The Amish Midwife

FIVE


I searched Tammy’s face and she nodded. I leaned forward with the baby, slipping her into the teenager’s hands. Tonya pulled the little girl to her chest. “You’re so beautiful,” she said. How many new mothers had I seen say exactly that? Even at fifteen, even still a girl, she instinctually knew what to do. Tonya’s mom hovered above the two, her hands clasped under her chin. “So beautiful,” the girl said again and then she began to sob. The nurse and I moved toward the door to give them space.

I still needed to deliver the placenta. The nurse needed to weigh the baby. And there was the matter of what to do with the newborn. Probably put her in a warm isolette in the nursery after the nurse cleaned her up. That would leave Tonya and her mom alone to grieve.

“Are the adoptive parents here?” I whispered to the nurse.

She shook her head.

Thank goodness. I waited a few more minutes and then said, “Tonya, how about if you pass the baby to your mom? We have a little bit more work to do.”

Their hands became entangled, and a second later the baby was in the new grandmother’s arms. As I concentrated on caring for Tonya, I kept track of Tammy out of the corner of my eye. She was entranced with her new granddaughter, swaying gently, making eye contact, smiling, saying sweet nothings. She was in her own world, just the baby and her. It wasn’t going to be easy for either one of them to let her go. I felt a pang for the hopeful adoptive parents. I thought of Mama and Dad, and for the first time wondered what the night I was born was like for them, if they were already in Pennsylvania or if they had waited to come. Why hadn’t I ever asked Dad about those details? If I had, would he have told me?

The nurse directed Tammy over to the in-room isolette to weigh the baby. “Six pounds four ounces,” she said. Tonya’s mom held her hand on the baby’s chest as the nurse cleaned her.

As I finished up, I thought of my own birth grandmother, wondering if she had been as enamored with me.

I covered Tonya with a warm blanket and lowered the bed to a reclining position. In a second her mother stood beside her, holding the baby again. The resemblance between the three was incredible. All had the same delicate nose and heart-shaped face. Each had a little hill of a chin that jutted out.

Tonya began to sob again.

Her mother leaned over and kissed her forehead. “What’s the matter?”

Tonya’s body convulsed, and her face quivered.

Tammy perched on the bed, the baby still tucked in her arm like a football. Tonya reached out and stroked the infant’s curled fist.

“It’s hard,” Tammy said. “I know.”

“You don’t know.” Another sob racked her. “You got to keep me.”

“I was older.” Tammy wiggled closer to her daughter. “Done with school. I had a job. And insurance.” Tammy’s voice was low.

Tonya reached out for the baby.

“Sweetie,” Tammy said.

“Please?”

Tammy’s face contorted as she stood. The baby began to whimper.

“Mom,” Tonya pled.

Now the baby was crying that traumatized newborn wail. “Shhh.” Tammy bounced the baby, but the cry grew louder.

Tonya was sitting up now, reaching for her child, and then Tammy was sliding her into her mother’s arms. “I can’t go through with it,” Tonya whispered, sinking back down onto the bed and pulling the baby to her chest.

Tammy nodded. “I’ll call the lawyer in the morning.” She didn’t seem surprised as she collapsed on the bed beside her daughter and now silent granddaughter. They stayed that way for a while, and then Tammy said, “You should nurse though, if you’re going to keep her.”

Tonya nodded. I slipped out the door, dabbing at my eyes. I knew of other midwives and doctors who would have intervened. They would have at least asked Tammy if they had the resources and support they needed. I would flag Tonya’s chart for a social worker to stop in and see her, but I wasn’t going to get in the middle of it. Tammy seemed to know what she was doing. She knew what it took to raise a child. And she couldn’t be more than forty herself. She was perfectly capable of raising another baby. No, I wouldn’t get involved in this one. It hit too close to home.

I stepped into Jane’s room, forcing myself not to think about the couple who was waiting, somewhere, hoping for that beautiful baby girl, having no idea of the heartbreaking phone call coming their way.

At 5:23 a.m. Jane delivered her eight-pound boy. By 7:15 she was tucked into bed, ready to sleep with baby Jefferson beside her and her husband hunched on the little window seat, already snoring. The gray morning sun streamed through the leaves of the trees outside the window. I turned the blinds shut. “Give Jackson a kiss for me when he comes to meet his brother,” I said as I patted Jane’s foot.

She nodded and smiled. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“My pleasure,” I said. And it was. Baby number 246. It had been a perfect night.

As I slipped into the hall, I decided to peek in on Tonya one last time. A woman, obviously a maternal aunt by how much she looked like Tammy, held the baby. Tonya slept, her mouth slightly open, on the bed.

“Have you had any rest?” I asked Tammy.

She shook her head. “I will later.” She turned toward me. “Does this happen very often? That a girl changes her mind about giving up her baby?”

“It happens.”

“Do you think I should have discouraged her?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think there’s any right answer. I think it’s entirely up to you.” I touched the baby’s cheek. I suddenly had the urge to tell Tammy that I was adopted, that I had a grandmother who had once loved me that I never knew. But I didn’t. Instead, I handed her my card and asked that she email me a photo of the baby when she got the chance.

“You bet I will,” she said.

Kin was the word that came to mind when I stepped out of the room. It was such an old-fashioned word. I remember Mama talking about her relatives who lived in Kansas and saying, “My kin…” I’d looked the word up in the dictionary a few months after she died and found “persons of common ancestry.”

I was kinless.

The next day I applied for a Pennsylvania nursing license and emailed requests for information from three traveling nurse agencies. In the following weeks, on my days off, I sorted through Dad’s things, trying not to drown in my grief. Memories of my parents and obsessions of my nowkinless state hovered like a thick fog on the Willamette River. Then came the mid-March morning, almost five weeks after my father had passed, when the fog began to clear.

I was riding my bike across the Broadway Bridge on my way home to Northwest Portland after a long labor and a difficult delivery of baby number 255. The weather was cold and the river was the color of steel. A tugboat pushed a barge toward the Saint Johns Bridge, and somewhere in the distance a whistle blew. Halfway across the bridge my cell phone began vibrating in the pocket of my bicycle jacket. I slowed and pulled it out. Sophie.

I stopped the bike, leaning against the railing as I said hello. A pigeon flew up from the underside of the bridge. Another bicycle went by me, the rider a flash of orange-and-yellow Lycra topped with a superhero helmet. Slapped across the back of the helmet was a bumper sticker, “Keep Portland Weird.”

“Hi, Sophie,” I said loudly, trying to be heard above the roar of the traffic on the metal plates of the bridge.

She told me she had more information about the midwife in Pennsylvania that she’d told me about the day of Dad’s funeral. “It turns out she does need help,” Sophie said. I could barely hear her and began to wheel my bike with one hand. She said the woman was in legal trouble. I guessed it was one of those messy lay-midwife licensing issues and was thankful I hadn’t agreed to help the woman. I already had a lead on a traveling nurse job in Pennsylvania, and my nursing license had arrived yesterday.

“I don’t know what the issue is, exactly,” Sophie said. “I’ll let you know when I find out more. But, and this is really why I’m calling, I’m pretty sure you and Marta—the woman’s name is Marta Bayer—are related somehow. At least the mutual friend we have thinks so. I wish my mother were still alive to tell us how, exactly.”

“My parents didn’t have any relatives in Pennsylvania,” I said, but even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized what she meant. She was talking about a blood relation.

A birth relation.

“Not adoptive relatives, Lexie,” she said, confirming my thoughts.

I banged my knee as I struggled to keep my bike upright. “What did you say?”

“She’s a blood relative. Maybe a cousin. Maybe closer.”

“How close?” I whispered. When I realized she hadn’t heard me, I cleared my throat and asked again, louder this time.

“She’s young, mid-thirties, I think, so she couldn’t be your birth mother. But still…”

“Why does the mutual friend think we’re related?”

“Well, we’re not positive about this,” Sophie said, “but we think that her mother, my mother, and your biological grandmother were all childhood friends in Indiana. That’s what we gathered when we met Marta at a conference a few years ago, anyway.”

I strained to listen as Sophie talked through the connections that had generated their theory that this Pennsylvania midwife and I could be blood relatives. Soon my head began to throb inside my helmet. Finally, I asked Sophie if I could call her back.

Even as I tucked away my phone, got back on my bike, and continued across the bridge, I knew what I was going to do. In my mind, I had already rearranged my schedule. I would fly out right away, but before starting the traveling nurse position in Philadelphia, I would help Marta for a couple of weeks in Lancaster County. The timing was perfect.

Sailing downhill through the last wisps of fog, I knew that if this Marta person did indeed turn out to be a blood relative, she would be the first direct connection to my past I had ever had.

Because of privacy issues, I couldn’t show James the photos of the two babies I received that day, one being Tonya’s baby that she had, in fact, kept. Sitting in my room, I looked at the photos again as I waited for him, flipping back past them in iPhoto to the previous photos too. Baby after baby. Some asleep; some bright eyed. A few yawning; a few screaming. Some with a shock of dark hair; some with no hair. Some with curly hair; some with straight. Some with fine hair so light it was transparent; two with red hair so bright it looked like flames.

I didn’t have any baby pictures of myself. Not one. In fact, I only had a couple of photos from my childhood. One of me as a distant two-year old in the garden under the windmill. Another on my first day of school. Three with Mama the year before she died. One with Dad in the orchard when I was eight. It seemed to me that my parents only used one roll of film over a span of ten years. When I started working for Sophie, I saved up and bought a camera. It was my first big purchase.

The intercom buzzed, and I pressed the button to tell James I would be right down. As I closed my laptop and gathered my things, I thought about our relationship and my urgent need to get away.

Anyone else in my position, feeling this isolated and alone, would probably be trying to reel James in about now. So why wasn’t I? If one is feeling kinless, why not start a family? I knew other adopted girls who always had to have a boyfriend, who always wanted to be needed, who always needed to be wanted. That wasn’t me. Once I finally got through my ugly duckling phase and started dating, I would break up when the guy became too serious.

James told me I did that because I was protecting myself. He said this happily at the time because we had been dating for six months, and he thought I’d made it past that phase with him. He wasn’t as happy now. Now he said I was pushing him away because I was afraid he would leave me, because I’d been traumatized by Dad “leaving” me. He was correct that I was pushing him away, but regardless of the reason, I was tired of his constant analysis. More than once, as he patiently outlined my actions in light of my damaged psyche, I was tempted to return the favor, telling him that his compulsion to practice psychology without a license was likely a natural defense mechanism against his own latent abandonment issues. Take that, Dr. James Nolan!

I met him on the sidewalk under a flowering cherry tree that rained pink petals on his head. He smiled as he brushed them out of his curls, but it was a melancholy smile with a hint of fear.

We walked around my neighborhood, strolling along the sidewalks. I stopped to window-shop; James grew restless and shuffled his feet. I was hoping to eat at the Asian Bistro on Twenty-third Avenue, but we ended up at Pepinos for their five-dollar special. James refused to let me pay when we went out.

“Tell me about Pennsylvania,” he said, unpeeling the foil from around his burrito. He knew I’d applied for the traveling nurse position; he knew I wanted to look for my birth family. In fact, I’d already posted my name, date of birth, and place of birth on the Pennsylvania adoption search site, hoping that someone from my family was looking for me too.

I told him about Sophie’s phone call and my change of plans. “I’ll work for a week or two in Lancaster County and then go to Philadelphia for four months.” Chances were, even if I put the house and orchard on the market before I left, it wouldn’t sell before harvest. I had to be back in case anything went wrong.

“Four months? Lexie, that’s a long time.”

I nodded.

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Nothing’s certain yet. It’s just looking like this might be how it all plays out.”

As he tilted his head, a pained expression passed over his face.

I rushed on, telling him the midwife worked with the Amish.

“So you’re going to be an Amish midwife?”

I smiled, thinking how odd that sounded. “Well, technically I’ll be a midwife to the Amish. But just for a week or two.”

“Is Marta Amish?

“No.”

“But she’s related to you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I think I’ve got it,” he said, smiling. Then he turned serious and added, “Are you really ready to find your birth family?” He’d broached the subject in the last couple of weeks, but I had evaded discussing it.

“You’re the one who’s wanted me to deal with my abandonment and attachment issues for the last year,” I said.

“But that’s different than looking for your birth family.”

“I just thought, you know, since Dad’s passed on that it was a good time to look. I won’t be hurting anyone’s feelings.”

“You were worried about that?”

“Or stirring up trouble.”

“Trouble for whom?”

“It’s not like I want a relationship with anyone, James. I just want to know…” my voice trailed off.

“Know what?”

I shrugged.

“What if it’s not what you expected?”

“Well, I don’t really expect anything in particular,” I lied. “So I think I’m good.”

He folded his hands on the table. “Wow.”

We stared at each other for a moment.

Then he said, “What does this mean for us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to take a break while you’re gone?”

I slumped against the bench seat. “Actually…” I’d been mulling this over and over. “I do. But just while I’m gone.”

He drew in a deep breath. He let it out slowly and then said, “Is this a break as in ‘so you can see other people’?”

I wanted to laugh. Who would I want to see? “No,” I answered quickly. “Just a break so I can focus, think about my birth family, think about finding the information I deserve to know. I need to devote all of my energies to that, not to us.” He looked at me intently, as if to say he hadn’t realized that our relationship was such hard work. We both knew it wasn’t. I dropped my gaze, adding, “But we can still talk. And text. Right? Occasionally?”

“Sure.” His voice was chilly.

My heart constricted. He was my best friend. What was I doing? I took my camera from my bag and snapped a picture of him, trying to lighten the moment.

“Stop.” He hated it when I did that. “You won’t be able to use that with the Amish.”

“Says who?” I put the camera on the table.

“The Amish.”

“What? Besides dressing as though it’s two centuries ago, they don’t believe in cameras?” I was especially sensitive to the dressing issue, even though my experience had been closer to dressing as if it were the 1930s. Still, I knew how humiliating it could be.

“I’ve been reading up on Pennsylvania.” James stood and put our garbage on the tray. “Apparently, they put photos in the category of graven images.”

“Oh.” Exodus. The Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thank goodness I’d only be in Amish country for a week or two. What would I do without my camera?

Darkness had fallen as we left the restaurant. “What do you hope to find?” he asked, stepping around me so he was walking closest to the street. Dad used to always do the same thing. I was pretty sure James learned it from Dad.

“Didn’t you already ask me that?”

“You didn’t answer.”

“My story,” I said. “The truth.”

James whistled. “That’s a pretty tall order.”

He didn’t come up to my apartment. As always, he would only do so if there was someone else with us. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t as chaste in high school.

I leaned in for a hug, but instead of embracing me, he grabbed my upper arms, pulled me toward him, and kissed me fiercely on the mouth. When the kiss was over, he straightened his arms, released his grip, and took a step back without a word. My face burning with heat, my heart pounding so loudly I was sure he could hear it, I whispered my goodbye. Then I turned and unlocked the door of the building, stepped inside, and pulled it closed behind me. Climbing up the stairs, touching my lips as I went, I wondered what, exactly, I thought I was doing. When I reached my apartment, I switched on the living room lamp and stopped at the window. James stood on the sidewalk, just as he always did, waiting to make sure I was safe. Our eyes locked and held for a long moment, and then he walked away.

A coldness welled up inside of me. I turned on all the lights and my stereo. What was I hoping for? I shivered as I sank down onto my white couch. I wanted to know why they gave me up. And I hoped, once they got a good look at me, that they would be sorry they did. But I couldn’t tell James that. I could barely tell myself. My cell phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket, hoping it wasn’t work. I was shocked to register that I wanted it to be James. I hadn’t felt this with other guys when I’d said I needed “a break.”

It wasn’t work or James. It was Sophie.

“I talked with Marta directly,” she said, without saying as much as hello. “And it’s worse than I was led to believe. She’s being investigated for manslaughter.”

“Yikes.” I’d need to rethink going to help her. This was serious.

“Two counts. Mother and baby. And the partner in her practice retired to Kentucky right before this happened and can’t come back because of health problems.”

“Oh no.”

“But it won’t be any of your concern after all.” Sophie paused.

I grabbed a couch pillow and held it against my chest, trying to follow what she was saying.

“She doesn’t want you to come. She wouldn’t tell me why. Just that some family matters are better left alone. She said to tell you thanks but no thanks. That was all.”