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
