The Rocking Chair

No mother ever wants to give up her child. Even if she does happen to be dead. The Rocking Chair is an unique adoption experience.

The Rocking Chair

Constance sat in front of me again. We’d gotten her through her wedding and she’d settled into her married life. She’d been trying to get pregnant since the wedding since they were both older and could feel the clock ticking. At this point, she was nursing another set of menstrual cramps and miserable.

“I’m ready to give up,” she told me. Black circles hung under her very red eyes. She was in her forties. Pregnancy wasn’t going to get easier. It might have gone past the point of doable. She got out her hankie and blew her nose again.

“Let’s look at your cup,” I said, to break through the log jam of grief.

She reluctantly finished her tea and turned the cup upside down. Water streamed out of the leaves at the bottom into the saucer.

“Some tears,” I said. “But we knew that.”

Six months earlier Constance had had the wedding no one thought was possible. After caring for her dying mother, she came up for air to find Bill, a man her age with a similar background of early responsibilities, now accomplished and over. Their wedding had been a small miracle.

After one miracle, it seemed a small enough thing to ask for another. Was it really too late for her to have a child? People faced motherhood later and later nowadays. The risks were more manageable. And there was the fertility technology to help Mother Nature along.

But it still hadn’t happened. Now as I read for her, she had only one question, when would she become pregnant? Could she have a child?

It’s hard to read for someone who is asking a specific question loaded with a lot of fear or desire. Sometimes fear and/or desire come through stronger than what is actually going to happen. I feared that was what I might see in Constance’s cup.

The rim of the cup was heavy with tea leaves set like a barrier, tears streaming from them. But at the bottom of the cup, further on was a child’s mobile, hung with stars and moons and suns. And a rocking chair.

“Constance. I’m seeing some tough times for a while, but then I’m seeing a nursery,” I told her.

“Don’t tease!” she started to cry again.

“I’m not teasing. I’m not sure if I’m seeing what you are wishing for, but it’s what I see.

Constance clearly wasn’t convinced but after what we’d been through with her wedding, she wasn’t going to out and call me a liar. “Thanks for the good thoughts, Marlene!” she said sadly as she pulled out a small tip for me.

“You’ll let me know,” I said. We were all hoping for her. Someone ought to have a happy ending sometime.

It was six months later when she came in carrying an armload of bags from a baby store.

“You’ll never guess!” she held my arm excitedly. “We’ve got a baby coming!”

Constance didn’t look pregnant. But she did look radiant.

“My pastor knows a young woman who’s having a baby at a time when she’s not ready or able to be a mom. He’s facilitating the adoption. It’s a little girl, due at the end of the month. I don’t know if we can possibly get ready in time.”

“What does Bill say? I asked her.

“Bill says that she better like football.” We could only hope. One never knows who your children will be until they’ve become who they are. But it was a good beginning. Constance was in a flutter of baby showers and nesting. She was almost bouncing in her chair. Our tea arrived. She sipped hers and handed me the empty cup.

“I never thought to be a mother,” she said. “I thought I’d waited too long.”

“It seems you waited just the right amount of time. Never say never,” I reminded her.

I peered into her cup. There was a swirl of activity. I saw a flight of birds flying towards the cup handle dragging what might be a bundle. As I tipped out her cup, water flowed from out of the leaves. There was a rocking chair with vines woven in and out of it. I saw a pair of eyes staring at a chair. Her dog, Mabel, was barking ferociously.

“Why would Mabel be barking?” I asked her.

We were both puzzled by the barking dog. Mable was a sweet old lab who had barked twice last year when there was a deer in the yard. We couldn’t imagine what would set her dog off. But everything else was in place. I offered her my congratulations.

“So, when? “I asked her

“If all goes right, two weeks from today we pick her up. They’re worried about the delivery so the doctors have planned for a C-section.”

“What will you call her?” I asked.

“Dorothy, after my mother. I think we’ll l her Dottie,” she said.

I thought about my encounter with her mother. Her mother had stolen her own daughter’s engagement ring at one point. But sometimes you’re better off not knowing. I had decided not to tell Constance that then, and this was not the moment.

“The baby shower will be this Friday if you’d like to come,” she invited me.

“But of course,” I said. Happy endings, indeed.

She skipped out the tea room door, light as air.

The baby shower was thrown by her office friends. Maggie and I came, with Mary Jane baby booties and a copy of Goodnight Moon.

Her husband, Bill, had found a cradle and a lovely oak rocker. They might have come out of the same nursery. They were antiques, but the store knew nothing of their provenance. Made from solid dark wood, they spoke of solidity and safety that endures.

The rest of the nursery was in delicate pink florals and vines, beautifully set off by the deep chocolate browns. She visited several times as she came into town to do her shopping. She’d stop for a muffin and tea and a chance to show us the things she’d found online

It was three weeks later when she came into the tea room with a baby carrier on her arm. Dottie was a sweet pink rose in her little onesie and blanket. We passed Dottie around like a box of candy that we cooed over, snuggled, rocked and kissed. She soaked all that affection up like the happy baby sponge she was. Maggie had her tucked into her arms and was singing some sweet southern lullaby while I was reading for her.

“We’re thrilled.” She said. “But the story isn’t as happy as we hoped. Her birth mom didn’t make it. There were complications. She never got to see her little girl.”

Maggie looked up from the baby. “I bet her momma is grateful her baby is safe and cared for. Terrible thing to lose either one, mother or child. At least you’re here to catch her so she won’t fall through the cracks,”

Constance touched my arm, to stop me. “I need your advice.” She said.

“Surely not about motherhood. I don’t know anything about kids.” I shuttered at my ignorance on the subject.

“It’s not about that, Marlene. Maybe I’m at home a lot more than I used to be, but I keep feeling someone is watching me. When I sit and feed her, sometimes she seems to be looking at something over my shoulder. It doesn’t frighten Dottie. She coos and giggles at whatever it is. But I feel like there’s someone else in the house.”

“Well,” I said, “Let’s take a look.” We drank our tea and she placed her cup upside down for me to read it.

When I peered inside, there was a wonderful set up of vines and flowers everywhere reaching from a heart at the bottom. Then I saw the image the vines had camouflaged. A pair of arms reached down from the handle of her cup and another pair reached out of the heart at the bottom. There was a series of walking hearts among the vine. There was lots of love here. But some confusion about how the details would work out

“Someone is going to want to take some time with your baby. You may feel you’re in a competition of some kind. But Dottie is yours. Holding on to her tighter doesn’t make her less yours. It just makes her world less stable.”

I don’t know where those words came from. It wasn’t a thing I knew anything about personally. I’d never had brothers and sisters and I had no children. I was way too young for that, in my heart and head, even if my body was quite ready. But something said that for me.

Constance went home and worked on her nesting for the next couple of weeks. She called me in some distress. “Can you help me tell if someone is haunting our house?” she asked.

“Has something been happening? Are you feeling like you’re being watched? Are you frightened? “I asked her.

“It’s unnerving. It’s like someone unexpected is there. My husband thinks it’s nesting hormones. But I don’t think so. We’ve been up and down through the house and checked all the locks, doors and windows. They’re all secure. We even have an alarm system that should go on if the perimeter is breached in some way. He’s convinced the house is completely safed.”

“But you’re not,” I concluded.

“It’s not unsafe,” Constance said. “I’m just not alone. I can feel another person in the house. Besides, Mabel is sure someone is there. She keeps going up to the rocking chair and putting her head in it like she was putting her head in someone’s lap. When the baby came, she barked for around two days. Now she sits at the bottom of the rocker whether I’m there or not.”

Even if I were inclined to disbelieve Constance, I trusted Mabel. Mabel was a very sensible old lab who had raised a couple of litters of puppies and only barked at deer and at people she thought were dangerous. Mabel almost never barked at anything, except for bossy squirrels.

I’d heard of adoptive parents having hormonal reactions to a new infant. Constance was trying induced lactation with the baby and was fully nesting in many ways. Perhaps she was having an odd reaction to lack of sleep.

Or perhaps it was something else. “Constance,” I said,” just keep track of how you feel and reach out to any of us as you need to. This is a whole lot of changes for you, for your husband and for the baby. Every new mother needs help.”

“I guess, she said,” as if it were the logical conclusion and hung up.

I thought that would be the last of it. I was wrong.

She called me in a week. “Have you ever heard of a haunted rocking chair?” she asked me.

“Why do you ask?” I had a bad feeling about this.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I go into the room and I see the rocking chair rocking.”

“That could that be the wind. Are you sure you didn’t brush by it? Some of them are very sensitive.”

“Not with the windows closed. I walked into the nursery last night, Marlene, and the rocker was moving on its own.”

“Was the baby disturbed?” I asked.

“No. And that’s the strangest part. She was smiling looking up at the ceiling. The books say that babies can’t smile at that age, but I swear she was. But that’s not the strangest part. Mabel spends almost all her day sitting between the rocker and the cradle. As if she were keeping watch.”

“She could just be watching the baby.”

“I thought that too. But she keeps putting her head in the rocker.”

“Uh huh,” I said, registering Mabel’s response. “Are you afraid?” I listened for a tone in her voice that would say if it were past just worry and concern.

“I’m feeling unnerved,” she said. “Unsettled. Like something isn’t natural here. But there’s no indication that there’s anything to be afraid of. Would you mind coming and taking a look?”

I spoke with Maggie before I went over. “Maggie, have you ever heard of a haunted nursery?” I asked her.

“It happens. I seen it once or twice,” Maggie answered me. “People don’t just have babies, and they don’t just love their babies. They fall in love with them. It’s hope. Everybody need hope, living and dead. Some day you remember how nasty diapers are, but everything in you gots to love that little person. If it ain’t love, I don’t know what is. Where there’s that kind of connection, people have trouble letting go. Even if they’re dead. Why do you ask?”

“Constance thinks she has a haunted rocking chair. It’s moving at odd moments. The baby is focused on things in corners and she’s too young to be doing that. Whatever it is, Mabel the lab approves and likes to hang out with it.” I answered.

“Go look,” Rita told me. “But I wouldn’t worry overmuch. Babies need love and we pour love out on them. I doubt if it’s something bad. Unless.”

“Unless what?” I was having trouble following her thoughts.

“Some folk have a mighty weird notion of what love is,” Maggie finished.

The notion of that left my stomach queasy.

Constance answered my knock at her door. She shushed me as she invited me in. “Dottie just went down for her nap. I appreciate you coming to check this out. Does this need to be noisy?”

“Heavens no. I’ll just take a little look. Do you mind if I sit quietly in her room with her asleep

”No. Not at all,” Constance murmured.

I was ushered into a room like a pink and brown chocolate box. The baby was tucked into her crib safely asleep. The rocker was on the other side of the room. I sat across from the rocker in a chair by the crib. “Do you want me here?” Constance asked.

“Probably less distracting if you’re not,” I said. “Is there something you’d like to get done?”

“Is there! A nap—a real nap.” Constance feigned putting her head on her hands with her eyes closed.

“Off you go,” I said. She slid out of the nursery to her room for a long needed rest.

I sat into the chair and made myself quiet. The room itself was sweet, quiet, and comfortable. I stared at the rocker waiting for it to do something.

Of course it didn’t. After a half hour of feeling really foolish, I drifted off myself.

I saw a plump woman, in her early twenties, sitting in the chair.

“It’s not my chair,” she said. “But I do sit here sometimes.”

“Why are you here?” I asked her.

“I’m watching my baby,” she said. She rose and put her hand on baby Dorothy, lightly brushing her cheek.

“Who are you?” She cocked her head, appraising me.

“My name is Marlene. I’m a friend of the family. Constance has been nervous about having you in the house.”

“She needn’t be. I’m so grateful she took Annie in.”

‘Constance calls her Dottie,” I corrected.

“I called her Annie,” she said with a flourish of pride. “I had enough time to give her a name before I died.”

“So you know you’re dead.” That would make this easier. It’s always distressing for someone to learn they’ve died. I don’t know if it’s worse being dead or if finding they’re still here afterwards. At least I wouldn’t have to walk her through that.

“I know,” she nodded. “I just couldn’t leave yet.” She reached for Dottie in her crib.

“Are you worried about the baby?” I asked.

“No,” she shook her head. “I just needed some time with her.”

“Your name is?” I asked her.

“Megan. Megan Collen,” she said.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Ghosts need many things. But I had a feeling this might be different.

“I just want to watch my baby grow,” she said. “I won’t try to interfere. I won’t disturb anyone. We had so little time together.” She was pleading.

“Don’t you feel the need to move on to what’s next?”

“I can’t. Annie needs me. Even with Constance who I think is a good mom. They both need me and I can’t leave them.”

“You should consider moving on. But I can’t imagine how you feel.”

“No you can’t” Her tone had turned sharp.” I want my child with me.”

“You won’t try to take her?” I asked.

“Take her where?” Megan sighed. “I want her to live her life. I just want to watch for a little while. Would you ask Constance if I may stay?”

“What will you do if she says no?” I wasn’t sure I’d get an honest answer, but it needed to be asked.

“Leave I guess” she said with a shrug. “But I won’t trouble anything.”

“This is going to be easier with permission than without. This is Constance’s home and she has a right to her privacy. If you’d lived, you still would have been separated. I think you know that.”

“Then ask her. Ask Constance if she minds. I’ll not hurt a soul. I’ll help if I can.”

I’ll ask Constance” I said. “But you don’t want your little girl growing up looking for ghosts. That’s a problem on its own.”

“I know.” Megan nodded. “Just a little while.”

She faded out of the chair as she was rocking it. It continued to move for a minute more, back and forth, a silent sentry.

I startled into wakefulness. Had I dreamed it or was it real? Sometimes both were true. I tiptoed out of the room and found Constance asleep in her chair. I sat down across from her. She startled awake as my cushion squeaked. “Did you find anything?” she asked softly.

“How much do you know about the birth mother,” I asked?

“She was very young. There were complications with the birth and she didn’t make it. Why?”

“Is she someone you would have minded having an open adoption with.” I asked her.

Constance shook her head as if to wake herself. “I don’t think it would have been a problem. But we’ll never know now. She’s dead.”

“Yes. And that’s why I think you’ll be seeing more of her.”

Constance’s eyes glazed over at that point. “What do you mean?” she asked me.

“She’s in the nursery” I told her. “Her name is Megan, and she’d like to stay for a while and watch her child grow.”

Constance started out of her chair. “Can she do that?”

“She’s a human spirit, Constance. She can’t be forced and she can’t be thrown out. You can be nasty to her, but she’s lost everything. I don’t think you’ll find her intrusive.”

By now Constance was standing, grasping the back of her chair for balance. “Oh my God. She’s already intrusive. She’s in our home!”

“You might want to remember,” I reminded her, “that she has nowhere on this world that is home. The chances are good that if she has something of what she needs now she’ll be more able to move on to whatever is next. She’ll be less likely to bother the baby or to be bitter. Those attitudes can be passed on through families, even after death.”

“So I have to have her in my house?” By now Constance was out of her shock and ready to go to war. At least if she was clutching the chair she wasn’t strangling anyone. But her hair had risen in a wave with her upset.

“Constance, think of her as an extra relative who lives upstairs and you don’t see often. She thinks there’s something she needs to give her child yet. What if she’s right? If she makes problems we can approach it differently, but she’s a lost soul. And she’s lost so much.”

“I need to talk to my husband. I need somehow to talk to her.” Constance said frantically.

“If you were to talk to her, what would you say?” I tried to slow this down for Constance, to pour oil on the waters. “This is not a scary ghost. This is a young woman who lost her child and her life. You have some reasons to be grateful for her trust and generosity. She gave you her baby.”

Constance’s hair settled and with that some of her panic. “Okay. If I were to talk to Megan I’d thank her for bringing Dottie into the world. I’d thank her for our baby. We’ll love and care for her as best as we can. But ask her to please don’t scare or trouble us.”

I saw Megan, hands stretched out in front of me.

“I don’t think she wants to trouble you.” I answered for her. “You never know. You may need her help.”

“Okay,” Constance said. “Trial basis okay. Ask her not to scare us, okay?”

I saw Megan nod quietly in assent. “I think you’ll find her the perfect nanny,” I told her.

Two months later Constance and Dottie came to visit us at the tea room. Maggie came over and took Dottie in hand. She was singing to her while I read for Constance.

“I had no idea what it would be like to have a ghost,” Constance told me. “It’s like I have an extra pair of hands.” Constance said, laughing.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“I’m getting ready to diaper Dottie, and I find a fresh diaper next to my hand waiting for me. I hear her start to wake and I walk in and she’s giggling at a form in the corner. I lost her favorite monkey doll only to find it tucked into the rocker waiting for her.” Constance may have had doubts about having a house ghost but Megan was a sterling astral guest.

“From what I saw, Megan seemed like a very nice young lady.” I told Constance. “It’s nice she can watch her child grow up.”

“It’s weird,” Constance admitted. “I’ve started telling her things. I sometimes think I see her in the mirror.” She sagged a little. “I’m so tired,” She told me.

“That’s fairly common,” I said. Then I looked at her with a more critical eye. Her eyes were rimmed in purple shadows and she looked dreadfully thin. She didn’t look sick. She looked pregnant.

“Have you had the flu?” I asked her.

“I’ve felt sick. Maybe that’s it.”

“How long?” I was coming to a conclusion on this.

“Three weeks?” she counted up.

I shook my head. “Flu doesn’t last that long.”

She got my meaning but she denied it straight out. “No. The doctor told us there wasn’t a chance. No. We went through all those fertility treatments.”

I looked into her cup. I saw two toddlers hanging in baby swings and two women pushing. The vines around them made a safe haven.

“I’d still pee on a test strip if I were you,” I told her. “I see you with two babies, not one.”

She didn’t believe me but when she got around to it, she was expecting. Having a baby had taken the pressure off of getting pregnant which had made it somehow possible. She was due in seven and a half months. “What is it when you have two children less than a year apart?” She asked me.

Maggie laughed in the background “They call that having Irish twins. We’re all so pleased for you.”

It was a happy disaster. It was a disastrous miracle. One baby was her heart’s desire. But the impending second baby sent her physical resources reeling. And yet it was everything she dreamed of.

Constance got through the first couple of queasy months and then broke into her stride. She got duplicates for the nursery for the new baby while she rocked and loved the girl she’d adopted. All the while a silent presence sat in the rocker and put her hand in to help

Constance’s husband, John took me aside.

“Do you know much about being pregnant?’ he asked me.

“Practically nothing, I would think,” I confessed.

“I’m worried about Constance and Dottie.”

“You’re a dad. We’d take your temperature if you weren’t worried.” I reminded him.

“No. This is serious. Constance is talking to herself.”

“Is she?” I asked. I knew that wasn’t what was happening, but some people just can’t bear as much truth as others. “What is she saying?” I asked.

“She’s saying things like Where are the diapers, and Will you watch her for a moment. Like someone else was in the room helping with Dottie.”

It was sort of nice to know Bill wasn’t completely thick, but I didn’t know quite how to handle this for him. It was, in a way, up to Constance to tell him.

“She’s probably just thinking out loud.” It was a safe answer. Not accurate. I believed he’d noticed Constance talking to Megan.

There’s a lovely theory that everyone thrives best in an attitude and practice of rigorous honesty. There are people for whom that is true. But it’s not true for everyone. Would John have welcomed the lonely and lost dead birth mother as a temporary house guest? I didn’t want to find out right now so I took the cowards way out. “Constance is under a lot of stress, John.” I said. It was patently true no matter what.

Constance’s time came closer. She was filled out and unable to sleep. They had decided on a midwife, and so all the arrangements had been made for Constance to have her child at home.

There was a tropical storm that swept up the coast. It brought a small coastal swell into the harbor but the rains and the wind were torrential. Wires were stripped from towers that had been tossed around like toothpicks. On the day Bill had left the house in pretty heavy rain. At the end of the day, people were navigating through Boston’s streets in boats.

Constance’s apartment was walking distance, even in the flood. Before the storm went ballistic, she’d called and asked if I could come sit with her. She’d spent the night in the bathroom, with her body in cleanse mode. She felt awful and was crampy and scared. She’d called the midwife, but it would be a while for the midwife to reach her in the storm. I finished my last two readings and went out into the wet to lend support.

The rain was a wall of water, not falling so much as cascading constantly between me and where I was going. I put up my umbrella only to have the wind twist it out of my hands and strip it inside out. I let go of the handle and it flipped across the street in the windstream. After that, I clung to the sides of buildings as I walked. Branches, papers, signs torn from their moorings flew through the air while the water boiled in the street and up the sidewalks. It was a good thing that Constance’s apartment wasn’t that far. I made it into the courtyard and waded through the ankle high water flooding the entrance. The towers had been knocked down and there was no electricity. I heard Constance screaming. I headed up brailling my way up the staircase. Finally, I reached her door.

“Constance!” I yelled, pounding on the door.

“Marlene,” she hollered back. “Thank God you’re here. I can’t move. I’m on the floor. It hurts so bad.”

“Are you alone? Did the midwife make it?”

“No. And no,” she said softly.

I heard a click of the lock. There was no one there at the door, but it swung open. Constance was being held by Megan, who had her supported in her lap as her contractions worked through her body. Constance moaned again and then went limp. Mabel lay at her feet, guarding them.

Megan may have been a ghost. But she was a mother who had lost her life in childbirth. She certainly knew more than I did.

“Megan, how is she doing?”

“Not good. She needs the midwife to come.”

She’s on her way. The storm is making travel impossible. Do you know what she needs?”

“Only kind of,” Megan said. “I know how it felt, but I’m not sure how to help. It was my first baby too. And I died.”

Dottie was asleep in her crib. A quick check on her showed her oblivious to her mother’s struggles and to the storm.

“Should I boil water?” I asked.

Megan shook her head at me. “I know they always do, but I can’t tell you why.”

“Have you looked to see if the baby’s coming yet?

We both got a hysterical Constance to lie back and let us look under her skirt and check her progress. There was no sign of the head yet. I couldn’t have gauged centimeters to save myself, but the exit didn’t look large enough for a child’s head to pass.

Marlene took Constance into her ghostly arms and held her in her lap. She rocked the laboring woman like a hurt child. “Now Constance, she said. “You need to listen to me really carefully. I can’t care for Dottie. We both knew that was true even when I was alive. And you can’t leave her. You’re her real mom. So you’ve got to make it through this. You’re going to be a mother not just of my little girl but yours too and a pack of other children on their way. I’m dead. I get to see these things.”

Constance looked at me wide-eyed. I could glimpse a bit of what Megan was seeing. But I knew that often the dead could simply see farther than we could. I nodded my assent.

“So you have to get through this,” Megan said. “You have to marshal all the energy you’ve got. I won’t leave you. Marlene won’t leave. Dottie needs you. Your new little girl needs you.”

“Annie,” Constance whispered. I know you wanted to call Dottie Annie. May I call my girl Annie for you?”

“Annie,” Megan assented.

Another contraction waved through Constance’s body as I heard the door crash open against the storm and feet up the steps. Maggie stumbled in on Jamie’s arm.

Jamie looked at the birth chamber, threw his arm over his eyes and said. “Oh my God, Aunt Maggie, I got you here but I think I’ve done all I can.”

Maggie looked at him with mercy in her eyes. “You go downstairs Jamie and see if you can find a kettle. Go boil some water.” He fled down the stairs. Now we knew what the boiled water was for. It was to get the menfolk out of the room.

Maggie settled in between Constance’s legs and examined her. “Almost there, child. Almost there.” Then she looked at both of us. “Either one of you ever birthed a baby?” Maggie looked up into the corner. She started to laugh, a bit louder than needed.

“Maggie you know better. We’re so glad you’re here.”

I looked up into the corner and saw someone I did not expect to see. Constance’s dead mother Dorothy was watching from the eves.

Maggie gave her a thousand-yard stare. “What, by all that is high and holy, Miss Dorothy, are you doing here?”

Dorothy was Constance’s dead and unlamented mother. As a ghost, Dorothy had stolen her daughter’s engagement ring as an anchor to make sure she could be at the wedding. We all understood why, but it was hallmark of Dorothy that she would do pretty much anything to get her way. Suddenly I had a notion of what Maggie meant when she said there were some odd definitions of love. Dorothy would have proclaimed her love for her daughter endlessly. But it wouldn’t have stopped her from cheating, lying, thieving or deceiving to get what she wanted.

“Is that my mother?” Constance asked. She was gasping for air. The contraction stopped and she wheezed for a moment. ‘Tell her no. She can’t be here.”

“No?” Dorothy screamed. “It’s my granddaughter. You can’t tell me no!”

“Dottie’s your grandbaby. You didn’t care to see her,” Constance accused her.

“She’s some whore’s child. Of course, I didn’t care if I saw her. This is my grandchild.”

Megan looked as if she’d been punched. I grabbed for a ghostly hand by way of taking control.

I stared the vile old lady down. “They’re both your grandchildren. But Constance wants you out of here, and that’s her choice.”

Maggie looked up from her task at Dorothy with that boiled-water look in her eye. “I told you what happens to a mother who ain’t kind to her child. You’re there, lady. Now get your ass down the astral plain or I will personally teach you how to fly down it.”

Dorothy flashed a half dozen emotions on her spectral face: shocked, hurt, offended, furious, and frozen. The rest of us were far too busy coaching Constance as she brought her little girl into the world to be bothered with an angry old ghost. Dorothy slid through the corner, out of the room out into the darkness and the storm.

The door slammed open again and brought Bill and the midwife into the room. The midwife was a practical soul with pepper and salt wavy hair and a wiry form. She took Maggie’s place looking between Constance’s legs.

“Good heavens, I’m late for the party!” she said. My name is Mary. She briefly shook hands and then gowned herself and attended Constance. It was a little later when Annie made her way through.

I was rocking Dottie at that point. She’d just had her bottle. Bill had joined Jamie downstairs where they were both drinking a beer. There was a peace in the room. The midwife sat with us and said, “I’m almost never late.” It was a deep apology.

“It was one hellacious storm,” Maggie told her. “You’re lucky you made it through.”

“Constance’s lucky in her friends.” The midwife stared at us both. What she didn’t see was the outline of a young woman hidden in the vines of the wallpaper.

“You have no idea,” I said.

Constance was settled in with her two babies, miracles enough for a lifetime.