The Midwife's Confession

“We can check online for her.” I was looking at the record book again. “I still think Noelle would have stopped after it happened,” I said. “Don’t you, Em? I mean, there are a bunch of babies born after this one. After Rebecca’s. Have you read the entry for the last girl born.”

“Yes,” Emerson said. “The last baby was a boy, but the baby before him was a girl. And the records look fine, just a little…sloppy.”

I read the name of Noelle’s second to last patient. “Denise Abernathy. That’s the girl’s mother,” I said. “I think we should check her out in addition to Rebecca.”

Emerson sat down on the sofa again, the blacked-out sheet of paper in her hand. She tapped her fingers to her lips. “How exactly are we going to do this?” she asked. “Try to meet these women and see if their daughters look like them or what?”

I gnawed my lip. What would we do with these names? “Well,” I said, “I guess we need to make up a reason to talk to them. I know it’s…creepy, but how else can we do it?”

She nodded. “I’ll try to find the Denise woman and you try to find Rebecca?” She sounded very unsure of herself, but in spite of the somber nature of what we were doing, I felt my usual thrill at taking on a new project. But then I remembered Grace’s words. You just stay busy so you don’t have to think about anything, she’d said. So you can forget about how messed up your life has gotten.

Well, I thought, what’s so wrong with that?

25

Anna

Alexandria, Virginia

Haley sat at the kitchen table doing her homework Sunday morning while Bryan and I straightened up after a late breakfast. She had on her blue-and-yellow-dotted bandanna today, her favorite. She’d been home all weekend, riding bikes with Bryan, helping me play catch-up in the office and watching movies with a friend in our basement den. Today, the Collier cousins were coming, as they did every year for Alexandria’s fall festival, and Haley was excited. The streets of Old Town Alexandria would be roped off and booths set up with food and artwork and handcrafted things. My town house was only a couple of blocks from the heart of Old Town and the girls could walk there easily while Marilyn, Bryan and I hung out at the house. In years past, it had been just Marilyn and me and I wondered how Bryan would fit in. Marilyn was divorced, too, and she and I had always gotten along well, talking mostly about the kids. In the early years, we commiserated about Bryan and what an asshole he was to walk out on Haley and me, but after a while he no longer figured into our conversation or our lives. She’d been as shocked as I was when he suddenly showed up two months ago. She still nursed some anger at him, but I’d told her I was done with it now. Life’s too short, I wrote her in an email last week. He’s back now and he’s wonderful with Haley. That’s what matters.

The first week’s search for a donor had come up empty, but Dr. Davis told us that wasn’t uncommon and not to panic. I’d only panicked—truly panicked—once in my life, and that was when I realized that Lily had vanished into thin air as though she’d never been born. I didn’t panic when Haley had her first bout with leukemia or even when she was diagnosed this second time. It was as though I’d worn out my ability to reach that level of anxiety with Lily’s disappearance. I was scared now, yes, but we had to take things one day at a time and the fact that Haley was doing well made that easier.

Her blood work looked good. She looked good. I sometimes wondered if her diagnosis could possibly be wrong. I knew that was crazy, but when she looked and acted so healthy, it was hard to believe she was actually so sick.

“Check out the cardinals,” Bryan said from where he stood at the kitchen sink. Haley and I looked out the sliding glass doors to see the male and female cardinals on the bird feeder.

“Cool,” said Haley. She got up from the table to move closer to the glass. “The cardinals never come to the feeder,” she said. “It’s that new seed we got, Mom.”

“Could be,” I agreed, but I wasn’t watching the cardinals. I was watching Bryan, who was leaning closer to the window, absorbed in the birds. Since his return, I’d barely noticed how he looked except to see that he had a few lines in his face now and that his hair was slowly on its way to gray. But the sun filled his eyes as he stood at the sink, and for the first time since before Lily was born and my world collapsed I felt a physical yearning for a man. For him. It had been so long since I’d experienced anything approaching desire that I barely recognized the feeling.

My life since Bryan had been all about children—taking care of Haley and looking for missing kids as a way to deal with my own lost child. It hadn’t been about men. I had women friends, both married and unmarried, and they were always talking about guys. They’d shake their heads at my total lack of interest. All I wanted was to get Haley safely grown up and to make the Missing Children’s Bureau more effective at performing miracles for frightened families.

I hadn’t completely withered away as a woman, though. There were certain celebrities who could still make me weak in the knees. I just wasn’t up to dating real-life, complicated and—too often—untrustworthy guys.

Suddenly, though, Bryan was back. In these past few weeks since I felt myself softening toward him, I realized that I liked him as a person. He was no longer the handsome young guy I’d fallen in love with when I was twenty- one, and he was no longer the man who’d deserted me when Haley got sick. He was someone new. Older, wiser, braver, contrite. He cared deeply about Haley and her sense of security with him was growing. Now I wondered if there could be something more between us. Not what we once had, but something different. Something better.

He was serious about not leaving. He’d had a job inter view in D.C. a few days ago and now the company had asked him to fly to San Francisco for an interview at their headquarters. He’d told them yes, as long as the job itself would be in D.C. He wasn’t leaving.

“What time is it?” Haley took her seat at the table again.

“Nearly eleven,” I said. “They should be here any minute.”

“I wish they’d hurry up!” She closed her history book and got to her feet. She was antsy this morning. She had to return to Children’s tomorrow for more of the maintenance chemo and I knew that had to be on her mind.

“It’s got to be hard to think about going back to the hospital tomorrow,” I said as I poured water into the coffeemaker.

She screwed up her face at me. “That’s why I don’t think about it, Mom,” she said. “Why’d you even have to bring it up?”