“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 rearended 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.”