Midwives (23 page)

“Sibyl, I just don’t know. For all I know, it’s possible. Maybe probation is possible—”

“Probation?”

“Let’s suppose the State has an airtight case, a case we just can’t win. There’s no way. In return for no jail time we plead guilty, and you get a suspended sentence and a couple years’ probation. Again, your life goes on more or less as it always has, except there’s this probation officer you see every so often, and you give up midwifery.”

Slowly, sounding at once oddly drugged and unshakably determined—each syllable in each word a declaration itself—my mother said, “That’s not an option, Stephen. I could never give that up. I never will give that up.”

The sun was well below the evergreens now, and the room around me was growing dark.

“I doubt it will even come to that,” Stephen murmured after a minute.

“You don’t believe that. You believe that it will.”

“I don’t know. And I won’t know for months.”

“Months …”

“Perhaps even longer. Like I said, delay helps us a lot more than them.”

“I don’t want this to drag on.”

“I understand.”

“And I won’t stop birthing babies.”

I heard the sound of my father’s Jeep as he pulled into our driveway and then turned off the engine.

“I think you’ll have to, Sibyl. At least for a while.”

“Until the trial?”

“Or until we settle with the State.”

“And you say that could be months.”

“At the very least.”

The Jeep’s door slammed, and I saw the shadow of my mother’s arm as she waved at my father.

“Please, Stephen,” she said, her voice not loud enough for my father to hear, “get this over and done with fast. As quickly as possible.”

“The longer it—”

“Please, Stephen,” she said again. “Fast. For the sake of me and my family: Get this over with fast.”

Years later when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer—an adenocarcinoma, the sort a nonsmoker’s most likely to get—I saw my father become an exquisite caregiver. I saw a tender person inside him emerge and purchase a Vita-Mix blender, and prepare her broccoli shakes and carrot juice in the middle of each afternoon. My mother told me he did all the laundry and the grocery shopping when she became unable, and I saw how he filled the house with fruit. I know he drove often to the department store in Burlington to buy my mother turbans and hats and scarves. And, toward the end, on occasion I saw him sitting patiently beside her as she did crossword puzzles in bed, keeping her company as a listener at once active and serene. Sometimes that bed was in their bedroom, sometimes it was in the hospital.

He was, I can write without reservation or qualification, an exceptional cancer coach: part nurse, part dietitian, part partner and soul mate. Part Knute Rockne.

But, of course, my mother was not diagnosed with cancer in 1981, she was charged with a felony. She was accused of taking one life when she was supposed to be facilitating another’s arrival.

Consequently, my mother didn’t need a nurse or a dietitian or a cancer coach, she needed a lawyer. And so I think it was natural that to a large extent that role of caregiver fell more upon Stephen Hastings’s shoulders than upon my father’s, and that my father was jealous: He wanted to help. He wanted responsibilities. He wanted more things to do.

I watched my parents carefully the night Stephen stopped by with his news, and it was clear that my mother had lost sight of the good tidings he’d brought her behind the bad. Undoubtedly she was relieved that in all likelihood the State would charge her with involuntary manslaughter instead of second-degree murder, but this information had been overshadowed by the idea that she would have to stop birthing babies for some period of time. Perhaps forever.

Looking back, I realize my mother’s reaction probably shouldn’t have surprised me: A criminal charge was an abstract thing to her, something she couldn’t fully comprehend. But midwifery was her calling, it was what she had chosen to do with her life. The very notion that she’d have to close her practice—even temporarily—caused her more anxiety than her lawyer’s news about the charge brought relief.

“What am I supposed to do, tell someone like May O’Brien that I can’t help her have her baby?” she asked my father that night as she picked at the food on her plate.

“I guess you’ll have to refer her to someone else,” my father said. “Maybe Tracy Fitzpatrick.”

“Tracy lives in Burlington, for God’s sake. She’s too far away for most of my mothers.”

“What about Cheryl?”

“Cheryl Visco doesn’t have a moment to breathe; she couldn’t possibly handle anybody else. Besides, she lives too far away, too.”

“What about—”

“And I have relationships with these women—that’s what counts! They trust me, not Cheryl or Tracy. They don’t even know Cheryl or Tracy. And what about someone like Peg Prescott? She’s due next month. What am I supposed to say to her? ‘Well, Peg, it’s no biggie. Just go to the hospital delivery room, and some doctor you’ve never seen before will take good care of you. No biggie, no biggie at all.’ She will freak, she will absolutely freak.”

Without looking up from his plate, my father asked, “What did Stephen say you should do?”

“He didn’t have a solution.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“We stumped the stars?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just surprised. I thought our hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer had the answer to everything.”

“Did I miss a step somewhere? Did Stephen say something to you today that pissed you off?”

“Do I sound pissed off?”

“Yes, you do.”

I tried to remind my parents of my presence before their fight could escalate, rising from the table on the pretext of getting another glass of skim milk. I asked them if either wanted anything from the refrigerator while I was up.

“Honestly, did Stephen say something that angered you?” my mother continued after she’d told me she was fine and my father had remained silent.

“No.”

“Then why this tone?”

“I just think it’s … it’s odd that he drove all the way out here this afternoon.”

“What’s odd about it? He’s our lawyer.”

“Maybe
odd
is the wrong word,” my father said. “It just seems to me that he shouldn’t be driving all the way out here to give you information he could just as easily give you on the phone. It seems financially irresponsible. It seems like he’s awfully cavalier with money. With our money.”

“Maybe lawyers don’t charge for driving.”

“And maybe there’s a fish with wings out back in the pond.”

“If I worked in Burlington, I’d want to get away as much as possible,” I said as I sat back down. I didn’t believe that at all—as a matter of fact, at that age I thought working in Burlington was positively glamorous—but it seemed to me the sort of thing my parents liked to hear, and it might help keep them civil.

“Is that so?” my mother asked me. She smiled slightly, and it was clear she didn’t believe a word I’d said.

“Yup. Get away from all that noise. All those cars.”

“All those record stores,” she added. “That big mall with all those clothing stores on Church Street.”

“I’m not saying a city’s all bad,” I explained. “It’s just that if you’re there every day, it’s probably fun to come out here every once in a while.”

“I agree,” my mother said, touching my hair fondly for a moment.

My father tried to glare at me, but he appreciated my intentions too much to be angry at me for siding with my mother. He smiled, too, as he raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, fine. Maybe his little visit here this afternoon didn’t cost us a penny.”

“Obviously it cost something,” my mother said.

“Oh, maybe not,” my father said, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. He leaned across the table and kissed her once on the forehead. “Maybe April mud is a great lure for a poet like our lawyer. Maybe it’s downright seductive. Maybe it was the beauty of our mud alone that drew Stephen here.”

While my father and I were watching television together after dinner, we heard my mother on the telephone with one of her midwife friends in the southern part of the state. It seemed that one of my mother’s newer patients, a college professor at the end of her first trimester, had been unable to hide her discomfort and nervousness around my mother at a prenatal appointment that morning. The woman’s blood pressure had been much higher than the first time my mother had taken it, a month earlier.

After a lengthy discussion—
interrogation
was the exact word my mother had used on the phone that night—about all of the things that could go wrong during a home birth, the patient had started asking very specific questions about what had occurred up in Law-son. As Stephen had advised her, my mother had refused to talk about that. Apparently my mother and the professor had eventually agreed that she should reconsider her decision to have her baby at home, and think about whether she might be happier after all delivering the child with a doctor in a hospital.

Recalling the conversation with her friend had saddened my mother, and my father and I both heard my mother’s voice go brittle. When she hung up the phone, my father went into the kitchen and rocked her in his arms for a long time.

I do the supermarket shopping, as if nothing happened. It’s surreal. I push my cart up and down the aisles, and I nod at people and they nod at me. I pick out fruit, which is never easy this time of year, and I try and find things I think Connie will eat
.

Yesterday Rand and I figured out the monthly bills, and we paid them. We made sure there was enough money in the checking account, as if life were still completely normal and our biggest worry was bouncing a check
.

And today I ordered a pair of blueberry bushes from the nursery, and Rand ordered three cords of wood. He said he hoped we could have them by Memorial Day so he could have them stacked by the Fourth of July. That’s Rand: only guy I know who has his winter wood stacked before summer’s even gotten a serious dent
.

Actually, the supermarket shopping is a little different now. It doesn’t feel like it’s taking longer, but I know I spent more time in the grocery store today than I have in years. It wasn’t intentional, it just happened. I pulled into the parking lot around one-thirty, and it was almost three o’clock by the time I got out. An hour and a half. I think it usually takes me about forty-five minutes
.

It’s not that the lines were so long, or people stopped me to talk. If anything, it seems like people go out of their way these days not to stop me to talk. They nod when they see me, and then stare with this amazing intensity at the label on the canned peas or beans in their hand so they don’t have to make any more eye contact with me than necessary and risk a conversation. It’s weird
.

So I don’t know exactly why the shopping took so long today. I just went about my business, but I guess I was moving in incredibly slow motion. Me and my cart, just moseying along the store aisles. But I have a theory. I once read somewhere that work takes up as much time as you can give it. If you give a job thirty minutes, for example, you’ll do it in thirty minutes. But if you can give it an hour, it’ll take an hour. That makes sense. And I think that’s what happened today at the grocery store. Normally I would have done the shopping in less than an hour because I’d have to be home for prenatals. I’d have two or three mothers scheduled between, say, two-thirty and five, and I’d have to be back to check weight and pee, and to listen to fetal heartbeats. I’d have to be back to measure bellies and look for edema
.

Nope, not today, not anymore. At least not while I’m—and I love this expression—“out on conditions.” What a concept. With a completely straight face, like he was explaining to me a tax code or something, the judge set five conditions for my “release.” First, he said, I had to agree to appear in court and I had to keep in touch with my lawyer. Those two made sense
.

But then, like I’m this hardened criminal and I go around holding up convenience stores on a weekly basis, he said I couldn’t commit another crime (like I’d committed one in the first place!) and I couldn’t do any illegal drugs (which I don’t think was a reference to the fact that I’ll smoke a joint when offered one if I’m not on call, but was merely one more way of getting in a dig)
.