Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

Judge Dorset smiled: "Unless there is a mother or an infant present who wants to make an issue of this, I doubt the jury will even notice."

And so we began. Graham Tuttle, Lawson plow driver, told everyone how impassable the roads were on March 14. The phone company's Lois Gaylord confirmed the hours the phones were down. Our accident reconstructionist reassured the jury that my mother had indeed spun out on the ice in the Bedfords' driveway, and a physician used photos to explain the cuts and bruises my mother had sustained on the slick surface. By lunchtime Stephen had done what he could to convey that my mother was trapped with the Bedfords, and there was absolutely no way they could leave for the hospital.

What Stephen could not do with this particular group of witnesses, of course, was undermine Tanner's contention that she should never have been trapped with the Bedfords in the first place-that a capable and trustworthy midwife would have checked the weather and learned of the oncoming storm, and then chosen to transfer Charlotte Bedford to the hospital the moment her labor commenced. In theory, that responsibility would fall upon the character witnesses planned for that afternoon: It would be up to them to refute any suggestion that my mother was not supremely competent and incontrovertibly reliable.

And most of them did a pretty good job, especially B.P. Hewitt, my mother's backup physician. Hewitt endured a cross-examination that would have withered most people.

"If Sibyl believed the woman was dead, then I believe the woman was dead," he told Tanner at one point.

"Were you present at the autopsy?"

"No."

"Did you examine Charlotte's medical records after she died?"

"No."

"Had you even examined her at any point in her pregnancy?"

"Nope."

"You really have no idea, then, what you're talking about, do you?"

"Objection!"

"Sustained."

"You really have no… detailed understanding of this case, then. Do you?"

"Oh, I think I do. I think I understand how a labor develops and-"

"This labor. Not any labor. This labor."

"I understood your question. You asked me if I had a detailed understanding of this case. Well, I do. And I don't believe it's Sibyl's fault."

"Your Honor, would you please instruct the witness to answer the question?"

"In my judgment, he did."

Tanner was flustered for a moment, but the moment was brief. He stared at his notes, caught his breath, and quickly regrouped.

"Okay," he continued, finally. "You never met Charlotte. You never saw her body after her death. You never saw her records. Why do you feel you understand her death so well?"

B.P. shook his head in astonishment. "Come on, I'm Sibyl's backup doctor. I don't think I've had a conversation with an ob-gyn in the last six months where this case hasn't come up."

"But you know nothing firsthand, do you?"

"I have known Sibyl Danforth for close to a decade. And I know what she has told me about this incident. If Sibyl tells me the woman was dead when she did the C-section, then in my mind the case is closed."

It would not be accurate to write that, the night before she was scheduled to testify, my mother feared she was going to be convicted. The word fear suggests that the prospect frightened her, and I think by Tuesday night her fear-and her notebooks indicate that there were moments earlier when she had been very scared indeed-had been replaced by numbness and shock. Rather, the night before my mother would take the witness stand, she simply expected that she was going to be convicted.

My father, on the other hand, was frightened. After one of those cold-cut dinners during which no one eats or says very much, I went upstairs to look at the books I was supposed to be reading for school. I didn't expect to accomplish anything, though, and I figured by nine o'clock I'd be on the telephone with Rollie or Tom, telling them what I thought had occurred that day in the courthouse, and what I thought it meant.

I was sitting on my bed about eight-thirty when my father knocked on my door (a knock that had always been louder than my mother's), and I told him to come in.

"Your mom just went to bed," he said, putting his coffee mug down on my desk. "She wants to get a good night's sleep for tomorrow."

"She tired?" I asked. Over the last few weeks, I'd noticed, he had gone from an occasional scotch after dinner to coffee, and I was glad.

"I guess. I know I am." He turned my desk chair so it faced the bed, and then collapsed into the small wooden seat as if it were a plush little couch. "How about you? Tired?"

"Yup."

"You've been a dream through this, you know."

I rolled my eyes, trying to downplay the compliment. "A dream? Corny, Dad. Very corny."

"I'm getting old."

"Yeah, right. You and Mom had me when you were about seven. If I get pregnant when Mom did, you'll both kill me."

He nodded. "Probably." He reached for his mug and took a swallow so long it surprised me. "Anyway, I just wanted you to know that your mom and I are proud of you. We're proud to have you with us through this whole… thing."

"What do you think will happen?"

"Tomorrow? Or when it's all over?"

"When it's all over."

He sighed. "Oh, we'll just go back to leading a normal, incredibly boring life. And we'll love it."

"So you think they'll find Mom innocent?"

"Oh, yes. And if they don't, we'll appeal."

"Have you and Stephen talked about that?"

"It's come up, yes."

He left a few minutes later. When he was gone, I tried not to read anything more into his visit than his desire to offer his daughter praise, but I did. Before I even thought about what I was telling Tom, I heard myself portraying my brief exchange with my father as further proof that my mother was going to be convicted, telling my boyfriend that the very idea of a family life in the coming years that was normal and incredibly boring had become my father's idea of a fairy tale.

"Why don't I go with you to the trial tomorrow?" Tom said.

"You shouldn't miss school. And you probably couldn't sit with me, anyway," I told him. But I liked the idea of Tom in the courtroom, knowing I could turn around and see him there-a sixteen-year-old in a dark turtleneck, surrounded in a back row by little babies and midwives-and I hoped he'd ignore me and skip school.

Everything had become for me a dramatic portent of evil, and not just because I was a fourteen-year-old girl with teenage judgment and adolescent hormones. To this day, I believe my take on the trial was accurate, and my actions the next day explicable-if not wholly justifiable.

Later that night when I was finally going to sleep myself, I heard my parents making love in their room, and even that seemed to me a sign that the end was nearing. I put my pillow over my head so I wouldn't hear their bed in the distance and so the pillowcase could absorb my tears. And as soon as the white cotton grew damp and I felt the wetness on my cheek, I was reminded of how my mother had used a pillow to soak up the blood inside Charlotte Bedford.

And then my tears became sobs.

My mother wore the green kilt she had worn the day the trial began, and she put back her hair in the same cornflower-blue hair clip. Her blouse was white, but it had a rounded collar and so much ornate stitching it did not look at all austere. As she sat on the stand, she looked to me like a professional and a mother at once-a mother, these days, too young to have a teenage daughter.

Moreover, because a witness stand tends to exaggerate both a person's aesthetic strengths and weaknesses, my mother's exhaustion gave her an almost heroic-looking stature: The combination of increased height and a waist-level barrier made her look like one of those saintly Red Cross volunteers I'd seen recently on the TV news who had stayed up all night giving coffee and blankets to hurricane victims in the Mississippi bayou.