The Midwife's Confession

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Jenny and I rode in the backseat, while my mother drove. We’d had to leave Emerson’s car in the parking garage at the hospital. We didn’t have a choice. Only one of the four of us was in any shape to drive and that was my mom, and even she wasn’t doing all that well.

Everything had reversed itself in the weirdest way. It was as if you had to do one of the worst things you could imagine, like walk barefoot across burning coals, and suddenly your best friend was going to do it for you. You know just how your friend feels because you felt the same way, and it hurts to watch your friend go through it all.

I’d thought before about how love could sneak up on you. One day when I was eleven years old, I suddenly realized I loved Jenny the same way I loved my mother and father. We’d been on the beach at Wrightsville, hanging out together in the sun and jumping in the waves, and I’d felt so happy. I looked over at Jenny and thought, I love you, just like that. It was a revelation, really. About a year later, Jenny said, “Love you,” when we talked on the phone, the same way our mothers said those words to each other, and it was like there was suddenly more color in my life. Love came with some hurt, though. When Jenny broke her ankle two years ago, I sat with her on her porch steps while we waited for the ambulance, and it was as though my own ankle had been broken. That’s how bad I felt.

Now, sitting in the back of the car with Jenny, I felt the same way again.

“What are they like?” Jenny asked me. “That girl and her mother? I didn’t even get a look at them, really.”

“They’re nice,” I reassured her, although a couple of hours earlier, I’d felt nothing for them. I thought of Anna’s coolness. “It’s hard to tell because I just, you know, popped into the room and said, ‘Hi! I’m your daughter!’ so they were obviously freaked. And you freaked them even more.”

Emerson and my mother were talking quietly in the front seats. From where I sat, I could see a tissue wadded up in Emerson’s fist. For the first hour of the drive, I’d heard words like I refuse to believe it and This will kill Ted and Where is my baby? They were whispered words I didn’t want Jenny to hear, so I tried to talk over them. I heard Emerson speak to Ted on the phone, so quietly I couldn’t understand what she said. How would she tell Ted their daughter was probably not their daughter, after all?

“So…tell me about this disease Haley has,” Jenny said after a while.

“It’s leukemia,” I said. “I only talked to her for a little while, but she’s cool.” I felt a tiny bit of jealousy: if Jenny was really Anna’s daughter, then she had a sister. “She seems really strong. She doesn’t seem like she’s going to die tomorrow or anything, but she could.” I couldn’t help myself. I knew my mother thought Jenny couldn’t handle this, but she needed to know the truth. “She is going to die if she can’t get a bone marrow transplant,” I said.

“Now they’ll want me to do it, won’t they?” she said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “But I think you should. A sibling has a one in four chance of being a match.”

Emerson must have heard me. She turned in her seat. “Jenny, don’t even think about this now, all right? We have no idea what’s going on yet, really, and even if you turn out to be the baby Noelle took, you don’t need to decide a thing right now. Not about being a part of their lives, and absolutely not about donating bone marrow.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard Emerson sound so firm. “You don’t need to ever decide, if you don’t want to,” she added.

Jenny didn’t say anything, but when Emerson had faced forward again, she turned to me. “What does it take,” she asked. “Being a donor?”

“Cheek swab first,” I said. “Then if you’re a match with the cheek swab, they do a blood test. If you’re a match after that, they have to take some of your bone marrow. I don’t know exactly how they do it. If you need to do it, though, I’ll go with you.”

“You were going to do it?” she asked.

“That doesn’t mean you have to.”

“But you’re such a wimp. And you were going to do it.”

I was amazed by that myself. “She could die,” I said with a shrug.

Jenny wrinkled her nose, then leaned forward and tapped Emerson on the shoulder. “Mom?” she said. “I need to find out if I’m a match for her. For Haley.”

Emerson turned around again. She looked at Jenny. Then she looked at me. Her face was a pasty-white mess, smeared with mascara. “All right,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Jenny’s phone rang and she checked the caller ID. “It’s Cleve.” She looked at me. “I talked to him while we were driving to Washington and told him what was going on. Should I answer?”

I took the phone from her. “Hey,” I said.

“Grace! You’re with Jenny? Where are you? I’ve been worried about you! I’ve been going out of my freakin’ mind, wondering what’s going on.”

I smiled. He’d been worried. Going out of his freakin’ mind. “I’m fine,” I said, “but it’s too long to go into right now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow?”

“Just tell me you’re all right,” he said.

“I’m good,” I said.

Cleve wasn’t a part of this. He’d never be able to understand everything that had happened. I was with the people who did understand: my mom and Emerson and Jenny. I felt like Cleve was from another part of my life that suddenly seemed so long ago, and I realized that, on this very long day when I thought I would turn into someone else, that was exactly what had happened.

64

Emerson

Topsail Island, North Carolina

I stood at the sliding glass door of the oceanfront cottage Ted, Jenny and I were renting. Midweek in October and not a soul on the beach for as far as I could see. We knew we’d practically have the island to ourselves. That’s why we came.

Ted and Jenny and the dogs were out there somewhere, but I’d begged off with the excuse that I wanted to make lasagna for dinner. Really, though, I wanted the time alone. Time to think.