wish it were more positive news,” he said finally. It was the best he could do. The most I could ask of him.

“All right.” I let him off the hook. I was alone in this. Then I thought of Bryan in the oncology unit, sitting with Haley. I thought of Haley’s new fondness for him. The affection in her voice when she talked about him. How attached she’d become to the very word Dad. I remembered Bryan from the day before when he’d shown up in Haley’s room after the surgery, how he walked directly to her bed. Touched her arm. And I thought maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t alone, after all.

20

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina

I thought I was screaming. I woke up abruptly and bolted out of bed and only then did I realize it wasn’t my voice I was hearing but Grace’s. I raced down the hall to her room, imagining someone hurting her. I was ready to