The Amish Midwife

by Mindy Starns Clark

  When I reached Marta’s, I pored over the schedule. The next two weeks were filled with both office visits and home visits. I would fit in postpartum and well-baby checkups as needed. As a nurse-midwife working in a hospital, I didn’t do well-baby checkups. Pediatricians did. With home births, after the one-week checkup, the baby went to a pediatrician and then later all of the vaccinations, which it seemed the majority of the Amish opted to do, were started.

  I had five mothers due in the next two weeks. I would commit to staying in Lancaster County that long, until I could talk to Ada and until the change of plea, unless one of the other midwives Marta had asked to help her came through.

  I figured Marta had a ninety percent chance, maybe a ninety-nine percent chance, of not keeping her business. If she plea-bargained and pled guilty to practicing without a license, I assumed that if she kept practicing, she’d be arrested again. If she didn’t plea-bargain and the matter went to trial, she would probably end up serving a sentence or at least being on probation. She wouldn’t be able to practice then, either.

  Helping out a little longer wasn’t going to make a difference in the long run, but maybe it would help Ella and Zed in the short run. I also thought it important not to abandon those five mothers here at the very end of their pregnancies.

  My last appointment for that afternoon was, thankfully, at two. I would be finished before Ella and Zed arrived home from school and able to talk with them about their mother. I closed the appointment book and stood. It shouldn’t be me, someone they hardly knew, doing the telling. It should be family. It should be Klara.

  The afternoon went by quickly, too quickly. In no time at all the last mother left and I had the office cleaned and ready for the next round of appointments.

  I waited in the cottage for the kids. I was afraid if I met them at the bus they would think something tragic had happened. With ten minutes to kill, I decided to call Sophie. She picked up on the second ring. I told her what had happened with Marta. She didn’t seem surprised. She thanked me for being willing to stay longer for the sake of Ella and Zed.

  Then she told me all the church members said to tell me hello. They’d had their weekly Bible study the night before and had prayed for me. Sophie also said Mrs. Glick inquired about when I would be back.

  I smiled, wondering who would have told me if my dad had landed in jail. It wouldn’t have been some stranger. It would have been Sophie. Or Mrs. Glick.

  “Have you talked to James?” Sophie asked.

  “A little.” I sat down on the sofa beside the cold woodstove.

  “He said you’ve made a doctor friend.”

  I sat up straight. “He did? He called you?”

  “Just to check in,” Sophie said.

  Right.

  “Was he upset?” I’d mentioned to James that I’d met Sean at the hospital and had breakfast with him, but I hadn’t told him about the other meals we’d shared.

  “No.” Sophie paused. “Just matter of fact.”

  “Oh.” Had I wanted him to be upset? “Sean’s not really a friend. More like an acquaintance. He’s an OB doc at Lancaster General.” My face grew warm, and I admitted to myself that I was lying. I quickly changed the subject to well-baby checkups, going over the details to make sure I was covering all the bases. They weren’t complex, but I wanted to make sure I was doing what I needed. Then I asked her if the hazelnut trees had leafed out.

  “You should ask James. He was working in the orchard last Sunday evening.”

  That caught me off guard, and I started to ask about the caretaker I’d hired, but then I heard the kids coming up the steps, and I told Sophie I needed to go. We hung up quickly.

  Zed was the first one through the door. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, searching the living room and then stepping toward the dining room. Her car wasn’t parked outside, so he knew she wasn’t home. I hadn’t thought about retrieving it.

  “She’s not here,” I called out to Zed as he hurried toward the kitchen.

  Ella came through the door and the screen slammed behind her. “What happened today?”

  “Both of you sit down,” I said. They both stared at me, not moving. I stood. “Your mom’s been charged with negligent homicide,” I said. “Bail was set.”

  “Where is she?” Zed’s voice had a frantic edge to it.

  “In jail.”

  Ella stepped around to the sofa and sat down, hard, her head falling into her hands. “How much is the bail?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars needs to be posted to get her out.”

  Neither Ella nor Zed spoke.

  “I’ll go see her tomorrow.” I needed to call to find out when visiting hours were. “I’ll see if you two can go too.”

  Still both were silent, and after a moment Zed stepped into the dining room. The whir of the computer started a moment later.

  “You’d better talk to Mom before you take us to see her. She might not like it,” Ella said through her fingers.

  “Okay.” I hadn’t thought of that. I sat down on the other end of the sofa. “Things will work out.”

  Ella took her hands away from her face. “How can you know that?” Tears filled her eyes. “You have no idea if they’ll work out or not. And if they don’t, what will Zed and I do? Become wards of the state?”

  “Ella—”

  She jumped to her feet, flinging a couch pillow against the sofa.

  “Ella.” I stood, stepping toward her, but she flew to the staircase, her coat still on, and disappeared up the steps. I waited for the slam of her door but it didn’t come.

  TWENTY

  Feeling lost, I decided to focus on dinner. Zed didn’t look up from the computer screen when I passed through the dining room. I wondered about him tying up the landline, but then I decided Marta would call my cell if she needed to talk. I searched through the little pantry cupboard. There was a box of saltine crackers. Chicken stock. A can of black beans. A box of whole wheat pasta. A jar of what looked like homemade spaghetti sauce—at least, I hoped it was. And a couple of jars of canned pears. I check the freezer above the refrigerator. There were several plastic containers of jam and a couple bags of green beans. It looked as though we would be having spaghetti for dinner and I would be going shopping tomorrow. I started water for the pasta and then put the sauce on to heat. There was a little bit of cheddar cheese in the fridge. I would grate that to go on top of the sauce. I wondered what the kids took for lunches. Maybe I would need to go to the store tonight.

  “Hey, Zed.” I stood in the doorway to the dining room. “Do you take sandwiches for lunches?”

  He shook his head without looking up. “Hot lunch.”

  “Do you have money for that?”

  “Yeah…” His voice trailed off.

  It was only five fifteen by the time dinner was ready, but I decided we might as well eat. As I set the table, there was a knock on the door. I knew Zed wouldn’t answer it, so I hurried into the living room. Alice was at the door with a casserole dish covered in foil. “I brought you a little something for dinner,” she said.

  I thanked her and asked her in. She declined, saying, “Just hug the children for me. Tell them I’m praying for their mother.”

  A minute later, as I turned off the burner under the sauce, there was another knock at the door. It was Peggy’s husband, Eli, with a store-bought frozen lasagna in his hands. “Peggy sent me over with this.” He thrust the lasagna toward me. His face reddened and he turned to leave quickly.

  “Thank you,” I said, wanting to ask about Peggy and the baby, but he’d already reached his carriage.

  Three more people dropped food off before I had dinner on the table, two Mennonite women and another Amish man. As I headed to the staircase to call Ella to come eat, she came bounding down, her cell phone in her hand. “It’s Mom,” she said. “She wants to talk to you.”

  I took the phone. Marta said, “My car’s in the parking garage two blocks from the courthouse. Could you get it back to the ho
use for me? There’s an extra key hanging by the front door.”

  “Sure,” I said. Maybe Sean could help me.

  “And speaking of cars, a couple from our church have a car you can borrow. I don’t think you should keep paying for that rental. It’s a waste of money.”

  I agreed. She told me they would drop the car off in the morning.

  Without as much as a transition, she said, “And please encourage the children to be hopeful. There’s no reason for them to be alarmed. Ella was pretty upset, but I think I talked her out of it.”

  I asked her about visiting the next day with the kids, but she said that wouldn’t be necessary. She sounded touched when I described all of the people who had shown up with food. We chatted about clients for a minute, and then she asked to talk to Zed. I sent Sean a quick text about the car as Zed took the phone.

  He said “Okay” several times and then, “I love you too. Bye.” That was all. Then we sat down to eat.

  We bowed our heads and prayed silently and much longer than usual. When Ella said, “Amen” out loud, I marveled at the change in her outlook, not sure if the swing was due to her age or personality or prayer, or if her mother still had that much control over her. There was another knock on the door before we even started to pass the pasta. I stood. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have to go to the grocery store in the morning after all.

  Sean was free to help, and he came in to meet Ella and Zed before taking me to get Marta’s car. He spoke warmly, shaking their hands and telling them how sorry he was about the events of the day. He encouraged them to be hopeful that things would work out. He then followed me to the car rental agency on the outskirts of town, and once I’d signed all the paperwork and turned over my key to the Taurus, I went outside and eagerly climbed into his two-door BMW. It was the first time I’d been in his car, and the leather seat felt like a fitted glove as I sank down onto it.

  As he drove we chatted, talking through a plan to go out to dinner again on Saturday evening. When we reached the parking garage, we found Marta’s Toyota on the top floor, a prepaid all-day receipt on her dash, just as she had said we would.

  Sean and I would be parting there, and as I turned back around to thank him for his help, he took my face in his hands and planted a kiss right on my mouth. I was surprised at first, but then I allowed myself to go with it, refusing to let thoughts of James enter my mind.

  When we finally pulled apart, Sean grinned.

  “Sorry about that,” he teased softly. “But I just knew you were going to say ‘How can I ever thank you,’ so I figured I’d go ahead and give you your answer.”

  Feeling just a tad unsteady on my feet, I got into the car and started it up before rolling down the window and giving him a reply.

  “Shows how much you know,” I said, shaking my head in mock scorn. “I was going to give you a fruitcake.”

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  All the way to the cottage, even as my heart felt heavy with guilt, a smile lingered on my lips.

  When I arrived, Zed called me into the dining room. “I joined a Swiss genealogical site,” he said. “And found some info on the property. According to a response I got, it’s in the Emmental.”

  I peered over his shoulder. There was a posting written in German.

  “Which is…” he clicked open a Wickipedia screen, “located in the Canton of Bern.”

  “Cool.” I leaned forward and skimmed the article. It was the second largest canton in Switzerland. The city of Bern, not surprisingly, was the capital, along with being the capital of the entire country. It was located in west-central Switzerland and included the Bernese Oberland, a portion of the Alps that consisted of the Jungfrau, among other peaks. The Emmental was a hilly landscape mostly devoted to farming, particularly dairy farming.

  It sounded a lot like Lancaster County, minus the nearby Alps.

  “Amielbach is outside the town of Langnau.” He clicked open another window. The outlying area was forty-nine percent agriculture, again mainly dairy farming, and forty-two percent forested. The village was the “sunniest” in Switzerland and had only nine thousand inhabitants.

  “And,” Zed said, opening a fourth window, “I had a response about an Abraham Sommers, who lived in the Emmental area from the mid- to late-1800s.” An email in German popped open. “But I haven’t verified it’s the man you’re looking for,” he said. “Not yet.”

  I thanked him for his work and then asked if I could use the computer for a minute. I logged onto the registry first. There were still no responses. Next I checked my email. I had a message from James, asking how things were going and saying he had a weekend retreat with the kids from the group home where he was doing his internship. He said he’d call me Sunday night. He didn’t mention our last phone conversation.

  As I stood, sliding the chair back to Zed, I asked how Ella was doing.

  “Fine, I guess,” Zed said. “She went out right after you left.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He focused back on the computer as he spoke. “Someone came and got her…”

  “Who?”

  He shrugged. “Someone who needs a new muffler.”

  “Someone in a car?” I hoped it was a car and wasn’t who I feared it was.

  “Nope. Sounded more like a motorcycle.”

  I called Ella’s phone but she didn’t answer. I walked down to the bridge, listening for the telltale sound of Ezra’s motorcycle, but I heard nothing except for the hoot of an owl. The sky was clear and the stars bright with no city lights to compete with, but the icy chill of the night made me shiver. Just the thought of Ella in her thin dress on the back of Ezra’s bike speeding along the highway had me vaguely nauseated.

  As I headed back to the cottage, I heard the distant roar of the motorcycle coming from the other direction. I made my way through the darkness as carefully and quickly as I could back toward the cottage, but it sounded like the roar had beaten me there. The sound paused and then, after a few moments, started up again. A lone headlight was coming toward me. I waved my hands for Ezra to stop, but he merely ducked his head as he buzzed by. I watched his taillight swim a little as he bounced onto the bridge. He wore his leather jacket and helmet, but another helmet was secured on the metal loop at the back of the empty seat.

  When I got to the house, Ella was in the shower.

  “A hot shower,” Zed said. “She was really cold.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Her birthday is Saturday.” Zed spoke with eyes glued to the screen.

  “So she said.”

  “She’ll be sixteen,” he added, as if that explained everything. He sat up straight and his eyes popped wide. “Incoming message.”

  I peered over his shoulder, but this email was in German too.

  Zed spoke slowly as he read. “Abraham Sommers had a daughter Elsbeth. And a property called Amielbach.” Zed paused. I already knew all that. “He was a councilman in the Emmental.” That I didn’t know.

  Zed continued. “His daughter left in—sometime in the mid 1870s—for America and ended up settling in Indiana.”

  I’d guessed at that, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

  “Elsbeth retained the property and passed it down through her family, but it was sold twenty-four years ago and turned into a hotel.”

  I would have been two years old at that point.

  I pulled a dining room chair next to Zed and sat down. It was too bad the beautiful house wasn’t in the family anymore, but I could still visit it someday.

  “And,” Zed looked at me furtively and then back at the screen, “an American woman moved to Amielbach right after it sold. She lives in a little house on the property.”

  I took a deep breath. “What’s her name?”

  “No name given.”

  Zed kept reading silently.

  “What does it say about her?”

  “Just that she’s not your average American and she’s very private and he
doesn’t feel that he should give out any personal information.”

  “Wait a minute. Not your average American how? In what sense?”

  “I don’t know. That’s how he put it.”

  I tensed. “Who is this man?”

  Zed reread the email. “Hey, my German isn’t perfect, but I think he owns the hotel. He’s a history buff. That’s why he’s on the list where I posted.”

  “Email him back and ask him for more information about the woman. Tell him…” Tell him what? That I wondered if the woman might be my birth mother? What were the chances of that? “Ask him if the woman’s name is Giselle.”

  It couldn’t hurt to try.

  Ella avoided me for the rest of the evening. Finally, I confronted her in her room. “I was worried about you.”

  “Why?” She wore a white nightgown under a terry cloth robe and sat on her bed with a textbook in front of her. Her hair hung long and wavy halfway down her back. The light caught the dark auburn sheen when she turned her head.

  “Let’s see…I didn’t know where you were, whom you were with, or when you were coming back.”

  “I was fine.” She looked up at me demurely and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Besides, I already told you that Ezra and I are good friends.”

  “What would your mom say?”

  Ella shrugged. “I turn sixteen on Saturday.”

  “But you’re Mennonite, remember. Not Amish. We don’t do rumschpringes.” Oops. Freudian slip—I’d meant to say “you,” not “we.”

  “But Mom has Amish roots, you know. She’s always said I’ll have more freedom when I’m sixteen.”

  “I doubt if she ever intended that freedom to include riding on the back of Ezra’s motorcycle.”

  “Well, she’s not here, is she?” Now Ella’s tone was a little bit sassy.

  “Next time, if I’m still in charge, call me. Or send me a text.”

  She closed her textbook with a thud. “That’s just it,” she said. “We don’t need you to be in charge. We’re totally capable of taking care of ourselves.”