Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"I guess."

"Yes?"

"Yes."

"Thank you." Stephen took the pen and began tapping it lightly against the table for a moment, perhaps hoping to distract Anne into looking his way. "So prior to the early-morning hours of March fourteenth, you had never seen the quantities of blood that might or might not flow in that situation. Correct?"

"Yes."

"You'd never seen blood spurt from a living or a dead body?"

"No."

"In that case, what in your background led you to make the wild assumption that the blood you saw that moment was coming from a living woman?"

"It was the way it spurted."

He shook his head. "I'm not asking you what you think you saw. I'm asking you what in your background led you to think that based on the bleeding Charlotte Bedford was alive?"

"You didn't see it. If you had been-"

"Your Honor, please instruct the witness to answer the questions," Stephen said abruptly.

Judge Dorset looked down at Anne and said simply, "Miss Austin, you will answer the questions."

"But if any of-"

"Miss Austin," the judge added, and he sounded almost as annoyed as Stephen, "answer the questions as they are asked. Please. Mr. Hastings, proceed."

"What part of your training led you to think that the blood you saw was coming from a living person?" Stephen asked, and he continued to tap the tip of the pen slowly on the table.

She folded her arms across her chest. "I don't recall."

"Is that because you have none-absolutely no medical training?"

"I guess."

"Am I correct in saying that any conjectures you made about the blood were founded on absolutely no experience-no first- or second- or even third-hand experience?"

Finally she looked in Stephen's direction and when she saw my mother she shut tight her eyes against tears, but they were too much. She sniffed back some, but her answer was still filled with her sobs. As if Stephen hadn't asked her a question, as if he weren't even present, she cried with the suddenness of lightning at my mother, "God, Sibyl, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I had to do it, I had to call! You know you killed her-"

Stephen tried to cut her off. He demanded the remarks be stricken from the record, and Judge Dorset slammed his gavel down on his bench a thousand times harder than Stephen had tapped his pen on his table a moment earlier, but before breaking down and triggering a recess, Anne managed to sob once more, "I'm sorry, Sibyl, I am! I know you didn't mean to, but we both know you killed her!"

My mother sipped water from a paper cup in a small, windowless conference room during the recess, and my father held her hand. She looked a little paler than she had before Anne's outburst, and sometimes she simply pressed the rim of the cup against her lower lip.

"She is a little witch, isn't she?" Peter murmured, I think trying to do little more than make conversation.

"No," my mother said, "she isn't really."

"That's awfully big of you, Sibyl. You're with family and friends here; you don't need to be noble," Stephen told her, and he seemed as angry as when the judge had called the recess fifteen minutes earlier.

"I'm not. Anne's just… she's young, and she's gotten herself in too deep."

"Well, then," Stephen said, "she's about to drown. It will be short and sweet, but we're about to take her down for the third time."

"Miss Austin, you will focus solely on the question Mr. Hastings is asking, and Mr. Hastings, you will allow her to answer each question fully. Do we have an understanding?" Judge Dorset asked when we had reconvened.

Stephen nodded, and moved out from behind his table and began pacing the room as he had with most other witnesses. He asked the court reporter to read back the last question he had asked, the one about first- or second- or even third-hand experience.

"That's right," Anne answered. Her eyes were red from crying, and her words were no longer draped in poise.

"But nevertheless, when Sibyl made the first incision, you decided Charlotte Bedford was alive."

"When I saw the blood, yes."

"Did the body show any other signs of life as the incision was made-or, for that matter, after?"

"Like what?"

Stephen shrugged. "Did the woman cry out with pain?"

"No, she was unconscious."

"Did the body… shudder?"

"I didn't see that."

"You didn't see it shudder?"

"No."

"It didn't move at all, did it?"

"Not that I saw."

"Does that mean that the only indication you had that the woman might have been alive was the blood?"

"Yes."

"But that was enough to alarm you?"

"It was."

"So what did you do when you were alarmed? Did you try to stop Sibyl from proceeding?"

"No."

"Did you say to her, 'Don't do this, Sibyl, she's alive'?"

"No."

"Did you try and take the knife out of Sibyl's hand and-"

"Objection. This is just badgering," Tanner said.

"Overruled."

"Did you try and take the knife out of Sibyl's hand?"

"No."

Stephen nodded, and walked the length of the jury box. "So despite your contention later on that Charlotte Bedford was alive before the incision, you did absolutely nothing to try and save the woman's life. Did you, at the very least, share your fear with the father while the two of you were still in the room?"

"No. Not then, I didn't."

"You testified earlier that you were surprised Sibyl never checked for a fetal heartbeat. Did you suggest to the midwife that perhaps she should?"

"No."

"So am I correct in saying that despite your claim after the fact that Charlotte Bedford had been alive before the incision, you did absolutely nothing at the time to try and prevent the surgery?"

"I just didn't know what-"

"Miss Austin-"

"I just didn't-"

"Your Honor-"

Judge Dorset rapped his gavel on the dark wood before him and then surprised me-probably surprised us all-by throwing the young woman a life preserver and thereby preventing her from going under a final time. "Counsel," he reminded Stephen, "I asked you to allow the witness the time to answer each question fully. Go ahead, Miss Austin."

She took a deep breath and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Finally, in a voice that quavered slightly, she said, "I just didn't have the confidence at the time to stop her, I just didn't know enough. Like you said, I hadn't been through anything like that before. But I saw the blood pumping and pumping and I knew something was wrong, and it was only a few hours later that I decided I had a… a moral responsibility to tell someone what I'd seen. I didn't want to, I really didn't want to. But I had to. That's the thing: I had to do it."

Perhaps because of the phone call I'd overheard one night between my mother and Stephen-a conversation that seemed steeped to me in flirtatious innuendo-I made a point of being home when he came by our house one afternoon in the week before the trial began. I hovered in the kitchen, pretending to do homework while they met in her office. When he finally left, as my mother walked him to his car, I went to an open window to watch them through the screen. They assumed I had stayed in the kitchen.

Instead of strolling to the car, however, they wandered to my mother's flower garden, stopping somewhere amidst the sunflowers-taller than they by far that date in September, but just about ready to die-in a spot I couldn't see. And so I went back to the kitchen and then out into our backyard through the sliding glass doors. Pressed flat against the side wall of our house, I still couldn't see them, but I could hear parts of their exchange.

I don't know if Stephen had actually tried to kiss my mother before I got outside: In my mind, I can see him taking her hands in his the way he once had by his car, and lowering his lips to hers. But I never saw him do such a thing.