“I doubt any of that will happen,” I said. “Grace is sixteen and she’ll have a say in any decision. And you don’t think Tara would say, ‘Oh, here, she’s yours,’ do you?”

“What would you do if you were in Tara’s place right now?” Jenny asked.

I blew out a breath and looked up at the ceiling. “I would give the other woman—Anna Knightly—I would give her my deepest sympathy, but I would do just what I hope Tara is doing. Get Grace out of here and let the lawyers handle everything.” I was worried, though. Jenny and I had debated over getting something to eat because we thought Tara would call us within minutes. Now, nearly forty minutes had passed. What was taking so long?

“How would you feel in Grace’s shoes right now?” I asked.

She gnawed on her lip for a moment. “I’d want to get to know the people,” she said. “My other family. But I wouldn’t want them to try to take me away from you and Dad. I absolutely wouldn’t let them. And I’d feel sad that your baby died that way. That’s so awful. Poor Tara.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s unbearable to think about.”

“I just can’t stand how Grace must be feeling right now.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” I looked her in the eye. “They’re really going to need our support, Jen,” I said.

“I think we should have gone with Tara to the room,” she said.

My daughter was braver than I was. “You want to be with Grace?” I asked.

Jenny nodded.

“All right.” I got to my feet. “Let’s go find them.”



58

Grace


Mom was being her usual self, chatting up Haley and Anna as we waited on the couch in Haley’s room for a nurse to come swab my cheek. Someone had brought in another chair so everyone could sit and I was still cold, even though I knew the temperature in the room was fine. I had the blue blanket wrapped around my shoulders again and it felt like armor. I didn’t know what to hope for. If I was a match, I was afraid of what would happen to me next. If I wasn’t a match, Haley could die. When I thought about it that way, I knew I had no choice.

My mother was just as nervous as I was. She was talking a mile a minute, which wasn’t all that unusual, and within ten minutes she knew everything there was to know about the neighborhood where Haley and Anna lived in Virginia and what Haley liked in school and all that typical stuff. She was acting like the always-on Tara Vincent, but her eyes were darting between Haley and Anna and the open door of the room and she had moved her chair right next to mine and hadn’t stopped touching me since she showed up at the hospital. I was glad of that. I belong to her, I wanted to say to Anna. I know I’m your baby and it wasn’t fair someone ripped me off, but my mom raised me and I belong to her, okay?

The whole time my mother was talking, Anna and Haley kept staring at me like I was a peach in the grocery store and they were trying to decide if they wanted to take me home with them or not. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Everyone please stop staring at me,” I said. Mom moved closer to me on the sofa, but Anna and Haley just laughed.

“We can’t help it,” Anna said.

“I would so seriously like some of that hair,” Haley said.

I wondered if I could give her some of it. Have it cut and donate it to the Locks of Love program so they could make it into a wig for her. Could you specify who you wanted to receive your hair?

While I was thinking about how I could donate my hair, Emerson and Jenny suddenly showed up in the doorway.

“Knock, knock,” Emerson said. “We just wanted to see how Tara and Grace are doing.”

Anna stood from her chair like someone had poked her with a stick, and Haley suddenly sat up straight in her bed.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Then everything turned upside down.



59

Noelle


Wilmington, North Carolina

1994

She’d had taxing deliveries before, scary deliveries where a birth she’d expected to proceed without complications suddenly turned into something that made her pulse race. But Tara’s delivery of Grace would forever remain one of the most frightening experiences of her professional life.

Tara had called early that morning to tell her that her contractions had started, so Noelle didn’t take her morning cocktail of drugs for her back pain. Instead, she put pinches of turmeric between her cheek and gum and made a thermos of red clover tea, without much hope of relief. There was something to be said for herbal remedies in childbirth, but they were failing her when it came to her back. Her pain was worse than ever these days. The only thing that helped were the drugs, and she blessed the inventors of Percocet and Valium.

With each hour of Tara’s long, grueling labor, Noelle’s back seized harder until she occasionally had to mask her tears of pain, not wanting Tara or Sam to worry about her when they needed to be concentrating on themselves. Her own concentration was split between the task at hand and the pills she had in her purse. Just one Percocet, she thought to herself over and over again. Just enough to take the edge off. But she fought the need for the drugs and kept on going.

Around four in the afternoon, Emerson called to say that her water had broken and a neighbor was driving her to the hospital. Ted was in California at a Realtors’ convention and she was facing labor alone. She cried on the phone, and Noelle felt torn in two.

“Ted’s on his way to the airport,” Emerson said. “He’ll get the first flight out, but he has to change planes in Chicago. It’s going to take him forever to get here.”

“You’re in excellent hands, honey,” Noelle assured her. Without Ted or her two closest friends by her side, Emerson would suffer emotionally, but medically, she’d get good care and that was what mattered most right now. Everything had to go well for her. After the two lost babies, Noelle couldn’t bear the thought of Emerson having anything less than the smooth delivery of her healthy baby girl.

She kept in touch with her by phone, comforting her and cheering her on as she labored. Once Tara gave birth and she was certain both mother and baby were stable, she’d talk to Tara and Sam about bringing in the postpartum doula she’d been working with for the past couple of years. Tara knew Clare Briggs and would be comfortable with her. Then, if Emerson was still in labor, Noelle could run over to the hospital to be with her.

Late that night, while Ted was stuck in Chicago and Tara was fighting fear and pain, Noelle called the hospital and learned that Emerson was having an emergency C-section. Oh, how she wanted to be there to hold her sister’s hand! She kept in touch with the hospital—she knew nearly every nurse in the unit—and she breathed a sigh of relief when Jenny was born and both the baby and Emerson were reported to be healthy and stable.

She poured apple juice for Tara, Sam and herself, and between Tara’s contractions they toasted the birth of Jenny McGarrity Stiles. Sam alone knew her relationship to that baby. He squeezed her hand as she sat on the edge of their bed. Noelle couldn’t wait to see her niece, but first she had a baby to deliver.

Midwifery was always physically taxing. The bending, leaning, twisting and supporting were part of the process, and for the first time Noelle wasn’t sure she’d make it through. The red-hot torture in her lower back wouldn’t let up and she once again toyed with the idea of taking one of her pills. Just one. She could almost hear them calling to her from her bag in the kitchen. She’d be more effective if she could move with less pain, she told herself, but she knew better. She knew the danger. This delivery was too risky. She was dealing now with posterior arrest: the baby was stuck and she knew her only option might be to transport Tara to the hospital for Pitocin to strengthen her contractions. Tara wept at the idea. “Your healthy baby’s more important than a home birth,” Noelle said, but she assured her they would try everything else she could think of first. She wanted to separate Tara’s actual need for transport from her own longing to be in the hospital near Emerson and her baby, as well as her desire to have this delivery behind her so she could take something for her back. She and Sam worked together, physically supporting Tara, changing her position on the bed, walking her around the room, giving her tincture of cohosh and other herbs—in short, doing everything she could think of to help the little girl who was trying to be born.

With only one option left to her short of transport, Noelle attempted to manually rotate the baby. The delicate maneuvering seemed to take forever, though she knew it must have seemed far longer to Tara. Noelle wished she’d had an assistant—she needed four hands to manage the rotation. Maybe five. She let out an enormous sigh of relief when the baby finally turned into position, her fetal heart tones strong and reassuring. A short time later, the infant slipped into the world and Noelle wasn’t sure which of the four of them in that hot, dark room was the most exhausted or the most relieved.

She was bathing the infant in the kitchen when Sam came into the room to watch. “She’s all right now, isn’t she?” he asked. “Tara?”

“She’ll be fine,” Noelle said, and she knew that when Tara had briefly lost consciousness after the delivery, he’d been afraid. She knew how much he loved Tara. She saw it every time she was in the same room with them, and she felt both happiness for the two of them—two people she loved—and a searing envy that had never eased up. Now they had a child to bind them together even more tightly. She was glad she was only a couple of months away from marrying Ian. For the first time in her life, she had someone to fantasize about the future with. Her longing for children, for an out-in-the-open family tied together by blood, would someday soon be a reality.