Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Yet absolutely none of this mattered, because my parents understood how badly I wanted to attend the trial. It seemed to me I had a moral responsibility to be present; in my mind, my appearance was an important show of solidarity with my mother.

Besides, Stephen wanted me there.

"Stephen thinks Connie here will be very helpful," my mother said to her mother, and she gave my arm a small squeeze. Don't you worry about Nonny, that squeeze said: You're going.

"Helpful? Helpful how?"

"Connie will be a constant reminder for the jury that I'm not just some faceless defendant. I'm not just some midwife. I'm a mother. I have a daughter, a family."

Nonny had turned the last carrots from her vegetable garden into a salad with raisins and walnuts, and while the carrots were supposed to be shredded, the blender my grandmother used was older than I, and the salad still had a great many large orange chunks. I watched Nonny methodically chew one of those pieces while she thought about my mother's explanation, and noticed there was some dry dirt on the cuffs of her light-blue cardigan. From her garden, I thought. She'd probably harvested the carrots we were eating that very morning.

Her voice more quizzical than dubious, more puzzled than angry, Nonny finally said, "And that means they'll have mercy?"

"This is not about mercy!" my mother snapped back.

"It's about-"

"I don't need mercy."

"Then what does that lawyer of yours mean? Why does he want Connie there so badly?"

"'That lawyer of yours'? Mother, must you put it that way? It sounds horrible. It sounds like you think he's some sort of charlatan."

Nonny sighed, and rubbed the arthritic bulbs of her long fingers. My mother and I both knew that Nonny did not think Stephen was a charlatan. How could she? If she meant anything at all by her diminution of Stephen Hastings to "that lawyer of yours," if there was anything at all behind the remark, it was probably a vague apprehension triggered by the way my mother's voice seemed to rise whenever she said the word Stephen, the way the word was tinged with promise and colored by hope when it came from her lips.

"I just don't think Connie should be there," Nonny said after a moment, wrapping her hands together in her lap. "If you don't need… mercy or sympathy or something, I don't see why you should bring a fourteen-year-old girl into that courtroom."

"It makes Mom a real person," I chimed in, paraphrasing a remark I had overheard Stephen make to my parents earlier that week. "And that makes it harder to convict her. Juries don't like to convict the kind of real people who might be their neighbors."

Both of the adults turned toward me.

"You weren't doing your homework Wednesday night, were you?" my mother said, trying hard to look stern.

"I did my homework Wednesday night."

"Yeah, after Stephen left you did your homework," she said. She then turned to my grandmother and continued, "Connie will be with me because I love her and I want her there-as long as she wants to be there. She's come this far with us, she may as well see it through."

I woke up in the middle of the night a few days before the trial began, and through the register in the floor I could see the light on in the den below. It was almost two in the morning. For a moment I assumed my mother or father had simply neglected to turn off the light before coming upstairs, and while that would have been uncharacteristic behavior from either of them, these were unusual times. We all had a great deal on our minds.

I rolled over, hoping to fall quickly back to sleep, but I thought I heard something in the den. Something as intangible as a rustle, as imperceptible as a draft. An eddy, perhaps, whorled, drifting up from the basement through the cracks between the floorboards. Had the curtains merely shivered? Or had someone exhaled, a faint tremor in his or her breath?

I climbed out of bed and crouched by the register in my nightgown. If there were people in the den, they were not on the couch, which-along with the coffee table and a part of the woodstove's hearth-was about all I could see through the wrought-iron grate.

I was neither frightened nor cold, but when I decided I'd go downstairs, I started to tremble: Connie Danforth, just like a heroine in one of those ridiculous slasher movies my friends and I were always watching, that idiot camp counselor who went alone into the woods at night, shining her flashlight before her as she practically beckoned the psycho killer in the hockey mask to come get her.

The stairs remained silent as I walked upon them, largely because I knew exactly where to step to avoid their idiosyncratic creaks and groans. I told myself I was going downstairs to get a glass of milk. If anyone asked what I was doing-and why would someone, it was my house-I would say just that: I'm getting a glass of milk.

The lights were off in the dining room and the kitchen; I saw the mudroom was dark. Perhaps my parents really had simply left the light on. Perhaps I had heard nothing more than one of the strange breezes that blow through an old Vermont house as the seasons change or the northern air grows cold.

I paused outside the kitchen entrance to the den, my back flush against the refrigerator, and felt its motor vibrate against my spine. I half-expected to hear a voice call out to me. I wondered if I'd hear, suddenly, an exchange between people in that room. Hearing neither, I pushed off the refrigerator with the palms of my hands and turned toward the den.

There I saw my father, alone with easily a dozen small stapled packets of papers scattered around him on the floor in one corner. Xeroxes of some sort. He was still wearing the business shirt he had worn to his office that day, and the same light-gray slacks. He was sunk deep into the rocking chair by the brass floor lamp.

"What are you doing up, sweetie?" he asked when he saw me in the doorway. He looked worried that I was awake.

"I'm getting a glass of milk."

"Couldn't sleep?"

"No. I mean, I woke up. And I decided I wanted a glass of milk."

He nodded. "Know what? I think I'll have one with you. Then I should probably go to bed myself."

"Is that work?" I asked, motioning toward the clusters of papers surrounding him on the floor.

"These? No, not at all. They're precedents. Legal precedents. They're some of the cases your mom's lawyer had researched while putting her defense together."

I picked up one of the stapled packets, a sheaf of nine or ten pages titled "State v. Orosco." I skimmed the lengthy subtitle, an incomplete sentence that seemed to me a study in gibberish: "Certified questions as to whether information and affidavit in involuntary manslaughter case were insufficient following denial of motions to dismiss and to suppress statements."

"You've been reading these?" I asked, astonished that he would punish himself so.

"Yup."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Because I love your mother. And I want to understand what Stephen's doing to defend her."

He stood and led me to the kitchen where I'd been only moments before, my mind rich with unspeakable suspicions, and pulled from the refrigerator a cardboard container of milk.

I didn't think I'd be scared once this thing began, but I am. I thought I'd get over it once I got here, once I was settled down in my chair. I was wrong. Or maybe I was just kidding myself the last few weeks.

All day long I tried to focus on the little things in the courtroom to take my mind off the big ones, even though I know I'm supposed to be paying attention like there's no tomorrow.

"No tomorrow." I wish I hadn't thought of that expression. It's hateful.

But there were times I couldn't do it, times I just couldn't pay attention. Or maybe I should say I wouldn't-there were times I just wouldn't pay attention. Some moments, I just found it easier to think about nothing but the incredible chandelier this courtroom has than the idea that I might be in prison somewhere when my sweet baby is in college or when she has her first baby.