Midwives (16 page)

And in the weeks immediately after the death, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the State was slowly and methodically building a case, Cheryl would drop by almost every other day for no other reason than to offer moral support. Sometimes she’d appear with one flower, sometimes with a note card she thought was funny. Sometimes she’d have the name of a book my mother should read, sometimes she’d have the book itself.

When she arrived late on a weekday afternoon, she would stay for dinner. When she arrived on a weekend morning, she would stay for lunch. The days were indeed growing longer as March became April, but—as my father said—when Cheryl was there they seemed to last forever.

Cheryl was probably in her early fifties then, but she was still a beautiful woman. Her hair was gray, and unlike most gray hair it still looked magnificent long. It fell like curtains down her back, usually draping a tight black sweater or the top of a long-sleeved but close-fitting black dress. Cheryl was close to six feet tall, more slender than most women half her age, and the subject of all sorts of rumor and gossip: She had three children from three different fathers, only one of whom she had actually bothered to marry. While some people assumed the relationships failed for the reasons the marriages of many midwives go bad—ridiculously long hours and a completely unpredictable schedule—others attributed the fact that Cheryl was a three-time loser in love to a flighty morality and a loose set of values. If she had had one husband and two significant partners over the years, the gossips whispered, she had most certainly had thirty lovers. Maybe three hundred.

Personally, what I believe did her marriages in was her truly astonishing ability to speak for hours at a time without stopping to breathe. She could tell whole stories without ever inhaling, recount lengthy anecdotes without so much as a pause. It drove my father crazy, just as it probably drove most men in Cheryl’s life away. In my experience, men aren’t particularly good listeners, and to be around Cheryl for any length of time demanded patience, passivity, and an insatiable interest in Cheryl Visco’s life.

Of course, Cheryl adored my mother, and in those weeks when my mother was still reeling from the death up in Lawson, Cheryl was the perfect friend: present but undemanding, company that necessitated no effort. My mother could simply sit still and listen, perhaps nod every so often if it felt right.

“Chance
is the strangest word in the world, isn’t it?” Cheryl might begin, speaking slowly at first but gathering momentum like an obese teenager on skis. “One syllable, six letters. It’s a noun, it’s a verb. Change one letter and it’s an adjective. And everything about it scares the bejesus out of so many people; it’s this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don’t travel to the Middle East these days—there’s a chance something could happen. Don’t get involved with that new fellow on Creamery Street—I hear a lot of mud was scraped off his floor after the divorce. Don’t have your baby at home—there’s a chance something could go wrong. Don’t, don’t, don’t … Well, you can’t live your life like that! You can’t spend your entire life avoiding chance. It’s out there, it’s inescapable, it’s a part of the soul of the world. There are no sure things in this universe, and it’s absolutely ridiculous to try and live like there are! There’s nothing that drives me crazier than when people say home birth is chancy or irresponsible or risky. My God, so what if it is? Which, in my opinion, of course, it isn’t. What’s the price of attempting to eliminate chance, or trying to better the odds? A sterile little world with bright hospital lights? A world where forceps replace fingers? Where women get IVs and epidurals instead of herbs? Sure, we can cut down the risk, but we also cut off a lot of touching and loving and just plain human connection. No one said living isn’t a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.”

Although Cheryl lived over an hour away in Waterbury, she would sometimes stay until ten or eleven o’clock at night. Some nights when I would go upstairs to do my homework or call one of my friends around eight or eight-thirty, I would leave her lecturing my parents. I’d hear my father escaping soon after, trudging upstairs with the excuse that he was tired. Later, when Cheryl had finally gone home and my mother had struggled upstairs herself, I’d hear my father comment angrily on Cheryl’s uncanny ability to outstay her welcome. Some nights his tone was more caustic than others; some nights his voice was louder.

On the quieter nights he might simply remark, “She can’t keep a husband because she can’t shut up.” But when he was particularly disgusted or he’d had an extra scotch during dinner, I might hear him raise his voice as he said, “We have enough stress in our lives without her! The next time she shows up and won’t leave, call me. Call me and I’ll sleep at the damn office.”

My mother would then shut their bedroom door, and I would wait silently at my desk, listening, wondering if tonight the fight would blow up or blow over.

We learned on Monday night what had happened to Anne Austin, my mother’s apprentice. We didn’t learn because the woman herself called my mother back, or because she finally answered the phone one of the many times my mother called her. We didn’t learn because she appeared at our door after Stephen Hastings and his photographer left, or because we ran into her while shopping at the supermarket.

We learned because B.P. Hewitt—Dr. Brian Hewitt—called from the hospital during dinner and said he wanted to drop by when he finished his rounds. My parents said sure, and much of our conversation as we finished our meal revolved around why my mother’s backup physician wanted to come by our house. As far as I knew, he’d only been here once before, and that was three years earlier when it seemed half the county was in our yard for the “graduation” party of sorts my mother held for Heather Reed, an apprentice who’d been with my mother for at least half a decade and was about to embark on a career of her own.

“How much does he know?” my father asked, pushing the skin of a baked potato around his plate with his fork.

“About Charlotte?” my mother asked.

“Yes,” my father said, after inhaling deeply and slowly so he wouldn’t snap at her. But the sound of that breath murmured clearly,
Of course. What the hell else could possibly be on his mind?

“I told him what I remembered. I told him the basics.”

“When did you talk to him? Was it Saturday or Sunday? Or today?”

“As a matter of fact, it was Friday. Friday morning. I called him from the hospital before I even went home. Why? Do you think it matters when I called him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I was just wondering whether he heard the story first from you, or from that … that creep who met you at the emergency room with the baby. The one who said all those ridiculous things to the newspapers. Dumond.
Doctor
Dumond.” He said the word
doctor
as if he thought the fellow had earned his medical degree by mail, as if he had found the school on the inside of a matchbook cover.

“He heard it from me.” Categorical, but defensive. A tone that would color more and more of my mother’s remarks that year. And while that tone was wholly understandable, the combination of absolute surety and righteous stubbornness made it sound a bit like a whine, and I believe on occasion it did her no good.

I knew Dr. Hewitt’s first name was Brian, but I had never heard him referred to as anything but B.P. Although he was more than a decade older than my parents, he still wore the nickname well he’d been given in medical school: B.P., a natural for a man hoping to become a doctor, whose first and middle initials were the abbreviation for blood pressure. His hair—vaguely camel-colored—was always flying around his forehead and flopping over the tops of his ears, and I can’t recall ever noticing a line on his face. He had four sons, two of whom were close enough to my age that it was not uncommon for me to see the doctor around town: In my mind, I can still see his hair sticking out from underneath baseball caps, bicycle helmets, and the straw hat he wore one summer to a county fair in Orleans. It always seemed appropriate to me that he was the kind of doctor who delivered babies.

B.P. delivered his patients’ babies in hospitals, of course, and he would testify that he believed hospitals were the safest place for newborns to arrive. But he also said he understood that some women were going to have their babies at home regardless of what he believed, and he was happy to back up the “right sort of midwife.”

My mother, apparently, was the right sort of midwife. As her backup physician, he agreed to be on call to go to the hospital when my mother transferred one of her own patients there. Since my mother took women to the hospital only when she feared a complication—a slowly evolving difficulty such as a labor that just wasn’t progressing, or the sudden and gut-wrenching chaos of fetal distress—this meant that the majority of the time B.P. met my mother there, he was anticipating a cesarean section.

In the nine years that B.P. had backed up my mother, the records would show that twenty-eight times my mother had transferred a patient to the hospital. Of those twenty-eight transfers—a small number, yes, but of course behind the vagaries of those digits lurk the terror and disappointment of twenty-eight women being rushed by ambulance or car from the warmth of their homes to the unknowns of a hospital, fearing with every movement (or pause) in their womb that their baby is dying—B.P. had been available twenty-six times. And of those twenty-six days or nights when he had met my mother at the hospital, on twenty-four occasions he had brought the laboring woman—usually silent with fear, although never, never numb—into an operating room and surgically removed the infant.

All but once the baby had been fine. Once the baby was stillborn. Born dead.

Never did a mother die.

And on that occasion when the baby was born dead, B.P. and the medical examiner were quite sure that the baby—a boy the parents would name Russell Bret—would have been born dead even if his mother had endured her labor in a hospital. If anyone believed that Russell Bret’s parents made a mistake by attempting to have the child at home, I don’t believe anyone said so. At least publicly. And no one, as far as I know, ever hinted that my mother might have been somehow to blame.

When B.P. arrived at our house that Monday night, he looked tired and preoccupied. I was immediately struck by the realization that this wasn’t the carefree father I’d seen in the high-school bleachers watching his son play second base, or the serene dad I’d noticed bicycling back and forth with other sons on Hallock Street. He gave me a smile as my father walked him into the living room, but it was the sort of desperately wan grin I’ve since learned is the precursor to particularly bad news. I’ve always imagined that—along with doctors—accountants, mechanics, and the attorneys who handle death row appeals have a need for that grin often.

While he told my parents why he had stopped by, I cleaned up the kitchen. I was careful to make just enough noise that my parents would assume I was focused upon the dishes, but not so much that I couldn’t hear most of what the adults were saying.

“She called about an hour after you did, Sibyl. Maybe forty-five minutes,” B.P. told them.

“Friday morning?” my mother asked.

“Yup. Friday morning.”

“She was that concerned?”

“Evidently.”

“Why didn’t she just call me?”

“Didn’t she?”

“No.”

“You two haven’t spoken to each other since … since the birth?”

“Sibyl’s been trying to reach her for three days,” my father said. “Over the last three days, Sibyl has probably left a half-dozen messages on the woman’s answering machine.”

I slowed the water pouring from the tap to a trickle and dried my hands on the dish towel by the sink. I began to feel dizzy, as if I had stood up too quickly after kneeling for a long moment. They were talking about Anne, I realized, my mother’s new apprentice. The woman who’d been with my mother at—to use B.P.‘s term for the event—the birth.

I reached for the edge of the counter with both hands and leaned forward, trying to take some of the weight off my feet.

“You two haven’t spoken, you two haven’t seen each other?” The doctor’s voice again. In it was something like surprise, something like concern. Concern for my mother.

“Nope,” my mother said. “Not one word.”

“I asked her to call you. Talk to you,” B.P. continued.

“She didn’t.”

“Is she still in Vermont?” my father asked.

“I believe so.”

“Then I’ll see her tomorrow,” my mother told B.P. “I have prenatal exams all afternoon, and Anne will assist me. We can talk about this whole affair then.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Sibyl,” B.P. said slowly, and I assumed the reason he had begun to speak at a slower speed was because he wanted to buy the time to find the right words for the point he was about to make. “If Anne hasn’t already called you, I wouldn’t expect her tomorrow.”