Midwives

  The cross-examination lasted most of the afternoon, and when it was complete Tanner had a brief redirect. Bedford reiterated what he had seen, steadfastly insisting upon the existence and power of one small geyser of blood. And then it was over, and the State rested.

  Chapter 20.

  Lawyers have a language as cold as doctors'. But it's not the legal terms themselves that are so icy, it's the way they're used. It's the way those people speak when they're in the courtroom, the way they use even common words and names. Especially names.

  Every time Stephen talks about me, he calls me "Sibyl." Every time he talks about Charlotte, she's "Mrs. Bedford" or "Charlotte Bedford." Or, simply, "the wife."

  At the same time, Tanner is doing exactly the opposite: When he opens his mouth, I'm always "Mrs. Danforth" or "the midwife." Never, ever "Sibyl." And Charlotte, of course, is always ... "Charlotte."

  Stephen hasn't mentioned it, but it's a strategy both guys are using. Each lawyer is pitting Charlotte and me against each other, and trying to make one of us seem friendly and likable, and the other sort of aloof and formal and distant.

  The thing is, I think at one time we were both pretty friendly. If Charlotte didn't have a lot of friends, it wasn't because she was aloof.

  I'm supposed to testify Wednesday. Not on Wednesday. Wednesday. The difference, it sounds to me, is one of duration. Between all of the questions I'll have to answer for the two lawyers, I have a feeling I'm going to have to be "Sibyl" and then "Mrs. Danforth" for a long, long time.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  STEPHEN NEVER DOUBTED my mother would be an attractive and compelling witness. But he did not want her to be the final witness; he did not want to end with her the way Tanner had chosen to conclude with Asa Bedford. He wanted her sandwiched in the middle, between the road crew members and character witnesses who filled Tuesday's dance card, and the medical and forensic experts--our medical and forensic experts, the ones who either believed in their hearts my mother did the right thing, or were at least willing to say so for the right fee--lined up for Thursday.

  Stephen said he wanted my mother to occupy the middle third of our defense so she would be an "accessible presence, a woman with a voice" for the jurors during most of it--especially the critical conclusion when our expert testimony was being presented. In his opinion, in the end this would still boil down to a battle of the experts, and so he wanted to wind up with people who had lots of degrees and dignified suits.

  He hoped to complete his defense in three days, but he said it wouldn't be the end of the world if it lasted four. His principal objective when he looked at the calendar was to be done by the end of the week, so the jury wouldn't go home for the weekend with the fear that the trial was going to drag on forever.

  I don't know exactly what Judge Dorset was expecting from my mother's midwife and client friends as Stephen prepared to present our version, but Tuesday morning before the jury was brought into the courtroom, he requested that all of the mothers who had babies wanting to nurse take their little ones outside the room when they grew hungry. Stephen objected, contending that changing the rules midstream sent a signal to the jury that somehow cast a negative light upon midwifery, home birth, and--of course--my mother. He also implied that the judge was risking a mistrial.

  Judge Dorset smiled: "Unless there is a mother or an infant present who wants to make an issue of this, I doubt the jury will even notice."

  And so we began. Graham Tuttle, Lawson plow driver, told everyone how impassable the roads were on March 14. The phone company's Lois Gaylord confirmed the hours the phones were down. Our accident reconstructionist reassured the jury that my mother had indeed spun out on the ice in the Bedfords' driveway, and a physician used photos to explain the cuts and bruises my mother had sustained on the slick surface. By lunchtime Stephen had done what he could to convey that my mother was trapped with the Bedfords, and there was absolutely no way they could leave for the hospital.

  What Stephen could not do with this particular group of witnesses, of course, was undermine Tanner's contention that she should never have been trapped with the Bedfords in the first place--that a capable and trustworthy midwife would have checked the weather and learned of the oncoming storm, and then chosen to transfer Charlotte Bedford to the hospital the moment her labor commenced. In theory, that responsibility would fall upon the character witnesses planned for that afternoon: It would be up to them to refute any suggestion that my mother was not supremely competent and incontrovertibly reliable.

  And most of them did a pretty good job, especially B.P. Hewitt, my mother's backup physician. Hewitt endured a cross-examination that would have withered most people.

  "If Sibyl believed the woman was dead, then I believe the woman was dead," he told Tanner at one point.

  "Were you present at the autopsy?"

  "No."

  "Did you examine Charlotte's medical records after she died?"

  "No."

  "Had you even examined her at any point in her pregnancy?"

  "Nope."

  "You really have no idea, then, what you're talking about, do you?"

  "Objection!"

  "Sustained."

  "You really have no ... detailed understanding of this case, then. Do you?"

  "Oh, I think I do. I think I understand how a labor develops and--"

  "This labor. Not any labor. This labor."

  "I understood your question. You asked me if I had a detailed understanding of this case. Well, I do. And I don't believe it's Sibyl's fault."

  "Your Honor, would you please instruct the witness to answer the question?"

  "In my judgment, he did."

  Tanner was flustered for a moment, but the moment was brief. He stared at his notes, caught his breath, and quickly regrouped.

  "Okay," he continued, finally. "You never met Charlotte. You never saw her body after her death. You never saw her records. Why do you feel you understand her death so well?"

  B.P. shook his head in astonishment. "Come on, I'm Sibyl's backup doctor. I don't think I've had a conversation with an ob-gyn in the last six months where this case hasn't come up."

  "But you know nothing firsthand, do you?"

  "I have known Sibyl Danforth for close to a decade. And I know what she has told me about this incident. If Sibyl tells me the woman was dead when she did the C-section, then in my mind the case is closed."

  It would not be accurate to write that, the night before she was scheduled to testify, my mother feared she was going to be convicted. The word fear suggests that the prospect frightened her, and I think by Tuesday night her fear--and her notebooks indicate that there were moments earlier when she had been very scared indeed--had been replaced by numbness and shock. Rather, the night before my mother would take the witness stand, she simply expected that she was going to be convicted.

  My father, on the other hand, was frightened. After one of those cold-cut dinners during which no one eats or says very much, I went upstairs to look at the books I was supposed to be reading for school. I didn't expect to accomplish anything, though, and I figured by nine o'clock I'd be on the telephone with Rollie or Tom, telling them what I thought had occurred that day in the courthouse, and what I thought it meant.

  I was sitting on my bed about eight-thirty when my father knocked on my door (a knock that had always been louder than my mother's), and I told him to come in.

  "Your mom just went to bed," he said, putting his coffee mug down on my desk. "She wants to get a good night's sleep for tomorrow."

  "She tired?" I asked. Over the last few weeks, I'd noticed, he had gone from an occasional scotch after dinner to coffee, and I was glad.

  "I guess. I know I am." He turned my desk chair so it faced the bed, and then collapsed into the small wooden seat as if it were a plush little couch. "How about you? Tired?"

  "Yup."

  "You've been a dream through this, you know."

  I rolled my ey
es, trying to downplay the compliment. "A dream? Corny, Dad. Very corny."

  "I'm getting old."

  "Yeah, right. You and Mom had me when you were about seven. If I get pregnant when Mom did, you'll both kill me."

  He nodded. "Probably." He reached for his mug and took a swallow so long it surprised me. "Anyway, I just wanted you to know that your mom and I are proud of you. We're proud to have you with us through this whole ... thing."

  "What do you think will happen?"

  "Tomorrow? Or when it's all over?"

  "When it's all over."

  He sighed. "Oh, we'll just go back to leading a normal, incredibly boring life. And we'll love it."

  "So you think they'll find Mom innocent?"

  "Oh, yes. And if they don't, we'll appeal."

  "Have you and Stephen talked about that?"

  "It's come up, yes."

  He left a few minutes later. When he was gone, I tried not to read anything more into his visit than his desire to offer his daughter praise, but I did. Before I even thought about what I was telling Tom, I heard myself portraying my brief exchange with my father as further proof that my mother was going to be convicted, telling my boyfriend that the very idea of a family life in the coming years that was normal and incredibly boring had become my father's idea of a fairy tale.

  "Why don't I go with you to the trial tomorrow?" Tom said.

  "You shouldn't miss school. And you probably couldn't sit with me, anyway," I told him. But I liked the idea of Tom in the courtroom, knowing I could turn around and see him there--a sixteen-year-old in a dark turtleneck, surrounded in a back row by little babies and midwives--and I hoped he'd ignore me and skip school.

  Everything had become for me a dramatic portent of evil, and not just because I was a fourteen-year-old girl with teenage judgment and adolescent hormones. To this day, I believe my take on the trial was accurate, and my actions the next day explicable--if not wholly justifiable.

  Later that night when I was finally going to sleep myself, I heard my parents making love in their room, and even that seemed to me a sign that the end was nearing. I put my pillow over my head so I wouldn't hear their bed in the distance and so the pillowcase could absorb my tears. And as soon as the white cotton grew damp and I felt the wetness on my cheek, I was reminded of how my mother had used a pillow to soak up the blood inside Charlotte Bedford.

  And then my tears became sobs.

  My mother wore the green kilt she had worn the day the trial began, and she put back her hair in the same cornflower-blue hair clip. Her blouse was white, but it had a rounded collar and so much ornate stitching it did not look at all austere. As she sat on the stand, she looked to me like a professional and a mother at once--a mother, these days, too young to have a teenage daughter.

  Moreover, because a witness stand tends to exaggerate both a person's aesthetic strengths and weaknesses, my mother's exhaustion gave her an almost heroic-looking stature: The combination of increased height and a waist-level barrier made her look like one of those saintly Red Cross volunteers I'd seen recently on the TV news who had stayed up all night giving coffee and blankets to hurricane victims in the Mississippi bayou.

  To the jurors, of course, she might simply have looked guilty. She might simply have looked like a tired woman who couldn't sleep because of the blood on her hands.

  But at least in the first two hours of her testimony, she spoke well. She was eloquent when Stephen asked her to explain why she had become a midwife, and why helping women to have their babies at home was important to her. She sounded like the most reasonable person in the world when Stephen asked her about the role hospitals usually played in her practice.

  "If I see a danger, I will never let a mother's desire to have her baby at home--even if it's a really powerful desire--cloud my judgment. If there are any indications at all that the baby is in distress, I will always transfer the woman to the hospital."

  "What about the mother?"

  "Same thing. If there's a problem developing, we'll go to the hospital. A lot of people think midwives are anti-hospital or anti-doctor. We're not. I'm not. I have a great relationship with B.P.--Dr. Hewitt. I do what I do--I help ladies have their babies at home--because I know that I can depend on hospitals and doctors if a medical emergency develops."

  And as reasonable as my mother sounded when she discussed hospitals, she was every bit as confident and unwavering when she offered her version of what had transpired on the morning of March 14.

  "Did you check one last time to see if the woman had a pulse?" Stephen asked.

  "Yes."

  "Did you hear one?"

  "No."

  "Did you check one last time to see if she had a heartbeat?"

  "Yes, absolutely."

  "And did you hear one?"

  "No, I did not."

  "You did everything possible to make sure the woman was dead?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "What about the baby? Did you check to see if the baby was alive?"

  "Yes, I did. I listened for a heartbeat with the Fetalscope. And I heard one," she answered, looking directly at Stephen as she spoke. She never allowed her gaze to wander toward my father and me, or toward the other side of the courtroom, where she might risk eye contact with Charlotte's family.

  "I did everything I could before I began to try and be sure that Char--the mother--had died, but the baby was still alive," she answered.

  "Where were the father and your apprentice when you checked? Were they with you?"

  "No, they weren't in the room. I think they were still in the kitchen."

  "Getting the knife?"

  "That's right."

  "So they never saw you check the woman or the baby?"

  "No."

  "But you did?"

  "Yes. For sure."

  Midmorning Tom Corts arrived in the courtroom, and I was both surprised and glad. With the exception of the small space beside the Fugetts, there were no seats left, and so he stood beside one of the court officers near the door, with his back flat against the rear wall.

  It was sometime near eleven o'clock that my mother's answers started sounding less precise and some of her responses began to grow slightly fuzzy. She had been on the stand for close to two hours, answering questions for Stephen that ranged from such generalities as the sorts of words she might use to convey risk to parents at a first trimester meeting, to the specifics of why she had ruptured the membranes that dammed Charlotte Bedford's amniotic fluid.

  "I didn't ask Asa in so many words, 'May I save the baby?' and maybe I should have, but at the time I was just focused on the baby--the baby and the mother--and that conversation seemed unnecessary," she said at one point, fumbling a bit as the adrenaline that had gotten her through most of the morning began to dissipate.

  "Am I correct in saying that conversation was unnecessary because in your opinion Asa understood exactly what you were planning to do, and had therefore given his consent?" Stephen asked, trying to bail my mother out.

  "Objection. Leading the witness, Your Honor."

  "Sustained."

  "Did you believe Asa had given his consent?"

  "Yes," my mother said.

  And then, a few moments later, when Stephen asked, "Did the father try and stop you?" she volunteered an answer that I know wasn't part of the script: "Asa was a husband as well as a father, and no husband in that situation would be in any condition to make any kind of decision."

  "But in your judgment he made a ... conscious decision not to stop you, correct?"

  "Correct."

  Before the day began, I had worried about the cross-examination, but never about my mother's direct testimony. I did now: I did not believe my mother wanted to be convicted, but as the morning drew to a close, some of her responses almost made it sound as if she no longer cared. Unfortunately, Stephen didn't dare end her testimony at that moment, because then the cross-examination would begin before lunch. I think Stephen thought it was paramoun
t to keep her on the stand until close to noon so the cross-examination would not start until after lunch and he could use the noon recess to buck up her spirits and get her refocused.

  Just before eleven-thirty, while still in the midst of her direct testimony, she slipped into one of her answers a sentence that none of us expected, and for which Stephen himself wasn't prepared. If it wasn't the single most damaging thing she could have said from our perspective, it was among the most surprising. It changed everything, and everyone in the courtroom knew it changed everything the moment she said it: