Love Potion #2

In any case, she was alone at the Women’s Resource Center, catching up on work—checking statistics for a grant writer who was trying to get more funding for the center—and holding down the hotline until the scheduled volunteer showed up later that afternoon.

The hotline rang, and Cameron picked it up from her desk. “Women’s Resource Center Helpline.”

“Hi. Mm. I’m upset by something. Something my husband did.”

“Yes?”

As she listened to the horror story that slowly unfolded, Cameron’s skin began crawling. She felt a terrible anger toward the man who had treated his wife so shamefully.

“He says it’s his right because he’s my husband.”

“He’s wrong.” Cameron questioned the woman about what she planned to do. Nothing. I can’t leave him, can I?

Fifteen minutes later, when she was off the phone, Cameron wondered if her answering the helpline might be bad for her baby. Weren’t you supposed to avoid negative emotions? And on the helpline, she listened to women in impossible situations, who truly believed there was no way out. The doubt and despair of rape, of violence, the constant echoing of Was it my fault?

She liked helping people, liked helping other women, and she knew she was good at it. She’d experienced enough unpleasantness in her life, seen enough, that she had compassion, that she knew bad things, or at least sad things, happened—eventually, to everyone. She’d been in bad situations with men, and what had been ghastly at the time had ultimately made her stronger.

But she wanted to do everything right for this baby, and she was only going to think positively about out-comes. Not for a second would she allow a negative thought to enter her head.

She wondered if it was too early to see a physician. Or a midwife.

Cameron believed that most women in the United States in particular—and especially their babies—were better off when birth happened at home. Hospitals routinely did things that made it difficult for women to labor and that compromised the health of the baby. The perfect example was the electronic fetal monitor. Hospitals used these, which forced a laboring woman to be on her back; the only worse position for giving birth would be standing on one’s head. The weight of the baby then pressed down on the mother’s vena cava, robbing the baby of blood and oxygen. Then fetal distress occurred.

But Cameron didn’t have a normal pelvis. Well, she suspected she didn’t, though she couldn’t really judge for herself. She was built like Beatrice. After miscarriage number four, Beatrice had decided to have her baby at the hospital. The baby had been premature, so the best place was the hospital. Preemies should always be born in the hospital. They were so vulnerable with their organs not fully formed.

Cameron knew midwives, of course. Clare Cureux was a “lay” or direct-entry midwife, meaning she hadn’t been to school to become a midwife, though she certainly was well-educated, her office filled with medical texts. And she went to workshops and conferences—or had done, for years. Bridget was thinking of going to school to become a certified nurse-midwife.

But Cameron couldn’t go to the Cureux women because she hadn’t yet told Paul she was pregnant.

She reached for the phone book to see who else she could find.

Thanksgiving

Myrtle Hollow

DAVID CUREUX had carved the turkey and was filling plates for the assembled family. Though he had divorced Clare more than two decades earlier, this was still his family: his eldest, Paul; his daughter, Bridget; Bridget’s husband, Beau; their two children, Nick and Merrill; and Clare.

He and Paul had put the extra leaf in the table so that the entire family would fit.

Bridget said, “Couldn’t Cameron make it?”

“She’s with her family at her grandmother’s house,” Paul said, not liking something sly in Bridget’s tone. He refused to encourage Bridget by asking what kind of concoction she’d brewed for Cameron or if it really had been innocuous, just something to help Cameron get over Graham Corbett.

Bridget was annoyed with him anyhow; she said he’d been insensitive in how he’d told her that she needed to watch Nick at the zoo when Nick was near the pond. Basic child safety! He hadn’t thought tact was an issue. Bridget, your kid could drown, hello? Which wasn’t what he’d said, admittedly.

His sister could hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Clare said, “We’re supposed to get snow next week.”

She spoke matter-of-factly. She loved to listen to weather reports. Though Clare had “the Sight” and knew some things in advance, she never knew what the weather would do except by listening to forecasters.

Bridget said, “Is her black eye gone?”

“Yes,” Paul answered succinctly.

“How’d she get a black eye?” asked David.

“Walked into a cabinet door.” Paul had given this explanation so many times that he’d begun to feel as though it was a lie. He did not want to talk about Cameron. Cameron was acting very strangely. She’d been avoiding him for two weeks. It reinforced that their sleeping together had been a mistake.

Bridget said, “Who’s that hunk she’s been hanging around with?”

Paul deliberately kept his face expressionless. “Someone we knew at school. Sean Devlin. New drama teacher at the high school.”

He could feel his sister watching him as though expecting him to turn neon-green.

“Are they seeing each other?”

“How should I know?”

Bridget made a sound that could have expressed amusement or scorn or triumph. “Because you talk to her every day?”

“She doesn’t talk to me about him.”

Bridget seemed to have exhausted the topic, for she exclaimed suddenly to her mother, “Oh, did you hear about Lou Anne Shaw?”

“That was a travesty,” her mother replied tartly.

Paul listened as Bridget described everything that had been done wrong by the local hospital for Lou Anne Shaw and her baby.

Paul’s father remained uncharacteristically silent on the subject. He was not going to leap in and support the colleague in question, which meant, Paul decided, that he felt that the people at the hospital had made some mistakes.

“They should have sectioned her right away,” exclaimed Bridget, an unusual point of view from a woman who’d grown up in a home where homebirth was considered the best way to have babies.

“Is everyone all right?” Paul finally asked, unable to forget Cameron’s hysteria a couple of weeks earlier. Childbirth was normal. He knew that. And, of course, Cameron wasn’t pregnant, would probably never get pregnant. But it seemed to him that labor and birth could be a risky business.

“Yes, everyone’s fine,” said Bridget. “No thanks to that quack.”

Her father roused himself to make tut-tutting sounds.

As far as Paul could make out, the woman had been a true case of something called CPD, which seemed to be what Cameron thought she had. A pelvis too small for having babies. The woman, who’d grown up in Logan but had moved away and was receiving prenatal care elsewhere, came in with premature labor. The physician, rather than listening to anything she told him, said he’d have a nurse monitor her for a bit and see what happened. Or something of that nature.

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