Margot Early - Talking About My Baby

Isaac’s eyes belonged to Laura now—so they’d stay off Tara. A woman was a complication he didn’t need, unless she liked babysitting. He’d ask her about that in a minute, seeing she’d appeared on his doorstep like Mary Poppins. “What’s Maternity House?”

“A birth center. I’m a midwife, too.”

“Oh.”

She wanted to know what he thought. Whose side was he on? Between doctors and midwives in the United States, there were always sides. She asked, “And do you approve?”

He glanced up. “Why should it matter?”

Only analysts should answer questions with questions; in other people, it seemed like evasion. “The medical community here. No one will provide physician backup while my mother’s doing homebirths.”

Not my problem, Isaac thought automatically, as automatically as he had once known no sense of “other,” always seeing himself in another’s eyes, always looking for the global solution. But not now and not homebirth.

With fifteen hospital beds for every ten thousand Rwandans, he and Heloise had both attended births in homes. But his boys had been born at the hospital, Danielle the only gift in a disaster at home.

When Dan visited, they’d listened to his stories of obstetrics in Precipice and sometimes of “the midwives.” Dan could make you laugh.

Especially in a country with so little to laugh about.

The midwives! Isaac remembered. Dan visiting Kibuye, talking about Francesca Walcott, Ivy the Babe, Tara the... Oh, yes, he’d heard all about Tara, hadn’t he?

She was the one who said “yoni” instead of “vagina,” YBAC instead of VBAC... Isaac wished he could remember more. That night, Heloise had said, “Yoni. I love that word. Yes, you must call my garden my ‘yoni’ from now on.” And he had. Except when he called it her garden.

He didn’t want Tara watching his kids, after all.

Noticing that Laura had soaked the front of his shirt, Tara shoved her pie plate away from her. “Hold her, okay, while I run out to the car?”

As Tara left, Laura began to cry, and he lifted her to his shoulder and stood. Precious baby.

Oliver and David headed upstairs. The music went off.

Danielle came over to squint up at him and the newborn. “La bébé est—”

She stopped midsentence.

Crouching beside her, he smiled, teasing. “C’est pour votre bien.”

She laughed, then tried. “You are—funny!”

“You are smart. My favorite girl.”

Danielle touched the baby and told her, in Kinyarwanda, to stop crying, Mama would be back. Laura was momentarily silent, but by the time Tara returned, her screaming had driven even Danielle to her room.

“Sorry,” Isaac apologized. “She’s mad.”

“There’s not much you could’ve done. Hungry and wet.” Taking the infant, Tara moved to his kitchen to warm some milk, set up the feeder. Minutes later, she sat on his couch and began to nurse, banishing any shyness about the feeder. I’m so lucky, Laura. Lucky to have you.

The cat dropped mouse guts at Isaac’s feet. He disposed of the remains, then sat opposite Tara, on a longer, more tattered couch. “How are you doing that?”

Tara’s face felt fiery for the second time that day.

He said, “Clinical interest.”

She tried to forget he was Dan McCrea’s brother. “Sure. It’s a supplemental feeder. There’s a tube. I’m not even producing milk yet.”

“I’ve never known a woman to do that. Induce lactation.” He brought Tara a fresh tumbler of water.

“Thank you.” His wife must have nursed. “Actually, I’d like to see if I can get a breast-milk bank going here. And a support group for nursing mothers.”

Good ideas. None of her attitudes shocked him. Heloise’s sister had nursed Danielle.

The cat rubbed his legs.

Isaac fetched their pie plates and set them on the big footstools. Between bites of apple pie, he asked, “Will you be practicing midwifery with your mother?”

“We haven’t worked that out yet.” Play it cool, Tara. It was one thing to practice as an unlicensed lay midwife in Colorado; it was another thing to confess the fact to a physician. Laura watched her. “I can’t stop looking at this baby. She’s irresistible.” Time to get a hundred miles away from the topic of midwifery. “My mom says you’re absolutely set on selling that house.”

“Right.” It wasn’t her business why. Raised Quaker and practicing into adulthood—right up to Heloise’s death in a country where priests had slayed or betrayed their own flocks, where anyone seemingly would kill anyone—Isaac had little trouble controlling what came out of his mouth.

“You know, my mom could probably pay a little more rent.”

“Then she shouldn’t have trouble finding a new place.”

“You don’t know Precipice.”

Isaac finished his piece of pie. He didn’t like turning a woman out of her home, but he had obligations. He yawned conspicuously.

Tara seemed not to see it. She was preoccupied, her forehead creased in a frown.

Her question made him jump in his skin.

“So, you’re...not married?”

CHAPTER TWO

I’m praying hard, praying I can do it.... I know

I can’t last much longer, that I’ll end up going

to the hospital, except for we have no money, no

insurance. Rowdy’s applied for a job at a gas

station in Logan, but he doesn’t think he’ll get

it. Gabriela talks to me, says I’m doing good.

She’s just a kid, younger than me, but she helps

her mom with midwife stuff. She’ll never do

what I did, though I’ll never call this precious

baby a mistake. Anyhow, when Ivy checks me

again the baby’s coming....

—“Alison Angelina’s Birth,” Devon Workman, age 16, Guyandotte, West Virginia

TARA SWITCHED BREASTS, moving the feeding tube as well. Her nipples already protruded from nursing. He noticed one of them was malformed and circled by shiny, puckered tissue. Burns?

With difficulty, he kept from staring. “Widowed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s been five years.”

Silence folded in on them.

She juggled Laura and her piece of pie, trying to eat and paying more heed to the baby than to covering her breasts. If she’d been Heloise, he would have fed her bites between kisses.

As it was, he found her sexy, prodding, earthy. She’d descended on him like a forest spirit and made herself comfortable in his disordered home. Mouseridden—a haven for hantavirus. He shuddered slightly. Wishing her quick exit from his life, he asked, “How long will you be visiting your mother?”

“We’re moving here. Need a babysitter?”

“No.” He’d already decided. There was a school bus. The kids could handle it. In some ways, Oliver was older at thirteen than the adults of Precipice.

But tragedy and bloodshed didn’t really mature a child.

And what to do with Danielle in the mornings?

“I have references. I went to junior high and high school here.”

He pictured her employed as nanny to Sleeping Beauty and other fairy-tale children. Not his kids. Time for this day to end. The children would be spending the weekend with his mother in Silverton; he’d drive them over Thursday night. Friday was his extra day off before the weekend, and he’d told the schools this would be an educational absence. Only six months in the U.S.? Everything was education.

On the kitchen counter, his pager buzzed, and he found it between pie plates. “This is new for me.” He eyed the device. “Can’t say I love it.”

Tara turned on the couch and laughed. “I love mine. A baby on the way is good news. Oh, no—I mean, I just dumped the pie on your couch.”

Blood awakened his penis. Her voice? Another glimpse of her breasts? Or just having a woman in the house? “Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up.” He gazed at the number. The answering service. “Excuse me.”