Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

I cannot undo what I've done, or what I might have done. I don't think there's anything left for me to set right.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

TANNER'S CROSS-EXAMINATION was often brutal and occasionally mean-spirited. He was angry that the notebooks had not been shared with the State, and his fury was fresh.

Yet my mother endured and even snapped back at Tanner a number of times. At one point she reminded him that when it came to neonatal mortality, her track record was as good as any ob-gyn's; a few moments later she noted that her mothers' babies were less likely to have a low birth weight. She was even able to reiterate how hard she had worked to try and save Charlotte, and how she had only performed the C-section because there didn't seem to be any other choice.

"I had completed at least eight or nine cycles by then," she told Tanner, referring to the CPR she had performed on Charlotte, "and I still wasn't hearing a heartbeat in the woman-but I was getting one from the baby. What was I supposed to do, let them both die?"

I wouldn't categorize all of her testimony as spunky, but there were some particularly spirited exchanges, and she had regained the clarity of mind she had demonstrated early that morning.

And Tanner never asked the one question I dreaded-and, in all likelihood, the one my mother and Stephen feared most: Is there absolutely no doubt in your mind that Charlotte Bedford was dead when you performed the cesarean? But Tanner had no idea what my mother had written in her diary, and so he assumed there was none. Asking her that question in front of the jury would only hurt the State's case by giving her yet one more opportunity to say Charlotte had already passed away when she chose to save the infant's life.

Although there were occasional sparks that afternoon, my mother's cross-examination and the remainder of the trial seemed anticlimactic to me.

Wednesday night I carried my mother's notebooks into the house from the car for her and offered to return them to her bookcase.

"That would be lovely," she said. "Thank you."

I flattened the pages that I'd removed as best I could before I returned them to the binders, but it would always be clear that someone at some point had removed some entries. Apparently she did not add anything to her notebook that night, and she was so tired she never even looked at the books before going to bed.

The next day, Thursday, our obstetricians and our forensic pathologists all said in one way or another that in their opinion my mother had not killed Charlotte Bedford. But Bill Tanner also made sure each witness acknowledged that he had received a fee for his opinion, and that those opinions were not based on having done-or even having seen-the autopsy. Nevertheless, they were impressive figures, especially the elderly fellow from Texas who had had the misfortune of having to perform autopsies four times on women who had died in botched cesareans, some in desperately poor hospitals near the border with Mexico. In all his years and in all those tragic autopsies, he had never once seen less than eleven hundred milliliters of blood in the peritoneal cavity-a full pint more than Vermont's Dr. Tierney had found inside Charlotte Bedford.

And then on Friday, the attorneys gave their closing arguments, and while they were eloquent, it was clear that both the fly fisherman and the Vietnam veteran were exhausted. I had expected the arguments to last all day-or at least all morning-and I was wrong. The arguments were over by quarter to eleven, and the jury had their instructions from the judge by eleven-thirty. They began their deliberations before lunch.

We expected a long deliberation, and so we went home. Stephen had offered to take us to lunch, but my mother said she wasn't hungry.

And so we-the Danforths and their lawyers-left the courthouse, expecting we would separate in the parking lot across the street. Just before my family climbed into our station wagon, as Patty was telling my grandmother and me something about her years on a high-school track team when she was roughly my age, I overheard my father ask Stephen what it would mean if the deliberations went into the weekend.

"This whole business has a lot of great myths," he said to my parents. "Usually, a long deliberation doesn't bode well for a defendant. If a jury's going to send someone away for a long time, they like to make absolutely sure they don't have any doubt about his guilt. And that can take time. But I've also seen cases, even first-degree murder cases, in which it was all pretty cut-and-dried, and the jury came back with a conviction in two or three hours."

"And this one?" my father asked.

"I haven't a clue. But there was a lot of so-called expert testimony they have to wrestle with, and to me that suggests they'll take their time."

"The weekend?"

"There's a chance. But for all we know, the minute you get home you'll get a phone call from me saying to turn around and come right back."

"Are you going back to Burlington?"

"Nope."

"You're staying in Newport?"

"I am."

"So in your opinion, there's a good chance they'll reach a verdict this afternoon."

He shrugged. "I'd hate to get all the way back to Burlington and have them reach their verdict around four o'clock. That wouldn't be fair to you."

"To us?"

"Judge Dorset won't allow the verdict to be read unless I'm present. And you don't want it read unless I'm present. If I couldn't be back here by five o'clock-five-fifteen, at the latest-he'd have to wait until Monday morning to have the verdict announced. And that just wouldn't be fair to you, Sibyl. To any of you."

"No, I guess it wouldn't," my father agreed.

"Nope, not at all."

"Those 'great myths,'" my father said. "Are there more?"

Stephen smiled. "Well, some lawyers think you can tell how the jury has ruled the moment they reenter the courtroom after their deliberations. If they look at the defendant, he's going to be acquitted. If they refuse to look at him-if they're unwilling or unable to look at him-he's going to be convicted."

"In your experience?"

"In my experience? Don't believe it, it's just a myth."

That was the only day during the trial that we had driven my grandmother to the courthouse, and so before we left Newport there was some brief discussion about whether we should go to her home to wait or ours. My mother wanted to go home, and so we decided we would go to Reddington.

"Do you want to join us, Stephen?" my mother asked. "Do you all want to join us? It'll only be sandwiches, but…"

Stephen thought for a moment, looked at his team-Patty and Peter and the law clerks-and then at my father. I'm sure my father wasn't happy about my mother's lawyer and entourage descending upon his house once more, but the invitation had come from his wife and so he offered Stephen a small smile.

"Sure," Stephen said, "that would be nice."

My grandmother sat in the backseat of our car and asked me innocuous questions about horses and Tom Corts before figuring out I was uninterested-perhaps incapable-of conversation. All I could think about were the ostensible myths Stephen had shared with my father, especially the idea that some lawyers believed you could tell the verdict the moment the jury returned. It made complete sense to me, it reflected what I imagined was the way I would behave if I were on a jury someday: I knew I would be unable to look at a defendant if I was about to send him to prison.

And so the myth grew real in my mind. It hardened into fact a little later as I drove with Cheryl Visco to the supermarket to get cold cuts and salads and breads for the group of lawyers and midwives that had gathered at our house; it became gospel as I watched the law clerk named Laurel and the midwife Donelle Folino find small reasons to laugh. When my mother was not within earshot, I would hear different groups of adults discussing my mother's future, and I would hear words like appeal and wrongful death, and I would cringe.