At Odds with the Midwife Read online

Kelvin’s knees collapsed under him and he landed in the wheelchair as Misty cradled her daughter and cried, “My baby, my little girl. Oh, you’re so beautiful.”

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Misty had delivered the placenta, the baby had been washed and swaddled in a clean blanket and beanie, and Kelvin had remembered how to breathe—though he still looked shell-shocked.

  When they’d headed to the hospital, Gemma turned to Nathan and said, “You can call our medical director now. I’m sure he’ll want to hear all about how I did exactly what I was supposed to do in spite of your obstructionism. I’ll get you his phone number.” She started toward her office and then turned back. “After that, I’m inviting you to leave. I understand that you want to shut me down, but this is my birthing center, I know exactly what I’m doing and you’re not welcome here.”

  Nate looked as if he wanted to argue, wanted to come back with an angry response, but after a moment of studying her furious expression, he turned and headed back to the hospital.

  * * *

  WIELDING HER HOE with a viciousness she didn’t know she possessed, Gemma worked her way down one row of herbs and up the next as she uprooted weeds that had sprung up while she’d been getting the birthing center open. The few pepper, carrot and lettuce plants she and Carly had put into the ground were thriving in spite of her neglect.

  An hour later, she was almost finished. Her wrath had begun to dissipate when she heard an approaching car. Carrying her hoe, she walked around to the front of the house, where she saw Nate’s car pull up. She turned around and went back to work.

  When she heard his footsteps following her, she didn’t even bother to glance up as she said, “Physically, I’m not capable of throwing you off my property, so I hope you’ll leave on your own.”

  He was silent for such a long time, she finally had to look up. His hands were in his back pockets. He rocked onto his heels, the picture of an uncomfortable male about to do something he didn’t want to. “I was hoping I could talk to you.”

  “Why bother?” she asked furiously. “You won’t listen to me. Talk to my medical director. Or did you already?”

  He glanced away, examining the rows of blue cohosh and other herbs. “I didn’t call him. I...came to apologize. I overreacted.”

  “Ya think? Why is that, Nate? Believe me, I’ve been in this situation before with doctors who think midwives are incompetent.”

  “I don’t think you’re incompetent.” He held up his hand as he said it. “If anything, I admire your professionalism—”

  “But not my knowledge and expertise. Not what I do, and do very well.”

  Heartsick, she turned away and continued attacking weeds. It could wait, but she needed something to keep her occupied while her mind replayed the events with Misty over and over and she tried to make sense of them.

  “Yes, I realize your education and training have been different than mine,” she went on, hoeing ruthlessly. “That you’re an MD with an emphasis in family practice, and that you’ve probably delivered hundreds of babies, but the Sunshine Birthing Center isn’t some fly-by-night, pop-up operation run by ignorant...harpies.”

  “I don’t think that, Gemma.”

  “Then what is it, Nate? Why don’t you have any respect for me and what I do?”

  “It’s not you. It’s not personal. It’s...” His words dropped away as his face worked, full of pain and despair.

  “What?” She threw her hand into the air. “I won’t know if you don’t tell me.”

  “A midwife killed my sister.”

  “What? What do you mean?” She lowered her hoe to the ground as her arms went weak with surprise.

  * * *

  NATE SCRUBBED HIS hands over his face and through his hair, then dropped them to his sides. He knew he looked haggard and disheveled, but he didn’t care. Even though he felt justified in his opinion of midwifery, he hadn’t handled the situation with Misty, or with Gemma, well. He’d let his history and his emotions cloud his judgment—something he’d been strictly trained not to do.

  After a minute, he went on. “Mandy went to college at OSU but dropped out after her first year. She and our parents had a huge fight over it. I didn’t understand everything that was going on. I was only nine when it happened. I only knew one night there was lots of yelling and door slamming—something my mother never allowed—and Mandy saying she wanted to explore the world, or at least the US. She had inherited some money from our mom’s father when she turned nineteen, a couple of months before. It was about two hundred thousand dollars and she must have thought it was all the money in the world. Now I understand it meant freedom to her, the first time she’d ever had money without strings tied to it. It meant...” His face spasmed. “Having a life where she didn’t have to care what anyone else thought, didn’t have to ask for money. My dad kept a tight hold on the purse strings.”

  Gemma frowned and Nate shook his head. “Ironic, isn’t it? George was tight with his own money but was willing to steal other people’s. Turned out, he wasn’t tight at all. He’d simply gambled it all away. He had no money, but none of us knew that at the time. Mandy’s funds from our grandfather had come straight to her so Dad couldn’t touch them.” He grimaced. “Sadly, I wasn’t as lucky. My inheritance disappeared down the gambling sinkhole. There was absolutely nothing left by the time I was old enough to take control of it.”

  “That’s what addiction is,” Gemma said sadly. Even though she was still furious with him, she couldn’t help sympathizing. “Any kind of addiction is a bottomless pit where money disappears.”

  They were both silent for a few moments, then she asked, “What happened after... Mandy and your parents fought?”

  “The next morning, before the sun was even up, Mandy slipped into my room to tell me goodbye. I cried and begged her not to go, but she said she had to. She said she couldn’t stay in that house, and she couldn’t do what they wanted her to anymore. It was killing her. I didn’t know what she meant, but by the time I was eighteen, I did. She had packed a duffel bag of her things and that’s all she took. She said she’d write to me, but I never heard from her.”

  “Oh, Nate. I’m sorry. I didn’t know...”

  He waved away her apology. “No one did. My mom and dad were horrified, said she’d been influenced by other people in town.”

  “Like my parents,” Gemma added.

  “I guess, but I didn’t know that then. The worst influence was a boyfriend she’d met while she was at university. He wasn’t a student, but he was worthless, jobless, even homeless. In fact, that’s what my dad called him—Les. I didn’t know what his real name was until much later. Brett Vaugrun.” Nate shook his head and gave a snort of disgust.

  “Once we found that out, Dad started calling him Les Vagrant. Turns out he was the son of one of the wealthiest families in the state. They were big in oil and gas wells, but their son wanted to find himself and took my sister along to help him do it. The truth is, his family was fed up with him and had cut him off. Looking back, I think he saw this inexperienced young girl who had a little bit of money for the first time in her life and he grabbed on to her, told her whatever she wanted to hear. He was ten years older than she was, wasn’t good-looking, but there must have been something about him, something he said or did, that attracted her. He’d been arrested numerous times. My dad got a copy of his arrest record and we all saw his mug shot.

  “I don’t know what she was looking for, what she hoped to gain. Since there was such a big difference in our ages, I never really understood what she wanted.” Nate paused. “But that guy... If Mandy was looking for some kind of knight in shining armor, he wasn’t it.”

  “Maybe she was looking for something or someone different than what was available in this rural town.”

  “I guess,” Nate said, then added emphatically, “But she wa
s smart, didn’t need someone like that. Old Les Vagrant must have been a helluva con artist.”

  He gazed into the distance, looking back to that dismal time. He was barely aware when Gemma took his arm and urged him into the house, to a chair at the table. She turned on an overhead fan and poured glasses of cold orange juice for both of them. She then took out some sliced ham, cheese and crackers, arranged everything on a plate and placed it before him, along with carrot and celery sticks.

  “What is this?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Obviously, it’s a snack. I suspect you haven’t eaten, your blood sugar is low and you need protein.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Absently, he sipped from his glass and ate a little of the food, suddenly realizing he was famished. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in many hours. His mind worked, trying to organize his thoughts and not let the memories swamp him before he finished what he had to say. He had been over this so many times, but even with the maturity and clarity of adulthood, he’d never been able to find his way through the tangle of emotions and events that had happened.

  Gemma took a drink of her juice and said, “Go ahead with what you were saying, Nate.”

  “After my sister left, my mom closed Mandy’s bedroom door and locked it. We never talked about her—not that my family was big on communication, anyway. My parents put out the story that she was studying abroad and wouldn’t be home for a while. I don’t know how many people actually believed that.”

  “But Mandy came home, right?”

  “Yes, when I was in seventh grade. She opened the front door and walked right in as if she’d only been gone for a few hours. She was almost nine months pregnant. We learned later that Les, er, Brett Vaugrun, had spent all the money she’d inherited and taken off. Maybe it was a good thing that it had taken him three years to spend it all because it must have taken her that long to realize what he was, and to make the decision to come home. She no longer had her car. The boyfriend must have sold it or kept it. Mandy hitchhiked home. Almost nine months pregnant and she’d hitchhiked from Fort Smith, Arkansas.”

  Gemma made a sound of distress and he saw the concern in her eyes. That almost stopped him because it was too much like pity, but he kept going.

  “But Mandy wasn’t alone. There was a woman with her, a midwife. Her name was Brendyce—she only went by one name—and she was going to deliver the baby when the time came. Strangely, my parents welcomed Mandy home with open arms and they were...tolerant of Brendyce.”

  He fell silent for so long, lost in the memories, that Gemma finally prompted him. “What happened?”

  Nate glanced up. He’d almost forgotten she was there. He gazed at Gemma’s honest, open face—from which she’d scrubbed the streak of green paint—and her bright, intelligent eyes. She was nothing like the slovenly, pushy Brendyce, but he couldn’t help connecting the two of them in his mind.

  “I was thrilled that she was home. Yeah, I know it’s not cool for a twelve-year-old boy to love his big sister, but I loved her and I hadn’t seen or heard from her in three years, so that made it even more special when she came home. She was...different, though.”

  “In what way?”

  “She seemed disconnected, as if she knew she was going to have a baby, but she acted like it was happening to someone else. At first, she didn’t talk about what had happened with her boyfriend, but he wasn’t around so my parents guessed he’d taken off and she later confirmed that.” Nate glanced up. “Not that my parents ever talked to me about it. I quickly learned to eavesdrop.”

  He paused again as if he was trying to organize his thoughts. “As I recall, she didn’t have so much as a box of diapers or a baby blanket, but she wouldn’t let anyone buy anything for the baby. She said she had plenty of money. She’d buy whatever the baby needed, but that wasn’t true. She had nothing. She spent the next few days wandering around in the woods as if she was looking for something. Sometimes Brendyce went with her, but usually Mandy was by herself. I know because I followed her.”

  “What did she do?”

  Nate was battered again by the anger and confusion he’d known then. “She went out to your family’s campground, sat by the lake...didn’t talk to anyone, although I saw your mom try to get her into conversation a couple of times.”

  “I know my mother tried to talk to her.” Gemma told him what her mom had said about the way Mandy seemed to be drifting. “Strange that I never knew any of this until now.”

  “Well, it seems that where my sister was concerned, there was an entire part of your parents’ lives that you didn’t know about.”

  She drew back, hurt, but he was so deep in his own remembered pain that he couldn’t veer from the recollections that were pulling at him.

  “She went into labor the week after she came home. Even though our hospital was open then, there was a doctor on duty and she could have been there in less than ten minutes, she was adamant about wanting a home birth for her baby.” Nate frowned. “Which was another thing I didn’t understand. She’d never been any happier in our home than I had. Why have the baby there? It didn’t make any sense. None of it made any sense.

  “Anyway, I don’t know if she’d had any prenatal care or not, but I can see now that neither she nor this Brendyce person were ready for what was about to happen. It was the middle of the night. Mandy screamed in a way I’ve never heard anyone scream before or since.” He paused. “Things went downhill from there—fast. We learned later that Mandy’s baby was turned sideways in the womb and couldn’t be born. A C-section would have saved both of them but Mandy, and her supposed midwife, waited too long.” The memory was tearing at him.

  “As forceful as my mother was, she wouldn’t go against Mandy at first. Finally, I was the one who called the ambulance, but it was too late. Mandy and the baby were both gone by the time they reached the hospital.” His hand clenched into a fist. “That was twenty years ago, but we had a good little hospital then. Doctor Young would have known exactly what to do. There was no reason for her and the baby to die.”

  Nate looked down at his hands. “That was the main reason I decided to become a doctor, although I always knew family practice would be my field.”

  “What did Dr. Young say? What went wrong? I’m asking because it sounds like gestational diabetes along with other issues.”

  “That was exactly it,” Nate said. “Diabetes.”

  “Were there mental problems, too? Is it possible that she lost her grip on reality when her boyfriend dumped her?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  They were both silent for a few minutes. Nate ate more of the snack Gemma had made for him, though dredging up the unhappy memories had cost him his appetite. Finally, he pushed the plate away.

  “And what about the midwife?” Gemma asked. “That Brendyce person? Did she go by only one name because she was skirting the law?”

  “Probably. As far as we knew, she wasn’t licensed or qualified to deliver a baby. I think she saw a young woman in trouble, thought she could take advantage of it and just took hold. Like a leech. Like Vaugrun had done. With Mandy’s mental state, it was probably easy.”

  “Was there any sign of her after that?”

  “No. That night, before my parents realized everything that had happened, Brendyce was gone—never to be seen again. They couldn’t find a trace of her. Not even her real name.”

  “I can tell you for certain that she wasn’t a trained midwife or she never would have put Mandy at risk. She would have known the signs of diabetes, checked her urine, taken every precaution and made sure she got to a qualified obstetrician right away. A midwife knows that some issues have to go straight to a doctor or medical facility.”

  “Like what happened with Misty today,” Nate said in a flat tone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  COLOR WASHED I
NTO her face. “I wasn’t going to bring that up, especially not now...after you told me what happened to your sister. But yes, today was different. I knew exactly what to do for Misty. I’ve done it before. I knew within minutes what was preventing the baby from being born and how to solve it. I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t simple luck.”

  “It was a risky situation.”

  “Was it, Nate? Or are you biased because of the actions of the incompetent woman you hold responsible for Mandy’s death?”

  “I’d like to think I’m more professional than that, Gemma, but—”

  “And I’d like to think that, too, Nate.”

  “If you’d let me finish,” he said, holding up his hand, but she shook her head and went on.

  “Do you honestly think the Sandersons, Mr. Clegg and the other donors would have made funds available for the birthing center if they’d thought I was incompetent? It’s more than their gratitude to me for delivering Max. They’re business people who look at the bottom line and they expect to get value for their money.” She made a waving gesture with her hand. “If they can trust me, you can, too.”

  “Trust has to be earned.”

  “And in your mind, I’ll never earn it, right, Nate?” Hurt and anger filled Gemma’s eyes as she said, “It doesn’t matter to you that I’m one of the few people who’s been on your side—”

  “That’s not true. I appreciate that, but I was going to do what needed to be done in Reston with or without your help—or your need to rescue me from the people of my hometown.”

  “Which you’re leaving,” she said. “As for my attempts at rescue, I obviously was wrong to do that. You don’t need my help.” She gestured toward his head, then down to his feet. “You’re complete unto yourself.”

  When he started to respond, she said, “It’s time for you to leave, Nate. We don’t have anything else to say to each other.”

  He was going to argue. A dozen responses sprang to mind, but his common sense finally made itself heard, urging him to walk away. Turning, he did as she said and headed back to his car so he could get off her property. A glance in his rearview mirror showed him she had returned to work, even though it was beginning to rain.