Margot Early - Talking About My Baby

While he was out of the room, Tara dabbed at the couch, then laid out a protective pad to change Laura. “We need to get you more clothes, kiddo.” The baby watched Tara’s eyes, and Tara smiled back, her mind on Isaac.

He was gone long enough to give her more chance to study the chalet. There were two primitive masks on one rough wooden wall, with a photo of a mountain gorilla between them. On the table beneath was a woven blanket.

When he returned, she asked, “What took you to Rwanda?”

“Doctors Against Violence. I was an intern and resident with them, then worked for them till last year.” They’d paid his way through medical school, too, in an accelerated program starting just after high school. And they’d gotten him and his children out of Rwanda on twelve hours’ notice.

Briefly, he remembered his fellow intern in Kigali fourteen years ago—twenty—four-year-old Heloise Nsanzumuhile. In three days, he’d known he was in love. With Heloise, her country and medicine.

He curtailed the conversation. “I have to go to the hospital.”

Doctors Against Violence. Back in the late ’80s, Tara had spent three weeks in Rwanda with her father and one of his friends, a biologist, and the mountain gorillas. On the way back to Kigali, Tara had seen the massacre of a Tutsi family. She was nineteen and had already lived in Chile for eighteen months, training in a hospital there as a matrona, a midwife—and reaching out, trying to create a link between the classes, between the few rich and the many poor, stirring the wrath of her friend Matilde’s patrón.... That day in Rwanda, her father had clapped his hand over her mouth and wouldn’t let her move. He knew her too well.

Weeks later, back in Chile, she landed in prison.

Not something she wanted to think about.

Feel the hope. Feel the possibilities. Isaac had wanted to hold Laura. Marry a doctor, adopt Laura. “Would you like me to stay and watch the kids?”

“We manage.” There was an intense, private protectiveness in his words. Tara gathered her things hurriedly, not meeting his eyes. Okay, he doesn’t want me for a sitter.

Which meant he wouldn’t want her for a wife, either.

LAURA’S CRYING penetrated her dreams later that night. Tara’s eyelids struggled open. How could any woman do this after a long labor? She’d started in great physical condition, yet she was exhausted.

She changed the infant’s sodden diaper. Precious little legs. Cuddle her in a blanket. But Laura cried all the way to the kitchen. Francesca had called some other new mothers earlier that day, and the freezer and refrigerator were stocked with fresh milk. It would keep for 48 hours in the fridge, two to four weeks in the freezer.

“I’ll hold her while you warm the milk and set up.”

Tara hadn’t even noticed her mother entering the kitchen. I’m dead on my feet. But it seemed important to manage alone.

As Isaac did.

“I’m fine.”

Francesca was already reaching for the baby.

“Mom, you really don’t have—”

“Don’t be so stubborn, Tara. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

Why did people always think she was trying to prove something? She’d been told the same thing before—by Danny, especially. What are you trying to prove, Tara?

Danny, Dan McCrea, Danielle McCrea. The little girl must be named for her uncle.

Reluctantly, Tara let her mother hold Laura while she put the kettle on for fenugreek tea. Maybe she didn’t have anything to prove to Francesca, but she had much to prove to herself, especially where Laura was concerned.

Her mother turned in a slow circle, Laura against her shoulder. Gently, Francesca patted the crying newborn’s back. “Tara, how are you going to handle her records? You can’t just pretend this child dropped from space.”

“I’ll homeschool her.” Ready to nurse, Tara took the baby from her mother and settled in a chair at the kitchen table. The immaculate house contrasted with the chaos at Isaac’s.

“Eventually, someone will want to see a birth certificate.” Francesca perched on the edge of another chair. Tara rarely saw her mother relax, rarely saw her sit back and just be. Even now, she seemed poised to spring up, to try to make Tara more comfortable.

But Francesca was right about Laura. “It’ll work out,” Tara promised. Laura’s soft cheek was curved, her little mouth suckling hard. Long ago, Tara had adopted the philosophy that things work out. She’d been jailed in one Third World country for defending the poor and in another for—bad luck. She never spoke of those times, seldom looked back.

Look forward, Tara.

Laura’s birth certificate, birth certificate... Oh, good grief! Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? “You could write a birth certificate.”

“That would be fraud.”

Tara heard. Francesca hadn’t said, Not on your life. She hadn’t refused.

“It’s the perfect solution, Mom.”

“No. I won’t do it. I wouldn’t even consider it, Tara.”

She had considered it. Tara knew but didn’t argue. Instead she began singing softly. “Golden slumbers kiss your eyes. Smiles await you when you rise. Sleep, pretty baby, do not cry....”

Francesca had rocked Tara to that song in Hawaii thirty years ago. Tara had been born in a homemade birthing tub beside a dolphin lagoon. She’d been born with the sac intact over her head, a symbol of good luck and strength. Francesca knew her daughter’s strength—but good luck?

More than a decade ago, Tara had survived a Chilean prison. Two years later, it was Mexico. In the United States she’d been arrested for protesting a nuclear waste dump and for protecting a palm grove in Hawaii from bulldozers. Francesca could scarcely conceive of what her daughter had survived in those instances. Especially Chile. But Tara’s eyes always shone, overflowing with enthusiasm, never betraying fear.

Francesca was afraid on her behalf. Always.

Tara never talked. She’d married Danny Graine, a contractor, and Danny had left her for her partner, for a fellow midwife. Francesca knew Tara couldn’t be held wholly innocent in the desertion. But all Francesca’s sympathies rested with her daughter.

Tara and Ivy. Besides midwifery, her vocation, they were her life. With Ivy, it was a little different. Ivy had joined their family as an adult. Brain damage, permanent amnesia, had robbed her of her past. She’d found it now. But back when Tara had suggested adopting Ivy, it had seemed natural. Francesca loved Ivy as a daughter. She is my daughter, like Tara and unlike Tara. Ivy’s levelheadedness was a counterpoint to Tara’s Charlie Marcus ways.

Ivy lived in West Virginia now. She was reunited with the husband and daughter she hadn’t been able to remember.

Fake a birth certificate for little Laura, precious Laura with her mouth latched so hard to Tara’s nipple? Francesca had seen her daughter wince while nursing Laura Estrella. I’ve already helped her round up more milk. So many generous mothers willing to help. Was the birth certificate so much more?

Yes.

And it was just what Charlie would have suggested. No interest whatsoever in obeying the law. Francesca abided by rules and regulations, had seldom found it difficult to do otherwise.

But Tara...

Nursing a child someone had abandoned in the back seat of her car. Holding inside the consequences of flouting the law in other lands.

I don’t want her hurt again. Not by another Danny Graine. Not by authorities who would take little Laura from her arms.

There must be a way to make the adoption legal. First, a home study. But where was Tara’s home? She couldn’t be legally employed as a midwife in Colorado until she became licensed. Maybe it was time to convince her to take that step, if not for her own sake then for Laura’s. “Tara, the law has changed. It’ll come into effect next year.”