Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

And so the State had seen the medical records and charts my mother kept on her patients-the prenatal forms, patient histories, obstetric examination reports-but not what she referred to as her notebooks.

The four attorneys and the court reporter huddled around Judge Dorset in a bench conference that lasted eighteen minutes. The clock in the courtroom read eleven twenty-nine when Bill Tanner stood and eleven forty-seven when the four men returned to their tables and the court reporter sat back down at her desk.

When it had become clear to the judge that the discussion would last more than a few moments, he had had the jury escorted from the room for the duration of the debate. But no one thought to offer my mother the chance to return to her own seat, and so she was forced to sit alone in the witness box the whole time as if she were cornered in a classroom in a dunce cap. Usually she stared into the courtroom or up at the chandelier without expression, her chin cupped in her hand, but she did glance once at our family and offer us a hint of a smile. This sure smarts, doesn't it? that hint of a smile said, and in my head I heard her voice saying exactly those words to me, recalling the time years earlier when I'd been standing on one of the picnic table benches in our backyard and slipped off, and banged my elbow on the table itself.

"This sure smarts, doesn't it?" she had murmured, rubbing the skin that would soon bruise with two fingers.

When Stephen returned to his table, he looked glum. It was a short walk from the bench to his seat, but in even those few steps it was clear he had lost for the moment his one-click-above swagger.

The judge scribbled a note to himself before informing us of his decision, and then spoke in a combination of legalese for the lawyers' benefit and layman's terms for the rest of us. Apparently during the conference Tanner had demanded that my mother produce her notebooks so the State could see what was in them. Stephen had argued that they weren't relevant to the event itself, and there was no medical detail in them that mattered. But Tanner insisted that it was, after all, my mother who had brought them up, and she had brought them up to corroborate her own testimony. And so Judge Dorset ruled that he wanted all of the notebooks from March forward in his hands by the end of the lunch break. The trial would be recessed until he had inspected them himself in camera-in his chambers.

"I will decide what, if anything, is relevant," he concluded.

He then told us all that the jury would be brought back into the courtroom and that my mother would complete her direct testimony; when she was finished, we would adjourn until he had reviewed the notebooks.

"Your Honor, a moment, please," Stephen said, and the judge nodded. Stephen then motioned for Patty to join Peter Grinnell and him at their table. The three of them whispered briefly together, and then Stephen asked to approach my mother. Again the judge nodded, and Stephen walked quickly to my mother and asked her a question none of us could hear.

But we all heard her response, and I began to realize what would happen next.

"They're right behind my desk," my mother said. "They're on a bookcase, on the lowest shelf."

Did I know exactly at that moment what I would do? I don't believe so; the idea was only beginning to form. But with merely a vague notion, I still knew what the first step had to be.

My father, my grandmother, and I were separated from the defense table by a link of black velvet rope-the sort of barrier that often cordons off bedrooms in historic homes. For the first and only time during that trial I leaned forward off my seat on the bench, half-squatting, and I tapped Peter Grinnell on the back of his shoulder.

When he turned to me I whispered, "Look, if you need any help, I'll go with you. I know right where they are."

Stephen still had to finish eliciting from my mother her direct testimony, and so Peter stayed with him in the courtroom. It was Patty Dunlevy who was sent to Reddington to get the notebooks.

I went with the investigator, on some level astonished that I was sitting in the front passenger seat of her sleek little car. I told myself that I had not yet committed to anything, I was not yet a criminal; I was still, in the eyes of everyone around me, merely going to my house with Patty Dunlevy to show her where my mother's notebooks were kept so we could bring them back to the courthouse as the judge had requested.

Yet there I was, trying to disregard the way my head was filled with the sound of my beating heart, focusing solely on what I had read late into the night the Wednesday before. I tried to remember which dates were the most incriminating, which entries were most likely to be-as the lawyers and the judge euphemistically phrased it-relevant.

The trees along the road were growing bare by then, a small sign to me of the way the world went about its business while we were squirreled away in a courtroom.

I thought of the far worse captivity that loomed before my mother.

"How are you holding up?" Patty asked, her voice suggesting a maternal inclination I hadn't imagined existed in her.

"Fine," I told her, practicing in my head what I would say when we arrived at my house: Why don't you wait here, and I'll run inside and get them.

"What just happened happens all the time. Try not to worry. A trial like this always has some chaos," she went on.

"Uh-huh." As I recalled, there were probably three loose-leaf binders that would matter to Judge Dorset: The March entries were toward the end of one notebook; early April through August were in a second; and August through September formed the beginning of a third. Those were the notebooks I would need to bring back to the courthouse.

"In the end, this will just be a… a little footnote to this whole affair," she said.

I nodded. Why don't you wait here, and I'll go find them. Don't worry, I can carry them.

She asked, "You hungry?"

"Nope." I figured I would have at least five minutes before Patty would begin to wonder what I was doing. I couldn't tell if she was the sort who would follow me into the house to help if I didn't return quickly.

"I am. Isn't that unbelievable?"

Fortunately, when my mother had begun keeping her notebooks years earlier, she had chosen to use three-ring binders and loose-leaf paper. Moreover, at some point she had gotten into the habit of beginning each entry on a separate sheet.

"I don't think I could eat anything," I told her. I would definitely remove the March 15 entry, because I knew there was another one on the sixteenth that also talked about Charlotte Bedford's death. I'd have to check to be sure, but I thought there was a chance it was on the sixteenth that my mother wrote about where Asa had been holding the baby and where Anne had been sitting. And there were those entries further on in the summer, the ones in late July and August and even September, where the doubts in her mind had become so pronounced that they were no longer doubts: She was almost certain she had killed Charlotte Bedford.

Those entries would have to go, too.

"Well, after we've given Dorset the notebooks, I'm going to have to steal away and get something to eat."

I nodded.

"Any idea what sort of things your mom wrote in her diaries?"

"She's never shown them to me," I told her.

I think initially Patty was going to keep her car running while I ran inside our house, but I heard her turn off the engine while I fumbled with my key in the front door.

I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn't dare take the time then. I went straight to my mother's office and found the three notebooks the judge would expect, and laid them out upon my mother's desk in a row. I would move chronologically forward from March.