The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,57

suspicion about his mother.

By the time we reached the covered bridge, dusk was falling. I eased onto the wooden slats carefully, releasing my anxiety with a sigh when the car rolled back onto the pavement on the other side. By the time we reached the cottage, though, my angst was gathering steam again, but Marta was nowhere to be found. I marched out to her office, ready to confront the woman whom I now knew was my aunt.

“You’re right,” she said, calmly, after my rant. “I am your biological aunt. We share some of the same DNA. That’s all.” She sat at her desk. “I am very sorry that you came out here to find this out. I did my best to stop you once I suspected who you were.” She looked up at me. “I was told, all those years ago, that your adoptive parents had renamed you. Clearly they didn’t, and that caught me off guard.”

“Please tell me what you know,” I begged.

“There’s nothing to tell. I haven’t seen Giselle in over two decades. I haven’t had a letter. Not even a postcard.”

“And no one else has heard from her?”

She shrugged. “That’s not really my business to tell.”

I stared at her.

“Alexandra,” she said. I shivered. It was the first time she’d called me by my full name, and the way she said it sounded as if she’d said it before. “Some things are better left alone,” she added.

I crossed my arms. “I would like to meet my—” I stopped, about to say “grandmother,” but instead I used the more familiar term, mostly to see how it would feel on my tongue, but perhaps also to get a rise out of Marta. “Mammi. I want to meet Mammi.”

Marta winced. Bull’s-eye.

“And Klara,” I said, feeling emboldened. “And Ada. And even Alexander.”

She looked as if I were throwing darts at her, aiming at her narrow eyes. “That’s not a good idea,” she finally said. She stood. “We were raised to forgive and forget. It’s offensive to us for you to come rushing in here, asking questions and stirring up the past.”

I felt as if I’d been slapped.

She continued. “I don’t know how they do things in Oregon, but this isn’t how we do things here.” Her hands were flat on her desk, and she leaned forward. “I appreciate your help with my practice, but I do not appreciate you involving my children in your schemes.”

My phone beeped.

“As far as tomorrow,” Marta said, sinking back down into her chair, “you have four prenatal appointments here in the office in the afternoon. You’ll have the morning off.”

I didn’t respond. How could she expect me to keep helping her?

“I have more work to do now,” she said. “Please go.” She folded her arms atop her bare desk.

As I left, she lowered her head to her arms on the desk. I closed the door and stood for a moment in the darkness. The evening breeze whispered through the pine trees. A car whizzed by on the road. I thought I could hear the sound of the creek down the hill where it rushed under the bridge. Was the last sound, the one I couldn’t quite identify, Marta’s muffled crying behind the door?

The new text was from Sean, asking about dinner again. I walked over to the pine trees and stopped at the base of the largest in the small grove. I couldn’t handle Sean and dinner, not tonight.

Light from the dining room window illuminated the side yard as I sank down to the damp ground. They had rejected me as a loveable newborn. What had made me think they would accept me now?

Years ago when I was teenager, after I’d decided to wait to search for my birth family, I came across a book about adoption on Sophie’s desk. The title was The Primal Wound. I skimmed the book. It scared me. Put me on edge. I’d never imagined that adoption was so complicated. The premise was, being abandoned by one’s birth mother left the worst wound possible, one that would really never heal. Later, as an adult, I came across the book. I’d remembered it from before as being four or five hundred pages at least, but it wasn’t. It was actually a small volume just over two hundred pages. When I saw the book as an adult, I wondered if Sophie had been reading it all those years before or if she had left it for me to find. My gut feeling was