He brought it, then his own, and they were alone at the table while the kids carried on their own conversation about the game, lapsing into Kinyarwanda—then, with a glance at him, returning to English. Rules for guests.
Tara tried to kick off the conversation. “How do you like being a doctor in Precipice?” She tucked a finger into the newborn’s tiny hand.
“It’s nice.” Calling himself to the conversation, Isaac shrugged.
Tara thought he sounded as though he was just visiting.
The baby began to wake, and she lifted the child from the sling. “Hello, Laura. Hello, hello, sweet princess.”
Laura. A coincidence that this baby should share a name with one of his dead children, one of the triplets. Only Danielle had survived the birth, to become his brother’s namesake three days later, when he had named her sisters, too, the sisters he’d dug up from the dirt in which they were buried. As he’d dug to find Heloise. His hands itched to hold this Laura. Could holding her be part of healing?
He reached out.
So the doctor likes babies. Tara filed the thought away. What was his story? What had happened to the children’s mother? Was she Hutu or Tutsi? One or the other, surely.
“This is Laura Estrella,” she said. Her hands to his. Big, long-fingered hands, man hands, beautiful hands.
The baby was all eyes. She was also wet, Isaac observed, and Tara hadn’t brought a diaper bag inside. “How many days old?”
“Two weeks.” Two weeks of finishing business at Maternity House—without letting anyone know about Laura. Then, packing her birth records and midwifery texts, settling into a routine with Laura. But this man would know, would know she hadn’t given birth to the child. I’m looking after her for her mother. Sure. Why not? Tara said the words, then followed them up. “I was working at Maternity House in Sagrado, Texas. Her mother was from Mexico and came up to have the baby. She’s young and doesn’t want to take care of Laura yet.” A lie. It was the worst kind of lie, partly true.
Isaac’s eyes belonged to Laura now—so they’d stay off Tara. A woman was a complication he didn’t need, unless she liked babysitting. He’d ask her about that in a minute, seeing she’d appeared on his doorstep like Mary Poppins. “What’s Maternity House?”
“A birth center. I’m a midwife, too.”
“Oh.”
She wanted to know what he thought. Whose side was he on? Between doctors and midwives in the United States, there were always sides. She asked, “And do you approve?”
He glanced up. “Why should it matter?”
Only analysts should answer questions with questions; in other people, it seemed like evasion. “The medical community here. No one will provide physician backup while my mother’s doing homebirths.”
Not my problem, Isaac thought automatically, as automatically as he had once known no sense of “other,” always seeing himself in another’s eyes, always looking for the global solution. But not now and not homebirth.
With fifteen hospital beds for every ten thousand Rwandans, he and Heloise had both attended births in homes. But his boys had been born at the hospital, Danielle the only gift in a disaster at home.
When Dan visited, they’d listened to his stories of obstetrics in Precipice and sometimes of “the midwives.” Dan could make you laugh.
Especially in a country with so little to laugh about.
The midwives! Isaac remembered. Dan visiting Kibuye, talking about Francesca Walcott, Ivy the Babe, Tara the... Oh, yes, he’d heard all about Tara, hadn’t he?
She was the one who said “yoni” instead of “vagina,” YBAC instead of VBAC... Isaac wished he could remember more. That night, Heloise had said, “Yoni. I love that word. Yes, you must call my garden my ‘yoni’ from now on.” And he had. Except when he called it her garden.
He didn’t want Tara watching his kids, after all.
Noticing that Laura had soaked the front of his shirt, Tara shoved her pie plate away from her. “Hold her, okay, while I run out to the car?”
As Tara left, Laura began to cry, and he lifted her to his shoulder and stood. Precious baby.
Oliver and David headed upstairs. The music went off.
Danielle came over to squint up at him and the newborn. “La bébé est—”
She stopped midsentence.
Crouching beside her, he smiled, teasing. “C’est pour votre bien.”
She laughed, then tried. “You are—funny!”
“You are smart. My favorite girl.”
Danielle touched the baby and told her, in Kinyarwanda, to stop crying, Mama would be back. Laura was momentarily silent, but by the time Tara returned, her screaming had driven even Danielle to her room.
“Sorry,” Isaac apologized. “She’s mad.”
“There’s not much you could’ve done. Hungry and wet.” Taking the infant, Tara moved to his kitchen to warm some milk, set up the feeder. Minutes later, she sat on his couch and began to nurse, banishing any shyness about the feeder. I’m so lucky, Laura. Lucky to have you.
The cat dropped mouse guts at Isaac’s feet. He disposed of the remains, then sat opposite Tara, on a longer, more tattered couch. “How are you doing that?”
Tara’s face felt fiery for the second time that day.
He said, “Clinical interest.”
She tried to forget he was Dan McCrea’s brother. “Sure. It’s a supplemental feeder. There’s a tube. I’m not even producing milk yet.”
“I’ve never known a woman to do that. Induce lactation.” He brought Tara a fresh tumbler of water.
“Thank you.” His wife must have nursed. “Actually, I’d like to see if I can get a breast-milk bank going here. And a support group for nursing mothers.”
Good ideas. None of her attitudes shocked him. Heloise’s sister had nursed Danielle.
The cat rubbed his legs.
Isaac fetched their pie plates and set them on the big footstools. Between bites of apple pie, he asked, “Will you be practicing midwifery with your mother?”
“We haven’t worked that out yet.” Play it cool, Tara. It was one thing to practice as an unlicensed lay midwife in Colorado; it was another thing to confess the fact to a physician. Laura watched her. “I can’t stop looking at this baby. She’s irresistible.” Time to get a hundred miles away from the topic of midwifery. “My mom says you’re absolutely set on selling that house.”
“Right.” It wasn’t her business why. Raised Quaker and practicing into adulthood—right up to Heloise’s death in a country where priests had slayed or betrayed their own flocks, where anyone seemingly would kill anyone—Isaac had little trouble controlling what came out of his mouth.
“You know, my mom could probably pay a little more rent.”
“Then she shouldn’t have trouble finding a new place.”
“You don’t know Precipice.”
Isaac finished his piece of pie. He didn’t like turning a woman out of her home, but he had obligations. He yawned conspicuously.
Tara seemed not to see it. She was preoccupied, her forehead creased in a frown.
Her question made him jump in his skin.
“So, you’re...not married?”
CHAPTER TWO
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