Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

And he probably spent entire days on the phone those first weeks, tracking down midwives around the country who'd been tried for one reason or another-practicing medicine without a license, illegal possession of regulated drugs-and interviewing their lawyers. He found forensic pathologists and obstetricians who could serve as our expert witnesses should they be needed, some willing to come from as far away as Texas.

And although Stephen may not have been particularly interested in the specifics of how high blood might spurt, there were some medical issues that mattered to him greatly-including, of course, Charlotte Fugett Bedford's cause of death. Stephen wanted to be sure that we had our explanation for why the woman had died, especially after the autopsy was complete and it was clear that the State was going to contend there had been no cerebral aneurysm, and that the cause of death was therefore Sibyl Danforth.

With the help of his specialists, in those first weeks Stephen began developing lists: long litanies of the complications that can occur in any birth, home or hospital; anecdotes from my mother's professional history that demonstrated her unusually high standards of care; incidents that suggested that the medical community had a vendetta against home birth, and my mother was merely a scapegoat-tragic, but convenient.

The specialist who became most involved with us as a family, however, actually knew as little about home birth in the beginning as Stephen. She was, in fact, more of a generalist, since her specialty was getting information. Patty Dunlevy was a private investigator, the state's first female PI. Stephen Hastings chose her as his investigator first and foremost, he said, because she was without question the best in Vermont. But given the issues surrounding my mother's case, we all understood the fact that she was a woman wouldn't hurt either.

Patty fast became a role model of sorts for Rollie McKenna and me. We met her together, on a Wednesday afternoon less than a week after Charlotte Bedford had died. The two of us were grooming Witch Grass in the section of the McKennas' paddock nearest the road when Patty's white car-a squat but sleek foreign thing caked with mud, a good-sized ding on the door, a spiderweb crack in the windshield-squealed to a stop in the dirt by the fence. The woman driving leaned across the empty passenger seat, pulled off the mirrored sunglasses she'd been wearing, and rolled down the window to ask if either of us knew where someone named Sibyl Danforth lived.

New paranoias die even harder than old habits (especially when the paranoia's grounded in reality), and my immediate fear was that this woman was a reporter. So despite the mistake I had made only two days before when Stephen Hastings appeared at our front door, I responded to the woman's question with an inquiry of my own.

"Does she know you're coming?" I asked warily.

"Sure does. You must be her daughter."

"What makes you think so?"

"You're looking out for her. I'm Patty Dunlevy. I work with Stephen Hastings-your mom's lawyer."

The woman was in her late thirties or early forties, but her hair was still an almost electric strawberry blond. That afternoon she was wearing a golf-course-green headband to keep her mane from her face, and the sort of tailored black leather jacket one was more likely to find on the back of a Park Avenue debutante at a dance party than a biker at a Hell's Angels rally. But we'd learn quickly that Patty was a chameleon, which was one of the reasons she was so good at what she did. I know when she interviewed my mother's clients or other midwives that spring and summer she was likely to be dressed in billowy peasant skirts or broken-in blue jeans; when she visited physicians or hospital administrators, especially the hostile ones, she'd appear in madras skirts and low-heeled pumps, with crisp, well-ironed blouses. Patty clearly liked her mirrored sunglasses and black leather jacket, but she also understood they were a needless occupational encumbrance with many of her sources, and was careful to make sure her first impressions were perfect.

And once I understood that Patty Dunlevy wasn't a reporter, I liked her right away. Rollie and I both did. Her car was both a reflection of her work ethic-style tempered with labor-and the remarkable way the woman herself was one of those walking centers of inexorable gravitation: After I'd informed Patty that she was indeed looking for my mother, I did not simply provide directions to our home, I climbed into the car and served as copilot for the five hundred yards separating the McKennas from the Danforths.

"How's your mom doing?" she asked, as Rollie and Witch Grass grew small in the rearview mirror.

"I guess fine."

"What a nightmare. You don't know how awful I feel for her."

"What do you do with Mr. Hastings? Are you a lawyer, too?" I asked, settling into the bucket seat in her car.

"Nope. I'm an investigator."

"A detective?"

"More or less. I work with lawyers to get the poop they can't."

An image passed behind my eyes of Patty Dunlevy sitting in her squat little car in the parking lot of one of the motels out by the Burlington airport. She was using a camera with a lens the width of a bazooka to photograph illicit lovers through dusty, half-open venetian blinds.

"What sort of poop?" I asked.

Her answer suggested that she'd heard the apprehension in my voice.

"Oh, all sorts. It might be something incredibly mundane like getting a confirmation of a power outage from an electric company. Some phone records. Or it might be something a little more interesting like getting background on a hostile witness. The sort of thing that just might discredit someone a tad. But I'll tell you point-blank what I tell everyone: I don't do adultery and I don't do divorces."

"What are you going to… do for my mother?"

She smiled. "Well, for starters, I'm going to get from her the name of every single person on this planet who will say something nice about her if we ask them to testify. Then we'll begin figuring out exactly what I'm going to do for her."

"You'll have a long list, you know."

"Of people who like her? Terrific. It's always a special treat when Stephen actually has me working for the good guys."

…

I'm not superstitious now, and I wasn't in 1981. In my mind, it is merely ironic-not symbolic-that Charlotte Fugett Bedford went into labor on the thirteenth of March, and that the results of the written autopsy arrived on the first day of April. April Fools' Day. The former a day of bad luck, the latter a day of bad jokes.

April 1 was a Tuesday that year, and in my parents' attempts to give our lives a small semblance of normalcy, they had insisted I try out for the junior varsity track team as we'd discussed throughout the winter. I always thought I was a pretty good athlete, and I was confident my legs were strong from my years of riding Witch Grass. I hadn't yet begun to imagine whether I'd be running long distances or sprinting short ones, but I knew I'd like the way I looked in those shorts.

Tryouts began on Tuesday, and so I didn't get home that afternoon until close to dinner. But there had been enough conversation about the imminent submission of the written autopsy in our house in the weeks since Charlotte Bedford had died that I could tell instantly by my parents' silence and the presence of a bottle of scotch on the kitchen table that its final conclusions had offered only bad news.

As my mother rose from her seat and began to serve dinner-a beef stew that none of us touched, despite the fact that we all understood it would be the last heavy stew of the winter-my father told me what I already knew. The medical examiner had found no signs of a stroke, no indications of a seizure. Immediate cause of death? Hemorrhagic shock due to a cesarean section during home childbirth.