Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"Who drove you there?"

"To the Bedfords'? I don't remember his name. He worked for the rescue squad."

"Your car was okay?"

"It was fine. The hardest part was backing around the police car."

"There were troopers still on the scene?"

"I guess so. One of their cars was still there."

"Did you speak to an officer?"

"I didn't see one to speak to."

"Were you alarmed?"

"Alarmed? Why would I have been alarmed?"

Rhodes apparently answered my mother's question with a question of his own: "So you didn't go into the house?"

"No."

"You went straight home."

"Yes. I went straight home. And then straight to bed."

There was a long silence. Finally Rhodes took the pad from the corporal and passed it across the coffee table to my mother.

"Why don't you read this, Mrs. Danforth, and make sure we have everything right," he said, as Tilley handed my mother his pen.

My mother read through the pages, but she said later she didn't read them particularly carefully. Most of the time she could decipher Tilley's penmanship, but she was exhausted and so when she came across a word or a sentence that was incomprehensible, she just ignored it and moved on. Tilley had usually captured the gist of what she had said, and it seemed to her that was all that should matter at that point.

"Is the story accurate?" Rhodes asked her when she was through. "Did Richard here even come close?" he continued, smiling.

"It's more or less what happened," my mother said.

"Good, good," Rhodes murmured. He then made the request of my mother that would finally lead both of my parents to realize they needed a lawyer, and they needed one right away. It didn't matter that it was between seven-thirty and eight o'clock on a Friday evening; it didn't matter that it was the start of a weekend. They needed an attorney. A criminal attorney. And they needed one immediately.

Nodding as if his request were small, a bit of minor and inconsequential protocol, Rhodes looked at the bookshelves over my mother's shoulder and asked, "Would you swear to the truth of it for us, please? And then sign it?"

Charlotte spent a half hour today looking at all of the pictures of babies and moms on my wall. She'd noticed the photos during her very first visit, but today was the first time she really wanted to see them.

"Look, Foogie," she said to her little boy, pointing at the first photo ever taken of Louisa Walsh. "Maybe your baby sister will look like her."

"Or maybe my baby brother will look like that one," Foogie said, pointing at a picture of another baby he must have assumed was a boy. It wasn't. He was actually looking at Betty Isham at three hours, wrapped in blue swaddling because that's what her parents happened to have handy. Of course I didn't tell Foogie that.

Anyway, Charlotte says she wants a girl, Foogie says he wants a boy, and Asa just wants a healthy baby. Charlotte tells me that's all Asa prays for from the birth: another healthy child. That's all he says that matters. A healthy baby.

Charlotte's taking good care of herself. I'm sure he'll get his wish.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER DID SIGN the affidavit. My father tried to stop her, telling the troopers, "She'll be happy to sign it once our attorney has reviewed it," but my mother believed that she had done absolutely nothing wrong.

"I'll sign it," she said to my father, and she did, scrawling her name in large, proud letters along the bottom of the eleventh page.

Saturday morning my parents were up and around well before me. I struggled downstairs in my nightgown sometime around eight o'clock, and my mother and father were already fully dressed and finishing breakfast. Unlike most Saturdays, my father was wearing slacks and a necktie, and my mother was wearing a skirt and a blouse. She was sitting with her right leg stretched out straight, and even through her thick wool tights I could see how swollen her ankle had become.

"How did you sleep?" my mother asked me, her voice a forced attempt to be cheerful.

"Okay," I mumbled, noting through my own morning fog that neither she nor my father looked particularly well rested. I imagined they had slept, but it had been fitful at best.

"Up to anything special today?" she continued.

I shook my head, suddenly self-conscious as I stood before them beside the refrigerator. Quickly I reached for the milk and a box of cereal and joined them at the kitchen table.

At that point I knew the basics of my parents' agenda for that day, but none of the details. I knew they were seeing lawyers, little more. As they sipped their coffee, I was able to pick up the rest.

Friday night my father had spoken by phone to attorneys at three firms, two in Montpelier and one in Burlington. The pair of attorneys in Montpelier were casual friends of our family, the sorts of people my parents would see at big Christmas parties and town-wide summer picnics and whose company they probably enjoyed. But we weren't especially close to either one, so my father's phone calls had probably caught them off guard the night before. Nevertheless, each lawyer was happy to meet with my parents and try and understand if he could help them.

The third attorney was Stephen Hastings, a friend of Warren Birch, one of the Montpelier lawyers my parents were visiting that morning. Hastings was a young partner in a Burlington firm, and Birch thought he was an excellent criminal lawyer-something Birch suggested he himself wasn't.

And so my parents' plan was to meet with the two Montpelier-based attorneys before lunch and then see Hastings at his firm in Burlington in the afternoon. They left soon after I'd finished my breakfast, and I spent most of that day in a daze.

Tom Corts and I had been going steady by then for close to four months, although we hadn't formalized the arrangement with anything as symbolic as an ID bracelet or ankle chain. In our part of Vermont, ID bracelets were passe by 1981, and the only girls who wore metal around their ankles were a trio of especially fast young things led by a newcomer to the Kingdom from Boston.

Tom and I were supposed to have gone to a dance together Friday night, a shindig at the American Legion post in Montpelier of all things. The Legionnaires had been holding "alcohol-free" dances every other Friday that winter for the high-school kids, hoping to decrease the number of us who drank too much before rolling our daddies' pickups into ditches, or slamming our already-dented Novas into trees. Obviously I was years away from driving that spring, and the privilege still eluded Tom by five months. And, of course, we were nowhere near old enough to drink legally in Vermont.

But Tom's friends in the tenth and eleventh grades had discovered that while the dances may have been alcohol-free in the Spartan dance hall inside the Post, there was almost always at least one unemployed quarry worker from Barre or laid-off lathe operator from the furniture factory in Morrisville hovering around the nearby convenience store who would buy a kid a six-pack if he could keep one or two of the beers for himself. And so small groups of us would stand in the shadows of the Legionnaires' Post or the convenience store, stamping our feet to stay warm and holding chilled beers that were nowhere near as cold as the night air around us.

Usually one of my parents or Rollie's mother would drive us to the dances that winter, but we always had one of Tom's older brothers pick us up. We feared our breath or my babbling would give our drinking away. I've never held alcohol well, and in eighth grade it only took a beer and a half to give me the giggles.

I had not gone with Tom to the dance that Friday night, however, because I had suspected in school that I had best be home in the evening. By the time most of us started piling into school buses to go home at three, Tom had heard that one of Sibyl Danforth's mothers had died. We discussed it briefly before each of our last classes began, and his take was at once characteristically prescient and prickly: