Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"No, just one. They kept asking me if Mom was there."

"And you told them she was?"

I nodded. "Was that okay?"

"God, Connie, of course. Of course it was. Your mom did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing. Sometimes women die in childbirth, just like sometimes people get sick and die. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Mrs. Bedford just happened to have been one of those few people who dies. It's sad-very sad-but these things happen."

"Unfortunately."

"Yes. Unfortunately."

He looked at the coffeepot and seemed to realize for the first time it was full. I expected him to stand and pour himself a cup, but he didn't move from his chair.

"Was it bloody?" I finally asked.

Resting his elbow on the table and his jaw on the palm of his hand, he nodded. "Yes, it was very bloody."

He might have told me then that my mother had performed a cesarean section, but in the hallway above us we heard footsteps. We both realized Sibyl was awake, and she was on her way downstairs. My father would leave it to her to tell me a few sketchy details of what had occurred in the Bedfords' bedroom early that morning.

When my mother entered the kitchen, her hair was still wild with sleep, and her eyes were so red they looked painful. She was wearing her nightgown, something she rarely did in the middle of the day even when she napped after a long nighttime birth, and her feet were bare. She looked old to me, and it was not simply because she was limping or because there were dark bags under her eyes. It was not merely because she looked tired.

That aura, to use one of my mother's favorite words, of limitless enthusiasm that seemed to surround her had dissipated. The energy-part optimism, part patience, part joy-that sometimes seemed to fill whole rooms when she entered had vanished.

It was also clear that my mother had not slept long, and whatever sleep she had been granted had not been deep. Those nights when sleep would come easily, those afternoons when naps would come quickly, those hours when her dreams would be untroubling and serene, were gone forever.

Clarissa Roberson's mother, Maureen, is a very together woman. She was a hospital baby, and so were all of her children (including, of course, Clarissa).

But David Roberson was born at home, and he wanted his children born at home. And so there little Clarissa was, all 137 pounds of her-137 pounds at nine months and a week!-laboring away on the bed in her bedroom, and her mom was right there beside David and me, helping her daughter through it.

And it was a long labor, and Maureen must be close to sixty now. But she was terrific. Tireless.

And while I've had lots of moms present at their daughters' deliveries, watching as their little girls made them grandmothers, I've never had one who wanted to be as involved as Maureen. Or involved in such an astonishingly loving and knowing and supportive sort of way. Some mothers get a little queasy or nervous when their own babies are in labor, and I think that's totally understandable. The surges can be breathtaking and scary, and the blood can be intimidating. I think that's why a lot of the mothers who help their daughters have babies limit themselves to things like brewing the tea, or cheering them on from the head of the bed.

But not Maureen. She was right in there with me. At one point between surges I put the Johnson's down to ask David a question, and when I turned around, there was Maureen up to her elbows in baby oil as she massaged her little girl's perineum.

It was beautiful. Incredibly, incredibly beautiful.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER SAID VERY LITTLE in the hours between when I returned home from school and when the state troopers arrived.

She sat on the couch in the den in her nightgown, with a quilt draped over her shoulders. The little room smelled like cinnamon from the herbal tea she was sipping. Whenever the phone rang-and it must have rung three or four times that afternoon-my father answered it and dealt with the caller.

About five-thirty the sun broke through once and for all, not long before it would disappear for the night into the western horizon. But for a few minutes sunlight filled the den, and the fire my father had started in the woodstove earlier in the day seemed unnecessary.

Twice my mother asked me how school had been that day, but I knew neither time she heard my response.

Once she asked my father for more aspirin for the pain in her ankle, and when he brought her the pills and a glass of cold water, he had to remind her that she herself had requested them.

"Let's have that ankle X-rayed tomorrow," my father suggested.

"Yes. Let's," my mother said. She rarely looked at my father or me. She stared at the fire through the glass windows in the woodstove, she stared at the tea in her mug. Sometimes she put her tea down on the table by the couch and looked at the cuts on her hands.

"Was that Anne?" my mother asked my father one of the times he returned from answering the phone in the kitchen.

"No. It was just Sara. She was hoping you could bake a cake for the fire department's potluck next weekend."

"The fund-raiser."

"Right."

"She hadn't heard?"

"Apparently not."

But most of the time the three of us sat in silence. For some reason I was afraid to leave the house, and I was afraid to be upstairs alone in my room. And so I sat with my parents in the den. I believe we all understood on some level that we were waiting for something to happen; we all had an intuitive sense that something well beyond our control was about to occur.

My father and I saw the state police cruiser rolling slowly up our driveway Friday night around dusk, and I believe that we saw it at about the same time. The rack of lights along the roof was off, but I don't think anyone can see a green police car coast to a stop by her house and not be alarmed. Especially the daughter of ex-hippies Rand and Sibyl Danforth.

I was flattening ground meat into hamburgers, and my father was beside me, reaching into the cabinet for a skillet. My mother was still in the den, unmoving and silent but awake.

"I'll see to that," my father said quietly to me, perhaps hoping he could shoo the police away as if they were a pair of vacuum cleaner salesmen.

I assumed I would have to remain by the counter beside the sink, hoping to overhear at least the key details, but my mother heard the knock on the door and grew more alert: She put down her tea and sat up, and craned her head toward the door. When she realized who had come to our house, she rose from the cushions and pillows into which she had burrowed, and somehow found the strength to amble into the front hall. And so I ventured there, too.

"I really believe this can wait until tomorrow," my father was saying.

"I'm sorry, it can't," one of the officers said, although his voice suggested that he certainly understood my father's desire to give my mother a night of peace. "But I promise," he added, "this won't take too long."

The officers were tall, and both well into middle age. One had a white mustache trimmed so severely it looked a bit menacing. The other had the sort of sharp, deep creases across his face that I always associated with farmers-the sort of wrinkles that come from driving a tractor into autumn winds for days and days at a time. Their jackets were buttoned against the March chill, their collars folded up around their necks. When the fellow who would do most of the talking that evening-the one with the mustache-noticed my mother and me approaching in the hallway behind my father, he removed his wide-brimmed trooper's hat, and the other officer immediately did the same. They nodded at my mother as if they knew her, and I got the impression they'd probably met her at the Bedfords' that morning.