Free The Midwife by Jolina Petersheim

children, then I would promise to have children.” Her laughter did not escape her lips. “He should not have assumed. I could not put everything on hold and go on a three-month maternity leave. My business was just starting up.”
    “So,” I said, “the surrogacy kind of works in your favor? You can just go about your life without morning sickness or doctor’s appointments and let Thom take it from there?” I no longer cared that I was teetering on the brink of rudeness. Meredith made this child I carried sound not like a miracle, but like an inconvenience. If not for Thom, I knew I could not give this child to such a driven woman, who had allowed her job to overtake her life.
    Meredith maneuvered her car into a space wedgedbetween two vehicles and shifted into park. She flicked off the key. The classical music faded. “I do not think surrogacy works in anyone’s favor,” she snapped. Jerking the keys out of the ignition, she cracked open the door and grabbed her purse. Bending, she met my eyes. “Except, of course, maybe yours.”
    She slammed the car door and stalked off toward the hospital. Once again, I had no choice but to follow. As I did, I wondered if Thom had preceded me in Meredith’s anger, and if this child in my womb would trail in my wake.

    A Filipino man with salt-and-pepper hair in a shoulder-length braid came into the room. He carried a manila envelope I assumed held the paperwork I had completed in the hospital lobby. Sitting on the stool beside the examining table, his pristine sneakers squeaked as his heels propelled him across the tile.
    “You’ve had an ultrasound before?” His teeth gleamed in his tanned face. The computer monitor was tilted just beyond my line of vision, but I saw his fingertips were poised above the keyboard.
    “Not here, but yes.”
    “How many weeks are you?” he asked.
    “Seventeen.”
    A pause as he typed it in.
    “This your first child?” He looked up, waiting.
    I cleared my throat that was blocked with emotions and replied, “No. I . . . I’ve carried a child to full term before.”
    When he finished typing, he came over and stood before me. I had tugged my sweatpants down below my hip bones and pulled up my T-shirt. He squirted some of the warmed ultrasound gel on my stomach and rolled the wand that looked like a deodorant stick.
    “Have you felt the baby move?” he asked.
    I nodded. “Not too often, though,” I said. “Just started to feel her in the past two weeks.”
    He rolled the ultrasound wand lower. It seemed he was trying to manipulate the baby. He didn’t know that I knew a little about the medical profession, and I didn’t tell him. I wanted to be like any other patient, allowing him to reassure me when I was afraid that something was wrong.
    Fear grew in the silence until it became a steel trap bracketing my chest. “I had some pain this morning,” I whispered. “And I just wanted to make sure that everything’s all right.”
    The ultrasound technician didn’t look at me. He removed the wand and wiped the gel off my stomach with a wet cloth. He gave me a hand and boosted me into a sitting position. It was not the weight of the baby I carried, but the weight of my apprehension, that made me weak. “I’ll be right back,” he said, patting my knee.
    The computer screen flooded the darkness with a square pool of light. I stared at it and wondered if we had come this far only to have lost the child I’d just allowed myself to love. The terror I’d tried to keep at bay made me want to reach out to my mother, whose absence hurt as much now as it had when she had left. I even wanted to call Meredithand tell her to come back to the hospital. After pacing in the lobby and chain-sipping Diet Cokes for half an hour, she’d said she could not wait any longer. She’d given me the number to her portable phone and then walked out through the automatic doors without asking if I would be okay.
    Although she was the least maternal person I