Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Was my mother wrong? Anne thought so, just as the medical examiner certainly believed there was room for doubt. Asa was standing by the window when my mother made the first cut, but he said later that-like Anne-he saw blood spurt.

Blood powered, the state's attorney would insist, by a pumping heart.

But Anne said nothing at the time, too young to be sure of what she had seen. It would be hours before she would pick up the phone, confused, unable to sleep, and call my mother's backup physician. She would later say she could not believe blood would have spurted like that from a dead woman, but my mother's attorney said there was probably another reason she called Dr. Hewitt: Stephen Hastings always viewed Anne as a nervous rat jumping from the Titantic.

She made that critical phone call late in the morning, while miles away in Burlington the medical examiner was in the midst of his autopsy, trying-and failing-to find a sign of the cerebral aneurysm.

…

My mother ran a fingernail in an imaginary line from Charlotte's navel to her pubic bone. Her hands were shaking.

She remembered reading somewhere that a surgeon could pull a baby from its mother in a crisis in twenty or thirty seconds, but that didn't seem possible to her. All those layers. Cutting into a human. Not wanting to cut the fetus. It just didn't seem possible.

Although she believed intellectually that she could do Charlotte no harm, she still moved carefully, as if she feared nicking an organ. She pretended the line she had sketched below Charlotte's navel was real and then pressed the tip of the carving knife hard into the dead woman's skin.

Blood burst from Charlotte at the point of incision in rhythmic spurts. These were not, Anne said, the powerful geysers one would expect from a healthy, beating heart, but the little spasms one might get from a weak one. Nevertheless, the blood seemed to Anne to be pulsing through Charlotte, and pumping from her where my mother had made the cut.

When she saw the blood spurt momentarily into the air-splattering my mother's fingers-the idea first began to form in Anne Austin's mind that my mother was performing a cesarean on a living woman.

But Anne hadn't noticed Charlotte's body move, she hadn't seen a reflexive spasm or twitch. And quickly the pulsations stopped, and the blood merely flowed. A thin string appeared, then grew wide. My mother pressed the blade further into the woman, through skin to fat to fascia, and pushed against the layer of muscle that was the only part of Charlotte's body resisting the steel intrusion. And then she drew the knife down toward Charlotte's vagina.

The blood rolled down the woman's belly, coating pale hips and thighs, and spilled onto the sheets on the bed to create fresh stains.

My mother pressed a pillow onto the wound for a brief moment to soak up some of the blood so she could see inside the incision. As she held the pillow there, she said later, she decided that she hadn't actually made something that resembled a surgical incision so much as she'd made a gaping, unclosable hole in Charlotte Bedford's abdomen. It suddenly seemed gigantic to her, monstrously big, and she heard her teeth begin chattering inside her head before she actually felt and understood what the noise was. Somehow, she was sweating.

When she pulled the pillow away, she saw the hemisphere from a salmon-pink kickball, the smooth, shining half shell of the uterus. Globular. Clean. Almost fruity. There it was, steaming amidst fat that was luminous, and meatlike strips of moist muscle. My mother wasn't squeamish, but she said the sight made her dizzy-not so much because it would be warm and slippery, but because here was life at its most visceral. Most primal. Here was life in the womb.

She ran her fingertips over the fundus until she understood where the baby was, and then grabbed the knife off the mattress. Using its tip like a pin, she pricked the uterus like a balloon in a spot far from the fetus. There was little amniotic fluid left, and her fear that it would spout into the air and coat her arms and her face and her hands had been unfounded. She'd ruptured the membranes earlier, she remembered; there was nothing left to splatter.

She then placed a finger into the uterus and tore it open gently with both hands, afraid to sever it with a knife: The baby was too near.

She would recall in the courtroom that tearing the uterus was as easy as tearing damp pastry dough, but she was nevertheless finding it hard to breathe as she worked.

When the opening was large enough for her hand, she reached deep inside and felt the baby's face. Her palm grazed its nose, and she ran her hand across its skull, its neck, its spine, until she had discovered one of its fat, pudgy thighs. She slid her hand up its leg until she had one foot, and then reached in her other hand for the child's other foot.

She then ripped the body from its mother, and in the air of the bedroom the fetus instantly became in my mother's eyes an infant. A boy. And when she had sucked the mucus from his throat with an ear syringe and he slowly came around-gasping, then breathing, then finally howling-he became for his father a living reminder of Charlotte Fugett Bedford's life and death and unspeakable ordeal.

Eleanor Snow arrived this morning, and she is the most amazingly lovely little thing. Eight pounds, one ounce, twenty inches. Her nose is a gentle little ski jump. The tiny rolls of baby fat on her arms make little bracelets at her wrists. And her hair, at least this morning, is strawberry blond.

Her eyes are gray today, but I think someday they'll be blue.

Dottie Snow's labor was quick: Anne and I got there about six-fifteen in the morning, and Dottie was already ten centimeters dilated and ready to rock and roll. I don't think she pushed for more than half an hour, and the joy in that room as she worked was just unbelievable. Unbelievable! She had her two sisters with her, her mom, and of course Chuck was there. Chuck had also been present for the birth of his first two children, and he is just the gentlest coach. He and Dottie were smooching and hugging between each surge, and he was always rubbing her breasts and shoulders. I really get off on that kind of love.

But what made the aura in that room so powerful was the combination of husband-wife love, sister love, and mother-daughter love. Dottie's sisters were hugging her, they were hugging each other, they were hugging Chuck. It was magnificent. I wish I could have bottled the vibes in that room and saved a little for some of the lonelier births.

Lonely births are the saddest things in the world. They can bring me down for days.

Charlotte Bedford's birth might be a lonely birth. At least the potential's there. Charlotte has no family anywhere near here, except Asa. And Asa is a sweet man, but he's so involved with his congregation he doesn't seem to have enough energy left for Charlotte.

And I don't think I've met a single female friend of hers. Female or male! She's met very few people outside of her husband's congregation, she says when we talk, and they keep a certain respectful distance because she's the new preacher's wife. I may be her closest friend up here, and so her prenatal visits go on forever.

No doubt about it, hers could be a lonely birth. And a lonely postpartum. I hope Asa's parish will look out for them. I have to believe they will, they're good people. But I wish I knew more people up in Lawson or Fallsburg.

Maybe I'll meet some before the baby arrives. Maybe I'll make an effort and try.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER WASN'T HOME from the Bedford birth by breakfast, and as my father and I ate our toaster waffles, we discussed how it looked as though poor Charlotte was in the midst of one of those eighteen- to twenty-four-hour marathons.