Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

I think they're talking like that because it's football season, and we hear those expressions all the time. But it sounds very strange coming from Rand, because he's never really been into football. Like me, he's always seen it as this totally bizarre form of organized violence.

But he's a man, and so I think that's the only language he has to inspire me; those are the only words that he knows.

Of course, the sport is everywhere suddenly. At least it seems that way in this part of the county. The football team at Connie's high school has won its first three games this fall, which wouldn't be a big deal in some areas, but it is around here. Someone told me this is a team that never wins, and suddenly it's won three games in a row, and it's won them in a big way. I gather the victories were very one-sided.

Stephen's a little better about the "Get psyched!" stuff, probably because he sees people like me who are scared all the time. It's part of what the guy does for a living. He has to keep me from completely falling apart, and so he seems to know just how far to push me with questions when we're together, and exactly when to back off and give me some space.

He's also a bit of a mimic. That's not the right word at all, because it makes him sound like a parakeet or a monkey. Or some sort of entertainer. All I mean is that it's clear he listens to me very carefully, and not just what I say: He listens to how I say something, the exact words I use. And then, a few minutes later, I'll hear a word or expression come back to me.

I was at his office this morning, and I was explaining to him what goes on in my opinion in the first stage of labor. I said to him how each surge has the potential to change a mother, and eventually one will. I told him how a woman at that stage might go from being this totally serene person in touch with everything around her, to this frenzied animal unaware of anything but her own physical reality. Her surges. The way her body is changing. And that's part of the deal, the giving up of everything-and I mean everything-but the demands of labor. A woman's body knows what it's doing, I said, and she just has to let it do its own thing.

Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later we're talking about this ob-gyn who actually believes in home birth-of course his practice is nowhere near Reddington, that would be way too much to ask-and what he's going to say on the stand. And Stephen says to me, "He's this totally serene guy. You'll like him." And then, a couple minutes later when we're talking about the time he's devoted to researching my case, he says, "I've done this often enough that I know instinctively how deep to dig into something, and instinctively when to let something go. It's just a part of doing my thing."

Does Stephen do this on purpose? Damned if I know. But I like it, it makes me feel good. And it's a whole lot better than the football stuff, which-like Rand-he sometimes resorts to, especially now that the trial's about to begin and he's afraid I'm not "fired up" enough.

I want to tell him-I want to tell him and Rand both-that it's hard to get "fired up" when most of the time I'm just too busy being scared to death. But I think all they'd do then is worry about me even more than they already do, and try and "pump me up." Get me ready to fight or hit back or whatever it is football people do.

Besides, I think if I told them how frightened I am, the floodgates would open. Suddenly I'd be telling them that I'm scared I'm going to jail. I'm scared I'm going to have to give up my practice. And-and this fear wasn't so bad in the spring, it's only in the last month or so that it's really crept up on me-sometimes I'm scared I might have made a mistake in March. It's possible. What if Charlotte Bedford really was still alive?

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

NEWPORT SITS AT the southern tip of Lake Memphremagog, a thin, cold lake that stretches thirty miles north to south. Perhaps a third of the lake is in the United States, while the rest is north of the border in Canada.

Before my mother's trial began, I hated that lake. By the time it was over, I loathed it.

As a child there were some obvious reasons to despise it. It was hard to spell and impossible to pronounce. I know now that the name is the Abenaki term for "beautiful waters," but in grade school it was merely a long chain of syllables, at once incomprehensible and unpleasant.

Even as a teenager, however, even when I was no longer intimidated by the phonetics of the word, I disliked the lake. It always looked to me like the sort of lake that liked to swallow swimmers and small boats whole. Those few times when I was taken swimming there with my friends, its waters always felt more frigid than its neighbors'-especially inviting little places like Crystal or Echo Lake-and its currents more dangerous.

And I don't think I ever saw the lake when its waters weren't choppy.

There were also myths about Memphremagog, some involving a giant lizard much more menacing than the benign monster said by some to swim in Lake Champlain, and some involving a particularly gruesome thing that could live as comfortably on the shore as it did underneath those dark waters, and would mutate into the form of its prey: fish or dogs or baby deer. That's how it killed them. Although I never believed any of these tales, they did reinforce in my mind my conviction that the lake was an unhappy place of which I wanted no part.

Most people aren't like me, however; most people think highly of Lake Memphremagog. And most people who spend any time at all in the courtroom of the Orleans County Courthouse are very glad the city of Newport meets the lake where it does. The courthouse sits on the top of the bluff on Main Street, and the courtroom is on the third-and, therefore, highest-floor of the century-old stone-and-brick box. The courtroom has three monstrously large windows facing the lake, a mere three blocks to the north. Jurors are granted a panoramic view of the waters, and the shapes and summits of Owl's Head and Bear Mountain in the distance. I imagine in trials less demanding or notorious than my mother's, jurors have stared themselves to sleep as they gazed at those waters.

Even during my mother's trial, however, jurors on occasion used Lake Memphremagog as a place upon which to focus when they wanted to be sure to avoid eye contact with my mother, or when an exceptionally grisly piece of evidence was on display. For me, this was just one more reason to hate the lake.

As the defendant, my mother had a spectacular view of the waters: She and Stephen shared a table by the window, and Stephen always took the seat toward the center of the courtroom so that he could rise and pace without having to climb around my mother or draw undue attention toward her. And as the defendant's daughter, I sat in the front bench-the one directly behind her-which meant the lake was an unavoidable and inescapable presence in the corners of my eyes as well. Even when my father took the "window seat," the shadow of the lake remained with me: The windows were that tall and wide and clean.

Fortunately, my mother did not share my dislike for Lake Memphremagog. With an awareness of how the media approached her trial and the role image would play in its history, she said something to my father and Stephen and me one night when we were leaving the courthouse that indicated in her mind the lake was not merely an impartial witness to the events occurring on the third floor of a building a few blocks from its shore, it was actually an ally of hers of sorts. The sun was low as we walked to our cars, but it had not yet set. It was probably close to five-thirty.

"Look where she's standing," my mother said, and she motioned toward the reporter from the CBS affiliate in Burlington who was speaking at the moment to a TV camera, "and look what's going to be in the background. That's where they all stand. Have you noticed? Day after day, every single one of them. Even that lady from the Boston station who only spent an afternoon here. Isn't that something? They all stand right over there somewhere."