The Midwife

by Jolina Petersheim

  I tried peering through his spectacles to read the meaning behind his words. By the slant of the winter sun, I instead kept seeing my own reflection that was morphed gaunt and featureless by my desperate, watery gaze. “You can’t say that.” My voice trembled with anger, with fear. Pressing a hand to my stomach, I stared up at him. “You can’t. We’re too far in to think of taking words back.”

  Thom nodded sadly and touched my sleeve. Turning, he converged with the throng of students whose white coats and bright scarves fluttered behind them like kites. But even after Thomas Fitzpatrick had crossed the viaduct to the other side of campus, I could still see him. My chest ached watching his ruddy hair and peacoat getting pummeled by the wind. I stood there until my face lost feeling. The belfry chimed the half hour. I remained focused on the hollow sound until I was sure my professor had disappeared from view. I knew then that the phantom promise of love had far stronger coercion than money.

  3

  Crossing the parking lot, I heard Thom’s car door slam. I moved faster. I could feel his eyes scanning me until my walk felt ungainly; my head, odd.

  “Hold on,” he called, jogging to catch up. I heard the jangle of keys in his hand.

  Since the afternoon two weeks before, when we’d met with the president of academics and the dean, Thom and I had not talked beyond the standard exchanges my research project required. I had made sure these exchanges were as curt and as professional as possible. Thom would not get the chance to tell me that things had to be different again. They were different already. This time, however, I was going to be the one who initiated the change. This was the very reason I had refused Thom’s carpool offer and demanded we each drive from the university to the clinic.

  Tidbits of asphalt crunched beneath my heel as I reeled to face Thom. I shaded my eyes against the afternoon sun pricking through scattered felt-gray clouds. But more than shielding myself from the sun, I wanted to shield Thom from seeing the pain in my eyes.

  “Aren’t you worried someone’s going to see us?” My voice sounded hostile.

  Thom’s smile vanished. Taking my elbow, he said, “No, Miss Beth. I’m not worried.”

  “Where’s Meredith?”

  His grip on my arm tightened. “Work.”

  A lean, dark-haired man held the clinic door open for a shuffling pregnant woman who I assumed was his wife. As we passed, they nodded with the familiarity established through common ground. I realized we must look like another quintessential American couple: two kids and a cookie-cutter house guarded by a white picket fence and a dog.

  In the clinic, Thom stood beside the fountain until I finished signing in. We both took a seat on one of the faux leather sofas lining the left-hand wall. The corners of my eyelids began to jerk. Thom drummed his knee. What does he have to be nervous about, I wondered. If things got out of hand, despite all the legal measures taken to ensure they wouldn’t, Thom’s wife could simply withhold university donations until her husband’s job was reinstated.

  At forty-five, Meredith Fitzpatrick was the head financial adviser for the Catholic hospitals throughout the nation and had used the university as a convenient, tax-free catchall for her surfeit of dollars. By accepting her donations, the university had become a puppet manipulated by Meredith’s French-manicured hands. Thus Thom had become the university’s youngest tenured professor the same year Meredith wrote a check earmarked for the remodeling of Ridgeview Apartments, where I lived. And thus, when Thom and Meredith’s lawyer sent the university a confidential memo regarding the commercial surrogacy, they turned a blind eye to the fact that one of their largest donors was hiring her husband’s graduate assistant as a surrogate.

  My graduate assistantship and stipend, on the other hand, were insured only by my silence. If in a moment of weakness I failed, I would lose everything.

  Thom stopped drumming his knees. He picked up a magazine about proper prenatal and postpartum care, which I found ironic. He taught reproductive science, but I doubted he knew how to care for a child after birth. Flipping through the pages, he said, “There are things about this situation you cannot understand.”

  I looked over at him. “About the pregnancy?”

  He nodded. “I should’ve told you that day I asked you to become our surrogate.” He paused. “But I didn’t want to scare you away. I didn’t want you to say no. We had no other choice, you see. Not on such short notice. When Meredith went in for her yearly physical, the doctor discovered a benign fibroid in her uterus that had grown to such an extent, the only way to remove it was to do a complete, radical hysterectomy. Not even her ovaries were allowed to remain. Nothing.” Thom paused to flip through the magazine. I knew he was not reading a word.

  “She and I’d always planned on having children,” he continued. “We talked about it even when she was putting me through medical school. We just wanted to wait until we had traveled some. Until our careers were more established, until we were more financially stable.” He laughed. Behind his glasses, his eyes remained somber. “But the years passed, and that ‘one day when’ never came. Meredith’s surgery was our wake-up call. We thought our dream of having children was over. Then I started thinking: Meredith was already on a low-dose contraceptive, so if she started taking Lupron to regulate her pituitary gland and shut down her ovaries, she could begin intramuscular injections to stimulate the growth of follicles on her ovaries.”

  “Controlled ovarian hyperstimulation,” I said.

  Thom nodded. “Within two months, the doctor could still give Meredith the complete hysterectomy needed. But while removing her ovaries, he could simply harvest her eggs.”

  “You just needed a recipient,” I said, and then glanced over at the fountain, embarrassed by my candor. This was his wife’s reproductive system we were discussing, not a case study in a book.

  “Yes,” Thom said. “We could harvest the eggs, but after Meredith’s hysterectomy, we’d have no womb to plant them in. That’s when the truth came out: All these years later, Meredith still wanted to focus on her career. Still wanted to travel more. She still wanted to focus on her life and not on a child who would have to become her life.” Thom flipped another page. I wished he would stop the pretense. I wished he would look at me. A woman with a pin-striped skirt and glossy claret heels was called back. Thom draped the magazine across his lap. He did not look at me. “I am the one who made it all happen,” he said. “I am the one who contacted you . . . the doctors, the lawyers, as I knew that if it did not happen now, it never would.”

  “Bethany Winslow?”

  I glanced up, and the nurse’s scanning dark eyes met mine. She smiled and I nodded; Thom and I stood. She asked my birth date at the door and led us through the narrow peach corridor over to a small carpeted room with a scale and a chair. It felt both uncomfortable and intimate to have Thom watching me stand in my stocking feet on the scale. He must have felt as strange as I, for though there was not much to be seen, he kept peering around the room. Every once in a while, his eyes would flick back to my stomach, and then up at my face. I wondered if he hadn’t let himself believe what was happening until now. I hadn’t let myself believe it either.

  “First-time parents?” the nurse asked, pulling the Velcro cuff apart with a dry rasp.

  Thom nodded, and I shook my head. There was no easy way to define our relationship. This being a fertility clinic, the nurse must have seen other complicated scenarios. She did not ask any more questions. She just took my blood pressure, then led us to a room that was pale-blue and square with one oblong window facing the west side. Cutaway diagrams of the female anatomy in the three trimesters of gestation were the only art gracing the walls. A model of the reproductive system sat on a Formica countertop next to a deep, stainless steel sink.

  “Dr. Hancock will be right with you,” the nurse said before pulling the door.

  The room echoed with quiet; it felt like the two of us were trapped inside a tomb. I leaned back against the examination table, and the paper cov
ering it crackled. Thom strode the tiled space in between the table and the wall.

  “Would you like to take the chair?” I asked. His frenetic movements were making me more nervous than I already was.

  Shaking his head, he laced his arms behind his back. “You’re sure you don’t mind me being here?”

  “Thom, it’s your child.”

  He stopped moving, then came back to face me—mere inches away. Behind his glasses, I could see the blue starbursts in his green eyes, the brown freckle dotting the left. “It is my child, isn’t it?” he said.

  I feared he was going to cry. I did not know how I could comfort Thom when I had promised myself that I would not reach out to him again.

  Dr. Hancock, the reproductive endocrinologist, came in five minutes after Thom had reined in his emotions and resumed pacing. Crossing the room to shake Thom’s hand, she asked how I was feeling and then asked me to lie back on the examination table. My long brown hair spread across the table like a sheet. My mind flashed between past and present, as if confused to which it belonged.

  Every movement, every gesture, every sound was a reminder of my previous pregnancy. The fact that I had carried a child to full term, followed by a natural birth, made me a perfect candidate for surrogacy.

  The fluorescent lighting bathing the room in a maritime glow faded. I closed my eyes. It was as if I were sitting back at my desk on that late-winter day after the entire bioethics department had gone home. I could almost hear Dr. Fitzpatrick’s shuffling gait due to his loose-fitting Birkenstocks.

  Then he’d stopped moving so abruptly, I knew that he had seen me. I didn’t turn, so he would be unable to perceive my tear-stained face. I heard him shift the strap of the leather satchel crisscrossing his shoulder. “Need a ride?” he’d asked.

  I knew he was uneasy, seeing me staring at my computer screen that I had already shut down. But I was too blindsided by grief to offer him reassurance that I was all right. I didn’t even know if I was.

  When I did not reply, he came and knelt in front of my swivel chair. “Miss Beth?” He reached out as if to touch my hand. He withdrew it and instead searched my eyes. “Are you hurt? Did . . .” He lowered his voice. “Did someone hurt you?”

  Alarmed he would think my catatonic state from an attack on campus, I shook my head and unclenched my fist. I held the crumpled paper out to him. He smoothed it on the thigh of his pant leg before holding it up. His eyes met mine. I could read his bewilderment as easily as I could read the words and numbers on the 4×6 page. It was today’s date that I had unthinkingly torn off my small desk calendar in preparation for tomorrow, when I realized what that day was—what that day meant. I was shocked to find that so many pages of days had passed since the day that had changed my life forever had come and gone.

  “February third,” I’d whispered. I stared at Thom’s silhouette that was bathed red by the emergency lighting of the basement office. “The day my son was born.”

  Thom had replied, “Your son?”

  A year ago, we were not as close as those weeks leading up to the signing of the contract for the IVF. But I knew it seemed strange to him that I had never revealed this information before now. What Thom did not know was that, besides the staff present during the twenty-four-hour labor and the parents who adopted my child after his birth, I had not revealed this information to anyone. Not even to the child’s father, with whom a single dance beneath a starlit Wisconsin sky had blurred the lines between friend and lover.

  Perhaps it was the cocoon of the darkened office warmed by the emergency lighting’s glow. Perhaps it was having Dr. Thomas Fitzpatrick kneeling down, staring up at me with such empathy that in his glinting spectacles I could see reflected the pain I felt. I don’t know what it was about him or about that moment, but before another cathartic tear could fall, I began to peel back the layers of self-protection that had accumulated during my years alone.

  I began to tell Thom what nobody knew, what nobody had guessed or asked in all these years. I told him that that day—the third of February—was the birth date of the four-year-old son whom I had given up for adoption. The son I had given away as if he were unwanted, when I had never wanted to keep, to cherish, to hold anyone more. I don’t know how long I talked. The words flowed out of me as if a dam had given way. The only way I could keep afloat was by hanging on to the truth, hoping that it was enough to keep me from drowning.

  Throughout it all, I cried. I cried the gut-wrenching sobs that, for four years, had caused me to clench my jaw in my sleep and wake with my head trapped in a throbbing fog whose vestiges clung all day. Thom let me cry at my desk, in the darkness, without touching me; without even offering a handkerchief, as I would expect from a man who wore tweed blazers and drank Earl Grey tea from antique cups. But his eyes never left my face until the tears had dried. I found that quality to be more gentlemanly than all the rest.

  “You all right?” he’d asked. I heard the worry in his voice.

  I found the strength to nod. It was a lie. I had known since that day my signature relinquished my son that a part of me would never be all right again.

  “Good.” Thom smiled. I saw traces of boyhood still lingering around his mouth. Rocking back on his Birkenstocks, he got to his feet. He went and fetched my boiled wool coat from the rack in the corner of the room near the line of chairs where undergrads came to sit, trying to get an inroad with the professors. I remember how surprised I was that, without asking, Thom had known exactly which coat was mine. Thom held it by the padded shoulders while my arms slipped into it. He kept the door open until I had passed beneath his elbow into the hallway that opened into the wintry night beyond.

  I had thought that on the sidewalk, Dr. Fitzpatrick might reach out to me in some way. He didn’t. It was as if that darkened office had enveloped us in an intimacy that was lost outside. Instead, we walked in watchful silence until I reached my bike. Thom held the handlebars steady as I worked my right leg over the seat and kicked up the stand. Then he pushed my back gently as I pedaled down the icy sidewalk that would lead me to Ridgeview Apartments, which his wife’s money had renovated ten years ago. . . .

  Dr. Hancock brought me back to the examining room by squirting warm gel onto my stomach and rolling the sonogram wand above my pubic bone. She was older than I was but younger than Thom. Perhaps thirty-five, forty. She had chin-length black hair sweeping high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes accented with liner. She wore no jewelry besides chocolate pearl studs. Her hands, as she deftly kneaded my stomach, were warm. On the other side of the room, Thom cleared his throat and averted his eyes as my khakis were unzipped and peeled down below my hip bones.

  My vision shifted back to Dr. Hancock as she guided the wand back and forth, harder and harder. The dimples around her mouth deepened. I knew for what she was searching, and my own frenzied heartbeat began to pound throughout the room. Thom moved closer and met my eyes. I saw the fear in them that something was wrong; something that, with our medical knowledge, we still had not foreseen.

  “Let me get Dr. Chun,” Dr. Hancock said. “He can always find them in a heartbeat.”

  Thom and I had long crossed the point of lightening tension with humor. We did not smile in return. Thom resumed pacing as we waited; he hadn’t made one return trip when he asked, “You haven’t spotted, have you?”

  My mouth was too dry to speak. I shook my head.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said after four lengths of pacing. Thom nodded at his own reassurance. Walking over to the window, he split the blinds to peer down at the parking lot. Dr. Chun came in and smiled at me, then saw Thom near the window. Thom turned to face him. I saw that, despite his words of comfort, Thom’s skin was as white as the doctor’s coat.

  “Nervous, Dad?” Dr. Chun quipped, coming over to the examining table. He kneaded my womb, then rolled the sonogram wand to the left and waited a moment to distinguish my rapid heartbeat from that of the heartbeat of someone beyond me. “There it is,” he w
hispered. My eyes were focused on Thom. The doctor glanced over his shoulder.

  “Hey, Dad,” Dr. Chun said, “I think she wants you closer for this.”

  Thom left the window and walked over to me without lifting his eyes to my face.

  “It’s okay,” I said, looking at the sweat rimming his hairline and his fingers tugging at the cuffs of his oxford sleeves. “Your baby’s going to be okay, Thom. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Taking off his glasses, he wiped his eyes and reached across the examining table to take my hand. I closed my eyes and turned my head toward the wall. Tears saturated the hair at my temples and leaked to pool in the whorl of my ears. And all the while, the room flooded with the sound of my heartbeat mingled with the heartbeat of the child who was Thom and Meredith Fitzpatrick’s.

  But who could never be mine.

  Rhoda, 2014

  A lone cricket chirps in a darkened corner of Hopen Haus, and even he sounds stifled—parched. The log-and-chink walls push in close. I cannot breathe around the aroma of cedar chips lining my dresser drawers and the mildewed rafters crisscrossing overhead. I know this panic attack is due to more than just temperature. It’s because of Ernest Looper’s disquieting presence.

  I pad barefoot down the stairs and go out to the east porch, expecting to find him. But it is almost midnight. The steps are empty; the swing, still. And then I hear music coming from the barn. The few dandelions that have escaped the goats’ insatiable mouths rub their feathered heads against my legs as I cross the yard. Loosening some bobby pins shackling my kapp over my bun, I tug out a few face-framing strands. But my hair is burlap-brown needled with silver—nothing like Alice Rippentoe’s halo of curls.

  I used to be relieved that these cape dresses and kapps buried every hint of femininity as if beneath a shroud. I had never cared for my appearance, and now it no longer mattered what I looked like.What was important was how well I could care for others. Yet walking down the hill toward this man whose presence once filled up my days but who now only consumes my past, I find that the shapeless dress reminds me that I am indeed a woman. And that when I lost my daughter, I let my dreams go with her.