by Mary Kubica
She shakes her head. She harrumphs. “Look at me,” Mrs. Tebow says, showing off her very pregnant self. “I’m fat. The last thing I need is a pastry.”
“You’re not fat,” I scold. “You’re pregnant.”
We take our coffee to a table and sit. The coffee shop is quiet, small. There are only a handful of people here, professionals on laptops mostly. These meetings are as much about me trying to impress potential clients, as they are the other way around. If we like each other at the end of it, a contract gets signed.
“My husband says I’m never going to lose all this weight. I’ve gained thirty pounds,” she says. She says it like it’s grotesque, but thirty pounds is average. I gained at least that with each of my kids.
“Is your husband on his way?” I ask. I didn’t have time to change after class. I wear my yoga clothes, with a sweater on top. My eyes are heavy, the lost hours of sleep catching up with me.
Shelby fiddles with a ring on her finger. “He’s not coming,” she says uneasily.
“I’m sorry to hear that. He couldn’t make it?”
Husbands don’t always make it. Sometimes they’re at work, or on a business trip, and sometimes they’re uninvolved. It’s okay. Because the women who need me most are often those with husbands who show disinterest or inefficacy.
Shelby looks sheepish. She lets go of her ring. She rearranges herself on her chair, takes a sip of her coffee, which I overheard her order and know it’s not decaf. I don’t judge. I didn’t drink caffeine when I was pregnant. But every pregnant woman is different. Maybe a little caffeine is the one thing that gets her through the day. I’ve seen a lot of women over the years. Single mothers. Women who’ve been raped, but want to keep their baby. Women who choose to abort a fetus based on the result of genetic testing. Being unbiased is important. Every woman is not me.
Shelby shakes her head. Her hands are also shaking. Tiny ripples form in her coffee, ruining the latte art. “I didn’t tell him I was meeting with you,” she says. She’s nervous. There could be a million reasons why. Maybe she’s just timid or is trying to impress me. Maybe she feels badly about her husband or she’s terrified of the impending birth.
“Oh?” I ask. I don’t want her to feel strange. I reach across the table and pat her hand. Research shows the importance of touch on a person’s emotions, their physical well-being, the way they respond to others. Tactile stimulation is one of the most important.
I say, “That’s not a problem. It happens all the time, Shelby.”
“Really?” she asks. Only then do her eyes move to mine.
“Of course it does. It can be hard to get those men on board. It’s not like they’re the ones pushing a baby out of their bodies,” I say with an empathetic smile. Across the table, Shelby visibly relaxes. “After we talk,” I tell her, “you can talk to your husband and decide what you want to do. How far along are you?” I ask.
She says, “Thirty-six weeks.”
Most of my clients come to me newly pregnant. Rarely do they come at thirty-six weeks. She tells me why, how she and her husband just moved to town. She had an obstetrician she loved, but now she’s two thousand miles away. She also had a close family, a large support system, but now they’re gone, too. In essence, she’s alone with the exception of her husband.
I tell her why I became a doula. I tell her about my experience giving birth to Leo. What I remember is that the hospital staff didn’t pay much attention to me that night. Josh had to beg and plead for a nurse to check on me. I felt alone. I felt like I was a burden. After it was done, I wished I had had someone to advocate for me, someone other than Josh, whose emotions were running on high like mine.
I’ve since seen things happen in a labor room that appall me. My own birth experience was a cakewalk in comparison. A common belief during labor is that a baby’s needs supersede that of the mother’s. Women don’t always know they have options. Or they aren’t given a choice in their care. If they are, they aren’t allowed ample time or information to come to a decision themselves. Choices are made without their consent. Too many women don’t want to be a burden and so they say nothing. The mistreatment is subtle, too, and falls under the guise of medical care.
Doctors do things that verge on sexual assault to me. They stick their hands inside a woman’s vagina without telling her first. They disregard a woman’s pain. They use forced or invasive practices. In the labor room, no doesn’t always mean no.
Most times labor ends with a happy ending. Women put aside whatever negative feelings they experienced during birth because they got what they wanted in the end: a healthy baby. That doesn’t make it right. One of the reasons I do what I do is to advocate for women during birth.
“Continuity of care is important. To have someone who is there for you and only you during your labor.” I leave it at that.
We talk about a birth plan, what she wants out of this birth. “A healthy baby, that’s all,” she says. She reaches down to set a hand on her midsection. I ask questions. I learn that Shelby doesn’t want to deliver at home. She wants to deliver in a hospital. “I don’t need any of that new age crap,” she says. “I mean, I want the epidural. I don’t want a C-section, unless I need it. Then I want it. But I won’t be eating my placenta any time soon.”
That gets a laugh out of me. It feels like the first in days.
There isn’t any definitive research into the benefits of placentophagia that I’ve been able to find. But if a client wanted to eat her own placenta, I wouldn’t stop her.
We talk awhile. As we do, I find that I like Shelby Tebow. I really like her. She’s practical, not pretentious. She’s matter-of-fact. She’s young, and it shows. I was once young, too. She has dreams for the rest of her life. She likes helping people. She’s not working now that she and her husband have relocated. But when she’s able, she wants to get back to work. Her husband doesn’t want her to work. He likes it better when she’s home.
“Tell me about your husband,” I say. It feels like a good transition.
“What about him?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Anything.”
Her husband is an insurance agent, she tells me. He was a linebacker in college. He wanted to go pro, until a knee injury sidelined him. He’s still bent out of shape about it. He’s three years older than her. They started dating in high school, when she was a freshman and he a senior. When she turned eighteen, they got married. Shelby never went to college. She tells me how much he loves kids, how he’ll be a great father one day. I just don’t get the sense that one day means four weeks from now, when their baby is due to arrive.
After a while she gets down to brass tacks. She isn’t sure she can trust her husband to be there for her during the birth—physically, emotionally or otherwise. He’s kind of hard core, as she calls him. I’m not sure what she means by that. But it’s why she needs me there.
The next time I see Shelby is two days later. We meet again at the same coffee shop. This time I offer to buy her coffee, but she says no; she can’t stay. She’s jumpy. She brings the signed contract. She presses it into my hand. I take it. Both she and her husband have signed the document.
“You were able to get him on board,” I say, smiling.
“He had his reservations,” she says. Shelby doesn’t smile.
“Like what?”
She waits a beat before she tells me. “He thinks you’re a con. He thinks you’re ripping us off. He looked up people in your line of work. He wants to know why you charge so much. At first he said I was out of my damn mind if I thought we were going to pay that much for a babysitter.”
An image of her husband forms: cynical, candid, lacking trust.
I’ve been asked this question before. I’m not agency-based or hospital-based. I work alone, which is the reason my fees may be more than most. I provide services not everyone provides. You don’t get just any doula when you g
o into labor, dependent on who’s on call. You get me.
“He found one online that charged only three hundred dollars,” Shelby says. “But I said I didn’t want that one. I want you.”
“Why’s that?” I ask. Shelby doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. Why would she pick me over any other doula?
She shrugs. She smiles. “I like you,” she says. “But Jason said if I could talk you down to a thousand, that would be even better.”
“Talk me down to a thousand?”
“Or even eight hundred. I mean, he’s right. It’s a lot of money for one day of work.”
I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t like where this conversation is headed. It’s not one day of work. It’s a prenatal appointment, meetings like this, the labor and delivery, a postnatal visit, endless phone calls and texts. It’s also my livelihood, me putting my own life and family on hold for hers.
I don’t tell her that.
“I’m sorry, Shelby, but I don’t negotiate on my fees.”
Another shrug. Another smile, this one far more brazen. I get the sense that there’s more to this woman than I originally thought. For as nervous as she was the other day, there’s none of it today. Today she is assertive and sure. Which side of her am I to believe is true?
“Yeah, well,” she says, “it doesn’t matter. I got him on board either way, didn’t I?”
What I notice is that Shelby wears sunglasses, though we’re inside and outside the day is gloomy and gray.
KATE
11 YEARS BEFORE
May
There’s a river in town. It’s bordered by landscaped trails that curve around the water’s edge in an area known as the Riverwalk. The Riverwalk is the crown jewel of town. On weekends, people flock to it by the hundreds to visit. They walk on the brick paths, toss coins in the fountain, get their pictures taken on any number of the covered wooden bridges that pass over the river.
In the heart of downtown, the paths are maintained with ample lighting, an abundance of flowers and pristine landscaping. Nary a weed grows there. The streets nearby are all upscale boutiques. The number of bars and restaurants in our downtown nears fifty. On weekends, it’s exasperating trying to find a place to park.
But the farther from downtown you get, the river’s edge turns woody. The wide, well-kept paths metamorphose into a desire line created by years of erosion from people who pass through, feet wearing away the land. The path becomes narrow, just a ribbon of dirt that cuts through the grass and weeds, enmeshed in trees.
This time of year, the area is mosquito-infested. The excessive rain and flooding are the cause of this. Mosquitoes breed in damp conditions. They lay their eggs in stagnant water, like puddles. Because of the heavy tree coverage, the puddles never have a chance to fully dry out, and so the land stays muddy, mossy, the ground littered with the moldy debris from trees.
This is where the body was found.
Our group meets back at Josh and Meredith’s house. Everyone is talking fast, sharing what they know. It’s frenetic. The air hums with the sound of voices, a constant drone.
I look around. Josh isn’t here. But there are police officers here. Their cars are parked just outside, while an officer stands guard at the door. Other officers are inside the house, searching through Josh and Meredith’s things.
“Has anyone seen Josh?” I ask.
“He’s gone to the river,” someone says, “to see the body.” We all fall momentarily silent at the mention of that word: body. My heart is in my throat, hoping and praying that it isn’t Meredith or Delilah they’ve found.
We stand in a circle on Josh and Meredith’s lawn. The entire group is on edge and feeling anguished and defeated. The rain has slowed to a steady drizzle. Those of us that have them hold umbrellas over our heads to repel the rain. The rest just get wet.
“How do we know there’s a body?” Bea asks.
“My wife and I heard about it,” a man says, stepping forward.
“How?” she asks.
“We were on the Riverwalk, showing Meredith and Delilah’s photo around, asking if anyone had seen them. There were a couple runners there. We showed them the photo. No, they said. They hadn’t seen them. But they’d heard that the cops were just a couple miles downriver, trying to identity a body that was found. Hope that’s not who you’re looking for, they said.”
“We continued to dig for details,” the wife says. “We asked around to see if anyone knew anything.”
What they derived, she tells us, fighting tears, was that the body had been discovered early this morning by a man walking his dog. It was half-buried in the earth. The head and the torso were concealed underground, while the rest of it poked obscurely out. It had likely been buried better, some surmise, but last night’s rain may have washed the mud and the leaves away. The dog found the body first, driven there by the offensive scent. The river there is high, on the verge of overflowing; a day or two later and the body would have been at risk of floating away.
“Any signs of foul play?” a woman asks.
The husband and wife exchange a glance. They tell us they heard the body was unclothed, and, collectively, we gasp. Our minds go to the same place.
“Oh God,” Bea, beside me, says, taking my hand into hers and squeezing it tightly. Our eyes meet, thinking of what might have happened to our friend before her body was left abandoned and alone, thinking of Delilah. Praying that the naked body does not belong to Delilah, but also wondering, if it is Meredith, then where is Delilah? Death might be preferable to being taken by someone we don’t know.
Because of our close proximity to Josh’s house, Bea and I go home and gather snacks to pass around to the search party, which now nears thirty in number. When we step into the house, the workers are there. The music is loud, something techno with a low bass that makes the entire house shake. They’re hard at work, but they stop when we come in. They stop and stare.
“Excuse us,” I say, begging their pardon for being in my own home. I feel a man’s eyes on me as I collect strawberries from the refrigerator, wash and slice them in the kitchen sink. It’s unnerving. Bea grabs two bags of chips and as many bottles of water as her arms can carry. We go back, grateful to get out of there.
Everyone politely declines our offer of food. No one wants to eat. Everyone feels the same sickness in their stomach, a sadness and unrest, not knowing what’s happening down there by the river. It’s all anyone can think about. I, myself, try and imagine the scene: police and evidence technicians, reporters, yellow caution tape. A body being exhumed from the bramble.
After a while, I watch as Bea pulls the midwife aside. I see them talking on Josh’s front porch, where they’re sheltered from the rain.
I’m in the middle of talking to the woman who first heard about the body late this morning. She and her husband, she tells me, tried to make their way to the body, to see it for themselves, to see if it was Meredith or Delilah. But they got only so far before the local community service officers got in their way, blocking them and anyone else from getting too close. Many people had the same idea, fueled mostly by morbid curiosity: to see a dead body.
I excuse myself. I make my way to Bea, extending a hand to the midwife and telling her that my name is Kate. The midwife is midfifties with tender eyes and a kind smile. Her hair is long, graying, woven into a single braid down her back.
“Kate is my partner,” Bea says.
The midwife replies, “Yes, of course. Meredith spoke of you often. Good things only. I’m Jeanette,” she says, shaking my hand. “Meredith and I worked together on occasion.”
As a doula, Meredith worked in a variety of settings. She worked home births, often with the help of a midwife. She worked in hospitals. She went where her clients went, whether they gave birth in a bathtub or a hospital bed.
Bea is in the middle of telling Jeanett
e what we learned from Jason Tebow. “He said Meredith was their doula. It sounds like something went wrong with that birth, but he wouldn’t say what. He suggested some animosity toward the obstetrician.”
“Dr. Feingold,” Jeanette says, nodding thoughtfully. “Nobody likes him much,” she says.
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“He doesn’t have the best bedside manner. He can be uncompromising. He wouldn’t have appreciated Meredith being there, questioning him, undermining his decisions. To Meredith, clients came first. She didn’t care who she pissed off in the process.” She explains to us the role of a doula: to be there for emotional and physical support, to empower the mother, to ensure the labor and delivery were the best experience they could be. “Meredith is a wonderful doula. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her clients,” she says. “We talked a lot about our clients, even those that we didn’t have in common. Labor and delivery can be overtaxing. The long, unplanned hours, the physical and emotional fatigue. It’s heady and exhilarating from time to time, but also the kind of career that can run someone into the ground. We relied on each other for support. Meredith is a good friend.”
“She is,” I say, thinking of all the times Meredith had been there for me. A thought comes to me. “Why would Shelby see an obstetrician like him, if he’s so unlikable?” I ask.
Jeanette says, “Shelby was already late into her pregnancy when she started seeing him. Very few OBs like to take a patient on that late in the game because they don’t have a full knowledge of the patient’s history. But Dr. Feingold did. Dr. Feingold was also one of the few who didn’t already have a full practice, which should have been a red flag.”
“Do you know anything about this particular birth?” asks Bea.
“I do,” Jeanette says. She breathes deeply, holds the air in. At first she’s reluctant to tell us. But then she does. She exhales slowly and says, “The baby isn’t right.”
Bea and I exchange a glance. We’ve both seen the baby. The baby didn’t look not right to us. “How so?” Bea asks.