The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,1
had known this was coming, that this was going to happen sooner rather than later. Still, that didn’t make it any easier.
Fingers trembling, I looked at the number as I dialed, even though I knew it by heart. My old friend and mentor, Sophie, answered on the first ring, blurting out the words I had expected to hear.
“It’s your dad, honey,” she said, her voice gentle but firm. “He needs you. It’s time for you to come on home.”
ONE
Three weeks later
For twenty-six years I thought I’d been told the truth. But I was wrong. “Alexandra,” my father rasped, his bony fingers fumbling for my hand.
“What is it?” I asked, leaning forward from my chair beside the bed, realizing that he was the only one who ever called me by my full name. Grasping my hand, he drew me closer, bringing my palm to his face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Sorry? Whatever for?” I asked, refusing to believe this dear man had a need to apologize to me for anything.
“For not telling you sooner. If your mother were still alive, she would have said something long before now.”
“Said something about what?” I asked, trying to ignore an odd fluttering in my stomach.
For a long moment he didn’t reply. Then he surprised me by saying it was about my adoption. It had been private, handled by an attorney, and though I had never been given many details about it beyond a few basic facts, my father seemed to have some sort of related, long-overdue information he wanted to share with me now.
“When your mother and I flew to Pennsylvania to get you, we met your birth grandmother,” he began, telling me what I already knew, how she had handed me to them in the Philadelphia airport, wrapped in the baby quilt that was now tucked away in the linen closet in my apartment in Portland. “It was the only time your mother and I ever left the Northwest.”
I knew that too. Before Mama became ill, we had taken day trips to Crater Lake and Mount St. Helens and the beach, but after she died he and I stuck pretty close to home, as they had before I came along in the first place.
“It pained your grandmother to give you up.”
I nodded again, wondering where he was going with this, what he so desperately needed to tell me. But then he began to cough, deep, rattling spasms that seemed to draw the very life from his lungs. Once the coughing stopped, he laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. Leaning forward, I whispered that he would have to save this conversation for later because right now he needed to stay quiet and get some rest.
The cancer that had started in his kidneys was in his lungs and probably working its way into his brain. Looking at his sad, sunken face now, I imagined the cells splitting, over and over. I willed them to stop, to rewind, but I knew it was too late.
After I washed the morning dishes, I bathed my father and turned him. The hospice nurse had asked me if she could order a hospital bed for the living room to make caring for him easier, but he wanted to die in his own room, the one he had slept in for the last fifty-two years, the one he’d shared with Mama.
At his request I played Bach’s Sei gegrüsset on his old stereo, and then after he took a few spoonfuls of vegetable soup for lunch, he asked me to read to him, nodding to his old worn King James Bible on the bedside table. I opened it to Psalm 23, wanting something familiar, words I wouldn’t stumble over. I read, “The Lord is my shepherd—” and then was interrupted by my cell phone trilling in my jeans’ pocket.
“Go ahead,” Dad said. “Maybe it’s your sweetheart.” His lips moved as if trying to smile.
I stood, digging out my phone. It was, indeed, James, his voice somber as he asked how we were doing.
“Getting by.” I didn’t want to give too many details with Dad listening. “How’s your project coming along?” It was the week before midterms, and James had a big presentation due the next day for his master’s in counseling program.
“Ah, I get it,” he said, his voice softer, deeper. “You’re there with your dad right now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I understand. Just tell me, are you all right? I mean, relatively speaking? You hanging in there?”