Midwives (12 page)
“A bit,” he said.
I think the only time I moved between the moment Rollie left and the moment Tom arrived was when I stood up to see what the small thuds were in the kitchen. It turned out to be one of those normally wondrous harbingers of spring: A male robin had returned to the bird feeder outside one of the kitchen windows after a winter away, and the fellow was doing battle with his reflection in the glass. That Saturday, however, the robin’s homecoming was merely an irritation, just another mesmerizing example in my mind of the idiocy of the natural world: Birds banged into glass, mothers died giving birth.
I probably looked like eighth-grade hell to Tom when I opened the door for him. I was as vain as any girl just shy of fourteen, but I hadn’t combed my hair once that Saturday, and I don’t believe I had remembered to brush my teeth. I had gotten dressed shortly before Rollie came over, but I certainly hadn’t dressed for Tom Corts. I was wearing jeans that were much too baggy and loose, and one of my mother’s old hippie sweaters that she had knit herself. She had used perhaps eleven shades of yarn, and while the effect was supposed to be psychedelic, even she used to say it was merely chaotic, as if the colors had been chosen by a preschooler.
But if Tom was appalled by what he saw when I opened the door, he kept his disappointment to himself. And I was indeed glad to see him. He wrapped his arms around the small of my back and pulled me to him, and gave me a kiss on the lips as gentle and chaste as the first one we’d shared a year earlier in the mud of the McKenna family’s small paddock.
And then he just rocked me for a long moment, an awkward sway that felt just right for that time. I pressed my forehead against the cotton from his shirt that peeked through his partly zipped parka, lulled if not wholly reassured. I don’t recall how he finally separated our two bodies and moved us inside, but somehow he managed without traumatizing me.
It was quickly apparent that Tom, like me, had absolutely no idea of how much or how little he should speak of Mrs. Bedford’s death or my mother’s involvement. He understood a hug would be good, but the spoken sentiments he’d have to ad-lib as he settled in for his visit.
“My cousin lives in a pit,” were his first words to me after we had walked into the kitchen. “That boy is as stubborn as a pig on ice, so there was no changing his mind. But, my God, has he moved into a dump.”
“What’s so bad about it?”
“Aside from the fact it’s got about two windows and they’re only as big as record albums, nothing. Except, maybe, it’s only two rooms and a bathroom, and the floor’s about rotted out in the bathroom. And I could only find one outlet in the whole darn place.”
As we walked through the kitchen to the den, he stopped before the refrigerator. “Can I get myself a soda?”
“Sure.”
“I just have no idea what that boy thinks he’s doing,” he went on as he reached inside the white Kelvinator for a Coke.
“Is the apartment in town, or outside it?”
“It’s in a house by the maple syrup company. The one that cans all the stuff from Quebec.”
“A nice house?”
“Hah! ‘Bout as nice as a car accident. It’s dark and old and in need of either a good carpenter or a well-placed bolt of lightning.”
He sat down on a corner of the floor by the stereo and began thumbing through the record albums and tapes lined up to one side.
“How’s your mom today?” he asked, careful to look intently at an album cover instead of at me.
“I think her ankle hurts more than she’ll admit.”
“Her ankle?”
I told him how in addition to everything else she had endured up at the Bedfords’, she had injured her ankle.
“She picked out a lawyer?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many are your folks seeing?”
“Three.”
He nodded approvingly. “My cousin said he guessed your parents make too much money to get a public defender. But he said he had a good one once.”
We may not have had particularly crisp reception back then in our part of Vermont, but I had nevertheless seen enough television to know what a public defender was.
“He did?”
“Yup, in St. Johnsbury. He said the guy was real sharp.”
“What’d he do?”
“My cousin or the lawyer?”
I shrugged. “I guess both.”
“My cousin was drunk and stole a car to go joyriding and then hit a telephone pole. Wrecked the thing.”
“Whose car?”
“Belonged to a guy from Boston. A Saab. Problem was, it was the second time he’d gotten smashed and taken somebody’s car. So he ended up spending thirty days in Windsor. But he said it would have been a lot worse than thirty days if his lawyer hadn’t been such a fast talker.”
“Stealing a car when you’re drunk gets you thirty days?” I asked.
“That’s what it got my cousin.”
In the kitchen the phone rang, and when I didn’t move to answer it, Tom looked up at me and offered to get it.
“Let the answering machine deal with it,” I told him, and explained how up until perhaps an hour earlier, the phone had been ringing nonstop. Not surprisingly, it was merely a reporter calling yet again.
“There’ll be a lot in the newspapers tomorrow, won’t there?” Tom said.
“I guess.”
“Has your mom spoken to any newspapers yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
He sighed and looked down at the pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his shirt. I could tell he wanted one, but he wasn’t allowed to smoke inside our house.
“Do you think she should?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Get her side out there.”
“Her side? What do you mean her side?”
He slipped an album back into the line of records wedged between the wall and one of the speakers, and clasped his hands behind his neck.
“Look, Connie, I don’t know much about any of this stuff. I can’t even fake it when it comes to lawyers and newspaper people. So I could be completely wrong about all this. But here’s the thing: A lady’s dead. And she died having a baby. She didn’t die because she was hit by lightning, or because she crashed her car into a rock, or because her house burned down in the middle of the night. She didn’t die because she was too fat for her heart, or because she broke her neck on a snowmobile. She’s dead because of something that happened while she was having a baby.”
“So?”
“So, they’re going to have to blame someone. Look at all the reporters who’ve started calling already.”
I heard the robin outside the kitchen window, back to beat up on his reflection. I tried to focus for a moment on what Tom was saying, but I kept coming back to his cousin and the time the fellow spent in the state prison in Windsor. The sentence kept forming in my mind like a word problem in a math class:
If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth?
“Who was your cousin’s public defender?” I asked.
“I don’t remember his name.”
“But it was in St. Johnsbury?”
“Yup.”
If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober
.
“Not Newport?”
“Not Newport.”
“Think Newport has its own public defender?”
“It’s a different county. Probably.”
If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober. When you do the math, don’t forget that the midwife cut open the mother after she died
.
“Mrs. Bedford died up in Lawson. The people who went by their house yesterday morning were all from Newport.”
“Look, I’m sure the Newport guy’s good, too.”
“I hope so.”
“Besides, even if your mom does end up needing a lawyer, your parents are the type who’ll shop around. They’ll probably use one of the guys they meet today.”
“And that’s if my mom even needs one,” I added hopefully, echoing his earlier words.
He nodded his head and murmured, “Yup, that’s right: if. If she even needs one,” but I could tell that deep down he was convinced that she would. Behind us the phone rang again, and this time Tom didn’t even look up. He just kept staring at the knees of his blue jeans, as yet another unfamiliar voice asked my mother to call him back when she returned.
Fifteen years ago, I always expected I’d be arrested one day. I marched against the war, I called police officers “pigs,” I smoked more than my share of pot
.
But I guess I never got mad enough or wild enough or stoned enough to do something really crazy. Maybe I would have if I hadn’t been blessed with Connie. I knew plenty of girls then who would give a trooper the finger while holding their baby in their other arm, but that wasn’t me. My baby was always too precious to me to screw around like that
.
I remember that Rand was picked up once and herded into a wagon. He was one of dozens and dozens of guys arrested in a Washington, D.C., protest, and I probably would have been with him if I hadn’t been five months pregnant at the time. But I was carrying Connie, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend a day in a cramped van driving from Vermont to Washington, and then another day standing around in the D.C. heat, screaming my lungs out with thousands of really, really angry people
.
I think Rand only spent a night in the jail, and he was never charged with anything
.
And unlike me, he never had to wear handcuffs
.
This afternoon when Stephen was making sure I didn’t have to go to jail, the judge and the state’s attorney—Tanner—made me feel like I’d shot someone while robbing a house. Stephen said it was all a formality, but I don’t think anyone who’s ever had state troopers show up at her house and arrest her would call “handcuffs” a formality. And while I was expecting the troopers, I certainly wasn’t expecting the handcuffs
.
“Now, I don’t really think that’s necessary, do you?” Stephen asked the two officers
.
“We don’t have a choice, Stephen, you know that,” the fellow with the mustache said, the one who I think is named Leland
.
And so right there on my own front porch, they made me put out my arms so they could “cuff me.”
I just don’t know how criminals ever get the hang of handcuffs. They really weren’t that tight, but I guess I don’t have much flesh or fat around my wrists. Every time I wiggled my thumb, the bones in my wrist rubbed against the steel. If I did it enough, I think it would have started to peel the skin
.
The weirdest thing about the handcuffs was this rubber guard someone put around the chain between the bracelets. It was like a five- or six-inch length of clear garden hose. Here they design these scary, ugly, painful metal shackles for people’s wrists, and then they put a rubber sleeve around the chain
.
It struck me as the most surreal part of a completely surreal experience. There I was, sitting in the backseat of a state police cruiser in this spring dress covered with blue irises, with my hands folded demurely in my lap because I was wearing handcuffs in a garden hose
.
—from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife
STEPHEN HASTINGS HAD NOT had many defendants in our cold, remote corner of the state. He usually worked in Burlington, where the sorts of crimes that might result in the need for a high-powered—by Vermont standards, anyway—attorney were most likely to occur. Stephen had defended the power company executive who was accused of drowning his wife in Lake Champlain, and the high-school English teacher who was charged with having sex with two fifteen-year-old girls from one of his classes. With Stephen’s help, they were both found not guilty.
And while he lost as many visible cases as he won, the fact that he won any at all made him a lawyer in some demand. After all, no one thought he had a chance with the hospital administrator who virtually decapitated the bookkeeper who had apparently figured out he’d been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. (“The means and mere gruesomeness of the death suggested premeditation,” Stephen told us the judge had remarked to him one evening when that trial was finished.) Everyone in the state knew a particular motel owner in Shelburne would be convicted of trafficking drugs, and the woman who left her infant twins to freeze atop Camel’s Hump would be found guilty of first-degree murder.