Talking About My Baby

Francesca thought, We’ve been here a hundred times before. Butting heads. “I would have driven straight back to Maternity House. What possessed you to do anything different?”

“I told you. I swore—”

“The mother is clearly not dead.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But her wishes were obvious. She considered herself dead—to this child. And now, Laura can grow up knowing that her mother and I made a pact, rather than that her mother abandoned her, which is the story she’d hear if she was adopted by strangers.”

Francesca pressed her lips together. The baby was darling, with her thatch of dark hair and huge dark eyes. I don’t dare hold her. But Tara... Tara was nursing her with supplemental milk. Ten to twelve times a day. What was she thinking? “Tara, that baby is stolen. From the next couple in the state of Texas waiting to adopt a child.”

Tara had already considered that. “I disagree. Julia fostered her out—informally—to me. People have done it forever, everywhere. Uther Pendragon handed Arthur to Merlin, who gave him to Sir Ector to raise. Dad told me about an Eskimo lady giving her second son to a woman who had none, for the strength of the community—”

Francesca rolled her eyes. She’d once heard Charlie convince a man that moose turn into caribou when they cross the Arctic Circle. “Things have changed, Tara.”

“But remember how it was in Hawaii? Lots of adoption within families. Fostering and adoption are ancient traditions—”

“And this is the dawn of the third millennium.”

Tara lifted the infusion of fenugreek she’d brewed. “To a bright new century. Here we are. And I can help you. I’ll do the homebirths. You do the hospital births.”

“I’ve already told my homebirth clients that I can’t attend homebirths anymore. I can’t risk losing hospital privileges, and there’s simply too much pressure from the medical community.”

“Tara to the rescue. I’ll start a homebirth practice to fill in the gaps. After all, I have no hospital privileges to lose.”

“You should not be practicing in the state of Colorado, Tara. It’s not legal. In January—” Francesca began.

“Not an issue. These hands caught more than eight hundred babies just last year.”

“In Texas. I know your credentials, Tara. But the answer is no.”

The infant in her arms ceased sucking at Tara’s nipple and the tube from the supplemental feeder. Her head dropped away in slumber, and Tara carefully turned her to burp her.

Pretending not to see the bonding between her daughter and the newborn, Francesca watered pots of cacti in the solarium. The muscles in her shoulders ached. How could Tara have done it?

Only Tara would have done it.

And Tara was fragile as a cactus. Cacti seemed hardy, but if you ignored what they were and watered them too much... Was Tara really over Danny, over his running off with her partner, having a child with her partner? Now ex-partner.

How can I turn her away? Wandering to the kitchen, Francesca touched the soft cheek of the sleeping newborn. Skin so fine. The smell of her so new. “Do you even have her birth certificate?”

“No.” The solution—the last-gasp, avoid-losing-Laura solution—confronted Tara again. Surely it wouldn’t come to that.

“How do you plan to adopt her, Tara?”

“I’m working it out. Don’t worry. If I’m not worrying, why should you?”

Francesca folded her arms across her chest. Lines in her forehead deepened as she returned to the solarium. After a bit, she shook her head and muttered, “That man.”

“Isaac the Greedy? His kids are cute.” Releasing the parking brake.

“His children are in dire need of a mother.”

In dire need of a mother?

Tara came alert. “Where’s their mother?”

“I understand she’s dead.” Reluctantly, Francesca added, “In Rwanda. That’s where they came from.”

Rwanda?

Tara saw the terraced slopes, felt the heat and humidity, smelled the scents, the unique scents of that country, the faces of the people. She had read the newspapers and books in ’94 and since, and cried for Rwanda.

She placed Laura in a sling against her chest, a style she’d learned in South America, and went to the sink. She removed the feeding system and emptied the remaining milk, then prepared for next time. Afterward, she took flour, cinnamon and nutmeg from the cupboard. “I’m going to make a couple of pies and take them up to your nemesis and his motherless children.”

Francesca’s eyes rounded. “You’re going to do what?”

“It’s for Laura. Here’s a man who needs a wife. And I need a husband so I can get a home study and adopt Laura.”

“Tara, you can’t—”

Tara laughed. “Just kidding, Mom.”

Francesca reminded herself to breathe. It sometimes occurred to her that Tara had been conceived in a turbulent year—oh, in how many ways—and that she’d been born on the fifth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and that maybe all of this was to blame for her having turned out as she had. But no. Charlie Marcus’s genes—and personality, if you could call it that—were responsible.

“I’m going to try to talk him out of selling this house,” Tara explained, almost as though reasoning with herself.

Francesca studied her daughter. Was Tara lying? She’d learned from the best—her father. “The house is a done deal.”

“Not till closing.”

“He’s not going to back down, Tara. I’ve known him longer than you have. Not to say that I do know him, only that I know how he feels about selling this house. I always get the same answer.”

Her daughter’s smile made Francesca uneasy, as if Tara actually planned to marry Isaac McCrea. “Then maybe someone else should do the asking.”

SHE DROVE SLOWLY, yet the low-slung station wagon hit rocks in the four-wheel-drive road. Her mother had offered to watch Laura, but Tara had declined. She didn’t want to be apart from her. You’re so precious. Blowing bubbles in her car seat.

Twilight bathed Tomboy. The ghostly skeleton of an uninhabited mining structure rose against the far rock walls. Closer by stood another deserted building, the Columbine, which had once been a bordello. Now the windows were boarded, like those of the houses across the road where miners had lived, but Tara drove with one elbow in order to direct an X made with her two index fingers toward the house of prostitution.

Had he bought that, too? Her mother had said “everything north of the road.”

Lights shone from a house set alone at the edge of the tundra. Decades ago, the mine owner had resided there, in a two-story cabin set eight feet above the road, at winter snow level. Subsequent owners had built onto the sides and back, adding the steep rooflines of a chalet, with outdoor shutters and balconies. A snowmobile near the side porch awaited the first storms.

Isaac McCrea had chosen a high and desolate paradise for his home, and Tara envied him the alpine wildflowers that would poke through the tundra, the grasslike slivers ice formed at that altitude, the alpenglow which would turn the peaks pink each night.

He must have heard her car. A tall shadow darkened a downstairs window, then moved away.

She parked, and when the motor died, she could hear music. Drums and singing.

HIS DOORBELL RANG, and he crossed the pine floor in his wool socks, calling over his shoulder to David, “I’m going to steal the scroll.”

Dice rolled on the kitchen table as he opened the door.

It was Francesca Walcott’s daughter with her newborn. He remembered an observation earlier that day. She didn’t look like a woman who’d recently given birth.

A black cat shot between his feet and leaped to the porch railing. Arching its back, it hissed.

“Don’t take it personally. She always acts that way.”

Tara heard a trace of an accent. How could she have missed it earlier? She held out a cardboard box. “I made you some pies. The bottom one might be a little crunched. I had to stack them. There’s cardboard in between.”

“Smells great. We’re not picky.” Pumpkin. Like his mom’s. “Come in.”

“Thanks.” Her grin was raw and unbridled, radiating sexuality. When she stepped inside, he noticed she was tall, five-ten maybe. Long straight hair the shade of a walnut fell down her back, and her eyes were almost the same color. They swept the foyer, the great beams, the ancient floors, the loft. Isaac realized what she must see—the laundry heaped on a chair, the dishes in the sink, Barbie dolls and Micro Machines on the rug, a cat’s kill. He grabbed a snow shovel from the porch and scooped the last outside.

The three children gathered at the table were neater than their surroundings. The little girl wore blue flannel pajamas, her long thick hair in two braids. Dirty dishes covered two counters. The music came from upstairs.

“You steal the scroll,” one of the boys said to Isaac.

“Okay, I’m going to read it.” Isaac remembered his manners belatedly. “Hold up, gang. We have a visitor. This is—”

“Tara.” She grabbed a chair at the table and surreptitiously brushed off crumbs before sitting. In Mexico, out in the country, the women’s homes had dirt floors. She’d loved visiting each home for prenatal visits and births. Years ago. “Who’s who, here? And what are you playing?”

“Dungeons & Dragons,” David said. As the boys dove in with answers, Isaac shut the door. Why was she here? The eviction? She couldn’t possibly think this would sway his decision about the Victorian.

And that couldn’t be her baby.

“Dad’s a thief. We just found this scroll, and he stole it.”

Isaac’s thoughts drifted back to the game, and he winced. “I forgot to ask Oliver to identify it.”

“That’s true.” David, his younger son, held their destinies in his hands. “And when you read the scroll, you begin to grow a beard. It grows at a rate of one foot per hour.”

Isaac and his fellow adventurers groaned.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” said Danielle. “Oliver has les ciseaux. La magique!” Her heavily accented English turned to French, then Kinyarwanda, until she covered her mouth to keep the words inside. The gesture stabbed Isaac. He’d been too intense about her speaking English.

Daddy was easy. She’d known him as Daddy all her life. Having the children call him Dad or Daddy had been his and Heloise’s main concession to the obvious fact that he was not Rwandan, not Hutu, not Tutsi, not Belgian. American.

Tara stared at Danielle with brilliant, admiring eyes. “You know more languages than me!”

“Not English.” Danielle sighed.

“You shouldn’t have read the scroll, Dad,” said Oliver, their magician. “We’ll try the magic scissors, but I think we’re going to have to pay someone to remove the curse.”

“Your English is very good.” Tara saw something dart across the shadows in the kitchen. A mouse. Someone should let the cat back in.

You sure made yourself at home, Isaac thought. “Everyone who wants a piece of pie needs to wash a plate.”

Three chairs moved in unison.

Another cat, dark gray, stalked toward the corner. Get him. Get that mouse. Tara glanced up at Isaac. “You have a great family.”

“Thanks. Shall I wash a plate for you?”

“Oh, I can wash my own.”

She began to rise, and he waved her down. “You’re a guest. Dishes just aren’t a high priority around here.”

“They never have been with me, either.” But someone better get a handle on the crumbs.

“And guys,” he told the children, “that’s a wrap for tonight. After the pie, go to bed.”

None of the children chose to eat at the table, instead settling all over the rustic furniture and the tattered rug that covered the center of the distressed-wood floor. In the kitchen, the mouse had become a toy for the charcoal cat.

Isaac set a piece of pie and a fork in front of Tara. “Something to drink?”

“Water, please.”

He brought it, then his own, and they were alone at the table while the kids carried on their own conversation about the game, lapsing into Kinyarwanda—then, with a glance at him, returning to English. Rules for guests.

Tara tried to kick off the conversation. “How do you like being a doctor in Precipice?” She tucked a finger into the newborn’s tiny hand.

“It’s nice.” Calling himself to the conversation, Isaac shrugged.

Tara thought he sounded as though he was just visiting.

The baby began to wake, and she lifted the child from the sling. “Hello, Laura. Hello, hello, sweet princess.”

Laura. A coincidence that this baby should share a name with one of his dead children, one of the triplets. Only Danielle had survived the birth, to become his brother’s namesake three days later, when he had named her sisters, too, the sisters he’d dug up from the dirt in which they were buried. As he’d dug to find Heloise. His hands itched to hold this Laura. Could holding her be part of healing?

He reached out.

So the doctor likes babies. Tara filed the thought away. What was his story? What had happened to the children’s mother? Was she Hutu or Tutsi? One or the other, surely.

“This is Laura Estrella,” she said. Her hands to his. Big, long-fingered hands, man hands, beautiful hands.

The baby was all eyes. She was also wet, Isaac observed, and Tara hadn’t brought a diaper bag inside. “How many days old?”

“Two weeks.” Two weeks of finishing business at Maternity House—without letting anyone know about Laura. Then, packing her birth records and midwifery texts, settling into a routine with Laura. But this man would know, would know she hadn’t given birth to the child. I’m looking after her for her mother. Sure. Why not? Tara said the words, then followed them up. “I was working at Maternity House in Sagrado, Texas. Her mother was from Mexico and came up to have the baby. She’s young and doesn’t want to take care of Laura yet.” A lie. It was the worst kind of lie, partly true.

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.”

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.