The Mountain Midwife

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “I worked until midnight last night.” Mary Kate sat up and smoothed down her skirt. “One of the other girls didn’t come in, so I worked the extra shift. The drunk guys who come in from the bar to sober up give good tips.”

  “But Boyd didn’t sleep?”

  “He has nightmares. I couldn’t get him to go back to sleep.” She began to unbutton her sleeve to roll it up. “I should wear something more practical for this.”

  “It’s okay. That blouse is thin enough for me to get a good reading through it.”

  Too thin for the weather.

  Ashley stuck the ends of the stethoscope into her ears and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Mary Kate’s plump upper arm. “Just relax.”

  Mary Kate closed her eyes and breathed slowly. In those breaths, Ashley heard a hitch, a faint rattle. She must listen to her lungs, she decided. She wasn’t qualified to diagnose nonreproductive conditions, but with her nurse’s training and experience, she recognized many common conditions. This one concerned her.

  So did the blood pressure.

  “Let me listen to your lungs.” She moved the bell of the stethoscope to Mary Kate’s back, then just below her collarbone. The rattle was there, but faint.

  “I think I have a bit of a cold,” Mary Kate said.

  Ashley set her equipment on the credenza before turning to her patient. “Mary Kate, I can’t diagnose you, so I won’t say anything except you might want to consider going to the doctor.”

  “I can’t.” Mary Kate’s voice cracked. “I can’t miss work.”

  “You can’t go to work in your condition. You’re sick. You are seven months pregnant, and your blood pressure is on the edge of being too high for me to continue to treat you.”

  “Can’t you give me something?” Mary Kate began to twist her hands together faster and faster. “I know there are herbs and things. Granny Parrish in Gosnoll Holler—”

  “Don’t you dare.” Ashley’s reaction was instinctively sharp.

  The old woman should have been arrested decades ago for practicing medicine without a license. She had probably killed more than one witless “patient” over the past three-quarters of a century. Gramma Tolliver had seen to it the woman didn’t deliver babies, and now she wasn’t physically capable of doing so, but she still dispensed herbs and other potions with abandon.

  “You can give me something not too expensive,” Mary Kate insisted.

  “I wish I could.” If she had been able to go to med school . . . “But this is beyond my scope of care. And you know I’m not one for herbs. They’re too unpredictable in potency.”

  “I can’t afford no doctor. I gotta get to work.” Breathing hard, the wheeze obvious without the stethoscope now, Mary Kate shoved herself to her feet. “I’m gonna be late.”

  Ashley stepped into the doorway to waylay her patient’s departure. “I can’t in good conscience let you go to work.”

  For a moment, the two women faced off, Ashley taller, Mary Kate heavier. Then Mary Kate heaved a sigh that ended on a cough and nodded. “All right. I’ll go to the urgent care if I start coughing harder.”

  “I’d rather you went to Dr. White. I’ll give him a call to be expecting you. He’ll fit you in.”

  Mary Kate grimaced. “And want money up front.”

  “Don’t worry about the money.” Ashley held up her hand. “I’ll pay him from your account and you can keep paying me off as long as you need to.”

  “All right. All right. I said I’d go if I get to feeling worse.” Mary Kate’s lips thinned. “Now I gotta get going.”

  “Let me drive you.” Ashley led the way from the exam room and snatched her own coat off its peg. Her handbag was upstairs. She held up a hand to halt Mary Kate’s progress to the back door. “Let me fetch my purse, and I can drive you into town.”

  “But then I won’t have no way home.” Mary Kate pressed her hands to her rounded belly. “I gotta work. Sitting around a doctor’s office don’t pay the rent.”

  “I know, but, Mary Kate, your condition is—could be serious.” Ashley rested her hands on the younger woman’s shoulders. “You do trust me to know this, don’t you? I delivered your other baby.”

  “And all went just fine. It will again this time.” Mary Kate smiled, her blue eyes growing bright and beautiful as she did so. “I don’t trust nobody more than you.”

  “Then trust me when I say you need to consider using a medical doctor.”

  Mary Kate shook her head. “I’m going to be late for work if I stop at the doctor’s, and Roline needs me to help with lunch prep.”

  “All right.” Ashley shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and sought for a compromise.

  She couldn’t force Mary Kate to the doctor short of physically restraining her. Sadly, if she hadn’t built up enough trust with her patient over the past two years years and the other delivery for Mary Kate to simply do as she said, then Ashley was doing something wrong. That the last pregnancy had gone well was no excuse.

  Flexibility, though. That was what Momma always said was the beauty of midwifery over traditional medical care. So Ashley must be flexible in how she handled Mary Kate’s situation.

  “What if I come to the diner tomorrow and see how you’re doing? I can listen to your lungs in the office or my Tahoe, if you like.”

  Mary Kate grimaced. “You mean if you like.” Her face softened into a smile. “Don’t worry, Miss Ashley. I’m pregnant, not sick or dying. I’ll be right fine in a day or two.”

  Ashley had heard that line before, as though using a midwife immunized women from the vagaries of the human body.

  “All right. I’ll look in on you.”

  Mary Kate departed with a cheery wave and a bark of a cough.

  My fault. If she doesn’t trust my recommendation, then I have done something wrong.

  Grinding her molars with frustration, Ashley yanked her phone from her pocket to call Sofie. The Missed Call notice still flashed on her screen. A 703 number. Northern Virginia, but not her brother who lived there. Not a number in her contacts. She frowned. Who would call her from a couple hundred miles away?

  She started to tap the number to return the call when she noticed the person had left a voice mail. Probably someone in marketing clever enough to hear the message on her other phone and call this one, or perhaps someone interested in being added to her birthing assistant list, or—

  She touched her thumb to the Home key to unlock the phone and listened to the voice mail.

  “Miss Tolliver.” A zing hummed along Ashley’s nerves at the sound of the mellow male voice rumbling through the speaker. “This is Hunter McDermott. You don’t know me and—”

  She didn’t know him, but the name sounded familiar. So did the voice. But even with her eyes closed, she couldn’t recall a face to go with name or voice.

  “I am looking for a woman named Deborah Tolliver.”

  A pang clenched Ashley’s heart at the mention of her grandmother, deceased now for six years. Uneasiness followed. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would be looking for her grandmother after all this time, especially someone from near Washington, DC.

  “Do I possibly have the correct Tolliver?”

  Sort of.

  Ashley tucked one cold hand into her coat pocket and gripped the phone with the other hand so hard her fingers went numb.

  “If I do not, please just ignore this message. If I do, will you please have her return my call? Again, my name is Hunter McDermott and my number is . . .”

  He recited the number on the caller ID and the message ended.

  Ashley lowered the phone to look at the screen. He didn’t have the right Tolliver. She was gone, buried with her granddaughter’s decision to go to medical school, but, unlike those ambitions, Gramma wasn’t going to return. She should simply delete the message and let him think he had the wrong Tolliver. After all, no one from the city needed to contact Gramma if they didn’t even know she was dead.

  She deleted the voice
mail and changed menus to call Sofie and ask her where she had gone and what was going on. But before she tapped her assistant’s number, she thought about Mr. McDermott calling and about all the trouble Sofie’s mother had gotten into falsifying birth certificates on the border, and the cold seeped deeper than her hands, than her skin, right to her marrow.

  Surely Grandmomma had done nothing illegal like that. She kept scrupulously neat and precise records of every baby she caught—nearly six thousand in her fifty years of practicing midwifery.

  But what if she hadn’t recorded every birth? Ashley hadn’t yet recorded last night’s birth. She would, and yet the incidents subsequent to the birth had put record keeping out of her head. The only thing worse than not recording a birth was falsifying that birth record, as Sofie’s mother had done.

  As if thoughts of her caused it to happen, Sofie’s ringtone pierced the quiet of the autumn morning. Ashley paused at the foot of the driveway to stop the Texas blues song in the middle of a chord. “Where did you go?”

  “Home to pack. I’m flying out from Roanoke in three hours.” Sofie sounded calmer, but a hint of accent suggested the stress she was under.

  Despite being born and raised on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande River, Sofie had grown up in a community more inclined to speak Spanish than English and, when she was under stress, her flawless English slipped.

  “What’s going on?” Ashley heard the rumble of a car engine and retraced her steps up the driveway a dozen feet.

  A white SUV drove past far below the forty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. With memory of her cut phone line fresh in her mind, Ashley retreated another dozen feet and leaned against the trunk of a black walnut tree.

  Sofie hadn’t yet answered.

  “Sofia.”

  Sofie sighed. “Mi madre helped in a birth she shouldn’t have and the baby was dead.”

  “Oh no.” Ashley felt sick—for the mother of the stillborn child, for Sofie’s mother, for Sofie herself. Nothing about this situation could turn out well.

  “I know. Mi madre will likely go to jail over this one, and who will take care of the children?”

  Sofie’s five younger siblings.

  A flash of anger rocketed through Ashley. “Your father so you can take your certification exam?”

  Sofie snorted.

  And the white SUV returned down the road along the other side.

  “I’d better get going.” Sofie’s voice held a hitch, a hiccup or sob. “I’ll study. I’ll be back in time. But I have to go now.”

  “Wait, don’t hang up,” Ashley said as the white SUV braked and turned into her drive.

  CHAPTER 7

  ASHLEY HALTED AT the foot of the drive, one hand on the cell phone in her pocket, the other raised against the sunlight making its way over the mountains to the east and streaming into her eyes. As the vehicle turned fully onto the drive and stopped, she noticed that the driver was a man, potentially a patient’s husband. Sometimes a husband called or visited her to talk about his wife’s condition or ask questions he didn’t want his wife to hear. She encouraged it so the husband could be good support when the woman went into labor and needed extra help after the birth of the baby. She encouraged such support, but not that morning.

  The driver lowered his window. “Is this the midwife’s house?”

  He talked like a northerner. No greeting, no introduction, just the abrupt query—well-modulated and smooth and oddly familiar.

  “It is.” Ashley took a step to the side so the sun didn’t blind her and she could see the man better through the lowered window.

  “Finally.” The man cut the engine on the SUV, opened his door, and stepped onto the drive. “I’m Hunter McDermott. I left a message on someone’s voice mail a little while ago.” He extended his right hand, well-shaped and tanned despite this being late October. “Are you Ashley Tolliver?”

  “I am.” Against the rich smoothness of his cultured tones, those two words of hers sounded as mountain country as the speech of any of her patients, an accent most people automatically considered a signal of ignorance and little education. Flustered that she cared about her mountain ways all of a sudden with this stranger, she forgot to shake his hand, keeping her own fingers inside her jacket pockets, one still gripping her phone.

  He dropped his hand to his side, drawing attention to what a snub she had dealt him. Her cheeks heated despite the chill of the air and lack of warmth in the sunshine. She needed to say something more to him, but now that she had been both rude and sounded like Elly May on The Beverly Hillbillies, she didn’t want to open her mouth.

  With a forefinger, her visitor shoved his glasses up his nose. “You are related to the local midwife?”

  “Right now,” she responded automatically, her shoulders going back and her chin up, “I am the local midwife.”

  “I see.” He tugged his glasses off his nose and wiped them on his sleeve in a way sure to scratch the small, rectangular lenses on a button.

  And giving her an unobstructed view of his face, of his eyes in particular. Spectacular eyes the color of sapphires. If he hadn’t been wearing glasses, she would have suspected he popped in contact lenses to achieve that particularly deep and brilliant blue.

  He not only had better speech than she did, he possessed prettier eyes. Hers were merely brown like her father’s. Though Momma’s and her brothers’ eyes were pretty, being a bright sky blue, they didn’t compare with these bloodshot but still startling gemstone-blue eyes.

  She must have been staring, for he gave her a quizzical glance, then slid his glasses back onto a bony nose in annoyingly exact proportion to the rest of his face, not small and a little too high-bridged like hers.

  “But you’re too young.” Frowning, he shoved his fingers through his slightly curly dark hair.

  With that gesture, Ashley recognized him. Now the name clicked home, along with the voice. Not so long ago, she had been drooling—figuratively speaking—over his pictures on TV.

  “What are you doing on Brooks Ridge?” The question popped out before she thought better of being so blunt.

  He lifted his shoulders and rolled them back as though dislodging a burden. “I’m looking for a woman who was a midwife here thirty-two years ago.”

  “My grandmother. She’s been gone for six years.”

  “I was afraid of that.” His broad shoulders drooped. “My . . . father said I should call ahead, but it was the middle of the night . . .” He trailed off and cast a glance of loathing at his vehicle, a Mercedes she noticed now that it was up close. “I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about her patients?”

  “I suppose I would. She kept meticulous records.”

  She knew about the records of every midwife in her family for the past two hundred years. All the women’s journals and patient logs were clear and detailed except during and right after the War Between the States, when paper was expensive and scarce.

  “But they are confidential without permission from the patient herself.”

  “That’s the difficulty. I’m trying to find the patient herself and hoped I could do so through the midwife.” He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his bomber jacket and gazed at a point beyond Ashley’s shoulder. “I just drove nearly six hours to get down here.”

  “It’s that vital?” Ashley stared at him. “I mean, for you to drive all night after all you’ve been through?” He looked impossibly more weary than she felt with his red-rimmed eyes and shoulders that appeared strong enough to bear tremendous burdens, but had just been laden with the last straw. “Is this personal or business? I mean, you can get a warrant.”

  He could be a federal agent of some sort, though his dress of leather jacket and jeans was a bit casual. But wait. Hadn’t the news reported that he did something else more cerebral or, no, physical?

  That picture of him with his shirt plastered to a rather fine body flashed through her mind, and the sun suddenly felt like mid-summer heat on her face. That titillating glimpse
of a buff male body had done exactly what the news station wanted—titillated her. Shame on her. Now she couldn’t look at him without thinking of that picture. The poor man had been objectified when he was only trying to keep a little girl from running into a busy street—a little girl in another country. That meant he must have traveled for hours and faced the media circus before he drove six hours from Washington, DC, in search of her grandmother, and Ashley was keeping him standing at the foot of the drive in still-frosty temperatures.

  “I wish I could invite you to the house for coffee.” A twinge of guilt pinched her, as she didn’t wish for any such thing. She wanted sleep, not someone else’s problems, for at least four hours. “Mr. McDermott, I recognize who you are and realize you must be worn out.” She went for practical suggestions, as though he were one of her patients. “Don’t you think you oughta get some sleep and find another way to hunt up . . . whoever it is you want to find?”

  “That would be the logical thing to do.” He smiled.

  Ashley’s stomach spiraled into a loopty-loop like an out-of-control roller coaster. That smile softened the planes and angles of his face. Devastating to her lowered immune system—immunity to attraction to the opposite sex bolstered by her ambitions.

  She took an involuntary step backward and hugged her arms across her middle as though he carried something contagious. “I can’t help you, you know. I wish I could, but we midwives are bound by HIPAA laws just like any other medical professionals are.”

  “I understand that.” He reached behind him and rested one hand on the window frame of his SUV. “I was hoping Mrs. Tolliver might be able to get in touch with the patient and see if she would see me.”

  Ashley opened her mouth to ask what the reason was, but an enormous yawn took over. She clapped her hand to her lips and tried to hold her jaws rigid, a feat that made her eyes water. Sure she was going to melt with the heat of her mortification, she half turned away. “If you will please excuse me, it was a rough night for me.”