Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

But if Tom was appalled by what he saw when I opened the door, he kept his disappointment to himself. And I was indeed glad to see him. He wrapped his arms around the small of my back and pulled me to him, and gave me a kiss on the lips as gentle and chaste as the first one we'd shared a year earlier in the mud of the McKenna family's small paddock.

And then he just rocked me for a long moment, an awkward sway that felt just right for that time. I pressed my forehead against the cotton from his shirt that peeked through his partly zipped parka, lulled if not wholly reassured. I don't recall how he finally separated our two bodies and moved us inside, but somehow he managed without traumatizing me.

It was quickly apparent that Tom, like me, had absolutely no idea of how much or how little he should speak of Mrs. Bedford's death or my mother's involvement. He understood a hug would be good, but the spoken sentiments he'd have to ad-lib as he settled in for his visit.

"My cousin lives in a pit," were his first words to me after we had walked into the kitchen. "That boy is as stubborn as a pig on ice, so there was no changing his mind. But, my God, has he moved into a dump."

"What's so bad about it?"

"Aside from the fact it's got about two windows and they're only as big as record albums, nothing. Except, maybe, it's only two rooms and a bathroom, and the floor's about rotted out in the bathroom. And I could only find one outlet in the whole darn place."

As we walked through the kitchen to the den, he stopped before the refrigerator. "Can I get myself a soda?"

"Sure."

"I just have no idea what that boy thinks he's doing," he went on as he reached inside the white Kelvinator for a Coke.

"Is the apartment in town, or outside it?"

"It's in a house by the maple syrup company. The one that cans all the stuff from Quebec."

"A nice house?"

"Hah! 'Bout as nice as a car accident. It's dark and old and in need of either a good carpenter or a well-placed bolt of lightning."

He sat down on a corner of the floor by the stereo and began thumbing through the record albums and tapes lined up to one side.

"How's your mom today?" he asked, careful to look intently at an album cover instead of at me.

"I think her ankle hurts more than she'll admit."

"Her ankle?"

I told him how in addition to everything else she had endured up at the Bedfords', she had injured her ankle.

"She picked out a lawyer?"

"I don't know."

"How many are your folks seeing?"

"Three."

He nodded approvingly. "My cousin said he guessed your parents make too much money to get a public defender. But he said he had a good one once."

We may not have had particularly crisp reception back then in our part of Vermont, but I had nevertheless seen enough television to know what a public defender was.

"He did?"

"Yup, in St. Johnsbury. He said the guy was real sharp."

"What'd he do?"

"My cousin or the lawyer?"

I shrugged. "I guess both."

"My cousin was drunk and stole a car to go joyriding and then hit a telephone pole. Wrecked the thing."

"Whose car?"

"Belonged to a guy from Boston. A Saab. Problem was, it was the second time he'd gotten smashed and taken somebody's car. So he ended up spending thirty days in Windsor. But he said it would have been a lot worse than thirty days if his lawyer hadn't been such a fast talker."

"Stealing a car when you're drunk gets you thirty days?" I asked.

"That's what it got my cousin."

In the kitchen the phone rang, and when I didn't move to answer it, Tom looked up at me and offered to get it.

"Let the answering machine deal with it," I told him, and explained how up until perhaps an hour earlier, the phone had been ringing nonstop. Not surprisingly, it was merely a reporter calling yet again.

"There'll be a lot in the newspapers tomorrow, won't there?" Tom said.

"I guess."

"Has your mom spoken to any newspapers yet?"

"I don't think so."

He sighed and looked down at the pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his shirt. I could tell he wanted one, but he wasn't allowed to smoke inside our house.

"Do you think she should?" I asked.

"I don't know. Maybe. Get her side out there."

"Her side? What do you mean her side?"

He slipped an album back into the line of records wedged between the wall and one of the speakers, and clasped his hands behind his neck.

"Look, Connie, I don't know much about any of this stuff. I can't even fake it when it comes to lawyers and newspaper people. So I could be completely wrong about all this. But here's the thing: A lady's dead. And she died having a baby. She didn't die because she was hit by lightning, or because she crashed her car into a rock, or because her house burned down in the middle of the night. She didn't die because she was too fat for her heart, or because she broke her neck on a snowmobile. She's dead because of something that happened while she was having a baby."

"So?"

"So, they're going to have to blame someone. Look at all the reporters who've started calling already."

I heard the robin outside the kitchen window, back to beat up on his reflection. I tried to focus for a moment on what Tom was saying, but I kept coming back to his cousin and the time the fellow spent in the state prison in Windsor. The sentence kept forming in my mind like a word problem in a math class:

If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth?

"Who was your cousin's public defender?" I asked.

"I don't remember his name."

"But it was in St. Johnsbury?"

"Yup."

If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober.

"Not Newport?"

"Not Newport."

"Think Newport has its own public defender?"

"It's a different county. Probably."

If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober. When you do the math, don't forget that the midwife cut open the mother after she died.

"Mrs. Bedford died up in Lawson. The people who went by their house yesterday morning were all from Newport."

"Look, I'm sure the Newport guy's good, too."

"I hope so."

"Besides, even if your mom does end up needing a lawyer, your parents are the type who'll shop around. They'll probably use one of the guys they meet today."

"And that's if my mom even needs one," I added hopefully, echoing his earlier words.

He nodded his head and murmured, "Yup, that's right: if. If she even needs one," but I could tell that deep down he was convinced that she would. Behind us the phone rang again, and this time Tom didn't even look up. He just kept staring at the knees of his blue jeans, as yet another unfamiliar voice asked my mother to call him back when she returned.

Fifteen years ago, I always expected I'd be arrested one day. I marched against the war, I called police officers "pigs," I smoked more than my share of pot.

But I guess I never got mad enough or wild enough or stoned enough to do something really crazy. Maybe I would have if I hadn't been blessed with Connie. I knew plenty of girls then who would give a trooper the finger while holding their baby in their other arm, but that wasn't me. My baby was always too precious to me to screw around like that.

I remember that Rand was picked up once and herded into a wagon. He was one of dozens and dozens of guys arrested in a Washington, D.C., protest, and I probably would have been with him if I hadn't been five months pregnant at the time. But I was carrying Connie, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend a day in a cramped van driving from Vermont to Washington, and then another day standing around in the D.C. heat, screaming my lungs out with thousands of really, really angry people.