The Midwife's Confession Part 4

"The explanation is that we never really knew Noelle." I looked at Tara, determination suddenly taking the place of my confusion. "We have to figure out why she died, Tara," I said. "One way or another, we need to get to know her now."

7.

Noelle Robeson County, North Carolina

1984.

Her mother stood in the middle of their living room, looking around with a worried sigh. "I hate to leave you with this mess," she said. "The timing of this is all wrong."

"You're making too much out of it, Mama," Noelle said as she ushered her mother toward the door. "Everything's going to be fine."

Her mother looked through the open doorway to the two cars in the gravel drive. Her old Ford stood next to Noelle's "new" car-a dented, faded Chevy she'd picked up for six hundred dollars. The weather was threatening to storm and a hot wind blew through the treetops.

"Everything's changing so fast," her mother said.

"For the better." Noelle gave her a little shove toward the door. "It's not like you ever loved living here."

Her mother laughed. "That's the truth." She touched her daughter's cheek. "It's being apart from you. That's the change I can't stand."

"I'll miss you, too," Noelle said. She would. But she had her future spread out in front of her and that would make up for any sense of loss she felt over being apart from her mother and leaving the house she'd grown up in. "I'm going to see you in a couple of days," she added. "It's not like this is goodbye."

Her mother's car was packed to the gills for the short trip to New Bern but not everything would fit, so Noelle had promised to bring the rest of her things to her in a few days. Then she'd have to turn around and come home to pick up her own belongings and head to UNC Wilmington.

"Remember, Miss Wilson has a spare room you can stay in on vacations."

"I'll remember," Noelle said, not sure she'd ever want to stay in the house of a stranger, even if her mother would be there. Miss Wilson was the elderly sister of one of her mother's friends. She'd broken her hip and needed a live-in aide and was hiring Noelle's mother for the job. With Noelle going off to college on a full scholars.h.i.+p, the timing was right to sell the house. They'd sold it nearly overnight to a young couple from Raleigh who were looking for a place in the country. It had all happened fast. They'd donated their old furniture, but there was so much left to do.

"I love you, honey." Her mother pulled her into a hug, then stood back and tried to smooth Noelle's unsmoothable hair.

"I love you, too." She gave her mother a gentle shove through the doorway. "Drive safely."

"You, too."

Arms folded tightly across her chest, Noelle watched her mother's car crunch down the gravel drive to the dirt road. She felt so much love for her mother that her eyes filled as the car disappeared around the bend. Fifty-eight years old now, her mother was. She was active, vibrant, full of life. Yet fifty-eight seemed so old to Noelle and it worried her. Her father had died two years earlier at fifty-seven. She'd learned about it in a stilted letter from Doreen. The letter arrived nearly a month after his death with a check for four hundred dollars, made out to Noelle. "He didn't have a will," Doreen wrote, "but I thought Noelle should get something from his estate." His estate. The word made Noelle and her mother laugh for hours, the sort of laughter that was borne of hurt and pain. But the four hundred dollars had helped her buy the car, which she named Pops, and she hoped it would treat her better than her father ever had.

Aside from Noelle's trimmed-down belongings and the boxes she had to transport to Miss Wilson's, the only other thing left in the house was an old recliner. James was borrowing a truck to take it to his house. After the night that Bea's baby was born, James became a fixture around their house, mowing their lawn at first out of grat.i.tude but later for the few dollars Noelle's mother insisted on paying him. That family had been full of surprises. As it turned out, James wasn't Bea's brother, but her boyfriend and the father of the baby she had that night. That baby was now five years old and he already had two younger brothers, both "caught" by Noelle's mother, as she would say, with Noelle as her a.s.sistant. Noelle's mother had tried to persuade Bea and James to practice birth control, but her pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Bea, it turned out, liked being a mother and she doted on her kids.

Noelle was carting boxes to her car when James showed up with his truck.

"Hey, Miss Noelle," he said as he hopped out of the cab, "did I miss your mama?"

"She took off an hour ago." Noelle heaved a box into the cramped trunk of her car.

"What we gonna do without her?" he asked.

"You and Bea better stop having babies, that's what."

James grinned. He'd grown into a handsome man and he had the sort of grin that made you grin back. "Too late for that," he said.

Noelle put her hands on her hips and stared at him. "Again? What are you going to do with all these kids?"

James shrugged. "Love 'em up," he said.

People have a right to make their own choices, Noelle, her mother had told her when Noelle complained the last time Bea announced she was pregnant.

"Well," Noelle said now, "let me help you carry that recliner out to your truck."

It took them nearly half an hour to carry the recliner through the tight doorway of the house, across the windy yard and into the truck. Then James helped her with the rest of her mother's cartons.

She was walking from the car toward the house to pick up another box, when she saw James suddenly drop one of the cartons to the gra.s.s, his arms flung out in the air.

"Girl!" He nudged the box with the toe of his shoe. "Where these boxes been? They got spider s.h.i.+t all over 'em."

Noelle hadn't noticed, but he was right. Round egg sacs hung from the corners and cottony webs crisscrossed the untaped flaps.

"Leave it there, James," she said. "Nothing's alive, I don't think, but I don't want to drag these filthy things into that Miss Wilson's house. Let me get a rag and I'll clean them up."

"You got some tape?" James squatted down next to the box. "I'll check inside a couple to make sure they ain't no infestation or nothin'."

Finding a rag in the cleaned-out kitchen was easier said than done, and Noelle finally resorted to pulling one of her washcloths from her suitcase. She dampened it under the tap and headed back to the front yard.

By the time she reached James and the box, he was on his feet, a manila folder in his hands. He looked at her from behind a frown.

"Was you adopted?" he asked.

She froze. How would he know that? She'd only found out herself the night Bea's first baby was born, when her mother finally told her the truth. They'd sat together on the hammock in the backyard while her mother apologized for not telling her sooner. "You had a right to know way before now," she'd said, "but I didn't want you to think that you being adopted had anything to do with Daddy leaving."

Noelle had felt stunned, like a huge void opened up inside her. "My mother?" she'd asked. "Who were my real mother and father?"

"Your father and I are your real parents," her mother said sharply. "But your biological mother was a fifteen-year-old girl like that one we just left. Like Bea. Your father..." She'd shrugged. "I don't think anybody knew who your father was."

"I'm not yours," Noelle said, trying on the fit of the words.

"Oh, you're mine, honey. Please don't ever say that again."

"I'm not part Lumbee?" She felt the magic drain out of her. The Spanish moss hanging above the hammock suddenly looked like nothing more than Spanish moss, not the hair of an Indian chief's wife.

"I believe you're a mishmash. A little of this and a little of that." Her mother had taken her hand and held it on her lap. "What you are," she said, "is the best thing that ever happened to me."

Now, Noelle looked at James. "Yes, I'm adopted," she said, as though the fact meant nothing to her. "But how did you know?"

He handed the folder to her. "Some papers fell out of this thing in the wind," he said. "Ain't nothin' to me," he said. "But maybe mean somethin' to you."

His soft brown eyes told her he'd seen something he shouldn't have seen. Something she'd never been meant to see, either. And when he gave it to her, he touched her hand. Not like a man would touch a woman. It was the touch of a friend who knew that the papers in that folder just might change her world forever.

8.

Tara Wilmington, North Carolina

2010.

Oh, G.o.d, this felt strange.

I sat across the table from Ian at the Pilot House, wondering if I was on a date. It had seemed casual enough yesterday when he said he had two tickets for a film at Thalian Hall. Then he suggested we grab something to eat first, and when you put dinner on the waterfront together with a film at a place as nice as the renovated Thalian Hall, what else could it be but a date? I liked Ian. I'd known him for so long and in some ways I could honestly say I adored him, but I didn't want to date him. I didn't want to date anyone. The thought of kissing or even holding hands with someone other than Sam made me shudder-and not with desire. It was actually repellent. I felt a deep, deep loneliness in my bed at night, but it wasn't for just any man. It was for my husband.

"This isn't a date, is it?" I asked Ian after the waiter had poured my second gla.s.s of wine.

Ian laughed. "Not if you don't want it to be," he said.

"Were you thinking it was? Is?" I was smiling. I liked that I could talk easily to Ian. I needed a male friend much more than I needed a lover.

"I was just thinking it would be good to see you smile," Ian said, "like you are right now."

The moment he said that, I felt my smile disappear. There was something I needed to tell him. I'd planned to wait until tomorrow so that tonight we could both relax and unwind. Suddenly, though, I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep my mouth shut.

After school that afternoon, I'd driven to Noelle's to help Emerson start cleaning out the house. Emerson had been waiting for me on the porch, and as soon as I'd reached the top step she grabbed my hand and sat down with me on the glider. Her face was red and gleamed with perspiration, and I knew she'd already been hard at work inside the house. But the stress in her face was from more than physical labor.

"You're not going to believe the autopsy report," she said.

"She was sick," I said. I wanted that to be the case. A terminal illness that Noelle could see no escape from. I could envision her making the choice to end her life then, not wanting to put any of us through a long drawn-out illness with her.

But that wasn't it at all.

Now I looked across the table at Ian. "Noelle had a baby," I said.

He stared at me, then laughed. "What are you talking about?"

"Emerson got the autopsy report today. Cause of death was the overdose, as we'd expected. But the autopsy showed that, sometime in her life, she'd been pregnant and given birth."

All signs of levity left Ian's face. "When?"

"I don't know." I hesitated for just a moment, then asked, "Could it have been yours, Ian?"

He looked jarred by the thought. I was certain we were both remembering back to the abrupt end to his and Noelle's engagement. Was there a connection?

"I don't see how," he said. "I-all of us-would have noticed if she'd been pregnant. Especially pregnant enough to actually give birth."

"It must have happened when she was a teenager, then," I said. "Before any of us knew her. Emerson and I figure that she relinquished the baby for adoption. Maybe she's been dealing with sadness from that experience all these years and none of us knew."

"Well," Ian said, "maybe you're right or maybe the baby died or... I guess we'll never know. I just...I thought I knew her so well back when we were together. Why didn't she tell me?"

"Why didn't she tell Emerson or me?" I added. "Her best friends?" I looked down at my plate where a few bites of flounder remained. I wasn't sure I could finish it. "Anyhow, it probably has nothing to do with why she killed herself," I said.

"Unless it's something she never got over." He looked miserable.

"I'm sorry I brought this up tonight. I should have kept my mouth shut."

"No, I'm glad you told me," he said.

I ate another bite of flounder without really tasting it. I was tired. Emerson and I had packed up everything in Noelle's kitchen, filling boxes with items Ted would take to the women's shelter. There wasn't much. Noelle had pared down her life. She'd never been a pack rat, but I'd been surprised at how empty her kitchen cabinets had been. A few plates. A few gla.s.ses and cups and bowls. Nothing extraneous. Her dresser and closet had been the same way, stripped down to the necessities. It had been hard to see her familiar old long skirts and loose cotton blouses, knowing we'd never see Noelle in them again. Then there were the black garbage bags filled with baby items that had been all over the house. Ted and Emerson piled the bags into their car to take home with them, where Grace and Jenny promised to organize the mess and turn it over to Suzanne.

I'd been shocked when Grace told me she planned to help out with the babies program as Noelle had requested. Emerson had given her Noelle's old sewing machine and shown her how to hem the little blankets that were part of the layettes donated to sick or needy infants. When Grace told me what she was up to, I put my hand on her forehead as if checking for fever. "Are you all right?" I'd smiled. Wrong move.

She'd jerked her head away from my hand. "I'm fine," she said. "Don't make a big production out of it."

I doubted she'd be one of the volunteers who delivered the layettes to the hospital. Ever since Sam's accident, she'd been nearly phobic of hospitals. She'd told me that if I ever needed hospitalization, she wouldn't visit me. She wouldn't even visit Cleve in the hospital, she'd said. I blamed myself. When we reached the emergency room after Sam's accident, I plowed through the treatment room doors in a panic with Grace close on my heels. Even I couldn't bear to remember what we saw in that room-Sam's beautiful face, bloodied and torn apart. Grace had fainted, dropping to the floor behind me like a stone.

"So," Ian said, "did you find anything at Noelle's that seemed...out of the ordinary?"

I shook my head. "Emerson had to examine everything she touched for clues," I said. "She thinks something in that house is going to tell us why she killed herself or what happened to her child or why she lied to us about being a midwife."

Noelle and midwife. The words went together like milk and cookies. "Midwife" defined who she was in my mind. In all of our minds. Hadn't at least one of us introduced her as a midwife over the past decade and hadn't she said nothing to correct us? It was bizarre.

Ian tapped his fingertip against the base of his empty winegla.s.s. "Noelle..." He shook his head. "It was impossible to know what was going on with her sometimes."

I felt sorry for him. I knew how much he'd once loved her. "It must have been so hard on you when she broke off the engagement."