The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,107

County. Two were primagravida mothers and the third was a gravida five who was two weeks late. Still, all three were textbook smooth with not even a moment of complications.

After the third birth, I came home Wednesday morning and slept for a few hours before accompanying Marta to the courthouse. The pretrial hearing was brief. The DA said he was ready to plea bargain. Marta spoke for herself, saying she was innocent and had no reason to bargain. Her attorney was clearly flustered and requested to speak to the judge. He granted her permission, and Connie Stanton shuffled up to the bench. The back of her gray skirt was wrinkled, and her hair, tucked into an untidy French roll, looked as if it might spring free at any moment.

As she spoke to the judge, I looked around the room, noting a few Amish and Mennonites in attendance, but none I knew. Feeling antsy, I pulled out my cell phone to check for messages. It had been a week, and even though the DNA test was scheduled for tomorrow, Ada still hadn’t returned my text. Actually texts—I’d sent two more asking if she’d received the first, and she still hadn’t responded.

The phone vibrated just as I was putting it away and I quickly jerked it back up, only to see that the message wasn’t from Ada but instead from Sophie: Got your email! You contacted a Realtor? What’s going on? Call me…

I would have to answer her later. Connie Stanton stopped whispering to the judge and stepped away from the bench. He hit his gavel once and set a trial date of September 17. September. By then, I’d either be in Oregon for the hazelnut harvest or I would have sold the orchard. Maybe I would be in Baltimore. But there was no way I was going to be in Pennsylvania. Even Marta had to know I couldn’t stick around that long.

She turned toward me, and a moment later I pushed open the solid wood doors and she followed me out to the second floor lobby and then down the stairs to the foyer. Neither of us said a word as we walked to the car. Once we were in the borrowed Datsun, Marta said she’d been thinking a lot about Esther and wondering how Caroline was doing. Given all she’d just been through, I marveled at her train of thought.

“Let’s stop by,” she said. “We’re just a couple of blocks away.”

Now that the baby was under the care of a pediatrician, ours was strictly a social visit. But once we got there, it soon turned into something more. David was home, and as he let us in, he explained that Caroline had a cold and her breathing seemed labored. They had an appointment with the doctor for that afternoon but had been trying to decide if they should head over sooner, if maybe they should even get her to the hospital.

“Go get your stethoscope,” Marta whispered to me.

A few minutes later I had little Caroline lengthwise in my lap, her dark eyes fixed on mine, the diaphragm of my scope against her body. But I knew already, from the rise and fall of her chest, that she had pneumonia.

Marta knew it too. “You take them,” she said to me. “I’ll stay with Simon.”

The ER doc confirmed that Caroline had pneumonia and ordered tests to find out if it was bacterial or viral. She was admitted to the pediatric critical care unit and in no time was in a warm isolette, wearing just a diaper, and hooked up to an IV.

I stayed with Esther and David, answering their questions. If the pneumonia was bacterial, Caroline would be given antibiotics. If it was viral, then all that could be done would be to give her fluids and oxygen, if she needed it. The nurses were attentive and gentle with both the baby and Esther and David. I tried to talk the parents into going down to the cafeteria for lunch, but they wouldn’t leave their daughter’s side.

I went down by myself, sending Sean a text on the way, and bought sandwiches for Esther and David. When I came back into the room, an oxygen mask was over Caroline’s face. Esther was crying even as she was humming to the baby. It took me a second to recognize the tune, the chorus to “Our God Is an Awesome God.”

“She is struggling more and more to get her breath,” David told me. “We leave