Midwives (38 page)

“It was the way it spurted.”

He shook his head. “I’m not asking you what you think you saw. I’m asking you what in your background led you to think that based on the bleeding Charlotte Bedford was alive?”

“You didn’t see it. If you had been—”

“Your Honor, please instruct the witness to answer the questions,” Stephen said abruptly.

Judge Dorset looked down at Anne and said simply, “Miss Austin, you will answer the questions.”

“But if any of—”

“Miss Austin,” the judge added, and he sounded almost as annoyed as Stephen, “answer the questions as they are asked. Please. Mr. Hastings, proceed.”

“What part of your training led you to think that the blood you saw was coming from a living person?” Stephen asked, and he continued to tap the tip of the pen slowly on the table.

She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t recall.”

“Is that because you have none—absolutely no medical training?”

“I guess.”

“Am I correct in saying that any conjectures you made about the blood were founded on absolutely no experience—no first- or second- or even third-hand experience?”

Finally she looked in Stephen’s direction and when she saw my mother she shut tight her eyes against tears, but they were too much. She sniffed back some, but her answer was still filled with her sobs. As if Stephen hadn’t asked her a question, as if he weren’t even present, she cried with the suddenness of lightning at my mother, “God, Sibyl, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I had to do it, I had to call! You know you killed her—”

Stephen tried to cut her off. He demanded the remarks be stricken from the record, and Judge Dorset slammed his gavel down on his bench a thousand times harder than Stephen had tapped his pen on his table a moment earlier, but before breaking down and triggering a recess, Anne managed to sob once more, “I’m sorry, Sibyl, I am! I know you didn’t mean to, but we both know you killed her!”

My mother sipped water from a paper cup in a small, windowless conference room during the recess, and my father held her hand. She looked a little paler than she had before Anne’s outburst, and sometimes she simply pressed the rim of the cup against her lower lip.

“She is a little witch, isn’t she?” Peter murmured, I think trying to do little more than make conversation.

“No,” my mother said, “she isn’t really.”

“That’s awfully big of you, Sibyl. You’re with family and friends here; you don’t need to be noble,” Stephen told her, and he seemed as angry as when the judge had called the recess fifteen minutes earlier.

“I’m not. Anne’s just … she’s young, and she’s gotten herself in too deep.”

“Well, then,” Stephen said, “she’s about to drown. It will be short and sweet, but we’re about to take her down for the third time.”

“Miss Austin, you will focus solely on the question Mr. Hastings is asking, and Mr. Hastings, you will allow her to answer each question fully. Do we have an understanding?” Judge Dorset asked when we had reconvened.

Stephen nodded, and moved out from behind his table and began pacing the room as he had with most other witnesses. He asked the court reporter to read back the last question he had asked, the one about first- or second- or even third-hand experience.

“That’s right,” Anne answered. Her eyes were red from crying, and her words were no longer draped in poise.

“But nevertheless, when Sibyl made the first incision, you decided Charlotte Bedford was alive.”

“When I saw the blood, yes.”

“Did the body show any other signs of life as the incision was made—or, for that matter, after?”

“Like what?”

Stephen shrugged. “Did the woman cry out with pain?”

“No, she was unconscious.”

“Did the body … shudder?”

“I didn’t see that.”

“You didn’t see it shudder?”

“No.”

“It didn’t move at all, did it?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Does that mean that the only indication you had that the woman might have been alive was the blood?”

“Yes.”

“But that was enough to alarm you?”

“It was.”

“So what did you do when you were alarmed? Did you try to stop Sibyl from proceeding?”

“No.”

“Did you say to her, ‘Don’t do this, Sibyl, she’s alive’?”

“No.”

“Did you try and take the knife out of Sibyl’s hand and—”

“Objection. This is just badgering,” Tanner said.

“Overruled.”

“Did you try and take the knife out of Sibyl’s hand?”

“No.”

Stephen nodded, and walked the length of the jury box. “So despite your contention later on that Charlotte Bedford was alive before the incision, you did absolutely nothing to try and save the woman’s life. Did you, at the very least, share your fear with the father while the two of you were still in the room?”

“No. Not then, I didn’t.”

“You testified earlier that you were surprised Sibyl never checked for a fetal heartbeat. Did you suggest to the midwife that perhaps she should?”

“No.”

“So am I correct in saying that despite your claim after the fact that Charlotte Bedford had been alive before the incision, you did absolutely nothing at the time to try and prevent the surgery?”

“I just didn’t know what—”

“Miss Austin—”

“I just didn’t—”

“Your Honor—”

Judge Dorset rapped his gavel on the dark wood before him and then surprised me—probably surprised us all—by throwing the young woman a life preserver and thereby preventing her from going under a final time. “Counsel,” he reminded Stephen, “I asked you to allow the witness the time to answer each question fully. Go ahead, Miss Austin.”

She took a deep breath and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Finally, in a voice that quavered slightly, she said, “I just didn’t have the confidence at the time to stop her, I just didn’t know enough. Like you said, I hadn’t been through anything like that before. But I saw the blood pumping and pumping and I knew something was wrong, and it was only a few hours later that I decided I had a … a moral responsibility to tell someone what I’d seen. I didn’t want to, I really didn’t want to. But I had to. That’s the thing: I had to do it.”

Perhaps because of the phone call I’d overheard one night between my mother and Stephen—a conversation that seemed steeped to me in flirtatious innuendo—I made a point of being home when he came by our house one afternoon in the week before the trial began. I hovered in the kitchen, pretending to do homework while they met in her office. When he finally left, as my mother walked him to his car, I went to an open window to watch them through the screen. They assumed I had stayed in the kitchen.

Instead of strolling to the car, however, they wandered to my mother’s flower garden, stopping somewhere amidst the sunflowers—taller than they by far that date in September, but just about ready to die—in a spot I couldn’t see. And so I went back to the kitchen and then out into our backyard through the sliding glass doors. Pressed flat against the side wall of our house, I still couldn’t see them, but I could hear parts of their exchange.

I don’t know if Stephen had actually tried to kiss my mother before I got outside: In my mind, I can see him taking her hands in his the way he once had by his car, and lowering his lips to hers. But I never saw him do such a thing.

Nevertheless, I’ve always understood why a lawyer has faith in logical inference, the idea that one doesn’t need to hear or see it rain overnight to know in the morning that it did rain if the cars and the ground and the trees are all wet.

And so I believe Stephen may have tried to kiss my mother by the way I heard her saying to him, “No, it’s not just the place. It’s everything. If I sent you those signals, I’m sorry. I’m really and truly sorry.”

Before I became a doctor, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would become a coroner. I assumed that anyone willing to spend that much time around corpses was inordinately fixated on death or—at best—had never outgrown a nine-year-old boy’s interest in vampires and mummies and ghouls. Only after I’d started medical school did the fascinations of that job become apparent to me, and the reasons why so many profoundly—at least outwardly—normal people choose it as their life’s work. It’s like being a detective. And once you’re past your first cadaver, human tissue loses its ability to shock, and organs and bones become routine.

When I was fourteen, however, I imagined a coroner had to be a very sick person. And so I was unprepared for the medical examiner for the state of Vermont when a bailiff escorted him between the two rows of packed benches in the courtroom mid-Friday afternoon, and led him to the witness stand. Terry Tierney looked like any one of the fathers I knew in Reddington who coached Little League baseball in the spring and Pop Warner football in the fall: energetic but patient in carriage, and downright unexceptional in appearance. He was a good decade older than my parents, with a black beard that was graying and eyeglasses very much like Stephen’s.

He smiled when Bill Tanner greeted him, and—at Tanner’s prodding—explained for the jury his litany of degrees and accomplishments. The two were so chummy that for a few moments I almost expected them to start discussing the deer hunting they could expect later that fall.

When they finally got around to the scene that had greeted Tierney when he walked into the Bedfords’ bedroom back in March, however, all of that changed, and Tierney grew serious. He described the way my mother had stitched the exterior incision she’d made and then pulled the woman’s nightgown back down over her torso.

“Did Mrs. Danforth tell you how Charlotte Bedford had died?” Bill Tanner asked.

“She said the lady had had a stroke.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought it was possible. Anything’s possible in a home birth.”

“Objection!” Stephen said, shooting up from his seat, and the judge sustained it.

“When did you conduct the autopsy?” Tanner continued, as if there had never been an interruption.

“Later that morning.”

“Did you find any indication that the woman had had a stroke?”

“No.”

“If Charlotte Bedford had had a stroke, would you have been able to determine that from an autopsy?”

“Definitely. Absolutely.”

“Why?”

Dr. Tierney sighed and gathered his thoughts. Looking back, I believe he was merely pausing to frame his answer in a way that would convey the details of postmortem dissection without sickening the jury. But at the time I thought his hesitation was driven by sadness.

“When I examined the brain, I would have found significant changes. I would have seen hemorrhaging—bleeding. The tissue would have softened; it would have gotten almost spongy.”

“And you saw none of that—no bleeding, no softening—when you were examining Charlotte Bedford’s brain?”

“No, I did not.”

Tanner returned to his table, and his deputy handed him what I assumed were his notes.

“Did you examine Charlotte Bedford’s abdominal area?”

“Yes.”

“Beginning with the incision?”

“That’s right.”

“Including her reproductive organs?”

“Of course.”

“You mentioned Mrs. Danforth had sewn up the skin where she had cut Charlotte open. Did she sew up her internal organs as well?”

“No.”

“She didn’t sew up the uterus?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Objection,” Stephen said. “Calls for speculation.”

“Sustained.”

“So you found the uterus had not been repaired,” Tanner continued.

“No, it had not.”

“Could you tell where in the birth canal the baby had been when Mrs. Danforth pulled him from his mother?”

“No.”

“Could you tell if the baby had descended at all in all those hours Mrs. Danforth forced Charlotte to push?”

“Objection, no one forced anyone to do anything.”