Could we talk about marriage? Oh, Tara, get real. “Yes. Yes to everything.”
His eyes never left her face.
Knowing Francesca wouldn’t say what was on her mind in front of Isaac, Tara used her finger to break Laura’s contact with her nipple. “Okay, pumpkin. Let’s go see your grandma.”
“Grandma?”
Tara flushed. “Sometimes I forget she’s not mine.” She had brought Laura’s car seat inside, and she settled and strapped the newborn in it.
When she stood and lifted the car seat, he stood, too, but Tara didn’t raise her eyes again until she reached her mother.
FRANCESCA SPOKE IN a low voice to Tara. “If I have to see another woman deliberately frightened by those men...” Francesca knew she was overstating the point. It was hard for physicians like Dan McCrea to see women in labor and not want to relieve their pain. Dan wasn’t a drug-pusher, he was just trying to help, in the way he believed was best.
But it’s just unnecessary interference. If Millie had asked for pain relief, had asked for a monitor... Francesca had seen a few women stuck at seven centimeters dilate to ten in an hour on an epidural. But most of the time she felt it slowed labor.
If only obstetricians and midwives could truly coordinate their efforts. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said homebirth was unsafe. All over the country, midwives were attending homebirths with no physician backup—because there was none to be found. Ivy’s situation in West Virginia was unusual; her backup physician, Mata Iyer, saw the need for a midwife who would visit homes in her impoverished rural area—and undoubtedly, Mata had never said the word “homebirth” to her insurance provider. Francesca’s own backup physician had retired a year before, after battling endless hospital politics.
Francesca appreciated the risks. For years, she’d kept all homebirths within five minutes of the hospital, attending women at the Victorian if they lived too far from town. The more she saw, the less sorry she was to work in the hospital.
Until she actually worked in the hospital.
I am so tired of all this. Maybe it was time to quit, or take up nursing full-time.
“Did they leave?” Tara asked, knowing the answer.
“He’s ordered the epidural and monitor. I’m going back to see how she’s doing.”
“We’ll come with you.” She and Laura.
“Tara, it won’t help. Please go home and sleep. You need it. And Laura needs you.”
“If Millie doesn’t mind, I’d like to stay. I’ll wait till the boys have done their thing and left, so we won’t crowd the room.”
Tara’s dark eyes were eager, yet failed to hide her fatigue. Francesca knew this aspect of her daughter too well. Tara relied on births for some kind of spiritual recharge. But now she needed physical recharge.
“Tara, you’re trying to produce milk, and you need rest for that.”
Her mother was right. But Tara longed to see Millie’s labor through to its magical conclusion. There was nothing more intense, more complete, than birth. It fulfilled something in her that nothing else ever would. Except, perhaps, Laura.
“I’m really wide-awake, Mom.”
Francesca knew that was untrue. But Tara was an adult. “Millie asked where you went.” She sighed. “Let’s go see how she’s doing.”
THE BABY’S HEAD crowned four hours later. Francesca caught the head when it emerged, and Tara guided Millie’s hands toward her child. She remembered Laura’s birth, Julia’s apathetic eyes. But there was nothing like this joy. The experience of meeting a person never met before.
No cord. More pushing.
“Ahhh... ahhh... ”
“Hey, you handsome guy.” Admiring the newborn—and double-checking Francesca’s quick suctioning—Dan smiled at Millie and her husband. “This one’s going to play for the Broncos.”
“My baby! Oh, sweet baby!”
In the bliss of seeing mother and child, Tara could even feel warmth for the obstetrician, could even appreciate that he was smiling over the newborn. She settled in a chair at the edge of the room and savored the experience of the birth.
But her eyes dropped shut.
Snow...
Walking with Isaac. He asked her why she’d become a midwife.
It’s what I am. It’s all I am.
There are other parts of you.
They’d stopped, and he touched her.
“Tara.”
Her eyes opened. It was her mother. Laura slept in the car seat at Tara’s feet, while Millie Rand dozed on the bed, her newborn in a bassinet beside her.
No Isaac.
Just herself, aroused by a dream of him.
Francesca spoke softly. “Time to go home.”
Silently, Tara gathered her things. As she lifted the car seat, Laura’s eyes opened. Don’t cry. Carrying the baby and her diaper bag, Tara slipped through the door with her mother. Outside the suite, in the bright lights of the hall, Francesca said, “I didn’t want to waken you.”
While Tara paused to transfer Laura to the sling, Francesca collected the car seat.
The clock at the nurses’ station read five-thirty, and Pilar was talking to the nurse on the next shift. Moving on, Francesca and Tara waved, and she waved back.
“Thank you for the sleep, Mom.” Tara covered her yawn with her hand.
Francesca caught her peering up and down the halls. “What are you looking for?”
Tara hid any reaction in drowsiness. “The way out.”
BY THE FOLLOWING afternoon, her plan was set in stone.
She wanted to adopt Laura legally, and she knew the other midwives at the birth center in Sagrado would help her. But in her case, the authorities would insist on a prerequisite. A husband.
Tara didn’t have time to “fall in love,” as her mother had suggested the other night. It would take a century. But a “suitable” man to marry lived two miles away, and she had the tool to bribe him. Herself. She could care for his children, and she could clean that chalet. Isaac wouldn’t be likely to toss his new mother-in-law out in the street, either.
Are you crazy, Tara? What made her think he’d marry her because he needed childcare—or a housekeeper? As far as she knew, he didn’t
