The Midwife's Confession

peace? Peace was impossible.

All during the year, she’d hoped that Emerson’s parents might visit her from California and Noelle would finally get to meet her birth mother. That never happened. Once, Emerson’s grandparents visited unexpectedly from Jacksonville, but Noelle arrived back in the dorm mere minutes after they’d left. Ironically, she’d felt relieved. She was afraid that a surprise meeting with her grandparents might have caused her to blurt out something she’d later regret. She wanted to meet them, but she needed to be prepared.

The fourth night in the cottage at Wrightsville Beach, Noelle woke up with a start. She lay quietly in the darkness trying to figure out what had jolted her awake. Voices? The phone? Everything was so still.

Suddenly, though, her bedroom door flew open.

“Noelle, wake up!” Sam moved toward her bed. He shook her shoulder, and she sat up, brushing her hair back from her face with her hands.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Emerson’s mother’s dead!” he said. “She—”

“What?”

“Her father just called. They were riding bikes and she was hit by a car. Emerson is—”

“Oh, no.” She swung her legs over the side of her bed and pulled on her shorts, her hands shaking. This couldn’t be happening. “Where’s Emerson?”

“She ran out to the beach.” Sam headed for the living room. “She’s hysterical. Tara’s gone after her and I’m on my way out there.”

“I’m right behind you,” she said.

They ran through the living room and onto the porch.

Sam pushed open the screen door and Noelle followed him out to the beach. She couldn’t absorb this. Her mother dead? No, no, no.

The air was like tar, thick and black, and the sea was so calm that they could hear Emerson before they saw her. The keening tore at Noelle’s heart. They found her sitting in a crumpled heap in the sand, Tara cradling her in her arms like a child.

“I can’t believe it!” Emerson wailed. “I can’t believe it!”

Noelle and Sam dropped to the sand next to them, wrapping their arms around both Emerson and Tara. Sam and Tara murmured words of comfort, but Noelle had no voice. It was caught fast in her throat and she was glad of the darkness so she could shed her own tears for the mother she would never have the chance to know.

None of them slept that night. There were a dozen more phone calls, arrangements being made, flights being booked. Tara decided she would fly to California with Emerson. Noelle somehow missed the information about Emerson’s grandparents picking them up for the drive to the airport, so she was the one who opened the cottage door and came face-to-face with a man whose vivid blue eyes were very much like her own. She knew instantly who he was and she stood frozen in the living room, her hand locked on the doorknob.

“I’m Emerson’s grandpa,” he said. “Are they ready?” He had starbursts of laugh lines at the corners of each eye as though he laughed often and hard. He wasn’t laughing now, though.

Noelle’s mouth was dry as sand. She knew she should say something—I’m sorry for your loss—but the words wouldn’t form. “I’ll get her,” she finally managed to say. She turned around and saw Sam walking toward the door. “Tell Emerson her grandfather’s here,” she said, heading for the bath room. “I don’t feel well.”

She’d wanted to hug Emerson and Tara goodbye. Instead, she stayed in the small bathroom, sitting fully dressed on the toilet, waiting for them to leave. She heard muffled voices through the door. Voices belonging to her sister. Her grand father. She sat there alone as the sound of slamming car doors sifted through the screen of the bathroom window.

Still, she didn’t budge from the bathroom. She stayed there so long that Sam finally knocked on the door. “Noelle? You okay?” he asked.

She splashed water on her face and walked out of the room into the hallway. “I’m all right.” She didn’t look at him. She wasn’t sure what was written in her face, but she didn’t want him to read it.

“Tara and Emerson wanted to say goodbye.”

“I just…I was nauseous for a minute.”

Sam looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it’s only two,” he said. “It feels like days since that call came this morning.”

“I know.” She felt him staring at her. “I’m going to read in my room for a while,” she said.

“Sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Are any of us okay right now?”

He shook his head. “I guess not,” he said, but he was looking at her with a mixture of worry and curiosity, and she had to turn away.

She wanted to call her mother to tell her what had happened and yet she wasn’t ready. She would cry too hard and her mother would worry about her, but Noelle knew she would not be able to sympathize. Not the way she needed her to. Her mother already had such mixed feelings about Noelle’s secret closeness to her biological family.

She picked up the phone a few times and started to dial the number at Miss Wilson’s, but each time she put the receiver down again. Finally, she walked out to the beach where Sam was sitting in a beach chair, an open book resting on his bare thighs. She knelt in the sand next to his chair as if she were about to pray. She wrapped her hands around his arm, warm beneath her palms.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

He set down his book, and although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses she saw the concern in his face. “Of course you can talk to me,” he said.