The Mountain Midwife (30 page)

A fresh wave of anger toward them, suppressed for the past four weeks, washed over him. He wished he saw an ax. He could have used some backbreaking work at that moment.

The wood, however, was neatly cut into logs fit for the wood-burning stove and neatly stacked. Someone had been taking care of Sheila Brooks. Not taking close care, but had made sure she had a supply of firewood for a while at any rate. She needed more propane, if it was indeed nearly out. She wouldn’t be able to cook without it unless she used the woodstove. And if a storm came . . .

He could only do so much at a time. One step at a time. Get her room warm and then find out how she could be alive when Ashley’s grandmother’s records said Sheila Brooks had died shortly after childbirth. Surely Ashley’s grandmother hadn’t lied. She would have no reason to do so. This woman claiming to be his mother had many reasons to deceive. She had television. A satellite dish attested to how. If she had figured out who he was, she knew he was from a wealthy family and not doing too badly on his own.

One step at a time.

He gathered up armfuls of wood and lugged it to the house. Before he left, he would pile more by the door. Maybe she had a tarp of some kind he could spread over it to keep the wood dry.

Regardless of who she was, he wondered how he and Ashley could drive away from a sick woman knowing she was alone.

One step at a time.

He carried the wood into the house and stacked it beside the stove.

“A city boy like you know how to build a fire?” Sheila laughed, then coughed.

“Yes ma’am, I do.” He squatted before the stove and laid four
logs on the firebox floor. She had plenty of kindling. From the look of things, she was trying to keep warm with those sticks alone.

He laid several pieces of the kindling across the logs, then broke several smaller pieces of kindling to rest atop those. With each step, he felt Sheila’s eyes upon him, watching, assessing, perhaps judging.

Once he had the wood set the way he wanted it, he glanced around for newspaper.

“Under the television.” Sheila knew exactly what he needed next.

He found a pile of paper there, recent copies of the
Washington Post
and
Roanoke Times
. The latter didn’t surprise him. The former did enough that he sat gazing at the newspaper for several moments.

“Always looking for something about you or your family. Jeremiah brings them to me.”

Later he would ask who Jeremiah was, but with his own birth name of Zachariah ringing in his head, he had an odd suspicion. Zachariah. Jeremiah. Old Testament names. Not uncommon with today’s babies being born, judging from what his married friends were naming their kids, but thirty years ago, names like Ian and Ryan were far more common.

“I try to stay out of the papers.” Such a lame thing to say, but he didn’t know how else to respond.

“That’s why I was so surprised to see you on the television. Thought my eyes were going with everything else.” She laughed and coughed again as though she had made a joke.

With care, Hunter took one sheet of newspaper, rolled it from corner to corner, then knotted it in the middle. He selected a second sheet for the same treatment before he asked the question uppermost in his head. “How did you know it was me? I mean, how did you know I’m your—the person you claim is your son?”

“That’s easy.” A lighter flicked behind Hunter and the smell of
tobacco filled the room, not cigarette smoke, but pipe smoke, more fragrant, but still smoke. Surely not good for a woman who looked so unhealthy.

Perhaps the reason why she was so unhealthy?

He didn’t look at her but concentrated on his newspaper rolling.

“You got Brooks eyes.” Sheila exhaled audibly, wheezing a little. “But the rest of you is pure McDermott.”

The sheet of newspaper in Hunter’s hands tore in half with a ripping sound that seemed twice as loud as normal. He crumpled the halves in his fists and swung around fast enough to lose his balance. Landing hard on his knees, he stared up at Sheila Brooks, hardly able to breathe sufficient oxygen into his lungs to pose a wholly unnecessary question. “What did you say?”

He knew what she had said. He needed to hear it again to have it sink into his ears, his brain, his heart with all its implications. “How can I look like a McDermott?”

“It’s in your DNA.” She pronounced the initials individually like a cheerleading chant, then grinned, the stem of her pipe a mere inch from her cracked lips. “You didn’t think I’d know about DNA, but I watch television. I know lots of things.”

“Apparently I don’t know enough.” His chest so tight he could hardly draw any air into his lungs, his head spinning as though he were riding on an atomically powered merry-go-round, Hunter resumed his paper rolling. If he didn’t do something with his hands, he feared he would leap up and race from the house, shout something unacceptable into the wind until the words bounced off the mountains and returned to batter his ears loudly enough to blot out what this woman claiming to be Sheila Brooks was claiming.

One. Two. Three. Four twists of newspaper atop the fine kindling, Hunter selected a long match from a container atop the
woodbox and struck it on the rough steel side of the stove. The head flared to life and he touched the flame to the newspaper. The print caught. He shook out the match and closed the doors to the stove. The room should be warm shortly. He wasn’t sure he would ever be warm.

Across the room, Sheila huddled in an afghan, smoking, watching him, breaking off to cough against the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Beyond the screen door into the trailer section, he heard crockery rattle and found his escape.

“I’ll go help Ashley.” He rose and ascended the steps into the trailer.

To his left was a room set up like a dining room with a hallway beyond it. To his right lay a kitchen so old the appliances were avocado green. Ashley stood at the Formica counter, cups and saucers laid out atop the scarred and chipped surface, her hands curled around the metal rim.

“She’s got to be lying.” Ashley’s voice was hoarse. “My grandmother would never write false records like that.”

“She also says I look like a McDermott and that’s in my DNA.”

“What is she talking about there?”

“I don’t know.” He wrapped his arms around her from behind and rested his cheek on the top of her head, drawing comfort from her, and giving some to her, he hoped. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

“I think . . . I think she can’t be making all this up. But—” She leaned back against him. “Whatever game she’s playing, we need to stay and help her. She’s dying, you know.”

“I thought she might be. Lung cancer? She’s smoking a pipe and coughing.”

“I think breast cancer. She’s had a double mastectomy.”

“I didn’t notice.”

The tightness in his chest grew into a leaden weight crushing his entire torso. Grief for a woman he didn’t know. Loss for something he had never had.

“I don’t think she has a phone, and I haven’t seen a car.” Talking practical issues was easier.

“She hardly has any food in here.” The teakettle began to whistle, and Ashley poured the steaming water over desiccated tea bags in the bottoms of the cups. “Will you carry one of these and get the door?”

Hunter picked up a mug and crossed the room to open the door. Ashley preceded him down the steps into the living room. Inside the stove, the fire had taken hold and heat fought with the chill. Sheila no longer smoked her pipe. She sat in her chair, the afghan wrapped around her like an oversize shawl, her hands gripping a notebook with frayed corners.

When Ashley set a mug of tea on the TV table beside her, Sheila held the notebook out to her. “It’s all in here. I want to sleep now.” She took a swallow of her tea, then leaned back into the corner of the chair and closed her eyes.

For the first time, Hunter noticed the bottle of pills on the table. Pain medication? He cut his gaze to Ashley, who nodded, then settled on a sagging sofa covered with what looked like a tablecloth.

He joined her, wanting and not wanting to see what was in the notebook.

It was a diary of sorts, handwritten notes of a young woman ready to run away to the city now that she had her high school diploma. She was seventeen, so she had to sneak off when her daddy wouldn’t notice her gone long enough for her to get away, or he would haul her back by her hair.

That man has hit me one last time
.

The writing was legible and literate. Even the spelling was mostly correct, demonstrating, despite the abuse and poverty she talked about, she had been a decent student. And a hard worker. She seemed to have obtained several part-time jobs doing farmwork and knitting things to sell at local craft shows. She worked at the predecessor to the current diner, and she saved every penny she could hide from her father.

I got me a good nest egg
.

While the fire crackled, heating the room, and the wind rose outside, Sheila Brooks slept in her chair, wheezing and coughing, and as their own tea grew cold, Ashley and Hunter sat side by side and read her story that was too familiar.

A picture of her pasted inside the pages showed a stunning young woman with a lush figure, white-blond hair, and startlingly blue eyes. Her smile was open and warm and her skin flawless. She worked three jobs in Raleigh, as far as her money would get her, to afford a room and meals. A year of that and she was happy to accept the offer of an older man to take care of her.

We had ourselves some good times until he gave me a baby.

She never mentioned how she felt about it. She simply said she was going home so her momma could take care of her.

He promises to make things right
.

His wife couldn’t have more children but wanted another baby. He would adopt hers with his wife, and she would have enough money to live the rest of her life.

At that section, Hunter glanced around the barely adequate living conditions and wondered if the money had been what was promised or what had happened to it.

Beside him, Ashley turned the page, then rested her hand on his arm. She trembled, and a tear splashed onto the page.

Until that moment, he felt as though he were reading a story about strangers. Ashley’s silent tears reminded him that he was reading about the woman who claimed to be his mother, a woman who was more than likely related to him somewhere on his family tree.

His own throat closed and his eyes burned. He swallowed, blinked, and kept reading.

Sheila went home.
I’m safe from Daddy beating me. He won’t harm the baby cause it means money
.

But her daddy said he would get more money than Mr. M. offered. He would make him pay more if he wanted the baby, if he wanted Sheila to sign over her rights.

But Mr. M. just might walk away if Daddy gets too greedy
.

Mr. M. Mr. M.

Hunter glanced toward Sheila Brooks. She slumped in the chair still, but he couldn’t tell if she continued to sleep. His throat clogged with questions he wanted to shout at her. His brain spun with a hundred denials he wanted to bellow to the hills until they came true. He swallowed them like tears and made himself continue to read how Sheila and her momma and Ashley’s grandmother planned to convince her daddy he couldn’t get a thing for the baby.

If I’m dead, then Mr. M. is the baby’s only parent and Daddy ain’t got no way to hold on to him
.

That lawyer is right smart
.

And could have been disbarred for such a deception. Ashley’s grandmother could have lost her certification. But lawyer, midwife, and Momma Brooks all swore Sheila died, hemorrhaging too quickly to get to any hospital. Sheila’s daddy found out. The truth couldn’t be hidden from him when nobody showed up, but by that time, the baby was legally signed over to the McDermotts and Sheila had taken the money and run.

I’ll come back from this flat land when everybody guilty is dead. And one day I’ll give this book to my son
.

Her son. He was her son. Her son and Mr. M.’s.

Hands shaking and eyes blurry, Hunter flipped over the last page. The back of the notebook was stuffed with newspaper clippings taped to the pages, mostly articles in which he or one of the other McDermotts was mentioned, with the exception of four obituaries—a local attorney, husband and wife with the surname of Brooks, and Deborah Tolliver, a local midwife—all the information he needed to know that the McDermotts had lied to him twice, once when they led him through a lifetime of believing that Virginia McDermott was his mother, and second when they led him to believe that Richard McDermott was not his father.

C
HAPTER
23

A
SHLEY HAD BEEN
so focused on the deception Gramma had perpetrated she didn’t make the connection between Mr. M. in the notebook and Hunter’s last name until he closed the notebook with shaking hands and she glanced up to see his face stark and white and that of someone about to go into shock. She reached out to him. “Hunter.”

He rose and strode across the room to stand beside Sheila Brooks’s chair, one hand on the back. With the other, he tugged off his glasses and folded the stems between his fingers. An iciness in his eyes suddenly softened, and he crouched beside her. “When did you come back?”