Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

I think Rand only spent a night in the jail, and he was never charged with anything.

And unlike me, he never had to wear handcuffs.

This afternoon when Stephen was making sure I didn't have to go to jail, the judge and the state's attorney-Tanner-made me feel like I'd shot someone while robbing a house. Stephen said it was all a formality, but I don't think anyone who's ever had state troopers show up at her house and arrest her would call "handcuffs" a formality. And while I was expecting the troopers, I certainly wasn't expecting the handcuffs.

"Now, I don't really think that's necessary, do you?" Stephen asked the two officers.

"We don't have a choice, Stephen, you know that," the fellow with the mustache said, the one who I think is named Leland.

And so right there on my own front porch, they made me put out my arms so they could "cuff me."

I just don't know how criminals ever get the hang of handcuffs. They really weren't that tight, but I guess I don't have much flesh or fat around my wrists. Every time I wiggled my thumb, the bones in my wrist rubbed against the steel. If I did it enough, I think it would have started to peel the skin.

The weirdest thing about the handcuffs was this rubber guard someone put around the chain between the bracelets. It was like a five- or six-inch length of clear garden hose. Here they design these scary, ugly, painful metal shackles for people's wrists, and then they put a rubber sleeve around the chain.

It struck me as the most surreal part of a completely surreal experience. There I was, sitting in the backseat of a state police cruiser in this spring dress covered with blue irises, with my hands folded demurely in my lap because I was wearing handcuffs in a garden hose.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

STEPHEN HASTINGS HAD NOT had many defendants in our cold, remote corner of the state. He usually worked in Burlington, where the sorts of crimes that might result in the need for a high-powered-by Vermont standards, anyway-attorney were most likely to occur. Stephen had defended the power company executive who was accused of drowning his wife in Lake Champlain, and the high-school English teacher who was charged with having sex with two fifteen-year-old girls from one of his classes. With Stephen's help, they were both found not guilty.

And while he lost as many visible cases as he won, the fact that he won any at all made him a lawyer in some demand. After all, no one thought he had a chance with the hospital administrator who virtually decapitated the bookkeeper who had apparently figured out he'd been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. ("The means and mere gruesomeness of the death suggested premeditation," Stephen told us the judge had remarked to him one evening when that trial was finished.) Everyone in the state knew a particular motel owner in Shelburne would be convicted of trafficking drugs, and the woman who left her infant twins to freeze atop Camel's Hump would be found guilty of first-degree murder.

Although Stephen's murder, rape, and drug trials garnered the most ink, he had also defended a bank president who had doctored his institution's reported assets and liabilities, an entrepreneur who had stolen from her investors, and a pair of Vermont officials who had accepted bribes from a construction company bidding on a state office complex. Vermont rarely endures more than a dozen murders a year, and most of those are the sorts of drug-related homicides or domestic nightmares that wind up with the public defender. Consequently, it was only natural that a firm like Stephen's-and Stephen himself-would handle all sorts of less visible (and less grisly) white-collar crime as well.

While Stephen may have rarely wound up in the Orleans County Courthouse in Newport, he still knew the county's state's attorney fairly well. Vermont is a small state, and Stephen and Bill Tanner ran into each other at formal bar association functions in Montpelier, and informal receptions at the law school in Royalton. They had mutual friends in Burlington and Bennington, and once spent a Saturday skiing together at Stowe, when they ran into each other in a lift line early that day.

Consequently, the scene I inadvertently witnessed one morning during the trial shouldn't have surprised me. But of course it did. I viewed Bill Tanner as an almost psychotic sort of villain, a fellow bent upon the destruction of my mother and my family for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. He was, in my mind, especially menacing because he was so unfailingly mannered.

In any case, one morning before the trial began for the day, I was standing outside the two lacquered wooden doors that led from the courthouse hallway into the courtroom itself. It was still very early, but through the porthole glass windows I could see that Stephen and Tanner and Judge Dorset were already inside. Dorset wasn't wearing his robe, and his necktie hung loose around his neck like a scarf: He had not even begun to tie it.

Tanner was eating a banana and Stephen was munching on dry cereal, his whole hand and part of his arm disappearing periodically inside the large cardboard box. The three men were hovering around the defense table, and Tanner was actually sitting in the chair that usually belonged to my mother. The jury had not yet been brought in, nor had the bailiff or the court reporter arrived. The newspaper writers hadn't struggled in, nor had most of the other spectators who filled the courtroom during the trial: my mother's friends and supporters, curious members of the State Medical Board, and Charlotte Bedford's family-a small group at once inconsolably sad and unmollifiably angry. The only two people I saw in the gallery that moment were the two young adults who-based upon the thick books of state statutes they were reading, and the yellow markers they used to highlight passages in their dense law journals-I assumed were law students.

My mother was in the women's room on another floor of the building at that moment, and my father was with her-probably pacing the corridor just outside the bathroom.

Something about the sight of the two lawyers and the judge together prevented me from plowing into the courtroom as planned. The acoustics in the courtroom were sound, and through the thin crack between the double doors I could hear their conversation.

"Oh, God, I almost laughed out loud when I saw the paper this morning," Tanner was saying, chuckling just the tiniest bit.

"Was Meehan at the same trial we were?" Stephen said, and it took me a moment to remember why I knew the name Meehan. And then it clicked: He was the gaunt, blond fellow covering the trial for the Montpelier Sentinel, the man who always looked so tired.

"I just had no idea it was going so damn well, Stephen," Tanner continued, pressing the yellow and black peel from his banana into an empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

"Meehan's an idiot," Dorset said. "You both know that."

"Maybe. But if the jury has seen it so far the way he has, I have really screwed up here," Stephen said.

"No one sees things the way Meehan does," Dorset said.

"I hope so. Otherwise, it's going to be a very long couple of days for my friend Sibyl," Stephen said, shaking his head with mock drama.

"But a very short deliberation," Tanner quickly added, and he punched Stephen lightly on the arm.

I think what distressed me most at that moment wasn't the idea that Stephen feared the trial was going badly, although I'm sure that contributed to the queasiness I felt most of the morning. It may not even have been the way the attorney who was supposed to protect my mother and preserve my family was fraternizing with the enemy that I found so disturbing.

No, looking back, what I believe upset me the most that day was the casual, lighthearted way the three men were bantering. This trial had become everything for my family, it was our lives; it was in our minds every moment we were awake, and I can't imagine my mother escaped it in her dreams. I know I didn't. The penalty for involuntary manslaughter was one to fifteen years in prison, and Tanner's relentless attacks on my mother had made it clear to us all that should she be found guilty, the State would press hard for the maximum penalty. (I had done the math instantly the morning the charges were brought against my mother: If she was found guilty and sent to prison for a decade and a half, I would be twenty-nine years old by the time she got out, and my mother would be close to fifty.)