Midwives (28 page)

Her voice more quizzical than dubious, more puzzled than angry, Nonny finally said, “And that means they’ll have mercy?”

“This is not about mercy!” my mother snapped back.

“It’s about—”

“I don’t need mercy.”

“Then what does that lawyer of yours mean? Why does he want Connie there so badly?”

“‘That lawyer of yours’? Mother, must you put it that way? It sounds horrible. It sounds like you think he’s some sort of charlatan.”

Nonny sighed, and rubbed the arthritic bulbs of her long fingers. My mother and I both knew that Nonny did not think Stephen was a charlatan. How could she? If she meant anything at all by her diminution of Stephen Hastings to “that lawyer of yours,” if there was anything at all behind the remark, it was probably a vague apprehension triggered by the way my mother’s voice seemed to rise whenever she said the word
Stephen
, the way the word was tinged with promise and colored by hope when it came from her lips.

“I just don’t think Connie should be there,” Nonny said after a moment, wrapping her hands together in her lap. “If you don’t need … mercy or sympathy or something, I don’t see why you should bring a fourteen-year-old girl into that courtroom.”

“It makes Mom a real person,” I chimed in, paraphrasing a remark I had overheard Stephen make to my parents earlier that week. “And that makes it harder to convict her. Juries don’t like to convict the kind of real people who might be their neighbors.”

Both of the adults turned toward me.

“You weren’t doing your homework Wednesday night, were you?” my mother said, trying hard to look stern.

“I did my homework Wednesday night.”

“Yeah, after Stephen left you did your homework,” she said. She then turned to my grandmother and continued, “Connie will be with me because I love her and I want her there—as long as she wants to be there. She’s come this far with us, she may as well see it through.”

I woke up in the middle of the night a few days before the trial began, and through the register in the floor I could see the light on in the den below. It was almost two in the morning. For a moment I assumed my mother or father had simply neglected to turn off the light before coming upstairs, and while that would have been uncharacteristic behavior from either of them, these were unusual times. We all had a great deal on our minds.

I rolled over, hoping to fall quickly back to sleep, but I thought I heard something in the den. Something as intangible as a rustle, as imperceptible as a draft. An eddy, perhaps, whorled, drifting up from the basement through the cracks between the floorboards. Had the curtains merely shivered? Or had someone exhaled, a faint tremor in his or her breath?

I climbed out of bed and crouched by the register in my nightgown. If there were people in the den, they were not on the couch, which—along with the coffee table and a part of the woodstove’s hearth—was about all I could see through the wrought-iron grate.

I was neither frightened nor cold, but when I decided I’d go downstairs, I started to tremble: Connie Danforth, just like a heroine in one of those ridiculous slasher movies my friends and I were always watching, that idiot camp counselor who went alone into the woods at night, shining her flashlight before her as she practically beckoned the psycho killer in the hockey mask to come get her.

The stairs remained silent as I walked upon them, largely because I knew exactly where to step to avoid their idiosyncratic creaks and groans. I told myself I was going downstairs to get a glass of milk. If anyone asked what I was doing—and why would someone, it was my house—I would say just that: I’m getting a glass of milk.

The lights were off in the dining room and the kitchen; I saw the mudroom was dark. Perhaps my parents really had simply left the light on. Perhaps I had heard nothing more than one of the strange breezes that blow through an old Vermont house as the seasons change or the northern air grows cold.

I paused outside the kitchen entrance to the den, my back flush against the refrigerator, and felt its motor vibrate against my spine. I half-expected to hear a voice call out to me. I wondered if I’d hear, suddenly, an exchange between people in that room. Hearing neither, I pushed off the refrigerator with the palms of my hands and turned toward the den.

There I saw my father, alone with easily a dozen small stapled packets of papers scattered around him on the floor in one corner. Xeroxes of some sort. He was still wearing the business shirt he had worn to his office that day, and the same light-gray slacks. He was sunk deep into the rocking chair by the brass floor lamp.

“What are you doing up, sweetie?” he asked when he saw me in the doorway. He looked worried that I was awake.

“I’m getting a glass of milk.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“No. I mean, I woke up. And I decided I wanted a glass of milk.”

He nodded. “Know what? I think I’ll have one with you. Then I should probably go to bed myself.”

“Is that work?” I asked, motioning toward the clusters of papers surrounding him on the floor.

“These? No, not at all. They’re precedents. Legal precedents. They’re some of the cases your mom’s lawyer had researched while putting her defense together.”

I picked up one of the stapled packets, a sheaf of nine or ten pages titled
“State
v.
Orosco.”
I skimmed the lengthy subtitle, an incomplete sentence that seemed to me a study in gibberish: “Certified questions as to whether information and affidavit in involuntary manslaughter case were insufficient following denial of motions to dismiss and to suppress statements.”

“You’ve been reading these?” I asked, astonished that he would punish himself so.

“Yup.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because I love your mother. And I want to understand what Stephen’s doing to defend her.”

He stood and led me to the kitchen where I’d been only moments before, my mind rich with unspeakable suspicions, and pulled from the refrigerator a cardboard container of milk.

I didn’t think I’d be scared once this thing began, but I am. I thought I’d get over it once I got here, once I was settled down in my chair. I was wrong. Or maybe I was just kidding myself the last few weeks
.

All day long I tried to focus on the little things in the courtroom to take my mind off the big ones, even though I know I’m supposed to be paying attention like there’s no tomorrow
.

“No tomorrow.” I wish I hadn’t thought of that expression. It’s hateful
.

But there were times I couldn’t do it, times I just couldn’t pay attention. Or maybe I should say I wouldn’t—there were times I just wouldn’t pay attention. Some moments, I just found it easier to think about nothing but the incredible chandelier this courtroom has than the idea that I might be in prison somewhere when my sweet baby is in college or when she has her first baby
.

I want to be there when she has her first baby so much
.

I want to be there when she has all her babies
.

And when the idea that I might miss out on something like that crossed my mind today, I’d zone out as fast as I could and focus on something else. Anything else. Like that chandelier. I’d seen the courtroom before when I was charged back in the spring, but I hadn’t looked around that day and so I hadn’t noticed the chandelier. After all, all I’d really done that morning was breeze in in my little spring dress while Stephen said, “Not guilty, Your Honor.” Took about two seconds
.

But I saw the chandelier today, I couldn’t miss it. And it’s a beauty, it really is. A huge wrought-iron thing that hangs down from smack in the center of the ceiling. The bulbs sit inside these delicate glass tulips, and the metalwork is a series of the most amazingly graceful curlicues and swirls. A lot of times, it was just so much easier for me to get a picture in my head of those tulips or those swirls than the faces of the people being asked all sorts of questions about home birth and midwifery. Stephen and Bill Tanner must have talked to thirty or thirty-five people today, and they still haven’t agreed upon who will be on the jury and who won’t
.

So, as Stephen said, “We get to do this again tomorrow.” I just can’t believe it
.

I think there were four or five people up there today who hated me without even knowing me. That wouldn’t have bothered me once. Before Charlotte died, I don’t think it fazed me a bit when I came across a person who hated me for what I did. I think I viewed it as their problem, not anything I needed to lose sleep over. It was like, “Hey, you deal with it. That’s your trip, not mine.”

But it really freaked me out today. It really frightened the hell out of me
.

From where I sit, I can see Lake Memphremagog, and every so often this afternoon when a possible juror was explaining how all of his children had been born in a hospital because it’s safer, I’d try to get a picture of the water in my mind. Then I could stare at the guy and look like I was listening, when all I was seeing was the lake
.

I’ll bet that water’s cold right now, incredibly cold
.

This just isn’t a good time of the year for a trial like this. At least for me. Everything’s dying, or going brown. I didn’t used to mind the fall. I do this year. That’s another thing that seems to be different with me since Charlotte died. Suddenly I dislike the fall
.

There were moments today when I found myself staring at the water in the lake and getting the chills when I thought about where I might be when it freezes
.

—from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

DOCTORS DO NOT PROTEST, they lobby. They are not the sort of people who will stand around outside a courthouse with placards and sandwich boards, or hold hands and sing rally songs. Mid-wives, on the other hand, are. Midwives are exactly the sort of folk who will use public spectacle to make a political point.

And so while doctors made their presence felt in a variety of powerful ways before and during my mother’s trial—they just loved to testify—they did not stand on the steps of the Orleans County Courthouse.

That responsibility fell upon the midwives.

The Monday my mother’s trial began, my family was greeted in Newport by somewhere between sixty and seventy people, counting the midwives and their clients. There were women whose faces I recognized, like Cheryl Visco and Megan Blubaugh, Molly Thompson and Donelle Folino, and there were a great many women and men I’d never seen before, but who, apparently, believed passionately in a woman’s right to labor in her own bedroom. There were some of my mother’s patients there as well, faces I remembered from prenatal exams at our house as recently as the previous winter. Inside, we’d soon discover, were even more of my mother’s clients, quietly knitting or nursing in the three back benches.

We saw the supporters as soon as we drove down Main Street that morning, standing like a phalanx along both sides of the courthouse steps and in long lines on the grass that extended out from the walkway to the front door. We had driven to Newport in my mother’s distinctive old station wagon, and so we were recognized immediately, and a cheer went up as we coasted into the parking lot between the courthouse and the lake.

“Set Sibyl free, let babies be!” was the first chant we heard from the group, and we heard it the moment we emerged from our car. Of all the chants we’d hear over the next few weeks (and we’d hear many), that one was my least favorite. It implied my mother wasn’t free; it suggested prison and confinement and my family’s destruction.

Unfortunately, to this day it’s the one I hear most often in my head. The others—either doggerel that linked hospitals with laboratories, or ditties that elevated home birth to a religious rite—come back to me when I think hard about those weeks, but they don’t pop into my head today like bad songs while I’m seeing patients or brewing coffee.

As planned, Stephen and a young associate from his firm were already waiting for us in the parking lot when we arrived. There had been a frost the night before, so even though the sun was well up by eight-thirty, the air still felt cool and I could see Stephen’s breath when he spoke.

“You have some fans,” he said, motioning toward the demonstration across the street.

My mother smiled. “Are you behind this?”

“God, no! We made sure we’ll have some friends once we get inside the courtroom—quiet friends—but those campers over there came on their own. Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy they’re here, but I had nothing to do with it.”