Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"I will."

"Promise?"

I rolled my eyes. "Mom!"

She rolled her eyes and threw back her head histrionically in response.

"Promise?" she asked again, a reference to the vow she'd asked me to make when I turned thirteen that if I ever thought there was even the slightest chance I might be having sex in the foreseeable future-even if that chance was as statistically remote as being hit by lightning in late December-I would tell her, and we would visit Planned Parenthood and get me fitted for a diaphragm. Short of dealing heroin to our schoolmates or shooting a teacher, I think the only thing Tom and I could have done that year that would have truly disappointed and upset my mother would have been to have had the sort of tumble together that results in an unexpected teenage pregnancy.

When I told some of my friends about this promise, girls like Rollie and Sadie, they decided that there was no mother on the planet as cool as my mom. Most mothers then wouldn't even say the word diaphragm to their thirteen-year-old daughters, much less offer to drive them to the clinic where they could get one. In the eyes of my friends, the attitudinal advantages of having a midwife for a mother dramatically outweighed the inconveniences brought on by long labors and midnight deliveries.

"I promise," I said.

"Thank you." She rolled the magazine into a tube and held it primly in her lap like a diploma.

"You're welcome. How does your ankle feel?"

"It feels okay." She shrugged. "Painkillers."

"They work?"

"You bet."

"What did Dr. Hewitt want?"

"You weren't listening?"

"I couldn't hear everything."

"He's a good friend," she said instead of answering my question. I don't think it was a conscious evasion, but she quickly continued, "I think I'm on my own for the prenatals tomorrow."

"Anne doesn't do much yet anyway, does she?"

"She does her share. She's learning."

"It sounds like she's got a lot to learn."

My mother looked at me for a long moment, and I worked hard to maintain eye contact. I think she realized in that second just how much I understood: how much she needed to share with me, and how much she didn't. She didn't blink, and if the cluster flies in our walls were not dormant that moment, they would have seen my mother's head nod just the tiniest bit. Yes, that nod agreed, she does.

Downstairs my father added water to the kettle atop the wood-stove, pushing the wrought-iron lid against the brass handle. I knew the clang it made well. A second later my mother and I both heard the brief sizzle from the drops of water that spilled down the sides of the kettle onto the soapstone surface of the stove, hot enough to turn that water to steam in an instant. He then pulled the chain of the reading lamp by the couch, and we knew he was about to come upstairs.

Finally I looked down at the edge of my quilt, unable to meet my mother's gaze any longer.

"Sleep well, sweetie," she said. "Sweet dreams."

"You, too, Mom," I answered, and somewhere inside her she found the strength to murmur the lie that she would.

$25,000. A two and a five and three zeros-five zeros if you're using a decimal point. Not a whole lot less than it took to buy this whole house not that many years ago. The cost of two years of college for Connie. The cost of my baby's entire college education, with change, if she decides she wants to go to the University of Vermont.

Until today, Rand and I had never written one check that big. Technically, I guess, I still haven't. It was Rand who actually tracked down a pen in the kitchen drawer and wrote out the words "Twenty-five thousand dollars" on that line checks have right below "Pay to the Order of." Then he scribbled the two and the five and all those zeros.

And that $25,000 is just the beginning. "The retainer to get the clock started," Stephen Hastings said. "The money to feed the meter." And now the meter's running.

I was very disturbed by the amount at first, and I found myself wishing we were eligible for the public defender, but we're not. I kept hearing these words in my head, this sentence: "Man, that's a lot of bread." That's what we used to say: "A lot of bread." Grass might be a lot of bread, or a car-used or dented or wrecked by some sort of really hideous orange paint that someone thought was psychedelic-or a pair of stereo speakers.

I told Rand it was too much money, especially since we'll need a lot more if this thing drags on. It's almost our entire life savings, almost all of the money we've squirreled away for over a decade for Connie's college or our retirement or both.

Besides, I haven't done anything wrong. And so I said to Rand maybe we didn't have to have the best attorney we could find, or the best lawyer money could buy. It's not like I was caught robbing a bank with a machine gun.

But Rand disagreed, and said it didn't matter whether I'd done anything wrong, that wasn't the point. The point was that a woman had died doing something we all know the state hates, and that was having her baby at home. And so someone will have to be held accountable.

In the old days, of course, he would have called the state "the establishment."

In my mind, I can see Rand shaking his head and I can hear him saying, "Man, it will take a lot of bread to beat the establishment, but pay up we must." He didn't say that, of course. He wouldn't, not these days.

What he said was, "We want the best, and apparently that's Stephen Hastings. We shouldn't be surprised that he's the most costly."

Rand is probably right. But given who I am and what I do, Stephen Hastings is a very ironic choice. In the world of law, Stephen's as pricey as they come: He's polished and high-tech and very, very slick. Meanwhile, in the world of babies, I'm about as inexpensive as you get, a fraction of the cost of an ob-gyn. And I try hard to be unpolished and low-tech and… earthy.

And it sounds like Stephen was in Vietnam, based on something he said to Connie. I find that very weird, too. Imagine this: It's a single day fourteen years ago. On one side of the planet, I'm in Plattsburgh in my "Drop acid, not bombs" T-shirt, putting daisies all over the wire fence at the air base and in the gun barrels of the soldiers who keep telling us we have to stop. And somewhere on the other side of the planet it's nighttime, and there's this guy from Vermont named Stephen Hastings who's up to his hips in some swamp or rice paddy. And now that guy's defending me.

I do believe this will all be fine in the end, at least partly because Stephen seems to be such a good lawyer. But also because I was trying to do the right thing when I decided to save Veil.

Stephen seems to understand that. He may be polished and slick and a high-tech kind of guy, but I can see myself delivering his wife's or girlfriend's baby someday in their home. Maybe Stephen will be my first lawyer daddy. That'd be cool.

I know he doesn't have any children yet, and I know he's no longer married. I wonder if he has a girlfriend back in Burlington.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

HOW HIGH DOES BLOOD SPURT from a beating heart? For my mother, the question lost its rhetorical or theoretic flourish, and became instead one of pathological and clinical detail: In her mind, there was a tangible, perhaps even mathematical, connection between the power of the pulse and the height of the geyser at the point of incision.

For Stephen Hastings, however, the issue became one of mere staging and lighting: logistics, not pathology. It didn't matter to him how high into the air a beating heart could arc a fountain of blood, or whether the red crescent was narrow or squat-a water pistollike squirt, or the burp of a water balloon burst with a pin. Although my mother's fate would indeed depend in large measure upon who would win the battle of the experts Stephen waged with Bill Tanner-his doctors versus the State's, his midwives versus theirs-on this one question he didn't worry much about medical testimony. He worried instead about blocking, and where Asa Bedford and Anne Austin were standing when my mother took a kitchen knife and first pierced Charlotte's skin: