Praise for
Diane Chamberlain

“So full of unexpected twists you’ll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult’s style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.”

—Candis

“This complex tale will stick with you forever.”

—Now magazine

“Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read.”

—Closer

“A moving story”

—Bella

“A fabulous thriller with plenty of surprises”

—Star

“A brilliantly told thriller”

—Woman

“An engaging and absorbing story that’ll have you racing through pages to finish”

—People’s Friend

“This compelling mystery will have you on the edge of your seat.”

—Inside Soap

“Chamberlain skilfully … plumbs the nature of crimes of the heart.”

—Publishers Weekly

The Midwife’s

Confession

Diane

Chamberlain

GETS TO THE HEART OF THE STORY

www.dianechamberlain.co.uk

In memory of Kay Eleanor Howe

2000–2010

PART ONE

NOELLE

1

Noelle

Wilmington, North Carolina September 2010

She sat on the top step of the front porch of her Sunset Park bungalow, leaning against the post, her eyes on the full moon. She would miss all this. The night sky. Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks. September air that felt like satin against her skin. She resisted the pull of her bedroom. The pills. Not yet. She had time. She could sit here all night if she wanted.

Lifting her arm, she outlined the circle of the moon with her fingertip. Felt her eyes burn. “I love you, world,” she whispered.

The weight of the secret pressed down on her suddenly, and she dropped her hand to her lap, heavy as a stone. When she’d awakened this morning, she’d had no idea that this would be the day she could no longer carry that weight. As recently as this evening, she’d hummed as she chopped celery and cucumbers and tomatoes for her salad, thinking of the fair-haired preemie born the day before—a fragile little life who needed her help. But when she sat down with her salad in front of the computer, it was as though two beefy, muscular arms reached out from her monitor and pressed their hands down hard on her head, her shoulders, compressing her lungs so that she couldn’t pull in a full breath.

The very shape of the letters on her screen clawed at her brain and she knew it was time. She felt no fear—certainly no panic—as she turned off the computer. She left the salad, barely touched, on her desk. No need for it now. No desire for it. She got everything ready; it wasn’t difficult. She’d been preparing for this night for a long time. Once all was in order, she came out to the porch to watch the moon and feel the satin air and fill her eyes and lungs and ears with the world one last time. She had no expectation of a change of heart. The relief in her decision was too great, so great that by the time she finally got to her feet, just as the moon slipped behind the trees across the street, she was very nearly smiling.

2

Tara

Going upstairs to call Grace for dinner was becoming a habit. I knew I’d find her sitting at her computer, earbuds in her ears so she couldn’t hear me when I tried to call her from the kitchen. Did she do that on purpose? I knocked on her door, then pushed it open a few inches when she didn’t answer. She was typing, her attention glued to her monitor. “Dinner’s almost ready, Grace,” I said. “Please come set the table.”

Twitter, our goldendoodle, had been stretched out beneath Grace’s bare feet, but at the mention of “dinner” he was instantly at my side. Not so my daughter.

“In a minute,” she said. “I have to finish this.”

I couldn’t see the screen from where I stood, but I was quite sure she was typing an email rather than doing her homework. I knew she was still behind. That was what happened when you taught at your child’s high school; you always knew what was going on academically. Grace had been an excellent student and one of the best writers at Hunter High, but that all changed when Sam died in March. Everyone cut her slack during the spring and I was hoping she’d pull it together this fall, but then Cleve broke up with her before he left for college, sending her into a tailspin. At least, I assumed it was the breakup that had pulled her deeper into her shell. How could I really know what was going on with her? She wouldn’t talk to me. My daughter had become a mystery. A closed book. I was starting to think of her as the stranger who lived upstairs.

I leaned against the doorjamb and studied my daughter. We had the same light brown hair dusted with the same salon-manufactured blond highlights, but her long, thick mane had the smooth shiny glow that came with being sixteen years old. Somewhere along the way, my chin-length hair had lost its luster.

“I’m making pasta with pesto,” I said. “It’ll be done in two minutes.”

“Is Ian still here?” She kept typing but glanced quickly out the window, where I supposed she could see Ian’s Lexus parked on the street.

“He’s staying for dinner,” I said.

“He might as well move in,” she said. “He’s here all the time, anyway.”

I was shocked. She’d never said a word about Ian’s visits before, and he only came over once or twice a week now that Sam’s estate was settled. “No, he’s not,” I said. “And he’s been a huge help with all the paperwork, honey. Plus, he has to take over all Daddy’s cases and some of his records are here in his home office, so—”

“Whatever.” Grace hunched her shoulders up to her ears as she typed as if she could block out my voice that way. She stopped typing for a second, wrinkling her nose at her screen. Then she glanced up at me. “Can you tell Noelle to leave me alone?” she asked.

“Noelle? What do you mean?”

“She’s always emailing me. She wants me and Jenny to—”

“Jenny and me.”

She rolled her eyes and I cringed. Stupid, stupid. I wanted her to talk to me and then I critiqued what she said. “Never mind,” I said. “What does she want you and Jenny to do?”

“Make things for her babies-in-need program.” She waved her hand toward her monitor. “Now she’s on this ‘community work will look great on your college applications’ kick.”

“Well, it will.”

“She’s such a total whack job.” She started typing again, fingers flying. “If you could compare her brain with a normal brain on an MRI, I’m sure they’d look completely different.”

I had to smile. Grace might be right. “Well, she brought you into the world and I’ll always be grateful for that,” I said.

“She never lets me forget it, either.”

I heard the timer ringing downstairs. “Dinner’s ready,” I said. “Come on.”

“Two seconds.” She got to her feet, bending over the desk, still typing furiously. Suddenly she let out a yelp, hands to her face. She took a step back from the keyboard. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, no,” she said again, whispering the words this time as she dropped back into her chair, eyes closed.

“What is it, sweetie?” I started toward her as if I might somehow be able to fix whatever was wrong, but she waved me away.

“It’s nothing.” She stared at her monitor. “And I’m not hungry.”

“You have to eat,” I said. “You hardly ever eat dinner with me anymore.”

“I’ll get some cereal later,” she said. “Just … right now, I have to fix something. Okay?” She gave me a look that said our conversation was over, and I backed away, nodding.

“Okay,” I said, then added helplessly, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“She’s having a meltdown,” I said to Ian as I walked into the kitchen. “And she’s not hungry.”

Ian was chopping tomatoes for the salad but he turned to look at me. “Maybe I should go,” he said.

“No way.” I spooned the pesto-coated rigatoni into my big white pasta bowls. “Someone needs to help me eat all this food. Anyway, it’s not you that’s keeping her away. It’s me. She avoids me all she can.” I didn’t want Ian to leave. There was comfort in his company. He’d been Sam’s law partner and close friend for more than fifteen years and I wanted to be with someone who’d known my husband well and had loved him. Ian had been my rock since Sam’s death, handling everything from the cremation to the living trust to managing our investments. How did people survive a devastating loss without an Ian in their lives?

Ian set the bowls of pasta on the kitchen table, then poured himself a glass of wine. “I think she worries I’m trying to take Sam’s place,” he said. He ran a hand over his thinning blond hair. He was one of those men who would look good bald, but I knew he wasn’t happy about that prospect.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said, but I remembered Grace mentioning that he might as well move in. Should I have asked her why she said that? Not that she would have answered me.

I sat down across the table from Ian and slipped the tines of my fork into a tube of rigatoni I didn’t really feel like eating. I’d lost twenty pounds since Sam died. “I miss my little Gracie.” I bit my lip, looking into Ian’s dark eyes behind his glasses. “When she was younger, she’d follow me everywhere around the house. She’d crawl into my lap to cuddle and I’d sing to her and read to her and …” I shrugged. I’d known how to be a good mother to that little girl, but she was long gone.

“I imagine everyone feels that way when their kids become teenagers,” Ian said. He had no kids of his own. Forty-five and he’d never even been married, which would be suspect in another man but we’d all just accepted it in Ian. He’d come close long ago—with Noelle—and I didn’t think he’d ever quite recovered from the sudden ending of that relationship.

“Sam would have known what to say to her.” I heard the frustration in my voice. “I love her so much, but she was Sam’s daughter. He was our … our translator. Our intermediary.” It was true. Sam and Grace had been two quiet souls with no need to speak to each other to communicate. “You could feel the connection between them when you’d walk into a room where they were sitting, even if one of them was on the computer and the other reading. You could feel it.”

“You’re such a perfectionist, Tara,” Ian said. “You have this expectation of yourself that you can be a perfect parent, but there’s no such thing.”

“You know what they loved to do?” I smiled to myself, stuck in my memory, which was where I was spending a lot of my time lately. “Sometimes I’d have a late meeting and I’d come home and find them sitting in the family room, watching a movie together, drinking some coffee concoction they’d invented.”

“Sam and his coffee.” Ian laughed. “All day long. He had a cast-iron gut.”

“He turned Grace into a caffeine addict by the time she was fourteen.” I nibbled a piece of pasta. “She misses him like crazy.”

“Me, too,” Ian said. He poked at his rigatoni.

“And then to have Cleve break up with her so soon after.” I shook my head. My baby girl was hurting. “I wish she were a little more like me,” I said, and then realized that was unfair. “Or that I was a little more like her. I just wish we had something more in common. Some activity we could share, but we’re so different. Everyone at school talks about it. The other teachers, I mean. I think they expected her to be into theater, like me.”

“I think there’s a law there can only be one drama queen in a family,” Ian said, and I kicked him beneath the table.

“I’m not a drama queen,” I said. “But I’ve always thought the theater could be so good for her, don’t you think? It would get her out of her shell.”

“She’s just quiet. It’s not a crime to be an introvert.”

Not a crime, no, but as someone whose need to be with other people bordered on the pathological, I had trouble understanding my daughter’s shyness. Grace loathed any social event that involved more than one or two people, while, as my father used to say, “Tara can talk the ears off a stalk of corn.”

“Has she mentioned getting her driver’s license yet?”

I shook my head. Grace was afraid of driving since Sam died. Even when I drove her someplace, I could feel her tension in the car. “I suggested it a couple of times, but she doesn’t want to talk about it,” I said. “She would have talked to Sam, though.” I slipped my fork into another piece of pasta. Sitting there with Ian, I was suddenly slammed by the reality that could catch me unawares at any moment—in the middle of my classroom, while casting the junior play, while doing the laundry: Sam was never coming back. He and I would never make love again. I’d never again be able to talk to him in bed at night. I’d never again feel his arms around me when I woke up in the morning. He’d not only been my husband but my dearest and oldest friend, and how many women could say that about the man they married?

We were loading the dishwasher when my phone rang, the electronic tones of “All That Jazz” filling the kitchen. I dried my hands and glanced at the caller ID. “It’s Emerson,” I said to Ian. “Do you mind if I take it?”

“Of course not.” Ian was even more addicted to his BlackBerry than I was. He had no room to complain.

“Hey, Em,” I said into the phone. “What’s up?”

“Have you spoken to Noelle?” Emerson asked. It sounded like she was in her car.

“Are you driving? Do you have your headset on?” I pictured her holding her cell phone to her ear, her long curly brown hair spilling over her hand. “Otherwise, I’m not talking to—”

“Yes, I have it on. Don’t worry.”

“Good.” I’d become überconscientious about using a cell phone in the car since Sam’s accident.

“So have you spoken to her in the past couple of days?” Emerson asked.

“Um.” I thought back. “Three days ago, maybe? Why?”

“I’m on my way over there. I haven’t been able to reach her. Do you remember her talking about going away or anything?”

I tried to remember my last conversation with Noelle. We’d talked about the big birthday bash she, Emerson and I were planning for Suzanne Johnson, one of the volunteers for Noelle’s babies program … and Cleve’s mother. The party had been Noelle’s idea, but I was overjoyed to have something to keep me busy. “I don’t remember her saying anything about a trip,” I said.

Ian glanced at me. I was sure he knew who we were talking about.

“Not in a long time,” Emerson said.

“You sound worried.”

Ian touched my arm, mouthed, “Noelle?” and I nodded.

“I thought she was coming over last night,” Emerson said, “but she didn’t show. I must have—Hey!” She interrupted herself. “Son of a bitch! Sorry. The car in front of me just stopped for no reason whatsoever.”

“Please be careful,” I said. “Let’s get off.”

“No, no. It’s fine.” I heard her let out her breath. “Anyway, we must have gotten our wires crossed, but now I can’t reach her so I thought I’d stop in on my way home from Hot!“ Hot! was the new café Emerson had recently opened down by the waterfront.

“She’s probably out collecting baby donations.”

“Probably.”

It was like Emerson to worry. She was good-hearted and caring, and no one ever described her without using the word nice. Jenny was the same way, and I loved that my daughter and the daughter of my best friend were also best friends.

“I’m in Sunset Park now and about to turn onto Noelle’s street,” Emerson said. “We’ll talk later?”

“Tell Noelle I said hi.”

“Will do.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Ian. “Noelle was supposed to go over Emerson’s last night and never showed up, so Em’s stopping by her house to make sure everything’s okay.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m sure she’s fine.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better go and let you take some food up to Grace.” He leaned over to kiss my cheek. “Thanks for dinner, and I’ll pick up the rest of Sam’s files in a couple of days, all right?”

I watched him leave. I thought about heating up a bowl of the pasta for Grace, but I doubted she’d appreciate it and I frankly didn’t want to feel her coolness toward me again that evening. Instead, I started cleaning the granite countertops—a task that I found soothing until I found myself face-to-face with the magnetized picture on the refrigerator of Sam, Grace and myself. We were standing on the Riverwalk on a late-summer evening a little more than a year ago. I leaned back against the island and stared at my little family and wished I could turn back time.

Stop it, I told myself, and I started cleaning the counters again.

I pictured Emerson arriving at Noelle’s, giving her my greeting. I talked to Noelle a couple of times a week, but I hadn’t seen her in person in a while. Not since she’d shown up at my door on a Saturday evening in late July, when Grace was out with Jenny and Cleve, and I was sorting through Sam’s desk in our den. I’d found combing through his desk agonizing. Touching all those things he’d so recently touched himself. I had piles of papers on the floor, neatly stacked. I would give them to Ian, because I couldn’t tell if the documents and letters were related to any cases Sam might have been working on. Ian was still having trouble making sense of Sam’s files. Sam was sloppy. His desk was a rolltop and we’d had an agreement: he could keep the desk as disorganized as he liked as long as I didn’t need to see the mess. I’d give anything to see that mess right now.

I realized only later why Noelle had come that night. She’d known from Emerson that Grace was out with Jenny. She’d known I would be alone, on a Saturday night, when it felt as though everyone in the world was part of a couple except me. The summer was hard, since I didn’t have my teaching job to throw myself into and I wasn’t involved in any production at the community playhouse. Noelle had known she would find me sad or frustrated or angry—some emotion that made me too vulnerable to be around other people but safe with her. We were all safe with her, and she was always there for us.

I’d slumped in Sam’s desk chair while she sat on the love seat and asked me how I was doing. Whenever people asked me that question, I’d answer, “Fine,” but it seemed pointless to pretend with Noelle. She would never believe me.

“Everyone’s tiptoeing around me like I’m going to fall apart any second,” I said.

Noelle had been wearing a long blue-and-green paisley skirt and big hoop earrings and she looked like an auburn-haired Gypsy. She was beautiful in an unconventional way. Pale, nearly translucent skin. Eyes a jarring, electric blue. A quick, wide smile that displayed straight white teeth and a hint of an overbite. She was a few years older than me, and her long curly hair was just beginning to glimmer with the random strand of gray. Emerson and I had known her since our college days, and although she was beautiful in her own pale way, it was the sort of look that most men wouldn’t notice. But there were other men—sensitive souls, poets and artists, computer nerds—who would be so mesmerized by her as they passed her on the street that they’d trip over their own feet. I’d seen it happen more than once. Ian had been one of those men, long ago.

That night in my den, Noelle had kicked off her sandals and folded her legs beneath her on the love seat. “Are you?” she asked me. “Are you going to fall apart?”

“Maybe.”

She talked to me for a long time, guiding me through the maze of my emotions like a skilled counselor. I talked about my sadness and my loss. About my irrational anger at Sam for leaving me, for putting new lines across my forehead. For turning my future into a question mark.

“Have you thought of finding a widows’ support group?” she asked after a while.

I shook my head. The thought of a widows’ support group made me shudder. I didn’t want to be surrounded by women who felt as bad as I did. I would sink down and never be able to climb up again. There was a floodgate inside me I was afraid of opening.

“Forget the support group idea,” Noelle corrected herself. “It’s not for you. You’re outgoing, but not open.” She’d said that to me once before and I was bothered by the description.

“I was open with Sam,” I said defensively.

“Yes,” she said. “It was easy to be open with Sam.” She looked out the window into the darkness as if she was lost in thought and I remembered the eulogy she’d given at Sam’s memorial service. Sam was a champion listener, she’d said.

Oh, yes.

“I miss talking to him.” I looked at the stack of papers on the floor. The battery-operated stapler on his desk. His checkbook. Four pads of Post-it notes. I shrugged. “I just miss him,” I said.

Noelle nodded. “You and Sam. I hesitate to use the term soul mates because it’s trite and I don’t think I believe in it. But you had an exceptional marriage. He was devoted to you.”

I touched his computer keyboard. The E and D keys were worn and shiny, the letters faint. I ran my fingertips over the smooth plastic.

“You can still talk to Sam, you know,” Noelle said.

“Pardon?” I laughed.

“Don’t tell me you don’t. When you’re alone, I bet you do. It would be so natural to say, ‘Damn it, Sam! Why did you have to leave me?’”

I looked at the keyboard again, afraid of the floodgates. “I honestly don’t,” I lied.

“You could, though. You could tell him what you’re feeling.”

“Why?” I felt annoyed. Noelle loved to push her agenda. “What possible purpose could it serve?”

“Well, you never know if he can get your communication on some level.”

“Actually, I do know that he can’t.” I folded my arms across my chest and swiveled the chair in her direction. “Scientifically, he can’t.”

“Science is making new discoveries all the time.”

I couldn’t tell her how, when I ate breakfast or drove to school, I’d sometimes hear his voice as clearly as if he were sitting next to me and wonder if he was trying to contact me. I’d have long, out-loud conversations with him when no one else was around. I loved the feeling of him being nearby. I didn’t believe people could reach out from the other side, but what if they could and he was trying and I ignored him? Yet I felt crazy when I talked to him, and I was so afraid of feeling crazy.

“You’ve always been afraid of having psychiatric problems like your mother,” Noelle said, as if she’d read my mind. She could spook me that way. “I think it’s your biggest fear, but you’re one of the sanest people I know.” She got to her feet, taking in a deep breath as she stretched her arms high over her head. “Your mother had a chemical thing,” she said, letting her long, slender arms fall to her sides again. “You don’t. You won’t, ever.”

“The floodgates …” I looked up at her from the desk chair. I didn’t want her to leave. “I’m afraid of opening them.”

“You won’t drown,” she said. “Drowning isn’t part of your makeup.” She bent low to hug me. “I love you,” she said, “and I’m a phone call away.”

I’d polished the granite countertop until the ceiling lights glowed on its surface. Then I dared to look at the photograph of Sam, Grace and me on the refrigerator again. Noelle had helped me sort through so much on that hot, miserable July night, yet one emotion still remained unchecked inside me: fear that I was failing my daughter.

Grace stood between Sam and me in the picture, smiling, and only someone very observant might notice how she leaned toward Sam and away from me. He’d left me alone with a child I didn’t know how to mother. A child I longed to know, but who wouldn’t let me in. A child who blamed me for everything.

He left me alone with the stranger upstairs.

3

Emerson

Noelle’s junker of a car sat in her driveway and I pulled in behind it. The light was fading, but I could still read all of her bumper stickers: Coexist, No Wetlands=No Seafood, Cape Fear River Watch, Got Tofu?, Bring Back My Mid-wives! Noelle’s passions—and she had plenty—were spelled out across the dented rear of her car for all the world to see. Good ol’ boys would pull up next to her at stoplights and pretend to shoot her with their cocked fingers, and she’d give them her one-fingered salute in return. That was Noelle for you.

She’d given up midwifery a year or so ago when she decided to focus on the babies program, even though it meant she’d have to live on her savings. At the same time, the ob-gyn offices in the area were making noise about letting their midwives go, so Noelle figured it was time to get out, though it must have felt like she was hacking off her right arm. Noelle needed ten lives to do all the things she wanted to do. She would never be able to fix the world to her liking with just one.

Ted and I had stopped charging her rent for the house even though between the teetering economy and the start-up costs of Hot! we weren’t exactly ready to put a kid through college. Ted had bought the dilapidated 1940s Craftsman bungalow shortly before we were married. I’d thought it was a lamebrain idea, even though the seller was practically giving it away. It looked like no one had taken care of the place since 1940, except to fill the front yard with a broken grill, a couple of bicycle tires, a toilet and a few other odds and ends. Ted was a Realtor, though, and his crystal ball told him that Sunset Park was on the brink of a renaissance. The ball had been right … eventually. The area was finally turning around, although Noelle’s bungalow was still a pretty sorry sight. The grill and toilet were gone, but the shrubs were near death’s door. We’d have to do a major overhaul on the place if she ever moved out, but we’d make a good profit at that point, so letting her live there for the cost of her utilities wasn’t that much of a hardship.

Ted wasn’t thrilled about the “no-rent for Noelle” idea in the beginning. He was feeding money into my café at the time and we were both biting our nails over that. I’d wanted to open a café for years. I fantasized about people lining up for my cooking and baking the way some women fantasized about finding Matthew McConaughey in their beds. The good news was that Hot! was already holding its own. I had a following among the locals downtown and even had to hire extra help during the tourist season. So Ted had come around, both about the café and Noelle’s rent-free existence on our property.

From Noelle’s weedy driveway, I could see the left-hand corner of the backyard where she’d planted her garden. She wasn’t much for fixing up the house and the rest of the landscaping was in ruins, but years ago she’d surprised us by planting a small masterpiece of a garden in that one corner. It became one of her many obsessions. She researched the plants so that something was blooming nearly year-round. A sculptor friend of hers made the birdbath that stood in the center of the garden and it was like something out of a museum. It was your typical stone birdbath, but next to it, a little barefoot girl in bronze stood on her tiptoes to reach over the lip and touch the water. Her dress and hair fanned out behind her as if she’d been caught in a breeze. People knew about the birdbath. A couple of reporters wanted to take pictures of it and write articles about the sculptor, but Noelle never let them. She was afraid someone would try to steal it. Noelle would give away everything she owned to help someone else, but she didn’t want anyone messing with her garden. She watered and mulched and pruned and loved that little piece of land. She took care of it the way other women took care of their kids and husbands.

The bungalow was a peeling, faded blue, like the knees of your oldest pair of jeans, and the color looked a little sick in the red glow of the sunset. As I walked up the crumbling sidewalk to the front porch, I saw a couple of envelopes sticking out of the mailbox next to the door, and even though the air was warm, a chill ran up my spine. Something wasn’t right. Noelle was supposed to come over for dinner the night before and bring fabric for Jenny, who was actually sewing blankets for the babies program, much to my shock. That wasn’t the sort of thing Noelle would forget to do. It bothered me that she hadn’t answered my messages. I’d left her one the night before saying, “We’re going to go ahead and eat. I’ll keep a plate warm for you.” I left the next one around ten: “Just checking on you. I thought you were coming over but I must have misunderstood. Let me know you’re okay.” And finally, one more this morning: “Noelle? I haven’t heard back from you. Is everything all right? Love you.” She hadn’t gotten back to me, and as I climbed the steps to the porch, I couldn’t shake a sense of dread.

I rang the bell and heard the sound of it coming through the thin glass of the windowpanes. I knocked, then tried the door, but it was locked. I had a key for the house somewhere at home but hadn’t thought to bring it with me.

I walked down the steps and followed the walkway through the skinny side yard to the back door. Her back porch light was on and I tried the door. Also locked. Through the window next to the door, I saw Noelle’s purse on the battered old kitchen table. She was never without that purse. It was enormous, one of those shapeless reddish-brown leather shoulder bags you could cram half your life into. I remembered Noelle pulling toys from it for Jenny back when she was still a toddler—that’s how long she’d had it. Noelle and that bag were always together. Auburn hair, auburn bag. If the purse was here, Noelle was here.

I knocked hard on the window. “Noelle!”

“Miss Emerson?”

I turned to see a girl, maybe ten years old, walking across the yard toward me. We were losing daylight fast, and it took me a minute to see the cat in her arms.

“Are you …?” I glanced at the house next door. An African-American family lived there with three or four kids. I’d met them all but I was terrible with names.

“I’m Libby,” the girl said. “Are you lookin’ for Miss Noelle, ‘cause she had to go away all of a sudden last night.”

I smiled with relief. She’d gone away. It made no sense that her purse and car were there, but I’d figure that out eventually. Libby had put one foot on the porch step and the light fell on the calico cat in her arms. I leaned closer. “Is that Patches?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Miss Noelle asked me to take care of her at my house this time.”

“Where did she go?”

“She didn’t say. Mama says it was wrong for her not to tell me.” She scratched the top of Patches’ head. “I take care of Patches sometimes but always in Miss Noelle’s house. So Mama thinks this time Miss Noelle meant she was going away for a long time like she does sometimes, but it was wrong she didn’t say when she was coming back and she ain’t answering her cell phone.”

What the hell was going on?

“Do you have a key to the house, Libby?” I asked.

“I ain’t got one, ma’am, but I know where she keeps it. I’m the only one that knows.”

“Show me, please.”

Libby led me across the lawn toward the little garden, our shadows stretching long and skinny in front of us. She walked straight to the birdbath and bent down to pick up a rock near the little bronze girl’s feet.

“She keeps it under this rock,” Libby whispered, handing me the key.

“Thanks,” I said, and we headed back to the door. At the steps, I stopped. Inside, I’d find a clue to where Noelle had gone. Something that would tell me why she hadn’t taken her giant bag with her. Or her car. That ominous feeling I’d had earlier was filling me up again and I turned to the girl. “You go home, honey,” I said. “Take Patches back to your house, please. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on and come tell you, all right?”

“Okay.” She turned on her heel, slowly, as though she wasn’t sure she should trust me with the key. I watched her walk across the yard to her own house.

The key was caked with dirt and I wiped it off on my T-shirt, a sure sign I didn’t care about a thing except finding out what was going on with Noelle. I unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen. “Noelle?” I shut the door behind me, turning the lock because I was starting to feel paranoid. Her purse lay like a floppy pile of leather on the table and her car keys were on the counter between the sink and the stove. Patches’ food and water bowls were upside down on the counter on top of a dish towel. The sink was clean and empty. The kitchen was way too neat. Noelle could mess up a room just by passing through it.

I walked into the postage stamp of a living room, past the crammed bookshelves and the old TV Tara and Sam had given her a few years ago when they bought their big screen. Past the threadbare brown sofa. A couple of strollers sat on the floor in front of the TV and three car seats were piled on top of some cartons, which were most likely filled with baby things. More boxes teetered on top of an armchair. I was definitely in Noelle’s world. On the wall above the sofa were framed pictures of Jenny and Grace, along with an old black-and-white photo of Noelle’s mother standing in front of a garden gate. Seeing the photographs of the children next to the one of her mother always touched me, knowing that Noelle considered Tara’s and my girls her family.

I walked past the first of the two bedrooms, the one she used as her office. Like the living room, it was bursting with boxes and bags and her desk was littered with papers and books … and a big salad bowl filled with lettuce and tomatoes.

“Noelle?” The silence in the house was creeping me out. A slip in the shower? But why would she have told Libby to take care of Patches? I reached her bedroom and through the open door, I saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her rib cage, still and quiet as though she were meditating, but her waxen face and the line of pill bottles on the night table told me something different. My breath caught somewhere behind my breastbone and I couldn’t move. I wasn’t getting it. I refused to get it. Impossible, I thought. This is impossible.

“Noelle?” I took one tiny step into the room as if I were testing the temperature of water in a pool. Then reality hit me all at once and I rushed forward. I grabbed her shoulder and shook her hard. Her hair spilled over my hand like it was alive, but it was the only living thing about her. “No, no, no!” I shouted. “Noelle! No! Don’t do this! Please!”

I grabbed one of the empty pill bottles but none of the words on the label registered in my mind. I wanted to kill that bottle. I threw it across the room, then dropped to my knees at the side of the bed. I pressed Noelle’s cold hand between mine.

“Noelle,” I whispered. “Why?”

It’s amazing what you can miss when you’re an emotional wreck. The note was right next to me on her night table. I’d had to reach past it to use her cell phone to call for help. The phone had been inches from her hands. She could have called me or Tara. Could have said, “I just did something stupid. Come and save me.” But she didn’t. She hadn’t wanted to be saved.

The police and emergency team poured into the room, taking up all the air and space and blurring into a sea of blue and gray in front of me. I sat on the straight-backed chair someone had brought in from the kitchen, still holding Noelle’s hand as the EMTs pronounced her dead and we waited for the medical examiner to arrive. I answered the questions volleyed at me by the police. I knew Officer Whittaker personally. He came into Hot! early every morning. He was the raspberry-cream-cheese croissant and banana-walnut muffin, heated. I’d fill his mug with my strongest coffee, then watch him dump five packets of sugar into it.

“Did you call your husband, ma’am?” he asked. He always called me ma’am, no matter how many times I asked him to call me Emerson. He moved around Noelle’s claustrophobic bedroom, gazing at another framed photograph of her mother on the wall, touching the spine of a book on the small bookcase beneath the window and studying the pincushion on her dresser as though it might give him an answer to what had happened here.

“I did.” I’d called Ted before everyone had arrived. He was showing a property and I had to leave a message. He hadn’t received it yet. If he had, he would have called the second he heard me stumbling over my words as if I were having a stroke.

“Who’s her next of kin?” Officer Whittaker asked. Oh, no. I thought of Noelle’s mother. Ted would have to call her for me. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t and neither could Tara. “Her mother,” I whispered. “She’s in her eighties and … frail. She lives in an assisted-living community in Charlotte.”

“Did you see this?” Officer Whittaker picked up the small piece of paper from Noelle’s night table with gloved fingers. He held it out for me to read.

Emerson and Tara, I’m sorry. Please look after my garden for me and make sure my mother is cared for. I love all of you.

“Oh.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Oh, no.” The note made it real. Until that second, I’d managed to avoid thinking the word suicide. Now there it was, the letters a mile high inside my head.

“Is it her handwriting?” Officer Whittaker asked.

I opened my eyes to slits as if I couldn’t stand to see the entire note again, all at once. The sloppy slope of the letters would be nearly illegible to someone else, but I knew it well. I nodded.

“Was she depressed, ma’am? Did you have any idea?”

I shook my head. “No. Not at all.” I looked up at him. “She loved her work. She would never have … Could she have been sick and not told us? Or could someone have killed her and made it look like suicide?” I looked at the note again. At all the pill bottles. I could see Noelle’s name on the labels. One of the EMTs noticed that some of the prescriptions had been filled the month before, but others dated back many years. Had she been stockpiling them?

“Did she talk about her health lately?” Officer Whittaker asked. “Doctors’ appointments?”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to wake up my memory. “She injured her back in a car accident a long time ago, but she hasn’t complained about pain from it in years,” I said. We’d worried about all the medication she was taking back then, but that had been so long ago. “She would have told us if something was wrong.” I sounded sure of myself, and Officer Whittaker rested a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“Sometimes people keep things bottled inside them, ma’am,” he said. “Even the people we’re closest to. We can never really know them.”

I looked at Noelle’s face. So beautiful, but an empty shell. Noelle was no longer there and I felt as though I’d already forgotten her smile. This makes no sense, I thought. She’d had so much she still wanted to do.

I needed to call Tara. I couldn’t handle this alone. Tara and I would figure out what to do. We’d piece together what had happened. Between us, we knew everything there was to know about Noelle.

Yet in front of me lay the evidence—our gone-forever friend—that we really knew nothing at all.

4

Noelle

Robeson County, North Carolina 1979

She was a night person. It was as if she were unable to let go of the day, and she’d stay up into the early hours of the morning, reading or—her mother didn’t know this—walking around outside, sometimes lying in the old hammock, trying to peer through the lacy network of tree branches to find the stars beyond. She’d been a night person all thirteen years of her life. Her mother said it was because she’d been born exactly at the stroke of midnight, which caused her to confuse day and night. Noelle liked to think it was because she was one-eighth Lumbee Indian. She imagined the *********Lumbees had had to stay alert at night to fend off their enemies. She was also part Dutch and one-eighth Jewish, according to her mother, and she liked shocking her classmates with that element of her heritage, which struck them as exotic for rural North Carolina. But her mother sometimes made things up, and Noelle had learned to pick and choose the parts of the story she wanted to believe.

She was reading The Lord of the Rings in bed late one summer night when she heard the rapid-fire crunch of footsteps on the gravel driveway. Someone was running toward the house and she turned out her light to peer through the open window. The full moon illuminated a bicycle lying in the driveway, its tires and handlebars askew as though some nor’easter had tossed it there.

“Midwife?” a male voice yelled, and Noelle heard pounding on the front door. “Midwife?”

Noelle pulled on her shorts and tucked her tank top into the waistband as she rushed into the pine-paneled living room.

“Mama?” she shouted toward her mother’s room as she headed for the door. “Mama! Get up!”

She flipped on the porch light and pulled opened the door. A black boy stood there, his eyes huge and frightened. His fist was in the air as he readied it to pound the door again. Noelle recognized him. James somebody. He was a few years older than her—maybe fifteen?—and he used to go to her school, though she hadn’t seen him this past year. He’d been a quiet, shy boy and she once overheard a teacher say there was hope for him, that he might end up graduating. Maybe even going to college. You couldn’t say that about too many of the kids in her school, black or white or Lumbee. But then he’d disappeared and Noelle hadn’t given him another thought. Not until right now.

“Get your mama!” He was all wired up and looked like he might try to rush past her into the house. “She a midwife, right?”

“Maybe,” Noelle hedged. People weren’t supposed to know about her mother. Everybody did, of course, but Noelle wasn’t supposed to say it straight out like that.

“What you mean, ‘maybe'?” James pushed her shoulder, nearly knocking her off balance, but she didn’t feel afraid. He was the one who was scared. Scared and panicky enough to give her a shove.

“Get your hands off her!” Her mother swept into the living room, pulling a robe around her shoulders. “What do you think you’re doing? Shut the door, Noelle!” She grabbed the door and tried to push it closed but Noelle hung on tight to the knob.

“He says he needs a midwife,” she said, and her mother stopped pushing the door and looked at the boy.

“You do?” She sounded as if she didn’t quite believe him.

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked contrite now, and Noelle could see his body shaking with the effort of being polite when what he really wanted to do was shout and beg. “My sister. She havin’ a baby and we ain’t got—”

“You live in that house on the creek?” Her mother squinted past him as though she could see his house through the dark woods.

“Yes’m,” he said. “Can you come now?”

“Our car’s not running,” her mother said. “Did you call the rescue squad?”

“We ain’t got no phone,” he said.

“Is your mother with her?”

“Nobody’s with her!” He stomped his foot like an impatient little kid. “Please, ma’am. Please come!”

Her mother turned to Noelle. “You call the rescue squad while I get some clothes on. And you come with me tonight. I might need you.”

She’d never invited Noelle to go out on a call with her before, but this whole situation was different than the usual. This was the first time a neighbor had come knocking at two in the morning. Sometimes there’d be a phone call in the middle of the night. Noelle would hear her mother leave the house and she’d know she’d be on her own for making breakfast and getting ready for school. Her mother would probably be back by the time she got home in the afternoon, but she’d be quiet about whatever had gone on. Noelle didn’t really care. She was more interested in reading than she was in how her mother spent her time.

Her mother was ancient—fifty-two years old—and her mousy brown hair was streaked with gray. She had wrinkles around her eyes and on her throat. She was much older than the mothers of Noelle’s classmates and people often thought she was her grandmother. Her friends’ mothers painted their carefully shaped fingernails. They wore lipstick and went to the beauty parlor in Lumberton to get their hair done. Noelle was embarrassed by her mother’s age and unconventional demeanor. But as she dialed the rescue squad and did her best to explain to the dispatcher where James lived, she had the strangest feeling that her perception of her mother was about to change.

She hadn’t known her mother could run. They jogged down the dirt road behind James’s bike. Even carrying her blue canvas bag of supplies, her mother was outpacing her. The air was heavy with the smell of the river, and Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees lining the road. They turned onto the lane that bordered the creek and some of the moss brushed Noelle’s shoulders. When she was little, her mother told her that a Lumbee Indian chief’s wife had disobeyed him, so he chopped off her hair and tossed it over the branch of a tree, where it grew and multiplied and soon began covering the branches of all the neighboring trees. What that had to do with Spain, Noelle didn’t know, but she loved imagining that the Indian chief’s wife might have been one of her long-lost ancestors.

Noelle and her mother followed James around the last bend in the lane. Moonlight flickered on the peeling white paint of the tiny shack, but they heard the screams even before the house came into view. The voice sounded more animal than human, and it cut through the dank air like a sword. The screams made her mother run even faster while Noelle slowed her own pace, a little unnerved. Birth wasn’t completely foreign to her—she’d seen their cat give birth to kittens—but she’d never heard anything like those screams.

“Where are your parents?” her mother asked as James tossed his bike to the ground.

“Ma’s up to Lumberton,” he said over his shoulder. He grabbed the knob of the beat-up front door and turned it. “Her sister took sick.”

He didn’t mention his father and Noelle’s mother didn’t ask. They raced into the house, which was no more than two squat little rooms. The first was kind of a kitchen and living room together, with a couch at one end and a sink and stove and half-size refrigerator at the other. Noelle’s mother didn’t seem to notice the room, though. She followed the wailing to the second room, where a girl, slim as a reed except for the giant globe of her belly, lay on her back in a double bed. She could only have been a couple of years older than Noelle, and she was naked from the waist down, her green T-shirt hiked up to her breasts. Her knees were bent and the place between her legs bulged with something huge and dark.

“Oh, my stars, you’re crowning already!” her mother said. She turned to James. “Fill every pot and pan in the house with water and set it to boil!” she commanded.

“Yes, ma’am!” James disappeared from the room, but Noelle stood frozen, mesmerized by what was happening to the girl’s body. It couldn’t be normal, could it? It looked and sounded like she was being torn apart.

“All right, darling.” Her mother began pulling things out of her bag as she spoke to the girl. “Do not push. I know you feel like pushing, but don’t push yet, all right? I’m going to help you and everything’s going to be fine.”

“Not … fine!” the girl yelled. “I don’t want no baby!”

“Well, you’re going to have one in just a few minutes, regardless.” Noelle’s mother turned to her. “Find me every clean towel and piece of linen that’s in this house,” she said as she wrapped her blood pressure cuff around the girl’s thin arm. “Then wet a cloth with some of that water the boy’s heating up and bring it to me.”

Noelle nodded and began searching in the narrow bedroom closet, grabbing the neatly folded towels and sheets and pillowcases from the shelves. In the other room, she found James trembling over water-filled pots on the stove.

“I need to dip one of these in warm water.” Noelle pointed to the pots. “Which one’s warmest?”

“This one, maybe.” He nodded toward the one closest to her and she dipped the washcloth into the water, then wrung it out in the sink and carried it back to the bedroom.

Her mother partly unfolded one of the sheets and slid it under the girl’s bottom. Then she took the warm washcloth and held it to the bizarrely stretched skin that circled the baby’s head. Noelle leaned down to whisper in her mother’s ear, “Is this normal?” She pointed between the girl’s legs and her mother brushed her hand away.

“Completely normal,” her mother said out loud, and Noelle knew she was trying to reassure the girl at the same time she answered the question. “Why don’t you go help the boy?” she suggested.

Noelle shook her head. “I want to stay here.”

“Then get a chair.” She nodded toward the girl. “Let her hold your hand.”

Noelle dragged a straight-backed chair from the living room to the side of the bed. The girl was gripping the edge of the mattress with her fist, and Noelle awkwardly pried her fingers loose and then pressed them around her own hand. The girl squeezed her fingers hard. Tears ran down the sides of her face and tiny dots of perspiration covered her forehead. Her skin was lighter than James’s, and even with her face contorted with pain, Noelle could see how pretty she was. And how scared.

She reached forward, wiping the girl’s tears away with her fingertips. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Bea,” the girl whispered. “I’m dyin', ain’t I? This baby goin’ kill me?”

Noelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “My mother—”

Bea interrupted her with another scream. “I’m splittin’ apart!” she yelled.

“No woman’s ever split apart, darlin',” Noelle’s mother said, “and you’re stretching just like you’re meant to do.”

“My thing’s burnin’ up!” Bea said. She let go of Noelle’s hand to reach between her legs. Her eyes widened as she touched whatever was down there out of Noelle’s line of sight. “Lord Jesus!” Bea said. “Lord Jesus, save me!”

“Yes, Lord Jesus,” Noelle’s Jewish-Lumbee-Dutch mother said with a laugh, probably using those words together for the first time in her life. “Your Lord Jesus is right here with you, darlin', if you need him to be.” She lifted her head. “Noelle, you want to see this baby come into the world?”

Noelle stood and walked to the end of the bed. The dark circle had grown even larger and she held her breath, wondering how her mother was going to get that baby out of skinny little Bea. All of a sudden, Bea let out a yelp and the dark haired, dusky-skinned head popped from her body.

Noelle gasped with amazement.

“Beautiful!” her mother said. “You’re doing beautifully.” She held her hands above and below the baby’s head, not touching it, not touching Bea, just holding her hands there as if supporting the head in midair by magic. The baby’s head turned to the side and Noelle could see its tiny face, all scrunched up as if this being-born business was as much work for him or her as it was for Bea. Suddenly, the little squinty eyes and blood-streaked lips blurred in front of Noelle’s face and she realized that for no reason she could name she was crying.

All at once, the baby slipped from Bea’s body into her mother’s hands.

“A precious boy!” Her mother wrapped the squawking infant in a towel and rested him on Bea’s belly, the movement so quick and easy that Noelle knew she’d done it hundreds of times before.

“I don’t want this baby,” Bea moaned, but she was lifting the corner of the towel, touching the damp hair of her son.

“We’ll see about that,” her mother said. “Right now we have a little more work to do down here.”

Noelle watched as her mother cut the cord and delivered the placenta, answering her questions and explaining everything she was doing. Her mother was not the same woman who made their dinner each night, who cleaned their house and fed the chickens and grew tomatoes and mowed their scrawny lawn. In that room filled with animal cries and sweat and blood and air too thick to breathe, her mother became someone else—someone mysterious, part sage, part magician. She was beautiful. Every line in her face. Every gray thread in her hair. Every swollen knuckle in the hands that had brought the baby into the world with such ease and grace. Noelle knew in that moment that she wanted to be like her. She wanted to be exactly like her.

The rescue squad came way too late to be of much use, and the atmosphere suddenly shifted in the little house. There were pointed questions. Shiny medical equipment. Sharp needles and bags of liquid hanging from poles. A stretcher on wheels.

Bea was afraid. “Don’t be.” Noelle’s mother squeezed her hand as two of the men in uniforms moved her from the bed to the stretcher. “You did a perfect job. You’ll be fine.”

“You deliver the baby?” one of the men asked her mother.

“She a midwife,” James said, and the rescuer raised his eyebrows.

“Just a neighbor, helping out,” Noelle’s mother said quickly. A few years earlier, she’d spent several days in jail for midwifing and Noelle knew she didn’t plan to go again. Daddy’s girlfriend, Doreen, had stayed over while her mother was gone. Doreen was a maid, her father had explained to her. Noelle might have been only nine years old but she wasn’t stupid. Her father eventually divorced her mother and married Doreen. Noelle hated that woman. Doreen had stolen her father. Stolen her mother’s husband. “Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me,” her mother said to her later. “Just don’t ever.” And Noelle swore up and down that she never would and she thought for sure that she was telling the truth.

* * *

It was nearly dawn by the time they walked home. Their pace was slow and easy, and for a while neither of them spoke. The buzz of the cicadas had given way to a peaceful quiet that enveloped them in the darkness. Every once in a while, Noelle could hear the call of a bird from deep in the woods. She loved that sound. She’d hear that same bird sometimes when she wandered outside in the middle of the night.

They turned from the lane onto the dirt road that led to their house. “How did you know how to do all that?” Noelle asked.

“My mama,” her mother said. “And she learned it all from her mama. There’s no big mystery to it, Noelle. Doctors today would like you to think that there is. They make you think you need drugs and C-sections—that’s surgery that cuts the baby out of you—and all sorts of sophisticated interventions to have a baby. And sometimes you do. A good midwife needs to know when it’s safe for a woman to have a baby at home and when it’s not. But it’s not rocket science.”

“I want to do it.”

“Do what? Have a baby?”

“Be a midwife. Like you.”

Her mother put her arm around Noelle’s shoulders and hugged her close. “Then I want you to do it the right way,” she said. “The legal way, so you don’t have to hide your light under a bushel like I do.”

“What’s the legal way?”

“You become a nurse first,” she said. “I never took that step. I don’t think it’s necessary. Harmful even, because they indoctrinate you with the idea that more is better when it comes to having babies. But North Carolina’s got its laws and you need to do it legally. I’m not having a daughter of mine spending time in jail.”

Noelle thought back to Bea’s steamy little room where her mother had done nothing but good. “That Bea girl,” Noelle said. “She’s only a couple of years older than me. If I had a baby, I’d want it. I don’t understand not wanting your own baby.”

Her mother didn’t say anything right away. “Sometimes not keeping a baby is the loving choice,” she said. “Sometimes you know you don’t have the money or the support to give a baby a good chance in life and then letting the baby go to a good family is the right thing. That girl—” her mother drew in a long breath “—she’ll have to decide for herself. The baby being black makes it harder to find adoptive parents for it, so I do hope she decides to keep it and maybe her mama can help out with it. But fifteen is just plain too young. So do me a favor and don’t get pregnant until you’re a lot older than that.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t even want to kiss a boy, much less make a baby with one.”

“That’ll change.” Her mother was smiling. Noelle could hear it in her voice.

The sky was beginning to pink up with the sunrise. The dirt road was visible now beneath their feet, and ahead of them Noelle could make out the corner of their house beyond the woods.

“There’s something I need to tell you, Noelle,” her mother said suddenly, her voice so different it might have been another woman speaking. “It’s something I should have told you long ago, but with your father leaving and everything … it just seemed like too much of a burden to give you.”

Noelle felt the muscles tighten in her chest.

“What, Mama?” she asked.

“Let’s sit out in the yard while the sun comes up,” her mother said. “I’ll make some tea and we’ll have a good talk.”

Noelle slowed her footsteps as they turned into the gravel driveway, not sure she wanted to hear whatever it was that made her mother sound so strange and different. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d left the house that night as one person, but would be returning to it as another.

She was right.

5

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina 2010

It seemed like only a few weeks since I’d sat in this same church for Sam’s memorial service, and I’d had to force myself to come today. Emerson and I had planned the service in a daze. Em had asked me if I wanted to sing, which I did occasionally at weddings or receptions, but I’d said absolutely not. As I listened to one of my fellow choir members sing Fauré's Pie Jesu in her beautiful soprano, I was glad I’d passed. My voice would never have made it past the lump in my throat. Not here, where the memories of Sam’s service still hung in the air of the church. And not now, when I still couldn’t believe our Noelle was gone.

Noelle’s mother sat to my left. I hadn’t seen her in about a year, and at eighty-four she was showing the early signs of dementia. She’d forgotten my name, although she remembered Emerson’s and even Jenny’s, and she certainly understood that Noelle was gone. Sitting next to me, she pressed one crippled fist to her lips and shook her head over and over again as if she couldn’t believe what was happening. I understood the feeling.

Grace sat on my right next to Jenny, Emerson and Ted, twirling a strand of her long hair around her index finger the way she did when she was anxious. She’d pleaded to stay home. “I know it’s hard,” I’d said to her that morning. I’d sat on the edge of her bed where she had cocooned herself beneath her sheet. Her blue-and-green polka-dotted comforter lay in a heap on the floor and I had to stop myself from picking it up and folding it neatly on the end of the bed. “I know it reminds you of going to Daddy’s memorial service, but we need to be there to honor Noelle’s memory,” I said. “She loved you and she’s been so good to you. We need to be there for her mother. Remember how important it was to have people come to Daddy’s service?”

She didn’t respond and the hillock her head formed beneath the sheet didn’t move. At least she was listening. I hoped she was listening. “It wasn’t for Daddy that people came,” I continued. “It was for us, so that we’d feel their love and support and for people to be able to share memories about—”

“All right!“ She snapped the sheet from her head and pushed past me out of the bed, her hair a tangled mane down her back. “Do you ever stop talking?” she said over her shoulder. I didn’t criticize her for her rudeness. I was too afraid of pushing her even further away.

I noticed now that Grace was clasping Jenny’s hand between them on the pew and I was glad to see her comfort her best friend that way. Jenny looked even paler than usual. She’d already lost the little bit of tan she’d gotten over the summer, while Grace’s skin still had a caramel glow. Jenny had inherited Emerson’s too-fair skin and Ted’s thin dark hair, which she wore in a sweep across her forehead that nearly covered her left eye. She was cute and I loved her to pieces, but to my biased eyes, she nearly disappeared next to Grace. When I saw them together at school, I couldn’t help but notice the way the boys reacted to them. They would approach Grace and Jenny with their eyes glued to my daughter … until they all started talking. Then it was as though a magnet pulled them toward Jenny and my quiet child became invisible.

But Cleve had chosen Grace, not Jenny. Cleve was a handsome boy, the son of a white mother—Suzanne—and a black father, with killer blue eyes and a smile that could nearly make me weak in the knees, and I knew Grace thought she’d found The One. Now Jenny was seeing a boy named Devon, and Grace had to be feeling very alone. Father gone. Boyfriend gone. One inadequate mother remaining.

Ian sat in the pew behind us. He’d been the one to tell Emerson and me about Noelle’s will. He’d known of its existence for months because he found it while going through Sam’s files, but of course he’d said nothing to me about it and I’m sure he never expected it would be needed so soon. The will was fairly recent, written only a couple of months before Sam’s death. I was frankly surprised that Noelle had drawn up a will at all; she was never the most organized person. But I was even more surprised that she’d turned to Sam for it. True, she’d known Sam as long as she’d known me and they’d always been good friends despite a rough patch now and then. But the contents of the will were such that she’d had to have been uncomfortable talking to him about it, and I’m sure he felt a little awkward hearing her wishes.

In her will, Noelle had named Emerson her executor. I felt hurt when Ian told me. I couldn’t help it. Emerson, Noelle and I had always been very close. A threesome. I’d sometimes felt a little left out but I’d convinced myself it was my imagination. Noelle’s choice of executor told me I’d been right all along. Not that anyone would want the work involved in being an executor, yet I couldn’t help but wonder why Noelle didn’t have us share the job. Did Sam even think to suggest that to her?

More telling, though, was the division of her assets. She’d lived simply, but she’d managed to save a little more than fifty thousand dollars over the years. She wanted Emerson to be sure her mother’s needs were met first. If there was money left over, it was to be put in trusts for Jenny and Grace in a seventy-five/twenty-five percent split, with Jenny getting the larger sum. How did Sam feel as Noelle made it clear that she favored Ted and Emerson’s daughter over his own? I knew the division was fair. It was right. Jenny had helped Noelle with the babies program and she seemed to appreciate Noelle in a way that Grace did not. The money itself didn’t matter. It was the jolt to my solar plexus, the realization that the friendship between Emerson, Noelle and myself had been more lopsided than I’d imagined.

Also in her will, Noelle had requested that Suzanne take over the babies program if she was willing, which she was. Suzanne sat in the pew behind us next to Ian. Her big fiftieth birthday party was right around the corner and now I wondered if we should cancel it. Long ago, she’d worked as a doula with Noelle and they’d been friends ever since, through Suzanne’s divorce and two bouts with cancer. After this last time, her hair grew in curly and full and snow-white. When I greeted her before the service, I noticed how healthy she looked. Her huge round blue eyes always made me think of an awestruck little girl and it was hard to look at her without smiling, even in the days when she was sick and bald from chemo. Those eyes would hold you captive.

I’d imagined that all the women who had been Noelle’s patients would have turned out for this service, but when I glanced over my shoulder I saw that the small church was less than half-full. I put my arm around Noelle’s mother, willing her not to look behind us. I didn’t want her to see that the people Noelle had touched had not cared enough to come.

The mayor was giving the eulogy and I tried to pay attention. He was talking about how they’d tried to give Noelle the Governor’s Award for Voluntary Service for her babies program and she’d refused to accept it. So like Noelle, I thought. None of us had really been surprised. Noelle didn’t think helping others should be treated as anything special.

I felt a tremor run through her mother’s body as we listened to the mayor and I tightened my arm around her shoulders. At Sam’s funeral, I’d sat with my arm around Grace. We’d been like two blocks of wood that day. Her shoulders had felt stiff and hard and my arm had simply gone numb—so numb that I’d had to pry it from her shoulders with my other hand. I remembered sitting so close to her that day, the length of our bodies touching. Now there was nearly a foot of space between us on the pew, nearly two inches of distance for every month Sam had been gone. Too much space for me to reach across. I couldn’t put my arm around her now if I tried.

I wondered if, like me, Grace thought about the what-ifs. What if Sam had left the house five seconds later? The three of us had been rushing around the kitchen as we always did in the morning, not talking much, Sam pouring coffee into the hideous striped purple travel mug Grace had given him for his birthday years ago, Grace scrambling to find a book she’d mislaid, me straightening up behind them both. Sam forgot the mug when he raced out the door. I’d glanced at it on the counter, but figured he’d already pulled out of the driveway by then. What if I’d run out the front door with it? Would he have seen me? Then he would never have stopped at Port City Java for his coffee. He never would have been crossing the Monkey Junction intersection at exactly the wrong moment. Would he be sitting next to me right now if I’d tried to catch him?

If, if, if.

To my right, Emerson was sniffling, and the tissue wadded up in my hand was damp with my own tears. Emerson glanced at me and tried to smile, and I wished Grace and Jenny had not been between us so I could touch her arm. Emerson and I were a mess. When it came to Noelle’s suicide, the what-ifs that tormented us were huge and haunting. Maybe there really had been something we could have done to change the course of things for Noelle. Noelle had killed herself. Much different than the freakish collision of two cars at an intersection. Much more preventable if one of us had only seen the symptoms. Yet what symptoms had there been? Noelle committing suicide made no sense. She’d always been so life embracing. Had we missed an emptiness in her? I wondered. She’d never married after breaking off her engagement to Ian years ago and she’d delivered baby after baby with no babies of her own. She’d seemed content in her choices, but maybe she’d put on a game face for all of us. I remembered Noelle comforting me as I grieved for Sam that Saturday night in July. I’d thought only of myself. What small, telltale ache had I missed in her that night?

I’d known Noelle since my freshman year in college and I had thousands upon thousands of memories of her since that time. Yet the one that would always stand out in my mind was the night she helped me give birth to Grace. Sam had agreed to a home birth only reluctantly, and frankly, if the midwife had been anyone other than Noelle, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable about it myself. I had total confidence in her, but Sam was afraid we were taking unnecessary risks, and the truth was, things did not go smoothly.

Noelle had been coolheaded, though. There are people whose presence alone can lower your blood pressure. Slow your breathing. Keep you centered. That was Noelle. I’ll take care of you, she told me that night, and I believed her. How many women had heard those words from her over the years? I’d known they were the truth. The lamp she’d aimed between my legs lit up her electric-blue eyes, and her wild hair had been pulled back from her face, damp tendrils of it clinging to her forehead. In the lamplight, her hair glowed nearly red. She’d walked me around the moonlit room. She gave me brandy and strange teas that tasted like earth. She turned me in odd positions that, given my big belly and shivering legs, made me feel like a contortionist. She had me stand with one foot on the kitchen stool she’d dragged into the bedroom and told me to rock my hips this way and that. I’d cried and moaned and leaned against her and my worried husband. My teeth had chattered even though the room was very warm. I’d hated feeling so out of control, but I’d had no choice but to turn myself over to Noelle. I would do anything she said, drink any brew she gave me. I trusted her more than I trusted myself, and when she finally said something about calling an ambulance, I thought, If Noelle says we should, then I guess we should.

But she never did call for help and the rest of the night became a blur of pain to me. I woke up in the darkness to find Sam sitting next to our bed, a fuzzy silhouette against the lamplight. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. My body ached and I felt raw and empty.

“You’re a mom, Tara.” He smoothed his fingers over my cheek. “You’re an amazing, brave and beautiful mom.” I couldn’t see his face, but his voice held a smile.

“Am I in the hospital?” All that I could force from my throat was a whisper. I had no voice. My mouth felt dry and scratchy.

“No, Tara. You’re here. You’re home. Noelle pulled it off. She thought for a while she might need to take you to the hospital, but she was able to turn the baby.” He smoothed my hair, held his hand against my cheek. I smelled soap.

“My mouth.” I licked my dry lips. “Feels like sand.”

Sam chuckled. “Cinders.” He held a glass toward me, guided the straw to my lips, and I felt the scratchiness ease as I sipped.

“Cinders?” Had I misunderstood him?

“You passed out after the baby was born. Noelle cut off some of my hair—” he touched the dark hair above his forehead “—and burned it and put the cinders beneath your tongue to bring you back.”

My head spun a little. “Did it work?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’m sorry everything was so hard on you, but our baby’s beautiful, Tara. You held her. Do you remember?”

All at once, I recalled the mewing cry of my daughter as I reached for her. I remembered the soft flannel-wrapped weight of her in my arms. The tug at my nipple. The memories were dreamlike and I wished I could recapture every minute detail.

“Where is she? I want to see her.” I looked past him toward the bassinet near the window.

“Noelle has her in the kitchen doing some midwifey thing to her. I told her I thought you were waking up and she said she’d bring her in.” Suddenly, he leaned toward me, resting his cheek against mine. “I thought I was going to lose you,” he said. “Lose both of you. I was so scared. I thought we’d made a terrible mistake, trying to have the baby here at home. But Noelle … no obstetrician could have done a better job. We owe her everything. She was so good, Tara.”

I felt the heat of his cheek, the stickiness of his damp skin against my own, and I rested my hand on the side of his face. “The baby’s name.” I whispered. We’d felt so certain the baby would be a boy, another Samuel Vincent, that we’d never settled on a girl’s name. Grace, Sara, Hannah had all risen to the top, but we hadn’t made a firm decision. “Noelle?” I suggested now.

He lifted his cheek from mine. For a moment, I thought I saw a flash of doubt cross his face, but then he smiled. Nodded.

“Here she is.” Noelle walked into the room carrying the tiny bundle. “Your mama’s waiting for you, darlin'.” She leaned her head close to the bundle and I felt a hunger unlike anything I’d ever known. If I could have leaped out of the bed to grab my child I would have, but I held out my arms and let Noelle settle the baby into them.

Sam tipped his forehead to mine and we stared into the face of our daughter. I slipped the tiny yellow hat from her head to reveal light brown hair. Her cheeks were round and rosy, her eyebrows smudged pale crescents. She blinked her eyes open and looked at us blindly but with interest, as though she’d been waiting to see us as anxiously as we’d been waiting to see her, and I felt my own eyes fill at the miracle in my arms. I couldn’t tear my gaze from her, but Sam lifted his head to look at Noelle. She sat, a small smile on her lips, at the foot of the bed.

“We’re going to name her Noelle,” he said.

I looked up in time to see the smile leave her face. “Oh, no, you’re not.” She made it sound like a warning.

“Yes,” I said. “We want to.”

Even without my contacts, I could see the sudden rise of color in Noelle’s cheeks.

“Please don’t,” she said. “Promise me you won’t saddle this child with my name.”

“Okay,” Sam and I said together, quickly, because clearly we’d caused her distress. I didn’t understand. Did she hate her name? I’d always thought it was a pretty name, lyrical and strong. For whatever reason, though, the thought upset her. It didn’t matter. We’d pick another name, a beautiful name for our beautiful little daughter.

Now, sitting in the church next to the daughter born that night, I remembered my closeness with that daughter. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. It had blossomed between us so easily in those early years. How did that closeness turn into this unbearable distance? Was there any hope of ever getting it back?

6

Emerson

God, I felt like a zombie. The reception after the service was in my own house, but I could hardly find my way around the rooms. Faces and voices blended together into a jumble of sight and sound. Nearly everyone was wearing black except me. I had on my favorite green blouse and the green-and-tan floral skirt that was getting too tight in the waist. Just plucked them out of the closet that morning without thinking. Noelle would have hated all the black, anyway.

I was only vaguely aware of what was happening: Jenny and Grace going upstairs to escape the adults; the caterer Tara’d hired floating through the rooms with trays of bruschetta and shrimp; Ted keeping an eye on me from wherever he was. He knew I was a wreck. I was glad that Noelle’s mother had left with her aide after the service. I didn’t think I could bear to see any more of her sorrow.

Tara was doing her social-butterfly thing, but for the most part she stayed close to my side. Ted and Ian were holding their little plates and talking in the corner of the living room, probably about sports. I still hadn’t adjusted to seeing the guys together without Sam. Now Noelle was gone, too. Not only that, but my grandfather’s nursing home had called that morning to tell me they were moving my beloved grandpa into hospice. I was losing everyone. Nothing was going to feel right again for a long time.

A few volunteers from Noelle’s babies program had come over. I knew most of them, though not well. I tried to make small talk with everyone, nodding, smiling, shaking hands. People said nice things about Noelle. Nobody said, “Why did she do it?” At least, not to me. They asked me how the café was doing and I answered with my usual “Great! Stop in sometime!” But I heard their voices and my own through a thick fog. I kept searching the room for the one person who was missing: Noelle. When I’d catch myself looking for her, my body would suddenly jerk back to reality. I was losing my mind.

An hour into the reception—an hour that felt more like three—Tara finally pulled me away from a woman who was going on and on about knitting baby clothes. “Break time,” she said in my ear.

I let her guide me through the living room and out to the sunroom we’d added on the year before. Tara took me by the shoulders and lowered me to the sofa, then plunked down on an ottoman in front of me. The voices from the living room were a hum through the closed sunroom door. They sounded wonderfully far away. I looked at Tara. “Thank you,” I said. “I was drowning out there.”

Tara nodded. “I know. It’s hard.”

I scrunched up my face. “I keep looking for Noelle,” I admitted. “That’s insane, isn’t it? I mean, seriously, I’m not joking. I keep expecting her to walk through the door.”

“Me, too,” Tara said. “I still think I see Sam sometimes. I thought I saw him in the grocery store the other day. And there was a guy driving down Water Street and I almost turned the car around to follow him.”

“I don’t get why there weren’t more people at the service,” I said. The turnout—or lack of turnout—hurt me. “I honestly thought there’d be … that every mother whose baby she delivered …” I shook my head. “You know the kind of relationship she had with her moms. That closeness. I thought they’d all come.”

“I know.” Tara rubbed my hand where it rested on my thigh. “I thought the same thing, but maybe they didn’t see the article in the paper.” She’d written the piece about Noelle and she’d done a great job with it. A bit of melodrama in her description of Noelle, but that was Tara.

“Word would have gotten around, though, article or not,” I said.

“They’re probably so busy with their families,” Tara said.

I suddenly pounded my fist on my thigh. “I just don’t understand why she did it!” I sounded like a broken record. “What did we miss? What did I miss? How did we fail her?”

Tara shook her head. “I wish I knew.” She massaged her forehead. “It wasn’t financial trouble, right? She had that money socked away, so that couldn’t have been it.”

“She didn’t give a damn about money, anyway,” I said. “You know that.”

“I keep thinking maybe she was sick and didn’t tell us,” Tara said. “She didn’t have insurance and maybe suicide seemed like her only way out. Has the final autopsy report come back yet?”

“Not yet. I don’t think she was sick, Tara, I really don’t. I’m sure the report’s going to show a massive dose of tranquilizers and narcotics and that’s it.”

Tara leaned back on the ottoman. “She was terrible at asking for help,” she said.

“Or showing weakness,” I added. “She always had to be the strong one.”

The sunroom door opened a few inches and a woman poked her head into the room. “Is one of you Emerson?” she asked.

“I am.” I wanted to get to my feet, but my body had other ideas and I stayed rooted to the sofa.

The woman crossed the room like a drill sergeant, all sharp edges and quick movements, jutting her hand toward me for a shake. I actually recoiled. I felt like a balloon she could pop if I let her get too close. “I’m Gloria Massey,” she said. She was in her mid-sixties, with short, no-nonsense gray hair. Khaki pants. Navy blue blazer.

Tara stood from the ottoman and offered it to her and the woman sat down in front of me, her knees pointy knobs beneath her pants. Gloria Massey. Her name was familiar, but God only knew why. I glanced at Tara, frowning, and I could tell she was trying to place her, too. Both our minds were mush. She seemed to figure that out.

“I’m an obstetrician with Forest Glen Birth Center,” she said. “Noelle used to be a midwife in our practice.”

“Oh, right.” I gestured toward Tara. “This is Tara Vincent. We were Noelle’s closest friends.”

“Yes, I remember,” Gloria said. “You went to UNCW with her, right?”

Tara nodded. “She was a few years ahead of us, but yes, we did.”

“Well, I’m sorry to get here so late,” Gloria said. “I had a delivery this morning so I missed the service, but I wanted to be sure to see you two and tell you how sorry I was to hear about Noelle. She was one of a kind.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I hadn’t seen her in … oh, it must be ten years now, but she’s the sort of person you never forget.”

Ten years? “Maybe I have you mixed up with someone else,” I said. “I thought she left your practice just a little over a year ago.”

Gloria Massey raised her eyebrows in surprise. “No,” she said. “I was actually confused by the article in the paper. It said she left us a couple of years ago, but it’s really been at least ten. Probably more like twelve. I’d have to think. It was around the time she started that babies-in-need program.”

I frowned, trying to remember. “I thought she’d worked with you all these years.” I looked at Tara. “Am I that out of it? Wasn’t she affiliated with Forest Glen right up until her retirement?”

Tara nodded. “I referred someone to her there just a couple of years ago,” she said.

“Well, we always had requests for her, that’s true,” Gloria said, “but we referred them on to the other midwife working with us.”

“So where was Noelle working, then?” I asked. “I’m confused.”

“I.” Gloria looked from me to Tara. “I’m quite sure she quit midwifery altogether when she left us,” she said. “I would have known if she’d gone to another practice.”

Both of us stared at her. I felt like I was slipping into a long dark tunnel. I didn’t think I could handle learning one more thing that didn’t fit with what I knew about Noelle. My brain hurt. I wanted to shout to the universe, “Noelle was not a big mystery! Stop trying to make her into one!”

“I think,” I said to Gloria, “for some reason, she didn’t want you to know she’d gone someplace else.”

With her sharp little machinelike gestures, Gloria pulled her cell phone from the purse slung over her shoulder. “Hold on.” She quickly dialed a number. “Laurie, it’s me,” she said. “Do you recall when Noelle Downie left us?” She nodded, looked at me and repeated what she was hearing, “Twelve years as of December 1,” she said. “This is my office manager on the phone and she says she remembers the date because it was the day her husband asked for a divorce. Which he didn’t get and it’s all patched up now, right, Laurie?” She smiled into the phone, while my mind scrambled to take in this bizarre information.

“Where did she go?” Tara asked.

“Did she go somewhere else?” Gloria asked her office manager. She nodded again. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. Okay, thanks. I’ll be in a little later.” She dropped her phone back in her purse. “Noelle let her certification lapse after she left us,” she said.

“What?” I said. “No way!”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all.” Tara dropped down next to me on the sofa.

“Maybe this Laurie person has her mixed up with one of your other midwives,” I suggested.

Gloria shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She looked straight at me and I could practically hear her thinking what a shitty friend I was for not knowing what Noelle was up to. “I remember there being talk about it and everyone saying she just wanted to focus on the babies program,” Gloria said. “I know she was having a lot of back pain. I remember that. One of the other practices tried to get her to join them when they realized she’d left us, but she told them she was out of the business.”

“But she’s been delivering babies all this time!” I said.

“That’s true,” Tara agreed. “She’s been practicing as a midwife.”

“Are you sure?” Gloria tipped her head to one side. “Under whose supervision?”

I looked at Tara, who shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

“She’d tell me she was with a patient sometimes,” I said, but I spoke slowly, suddenly unsure about what I was saying. Unsure about everything. Did she tell me that? I pressed my fingers to my temples. “Twelve years? This is ludicrous!” As far as I knew, Noelle had had three passions for the past twelve years: her local midwifery practice, the babies program and what she called her “rural work.” Every couple of years she’d spend a few months in an impoverished rural area volunteering her skills as a midwife. She grew up in an area like that and it was her way of giving back. Could twelve years of Noelle’s life have slipped past without us knowing what was really going on with her?

“I know I heard her mention her patients,” Tara said. If I was crazy, Tara was, too.

“I’m so sorry.” Gloria stood. “I’ve upset you both and that was the last thing I meant to do when I came here.” She leaned down to give me a quick, soulless hug, then another one to Tara. “I need to run,” she said. “Again, please accept my condolences. This is such a loss to the whole community.”

She left the room and Tara and I sat in quiet confusion for a moment. My gaze blurred on the sunroom door.

Tara rubbed my back. “There’s an explanation for this,” she said.

“Oh, there’s an explanation, all right,” I said. “And I know exactly what it is. I hate it, but we have to accept it.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“The explanation is that we never really knew Noelle.” I looked at Tara, determination suddenly taking the place of my confusion. “We have to figure out why she died, Tara,” I said. “One way or another, we need to get to know her now.”

7

Noelle

Robeson County, North Carolina 1984

Her mother stood in the middle of their living room, looking around with a worried sigh. “I hate to leave you with this mess,” she said. “The timing of this is all wrong.”

“You’re making too much out of it, Mama,” Noelle said as she ushered her mother toward the door. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Her mother looked through the open doorway to the two cars in the gravel drive. Her old Ford stood next to Noelle’s “new” car—a dented, faded Chevy she’d picked up for six hundred dollars. The weather was threatening to storm and a hot wind blew through the treetops.

“Everything’s changing so fast,” her mother said.

“For the better.” Noelle gave her a little shove toward the door. “It’s not like you ever loved living here.”

Her mother laughed. “That’s the truth.” She touched her daughter’s cheek. “It’s being apart from you. That’s the change I can’t stand.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” Noelle said. She would. But she had her future spread out in front of her and that would make up for any sense of loss she felt over being apart from her mother and leaving the house she’d grown up in. “I’m going to see you in a couple of days,” she added. “It’s not like this is goodbye.”

Her mother’s car was packed to the gills for the short trip to New Bern but not everything would fit, so Noelle had promised to bring the rest of her things to her in a few days. Then she’d have to turn around and come home to pick up her own belongings and head to UNC Wilmington.

“Remember, Miss Wilson has a spare room you can stay in on vacations.”

“I’ll remember,” Noelle said, not sure she’d ever want to stay in the house of a stranger, even if her mother would be there. Miss Wilson was the elderly sister of one of her mother’s friends. She’d broken her hip and needed a live-in aide and was hiring Noelle’s mother for the job. With Noelle going off to college on a full scholarship, the timing was right to sell the house. They’d sold it nearly overnight to a young couple from Raleigh who were looking for a place in the country. It had all happened fast. They’d donated their old furniture, but there was so much left to do.

“I love you, honey.” Her mother pulled her into a hug, then stood back and tried to smooth Noelle’s unsmoothable hair.

“I love you, too.” She gave her mother a gentle shove through the doorway. “Drive safely.”

“You, too.”

Arms folded tightly across her chest, Noelle watched her mother’s car crunch down the gravel drive to the dirt road. She felt so much love for her mother that her eyes filled as the car disappeared around the bend. Fifty-eight years old now, her mother was. She was active, vibrant, full of life. Yet fifty-eight seemed so old to Noelle and it worried her. Her father had died two years earlier at fifty-seven. She’d learned about it in a stilted letter from Doreen. The letter arrived nearly a month after his death with a check for four hundred dollars, made out to Noelle. “He didn’t have a will,” Doreen wrote, “but I thought Noelle should get something from his estate.” His estate. The word made Noelle and her mother laugh for hours, the sort of laughter that was borne of hurt and pain. But the four hundred dollars had helped her buy the car, which she named Pops, and she hoped it would treat her better than her father ever had.

Aside from Noelle’s trimmed-down belongings and the boxes she had to transport to Miss Wilson’s, the only other thing left in the house was an old recliner. James was borrowing a truck to take it to his house. After the night that Bea’s baby was born, James became a fixture around their house, mowing their lawn at first out of gratitude but later for the few dollars Noelle’s mother insisted on paying him. That family had been full of surprises. As it turned out, James wasn’t Bea’s brother, but her boyfriend and the father of the baby she had that night. That baby was now five years old and he already had two younger brothers, both “caught” by Noelle’s mother, as she would say, with Noelle as her assistant. Noelle’s mother had tried to persuade Bea and James to practice birth control, but her pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Bea, it turned out, liked being a mother and she doted on her kids.

Noelle was carting boxes to her car when James showed up with his truck.

“Hey, Miss Noelle,” he said as he hopped out of the cab, “did I miss your mama?”

“She took off an hour ago.” Noelle heaved a box into the cramped trunk of her car.

“What we gonna do without her?” he asked.

“You and Bea better stop having babies, that’s what.”

James grinned. He’d grown into a handsome man and he had the sort of grin that made you grin back. “Too late for that,” he said.

Noelle put her hands on her hips and stared at him. “Again? What are you going to do with all these kids?”

James shrugged. “Love ‘em up,” he said.

People have a right to make their own choices, Noelle, her mother had told her when Noelle complained the last time Bea announced she was pregnant.

“Well,” Noelle said now, “let me help you carry that recliner out to your truck.”

It took them nearly half an hour to carry the recliner through the tight doorway of the house, across the windy yard and into the truck. Then James helped her with the rest of her mother’s cartons.

She was walking from the car toward the house to pick up another box, when she saw James suddenly drop one of the cartons to the grass, his arms flung out in the air.

“Girl!” He nudged the box with the toe of his shoe.

“Where these boxes been? They got spider shit all over ‘em.”

Noelle hadn’t noticed, but he was right. Round egg sacs hung from the corners and cottony webs crisscrossed the untaped flaps.

“Leave it there, James,” she said. “Nothing’s alive, I don’t think, but I don’t want to drag these filthy things into that Miss Wilson’s house. Let me get a rag and I’ll clean them up.”

“You got some tape?” James squatted down next to the box. “I’ll check inside a couple to make sure they ain’t no infestation or nothin'.”

Finding a rag in the cleaned-out kitchen was easier said than done, and Noelle finally resorted to pulling one of her washcloths from her suitcase. She dampened it under the tap and headed back to the front yard.

By the time she reached James and the box, he was on his feet, a manila folder in his hands. He looked at her from behind a frown.

“Was you adopted?” he asked.

She froze. How would he know that? She’d only found out herself the night Bea’s first baby was born, when her mother finally told her the truth. They’d sat together on the hammock in the backyard while her mother apologized for not telling her sooner. “You had a right to know way before now,” she’d said, “but I didn’t want you to think that you being adopted had anything to do with Daddy leaving.”

Noelle had felt stunned, like a huge void opened up inside her. “My mother?” she’d asked. “Who were my real mother and father?”

“Your father and I are your real parents,” her mother said sharply. “But your biological mother was a fifteen-year-old girl like that one we just left. Like Bea. Your father …” She’d shrugged. “I don’t think anybody knew who your father was.”

“I’m not yours,” Noelle said, trying on the fit of the words.

“Oh, you’re mine, honey. Please don’t ever say that again.”

“I’m not part Lumbee?” She felt the magic drain out of her. The Spanish moss hanging above the hammock suddenly looked like nothing more than Spanish moss, not the hair of an Indian chief’s wife.

“I believe you’re a mishmash. A little of this and a little of that.” Her mother had taken her hand and held it on her lap. “What you are,” she said, “is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Now, Noelle looked at James. “Yes, I’m adopted,” she said, as though the fact meant nothing to her. “But how did you know?”

He handed the folder to her. “Some papers fell out of this thing in the wind,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ to me,” he said. “But maybe mean somethin’ to you.”

His soft brown eyes told her he’d seen something he shouldn’t have seen. Something she’d never been meant to see, either. And when he gave it to her, he touched her hand. Not like a man would touch a woman. It was the touch of a friend who knew that the papers in that folder just might change her world forever.

8

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina 2010

Oh, God, this felt strange.

I sat across the table from Ian at the Pilot House, wondering if I was on a date. It had seemed casual enough yesterday when he said he had two tickets for a film at Thalian Hall. Then he suggested we grab something to eat first, and when you put dinner on the waterfront together with a film at a place as nice as the renovated Thalian Hall, what else could it be but a date? I liked Ian. I’d known him for so long and in some ways I could honestly say I adored him, but I didn’t want to date him. I didn’t want to date anyone. The thought of kissing or even holding hands with someone other than Sam made me shudder—and not with desire. It was actually repellent. I felt a deep, deep loneliness in my bed at night, but it wasn’t for just any man. It was for my husband.

“This isn’t a date, is it?” I asked Ian after the waiter had poured my second glass of wine.

Ian laughed. “Not if you don’t want it to be,” he said.

“Were you thinking it was? Is?” I was smiling. I liked that I could talk easily to Ian. I needed a male friend much more than I needed a lover.

“I was just thinking it would be good to see you smile,” Ian said, “like you are right now.”

The moment he said that, I felt my smile disappear. There was something I needed to tell him. I’d planned to wait until tomorrow so that tonight we could both relax and unwind. Suddenly, though, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep my mouth shut.

After school that afternoon, I’d driven to Noelle’s to help Emerson start cleaning out the house. Emerson had been waiting for me on the porch, and as soon as I’d reached the top step she grabbed my hand and sat down with me on the glider. Her face was red and gleamed with perspiration, and I knew she’d already been hard at work inside the house. But the stress in her face was from more than physical labor.

“You’re not going to believe the autopsy report,” she said.

“She was sick,” I said. I wanted that to be the case. A terminal illness that Noelle could see no escape from. I could envision her making the choice to end her life then, not wanting to put any of us through a long drawn-out illness with her.

But that wasn’t it at all.

Now I looked across the table at Ian. “Noelle had a baby,” I said.

He stared at me, then laughed. “What are you talking about?”

“Emerson got the autopsy report today. Cause of death was the overdose, as we’d expected. But the autopsy showed that, sometime in her life, she’d been pregnant and given birth.”

All signs of levity left Ian’s face. “When?”

“I don’t know.” I hesitated for just a moment, then asked, “Could it have been yours, Ian?”

He looked jarred by the thought. I was certain we were both remembering back to the abrupt end to his and Noelle’s engagement. Was there a connection?

“I don’t see how,” he said. “I—all of us—would have noticed if she’d been pregnant. Especially pregnant enough to actually give birth.”

“It must have happened when she was a teenager, then,” I said. “Before any of us knew her. Emerson and I figure that she relinquished the baby for adoption. Maybe she’s been dealing with sadness from that experience all these years and none of us knew.”

“Well,” Ian said, “maybe you’re right or maybe the baby died or … I guess we’ll never know. I just … I thought I knew her so well back when we were together. Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Why didn’t she tell Emerson or me?” I added. “Her best friends?” I looked down at my plate where a few bites of flounder remained. I wasn’t sure I could finish it. “Anyhow, it probably has nothing to do with why she killed herself,” I said.

“Unless it’s something she never got over.” He looked miserable.

“I’m sorry I brought this up tonight. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“No, I’m glad you told me,” he said.

I ate another bite of flounder without really tasting it. I was tired. Emerson and I had packed up everything in Noelle’s kitchen, filling boxes with items Ted would take to the women’s shelter. There wasn’t much. Noelle had pared down her life. She’d never been a pack rat, but I’d been surprised at how empty her kitchen cabinets had been. A few plates. A few glasses and cups and bowls. Nothing extraneous. Her dresser and closet had been the same way, stripped down to the necessities. It had been hard to see her familiar old long skirts and loose cotton blouses, knowing we’d never see Noelle in them again. Then there were the black garbage bags filled with baby items that had been all over the house. Ted and Emerson piled the bags into their car to take home with them, where Grace and Jenny promised to organize the mess and turn it over to Suzanne.

I’d been shocked when Grace told me she planned to help out with the babies program as Noelle had requested. Emerson had given her Noelle’s old sewing machine and shown her how to hem the little blankets that were part of the layettes donated to sick or needy infants. When Grace told me what she was up to, I put my hand on her forehead as if checking for fever. “Are you all right?” I’d smiled. Wrong move.

She’d jerked her head away from my hand. “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t make a big production out of it.”

I doubted she’d be one of the volunteers who delivered the layettes to the hospital. Ever since Sam’s accident, she’d been nearly phobic of hospitals. She’d told me that if I ever needed hospitalization, she wouldn’t visit me. She wouldn’t even visit Cleve in the hospital, she’d said. I blamed myself. When we reached the emergency room after Sam’s accident, I plowed through the treatment room doors in a panic with Grace close on my heels. Even I couldn’t bear to remember what we saw in that room—Sam’s beautiful face, bloodied and torn apart. Grace had fainted, dropping to the floor behind me like a stone.

“So,” Ian said, “did you find anything at Noelle’s that seemed … out of the ordinary?”

I shook my head. “Emerson had to examine everything she touched for clues,” I said. “She thinks something in that house is going to tell us why she killed herself or what happened to her child or why she lied to us about being a midwife.”

Noelle and midwife. The words went together like milk and cookies. “Midwife” defined who she was in my mind. In all of our minds. Hadn’t at least one of us introduced her as a midwife over the past decade and hadn’t she said nothing to correct us? It was bizarre.

Ian tapped his fingertip against the base of his empty wineglass. “Noelle …” He shook his head. “It was impossible to know what was going on with her sometimes.”

I felt sorry for him. I knew how much he’d once loved her. “It must have been so hard on you when she broke off the engagement.”

“Oh, God, Tara.” He brushed the comment aside. “It was so long ago. Another lifetime ago.”

“I don’t remember you getting angry. I think most men would have been furious.”

“I was more worried about her than angry,” he said. Then he shifted in his chair and smiled again. “Let’s lighten up, okay. Let’s not talk about Noelle or Sam or anything sad for the rest of the night.”

“Perfect,” I agreed.

“So—” he cut a plump scallop in half on his plate “—when’s the last time you actually went out to a movie instead of watching a rental at home?”

I thought back through the recent months, then wrinkled my nose. “Not since Sam,” I said.

He laughed. “Okay, let me try that again.” He looked up at the ceiling as if searching there for a safe topic. His eyes suddenly brightened behind his glasses. “I’m thinking of getting a dog,” he said.

“You’re kidding!” I knew he loved our dog, Twitter, but I couldn’t picture him with one of his own. “A puppy? Or an older rescue, or—”

“Puppy,” he said. “I haven’t had one since I was a kid. I’d have to do more of my work at home for a while, I guess.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” I said. “Maybe you could get two so they could entertain each other while—”

“Tara?” I looked up to see an older woman walking toward our table. I was so caught up in the idea of Ian with a puppy that it took me a moment to recognize her.

“Barbara!” I rose to my feet and gave her a hug. “It’s good to see you.” I hadn’t seen Barbara Read since her retirement party a couple of years ago. Ian was getting to his feet, as well. “Ian, this is Barbara Read,” I said. “She used to teach math at Hunter.”

“Sit down now, both of you.” Barbara smiled. She looked great, her coppery hair cut very short and her skin satin-smooth. Retirement definitely agreed with her. “Oh, honey,” she said to me once I took my seat again, “I’m glad to see you looking so well. I was just devastated to hear about Sam. And poor Grace. I know this must be a terrible time for both of you.”

“Thank you.” I nodded toward Ian. “Ian was Sam’s law partner,” I said. I felt the need to explain why I was sitting in a restaurant, sipping wine with another man a mere six months after Sam’s death. I saw a smile play on Ian’s lips. He was on to me and my guilt.

Barbara barely seemed to hear me, though. “And I just heard about Noelle Downie,” she said. “Oh, my Lord, what a tragedy.”

I nodded. “It’s very sad,” I said.

“I know you were close to her,” Barbara said. “She had a big heart. I saw her and Sam at the South Beach Grill a couple of times last year and it’s hard to believe they’re both gone. Did he mention seeing me? I told him to tell you hello.”

I thought I’d misunderstood her. “You saw Sam and Noelle at the South Beach Grill? In Wrightsville Beach?”

“I love that restaurant, don’t you? I often go over there for lunch. Off season, of course. I don’t go near the beach during the summer.”

“When was this?” I didn’t want to sound upset—or worse, jealous—but this was very strange. Noelle and Sam were friends, but certainly not the meet-for-lunch sort of friends.

“Oh, let me think.” Barbara tapped her chin as she looked out the window toward the river. “Well, it must have been the spring. April, maybe?”

“Sam died in early March.” I felt impatient with her. I glanced at Ian and saw the crease between his eyebrows.

“Hmm, then maybe late winter, or it might even have been last fall.” Barbara laughed. “Retirement messes with the calendar in your head, just you wait and see! It was twice, I remember that. I talked to Sam both times. I didn’t know Noelle personally, but everyone knows who she is. Was. I figured he was probably the lawyer for that baby program she ran.”

“Probably right,” Ian said. He was looking at me and his eyes told me to get rid of her.

“Barbara, it’s been so good seeing you,” I said, “but Ian and I’d better finish up here or we’re going to miss our movie.”

“Oh, same here.” She looked over her shoulder in the direction she’d come from. “My husband probably thinks I got lost in the ladies’ room.” She leaned over to pat my wrist. “Wonderful seeing you, honey. And nice meeting you, Ian. Y’all have a good evening.”

Ian and I stared at each other until we were sure she was out of earshot. “The babies program needs a lawyer?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’m sure that’s not it,” he said, “but I just wanted her to leave. I could see she was upsetting you.”

“I’m not upset. I’m confused.”

“Look.” Ian licked his lips and studied his plate for a moment. “I think it was probably the will.” He raised his eyes to mine. “It was written in February, and I’m sure Sam and Noelle had to have a couple of meetings to talk about it. There were papers having to do with her mother’s care that Sam had to draw up, and … he probably helped her think through how she wanted to divide her assets.”

“Why at a restaurant and not his office?”

“Because they were friends, so they decided to be comfortable while they worked. I do it, and Sam took his clients out all the time.” He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. “Hey,” he said, “you’re not thinking …?”

I shook my head. “Noelle and Sam? No way. Sam always liked her but he also thought she was wacky. It’s just weird to hear something like that out of the blue, when I had no idea.” My voice trailed off.

“You had no idea about it because Sam was ethical,” Ian said. “He didn’t tell you about her will for the same reason I didn’t tell you about it when I came across it in his files. Until she died, it was frankly none of your business.”

“Right.” I nodded. It wasn’t the first time I’d discovered that Sam had handled the legal affairs of someone I knew without telling me. I’d learned early in our married life not to ask questions.

Our waiter delivered our bill and Ian leaned back in his chair to pull out his wallet. “Well—” he laughed as he set his credit card on the table “—we didn’t have much success not talking about Noelle or Sam, did we?”

“Not much.” I set my napkin on the table. “Let’s go lose ourselves in a movie.”

“Deal,” he said, and it wasn’t until we were walking from his car into the theater that I realized I’d let him pay for my dinner.

I guessed it was a date, after all.

9

Emerson

The human race lost something when digital photography was invented. I sat cross-legged on the floor of Noelle’s small living room, my back against the sofa, as I paged through one of her old photo albums. Like my own albums, hers had few recent pictures. They were all on her computer. Generations to come—my grandkids, for example—would never get to look through my photo album and wonder, Who is this guy and why was he important to Grandma? Honestly, it made me sad. The handful of recent pictures in Noelle’s album were Jenny’s and Grace’s not-very-flattering school pictures and some photographs taken at fundraising events, like the big baby shower Noelle held each year on the grounds of our church.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in the album, anyway. A picture of her with a stranger, maybe? A grown son or daughter whom she’d hidden away from us? Someone who had the answers we needed? As I dug through the pages, it was the pictures of Noelle herself that I lingered over, each one giving me a bittersweet twist of pain in my chest. I was mad at her for leaving the way she did with no explanation and mad at her for the lies, but I hated being angry with her. The only way to get rid of the anger was to make sense of what she’d done.

“I love this picture of her,” I said to Ted, who was pulling books from the shelves on either side of the fireplace and stacking them in boxes. He was working like a dog while I played detective. I knew he thought I was merely brooding and he felt sorry for me. He hadn’t gotten on my case at all. Yet.

“Uh-huh,” he said as he dropped another couple of books into the box. I’d mentioned to him my need to find answers to Noelle’s mystery life, but he thought I should just let it go, so now I was keeping my sleuthing to myself. I’d never had the sort of close—quite honestly, passionate—relationship with Ted that Tara had with Sam, but he was a good provider, a faithful husband and a caring dad. They were my three main requirements and he met them handily, so I was keeping him.

In the photograph, Noelle stood in front of a decorative wall hanging. The picture was overexposed with far too much light on her face. It made her fair skin look like alabaster. Simple silver hoops hung from her ears. The intense light brightened the already neon-blue of her eyes and nearly erased her eyebrows. She was very slender and always had been, even before her Spartan vegan diet. I envied her skinniness, but I loved food too much—my TV was always set to the food channel. I’d carry a few extra pounds around with me for the rest of my life and that was just the way it was going to be. She and I both had thick and annoying hair. In the picture, Noelle’s wild, unruly hair was pulled back from her face, which was the way she always wore it. The unruliness was there, but under control. That’s how I would have described her to someone who didn’t know her: unruly, but under control. I guessed the description still fit. She’d played her cards exactly the way she’d wanted, right down to the bitter end.

Ted straightened up from the box he was filling, his hands on the small of his back. “Em,” he said, “we’re never going to get out of here if you pore over everything you find.”

I laughed. “I know,” I said. Enough. I closed the album and leaned forward to add it to the box of stuff we were keeping. I’d sort through her personal things later. Right now, we needed to get everything out of the house. Ted and I had decided we’d renovate before putting it up for rent. We’d redo the kitchen and the scratched hardwood floors and paint inside and out. And we’d tend the garden, as Noelle had asked. Tara was more into gardening than I was, so she said she’d be responsible for it. It wouldn’t take much work until the spring and by then the house would have a tenant. Suzanne Johnson was interested. She’d been renting ever since her divorce years ago, and with Cleve at college in Chapel Hill, she was ready to downsize. Plus she loved Sunset Park. I’d need to make sure she also loved gardening. My anger at Noelle didn’t erase even a molecule of the love I felt for her. She wanted her special little garden cared for, so I’d make sure that happened.

Patches was now part of my household and she didn’t seem thrilled at finding herself living with two dogs. She’d adjust. It struck me as strange that Noelle had asked us to take care of the garden in her note, but not her cat. Maybe she’d figured her neighbors would keep Patches once they found out what happened, but Noelle had loved that cat and I didn’t want her with strangers.

I opened a fresh packing carton and started in on the bookcase to the left of the fireplace while Ted continued with the shelves on the right. Tara and I had taken care of the kitchen and bedroom that morning, but the living room and Noelle’s office were the bigger challenge. The office closet and file cabinets still needed to be emptied out and I’d put them off because they were overflowing with papers and who knew what. I was itching to get at those papers, though. I knew Ted would want to toss them all, but I planned to scrutinize every receipt, every bill, everything, looking for answers. I also wanted to check out her computer. I didn’t think it was password protected and if I could get into her email, maybe I’d find The Answer. And maybe not.

I looked at the title of one of the books in my hands. The Midwife’s Challenge, it was called. I opened it and glanced at the copyright date: 1992. Old. I sighed. I kept looking for a clue that she’d left midwifery only a couple of years ago. I was still in denial even after calling the certification board and learning that Noelle had let her certification lapse eleven years earlier. Eleven years! “I still don’t get it,” I said to Ted now. “Why would she lie to us?”

Ted let out a sigh. He was tired of the whole subject. “Did she actually lie or did she just leave out information?” he asked.

“She lied. Up until a couple of years ago, she was always telling me she had a delivery scheduled or she’d mention something going on with a patient.” I couldn’t think of any specific examples, but I was sure she’d talked to me about her patients. “Then there were those trips she was always making to the country or the backwoods or … wherever. You know, her so-called ‘rural work.’ She’d stay there for months, delivering babies. That’s what she always told us.”

“Could she have been practicing under the radar?” Ted asked.

“I can’t imagine it.” As unorthodox as Noelle could be, she wasn’t the sort to skirt the law. She’d been professional and cautious. She’d always dissuade her high-risk patients from considering a home birth. I knew, because I’d been one of them. Tara and I had been due three weeks apart, and we’d both wanted home births. But I’d had two miscarriages before getting pregnant with Jenny as well as some complications during my pregnancy with her, so Noelle vetoed a home birth for me and referred me to her favorite obstetrician. She’d wanted to assist at the hospital delivery, but nothing went according to plan. Ted was out of town when I went into labor three weeks early—the same night as Tara—and I ended up with a C-section. So Noelle was with Tara when Jenny made her happy, healthy way into the world, and I don’t think I’d ever felt quite so alone. “I can’t picture her practicing without her certification,” I said now to Ted. Yet, I couldn’t picture her killing herself, either. “We should have known what was going on with her.” I reached for another book on the shelf.

“Hon, please stop blaming yourself.” Ted sat down on the sagging sofa, rubbing his lower back. “Look,” he said, “Noelle was great, but she wasn’t the most stable person in the world. You know that.”

“She was perfectly stable. Different? For sure. Unstable? No.”

“What stable person keeps a secret life from the people who love her? What stable person happens to have … what was it? Twelve? Twelve bottles of drugs lying around, stockpiled for the day she killed herself? What stable person kills herself, for that matter?”

“I think she had those pills from after the car accident, when she hurt her back.” Noelle had been driving back from a middle-of-the-night delivery when she was rear-ended at a stoplight, and I remembered that dark period long ago when she’d been so often in pain. Then she organized the babies program and came back to life.

“What are these?” Ted was back on his feet, leaning over to lift one of several fat, leather-bound books from the bottom shelf of the bookcase. He blew the dust off the cover and leafed through the pages. “Handwriting,” he said. “Is this a journal or something?” He handed the book to me.

“No.” I recognized it as I took it from his hand. “They’re her logs.” I opened the book and looked at the first entry: January 22, 1991. The patient’s name was Patty Robinson and Noelle had detailed her labor and delivery over four and a half pages. I smiled as I read her words. “She was such a strange mix, Ted,” I said. “She has all these really technical notes and then she says, ‘I left Patty and her new little angel at 10:00 a.m., when birdsong poured through the open window and the scent of coffee filled the air.'” I looked at the other leather-bound logs lined up on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. “Oh, give me the one with Gracie in it!” I said. “This one ends in 1992, so Grace is probably in the third one, maybe.”

Ted handed the third book to me and I sat down on the floor and flipped through the musty-smelling pages until I reached Grace’s delivery in September. I scanned Noelle’s notes. I knew that Tara’s labor had been long and harrowing compared to mine, which had been cut short by the C-section.

I skimmed Noelle’s notes until I came to this one: “'Baby girl came into the world at 1:34 a.m., nineteen inches long, six pounds two ounces,'” I read aloud to Ted. “'She’s a beauty! They’re naming her Grace.’”

Ted bent over to plant a kiss on the top of my head, though I didn’t think he’d heard a word I’d read. “You want to finish up the shelves while I tackle the closet in Noelle’s office?” he asked. “Can’t put it off any longer.”

“Okay,” I said, but I held on to the book as if I were holding on to Grace. “I’ll come help you in a sec. Don’t throw anything away.”

I was sitting at the small desk in Noelle’s office a couple of hours later, looking through months of email on her monitor. There were some exchanges with Tara, myself, Jenny and Grace, but most of them were with Suzanne and other volunteers. There was nothing out of the ordinary. There was just plain nothing.

Ted dragged a huge cardboard box from the closet into the middle of the room. “Can we just toss this stuff?” he asked.

He’d opened the top of the box and I could see envelopes, cards, handwritten letters, photographs. “What is it?” I asked, reaching in for a handful. I set them on the desk and opened one of the cards.

Dear Noelle,

It’s hard to put into words what you’ve meant to us over the past nine months. I only wish that I’d had a home birth with all my kids now. It was extraordinary. Your warmth and gentleness and the way you were always there for me was incredible. (Even that night I called you at 3:00 a.m. and you came right over even though you guessed correctly it was just Braxton Hicks. Thank you!) Gina is nursing well and growing like crazy. We are so grateful to you, Noelle, and hope you will always be a part of our lives. Fondly, Zoe

“They’re thank-you cards and letters from patients,” I said. I plucked a picture of a baby from the box. “And pictures of babies she delivered.” And clues, I thought, although by now I was doubtful. I’d gone through stacks and stacks of memos and receipts and all sorts of junk and had to admit that most of it could be trashed.

“Toss them?” Ted asked hopefully.

I opened another card and read the words inside.

I couldn’t belive it when the lady brung the cute baby clothes to the shelter for me and my baby. Thank you, Miss Noelle!

I looked at Ted. “I can’t,” I said. “Not yet. I’ll take the box home with me. I’d like to look through it when I have time.”

Ted laughed. “When do you ever have time? You’ve got Hot! to manage and you’re trying to visit your grandfather a couple of times a week. And are you still planning to have Suzanne’s party at our house?”

I nearly choked on my breath. Suzanne’s party. I put my hands on my head. “I forgot all about it,” I said to Ted. I’d agreed to have the party at our house, since Noelle wanted to invite half the world and we had the space.

“Cancel it,” Ted said.

I shook my head. “We can’t. The invitations have all gone out and—”

“I’m sure Suzanne would understand, given the circumstances.”

Suzanne hadn’t said a word to me about it, probably not knowing how to bring it up. She was a single mother who’d fought cancer twice and never expected to see fifty. Noelle would want the party to go on. “No,” I said. “We’re having the party. It’s three weeks away and Tara’s going to help.” If there was anything that needed to be planned or managed or organized, Tara was the person to do it.

“Are you sure?” Ted asked. “I think you’re taking on too much.”

He was probably right and I wanted more time, not less, with my dying grandfather. I could hardly think about him without crying. Jenny and I’d visited him in Jacksonville the day before and he’d looked so emaciated in that big bed at the hospice that I’d barely recognized him. He’d been alert and happy to see us, though. My childhood was filled with memories of him. My father was always traveling and it was Grandpa who taught me to ride a bike and fish and even to cook. Making time to visit him was a priority.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t giving up this box.

“I want to keep the box for now,” I said to Ted. “I just want to see what all these women had to say to her.”

“I wish you’d dump it,” he said. “We don’t have room for all her stuff.”

“I’m taking it,” I said, feeling stubborn as I folded the top of the carton into place. Maybe, just maybe, something in the box would lead me to her son or her daughter and, in that small way, I could help Noelle live on.

10

Noelle

UNC Wilmington 1988

She sat in the lounge of the Galloway dormitory with the other Resident Assistants on the last day of their training. The freshmen would arrive the following day and then the lazy calm that had enveloped the Wilmington campus would give way to mayhem. Noelle was looking forward to it. She loved this school.

Empty pizza boxes and soda cans littered the tables of the lounge. Noelle hadn’t touched the artery-clogging pizza. She’d kicked off her sandals and sat cross-legged on one of the sofas, her long blue skirt pooling around her like the sea, and she ate carrot sticks and almonds from the Baggie she carried with her everywhere. She offered the bag to one of the other trainees, Luanne, who sat next to her on the couch and who helped herself to one of the carrot sticks. Of all the RA trainees in the lounge, Noelle was closest to Luanne, but that wasn’t saying much. Her fellow UNC students liked Noelle and respected her, but she was just a little too different to fit in. It had been that way all her life, and she didn’t really mind. She was used to holding herself a bit apart from her peers. The other girls treated her warmly and even turned to her with their problems, yet there was always a distance, and she never formed those intense, heart-to-heart connections that most women had with other women.

As for the guys … well, the jocks and frat boys had no idea how to relate to someone like Noelle. There was something weird about her, they’d say dismissively, not sure how to handle the discomfort they felt around her. She was the quirky woman you could see wandering alone around campus after midnight. She was pretty in an unconventional way, but she was too hard to get to know and not worth the effort. It was as if she were covered by a veil that couldn’t be pierced or lifted. She was simply out of their league, and deep down, they knew it.

Yet she had no dearth of lovers. There were certain guys on campus who were intrigued rather than intimidated by her. They were the cerebral or artsy types who were too shy to talk to the typical coeds, but who recognized in Noelle a kindred spirit. So although she’d had no real boyfriend during her first three years at UNC, she did have relationships that went deeper than friendship, even if those relationships would never lead to anything permanent. That was fine with her. She had one single goal and that was to become a midwife. The rest of her life could sort itself out later.

This would be her senior year as a nursing student and she was already researching midwifery programs for next year. She’d have no problem getting in wherever she wanted to go; she was at the top of her class. No one ever said as much, but they didn’t need to. She was a hard worker and her professors adored her. She had issues with some of the ridiculous rules she was required to follow in the hospital setting during her clinicals, but she did everything she was told. When she grew frustrated, she called her mother, who was still working for Miss Wilson and who could always calm her down. “Just do what they say and get your degree,” she’d tell her. “Then you’ll be freer to make your own rules. You have to find a way to work with the system, Noelle.”

Now, sitting with the other RA trainees in the lounge, Noelle focused her attention on the young man leaning against the back of one of the sofas. He was a grad student in psychology and he’d been their trainer for the past couple of days. “So tomorrow’s going to be chaos,” he said. “People will be complaining about their rooms and their roommates within an hour of their arrival. Just expect it and it won’t overwhelm you. If you have any problems, you know how to reach me, right?”

Everyone murmured a weary response. They were all tired of being cooped up in the lounge, and Noelle was no exception. The day was gorgeous, not too hot for the end of August, and she wanted to be outside. But the trainer was going to hand out their dorm assignments and she couldn’t leave until she’d received hers.

She’d requested the Galloway dorm, where she was sitting right that moment. It was where she’d spent her freshman year and she remembered the kindness of the RA she’d had back then. She wanted to be that helpful, nonjudgmental sort of RA for a new, green group of students.

The grad student was sifting through sheets of paper and Noelle knew they were the lists of students on each floor of the various dormitories.

“Noelle?” he said, holding one of the sheets toward her. “You’ve got Galloway. Third floor.”

“Excellent.” She stood to take the paper from him, then sat down next to Luanne again.

The grad student handed Luanne her list.

“I have Galloway, too,” Luanne said, studying the sheet of paper. “Cool.”

“What floor?” Noelle asked.

“Fourth.”

Noelle bit her lip, surprised when she felt a little seed of longing forming in her chest. “That’s where I lived my freshman year,” she said.

“Are you sentimental about it?” Luanne smiled at her. “I don’t have any big preference if you want to switch.”

She realized that she did want to switch. She couldn’t have said why. That year had been so good for her. She’d come into her own—away from home, living in a city for the first time in her life and loving every minute of it. The floors of the Galloway dorm were nearly identical, so it seemed silly to switch, and yet.

“You wouldn’t mind?” she asked.

“Uh-uh.” Luanne started to hand her the list of fourth-floor students, but as Noelle reached toward her with her own list, she noticed one of the names near the bottom of the paper and stopped. She looked hard at the name, her eyes narrowed as she tried to make sense of what she was reading. She drew the sheet of paper back.

“I’ll keep the third floor.” She heard the tremor in her voice. “I was just being silly. They’ve got our floors recorded and we’ll mess everything up if we trade.”

Luanne frowned at her. “I doubt it would be any big deal,” she said.

“No, this is fine,” Noelle said, and she pressed the list to her chest as if it were a long-buried treasure.

11

Tara

Wilmington, North Carolina 2010

I knocked on Grace’s door and heard her scramble a little, as though she might be doing something she didn’t want me to know about.

“Come in,” she said after a moment.

I opened the door and saw her sitting at her desk, a textbook open in her lap. She’d probably been on Facebook or answering email but was trying to convince me she was actually working. I didn’t care. I really didn’t. I just wanted her to be happy and okay. She looked up at me as she sipped from her favorite black mug. High-test coffee, no doubt. I couldn’t even drink the stuff she and Sam would make.

“Just wanted to see if you need any help with the sewing machine,” I asked.

“I don’t have time to do it now, Mom,” she said. “I’m studying.”

“Well, whenever.” I sat down on the edge of her bed, longing for a real conversation with her. Longing for contact. Twitter rested his big head on my knee and I ran my hand over his back. “Noelle would be so pleased you’re helping with the babies program.”

“Uh-huh.” She lifted her backpack from the floor and dug around inside it, pulling out a notebook. She looked everywhere in the room except at me. I hated the strain I felt between us. Just hated it.

I smiled at her mug. “I don’t know how you can drink coffee this late in the day,” I said.

She flipped open her notebook with an exasperated sigh. “You say that every single time you see me with a cup of coffee in the afternoon,” she said.

Did I? “It reminds me of your dad,” I said. “You two were so much alike that way.”

“Speaking of Dad,” she said, now looking directly at me, “how was your big date with Ian?”

I frowned, surprised by the question. Sarcasm wasn’t her style at all, and she’d caught me off guard. “It was not a date, Grace,” I said.

She looked out the window, her cheeks reddening, and I thought she’d blurted out the question before she’d been able to stop herself. “I think of Daddy being dead while you’re out having fun,” she said. “I don’t know how you can do that to him.”

“It wasn’t a date,” I said again. “Not the way you’re implying, anyway. It’ll be a long time before I’m interested in a man other than Daddy, but I need to be able to go out to dinner or a movie with a friend sometimes, the way you go out with Jenny. We both need to get out.” I leaned forward and lowered my head, trying to get her to look at me again. “Can you understand that?” I asked.

“It’s fine.” She didn’t sound convincing.

“I know you miss Cleve,” I said, straightening up again.

She looked down at her notebook and I had the feeling I’d touched an exposed nerve.

“It’s no big deal,” she said.

I’d never been certain how far things had gone between Grace and Cleve. Had they had sex? They’d gone out together for eight months and although I couldn’t picture it—I didn’t want to picture it—I suppose they had. The one thing I knew for sure was that she’d loved him. Even now, his pictures dotted her dresser and desk and the bulletin board behind the computer. She still loved him. I wished I could make the hurt go away.

“I remember what it was like when your father and I were separated,” I said.

“Separated? What are you talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t mean while we were married,” I said. “I mean when he went away to college while I was still in high school.”

“Well, the big difference with you and Daddy being separated was that Daddy didn’t break up with you before he left.” She looked surprised at herself for giving me a glimpse into her emotions. I needed to capitalize on that glimpse.

“I know, honey,” I said. “I know how hard it must be.”

“No, you don’t,” she muttered.

“I know it’s different than it was with your dad and me, but the way I dealt with being apart from him was to get busy. Get involved with things. Take action.” I leaned toward her. “I wish you could see how that would help you, Grace.”

“I am totally involved with things!” she snapped. “I’m working at the Animal House and going to school and now doing the stupid babies program. What more do you want?”

“All that’s good,” I said, “but it’s all work and no play, isn’t it? You could branch out a little, honey. I know you love Jenny, but you should do things with other friends, too. When your dad and I were apart, I made friends with Emerson and Noelle. I got into my studies and acted in plays.”

“Yeah, you were Miss Perfect, like always,” she said.

“I’m not saying that,” I said. “I’m just trying to tell you some possible ways to cope.” I twisted my wedding ring on my finger. I was doing that a lot lately whenever I felt tense. Whenever I felt as though I needed Sam by my side.

“You just stay busy so you don’t have to think about anything,” Grace said. “So you can forget about how messed up your life has gotten.”

“Oh, Grace.” I shook my head. “It has nothing to do with that. Being involved in things is just healthy.” I stopped twisting my ring and laid my hands flat on my thighs. “You know,” I said, “we haven’t talked about this in a while, but I wish you’d seriously consider joining the drama club. You don’t have to act. You’re such a good writer. You could write plays. I know you’re afraid it would seem weird, since I’m the—”

“You don’t know me at all!” She slapped her notebook down on her desk. “I’m not you, okay? I don’t deal with stuff the same way you do.”

“No. I know you don’t.” I slumped a little on her bed. I was failing with her again. “And that’s okay. It was just a thought.”

“I really need to study.” She lifted her biology book an inch or two off her lap to show me how I was interrupting her.

“All right.” I pushed myself off her bed, walked over to her chair and leaned down to give her a hug. She was stiff as a board beneath my arms. “I’ll call you when dinner’s ready,” I said.

I left her room, shutting her door behind me, and stood in the hallway feeling frustrated and a little lost. This chilly girl who treated me with such impatience and disdain was not the Grace I’d known and loved for sixteen years. This was a girl who was angry with me. I wasn’t sure exactly why. For going back to work only two weeks after Sam died? She’d been horrified by that, but I’d needed to stay as busy as possible to survive. Was she still angry I’d gotten rid of Sam’s things? Did she think I was betraying him by seeing Ian?

One thing I knew for certain was that, rightly or wrongly, she blamed me for Sam’s death.

There were moments when I even blamed myself.

12

Emerson

It was Friday afternoon, and I thought I would finally have some time to myself to look through the box of Noelle’s cards and letters. Jenny was still at school, Ted was showing a property to a client and I’d closed up the café after the lunch crowd. People were telling me I should start serving dinner, but lunch and breakfast were all I could manage. Right now I could hardly keep up with that.

When I got home, I was surprised to find Jenny and Grace in the bonus room above the garage, sorting through the stuff for the babies program.

“What are you two doing home?” I asked, surveying the neat piles they were making of clothing and blankets.

“Half day today,” Jenny said. She gave me a hug. Jenny was a hugger and always had been. She got it from me. She sure didn’t get it from Ted.

“How are you doing, Grace?” I asked, picking up a tiny yellow hand-knit sweater from one of the piles. “God, this stuff is cute.”

“I’m good,” Grace said. “I totally suck at sewing, though.” She held one of the little blankets toward me and I had to laugh at the puckered hem. “The rest I did are better,” she said. “It was the tension on the machine. Mom had to fix it for me.”

I could picture Grace sewing. Maybe even enjoying it. She’d always loved things she could do alone. Writing. Reading. Drawing.

“Listen,” I said. “Suzanne’s party is in a couple of weeks and Tara and I can really use some help with the decorations. Would you two have the time to—”

“Suzanne’s having a party?” Grace looked up from the blanket she was folding.

I nodded. “Her fiftieth birthday party,” I said. “We’re going to have it here at the house and—”

“Will Cleve come home for it?” she asked. Her face was so hopeful, so filled with longing, that I could hardly bear to look at her.

“I’m not sure, honey,” I said. “Maybe.” A light had gone out of Grace’s eyes when Cleve broke up with her.

Grace dropped the blanket she’d been holding and pulled her phone from her pocket. I watched as she texted a message—to Cleve, no doubt. Jenny watched, too, and I didn’t miss the worry in my daughter’s face.

Jenny looked up at me. “We can help, Mom,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “And one other thing. When I spoke to Suzanne this morning, she said a couple of preemies were born overnight and asked if one—or both—of you could take a couple of layettes over to the hospital this afternoon.”

“Sure,” Jenny said. She loved any excuse to drive now that she had her license.

Grace looked up from her phone. “Can you drop me off home first?” she asked Jenny.

“Don’t you want to see the babies?” Jenny asked.

Grace shook her head, but I knew it wasn’t the babies she didn’t want to see. It was the hospital. Tara had told me that Grace couldn’t even look at the road sign for the hospital these days without going pale.

“They need to go over this afternoon sometime,” I said, “so I’ll let you two work it out.”

“Okay,” Jenny answered.

I headed for the stairs and was halfway down them when I heard Jenny ask Grace, “What does he say?”

I stopped walking and stood still, snooping.

“Can’t miss it or she’d disown me,” Grace said. I pictured her reading the text message from her phone display. I could hear the smile in her voice. The hope.

Oh, Gracie, I thought. He’s eighteen and in college, honey. There’s no place for this to go.

Downstairs, I headed for our home office where the box of Noelle’s cards was waiting for me. The box was beginning to feel like another person in my house, a person with too much power for the space she took up. It was our last hope, that box. Nothing in Noelle’s house had given us answers. Tara and I had spoken with the staff at every single obstetrical office in a twenty-mile radius, and they all knew what we hadn’t known: Noelle gave up midwifery years ago. Few of them had seen her recently, so we didn’t bother asking if they knew she was depressed. Suzanne and the other volunteers were all coming to us with that question. Whatever had been bugging Noelle, she’d kept it to herself. I suspected that the box wasn’t going to give us the answer, either, but if I ignored it, at least it gave me hope.

No more excuses. I had time now. I was going to start digging.

Ted and I shared our home office. It was a big low-ceilinged room that the previous owners had added on as an in-law suite … for in-laws they must not have liked too much. The low ceiling was oppressive, but the space worked for us. Ted’s desk and office equipment were on one side, while my smaller desk was on the other. We’d had bookcases built into one windowless wall, and two long tables were set up in front of the windows where Ted could spread out his area maps. At that moment, Shadow and Blue were snoring beneath the tables. Before I’d opened Hot! I’d used my part of the office for household records. Now, I had my own filing cabinet devoted to the café. It was so wonderful how things had fallen together for me, and I’d started to feel as though my life was charmed. Now Sam and Noelle were dead and I was about to lose my grandpa, and I knew I would never have that everything’s-right-in-my-world feeling again.

I sat down in the armchair by the window and lifted a fistful of cards and letters from the box, but I quickly realized that a leisurely approach wasn’t going to do. In my hands I had a letter dated a month ago and another dated eight years ago. There was a copy of an email exchange between Noelle and another midwife. Two pictures of babies. A picture of a teenage boy. A birthday card from Jenny that I remembered picking out for her to send Noelle years earlier. It was as though Noelle had taken a giant Mixmaster to the box and scrambled the contents. I wished Tara had the time to help me. In thirty minutes, she could have this mess alphabetized and arranged by date.

I stood, cleared off one of the tables by the windows and began sorting the cards and letters and pictures and a few newspaper clippings. Ted still thought I should just toss the whole mess, but Noelle had kept these things. They’d been important to her. I wanted to try to feel whatever she’d felt as she dropped each of them into the box. Why did she keep them? Ted thought I was becoming maudlin, grieving over Noelle and worrying about my grandfather. He said I was obsessed, and maybe I was, but the box felt like my last link to one of my two best friends. These were the things she’d cared about enough to save.

If I approached the items chronologically, maybe I’d be able to follow what had gone on in her mind over the years. Maybe I could even write a minibiography of her. If we ever found her now-adult child, maybe he’d appreciate having that remembrance of his—or her—birth mother.

“Like you have time to write,” I said to myself as I neatened the stack of cards. Shadow lifted his head to look at me on the off chance I was talking about food.

I spotted the card I’d sent Noelle for her last birthday. Her very last birthday. I touched the card, heavyhearted, then pulled another handful from the box. There was a newspaper clipping from the year before about the obstetrical practices in the area getting rid of their midwives. I shook my head. That was why we thought she’d quit. She told us that, didn’t she? That she was getting out while the getting was good, when the truth was, she’d gotten out long ago. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked out loud.

My plan to organize the items chronologically quickly fell apart because so many of the cards and letters had no dates. So I stacked them according to type: cards in one pile, letters in another, printouts of emails in a third pile and newspaper articles in a fourth. Tucked in the bottom of the carton, caught halfway beneath the flap, was a valentine Grace had made for Noelle when she couldn’t have been more than four. I pictured Noelle holding the card above her trash can, then deciding to add it to this box of keepsakes instead.

I heard the girls leave the house and used that interruption to take a break. In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea and unwrapped one of the scones I’d brought home from the café, breaking off the corners to give to the dogs. Then I carried the scone and tea back to the office.

When I walked into the room, a little blue-and-white-checked note card on the top of a pile jumped out at me. I rested my mug and plate on my desk and picked up the card. When I opened it, I had to sit down in the armchair as it hit me: the card was from me, and it was ancient. Seventeen years old, to be exact.

Noelle,

Thank you for taking care of me. You seem to understand exactly how painful this has been for me and know just the right things to do and say to help. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Love, Em

I remembered writing the words a few weeks after my second miscarriage. My second baby lost. Ted and I had lived near the campus then, and Noelle moved in with us for a couple of weeks to take over everything. She cooked and cleaned and, most important of all, listened to me grieve. Ted had run out of words to comfort me by then; he had his own grief to deal with. Noelle knew how badly I’d wanted those babies. Little more than a year later, I’d be holding Jenny in my arms. She couldn’t make up for the loss I felt—the loss I still felt when I thought of those babies I never got to know—but Jenny brought me back to life.

I held the card in my hand for a while. What was the point of keeping it? Of keeping any of the notes written to Noelle? Yet I put it back on the pile. I didn’t need to make any decisions right now.

I sipped my tea as I read through some of the letters. They were filled with happy words of gratitude, the sort of sentiments you wrote when you were bursting with joy, and I needed to read them after being broadsided by my own sad old card. I held the stack of letters on my lap, scanning most of them, reading every word of others, turning each of them upside down on the arm of the chair as I finished with it.

I came to a nearly blank sheet of notepaper and it took me a moment to recognize it as Noelle’s stationery. There was a familiar, faint peach-basket-weave pattern to the paper. I hadn’t seen her stationery in years—did anyone still write letters by hand?—but I remembered getting the occasional note from her on this paper. There was only one line on the sheet.

Dear Anna,

I’ve started this letter so many times and here I am, starting it again with no idea how to tell you

That was it. Just that line. Tell her what? Who was Anna? I sifted through the letters and cards looking for anything from an Anna. There was a card signed by an Ana. All she wrote was, “Noelle, Our family adores you! Ana.” Spelled differently from the Anna in Noelle’s letter. No surname. No date. There was a picture of a little boy attached to the card with tape, and when I pulled it off I saw a name written on the back: Paul Delaney.

No idea how to tell you.

The letter was old. The peach-colored paper was soft with age. What could it possibly matter now?

I shrugged off the unfinished letter and continued making my way through the pile, nibbling my scone and sipping my Earl Grey. It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the stack that I found another partial letter Noelle had written, this one typed. It was a bit crumpled. I remembered needing to flatten it when I first stacked the letters. I read it, sucking in my breath and forgetting to let it out again, and I stood so quickly, so violently, that I knocked my cup of tea to the floor.

13

Noelle

UNC Wilmington 1988

The second day after the freshmen filled the Galloway dormitory, Noelle made her rounds, saving Room 305 for last the way she saved the blueberries for last in her fruit salad each morning because they were her favorite. She never felt anxious about those blueberries, though, and she was definitely feeling anxious about Room 305.

In the hallway, she heard laughter coming from the room even before she neared the open doorway. They were bonding, the two girls. Emerson McGarrity and Tara Locke. She knocked on the doorjamb, peering inside. The girls were sitting on the bed closest to the window, culling through a stack of record albums. They looked up at her and she knew immediately which one was Tara—the brown-eyed blonde—and which one was Emerson. Her hair was long, dark and curly. Noelle knew exactly how hard it would be to pull a comb through that hair.

“Hi.” She smiled. “I’m Noelle Downie, your Resident Assistant. I’m making the rounds to get to know everyone.”

The blonde hopped to her bare feet and held out a hand. “I’m Tara,” she said.

Noelle shook the girl’s hand, then turned her attention to Emerson, who had a stack of records in her lap and didn’t bother to get up. Noelle had to lean forward to shake her hand. “Emerson?” she asked.

“Right.” She had a nice smile, warm and encouraging, and Noelle had a hard time letting go of her hand.

“You want to sit?” Tara motioned to the desk chair and Noelle was surprised at her need to drop into it, her knees suddenly too soft to hold her upright.

“I could hear you two laughing like you’ve been friends for a long time,” she said. “Did you know each other before you got here?”

They laughed again and looked at each other. “It only feels that way,” Tara said. Of the two of them, she was clearly the more outgoing. You could see it in her bright eyes, hear it in the self-assured volume of her voice.

“We clicked right away,” Emerson said. “I mean, we talked on the phone once over the summer about what we were bringing and everything, but we didn’t know each other at all, really.”

“And then when we met yesterday it was like we’d known each other forever,” Tara said. “We stayed up all night talking.”

“That’s super,” Noelle said. “Doesn’t always work out that way.” Doesn’t always last, either, she thought. She hoped it did work out for these two. Already, she wanted everything good for Emerson. Her feelings scared her; they were so visceral, so deep. She had to watch what she said and did. She could lose herself too easily here in this room. She had to treat Emerson no differently than she did the other students.

She glanced at the dressers. Framed photographs stood on each of them. Testing her legs, she got to her feet and picked up one of a young man with dark hair so long it brushed his shoulders. He looked familiar. He had a symmetrically shaped face and that combination of blue eyes and black hair that was hard to forget. “Who’s this guy?” she looked from Emerson to Tara.

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