Читать книгу Talking About My Baby - Margot Early, Margot Early - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
In Hawaii, I kept chickens. I had free-roaming
chickens that came into the pen to roost at night
or if they had problems outside. Once in a while,
one of the free-range chickens—never a rooster,
always a hen—would not want to roost in the
pen and would find herself in a tree. If she was
not lured back into the pen and retrained to come
in at night, she would never return; she would
go wild. She would join the group at a safe dis-
tance in the daytime, hide her nest from every-
one, and climb higher and higher in her own
roost so no one could get her. Somehow, in Tara,
I have raised a wild hen.
—Francesca Walcott, CNM
On the road again
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. Driving north, out of Texas, Tara chased off night memories and twilight ghosts, excluding everything but the road and Laura. In slumber, Laura opened and closed her soft tiny hands, holding them close against her blue sleeper.
Almost safe.
She had made it out of Sagrado. In Colorado, she would live with her mother, Francesca—and maybe make ends meet as a midwife. She wouldn’t enjoy living with Francesca. But she had to give Laura the best life possible.
She was trying.
No one at Maternity House had questioned her buying a supplemental feeding system or taking donated breast milk from the breast bank. The birth center sometimes helped an adoptive mother get started inducing lactation. But Tara had told no one about Laura Estrella. Not then, not during the two weeks that followed. Laura would have been given to social services, and...
No way. She’s mine.
Hours after finding the baby in her car, Tara had returned to Maternity House for the things she needed. Then, she’d put Laura to her breast, providing the milk through fine, flexible tubing taped to her nipple. A disposable bag hanging between her breasts, beneath her clothing, held the donor milk. She was massaging her breasts nightly and, with the help of herbs... Yes, maybe months from now, her own breasts would produce milk. But she would always need to supplement.
I’m lucky. I’m so lucky.
She had Laura. She had Laura, and she would do what she must to keep her. Anything at all.
Precipice, Colorado
THE TURNING SEASONS sprayed the mountainsides red, orange and yellow. The leaves flashed gold on red and black rocks, contrasting with the dark pitch of evergreens. Driving home at six-thirty that night, Isaac told the kids, “That whole ridge used to be green.”
It was Wednesday; another babysitter was gone from his life—late getting back from a mountain bike ride. The children had been at the clinic since four-thirty. Keeping tabs on three children, ages five through thirteen, and seeing patients, and dealing with his staff... He felt the stress, readjustment to the cold and the mountains and the U.S.
Danielle cried out in Kinyarwanda, begging his help against David, who was dismembering one of her Barbie dolls.
Isaac took a breath. “English, Danielle.”
She burst into tears, and both her brothers began to soothe her—in the language she’d chosen. Oliver turned around in the passenger seat to speak to her. The doll was reassembled.
“Dad,” said David, behind him. “I have the coolest idea for tonight.”
For D&D, Dungeons & Dragons. Isaac’s brother and mother had brought the game to Rwanda years ago, along with a television and VCR that had later become bargaining chips, buying lives. In Colorado, David had discovered D&D accessories—books, boxes of dice with any number of sides—eight, ten, twelve, twenty, one hundred. David was a wizard at probability. He had written his first seventh-grade essay on chance, and his teacher had sent it to a national contest.
Isaac would have to play Dungeons & Dragons tonight. He’d enjoy it, but his life was full of have-tos, and each day he tried to unload more of them, usually at the clinic. The nurses were always dropping hints—like today. Dr. McCrea, we’re two hours behind schedule! Then he’d heard her tell the receptionist, Guess we’re on African time again.
He’d called an office meeting on the spot and encouraged everyone to air their feelings. They had. In a nice way.
In a nice way, he’d explained that his office wasn’t an emergency room. What most of his patients needed was someone to talk to. He liked to find out what was bothering them and try to get across how they could become well.
Everyone in his office needed to relax about the clock. Precipice had one physician for every five hundred residents; Rwanda, one for every forty thousand. He worked well at great speed, but here, why race the clock?
No one had relaxed. He’d heard about the crying babies and the elderly people on oxygen, and...
There were more have-tos at the clinic. Perhaps he should record his own perceptions of time, as David had recorded his vision of chance.
Looking west at the ski lifts, hanging motionless above the rocks and grass and trees, he weighed the price of season passes against discount ski cards. Oliver and David wanted snowboards. When Isaac had left Colorado, snowboards hadn’t existed. Fourteen years he’d been away.
The face of Precipice Peak bordered one side of the town. Rust-red mountains rose on the other at a gentler angle. He headed that way, east toward Tomboy, and at the top of the road, when he turned left, Danielle exclaimed, “La sage femme! Et une dame et un bébé.”
French now.
Isaac said, “The midwife. And a lady and a baby.”
“Say it, Danielle,” suggested twelve-year-old David. “The midwife. And a lady and a baby.”
“Yes,” Oliver encouraged. “Practice!”
Another have-to. Isaac had to tell the midwife, Francesca Walcott, when the new owners were taking occupancy of her rented Victorian. Two years ago, when Isaac was still in Rwanda, his mother had dispersed most of her assets between him and Dan, his brother. A year later, Dan had negotiated the purchase of the Victorian and Isaac’s own place—as well as empty acres and abandoned buildings sprawled over one side of Tomboy—as a package deal, acting for Isaac. Now Isaac was turning over the Victorian at a profit.
He had to.
PRECIPICE HAD ONCE been a mining town. Since then, log homes and glassy condominiums had sprung up around the turn-of-the-century painted ladies. Yet Tara still saw alpine meadows beneath the grim-faced peaks. The wildflowers were gone, the heavy snows late this year. Aspens dropped golden leaves on her mother’s twenty-year-old Jeep Eagle in the gravel drive.
The sign in front of the Victorian read, Mountain Midwifery. Francesca Walcott, CNM. The name Ivy Walcott, CNM, had been painted over; Tara’s adopted sister had moved back to West Virginia, reunited with her husband and daughter.
Tara had considered turning to Ivy rather than face their mother with Laura. Too late now.
Before she could unfasten her seat belt, Francesca stepped outside and hurried down the walk toward the Safari station wagon, picking her way on stones set in the mud and gravel between naked flower beds. Her gray-tinged auburn curls cascaded over her shoulders. To Tara, Francesca always looked like the Icenian queen Boadicea, who had avenged the rape of her two daughters by waging war against the Romans.
Francesca suited the role.
Tara cranked down her window and smelled snow, unfallen.
Her mother saw Laura.
When Tara released the buckle on the infant car seat and lifted her, Laura didn’t wake, just curled her knees up to her chest. You are so sweet. I love you. I love you.
As Tara unfolded herself from the car with Laura, a blue Toyota Land Cruiser beat its way up the road, rocking over the bumps. The road led up to Tomboy, a ghost town recently turned real-estate speculation-ground. Though several properties were listed, her mother said only one resident had settled on the high alpine tundra, buying up half of what was there. So this must be Francesca’s troublesome landlord. But first Tara saw the children, with luminous skin shades darker than the Rio Grande and wavy, shiny, black hair. A boy, a little girl, another boy.
Finally, she caught an impression of black hair, granite cheekbones and fair skin behind the steering wheel. No one had ever mentioned his looks—only that he was an obstetrician and difficult. Now, there was a real-estate sign in the yard. Was he selling the Victorian?
Where will Mom go?
Where will Laura and I go?
Evicting Francesca so that he could rent out her house to skiers. So why was there a real estate sign on the front lawn?
Francesca plastered on a grin and waved.
The driver nodded, and Tara noted the careless scrape of his eyes, eyes some murky shade of dark gray or green. The children were speaking to each other, ignoring everything else.
“Friends?”
“Shut up and smile.” The hiss of a sigh escaped Francesca’s lips, saying plainer than words, What have you done now, Tara? Whose baby is that?
The Land Cruiser halted in the rocks and mud alongside the road, beneath evergreens. As the dust settled, a car door slammed, and the driver strode toward them.
“Great,” muttered Francesca.
“What?”
“Please, Tara. Let me do the talking. This is my landlord.” She added, “And Dan McCrea’s brother.”
Dan McCrea. The other creep in her life who’d been christened Daniel. Why did she have so much trouble with people named Dan? There was Danny Graine, her ex-husband—
And Dan McCrea, M.D., OB/GYN.
His brother was six foot three or four. Tara rocked Laura, singing softly, “Hush a-bye, don’t you cry, Go to sleepy, little baby....” Under the pine trees, she adjusted the receiving blanket over the tiny head in a cotton hat. She’d found the hat at Wal-Mart in El Paso, along with the infant car seat—everything but the cotton diapers she’d bought from a supplier, also in El Paso.
“Hello, Francesca.”
Tara thrust out a hand. “Hi, I’m Tara. Francesca’s daughter.”
“Isaac McCrea.” He shook her hand, then ignored her. “The buyers signed the contract today. Occupancy is set for November twenty-fourth.”
His eyes were hazel, with black lashes and eyebrows. Yeah, the resemblance to Dangerous Dan was there, alongside the differences. Great chin, nice jaw, straighter hair, more interesting eyes... In Tara’s arms, Laura stirred, made a soft crying sound.
She would have to get the milk and supplemental feeder from the cooler in the car. Her plan was to link up with some of Francesca’s nursing moms, see if any would donate breast milk.
“Is there something I can do to change your mind, Dr. McCrea?” asked Francesca.
“No.” He shook his head.
“Is it because I’m a midwife?”
Tara liked the direct question, the only relevant question. Relevant to everything when one’s life was midwifery—in the United States.
“Of course not.”
“Then, perhaps, when I find a new place for my home and office,” Francesca suggested, “you’ll be willing to serve as backup physician.”
Gutsy, Mom! Incision Dan’s brother serve as backup for the local midwife?
“I have no maternity insurance. I don’t do births.”
Didn’t do births? Tara broke in. “Aren’t you an obstetrician?”
“Family practice. You’re thinking of my brother.”
She blushed. On the phone, months and months ago, Francesca had said he was an obstetrician; but that was when he was new to town. Or maybe there was confusion with his brother, who’d lived in Precipice for years. In any case, Francesca had been getting flak from the hospital about her homebirth practice, and she always assumed the worst.
From the corner of her eye, Tara glimpsed motion. “Your car is rolling.”
The Land Cruiser connected with a house-sized boulder behind it and stopped.
“Not anymore.” Unconcerned about his children releasing the parking brake? Backing away, he murmured, “Enjoy your visit,” and he was partway to his car before he turned and looked at Tara.
She felt to her bones what he saw.
A woman with a newborn and a slender body and flat stomach. Quelling panic, fear of discovery, she grinned. “Bye, doc.”
“TARA. YOUR ETHICS!”
“Ethics, schmethics. This has nothing to do with being a midwife.”
“You attended that child’s birth! You can’t just keep the baby! And you can’t raise a child alone.”
“What would you have done?”
Francesca thought, We’ve been here a hundred times before. Butting heads. “I would have driven straight back to Maternity House. What possessed you to do anything different?”
“I told you. I swore—”
“The mother is clearly not dead.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But her wishes were obvious. She considered herself dead—to this child. And now, Laura can grow up knowing that her mother and I made a pact, rather than that her mother abandoned her, which is the story she’d hear if she was adopted by strangers.”
Francesca pressed her lips together. The baby was darling, with her thatch of dark hair and huge dark eyes. I don’t dare hold her. But Tara... Tara was nursing her with supplemental milk. Ten to twelve times a day. What was she thinking? “Tara, that baby is stolen. From the next couple in the state of Texas waiting to adopt a child.”
Tara had already considered that. “I disagree. Julia fostered her out—informally—to me. People have done it forever, everywhere. Uther Pendragon handed Arthur to Merlin, who gave him to Sir Ector to raise. Dad told me about an Eskimo lady giving her second son to a woman who had none, for the strength of the community—”
Francesca rolled her eyes. She’d once heard Charlie convince a man that moose turn into caribou when they cross the Arctic Circle. “Things have changed, Tara.”
“But remember how it was in Hawaii? Lots of adoption within families. Fostering and adoption are ancient traditions—”
“And this is the dawn of the third millennium.”
Tara lifted the infusion of fenugreek she’d brewed. “To a bright new century. Here we are. And I can help you. I’ll do the homebirths. You do the hospital births.”
“I’ve already told my homebirth clients that I can’t attend homebirths anymore. I can’t risk losing hospital privileges, and there’s simply too much pressure from the medical community.”
“Tara to the rescue. I’ll start a homebirth practice to fill in the gaps. After all, I have no hospital privileges to lose.”
“You should not be practicing in the state of Colorado, Tara. It’s not legal. In January—” Francesca began.
“Not an issue. These hands caught more than eight hundred babies just last year.”
“In Texas. I know your credentials, Tara. But the answer is no.”
The infant in her arms ceased sucking at Tara’s nipple and the tube from the supplemental feeder. Her head dropped away in slumber, and Tara carefully turned her to burp her.
Pretending not to see the bonding between her daughter and the newborn, Francesca watered pots of cacti in the solarium. The muscles in her shoulders ached. How could Tara have done it?
Only Tara would have done it.
And Tara was fragile as a cactus. Cacti seemed hardy, but if you ignored what they were and watered them too much... Was Tara really over Danny, over his running off with her partner, having a child with her partner? Now ex-partner.
How can I turn her away? Wandering to the kitchen, Francesca touched the soft cheek of the sleeping newborn. Skin so fine. The smell of her so new. “Do you even have her birth certificate?”
“No.” The solution—the last-gasp, avoid-losing-Laura solution—confronted Tara again. Surely it wouldn’t come to that.
“How do you plan to adopt her, Tara?”
“I’m working it out. Don’t worry. If I’m not worrying, why should you?”
Francesca folded her arms across her chest. Lines in her forehead deepened as she returned to the solarium. After a bit, she shook her head and muttered, “That man.”
“Isaac the Greedy? His kids are cute.” Releasing the parking brake.
“His children are in dire need of a mother.”
In dire need of a mother?
Tara came alert. “Where’s their mother?”
“I understand she’s dead.” Reluctantly, Francesca added, “In Rwanda. That’s where they came from.”
Rwanda?
Tara saw the terraced slopes, felt the heat and humidity, smelled the scents, the unique scents of that country, the faces of the people. She had read the newspapers and books in ’94 and since, and cried for Rwanda.
She placed Laura in a sling against her chest, a style she’d learned in South America, and went to the sink. She removed the feeding system and emptied the remaining milk, then prepared for next time. Afterward, she took flour, cinnamon and nutmeg from the cupboard. “I’m going to make a couple of pies and take them up to your nemesis and his motherless children.”
Francesca’s eyes rounded. “You’re going to do what?”
“It’s for Laura. Here’s a man who needs a wife. And I need a husband so I can get a home study and adopt Laura.”
“Tara, you can’t—”
Tara laughed. “Just kidding, Mom.”
Francesca reminded herself to breathe. It sometimes occurred to her that Tara had been conceived in a turbulent year—oh, in how many ways—and that she’d been born on the fifth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and that maybe all of this was to blame for her having turned out as she had. But no. Charlie Marcus’s genes—and personality, if you could call it that—were responsible.
“I’m going to try to talk him out of selling this house,” Tara explained, almost as though reasoning with herself.
Francesca studied her daughter. Was Tara lying? She’d learned from the best—her father. “The house is a done deal.”
“Not till closing.”
“He’s not going to back down, Tara. I’ve known him longer than you have. Not to say that I do know him, only that I know how he feels about selling this house. I always get the same answer.”
Her daughter’s smile made Francesca uneasy, as if Tara actually planned to marry Isaac McCrea. “Then maybe someone else should do the asking.”
SHE DROVE SLOWLY, yet the low-slung station wagon hit rocks in the four-wheel-drive road. Her mother had offered to watch Laura, but Tara had declined. She didn’t want to be apart from her. You’re so precious. Blowing bubbles in her car seat.
Twilight bathed Tomboy. The ghostly skeleton of an uninhabited mining structure rose against the far rock walls. Closer by stood another deserted building, the Columbine, which had once been a bordello. Now the windows were boarded, like those of the houses across the road where miners had lived, but Tara drove with one elbow in order to direct an X made with her two index fingers toward the house of prostitution.
Had he bought that, too? Her mother had said “everything north of the road.”
Lights shone from a house set alone at the edge of the tundra. Decades ago, the mine owner had resided there, in a two-story cabin set eight feet above the road, at winter snow level. Subsequent owners had built onto the sides and back, adding the steep rooflines of a chalet, with outdoor shutters and balconies. A snowmobile near the side porch awaited the first storms.
Isaac McCrea had chosen a high and desolate paradise for his home, and Tara envied him the alpine wildflowers that would poke through the tundra, the grasslike slivers ice formed at that altitude, the alpenglow which would turn the peaks pink each night.
He must have heard her car. A tall shadow darkened a downstairs window, then moved away.
She parked, and when the motor died, she could hear music. Drums and singing.
HIS DOORBELL RANG, and he crossed the pine floor in his wool socks, calling over his shoulder to David, “I’m going to steal the scroll.”
Dice rolled on the kitchen table as he opened the door.
It was Francesca Walcott’s daughter with her newborn. He remembered an observation earlier that day. She didn’t look like a woman who’d recently given birth.
A black cat shot between his feet and leaped to the porch railing. Arching its back, it hissed.
“Don’t take it personally. She always acts that way.”
Tara heard a trace of an accent. How could she have missed it earlier? She held out a cardboard box. “I made you some pies. The bottom one might be a little crunched. I had to stack them. There’s cardboard in between.”
“Smells great. We’re not picky.” Pumpkin. Like his mom’s. “Come in.”
“Thanks.” Her grin was raw and unbridled, radiating sexuality. When she stepped inside, he noticed she was tall, five-ten maybe. Long straight hair the shade of a walnut fell down her back, and her eyes were almost the same color. They swept the foyer, the great beams, the ancient floors, the loft. Isaac realized what she must see—the laundry heaped on a chair, the dishes in the sink, Barbie dolls and Micro Machines on the rug, a cat’s kill. He grabbed a snow shovel from the porch and scooped the last outside.
The three children gathered at the table were neater than their surroundings. The little girl wore blue flannel pajamas, her long thick hair in two braids. Dirty dishes covered two counters. The music came from upstairs.
“You steal the scroll,” one of the boys said to Isaac.
“Okay, I’m going to read it.” Isaac remembered his manners belatedly. “Hold up, gang. We have a visitor. This is—”
“Tara.” She grabbed a chair at the table and surreptitiously brushed off crumbs before sitting. In Mexico, out in the country, the women’s homes had dirt floors. She’d loved visiting each home for prenatal visits and births. Years ago. “Who’s who, here? And what are you playing?”
“Dungeons & Dragons,” David said. As the boys dove in with answers, Isaac shut the door. Why was she here? The eviction? She couldn’t possibly think this would sway his decision about the Victorian.
And that couldn’t be her baby.
“Dad’s a thief. We just found this scroll, and he stole it.”
Isaac’s thoughts drifted back to the game, and he winced. “I forgot to ask Oliver to identify it.”
“That’s true.” David, his younger son, held their destinies in his hands. “And when you read the scroll, you begin to grow a beard. It grows at a rate of one foot per hour.”
Isaac and his fellow adventurers groaned.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” said Danielle. “Oliver has les ciseaux. La magique!” Her heavily accented English turned to French, then Kinyarwanda, until she covered her mouth to keep the words inside. The gesture stabbed Isaac. He’d been too intense about her speaking English.
Daddy was easy. She’d known him as Daddy all her life. Having the children call him Dad or Daddy had been his and Heloise’s main concession to the obvious fact that he was not Rwandan, not Hutu, not Tutsi, not Belgian. American.
Tara stared at Danielle with brilliant, admiring eyes. “You know more languages than me!”
“Not English.” Danielle sighed.
“You shouldn’t have read the scroll, Dad,” said Oliver, their magician. “We’ll try the magic scissors, but I think we’re going to have to pay someone to remove the curse.”
“Your English is very good.” Tara saw something dart across the shadows in the kitchen. A mouse. Someone should let the cat back in.
You sure made yourself at home, Isaac thought. “Everyone who wants a piece of pie needs to wash a plate.”
Three chairs moved in unison.
Another cat, dark gray, stalked toward the corner. Get him. Get that mouse. Tara glanced up at Isaac. “You have a great family.”
“Thanks. Shall I wash a plate for you?”
“Oh, I can wash my own.”
She began to rise, and he waved her down. “You’re a guest. Dishes just aren’t a high priority around here.”
“They never have been with me, either.” But someone better get a handle on the crumbs.
“And guys,” he told the children, “that’s a wrap for tonight. After the pie, go to bed.”
None of the children chose to eat at the table, instead settling all over the rustic furniture and the tattered rug that covered the center of the distressed-wood floor. In the kitchen, the mouse had become a toy for the charcoal cat.
Isaac set a piece of pie and a fork in front of Tara. “Something to drink?”
“Water, please.”
He brought it, then his own, and they were alone at the table while the kids carried on their own conversation about the game, lapsing into Kinyarwanda—then, with a glance at him, returning to English. Rules for guests.
Tara tried to kick off the conversation. “How do you like being a doctor in Precipice?” She tucked a finger into the newborn’s tiny hand.
“It’s nice.” Calling himself to the conversation, Isaac shrugged.
Tara thought he sounded as though he was just visiting.
The baby began to wake, and she lifted the child from the sling. “Hello, Laura. Hello, hello, sweet princess.”
Laura. A coincidence that this baby should share a name with one of his dead children, one of the triplets. Only Danielle had survived the birth, to become his brother’s namesake three days later, when he had named her sisters, too, the sisters he’d dug up from the dirt in which they were buried. As he’d dug to find Heloise. His hands itched to hold this Laura. Could holding her be part of healing?
He reached out.
So the doctor likes babies. Tara filed the thought away. What was his story? What had happened to the children’s mother? Was she Hutu or Tutsi? One or the other, surely.
“This is Laura Estrella,” she said. Her hands to his. Big, long-fingered hands, man hands, beautiful hands.
The baby was all eyes. She was also wet, Isaac observed, and Tara hadn’t brought a diaper bag inside. “How many days old?”
“Two weeks.” Two weeks of finishing business at Maternity House—without letting anyone know about Laura. Then, packing her birth records and midwifery texts, settling into a routine with Laura. But this man would know, would know she hadn’t given birth to the child. I’m looking after her for her mother. Sure. Why not? Tara said the words, then followed them up. “I was working at Maternity House in Sagrado, Texas. Her mother was from Mexico and came up to have the baby. She’s young and doesn’t want to take care of Laura yet.” A lie. It was the worst kind of lie, partly true.
Isaac’s eyes belonged to Laura now—so they’d stay off Tara. A woman was a complication he didn’t need, unless she liked babysitting. He’d ask her about that in a minute, seeing she’d appeared on his doorstep like Mary Poppins. “What’s Maternity House?”
“A birth center. I’m a midwife, too.”
“Oh.”
She wanted to know what he thought. Whose side was he on? Between doctors and midwives in the United States, there were always sides. She asked, “And do you approve?”
He glanced up. “Why should it matter?”
Only analysts should answer questions with questions; in other people, it seemed like evasion. “The medical community here. No one will provide physician backup while my mother’s doing homebirths.”
Not my problem, Isaac thought automatically, as automatically as he had once known no sense of “other,” always seeing himself in another’s eyes, always looking for the global solution. But not now and not homebirth.
With fifteen hospital beds for every ten thousand Rwandans, he and Heloise had both attended births in homes. But his boys had been born at the hospital, Danielle the only gift in a disaster at home.
When Dan visited, they’d listened to his stories of obstetrics in Precipice and sometimes of “the midwives.” Dan could make you laugh.
Especially in a country with so little to laugh about.
The midwives! Isaac remembered. Dan visiting Kibuye, talking about Francesca Walcott, Ivy the Babe, Tara the... Oh, yes, he’d heard all about Tara, hadn’t he?
She was the one who said “yoni” instead of “vagina,” YBAC instead of VBAC... Isaac wished he could remember more. That night, Heloise had said, “Yoni. I love that word. Yes, you must call my garden my ‘yoni’ from now on.” And he had. Except when he called it her garden.
He didn’t want Tara watching his kids, after all.
Noticing that Laura had soaked the front of his shirt, Tara shoved her pie plate away from her. “Hold her, okay, while I run out to the car?”
As Tara left, Laura began to cry, and he lifted her to his shoulder and stood. Precious baby.
Oliver and David headed upstairs. The music went off.
Danielle came over to squint up at him and the newborn. “La bébé est—”
She stopped midsentence.
Crouching beside her, he smiled, teasing. “C’est pour votre bien.”
She laughed, then tried. “You are—funny!”
“You are smart. My favorite girl.”
Danielle touched the baby and told her, in Kinyarwanda, to stop crying, Mama would be back. Laura was momentarily silent, but by the time Tara returned, her screaming had driven even Danielle to her room.
“Sorry,” Isaac apologized. “She’s mad.”
“There’s not much you could’ve done. Hungry and wet.” Taking the infant, Tara moved to his kitchen to warm some milk, set up the feeder. Minutes later, she sat on his couch and began to nurse, banishing any shyness about the feeder. I’m so lucky, Laura. Lucky to have you.
The cat dropped mouse guts at Isaac’s feet. He disposed of the remains, then sat opposite Tara, on a longer, more tattered couch. “How are you doing that?”
Tara’s face felt fiery for the second time that day.
He said, “Clinical interest.”
She tried to forget he was Dan McCrea’s brother. “Sure. It’s a supplemental feeder. There’s a tube. I’m not even producing milk yet.”
“I’ve never known a woman to do that. Induce lactation.” He brought Tara a fresh tumbler of water.
“Thank you.” His wife must have nursed. “Actually, I’d like to see if I can get a breast-milk bank going here. And a support group for nursing mothers.”
Good ideas. None of her attitudes shocked him. Heloise’s sister had nursed Danielle.
The cat rubbed his legs.
Isaac fetched their pie plates and set them on the big footstools. Between bites of apple pie, he asked, “Will you be practicing midwifery with your mother?”
“We haven’t worked that out yet.” Play it cool, Tara. It was one thing to practice as an unlicensed lay midwife in Colorado; it was another thing to confess the fact to a physician. Laura watched her. “I can’t stop looking at this baby. She’s irresistible.” Time to get a hundred miles away from the topic of midwifery. “My mom says you’re absolutely set on selling that house.”
“Right.” It wasn’t her business why. Raised Quaker and practicing into adulthood—right up to Heloise’s death in a country where priests had slayed or betrayed their own flocks, where anyone seemingly would kill anyone—Isaac had little trouble controlling what came out of his mouth.
“You know, my mom could probably pay a little more rent.”
“Then she shouldn’t have trouble finding a new place.”
“You don’t know Precipice.”
Isaac finished his piece of pie. He didn’t like turning a woman out of her home, but he had obligations. He yawned conspicuously.
Tara seemed not to see it. She was preoccupied, her forehead creased in a frown.
Her question made him jump in his skin.
“So, you’re...not married?”
