Talking About My Baby. Margot Early

Rowdy’s applied for a job at a gas station in Logan, but he doesn’t think he’ll get it. Gabriela talks to me, says I’m doing good. She’s just a kid, younger than me, but she helps her mom with midwife stuff. She’ll never do what I did, though I’ll never call this precious baby a mistake. Anyhow, when Ivy checks me again the baby’s coming....

      

      —“Alison Angelina’s Birth,” Devon Workman, age 16, Guyandotte, West Virginia

      

      TARA SWITCHED BREASTS, moving the feeding tube as well. Her nipples already protruded from nursing. He noticed one of them was malformed and circled by shiny, puckered tissue. Burns?

      With difficulty, he kept from staring. “Widowed.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      “It’s been five years.”

      Silence folded in on them.

      She juggled Laura and her piece of pie, trying to eat and paying more heed to the baby than to covering her breasts. If she’d been Heloise, he would have fed her bites between kisses.

      As it was, he found her sexy, prodding, earthy. She’d descended on him like a forest spirit and made herself comfortable in his disordered home. Mouseridden—a haven for hantavirus. He shuddered slightly. Wishing her quick exit from his life, he asked, “How long will you be visiting your mother?”

      “We’re moving here. Need a babysitter?”

      “No.” He’d already decided. There was a school bus. The kids could handle it. In some ways, Oliver was older at thirteen than the adults of Precipice.

      But tragedy and bloodshed didn’t really mature a child.

      And what to do with Danielle in the mornings?

      “I have references. I went to junior high and high school here.”

      He pictured her employed as nanny to Sleeping Beauty and other fairy-tale children. Not his kids. Time for this day to end. The children would be spending the weekend with his mother in Silverton; he’d drive them over Thursday night. Friday was his extra day off before the weekend, and he’d told the schools this would be an educational absence. Only six months in the U.S.? Everything was education.

      On the kitchen counter, his pager buzzed, and he found it between pie plates. “This is new for me.” He eyed the device. “Can’t say I love it.”

      Tara turned on the couch and laughed. “I love mine. A baby on the way is good news. Oh, no—I mean, I just dumped the pie on your couch.”

      Blood awakened his penis. Her voice? Another glimpse of her breasts? Or just having a woman in the house? “Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up.” He gazed at the number. The answering service. “Excuse me.”

      While he was out of the room, Tara dabbed at the couch, then laid out a protective pad to change Laura. “We need to get you more clothes, kiddo.” The baby watched Tara’s eyes, and Tara smiled back, her mind on Isaac.

      He was gone long enough to give her more chance to study the chalet. There were two primitive masks on one rough wooden wall, with a photo of a mountain gorilla between them. On the table beneath was a woven blanket.

      When he returned, she asked, “What took you to Rwanda?”

      “Doctors Against Violence. I was an intern and resident with them, then worked for them till last year.” They’d paid his way through medical school, too, in an accelerated program starting just after high school. And they’d gotten him and his children out of Rwanda on twelve hours’ notice.

      Briefly, he remembered his fellow intern in Kigali fourteen years ago—twenty—four-year-old Heloise Nsanzumuhile. In three days, he’d known he was in love. With Heloise, her country and medicine.

      He curtailed the conversation. “I have to go to the hospital.”

      Doctors Against Violence. Back in the late ’80s, Tara had spent three weeks in Rwanda with her father and one of his friends, a biologist, and the mountain gorillas. On the way back to Kigali, Tara had seen the massacre of a Tutsi family. She was nineteen and had already lived in Chile for eighteen months, training in a hospital there as a matrona, a midwife—and reaching out, trying to create a link between the classes, between the few rich and the many poor, stirring the wrath of her friend Matilde’s patrón.... That day in Rwanda, her father had clapped his hand over her mouth and wouldn’t let her move. He knew her too well.

      Weeks later, back in Chile, she landed in prison.

      Not something she wanted to think about.

      Feel the hope. Feel the possibilities. Isaac had wanted to hold Laura. Marry a doctor, adopt Laura. “Would you like me to stay and watch the kids?”

      “We manage.” There was an intense, private protectiveness in his words. Tara gathered her things hurriedly, not meeting his eyes. Okay, he doesn’t want me for a sitter.

      Which meant he wouldn’t want her for a wife, either.

      

      LAURA’S CRYING penetrated her dreams later that night. Tara’s eyelids struggled open. How could any woman do this after a long labor? She’d started in great physical condition, yet she was exhausted.

      She changed the infant’s sodden diaper. Precious little legs. Cuddle her in a blanket. But Laura cried all the way to the kitchen. Francesca had called some other new mothers earlier that day, and the freezer and refrigerator were stocked with fresh milk. It would keep for 48 hours in the fridge, two to four weeks in the freezer.

      “I’ll hold her while you warm the milk and set up.”

      Tara hadn’t even noticed her mother entering the kitchen. I’m dead on my feet. But it seemed important to manage alone.

      As Isaac did.

      “I’m fine.”

      Francesca was already reaching for the baby.

      “Mom, you really don’t have—”

      “Don’t be so stubborn, Tara. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

      Why did people always think she was trying to prove something? She’d been told the same thing before—by Danny, especially. What are you trying to prove, Tara?

      Danny, Dan McCrea, Danielle McCrea. The little girl must be named for her uncle.

      Reluctantly, Tara let her mother hold Laura while she put the kettle on for fenugreek tea. Maybe she didn’t have anything to prove to Francesca, but she had much to prove to herself, especially where Laura was concerned.

      Her mother turned in a slow circle, Laura against her shoulder. Gently, Francesca patted the crying newborn’s back. “Tara, how are you going to handle her records? You can’t just pretend this child dropped from space.”

      “I’ll homeschool her.” Ready to nurse, Tara took the baby from her mother and settled in a chair at the kitchen table. The immaculate house contrasted with the chaos at Isaac’s.

      “Eventually, someone will want to see a birth certificate.” Francesca perched on the edge of another chair. Tara rarely saw her mother relax, rarely saw her sit back and just be. Even now, she seemed poised to spring up, to try to make Tara more comfortable.

      But Francesca was right about Laura. “It’ll work out,” Tara promised. Laura’s soft cheek was curved, her little mouth suckling hard. Long ago, Tara had adopted the philosophy that things work out. She’d been jailed in one Third World country for defending the poor and in another for—bad luck. She never spoke of those times, seldom looked back.

      Look forward, Tara.

      Laura’s birth certificate, birth certificate... Oh, good grief! Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? “You could write a birth certificate.”

      “That would be