by Kelly Irvin
Quinn stumbled back. “Do something for her! You’re supposed to help her.”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it. I love you, Quinn. I love you.” Jessica sobbed. “Help me, help me.”
“You’ll be okay, babe, I promise.” He glared at Iris. He had tears in his eyes. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Do something.”
“It’s okay. Jessica, you’re doing fine. You’re almost there.” Iris moved to the foot of the bed. She patted Jessica’s knee and lifted the sheets. She took another peek. “It’s time to push. Quinn, you can help.”
He looked as if he wanted to be anywhere in the world except in that bedroom. “You don’t need me. You’re the midwife.”
“Quinn, help your wife deliver your baby girl. Now.”
“She’s not my wife.”
“But this is your baby, isn’t it?”
He wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “Yah, it is.” He gripped Jessica’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean that in a bad way, babe. What do I do?”
“Get behind her. Encourage her.”
He did as he was told. Iris moved into position. “You can do this, Jessica. Give it all you have. Just think, in a few minutes you’ll see your baby.”
Jessica screamed again and again, but she pushed. For a skinny girl, she had great lungs and plenty of muscle. The contractions ripped through one after another now. Four pushes and the baby’s head crowned. Iris gently rotated her shoulders. “Give another big push. A big push now.”
The shoulders slid out. Then the rest of the body. Jessica and Quinn had an itty, bitty baby girl. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth gaped, but no sound came out.
Iris cleared her nose and throat. “Come on, sweet thing, come on.”
Seconds ticked by. “Come on, sweetie.” She rubbed the baby’s belly and patted her back.
“She’s not crying.” Jessica sat up. “Why isn’t she crying?”
The baby’s arms flailed. Tiny fingers rolled into fists. Her eyes opened. Finally, she wailed.
Quinn tottered one step in Iris’s direction. Shaking his head, he stared down at the baby. His mouth dropped open, and he bawled almost as loud as his new daughter.
CHAPTER 4
Iris shifted the dirty sheets into one arm and closed her bedroom door with a shove of her elbow. She stood in the dark hallway for a few seconds, enjoying the silence. Thank you, Gott, thank you. She leaned her head against the door. The wood was solid and cool against her warm forehead. Thank you. She never doubted for a second God was good, but some days—and nights—were hard. These English kids, barely able to navigate life, were now responsible for a baby. Iris had cleaned up the little mite, watched while Jessica diapered her, and convinced her to try nursing. That didn’t last long. Both nodded off to sleep after a few minutes. Quinn mostly stared out the window, even though it was dark and he could see nothing. She left him with a quiet good night he barely acknowledged. She wanted the responsibility he so obviously feared, but it had been denied her for reasons she couldn’t fathom. She took a deep breath of cold air and straightened.
She would not ask the question. She simply would not.
Why, Gott?
Shaking her head at her own prideful audacity, she strode through the hall to the stairs. God must be so disappointed in her inability to trust in His plan for her. If she never married, never had children, she would accept it as part of a bigger plan she couldn’t see but would come to know. She was not, as Rachel put it, mad at God. She was certain that was not allowed in her Gmay.
She might not like it, but she would be an obedient believer. A cheerful believer. She started down the stairs, repeating the words in her head, ignoring their grubby tarnish after forty-eight hours straight of delivering babies. “I just need to sleep.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Iris lurched to a stop. She grabbed the bannister with her free hand. Mahon sat at her father’s desk against the wall under the bannister. His hat lay on the desk next to a pad of paper, the one her mudder used to write to her pen pals. His big hands covered the top sheet. He stared up at her, looking much like a child caught stealing a still-warm apple pie from the windowsill.
“What are you doing here still? I told you to go home.” She glanced around the front room. A fire blazed in the fireplace. “Is Salome here too?”
“Nee. Your bruder took her home.” Mahon tore the top sheet from the pad, wadded it up in a tight ball, and tossed it in the wastebasket next to the desk. He stood and stretched his head from side to side. He rubbed his neck. He had thick, curly brown hair. “The bopli is gut?”
“In this weather?” Mahon had nice hair. She shouldn’t be thinking about Mahon’s hair. It was just that she hardly ever saw it. “Which bruder?”
Mahon smiled, a slightly lopsided smile that made him look less like Salome and more like his father. “Joseph. Rueben went with your mudder. Samuel and Carl went to bed when your schweschders did.”
Mahon could be counted on to keep track of everyone. To keep little ones safe and bigger ones in line. She tromped down the remaining stairs and headed for the kitchen and the laundry room. “Jah, the bopli is gut. Small, but she has all her fingers and toes and a healthy cry. The mudder is fine too. Giddy with relief. The daed almost fainted.”
“They’ll get the hang of it.” The tread of his boots told her Mahon followed. “It stopped snowing a couple hours ago, but I figured I should stay around. It didn’t seem right to leave you alone here with strangers I brought into your house.”
Joseph took Salome home. Did that mean they were courting? Salome hadn’t said a word. Joseph often disappeared in the evenings, but a sister didn’t ask questions. If something was going on, neither would want to make Iris feel bad in the wake of Aidan and Bess’s marriage. She didn’t feel bad. She was thrilled for her friend. Joseph was a hard worker, faithful, kind, and the joker of the family. He and Salome might be well suited to each other.
The rest of Mahon’s statement registered. “I’m not alone.” As the oldest of seven children, Iris didn’t remember a time when she’d ever been alone. “Didn’t Reuben come back from taking Mudder to Freeman’s?”
“He did, but he went to sleep.”
Mahon’s yawn echoed in the laundry room.
Laughing, Iris dumped the sheets next to a pile of shirts and dresses. Nine people in one house made for a long laundry day on Mondays. “Sounds like you should do the same.” She turned in time to catch him with his glasses in one hand and rubbing his eyes with the other. He looked up at her. He did have nice blue eyes. Right now, they were sleepy eyes. “You’ll have chores to do in a few hours.”
“I’ll sleep when you do.” The words hung in the air for a few seconds. Red scurried across his clean-shaven face, coloring chipmunk cheeks. “I mean . . . I didn’t mean . . . You’ll sleep here and I’ll go home and sleep. I mean—”
“I knew what you meant.” Iris grinned at him. “You’re the one who’s addled from lack of sleep. Do you want some hot tea before you go?”
“That just might hit the spot.”
Iris brushed past him and went to the kitchen. She made tea while he sat at the table and watched. He didn’t seem to need conversation. Or maybe he was afraid of what might come out of his mouth after that last gaffe. Inhaling the aroma of cinnamon and spice and everything nice, she smiled as she set the mug on the table. She pushed the teddy bear plastic bottle of honey toward him. He smiled back and squeezed a generous dollop into his tea and then another and another.
“Would you like a little tea with your honey?”
“Mudder says my sweet tooth is part of why I’m so sweet.” His face colored all over again. “I should just shut up.”
His mudder was right about him being sweet. Even though he was the younger brother, he’d kept watch over Salome growing up when they went to the pond to swim or fish. He shared his cookies with them and carried Iris to the house the time she sprained her ankle falling out of the pony wagon the day aft
er her tenth birthday. He never told on them when he saw them coming back from a party at the Rankins’ farm during their rumspringa. “How’s your daed? I haven’t talked to Salome in a while.”
He stirred his tea, his expression somber. “He and Mudder will move into the dawdy haus this spring.”
“Nathanael and his fraa will take the big house?”
“And run the farm with my other bruders.”
“You’re not happy about it?” Iris sipped her tea. The aroma of cinnamon reminded her of the tea her mudder made when Iris had a cold. All she lacked was the scent of fresh lemon. “You and John get along like puppies from the same litter. You always have.”
“It’s not that.” He cupped the mug in his hands and blew on the hot liquid. “There’s John and Nathanael and Avery and William.”
“You do have a bunch of older brothers.” At twenty-three, Mahon was number five of the Kurtz boys. Only Jason and Mark were younger. He and Salome had one other sister, Mary, who was sixteen. “But Avery has the harness shop.”
“He found himself a decent living.” Mahon nodded, but his gaze wandered to the kitchen windows. “Me, I don’t like being inside.”
“Which is gut, since you’re a farmer.”
“I like farming.” He yawned so wide his jaw popped. “It’s just tough to making a living these days, especially with my bruders’ families depending on the income.”
She couldn’t hide her smile at his attempt to cover another yawn. “Do you want to do something different?”
“I would like to make some of my own decisions about how to do it, that’s all. To do it better.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.” Iris had listened to plenty of similar discussions among her brothers and her father at the supper table. “My bruders and daed don’t always agree either.”
“Daed says it’s pie in the sky, like the stars I’m always looking at. He says I should get my head out of the clouds and pay attention to what has always worked. It’s not like I want to run off and buy a tractor or hook up electricity.” His voice deepened, became gruffer. “But we do the same thing, generation after generation. It’s what we do. How we stay who we are. Keeping the world at arm’s length.”
He stopped and drew a breath. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“You only want to provide for your family better.”
He nodded. “Now land is hard to come by and there are too many of us. I want to make a decent living on my own so I can . . .”
“Can what?”
“Pie in the sky, that’s all.” He ducked his head, then raised it so his gaze met hers. He shook his head. “That’s a discussion for another day.”
He wasn’t talking about farming anymore.
A spiral of heat drifted through Iris, warming her cheeks and her hands. The kind she hadn’t felt in a long time. “You better get home. Dawn will be here before you know it.”
“You should be the tired one.”
“I’m always wide-awake after I deliver a baby.” She dabbed at a drop of honey on the table with her finger. “It never stops being a mystery. It never stops being a gift.”
“Gott is gut.”
She lifted her gaze to his. “He is.”
He smiled. She smiled back. Nothing goofy about that smile. He had full lips and even, white teeth. Why was she thinking about his lips? The heat intensified. She grabbed her mug and lifted it to her lips. Liquid slopped over the edge and burned her fingers. “Ouch.”
“You’re getting punchy.” He stood. “I better go.”
She didn’t want him to go. The thought startled her. “It’s so cold and dark. Be careful.”
“Worried about me?”
She hesitated.
“Don’t answer that. Joseph said I could borrow a horse.” He paused next to her chair. His hand brushed her arm for a split second, a move so swift and so soft she might have imagined it. “I’ll try to get it back here sometime tomorrow. I want to check on you anyway.”
She touched the place where his fingers had been, then followed him to the front room. “Why?”
He stuck his arm in the sleeve of his wool coat. “I told you, I feel responsible for them. I brought them here.”
“I’m the midwife. Where else would you take them?”
“Into town, I guess. Will your daed say it was a good choice?”
“He will.” She was sure of it. She knew her daed. “We don’t turn people in need away from our door.”
He buttoned his coat. “We’ll see.” His gaze remained fixed on her face as he tugged open the door. An icy blast of winter air blew through Iris. It did nothing to cool her. She must be coming down with something. “We’ll see about many things, I hope.”
The door closed. Iris remained in the middle of the room, staring at it, debating whether she shared the sentiments his eyes suggested.
CHAPTER 5
The feathers tickled. Iris wiggled under the weight of the blankets and quilts on Abigail and Louella’s bed. She didn’t want to open her eyes. Not yet. Her eyelids were too heavy.
Tickle. Tickle. She wrinkled her nose and slipped her hand out into the frigid morning air to scratch it. Too cold. Icy cold. She rolled on her side and curled up. To her delight, she didn’t encounter the warm, space-hogging body of either sister. For little girls, they certainly took up more than their share of the bed. If they were up, it surely meant dawn had broken. Time to roll out of bed. On the other hand, a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. Mudder would understand. She always got breakfast when Iris had a late night.
Tickle. Tickle.
“Stop it.”
“The baby’s crying.”
“What?” She forced her eyes open. Morning sunlight coming through the bedroom window made her squint. A short, blurry figure stood by the bed, silhouetted in the light. “Huh?”
Tickle, tickle.
Iris’s sight adjusted. Abigail crawled onto the bed. The mattress creaked. The little girl’s pudgy fingers trailed down Iris’s nose and across her cheek. Her middle, lower teeth were missing so she tended to lisp when she talked. She smelled like peanut butter and looked as perturbed as a six-year-old with freckles and auburn hair could look. “The bopli is crying.”
Iris propped herself up on one elbow. She had to think a minute. Rachel’s baby? No. Jessica’s baby. She probably was crying. Newborn babies did. “Why are you telling me?”
“There’s nobody else to tell. Mudder and Daed are still at Freeman’s.”
“Where are Jessica and Quinn?”
“I don’t know. I asked Samuel. He says he hasn’t seen them.” The little girl shrugged. “I ate a peanut butter cookie, but I’m hungry. Can you make pancakes? Louella is trying, but I think she put too much milk in the batter.”
“Coming.”
Iris struggled into her dress. She would deal with her hair later. She raced down the hall to her bedroom. The wails were loud and insistent. The baby was hungry. She rapped hard on the door. “Jessica? Quinn? Time to get up. Can’t you hear the baby crying?”
No answer. The cries wound themselves around Iris’s heart and squeezed. How could anyone hear a baby cry and not want to hold her and hush her and rock her? She turned the knob and shoved the door open. “Jessica? Quinn? Your baby—”
The room was empty. Except for the baby, who had been laid in the wooden cradle Iris had positioned by the bed before leaving them to sleep. Iris rushed to its side. The baby was wrapped in a faded, nine-patch crib quilt with purple, pink, and lilac squares. The quilting was beautiful, intricate, and hand-stitched. The white cotton batting on the backside had yellowed with age and had a ragged stain that looked like coffee or tea. She scooped up the baby and tucked her in her arms. “You poor thing. Are you feeling neglected?” She sank onto the bed and rocked back and forth. “You’re fine. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
The baby’s face turned a deep reddish-purple from exertion. She beat her tiny fists against the air and demanded satisfaction. “I know
, I know,” Iris crooned. “You poor thing. Where is your mudder?”
She examined the room, searching the corners with her gaze as if Jessica or Quinn might be hiding in the shadows. The scruffy gym bag still sat next to the cradle. It was open, the sides flopping down, revealing an array of plastic baby bottles, cans of formula, disposable diapers, baby wipes, and a few outfits—frilly dresses not warm enough for a winter day. Iris tucked the screaming baby against her shoulder and patted. “Oh my, oh my, you sweet thing. You need a diaper change and a good feeding.”
A folded piece of notebook paper had been attached to the bag strap with a safety pin. Iris struggled to unpin it with one hand. Finally, she gave up and ripped it off, tearing one corner. She managed to unfold it and smooth it out on top of the heap of sheets and quilts.
Dear Iris,
Her name is Lilly Marie. Grandma was right. We can’t keep her. We thought we could, but now that she’s here, Quinn and me know it’s not gonna work. Quinn says we can come back for her after we get settled and get jobs and I finish high school. You know a lot about babies. I’m not afraid to leave her with you. You’ll take good care of her. I’ll come get her as soon as I can. I promise.
Keep track of how much you spend on diapers and formula. I’ll pay you back. I promise. Quinn says this note can be like an IOU.
Talk to you soon.
Promise.
Jess
Iris continued to rock. Her throat ached. She rocked harder, but Lilly kept crying. Maybe she knew her mother and father were gone. Maybe she missed the scent of her mother and the warmth of her womb. IOU one baby. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “She’ll be back. She says she’ll be back.”
They’d entrusted Iris with this baby. Whatever possessed them to do that? What circumstances or sequence of events led to abandoning a baby in the home of strangers? Inhaling the scent of baby spit-up and wet diaper, she tilted Lilly back and examined her face. A few curly wisps of blonde hair graced her soft scalp. Her eyes hadn’t decided yet what color they would be. The shape of her face and her rosebud lips made her look like her momma. Not much of Quinn and his dark, brooding looks in her. “Hello, Lilly. It’s nice to meet you—again.”