The Amish Midwife by Mindy Starns Clark, Leslie Gould Page B

from three traveling nurse agencies. In the following weeks, on my days off, I sorted through Dad’s things, trying not to drown in my grief. Memories of my parents and obsessions of my nowkinless state hovered like a thick fog on the Willamette River. Then came the mid-March morning, almost five weeks after my father had passed, when the fog began to clear.
    I was riding my bike across the Broadway Bridge on my way home to Northwest Portland after a long labor and a difficult delivery of baby number 255. The weather was cold and the river was the color of steel. A tugboat pushed a barge toward the Saint Johns Bridge, and somewhere in the distance a whistle blew. Halfway across the bridge my cell phone began vibrating in the pocket of my bicycle jacket. I slowed and pulled it out.
Sophie
.
    I stopped the bike, leaning against the railing as I said hello. A pigeon flew up from the underside of the bridge. Another bicycle went by me, the rider a flash of orange-and-yellow Lycra topped with a superhero helmet. Slapped across the back of the helmet was a bumper sticker, “Keep Portland Weird.”
    “Hi, Sophie,” I said loudly, trying to be heard above the roar of the traffic on the metal plates of the bridge.
    She told me she had more information about the midwife in Pennsylvania that she’d told me about the day of Dad’s funeral. “It turns out she does need help,” Sophie said. I could barely hear her and began to wheel my bike with one hand. She said the woman was in legal trouble. I guessed it was one of those messy lay-midwife licensing issues and was thankful Ihadn’t agreed to help the woman. I already had a lead on a traveling nurse job in Pennsylvania, and my nursing license had arrived yesterday.
    “I don’t know what the issue is, exactly,” Sophie said. “I’ll let you know when I find out more. But, and this is really why I’m calling, I’m pretty sure you and Marta—the woman’s name is Marta Bayer—are related somehow. At least the mutual friend we have thinks so. I wish my mother were still alive to tell us how, exactly.”
    “My parents didn’t have any relatives in Pennsylvania,” I said, but even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized what she meant. She was talking about a blood relation.
    A
birth
relation.
    “Not adoptive relatives, Lexie,” she said, confirming my thoughts.
    I banged my knee as I struggled to keep my bike upright. “What did you say?”
    “She’s a blood relative. Maybe a cousin. Maybe closer.”
    “How close?” I whispered. When I realized she hadn’t heard me, I cleared my throat and asked again, louder this time.
    “She’s young, mid-thirties, I think, so she couldn’t be your birth mother. But still…”
    “Why does the mutual friend think we’re related?”
    “Well, we’re not positive about this,” Sophie said, “but we think that her mother, my mother, and your biological grandmother were all childhood friends in Indiana. That’s what we gathered when we met Marta at a conference a few years ago, anyway.”
    I strained to listen as Sophie talked through the connections that had generated their theory that this Pennsylvania midwife and I could be blood relatives. Soon my head began to throb inside my helmet. Finally, I asked Sophie if I could call her back.
    Even as I tucked away my phone, got back on my bike, and continued across the bridge, I knew what I was going to do. In my mind, I had already rearranged my schedule. I would fly out right away, but before starting the traveling nurse position in Philadelphia, I would help Marta for a couple of weeks in Lancaster County. The timing was perfect.
    Sailing downhill through the last wisps of fog, I knew that if this Marta person did indeed turn out to be a blood relative, she would be the first direct connection to my past I had ever had.
    Because of privacy issues, I couldn’t show James the photos of the two babies I received that day, one being Tonya’s baby that she had, in fact,