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you’re wearing new school clothes. New underwear, polka dot. CJ Wilson flips your skirt up and everything’s changed. You never saw it coming.

Chapter Three
     
    T he story of my birth is an astounding one. I was born during a February blizzard in a truck tipped sideways into a ditch on Glass Factory Road. My grandfather was trying to get Tamar to Utica Memorial in time for the delivery, but there was no such luck. Astonishingly, a midwife came walking by the stuck truck just at the critical moment.
    The midwife was trying to get to Clearview Heights, the road on the hills above Utica where she lived with her husband and young child. She had to take Glass Factory, because it’s the only road that intersects with Clearview Heights. The midwife, whose name was Angelica Rose Beaudoin, was driving her car and it broke down in the middle of that blizzard. Bravely, Angelica Rose laced her boots up and tied them into double knots. She rummaged in the back seat for the emergency road kit that her husband had put together for her in a recycled coffee can. In it, the young midwife found some chocolate bars, some change for a pay phone, extra mittens, a space blanket, and a pair of earmuffs. She put on the ear-muffs. She wrapped the space blanket around her body,underneath her parka, for extra insulation. She put the extra pair of mittens on over the mittens she was already wearing.
    I love thinking about Angelica Rose Beaudoin, the young midwife. Angelica Rose had not been a midwife for long. She had trained for emergency births but had not actually had to deliver a baby outside of the hospital or a home. Never in a blizzard.
    Angelica Rose set off, keeping track of where she was by the telephone poles she could barely see through the driving snow. Up the steep hills and down she went, trudging her way toward Clearview Heights and home. Darkness was all about her, and the snow felt like stinging bees on her face. Her feet made no sound in the powdery snow. Unbeknownst to the snow, or to the frozen ground beneath it, the young midwife was thinking about a baby, her own baby, who had been born without ears. Within his tiny skull, Angelica Rose’s child had the means of hearing, but with no passage to the outside world her son lived in an unknown world. Sound came to him as if from underwater. His mother’s voice floated past his round baby-fuzzed head as if in a bubble. What her baby heard was not what was heard by her. What her baby heard was his own, his own to make sense of, his own to understand. Already, his mother could see a difference in the way her child inclined his head to speech.
    Angelica Rose trudged through the snow and thought about things that were missing, things that were broken and could not be fixed.
    Then, from the heart of the blizzard, the midwife heard a muffled cry.
    Angelica Rose cocked her head and listened again, to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. The cry came again.
    Help!
    It was my grandfather, calling for help through a hairline crack in the driver’s side window. He didn’t want to leave my mother and search for help, but hoping against hope that someone would pass by, he kept calling out the window into the storm.
Heeeeeeeeelp
, he called, once every couple of minutes, while Tamar twisted in the seat next to him.
    “Helloooooo!”
    That was the sound of the midwife’s voice, responding to the person in need. My grandfather heard her voice. Disbelieving, he cranked open the window, struggled out into the snow and found the midwife, her head turning this way and that, listening for that lone cry of help.
    “Come on! My daughter’s having a baby!”
    That was what my grandfather said. Angelica Rose Beaudoin said not another word. She had been trained for this moment. She nodded, started beating her mittened hands together to warm them, and followed my grandfather to the truck in the ditch. As she stumbled after him she summoned all her medical training and ordered her mind as to what