Midwives

Chapter 6.

Eleanor Snow arrived this morning, and she is the most amazingly lovely little thing. Eight pounds, one ounce, twenty inches. Her nose is a gentle little ski jump. The tiny rolls of baby fat on her arms make little bracelets at her wrists. And her hair, at least this morning, is strawberry blond.

Her eyes are gray today, but I think someday they'll be blue.

Dottie Snow's labor was quick: Anne and I got there about six-fifteen in the morning, and Dottie was already ten centimeters dilated and ready to rock and roll. I don't think she pushed for more than half an hour, and the joy in that room as she worked was just unbelievable. Unbelievable! She had her two sisters with her, her mom, and of course Chuck was there. Chuck had also been present for the birth of his first two children, and he is just the gentlest coach. He and Dottie were smooching and hugging between each surge, and he was always rubbing her breasts and shoulders. I really get off on that kind of love.

But what made the aura in that room so powerful was the combination of husband-wife love, sister love, and mother-daughter love. Dottie's sisters were hugging her, they were hugging each other, they were hugging Chuck. It was magnificent. I wish I could have bottled the vibes in that room and saved a little for some of the lonelier births.

Lonely births are the saddest things in the world. They can bring me down for days.

Charlotte Bedford's birth might be a lonely birth. At least the potential's there. Charlotte has no family anywhere near here, except Asa. And Asa is a sweet man, but he's so involved with his congregation he doesn't seem to have enough energy left for Charlotte.

And I don't think I've met a single female friend of hers. Female or male! She's met very few people outside of her husband's congregation, she says when we talk, and they keep a certain respectful distance because she's the new preacher's wife. I may be her closest friend up here, and so her prenatal visits go on forever.

No doubt about it, hers could be a lonely birth. And a lonely postpartum. I hope Asa's parish will look out for them. I have to believe they will, they're good people. But I wish I knew more people up in Lawson or Fallsburg.

Maybe I'll meet some before the baby arrives. Maybe I'll make an effort and try.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER WASN'T HOME from the Bedford birth by breakfast, and as my father and I ate our toaster waffles, we discussed how it looked as though poor Charlotte was in the midst of one of those eighteen- to twenty-four-hour marathons.

School had not been canceled that day, but the first classes had been pushed back two hours to allow the road crews time to turn the winding ice rinks throughout northeast Vermont back into roads. And so my father left for work before I left for school.

Charlotte Fugett Bedford and her son Veil went their separate ways soon after Veil was born. Charlotte's body was rushed in the funeral director's van to Burlington after the state's attorney and the medical examiner had surveyed the bedroom, and the state police had taken the sorts of postpartum photographs that are blessedly uncommon. The medical examiner informed my mother that he would be performing an autopsy when the body and he had returned to Burlington, but he said it was a standard practice and nothing that should alarm her.

My mother, Asa, and Anne actually left the Bedfords' before the men in suits and uniforms. They were still roaming around the bloody mattress and dropping items-wet rubber gloves, dry specks of herb tea, a clean syringe, a bloody washcloth-into clear plastic sandwich bags when Veil was taken to North Country Hospital in Newport, where pediatricians could examine him carefully. It was from the hospital that my mother phoned my father at his office and told him what had occurred. Her plan was to tell me in person when I returned home from school.

Like everything else surrounding the birth of Veil Bedford, it didn't work out as my mother expected. News of accidental death, especially when it is grisly, travels fast in our corner of Vermont. Collisions involving pickup trucks and cars that result in fatalities, logging disasters with chain saws or skidders, drownings in the deep waters of the nearby gorge all encourage conversation. When people die, people talk-especially teenagers.

Consequently, I learned of Charlotte Bedford's death during gym class, just before lunch. We had played volleyball that morning.

When I first heard the news, the story did not include my mother. Perhaps if the strange ways in which rumor and reality are linked could ever be severed and the separate parts dissected, their histories would show that I was the individual who first incorporated Sibyl Danforth into the tale-at least in my school, at least among the teenagers in our county.

I was changing from my gym shorts to blue jeans when Sadie Demerest told me, "That weird preacher up in Lawson lost his wife-that one from the South." Her voice was unconcerned and natural, as if she were telling me of another student's fashion faux pas-a girl with a sweater that was a tad too formal for school, or an unnatural streak of black in her hair that was just a bit too punk.

"She died?" I asked.

"Yup. In childbirth."

And I murmured aloud a thought that I do not believe had yet passed through Sadie's mind, although it certainly would have soon enough. "I wonder if my mother was there," I said.

Sadie paused on the bench before her locker, her own jeans still in her lap.

"Your mom was her midwife?" she asked after a long moment, and I nodded. The sounds in the changing room-the water rushing in the showers a few yards away, the giggles and laughter from the other girls, the tinny thump of the metal lockers as they were opened and closed-seemed to disappear as Sadie stared at me. At that moment I did not understand the full magnitude of the way my life was about to change, but the first dark inklings were beginning to coalesce.

I could see that the idea that my mother might have been present frightened Sadie and changed her perception of the story dramatically. Suddenly, this was no longer a tragedy with anonymous players, a horror story sufficiently distant to allow casual appreciation of its core gruesomeness. This little nightmare involved Connie Danforth's mother. Connie Danforth's mother had been with the dead woman. Connie Danforth's mother had not only been with the dead woman, she had been helping her have her baby.

And people weren't supposed to die having babies, not even in our rural corner of the Kingdom. And so Sadie asked me the question that everyone in the county would ask one another for months, the question that no one was able to answer fully at the trial and no one has been able to answer conclusively ever since. In Sadie's case, it was a rhetorical question, an inquiry she had to know I could not possibly answer. But it was a question she-like everyone else-was unable to resist asking.

Twisting the legs of her jeans in her hands, her skin growing pale before my eyes, Sadie asked, "Connie, what happened?"

When I got home from school, my father was in the kitchen. My mother was sleeping.

"How was school?" he asked. He was wearing the dress slacks and shirt he'd worn to work, but his necktie was gone-probably long gone by three-thirty in the afternoon. I imagined he'd been home for hours.

"Fine."

"Good, good," he said, his voice a numbed and distant monotone. I saw on the counter that someone had made a pot of coffee since I had left for school, but it didn't look as if anyone had touched it.

"You'll need to be gentle with Mom for a while," he then added.

"Because of what happened?"

He sat back in the wooden kitchen chair and folded his arms across his chest. "What have you heard?"

"I heard Mrs. Bedford died."

He shook his head sadly. "Why don't you put your books down and tell me what you know. Then I'll tell you what I know."

"The details?"

"If you don't already know them."

Throughout the afternoon, two notions had prevented me from hearing a word my English or history teachers had said. The first was that Foogie was now without a mother, and I couldn't imagine how the little boy would endure. At that point in my life, I had never met a child who didn't have a mother. The second was my fear that my family would suddenly become poor.

At thirteen I did not understand the details of how malpractice insurance worked, but I knew that Vermont midwives didn't carry any: There were no companies that offered it to them in the state. And I knew this was an issue on occasion between my parents, usually after my mother would return home from what she would describe as a complicated birth.

I think the afternoon after Charlotte Bedford died, this was my father's chief concern as well: a civil suit. I don't believe the idea that state troopers would be arriving at our home within hours had crossed his mind.

"So what have you heard?" he asked again when I had sat in the chair beside him. "What are people saying?"

"No one knows a whole lot. Mostly just that the southern preacher's wife died."

"In childbirth? Do they know she died in childbirth?"

"Uh-huh."

"Do they know your mother was attending?"

"Yup, they do." I didn't mention the fact that I was responsible for dropping that detail into the story as it circulated through the school.

"What else?"

"No one knew if the baby died, too. Did it?"

"No, the baby's alive and doing fine. They had a little boy."

"That's good, at least."

"It is, yes."

"What did they name it?"

"Reverend Bedford named him Veil," my father said, emphasizing the pronoun so that the object I'd called "it" would have a gender in my mind. "What else are people saying?"

"Like I said, no one really knows much. All I heard was that Mrs. Bedford had died in childbirth, and it was incredibly bloody. But I know childbirth is always bloody, and no one seemed to be able to tell me why."

"Why…"

"Why it was so bloody."

He toyed with one of his sideburns and then brought his fingers back to his chest. I realized I was sitting on my hands. "Who told you?" he asked.

"Sadie."

"Were a lot of kids talking about it?"

"Yup. By the end of the day, anyway."

"On the school bus?"

"I guess."

"Were the kids asking you a lot of questions?"

"No, just one. They kept asking me if Mom was there."

"And you told them she was?"

I nodded. "Was that okay?"

"God, Connie, of course. Of course it was. Your mom did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing. Sometimes women die in childbirth, just like sometimes people get sick and die. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Mrs. Bedford just happened to have been one of those few people who dies. It's sad-very sad-but these things happen."

"Unfortunately."

"Yes. Unfortunately."

He looked at the coffeepot and seemed to realize for the first time it was full. I expected him to stand and pour himself a cup, but he didn't move from his chair.

"Was it bloody?" I finally asked.

Resting his elbow on the table and his jaw on the palm of his hand, he nodded. "Yes, it was very bloody."

He might have told me then that my mother had performed a cesarean section, but in the hallway above us we heard footsteps. We both realized Sibyl was awake, and she was on her way downstairs. My father would leave it to her to tell me a few sketchy details of what had occurred in the Bedfords' bedroom early that morning.

When my mother entered the kitchen, her hair was still wild with sleep, and her eyes were so red they looked painful. She was wearing her nightgown, something she rarely did in the middle of the day even when she napped after a long nighttime birth, and her feet were bare. She looked old to me, and it was not simply because she was limping or because there were dark bags under her eyes. It was not merely because she looked tired.

That aura, to use one of my mother's favorite words, of limitless enthusiasm that seemed to surround her had dissipated. The energy-part optimism, part patience, part joy-that sometimes seemed to fill whole rooms when she entered had vanished.

It was also clear that my mother had not slept long, and whatever sleep she had been granted had not been deep. Those nights when sleep would come easily, those afternoons when naps would come quickly, those hours when her dreams would be untroubling and serene, were gone forever.

Chapter 7.

Clarissa Roberson's mother, Maureen, is a very together woman. She was a hospital baby, and so were all of her children (including, of course, Clarissa).

But David Roberson was born at home, and he wanted his children born at home. And so there little Clarissa was, all 137 pounds of her-137 pounds at nine months and a week!-laboring away on the bed in her bedroom, and her mom was right there beside David and me, helping her daughter through it.

And it was a long labor, and Maureen must be close to sixty now. But she was terrific. Tireless.

And while I've had lots of moms present at their daughters' deliveries, watching as their little girls made them grandmothers, I've never had one who wanted to be as involved as Maureen. Or involved in such an astonishingly loving and knowing and supportive sort of way. Some mothers get a little queasy or nervous when their own babies are in labor, and I think that's totally understandable. The surges can be breathtaking and scary, and the blood can be intimidating. I think that's why a lot of the mothers who help their daughters have babies limit themselves to things like brewing the tea, or cheering them on from the head of the bed.

But not Maureen. She was right in there with me. At one point between surges I put the Johnson's down to ask David a question, and when I turned around, there was Maureen up to her elbows in baby oil as she massaged her little girl's perineum.

It was beautiful. Incredibly, incredibly beautiful.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER SAID VERY LITTLE in the hours between when I returned home from school and when the state troopers arrived.

She sat on the couch in the den in her nightgown, with a quilt draped over her shoulders. The little room smelled like cinnamon from the herbal tea she was sipping. Whenever the phone rang-and it must have rung three or four times that afternoon-my father answered it and dealt with the caller.

About five-thirty the sun broke through once and for all, not long before it would disappear for the night into the western horizon. But for a few minutes sunlight filled the den, and the fire my father had started in the woodstove earlier in the day seemed unnecessary.

Twice my mother asked me how school had been that day, but I knew neither time she heard my response.

Once she asked my father for more aspirin for the pain in her ankle, and when he brought her the pills and a glass of cold water, he had to remind her that she herself had requested them.

"Let's have that ankle X-rayed tomorrow," my father suggested.

"Yes. Let's," my mother said. She rarely looked at my father or me. She stared at the fire through the glass windows in the woodstove, she stared at the tea in her mug. Sometimes she put her tea down on the table by the couch and looked at the cuts on her hands.

"Was that Anne?" my mother asked my father one of the times he returned from answering the phone in the kitchen.

"No. It was just Sara. She was hoping you could bake a cake for the fire department's potluck next weekend."

"The fund-raiser."

"Right."

"She hadn't heard?"

"Apparently not."

But most of the time the three of us sat in silence. For some reason I was afraid to leave the house, and I was afraid to be upstairs alone in my room. And so I sat with my parents in the den. I believe we all understood on some level that we were waiting for something to happen; we all had an intuitive sense that something well beyond our control was about to occur.

My father and I saw the state police cruiser rolling slowly up our driveway Friday night around dusk, and I believe that we saw it at about the same time. The rack of lights along the roof was off, but I don't think anyone can see a green police car coast to a stop by her house and not be alarmed. Especially the daughter of ex-hippies Rand and Sibyl Danforth.

I was flattening ground meat into hamburgers, and my father was beside me, reaching into the cabinet for a skillet. My mother was still in the den, unmoving and silent but awake.

"I'll see to that," my father said quietly to me, perhaps hoping he could shoo the police away as if they were a pair of vacuum cleaner salesmen.

I assumed I would have to remain by the counter beside the sink, hoping to overhear at least the key details, but my mother heard the knock on the door and grew more alert: She put down her tea and sat up, and craned her head toward the door. When she realized who had come to our house, she rose from the cushions and pillows into which she had burrowed, and somehow found the strength to amble into the front hall. And so I ventured there, too.

"I really believe this can wait until tomorrow," my father was saying.

"I'm sorry, it can't," one of the officers said, although his voice suggested that he certainly understood my father's desire to give my mother a night of peace. "But I promise," he added, "this won't take too long."

The officers were tall, and both well into middle age. One had a white mustache trimmed so severely it looked a bit menacing. The other had the sort of sharp, deep creases across his face that I always associated with farmers-the sort of wrinkles that come from driving a tractor into autumn winds for days and days at a time. Their jackets were buttoned against the March chill, their collars folded up around their necks. When the fellow who would do most of the talking that evening-the one with the mustache-noticed my mother and me approaching in the hallway behind my father, he removed his wide-brimmed trooper's hat, and the other officer immediately did the same. They nodded at my mother as if they knew her, and I got the impression they'd probably met her at the Bedfords' that morning.

It was just after six-thirty, and our porch light was on: Sometimes it would make the badges on their jackets sparkle.

"In that case, do you need to come in?" my father asked.

"We do, yes. But just for a few minutes."

He motioned them inside, and they wiped their shiny black shoes diligently on the mat near the stairs. I tried to remind myself that these two powerful-looking men were not evil, focusing in my mind on the gentle way the one with the mustache had spoken to my father. They both wore wedding bands, which meant they had wives, and if they had wives, they probably had children. And if they had children, then they were fathers themselves. Just like my dad. Remove the troopers' hats and the holsters, the guns and green jackets, and they were just regular old guys. There was no reason I should be frightened of them.

But, of course, I was.

"I'm Sergeant Leland Rhodes," the one with the mustache began, "and this is Corporal Richard Tilley."

"Rand Danforth," my father said, extending his hand first to Rhodes and then to Tilley. When he turned, he saw my mother and me standing in the hallway behind him.

"Connie, why don't you go upstairs. This shouldn't take long," he said, his voice even.

"I could finish cooking dinner," I offered.

"You could, but you don't have to," he said, and I felt my mother's hand on my shoulder, pushing me gently (but without ambiguity) in the general direction of the stairs.

My mother made them coffee. That was the first thing that surprised me: I had barely reached the top of the stairs, and I heard her asking the state troopers if they would like some coffee or herbal tea. They both chose coffee, and while my father escorted the pair into the den, my mother went to the kitchen to make a pot.

The next day, I gather, Stephen Hastings would think that was one of the strangest things he had ever heard. "Coffee," my father said the lawyer repeated over and over. "You made them coffee."

The officers were courteous, and Sergeant Rhodes began by explaining that they were simply gathering information that evening about the tragedy my mother had witnessed.

"We just want to know what you saw," Rhodes said, as if my mother were a mere spectator, someone who had happened to see two cars collide at an intersection. "We want you to tell us what happened, while the memories are still fresh."

"I don't think my memories of last night will ever go away," my mother responded, and years later my father would tell me that one sentence made a huge difference in what happened next. Apparently my mother's eyes grew watery as she spoke, and my father feared she might finally-and suddenly-break down. He became so fixated on her, so worried about her emotional well-being, that he failed to cut short the interview when he had the chance during the next exchange, or inform both the troopers and my mother that there would be no further conversation until they had an attorney present. He told me the idea had already begun to form in the back of his head that they would need a lawyer, but in his mind it would be to defend against a civil suit, not a criminal charge. Not the sort of felony that would bring state troopers by our house on a Friday night.

"That's probably true, Mrs. Danforth, but Bill Tanner and I have both found over the years that some details are more… crisp when you talk about them right away," Rhodes said.

"Bill Tanner?" my mother asked. "Why do I know that name?"

"He's the state's attorney for Orleans County. You met him this morning," the sergeant answered.

Once the troopers had left, my father told my mother he hadn't realized the state's attorney had been at the Bedfords' that morning. Either my mother had forgotten to tell him that detail or she hadn't realized who William Tanner was-or why the fellow had joined the medical examiner at the Bedfords' house.

And so when Rand Danforth interrupted with the question any husband-protector might ask in that situation, he asked it timidly, without conviction: "Should we have our attorney present?" he wondered aloud.

"Sure, if you'd like. But all we're doing right now is filling in the blanks in the story," Rhodes said, his voice casual and unconcerned.

Would things have ended differently if my mother had remained silent at that moment, or if my father had persevered-insisted, perhaps, that they postpone any discussions with the state police until they had an attorney present? It's possible, but it isn't likely.

In all fairness to my parents, even Stephen Hastings decided there was little that was particularly incriminating in the portion of the affidavit gathered that first evening. The troopers hadn't known what was involved in a home birth, and so they hadn't asked the sorts of questions that might have elicited long, informative, and damning responses: After Asa brought you the knife, did you examine Charlotte one last time to make sure she was dead? Did you check for a fetal heartbeat before cutting? Did you ask Asa for permission to slice open his wife?

Mostly the troopers had simply allowed my mother to tell her side of the story, to present what she believed had occurred. Stephen did make a pretrial issue of what he called the "interrogation," but he also told us before the suppression hearing that the State would probably prevail-which it did.

Besides, my parents didn't even have an attorney that night. They had used lawyers just twice before in their lives: once, almost a decade and a half earlier, to write their wills in the days immediately before I was born, and then a second time when my father started his own architectural firm and wanted a legal incorporation. They had used the same attorney on both occasions, an elderly friend of my grandmother who lived in St. Johnsbury and died soon after helping my father found his firm.

And the fact that the two troopers did not actively encourage my parents to have a lawyer present would actually prove helpful to Stephen in one small way when the case finally came to trial: He used that fact to help bolster his contention that the State had a vendetta against home birth, and was more interested in putting midwives out of business than protecting my mother's civil liberties. The troopers did not have to "Mirandize" my mother at that moment or inform her of her rights, the judge had ruled, there was nothing illegal about the way they took her statement; but Stephen nevertheless was able to suggest that Rhodes's portrayal of himself as a "good cop" that night was morally ambiguous at best.

In any event, my mother said both to the two police officers and to my father after he broached the idea of a lawyer, "I haven't done anything wrong." Her voice was incredulous, not defensive, as if she couldn't believe an attorney would ever be necessary. "I'll tell you exactly what happened. What do you need to know?"

At some point soon after my mother started to speak, Corporal Richard Tilley began taking notes. He wrote fast to keep up with my mother, and the few questions his partner asked usually began, "Could you repeat that, please, Mrs. Danforth?"

Eventually Tilley filled eleven pages of lined yellow paper, and my mother's story stretched from the moment early Thursday afternoon when Charlotte Bedford phoned her with the news that she was in labor to the time Friday morning when my mother leaned exhausted against a pay phone at North Country Hospital and called my father. The state troopers stayed in our den for over an hour, nodding and scribbling and sipping my parents' coffee.

A little after seven-thirty, Sergeant Rhodes looked over at his partner's pad. "And then you went home?" he asked my mother.

"No, then I went back to the Bedfords'. I had to get my car."

"Oh, that's right, it was still in the snowbank."

"Sort of. The snowbank had begun to melt."

"Who drove you there?"

"To the Bedfords'? I don't remember his name. He worked for the rescue squad."

"Your car was okay?"

"It was fine. The hardest part was backing around the police car."

"There were troopers still on the scene?"

"I guess so. One of their cars was still there."

"Did you speak to an officer?"

"I didn't see one to speak to."

"Were you alarmed?"

"Alarmed? Why would I have been alarmed?"

Rhodes apparently answered my mother's question with a question of his own: "So you didn't go into the house?"

"No."

"You went straight home."

"Yes. I went straight home. And then straight to bed."

There was a long silence. Finally Rhodes took the pad from the corporal and passed it across the coffee table to my mother.

"Why don't you read this, Mrs. Danforth, and make sure we have everything right," he said, as Tilley handed my mother his pen.

My mother read through the pages, but she said later she didn't read them particularly carefully. Most of the time she could decipher Tilley's penmanship, but she was exhausted and so when she came across a word or a sentence that was incomprehensible, she just ignored it and moved on. Tilley had usually captured the gist of what she had said, and it seemed to her that was all that should matter at that point.

"Is the story accurate?" Rhodes asked her when she was through. "Did Richard here even come close?" he continued, smiling.

"It's more or less what happened," my mother said.

"Good, good," Rhodes murmured. He then made the request of my mother that would finally lead both of my parents to realize they needed a lawyer, and they needed one right away. It didn't matter that it was between seven-thirty and eight o'clock on a Friday evening; it didn't matter that it was the start of a weekend. They needed an attorney. A criminal attorney. And they needed one immediately.

Nodding as if his request were small, a bit of minor and inconsequential protocol, Rhodes looked at the bookshelves over my mother's shoulder and asked, "Would you swear to the truth of it for us, please? And then sign it?"

Chapter 8.

Charlotte spent a half hour today looking at all of the pictures of babies and moms on my wall. She'd noticed the photos during her very first visit, but today was the first time she really wanted to see them.

"Look, Foogie," she said to her little boy, pointing at the first photo ever taken of Louisa Walsh. "Maybe your baby sister will look like her."

"Or maybe my baby brother will look like that one," Foogie said, pointing at a picture of another baby he must have assumed was a boy. It wasn't. He was actually looking at Betty Isham at three hours, wrapped in blue swaddling because that's what her parents happened to have handy. Of course I didn't tell Foogie that.

Anyway, Charlotte says she wants a girl, Foogie says he wants a boy, and Asa just wants a healthy baby. Charlotte tells me that's all Asa prays for from the birth: another healthy child. That's all he says that matters. A healthy baby.

Charlotte's taking good care of herself. I'm sure he'll get his wish.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER DID SIGN the affidavit. My father tried to stop her, telling the troopers, "She'll be happy to sign it once our attorney has reviewed it," but my mother believed that she had done absolutely nothing wrong.

"I'll sign it," she said to my father, and she did, scrawling her name in large, proud letters along the bottom of the eleventh page.

Saturday morning my parents were up and around well before me. I struggled downstairs in my nightgown sometime around eight o'clock, and my mother and father were already fully dressed and finishing breakfast. Unlike most Saturdays, my father was wearing slacks and a necktie, and my mother was wearing a skirt and a blouse. She was sitting with her right leg stretched out straight, and even through her thick wool tights I could see how swollen her ankle had become.

"How did you sleep?" my mother asked me, her voice a forced attempt to be cheerful.

"Okay," I mumbled, noting through my own morning fog that neither she nor my father looked particularly well rested. I imagined they had slept, but it had been fitful at best.

"Up to anything special today?" she continued.

I shook my head, suddenly self-conscious as I stood before them beside the refrigerator. Quickly I reached for the milk and a box of cereal and joined them at the kitchen table.

At that point I knew the basics of my parents' agenda for that day, but none of the details. I knew they were seeing lawyers, little more. As they sipped their coffee, I was able to pick up the rest.

Friday night my father had spoken by phone to attorneys at three firms, two in Montpelier and one in Burlington. The pair of attorneys in Montpelier were casual friends of our family, the sorts of people my parents would see at big Christmas parties and town-wide summer picnics and whose company they probably enjoyed. But we weren't especially close to either one, so my father's phone calls had probably caught them off guard the night before. Nevertheless, each lawyer was happy to meet with my parents and try and understand if he could help them.

The third attorney was Stephen Hastings, a friend of Warren Birch, one of the Montpelier lawyers my parents were visiting that morning. Hastings was a young partner in a Burlington firm, and Birch thought he was an excellent criminal lawyer-something Birch suggested he himself wasn't.

And so my parents' plan was to meet with the two Montpelier-based attorneys before lunch and then see Hastings at his firm in Burlington in the afternoon. They left soon after I'd finished my breakfast, and I spent most of that day in a daze.

Tom Corts and I had been going steady by then for close to four months, although we hadn't formalized the arrangement with anything as symbolic as an ID bracelet or ankle chain. In our part of Vermont, ID bracelets were passe by 1981, and the only girls who wore metal around their ankles were a trio of especially fast young things led by a newcomer to the Kingdom from Boston.

Tom and I were supposed to have gone to a dance together Friday night, a shindig at the American Legion post in Montpelier of all things. The Legionnaires had been holding "alcohol-free" dances every other Friday that winter for the high-school kids, hoping to decrease the number of us who drank too much before rolling our daddies' pickups into ditches, or slamming our already-dented Novas into trees. Obviously I was years away from driving that spring, and the privilege still eluded Tom by five months. And, of course, we were nowhere near old enough to drink legally in Vermont.

But Tom's friends in the tenth and eleventh grades had discovered that while the dances may have been alcohol-free in the Spartan dance hall inside the Post, there was almost always at least one unemployed quarry worker from Barre or laid-off lathe operator from the furniture factory in Morrisville hovering around the nearby convenience store who would buy a kid a six-pack if he could keep one or two of the beers for himself. And so small groups of us would stand in the shadows of the Legionnaires' Post or the convenience store, stamping our feet to stay warm and holding chilled beers that were nowhere near as cold as the night air around us.

Usually one of my parents or Rollie's mother would drive us to the dances that winter, but we always had one of Tom's older brothers pick us up. We feared our breath or my babbling would give our drinking away. I've never held alcohol well, and in eighth grade it only took a beer and a half to give me the giggles.

I had not gone with Tom to the dance that Friday night, however, because I had suspected in school that I had best be home in the evening. By the time most of us started piling into school buses to go home at three, Tom had heard that one of Sibyl Danforth's mothers had died. We discussed it briefly before each of our last classes began, and his take was at once characteristically prescient and prickly:

"That preacher's probably upset, but it's the doctors who'll come after her. Doctors think they know everything."

And then after a long pause, he added, "They scare me, doctors do. They're like pack animals. Wolves. They surround their prey and go right for the throat."

Tom had called me late Friday night, close to eleven, from the pay phone in the convenience store's parking lot. He said our line had been busy most of the night, and I explained to him that my father had been talking to lawyers. I could tell he'd been drinking, but he was still far from drunk. He said he couldn't come by my house Saturday morning because he'd agreed to help an older cousin move into a new apartment in St. Johnsbury, but he said he'd be by in the afternoon. I told him that would be fine.

When my mother and father left for Montpelier Saturday morning, they told me they wouldn't be back until late in the day, and that I should screen incoming calls: As a midwife, my mother had probably been one of the first people in the county to purchase an answering machine, and so our family had used one for years. I was an old hand at screening phone calls.

They were concerned that newspaper reporters would phone us, and their fears were well founded. The Burlington Free Press, the state's largest daily paper, was the first, but the reporter who called only beat the Montpelier Sentinel and the Caledonian-Record by minutes. A fellow from the Associated Press in Montpelier left three messages, and I will always believe he was the person who then called every ten minutes until lunch, hanging up each time when the answering machine's recorded message clicked on.

I spent most of the day in a fog, listening to the messages reporters and family friends and other midwives would leave on the answering machine, and waiting for Tom to come by. Usually if I was expecting Tom when my parents weren't home, I'd anticipate that we would wind up quickly on the couch in the den, where we would neck until Tom would start trying to pull up my sweater and I'd have to slow the proceedings. We both knew it was only a matter of time before I'd finally take off my sweater and let him do battle with my bra, but we hadn't reached that point yet.

The Saturday that my parents went searching for a lawyer, however, the idea that Tom and I might make a beeline toward the couch never even crossed my mind. I knew I was happy Tom was coming by, and I knew I was scared-scared as if one of my parents were desperately ill. But I had no concept of how the two emotions might overlap when Tom finally appeared at our front door: Was he supposed to hug me or bring me a beer? Was he supposed to grill me for the details of what I knew or mindfully talk about everything but home birth? And if he happened to be at our house when my parents returned, would either of us have the slightest idea what to say to them-especially to my mother?

Just before lunch Rollie came over, and for about an hour the two of us listened to the calls coming in to the answering machine. Had my parents even imagined the dozens and dozens of people who would use the phone to besiege me, they might have taken me with them and then sent me shopping in Montpelier and Burlington while they met with their lawyers. But none of us expected the deluge that began just after nine o'clock:

"Good morning, my name is Maggie Bressor, I'm a writer with the Burlington Free Press. I would like to speak with Mrs. Sibyl Danforth as soon as she returns, please. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm writing a story about the… the birth up in Lawson, and I only need a few moments of your time, Mrs. Danforth. I am on a deadline, so I may try you again this afternoon. My number here in Burlington is 865-0940. Thanks a lot."

"Hi, Sibyl, hi, Rand. Molly here. I heard about the, um, tragedy, and I'm thinking of you. Travis and I both are. Call us when you feel up to it. And let us know if there's anything we can do. Bye for now."

"Hello, I'm looking for Sibyl Danforth. This is Joe Meehan with the Sentinel. Just thought I'd see if you were home. I'll call back."

By the time Rollie arrived, I'd had to put in a second cassette tape to preserve the messages. And still people called.

"Sibyl? Are you there? If you're there but not picking up, please pick up! It's me, Cheryl. I have a whole file of legal stuff from MANA I want you to see. It's huge! Okay, you're not there, I believe you. But call me when you are. Or maybe I'll just drop the stuff by. There are even the names of some lawyers in it-all, of course, in places like Maryland and New Mexico-but they might be able to give you the name of one in Vermont. A good one. If you need one. Talk to you soon."

Rollie sipped her soda and asked me what MANA was.

"It's one of Mom's midwife groups. They're in the Midwest somewhere," I answered. I learned soon that the acronym stood for the Midwives' Alliance of North America, the closest thing lay mid-wives had then to a national trade association.

"Hi, guys, Christine here. Call me. I'm worried about you."

"Sibyl. Hello. This is Donelle. I know another midwife I want you to talk to. She witnessed a mother die in a home birth, so she understands the pain you're probably feeling. She lives in Texas, and I know she'd be happy to talk and listen all you wanted. Bye-bye."

"Timothy Slayton with the Associated Press. Thought I'd try again."

It really was endless. Eventually even Rollie grew tired of listening to the calls, and went home about one-thirty. Tom didn't get to our house until close to three, and in the hour and a half in between I continued to stare at the answering machine and watch its red eye blink when the tapes for incoming and outgoing messages weren't turning. Only once did I pick up the receiver and talk to someone, and that was when I heard my father's voice speaking from a phone in the attorney's office in Burlington.

"How are you doing?" he asked me.

"Oh, fine."

"What have you been up to?"

"Reading," I lied. I was afraid he and my mother would worry if they knew the truth and envisioned me sitting with my arms wrapped around my knees, transfixed by the telephone answering machine.

"Schoolwork?"

"Yup. Schoolwork."

"Well, it's Saturday, so don't work too hard. Life goes on. Have you been on the phone?"

"A little, I guess."

"Any calls for your mom?"

"A few."

"Friends or reporters?"

"Both."

"Okay. When your mom and I are done with Mr. Hastings, we have one more stop. Since we're in Burlington anyway, we're going to go by the hospital to get your mom's ankle X-rayed." He had tried to downplay the importance of the hospital visit, implying that they probably wouldn't have bothered with an X ray if they hadn't been in Burlington anyway, but it's hard to make light of a visit to the emergency room.

"It still hurts her?" I asked.

"A bit," he said.

I think the only time I moved between the moment Rollie left and the moment Tom arrived was when I stood up to see what the small thuds were in the kitchen. It turned out to be one of those normally wondrous harbingers of spring: A male robin had returned to the bird feeder outside one of the kitchen windows after a winter away, and the fellow was doing battle with his reflection in the glass. That Saturday, however, the robin's homecoming was merely an irritation, just another mesmerizing example in my mind of the idiocy of the natural world: Birds banged into glass, mothers died giving birth.

I probably looked like eighth-grade hell to Tom when I opened the door for him. I was as vain as any girl just shy of fourteen, but I hadn't combed my hair once that Saturday, and I don't believe I had remembered to brush my teeth. I had gotten dressed shortly before Rollie came over, but I certainly hadn't dressed for Tom Corts. I was wearing jeans that were much too baggy and loose, and one of my mother's old hippie sweaters that she had knit herself. She had used perhaps eleven shades of yarn, and while the effect was supposed to be psychedelic, even she used to say it was merely chaotic, as if the colors had been chosen by a preschooler.

But if Tom was appalled by what he saw when I opened the door, he kept his disappointment to himself. And I was indeed glad to see him. He wrapped his arms around the small of my back and pulled me to him, and gave me a kiss on the lips as gentle and chaste as the first one we'd shared a year earlier in the mud of the McKenna family's small paddock.

And then he just rocked me for a long moment, an awkward sway that felt just right for that time. I pressed my forehead against the cotton from his shirt that peeked through his partly zipped parka, lulled if not wholly reassured. I don't recall how he finally separated our two bodies and moved us inside, but somehow he managed without traumatizing me.

It was quickly apparent that Tom, like me, had absolutely no idea of how much or how little he should speak of Mrs. Bedford's death or my mother's involvement. He understood a hug would be good, but the spoken sentiments he'd have to ad-lib as he settled in for his visit.

"My cousin lives in a pit," were his first words to me after we had walked into the kitchen. "That boy is as stubborn as a pig on ice, so there was no changing his mind. But, my God, has he moved into a dump."

"What's so bad about it?"

"Aside from the fact it's got about two windows and they're only as big as record albums, nothing. Except, maybe, it's only two rooms and a bathroom, and the floor's about rotted out in the bathroom. And I could only find one outlet in the whole darn place."

As we walked through the kitchen to the den, he stopped before the refrigerator. "Can I get myself a soda?"

"Sure."

"I just have no idea what that boy thinks he's doing," he went on as he reached inside the white Kelvinator for a Coke.

"Is the apartment in town, or outside it?"

"It's in a house by the maple syrup company. The one that cans all the stuff from Quebec."

"A nice house?"

"Hah! 'Bout as nice as a car accident. It's dark and old and in need of either a good carpenter or a well-placed bolt of lightning."

He sat down on a corner of the floor by the stereo and began thumbing through the record albums and tapes lined up to one side.

"How's your mom today?" he asked, careful to look intently at an album cover instead of at me.

"I think her ankle hurts more than she'll admit."

"Her ankle?"

I told him how in addition to everything else she had endured up at the Bedfords', she had injured her ankle.

"She picked out a lawyer?"

"I don't know."

"How many are your folks seeing?"

"Three."

He nodded approvingly. "My cousin said he guessed your parents make too much money to get a public defender. But he said he had a good one once."

We may not have had particularly crisp reception back then in our part of Vermont, but I had nevertheless seen enough television to know what a public defender was.

"He did?"

"Yup, in St. Johnsbury. He said the guy was real sharp."

"What'd he do?"

"My cousin or the lawyer?"

I shrugged. "I guess both."

"My cousin was drunk and stole a car to go joyriding and then hit a telephone pole. Wrecked the thing."

"Whose car?"

"Belonged to a guy from Boston. A Saab. Problem was, it was the second time he'd gotten smashed and taken somebody's car. So he ended up spending thirty days in Windsor. But he said it would have been a lot worse than thirty days if his lawyer hadn't been such a fast talker."

"Stealing a car when you're drunk gets you thirty days?" I asked.

"That's what it got my cousin."

In the kitchen the phone rang, and when I didn't move to answer it, Tom looked up at me and offered to get it.

"Let the answering machine deal with it," I told him, and explained how up until perhaps an hour earlier, the phone had been ringing nonstop. Not surprisingly, it was merely a reporter calling yet again.

"There'll be a lot in the newspapers tomorrow, won't there?" Tom said.

"I guess."

"Has your mom spoken to any newspapers yet?"

"I don't think so."

He sighed and looked down at the pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his shirt. I could tell he wanted one, but he wasn't allowed to smoke inside our house.

"Do you think she should?" I asked.

"I don't know. Maybe. Get her side out there."

"Her side? What do you mean her side?"

He slipped an album back into the line of records wedged between the wall and one of the speakers, and clasped his hands behind his neck.

"Look, Connie, I don't know much about any of this stuff. I can't even fake it when it comes to lawyers and newspaper people. So I could be completely wrong about all this. But here's the thing: A lady's dead. And she died having a baby. She didn't die because she was hit by lightning, or because she crashed her car into a rock, or because her house burned down in the middle of the night. She didn't die because she was too fat for her heart, or because she broke her neck on a snowmobile. She's dead because of something that happened while she was having a baby."

"So?"

"So, they're going to have to blame someone. Look at all the reporters who've started calling already."

I heard the robin outside the kitchen window, back to beat up on his reflection. I tried to focus for a moment on what Tom was saying, but I kept coming back to his cousin and the time the fellow spent in the state prison in Windsor. The sentence kept forming in my mind like a word problem in a math class:

If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth?

"Who was your cousin's public defender?" I asked.

"I don't remember his name."

"But it was in St. Johnsbury?"

"Yup."

If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober.

"Not Newport?"

"Not Newport."

"Think Newport has its own public defender?"

"It's a different county. Probably."

If a man steals a car and is given thirty days in jail, how much time will a midwife get when one of her mothers dies during a home birth? The man is drunk, the midwife is sober. When you do the math, don't forget that the midwife cut open the mother after she died.

"Mrs. Bedford died up in Lawson. The people who went by their house yesterday morning were all from Newport."

"Look, I'm sure the Newport guy's good, too."

"I hope so."

"Besides, even if your mom does end up needing a lawyer, your parents are the type who'll shop around. They'll probably use one of the guys they meet today."

"And that's if my mom even needs one," I added hopefully, echoing his earlier words.

He nodded his head and murmured, "Yup, that's right: if. If she even needs one," but I could tell that deep down he was convinced that she would. Behind us the phone rang again, and this time Tom didn't even look up. He just kept staring at the knees of his blue jeans, as yet another unfamiliar voice asked my mother to call him back when she returned.

Chapter 9.

Fifteen years ago, I always expected I'd be arrested one day. I marched against the war, I called police officers "pigs," I smoked more than my share of pot.

But I guess I never got mad enough or wild enough or stoned enough to do something really crazy. Maybe I would have if I hadn't been blessed with Connie. I knew plenty of girls then who would give a trooper the finger while holding their baby in their other arm, but that wasn't me. My baby was always too precious to me to screw around like that.

I remember that Rand was picked up once and herded into a wagon. He was one of dozens and dozens of guys arrested in a Washington, D.C., protest, and I probably would have been with him if I hadn't been five months pregnant at the time. But I was carrying Connie, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend a day in a cramped van driving from Vermont to Washington, and then another day standing around in the D.C. heat, screaming my lungs out with thousands of really, really angry people.

I think Rand only spent a night in the jail, and he was never charged with anything.

And unlike me, he never had to wear handcuffs.

This afternoon when Stephen was making sure I didn't have to go to jail, the judge and the state's attorney-Tanner-made me feel like I'd shot someone while robbing a house. Stephen said it was all a formality, but I don't think anyone who's ever had state troopers show up at her house and arrest her would call "handcuffs" a formality. And while I was expecting the troopers, I certainly wasn't expecting the handcuffs.

"Now, I don't really think that's necessary, do you?" Stephen asked the two officers.

"We don't have a choice, Stephen, you know that," the fellow with the mustache said, the one who I think is named Leland.

And so right there on my own front porch, they made me put out my arms so they could "cuff me."

I just don't know how criminals ever get the hang of handcuffs. They really weren't that tight, but I guess I don't have much flesh or fat around my wrists. Every time I wiggled my thumb, the bones in my wrist rubbed against the steel. If I did it enough, I think it would have started to peel the skin.

The weirdest thing about the handcuffs was this rubber guard someone put around the chain between the bracelets. It was like a five- or six-inch length of clear garden hose. Here they design these scary, ugly, painful metal shackles for people's wrists, and then they put a rubber sleeve around the chain.

It struck me as the most surreal part of a completely surreal experience. There I was, sitting in the backseat of a state police cruiser in this spring dress covered with blue irises, with my hands folded demurely in my lap because I was wearing handcuffs in a garden hose.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

STEPHEN HASTINGS HAD NOT had many defendants in our cold, remote corner of the state. He usually worked in Burlington, where the sorts of crimes that might result in the need for a high-powered-by Vermont standards, anyway-attorney were most likely to occur. Stephen had defended the power company executive who was accused of drowning his wife in Lake Champlain, and the high-school English teacher who was charged with having sex with two fifteen-year-old girls from one of his classes. With Stephen's help, they were both found not guilty.

And while he lost as many visible cases as he won, the fact that he won any at all made him a lawyer in some demand. After all, no one thought he had a chance with the hospital administrator who virtually decapitated the bookkeeper who had apparently figured out he'd been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. ("The means and mere gruesomeness of the death suggested premeditation," Stephen told us the judge had remarked to him one evening when that trial was finished.) Everyone in the state knew a particular motel owner in Shelburne would be convicted of trafficking drugs, and the woman who left her infant twins to freeze atop Camel's Hump would be found guilty of first-degree murder.

Although Stephen's murder, rape, and drug trials garnered the most ink, he had also defended a bank president who had doctored his institution's reported assets and liabilities, an entrepreneur who had stolen from her investors, and a pair of Vermont officials who had accepted bribes from a construction company bidding on a state office complex. Vermont rarely endures more than a dozen murders a year, and most of those are the sorts of drug-related homicides or domestic nightmares that wind up with the public defender. Consequently, it was only natural that a firm like Stephen's-and Stephen himself-would handle all sorts of less visible (and less grisly) white-collar crime as well.

While Stephen may have rarely wound up in the Orleans County Courthouse in Newport, he still knew the county's state's attorney fairly well. Vermont is a small state, and Stephen and Bill Tanner ran into each other at formal bar association functions in Montpelier, and informal receptions at the law school in Royalton. They had mutual friends in Burlington and Bennington, and once spent a Saturday skiing together at Stowe, when they ran into each other in a lift line early that day.

Consequently, the scene I inadvertently witnessed one morning during the trial shouldn't have surprised me. But of course it did. I viewed Bill Tanner as an almost psychotic sort of villain, a fellow bent upon the destruction of my mother and my family for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. He was, in my mind, especially menacing because he was so unfailingly mannered.

In any case, one morning before the trial began for the day, I was standing outside the two lacquered wooden doors that led from the courthouse hallway into the courtroom itself. It was still very early, but through the porthole glass windows I could see that Stephen and Tanner and Judge Dorset were already inside. Dorset wasn't wearing his robe, and his necktie hung loose around his neck like a scarf: He had not even begun to tie it.

Tanner was eating a banana and Stephen was munching on dry cereal, his whole hand and part of his arm disappearing periodically inside the large cardboard box. The three men were hovering around the defense table, and Tanner was actually sitting in the chair that usually belonged to my mother. The jury had not yet been brought in, nor had the bailiff or the court reporter arrived. The newspaper writers hadn't struggled in, nor had most of the other spectators who filled the courtroom during the trial: my mother's friends and supporters, curious members of the State Medical Board, and Charlotte Bedford's family-a small group at once inconsolably sad and unmollifiably angry. The only two people I saw in the gallery that moment were the two young adults who-based upon the thick books of state statutes they were reading, and the yellow markers they used to highlight passages in their dense law journals-I assumed were law students.

My mother was in the women's room on another floor of the building at that moment, and my father was with her-probably pacing the corridor just outside the bathroom.

Something about the sight of the two lawyers and the judge together prevented me from plowing into the courtroom as planned. The acoustics in the courtroom were sound, and through the thin crack between the double doors I could hear their conversation.

"Oh, God, I almost laughed out loud when I saw the paper this morning," Tanner was saying, chuckling just the tiniest bit.

"Was Meehan at the same trial we were?" Stephen said, and it took me a moment to remember why I knew the name Meehan. And then it clicked: He was the gaunt, blond fellow covering the trial for the Montpelier Sentinel, the man who always looked so tired.

"I just had no idea it was going so damn well, Stephen," Tanner continued, pressing the yellow and black peel from his banana into an empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

"Meehan's an idiot," Dorset said. "You both know that."

"Maybe. But if the jury has seen it so far the way he has, I have really screwed up here," Stephen said.

"No one sees things the way Meehan does," Dorset said.

"I hope so. Otherwise, it's going to be a very long couple of days for my friend Sibyl," Stephen said, shaking his head with mock drama.

"But a very short deliberation," Tanner quickly added, and he punched Stephen lightly on the arm.

I think what distressed me most at that moment wasn't the idea that Stephen feared the trial was going badly, although I'm sure that contributed to the queasiness I felt most of the morning. It may not even have been the way the attorney who was supposed to protect my mother and preserve my family was fraternizing with the enemy that I found so disturbing.

No, looking back, what I believe upset me the most that day was the casual, lighthearted way the three men were bantering. This trial had become everything for my family, it was our lives; it was in our minds every moment we were awake, and I can't imagine my mother escaped it in her dreams. I know I didn't. The penalty for involuntary manslaughter was one to fifteen years in prison, and Tanner's relentless attacks on my mother had made it clear to us all that should she be found guilty, the State would press hard for the maximum penalty. (I had done the math instantly the morning the charges were brought against my mother: If she was found guilty and sent to prison for a decade and a half, I would be twenty-nine years old by the time she got out, and my mother would be close to fifty.)

For Stephen Hastings and Bill Tanner, however, for Judge Howard Dorset, this trial was merely their job. It was, in fact, just one of the many jobs they would have in their lives. One more house for a home builder. One more flight for an airline pilot. One more baby for an obstetrician or a midwife. The stakes may have been high for my family, but for the men arguing about my mother's character and capabilities, it was just another morning out of the office, another afternoon in court.

I didn't have a crush on Stephen Hastings, but it would have been understandable if I had. I imagine a lot of girls in my situation would have fallen madly in love with the fellow, given the fact that he was about as close as our family was going to get to having a white knight or cavalry officer ride into our lives and rescue us. And, of course, my hormones were the chemical mess that everyone's are at thirteen and fourteen years old, an explosive combination of elements with a tendency to combust-at least here in Vermont-in the damnedest places. A pickup truck with a pile of clothes or old blankets tossed casually in the bed. The mossy, hidden crevices that dot the rivers as they switchback through the woods. Cemeteries.

Perhaps because so much granite is pulled from quarries in Barre and Proctor, a lot of teenage boys in Vermont come to believe adamantly (albeit mistakenly) that graveyards and tombstones affect teenage girls like aphrodisiacs.

Rollie often teased me that I had a crush on Stephen, but I think that was because she herself was so attracted to the man. That didn't surprise me then; it doesn't surprise me now.

Stephen was my father's age the summer and fall he defended my mother, and two years older than Sibyl. The men around me that year were thirty-six, the woman who was my world was thirty-four.

I didn't read newspapers much before my mother's name started to appear in them on a regular basis, so I had never heard of Stephen before he entered our family's life, but I realized quickly that most adults around me had. If they didn't know his name, often they recognized his face once they met him. He was photographed frequently. Back then cameras weren't allowed into courtrooms when trials were in progress, so the typical Stephen Hastings pictures were what he once referred to around me as either "grip and grins" with a defendant on the courthouse steps after he had won, or "solo frowns of righteous indignation" when he was announcing the inevitable appeal after a defeat.

His hair was just beginning to gray along his temples and across the pair of graceful boomerangs that served as eyebrows. It was more black than brown, and he kept it combed and trimmed with the discipline one might expect from an air force veteran. Small wrinkles had begun to wave from the corners of his mouth, but otherwise his face was lean and sharp. Since I saw him most of the time in the late afternoon or evenings, he always had a shadow of stubble, a dark and natural makeup that in my memories suggests he was especially hardworking and wise.

He was about my father's height, an inch or so short of six feet, and he was slightly heavier-not fat, not even meaty, but he'd never lost the muscles he'd found while training for Vietnam.

He was recently divorced when he met my mother and father, but the marriage hadn't lasted very long or led to any children. My mother said that when he was especially preoccupied, he sometimes rolled the thumb and index finger on his right hand around the finger on his left where he had once worn a wedding band, but I never saw him do it myself.

Perhaps because I was a teen with a fairly predictable interest in clothing, I noticed that Stephen always seemed to be dressed slightly better than the men around him: If he was surrounded by attorneys in blazers and slacks at a Tuesday-morning deposition, he would be wearing a suit; if the gentlemen around him at a Saturday-night cocktail party were wearing khaki pants, his slacks would be gray; even one Sunday at a picnic that summer, before which the adults must have decided en masse that they would all appear in blue jeans, he alone chose to wear chinos-twilled, yes, but ironed and crisp and beige.

"One click above," he explained that day to my father and me, rolling his eyes and laughing at himself, after my father had made some comment about his habit of always dressing a tad better than the world around him. "To win at what I do-and let's face it, charge what I charge-demands dressing exactly one click above everyone else. Not two clicks, because then I look like an idiot. One. One click makes me look pricey. And, I hope, worth it."

"I hope so, too," my father agreed, the tone belying a tension otherwise veiled by his words.

Stephen never treated me like a child, which at that age meant a great deal to me. Twice he brought me punk albums from a record store in Burlington that wouldn't find their way to the Northeast Kingdom for months. Once after he heard Tom Corts expressing an interest in the American West, he brought him a paperback monograph of Ansel Adams prints. He always seemed enormously interested in my father's work, and I think by the time the trial began he knew so much about home birth he could have delivered a breech in a bedroom by himself.

I know that sometimes my father felt Stephen had become too much a part of our family's life, but that seemed to me a reasonable price to secure my mother's acquittal. Looking back, I think Stephen simply decided that-or as in actuality these things tend to work-discovered that he cared for my mother, and he wanted to be around us all as much as he could. His gifts, in my mind, were always genuine, his embraces avuncular and sincere.

Barely forty-eight hours would slip by between the Saturday my parents met Stephen Hastings in Burlington and the Monday evening he appeared at our home in Reddington with a photographer, and I was introduced to him. Apparently my parents had taken an immediate liking to Stephen the day they had met, and he'd agreed on the spot to represent my mother if-as he said to them-it proved necessary. And while we all held out hope as the State conducted its investigation throughout March that Bill Tanner would decide not to prosecute, Stephen was adamant that my parents should prepare for the worst: a charge of involuntary manslaughter stemming from my mother's recklessness or extreme negligence.

"Bill may even make some noise about it being intentional," Stephen had warned that Saturday afternoon.

"What does that mean?" my father had asked.

"In actuality it will mean nothing. But as the State's top gun in Orleans, Bill needs to act like he's one tough cowboy," Stephen began, before turning in his chair to address my mother directly. "If he suggests you acted intentionally, it means he believes he can win with a charge of voluntary manslaughter, not merely involuntary. Maybe even second-degree murder."

My mother simply nodded in silence, my father told me much later, and he said he couldn't think of anything to say. And so he just reached over and covered her hand with his.

Fortunately Stephen continued quickly, "Of course, it won't come to that. I don't think Bill could find a precedent for such a thing on God's green earth. I'm just warning you he might make noise to that effect early on."

Stephen wanted to take steps right away to begin building a defense-just in case-and my parents agreed. He wanted photographs of the scrapes and bruises my mother had received on the ice that Friday morning in Lawson, and the sprained ankle upon which she was hobbling. He wanted to examine Charlotte Bedford's prenatal records with a physician, and he said he'd probably bring on board an investigator right away. And he gave my mother some advice: "Don't talk to anybody about this, not a soul. Don't tell anybody anything-and don't tell me everything. I'll ask you what I need to know as we move along. And try not to worry. I know you will, but you shouldn't. In my opinion, the State should damn well be giving you a medal for saving that baby's life, not threatening you like a gang of legal thugs."

Of course, there were signals right away that should have told my parents clearly and concisely that any hopes they had that the State would not press charges were unfounded, any optimism unwarranted. Throughout the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday that followed Charlotte's death, my mother kept expecting Anne Austin to call. My mother was genuinely concerned that her young apprentice had been so deeply scarred by what she had seen, she would give up her plans of becoming a midwife herself someday. Consequently, my mother phoned her on Saturday morning before she and my father went in search of attorneys, and again when they returned at the end of the day. She called Sunday morning, and again Sunday night.

Like us, Anne had an answering machine, and my mother left a message each time. When Anne had still failed to call back by the time we had dinner Sunday night, my mother wondered aloud if Anne had gone to Massachusetts to visit her parents, and put some literal distance between herself and the house where Charlotte Bedford had died.

"And for all we know, she's tried reaching you a dozen times and gotten nothing but busy signals," my father added.

The Sunday newspapers, too, should have been a pretty good indication that the State would prosecute. Saturday morning there had merely been a couple of three- or four-inch articles in the Burlington Free Press and the Caledonian-Record noting that a woman named Charlotte Fugett Bedford had died during a home birth, but there was no mention of Sibyl Danforth. Anyone who came across either article would have assumed from the stories that while the woman's body had been taken to the medical examiner, it was just a formality and there was no reason to suspect anything other than death from a natural cause.

Sunday's stories, however, were very different. They were lengthy, more detailed, and grisly. They also lacked my mother's perspective on that long night in the Bedfords' bedroom, because she had chosen not to return any of the phone calls from reporters that Saturday. And while Stephen explained to my parents that they should forward press inquiries to him, they didn't know that as they sat in his office the first time, and so there were no comments from Stephen Hastings in Sunday's stories either.

Consequently, the articles that ran on Sunday were not only gory, they were one-sided and wrong. They were filled with quotes from doctors and midwives who hadn't been in the room with my mother, people who were willing to conjecture about what "must have happened" or what "might have occurred." The ob-gyn from North Country Hospital who greeted Veil soon after he was born was happy to talk both about what he knew (the boy was fine) and what he didn't (why the mother wasn't).

"We've all been lulled into believing that birth is as safe as having a cavity filled or a broken arm set," Dr. Andre Dumond told reporters. "Obviously, as this incident proves, it's not. The list of things that can go wrong in a home birth is frightening and it is endless. That's why doctors prefer the technological and institutional support of a hospital."

Even as a thirteen-year-old I can recall thinking as I read this remark that I personally wouldn't have had my teeth filled at home or a broken arm set in my bedroom, but I still understood his point. And I knew other people would as well.

Dumond was also asked by the reporter from the Associated Press whether Charlotte Bedford specifically would have died had she had her baby in the hospital, and his response to the question should probably be studied by public-relations executives and law students who understand the role the media can play in a trial:

"At this point I have no idea whether the poor woman would have died in a hospital. I don't know all the details yet of what happened. Would she have had her stomach ripped open with a kitchen knife? Of course not. Would she have had to endure a cesarean section without anesthesia? Of course not."

Of the half-dozen doctors who could have met my mother and Veil when they arrived at North Country Hospital, Dumond was the worst choice from my family's perspective. My mother and Dumond knew each other, and they disliked each other. I have no doubt that Dumond was a fine obstetrician, but he was in his mid-fifties then, and he was the sort of doctor midwives referred to euphemistically as "interventionist." He believed that birth was a dangerous business, and it demanded constant monitoring and lots of drugs. My mother and the other midwives sometimes called him "Ol' Doctor Forceps" and the "Electrolux Man"-a reference to the skull cap-like vacuum physicians such as Dumond would apply to the infant's cranium to help pull the child from the vagina-because he was so quick to make baby skulls look like turnips with his delivery room toys.

My mother thought it was absolutely ridiculous (but completely predictable) when Dumond convinced a pediatrician to keep Veil at the hospital over the weekend for observation. The two doctors went so far as to place the healthy, howling eight-and-a-half-pounder in the closest thing the hospital had to a neonatal intensive-care unit: a special, sealed room they set up beside the nursery with oxygen, monitors, an incubator, and bilirubin lights available. The baby even slept on a mattress through Sunday with an alarm inside that would sound if he stopped breathing.

In some articles, an anonymous official in the state's attorney's office, in all likelihood Bill Tanner himself, explained that Vermont was investigating the death. "We won't know for a while whether there's a basis for criminal charges, or whether it's merely a civil matter," the source said, suggesting that even if the State didn't press charges, my mother could expect to be sued for every penny she had.

Only the reporter from the little Newport Chronicle tracked down Asa Bedford for a short statement. The reverend hadn't exactly gone into hiding, but he had taken Foogie with him Friday night and spent the next few days at the home of one of his parishioners. Saturday morning or afternoon he told the newspaper writer that he was still in shock on some level, and he had nothing to say about my mother or his wife's labor:

"I am very, very grateful that I have been blessed with another child. But I don't even know how to begin to convey my grief over Charlotte's death. I just don't have those words. I'm sorry. I shouldn't say anything more."

He didn't preach on Sunday morning. He wasn't even in church. In fact, he never preached in that church again. He attended services there twice more, but by early May he had left Vermont and returned to Alabama, where he had family.

Some weeks later his expression "I shouldn't say anything more" would take on a life of its own for my father. For a time he became convinced that either Bill Tanner or some ambulance-chasing attorney had told Asa to say that, to make sure the reverend didn't say anything that would come back to haunt the Bedfords when they took the Danforths to court. And even if the words hadn't been suggested to Asa by a lawyer, the Sunday morning we saw them we should have realized they-along with the observations of Dr. Dumond and the source in the state's attorney's office-meant that my mother was going to trial.

My mother and I almost never made dinner together, and yet, ironically, that is essentially what we were doing late Monday afternoon when Stephen Hastings and his photographer rang our doorbell. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, trying her best to stay off her feet. Despite the Band-Aids on three of her fingers, she was attempting to peel the skins from the red peppers we'd roasted, while I chopped vegetables on the cutting board by the sink.

It was barely four-thirty, so my father wouldn't be home for at least another hour.

My mother knew her lawyer was coming by at any moment to talk with her some more and to pick up whatever papers from her records he deemed important. Perhaps because the state police had sent two men to our house Friday night, one who asked questions and one who took notes, I answered the front door expecting to find on the other side a fellow roughly my parents' age in a dignified suit, and a much younger person-probably dressed more casually-whose sole responsibility would be to capture the conversation on paper.

Instead I saw a man in slacks and a blazer, no necktie, and a slightly older man in blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a down vest. Like a pack animal, the fellow in jeans had camera bags slung over both of his shoulders, and in his hands were coils of extension cords and a pair of large metal lights.

The press, I feared, had decided to descend upon our house since my mother had refused to return their phone calls.

"I don't think my mother wants to speak with you," I said, standing tall and straight in the doorway.

The photographer turned to the other man, and although the photographer's beard was as thick as steel wool, I could see him frown. He raised his shoulders in a way that made the straps from his bags slide in toward his neck, and he sighed deeply with disgust.

The fellow in the blazer extended his hand to me and smiled. "You're Connie, aren't you?"

I refused his hand, but I nodded. I liked his voice and his tone-confident and serene, unaffected-but the last thing I wanted to do was to get involved in a protracted conversation with reporters when my mother's attorney was due at any moment.

"I'm Stephen Hastings," he continued. "I met your mother and father Saturday afternoon. This is Marc Truchon. He's with me to take some pictures."

Truchon nodded, as I reflexively took Stephen's hand.

"I thought you were reporters," I said, and I tried to laugh, but the noise sounded more like a grunt. Even today I'm not especially good at smoothing over social gaffes, and as a teenager-as awkward and self-loathing as most-I would sometimes blush a pink so deep I looked like I was choking. As I escorted the two men back into the kitchen, a moment's humiliation had probably cooked my skin so that it looked as if I'd spent a week in the sun.

My mother rose from her seat as we entered the room, holding on to the back of another chair for support.

"God, Sibyl, don't get up!" Stephen said, using his hands to motion her back into her seat as if he were directing traffic. When she was sitting down again, he grinned and added, "On second thought, why don't you get back up and jump around a bit? Let's get that ankle as big as a grapefruit."

For almost thirty minutes Marc Truchon photographed my mother in the living room, snapping pictures of parts of her body against a small white backdrop he had brought with him inside one of his bags. He recorded lacerations that ran along the palm of her left hand like lighthearted swoops, including a gash that ranged from the edge of her wedding band to her thumb. He took pictures of her inventory of abrasions and bruises, many with dozens and dozens of pinpoint-small dots formed by fresh scabs.

At first I was surprised that Marc began with my mother's arms and hands, since her legs were much more seriously beaten up and bruised. But then when he said, "Okay, Mrs. Danforth, shall we do the legs?" and Stephen wandered back toward the kitchen mumbling something about a glass of water, I understood: That afternoon my mother had been wearing a long paisley peasant skirt, a modest dress that fell almost to the floor when she stood, and she was now going to have to pull that dress up practically to her hips. In addition to her sprained ankle, she had bruises dotting both of her legs, including what I understand was a strawberry on her thigh so painful she was unable to wear jeans, a contusion so deep it was considerably more black than blue.

Quickly I followed Stephen into the kitchen to give my mother and the photographer their privacy. Besides, I didn't want to see the worst of my mother's bruises.

"Where do you keep glasses, Connie? I really would love a drink of water," Stephen said, wiping his eyeglasses with a white handkerchief.

I opened the cabinet door and reached for two glasses. Then, remembering how my mother was always offering people coffee and herbal tea, I pulled down the metal container in which my mother kept tea bags. "Would you like coffee instead? Or herbal tea?"

"Does your family own stock in some coffee or tea company?"

"I don't know," I answered, not realizing until after I'd opened my mouth that this was a joke.

"No," he went on, "water would be perfect right now."

I filled each glass from the kitchen sink.

"Eighth grade, right?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Up at the union high school?"

"Yup."

"They send a school bus up here, or do your parents have to drive you back and forth?"

"Oh, no, there's a school bus."

He shook his head. "Must be a dream in mud season."

"It's hard to stop a school bus."

"Do you know Darren Royce?"

"Mr. Royce, the biology teacher?"

"One and the same."

"Sure, I know him."

"Is he one of your teachers, or do you just know who he is?"

"I have him for biology. Fifty minutes a class, plus all the labs."

"Is he a good teacher?"

I realized as we spoke that I had begun to stand up straight, a response to the fact that Stephen's posture was perfect. I stepped forward from the counter against which I'd been leaning and squared my shoulders.

"Are you two friends?" I asked.

"Ah, answering a question with a question. Very savvy."

"Ah, answering a question with a compliment. Very savvy."

"Yes, we're friends."

"Yes, he's a good teacher."

"Like him?"

"Sure. How do you two know each other?"

"Air force. Want to have some fun at his expense?"

"Maybe."

"The next time you see him, tell him L-T says hi from Camp Latrine."

"L-T?"

"He'll know."

"And Camp Latrine: Was that what you called your base in the army?"

"Air force. Yup. It was one of them, anyway."

"Was this in Vietnam?"

"It was."

From the living room we would occasionally hear either my mother's or Marc's voice, and then the click the camera made every time he took a photograph. The door was shut no more than halfway, and each time the flash went off the kitchen would whiten as if summer lightning had brightened the sky outside.

"Your father home?" he asked.

"Not yet. He usually gets home around five-thirty or six."

He glanced at the skinned peppers on the kitchen table and the vegetables, some diced, on the counter.

"Dinner looks good. What are you making?"

"I'm really not making much of anything. I'm not much of a cook. I'm just chopping what Mom needs chopped. I think the end result will be some sort of stroganoff."

"Well, I hope we don't keep your mother too long."

"What are you doing next?"

He removed a tape recorder about as long as a postcard from one of his blazer's front pockets, and half as wide. "I'm just going to ask her a few questions. Nothing too tough tonight."

"You're not going to take notes?"

"Oh, good Lord, no."

"That's what the police did. My parents said the police took notes."

He opened the recorder and showed me the tiniest audiocassette I'd ever seen in my life, a tape little bigger than a postage stamp. "Well, the police have their methods, and I have mine. And you know what?"

"What?"

"Mine are a whole lot better."

It may have been the confident way that he spoke, and it may have been the ramrod way that he stood. It may have been the way he was dressed, that one-click-above blazer. It may have been all of those things combined. But I went to sleep that night absolutely convinced that if my mother indeed needed a lawyer-and, in all of our minds, that still wasn't a sure thing-she had the best one in Vermont.

Chapter 10.

Connie had a cup of coffee with breakfast yesterday. First time, but I think it's going to become a regular thing. I didn't ask her if she liked it because that would have been just too much like a parent. And I didn't stop her, although the idea crossed my mind. She isn't even fourteen yet.

I remember what I was doing when I was fourteen. It was a lot worse than coffee, and somehow I made it to fifteen. So I told myself this coffee thing is okay, she knows what she wants, and tried to chill out.

She must have put in two whole packets of Sweet'n Low. And I'll bet the coffee still wasn't as sweet as my girl looked to me. She was still in her nightgown, and she had on those slipper socks on her feet: big wool socks with leather soles. Rand was already up and out the door-until this whole horrible thing is over, I think the only time he'll ever get any work done is before the rest of the world is even awake-and she just shuffled into the kitchen, shuffled across the floor, shuffled over to the coffee mugs on the pegs by the toaster, and started pouring herself a cup.

I think I must have been staring by the way she stopped mid-pour and then looked over at me.

"Okay if I have a cup?" she asked.

And that's when this really weird sentence formed in my head, the sort of sentence I can hear my own mother saying to me: Don't you think you're a little young? So I just nodded like, you know, no big deal. And while on the one hand it isn't-it's coffee, and she sees her dad and mom practically mainlining the stuff-on the other hand, it is. It's one more step for our girl.

I want to write "little girl." But she hasn't been a little girl in years. I probably shouldn't even think of her as a girl anymore. The person in a nightgown and slipper socks is a young woman. (God, wasn't it just yesterday she was calling them "slippy socks"? Probably not. It was probably half a decade ago.) And I don't just mean she's a young woman physically, though it's clear as she stands in her nightgown that her body has changed. Height. Hips. Breasts.

I mean she's becoming this young woman emotionally. She's always been very mature for her age, but she has some moments these days when she seems totally grown up to me. She still sounds pretty kid-like when she's on the phone with Tom Corts, and from a distance she still looks pretty kid-like when she's grooming the McKennas' horse with Rollie. But the way she's handling the bigger things right now is amazing to me. That's when she seems like this little grown-up person. Like when she was reading all those horrible newspaper stories Sunday morning. She was practically dissecting them like she was one of those Sunday-morning news commentators on TV.

Or when she met my lawyer last night. That's a perfect example. When she met Stephen. She was this little diplomat, making sure he had whatever he needed, asking him these really good questions, and telling him these really funny stories.

She even asked him if he could stay for dinner. Just like a little diplomat. Just like a young diplomat. Not little. Young. And while he couldn't stay for dinner last night, I have a feeling he will be having dinner with us other nights this spring. Connie will have to see a lot of him, which is only unfortunate because of what he does, not because of who he is.

I know Connie's scared. I know I'm scared. I don't know what to do about that in either of our cases.

Here's what I think I'll do about the coffee. She can have coffee in the morning before school, but not after dinner. If she wants to start the day with a cup of coffee, that's cool. But none before bedtime because she is still growing, and she does need her sleep. That's how we'll handle this coffee thing.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

WHEN CHARLOTTE FUGETT BEDFORD died, the midwives were scared. The lay midwives, that is, the ones without any medical training, the ones who did the home births. Not the nurse-midwives: They worked with doctors and delivered babies in hospitals, and had no reason to be frightened.

But the lay midwives feared-rightly, it would prove-that the medical community would try and use the woman's death as an indictment of home birth in general. As winter slowly gave way to spring, however, and my mother was charged with a crime and treated like a criminal, when the midwives learned the conditions of my mother's bail, their fear quickly grew into anger. Fury, to be precise. And while the midwives I have met in the course of my life have many, many strengths, an ability to have a dispassionate conversation about home versus hospital birth or a willingness to discuss the conduct of one of their own with anything that resembles an objective detachment is not among them. Moreover, if-as Tom Corts had put it-doctors are predatory pack animals like wolves, then midwives are herd animals like elephants: Attack one, and the others will rush to the wounded animal and do all that they can to defend it.

In the months after Charlotte Fugett Bedford died, our house was filled with midwives. Sometimes they came with food as if someone in our family had died, sometimes they came with flowers: When May arrived, our house grew rich with the sweet aroma of lilacs; in June the dining room and kitchen were filled with the scent of sweet honeysuckle and narcissus. Occasionally they brought with them the names of other midwives around the country who had also experienced a-to use the midwife's euphemism for virtually any fatality, deformity, or grotesque malformation-"bad outcome." Sometimes they appeared with the names of those women's lawyers, a gesture which initially I assumed Stephen Hastings would find threatening. I was wrong. He was thrilled.

Early on he asked my mother to share with him the names of these midwives and their attorneys so he could discuss with them their trials and their defense strategies. From a lawyer in Virginia he got the name of one of the forensic pathologists who would eventually testify on my mother's behalf; from a midwife in Seattle he heard the story of the midwife in California who had been tried for practicing medicine without a license after she injected Pitocin and Ergotrate into a woman in labor.

The midwives who visited us came from all over New England and upstate New York, and a few traveled distances that absolutely astonished me, just for the opportunity to meet and console my mother. When some of the news articles about her were sent over the wires, midwives in places as far as Arkansas and New Mexico read about her plight, and one from each of those states ventured to Reddington as a show of solidarity.

These women, regardless of whether they were from a rural corner of northern New Hampshire or an urban neighborhood in Boston, regardless of how well they knew my mother, were huggers. They never shook her hand when they met her, they always embraced her. This went for my father, too, if he happened to be home, and for Stephen Hastings if he happened to be visiting. They, too, would be hugged. Moreover, these were not the sort of mannered little squeezes society matrons or youthful debutantes might share at dining clubs or cotillions in Manhattan, these were emphatic bear hugs of impressively long duration. These were the sorts of decorum-be-damned greetings that begin with arms opened like wings, which then close around one like a straitjacket. I hate to think of the sort of damage they might have done to their clothes if these midwives or my mother had been the sort who wore makeup.

The Vermont midwives, all of whom knew my mother, rallied around her like Secret Service agents around a president who's been shot. They brought her casseroles and stews; they left in our kitchen absolutely mammoth tureens of gazpacho, escabeche, or sweet pea and spinach soup. They baked multigrain breads and blueberry muffins, gingerbread cookies and decadent chocolate tortes. They wrote my mother poems. They penned editorials for the opinion pages of Vermont newspapers; they wrote letters to legislators and the state's attorney. They conducted "teach-ins" to explain home birth at public libraries in St. Johnsbury and Montpelier. Cheryl Visco and Donelle Folino organized a quilt sale to raise money for my mother's legal defense fund, while Molly Thompson and Megan Blubaugh wrote hundreds of fund-raising letters on her behalf. Midwife Tracy Fitzpatrick's sister and brother-in-law owned a vegetarian restaurant in Burlington, and she convinced them to have a special fund-raising dinner one night, with all of the proceeds going toward my mother's defense.

Some midwives dedicated births to her, and I don't believe there was a baby born at home in Vermont over the next six or seven months whose picture wasn't presented to Sibyl as a boost to her morale: This, said those snapshots and portraits of boys and girls born in bedrooms and living rooms, is what you're defending. This is why you must fight. I know of at least three young women living in Vermont today who are named Sibyl, each of whom was a baby born at home in the summer or fall of 1981, their names a not insignificant homage to my mother.

And, of course, the midwives helped out my mother by accepting her pregnant clients as patients, once the State insisted she stop practicing, at least temporarily, as a condition for bail. Often they actually conducted the prenatals in the women's homes to save them the additional burden of traveling after the trauma of losing their midwife.

Most of the time, I think, my father was glad to see my mother receiving all of this support from the midwives. It took some of the pressure off him. Sometimes it boosted his spirits, too. And as a family we really did eat very well that spring and summer. But there were other times when my father grew irritated, tired of the way his home had become a coffeehouse for a New Age world of women in sandals, for tireless earth mothers in wraparound paisley skirts. I think he found Cheryl Visco especially annoying.

The day after Charlotte had died, literally moments after my parents had returned from a Saturday spent with lawyers and emergency-room doctors, she appeared at our house with a ragged manila envelope overflowing with legal information she had amassed over the years from the Midwives Alliance of North America: the names of the women who had been tried for one reason or another, the outcomes of the cases. Bad copies of ancient newspaper articles. Lists of insurance companies. Law firms.

And in the weeks immediately after the death, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the State was slowly and methodically building a case, Cheryl would drop by almost every other day for no other reason than to offer moral support. Sometimes she'd appear with one flower, sometimes with a note card she thought was funny. Sometimes she'd have the name of a book my mother should read, sometimes she'd have the book itself.

When she arrived late on a weekday afternoon, she would stay for dinner. When she arrived on a weekend morning, she would stay for lunch. The days were indeed growing longer as March became April, but-as my father said-when Cheryl was there they seemed to last forever.

Cheryl was probably in her early fifties then, but she was still a beautiful woman. Her hair was gray, and unlike most gray hair it still looked magnificent long. It fell like curtains down her back, usually draping a tight black sweater or the top of a long-sleeved but close-fitting black dress. Cheryl was close to six feet tall, more slender than most women half her age, and the subject of all sorts of rumor and gossip: She had three children from three different fathers, only one of whom she had actually bothered to marry. While some people assumed the relationships failed for the reasons the marriages of many midwives go bad-ridiculously long hours and a completely unpredictable schedule-others attributed the fact that Cheryl was a three-time loser in love to a flighty morality and a loose set of values. If she had had one husband and two significant partners over the years, the gossips whispered, she had most certainly had thirty lovers. Maybe three hundred.

Personally, what I believe did her marriages in was her truly astonishing ability to speak for hours at a time without stopping to breathe. She could tell whole stories without ever inhaling, recount lengthy anecdotes without so much as a pause. It drove my father crazy, just as it probably drove most men in Cheryl's life away. In my experience, men aren't particularly good listeners, and to be around Cheryl for any length of time demanded patience, passivity, and an insatiable interest in Cheryl Visco's life.

Of course, Cheryl adored my mother, and in those weeks when my mother was still reeling from the death up in Lawson, Cheryl was the perfect friend: present but undemanding, company that necessitated no effort. My mother could simply sit still and listen, perhaps nod every so often if it felt right.

"Chance is the strangest word in the world, isn't it?" Cheryl might begin, speaking slowly at first but gathering momentum like an obese teenager on skis. "One syllable, six letters. It's a noun, it's a verb. Change one letter and it's an adjective. And everything about it scares the bejesus out of so many people; it's this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don't travel to the Middle East these days-there's a chance something could happen. Don't get involved with that new fellow on Creamery Street-I hear a lot of mud was scraped off his floor after the divorce. Don't have your baby at home-there's a chance something could go wrong. Don't, don't, don't… Well, you can't live your life like that! You can't spend your entire life avoiding chance. It's out there, it's inescapable, it's a part of the soul of the world. There are no sure things in this universe, and it's absolutely ridiculous to try and live like there are! There's nothing that drives me crazier than when people say home birth is chancy or irresponsible or risky. My God, so what if it is? Which, in my opinion, of course, it isn't. What's the price of attempting to eliminate chance, or trying to better the odds? A sterile little world with bright hospital lights? A world where forceps replace fingers? Where women get IVs and epidurals instead of herbs? Sure, we can cut down the risk, but we also cut off a lot of touching and loving and just plain human connection. No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive."

Although Cheryl lived over an hour away in Waterbury, she would sometimes stay until ten or eleven o'clock at night. Some nights when I would go upstairs to do my homework or call one of my friends around eight or eight-thirty, I would leave her lecturing my parents. I'd hear my father escaping soon after, trudging upstairs with the excuse that he was tired. Later, when Cheryl had finally gone home and my mother had struggled upstairs herself, I'd hear my father comment angrily on Cheryl's uncanny ability to outstay her welcome. Some nights his tone was more caustic than others; some nights his voice was louder.

On the quieter nights he might simply remark, "She can't keep a husband because she can't shut up." But when he was particularly disgusted or he'd had an extra scotch during dinner, I might hear him raise his voice as he said, "We have enough stress in our lives without her! The next time she shows up and won't leave, call me. Call me and I'll sleep at the damn office."

My mother would then shut their bedroom door, and I would wait silently at my desk, listening, wondering if tonight the fight would blow up or blow over.

We learned on Monday night what had happened to Anne Austin, my mother's apprentice. We didn't learn because the woman herself called my mother back, or because she finally answered the phone one of the many times my mother called her. We didn't learn because she appeared at our door after Stephen Hastings and his photographer left, or because we ran into her while shopping at the supermarket.

We learned because B.P. Hewitt-Dr. Brian Hewitt-called from the hospital during dinner and said he wanted to drop by when he finished his rounds. My parents said sure, and much of our conversation as we finished our meal revolved around why my mother's backup physician wanted to come by our house. As far as I knew, he'd only been here once before, and that was three years earlier when it seemed half the county was in our yard for the "graduation" party of sorts my mother held for Heather Reed, an apprentice who'd been with my mother for at least half a decade and was about to embark on a career of her own.

"How much does he know?" my father asked, pushing the skin of a baked potato around his plate with his fork.

"About Charlotte?" my mother asked.

"Yes," my father said, after inhaling deeply and slowly so he wouldn't snap at her. But the sound of that breath murmured clearly, Of course. What the hell else could possibly be on his mind?

"I told him what I remembered. I told him the basics."

"When did you talk to him? Was it Saturday or Sunday? Or today?"

"As a matter of fact, it was Friday. Friday morning. I called him from the hospital before I even went home. Why? Do you think it matters when I called him?"

"Maybe. I don't know. I was just wondering whether he heard the story first from you, or from that… that creep who met you at the emergency room with the baby. The one who said all those ridiculous things to the newspapers. Dumond. Doctor Dumond." He said the word doctor as if he thought the fellow had earned his medical degree by mail, as if he had found the school on the inside of a matchbook cover.

"He heard it from me." Categorical, but defensive. A tone that would color more and more of my mother's remarks that year. And while that tone was wholly understandable, the combination of absolute surety and righteous stubbornness made it sound a bit like a whine, and I believe on occasion it did her no good.

I knew Dr. Hewitt's first name was Brian, but I had never heard him referred to as anything but B.P. Although he was more than a decade older than my parents, he still wore the nickname well he'd been given in medical school: B.P., a natural for a man hoping to become a doctor, whose first and middle initials were the abbreviation for blood pressure. His hair-vaguely camel-colored-was always flying around his forehead and flopping over the tops of his ears, and I can't recall ever noticing a line on his face. He had four sons, two of whom were close enough to my age that it was not uncommon for me to see the doctor around town: In my mind, I can still see his hair sticking out from underneath baseball caps, bicycle helmets, and the straw hat he wore one summer to a county fair in Orleans. It always seemed appropriate to me that he was the kind of doctor who delivered babies.

B.P. delivered his patients' babies in hospitals, of course, and he would testify that he believed hospitals were the safest place for newborns to arrive. But he also said he understood that some women were going to have their babies at home regardless of what he believed, and he was happy to back up the "right sort of midwife."

My mother, apparently, was the right sort of midwife. As her backup physician, he agreed to be on call to go to the hospital when my mother transferred one of her own patients there. Since my mother took women to the hospital only when she feared a complication-a slowly evolving difficulty such as a labor that just wasn't progressing, or the sudden and gut-wrenching chaos of fetal distress-this meant that the majority of the time B.P. met my mother there, he was anticipating a cesarean section.

In the nine years that B.P. had backed up my mother, the records would show that twenty-eight times my mother had transferred a patient to the hospital. Of those twenty-eight transfers-a small number, yes, but of course behind the vagaries of those digits lurk the terror and disappointment of twenty-eight women being rushed by ambulance or car from the warmth of their homes to the unknowns of a hospital, fearing with every movement (or pause) in their womb that their baby is dying-B.P. had been available twenty-six times. And of those twenty-six days or nights when he had met my mother at the hospital, on twenty-four occasions he had brought the laboring woman-usually silent with fear, although never, never numb-into an operating room and surgically removed the infant.

All but once the baby had been fine. Once the baby was stillborn. Born dead.

Never did a mother die.

And on that occasion when the baby was born dead, B.P. and the medical examiner were quite sure that the baby-a boy the parents would name Russell Bret-would have been born dead even if his mother had endured her labor in a hospital. If anyone believed that Russell Bret's parents made a mistake by attempting to have the child at home, I don't believe anyone said so. At least publicly. And no one, as far as I know, ever hinted that my mother might have been somehow to blame.

When B.P. arrived at our house that Monday night, he looked tired and preoccupied. I was immediately struck by the realization that this wasn't the carefree father I'd seen in the high-school bleachers watching his son play second base, or the serene dad I'd noticed bicycling back and forth with other sons on Hallock Street. He gave me a smile as my father walked him into the living room, but it was the sort of desperately wan grin I've since learned is the precursor to particularly bad news. I've always imagined that-along with doctors-accountants, mechanics, and the attorneys who handle death row appeals have a need for that grin often.

While he told my parents why he had stopped by, I cleaned up the kitchen. I was careful to make just enough noise that my parents would assume I was focused upon the dishes, but not so much that I couldn't hear most of what the adults were saying.

"She called about an hour after you did, Sibyl. Maybe forty-five minutes," B.P. told them.

"Friday morning?" my mother asked.

"Yup. Friday morning."

"She was that concerned?"

"Evidently."

"Why didn't she just call me?"

"Didn't she?"

"No."

"You two haven't spoken to each other since… since the birth?"

"Sibyl's been trying to reach her for three days," my father said. "Over the last three days, Sibyl has probably left a half-dozen messages on the woman's answering machine."

I slowed the water pouring from the tap to a trickle and dried my hands on the dish towel by the sink. I began to feel dizzy, as if I had stood up too quickly after kneeling for a long moment. They were talking about Anne, I realized, my mother's new apprentice. The woman who'd been with my mother at-to use B.P.'s term for the event-the birth.

I reached for the edge of the counter with both hands and leaned forward, trying to take some of the weight off my feet.

"You two haven't spoken, you two haven't seen each other?" The doctor's voice again. In it was something like surprise, something like concern. Concern for my mother.

"Nope," my mother said. "Not one word."

"I asked her to call you. Talk to you," B.P. continued.

"She didn't."

"Is she still in Vermont?" my father asked.

"I believe so."

"Then I'll see her tomorrow," my mother told B.P. "I have prenatal exams all afternoon, and Anne will assist me. We can talk about this whole affair then."

"Oh, I don't think so, Sibyl," B.P. said slowly, and I assumed the reason he had begun to speak at a slower speed was because he wanted to buy the time to find the right words for the point he was about to make. "If Anne hasn't already called you, I wouldn't expect her tomorrow."

"What exactly did Anne say to you?" My father. Suspicious.

"Tell me something first. If you don't mind. How well do you know Anne?" the doctor asked, and I could tell he was directing the question at my mother.

"I believe I know her well."

"But she hasn't been your apprentice very long."

"No, not long at all."

"About six months?"

"Not even that long. Three. Maybe four. We started working together in December."

"You're stalling, B.P., you're avoiding the issue. What did the girl say to you?" my father asked once more, his patience fading.

B.P. sighed. Finally: "When you made the incision into Mrs. Bedford to rescue the baby, she says she saw blood spurt. A couple of times. She says she thinks Mrs. Bedford was alive."

There are expressions to convey silence; there are all the old cliches. There are the poetic constructs and affectations. A silence deep as death, a silence deep as eternity. Quiet as a lamb, a quiet wise and good. The silence of the infinite spaces, the silence upon which minds move.

After B.P. spoke, did the living room grow so quiet we could have heard a pin drop? Rooms are often that still, and the floor of that particular living room was hardwood painted gray. We could have heard pins drop in the quiet of that room most days and nights. No, the stillness that overtook the three adults and me, the stillness that fell upon our house was very different from silence. It was not the silence of thought, the quiet of meditation. It was not the silence that grows from serenity, the hush that flowers around minds at peace.

It was the stillness of waiting. Of preparation. Of anticipation tinged-no, not tinged, overwhelmed-overwhelmed by gloom.

How long we all remained still-the adults in the living room, I in the kitchen-was probably far different in reality than it feels to me now in memory. I remember the stillness lasting a very long time; I remember leaning over the sink on my arms for what seemed a great while. But I was so dizzy I feared I might become ill, and in reality the stillness may have lasted mere seconds. A pause in the conversation-albeit one in which everyone present understood that our realities were changed by B.P.'s news, that our lives before and after his remark would be very different-but a simple pause nonetheless.

And then it broke. The stillness brought on by words was done in by words.

"If you'd like," my mother said simply, "I'll talk to Anne tomorrow and put an end to this."

"She won't be here tomorrow, Sibyl, I'm telling you that."

"Why are you so sure? Did she say something to that effect?"

"She didn't have to. But it's clear. It's clear from the fact she hasn't connected with you since… since the woman died. She's avoiding you."

"Avoiding me." More of a statement than a question. My mother sounded more incredulous than concerned.

"Avoiding you. Yes."

I took in a few deep breaths to try and calm myself, to settle my stomach. But my knees were going and so I gave in, I allowed my body to slide to the kitchen floor. I fell slowly, as if I were slipping serenely underwater, my back sliding against the cabinet under the sink as I collapsed.

"What did you say to Anne when she called?" I heard my father ask, and for a brief moment the voices sounded so far away I feared I would faint, but the moment passed.

"I told her I doubted what she said was true. I told her I'd already spoken to you and Andre, and my sense was she probably saw a lot of blood and it was probably very frightening. But she hadn't seen you cut open a living woman. It just wasn't possible, given who you are."

"Who I am," my mother murmured. An echo.

"Yes. An experienced midwife. A woman with excellent emergency medical training."

"And then?" My father again.

"She seemed to understand, and I hoped that would be the end of it. I suggested she call you and get it all off her chest. Get it all out in the open between the two of you."

"But she never called me," my mother said, and in her voice I heard as much hurt as I heard fear.

"Apparently not. But later that day, she did call Reverend Bedford."

"She called Asa?"

"And then she called the state's attorney's office."

"And she told them she thought this woman had been alive when Sibyl did the C-section?" my father asked.

"So it would seem. What she probably told the state's attorney-and this is why I wanted to come by tonight-is that she and Asa both saw blood spurt when you made your incision. In her opinion, the heart was pumping when you began the operation."

"Then why didn't she say something?" my mother said, raising her voice for the first time that evening. "No, she knew Charlotte was dead-and Asa did, too!"

My mother wasn't frantic, but her tone suggested she understood clearly that Asa's perception of the tragedy affected everything. My father, perhaps with some cause, feared that frenzy was just another revelation away, and asked quickly, "B.P., why are you here tonight? This moment? Did something happen today?"

"I was interviewed. I guess that's the right word. Interviewed. I was interviewed today by a couple of state troopers. They wanted a statement. And based on their questions, I got the distinct impression that everyone-state's attorney, medical examiner, father-believes that somebody's dead right now because a midwife performed a bedroom cesarean on a living woman."

…

Later that night my mother knocked on my door and asked if I was awake. She probably knew that I was because she could see the light on under my door, and I was never the type to fall asleep while reading. Through the register in the floor I could hear my father downstairs, adding a last log for the night to the woodstove.

"Come on in," I said, rolling over in bed to face the doorway, and tossing the magazine I was reading onto my night table.

I was surprised that my mother hadn't yet gotten ready for bed. B.P. had left hours ago; it was probably close to midnight. But my mother was still dressed in her loose peasant skirt, and she still had her hair back with a barrette. She limped across the room and sat on the edge of the bed. Outside my window the moon was huge, an oval spotlight one sliver short of full.

"You're up late," she said.

"It's the coffee," I told her, teasing. I'd seen how closely she'd watched me that morning when I'd decided to test one of my limits. It was a completely spontaneous exploration, absolutely unplanned. I simply saw Mr. Coffee, and my arms and hands did the rest.

She picked up the magazine, one for women in their twenties, and thumbed through its pages. That particular issue had articles on super summer shorts and the pros and cons of tanning salons, as well as a special pullout section on birth control. There was no woman in the state of Vermont with a figure as perfect as the Texas blonde on the cover, and no girl with hair that big.

"Anything interesting in here?"

My mother knew exactly which parts of the magazine I found interesting.

"There are some shorts I like on page 186," I told her, not a complete fabrication, but not exactly the truth either.

She nodded and smiled. "They'd look good on you."

"Yeah. But they are sort of yachty," I said, making a word up when I couldn't find the right one. "I think you'd have to live on the ocean to get away with them."

"Probably."

"Or be some rich guy's mistress," I added, an inside joke between us. Whenever we saw a young woman in Vermont who was mind-numbingly overdressed for our little state, one of us would whisper to the other, "Over there-some rich guy's mistress," drawing out the word rich until it became almost two syllables: ri-ichhhhhh.

"Oh, good, there's an article on how to choose the right tanning salon. That should be very, very helpful," my mother said.

"There is one now in Burlington, you know."

"No, I didn't know."

"Yup."

"We're becoming pretty hip up here in the hills."

"Mostly I just look at the ads. To see what's cool."

She skimmed the headlines and captions in the section on birth control. "How are you and Tom doing?"

"Fine."

"Was it strange not going to the dance with him Friday night?"

"Strange?"

"Did you miss him?"

"We talked on the phone. And he came over Saturday afternoon, you know."

"I know. But I'll bet it's not the same as hanging out with him at a dance."

"Nope. Not exactly."

She looked down again at the magazine, and with her eyes on the section about diaphragms she said, "Don't ever forget: When you think it's time, you tell me. We'll go straight to the clinic." The clinic was our word-saving shorthand for Planned Parenthood.

"I will."

"Promise?"

I rolled my eyes. "Mom!"

She rolled her eyes and threw back her head histrionically in response.

"Promise?" she asked again, a reference to the vow she'd asked me to make when I turned thirteen that if I ever thought there was even the slightest chance I might be having sex in the foreseeable future-even if that chance was as statistically remote as being hit by lightning in late December-I would tell her, and we would visit Planned Parenthood and get me fitted for a diaphragm. Short of dealing heroin to our schoolmates or shooting a teacher, I think the only thing Tom and I could have done that year that would have truly disappointed and upset my mother would have been to have had the sort of tumble together that results in an unexpected teenage pregnancy.

When I told some of my friends about this promise, girls like Rollie and Sadie, they decided that there was no mother on the planet as cool as my mom. Most mothers then wouldn't even say the word diaphragm to their thirteen-year-old daughters, much less offer to drive them to the clinic where they could get one. In the eyes of my friends, the attitudinal advantages of having a midwife for a mother dramatically outweighed the inconveniences brought on by long labors and midnight deliveries.

"I promise," I said.

"Thank you." She rolled the magazine into a tube and held it primly in her lap like a diploma.

"You're welcome. How does your ankle feel?"

"It feels okay." She shrugged. "Painkillers."

"They work?"

"You bet."

"What did Dr. Hewitt want?"

"You weren't listening?"

"I couldn't hear everything."

"He's a good friend," she said instead of answering my question. I don't think it was a conscious evasion, but she quickly continued, "I think I'm on my own for the prenatals tomorrow."

"Anne doesn't do much yet anyway, does she?"

"She does her share. She's learning."

"It sounds like she's got a lot to learn."

My mother looked at me for a long moment, and I worked hard to maintain eye contact. I think she realized in that second just how much I understood: how much she needed to share with me, and how much she didn't. She didn't blink, and if the cluster flies in our walls were not dormant that moment, they would have seen my mother's head nod just the tiniest bit. Yes, that nod agreed, she does.

Downstairs my father added water to the kettle atop the wood-stove, pushing the wrought-iron lid against the brass handle. I knew the clang it made well. A second later my mother and I both heard the brief sizzle from the drops of water that spilled down the sides of the kettle onto the soapstone surface of the stove, hot enough to turn that water to steam in an instant. He then pulled the chain of the reading lamp by the couch, and we knew he was about to come upstairs.

Finally I looked down at the edge of my quilt, unable to meet my mother's gaze any longer.

"Sleep well, sweetie," she said. "Sweet dreams."

"You, too, Mom," I answered, and somewhere inside her she found the strength to murmur the lie that she would.

Chapter 11.

$25,000. A two and a five and three zeros-five zeros if you're using a decimal point. Not a whole lot less than it took to buy this whole house not that many years ago. The cost of two years of college for Connie. The cost of my baby's entire college education, with change, if she decides she wants to go to the University of Vermont.

Until today, Rand and I had never written one check that big. Technically, I guess, I still haven't. It was Rand who actually tracked down a pen in the kitchen drawer and wrote out the words "Twenty-five thousand dollars" on that line checks have right below "Pay to the Order of." Then he scribbled the two and the five and all those zeros.

And that $25,000 is just the beginning. "The retainer to get the clock started," Stephen Hastings said. "The money to feed the meter." And now the meter's running.

I was very disturbed by the amount at first, and I found myself wishing we were eligible for the public defender, but we're not. I kept hearing these words in my head, this sentence: "Man, that's a lot of bread." That's what we used to say: "A lot of bread." Grass might be a lot of bread, or a car-used or dented or wrecked by some sort of really hideous orange paint that someone thought was psychedelic-or a pair of stereo speakers.

I told Rand it was too much money, especially since we'll need a lot more if this thing drags on. It's almost our entire life savings, almost all of the money we've squirreled away for over a decade for Connie's college or our retirement or both.

Besides, I haven't done anything wrong. And so I said to Rand maybe we didn't have to have the best attorney we could find, or the best lawyer money could buy. It's not like I was caught robbing a bank with a machine gun.

But Rand disagreed, and said it didn't matter whether I'd done anything wrong, that wasn't the point. The point was that a woman had died doing something we all know the state hates, and that was having her baby at home. And so someone will have to be held accountable.

In the old days, of course, he would have called the state "the establishment."

In my mind, I can see Rand shaking his head and I can hear him saying, "Man, it will take a lot of bread to beat the establishment, but pay up we must." He didn't say that, of course. He wouldn't, not these days.

What he said was, "We want the best, and apparently that's Stephen Hastings. We shouldn't be surprised that he's the most costly."

Rand is probably right. But given who I am and what I do, Stephen Hastings is a very ironic choice. In the world of law, Stephen's as pricey as they come: He's polished and high-tech and very, very slick. Meanwhile, in the world of babies, I'm about as inexpensive as you get, a fraction of the cost of an ob-gyn. And I try hard to be unpolished and low-tech and… earthy.

And it sounds like Stephen was in Vietnam, based on something he said to Connie. I find that very weird, too. Imagine this: It's a single day fourteen years ago. On one side of the planet, I'm in Plattsburgh in my "Drop acid, not bombs" T-shirt, putting daisies all over the wire fence at the air base and in the gun barrels of the soldiers who keep telling us we have to stop. And somewhere on the other side of the planet it's nighttime, and there's this guy from Vermont named Stephen Hastings who's up to his hips in some swamp or rice paddy. And now that guy's defending me.

I do believe this will all be fine in the end, at least partly because Stephen seems to be such a good lawyer. But also because I was trying to do the right thing when I decided to save Veil.

Stephen seems to understand that. He may be polished and slick and a high-tech kind of guy, but I can see myself delivering his wife's or girlfriend's baby someday in their home. Maybe Stephen will be my first lawyer daddy. That'd be cool.

I know he doesn't have any children yet, and I know he's no longer married. I wonder if he has a girlfriend back in Burlington.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

HOW HIGH DOES BLOOD SPURT from a beating heart? For my mother, the question lost its rhetorical or theoretic flourish, and became instead one of pathological and clinical detail: In her mind, there was a tangible, perhaps even mathematical, connection between the power of the pulse and the height of the geyser at the point of incision.

For Stephen Hastings, however, the issue became one of mere staging and lighting: logistics, not pathology. It didn't matter to him how high into the air a beating heart could arc a fountain of blood, or whether the red crescent was narrow or squat-a water pistollike squirt, or the burp of a water balloon burst with a pin. Although my mother's fate would indeed depend in large measure upon who would win the battle of the experts Stephen waged with Bill Tanner-his doctors versus the State's, his midwives versus theirs-on this one question he didn't worry much about medical testimony. He worried instead about blocking, and where Asa Bedford and Anne Austin were standing when my mother took a kitchen knife and first pierced Charlotte's skin:

STEPHEN HASTINGS: And then you asked if your wife was dead?

ASA BEDFORD: Yes, sir.

HASTINGS: And Sibyl told you she was?

BEDFORD: That's right.

HASTINGS: So what did you do next?

BEDFORD: I didn't do anything.

HASTINGS: I believe, Reverend Bedford, we've already established that you went to the window. Correct me if I'm mistaken.

BEDFORD: No, I didn't understand the question. I thought you wanted to know if I did something… medical.

HASTINGS: You went to the window?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: To look outside?

BEDFORD: I guess.

HASTINGS: You looked out the window. Did you watch it snow?

BEDFORD: I don't remember, but I probably did. At least for a second or two. But then I looked back at Charlotte.

HASTINGS: From the window.

BEDFORD: Yes, sir.

HASTINGS: (motions toward easel with overhead drawing of the Bedford bedroom, State's 8 for identification) How far is the window from the bed?

BEDFORD: Not far. A couple of feet.

HASTINGS: Two feet?

BEDFORD: No, further.

HASTINGS: Three?

BEDFORD: No.

HASTINGS: Five?

BEDFORD: Maybe. It might be more.

HASTINGS: Seven?

BEDFORD: I don't know, I've never measured it.

HASTINGS: But you think it might be as much as seven feet away?

BEDFORD: Or as little as five.

HASTINGS: (at easel) Using the State's diagram and the State's scale, it's six feet, eight inches from the center of the bed to the glass. Does that sound right to you?

BEDFORD: It sounds… fine.

HASTINGS: Thank you. Was the sun up?

BEDFORD: No, sir, it was still dark out.

HASTINGS: So you did look outside.

STATE'S ATTORNEY WILLIAM TANNER: Objection. Asked and answered. JUDGE HOWARD DORSET: Sustained.

HASTINGS: It was still night?

BEDFORD: It was still dark. It wasn't night. It was dark because of the storm. The clouds.

HASTINGS: And so the only light in the room came from the lamps?

BEDFORD: Yes, but I could see Charlotte.

HASTINGS: (motions toward diagram) Was the floor light on? The one in the corner?

BEDFORD: Yes. That one had been on all night long.

HASTINGS: What about the one on the night table?

BEDFORD: Yes, that one was on, too. Sib-Mrs. Danforth had turned it on just before she began the… the operation.

HASTINGS: Where was Sibyl standing during the operation? On which side of the bed?

BEDFORD: The far side. The side away from me.

HASTINGS: Here?

BEDFORD: Yes, sir.

HASTINGS: (presses a bright blue dot onto the drawing beside the bed) This is Sibyl. (Presses a red dot onto the drawing just inside the window) And this is you. Is this accurate?

BEDFORD: I think so.

HASTINGS: In other words, your wife was in bed, and the bed was between you and Sibyl.

BEDFORD: Exactly. From the window, I had an unobstructed view.

HASTINGS: (presses a yellow dot on top of the night table behind the defendant) And this is the light Sibyl switched on just before she rescued your baby?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: (presses a second yellow dot in the corner of the bedroom behind the defendant) And this is the light that was on most of the night?

BEDFORD: Right.

HASTINGS: Is it a bright light?

BEDFORD: No, it's soft. And it only had a low-watt bulb in it, which is why we used it for the birth. Mrs. Danforth wanted the lights to be low.

HASTINGS: And the lamp by the bed. Was that a bright light?

BEDFORD: In my opinion, it was. It was our reading light.

HASTINGS: Bright enough to cast a shadow?

TANNER: Objection. Calls for speculation.

DORSET: I'll allow it. The witness may answer.

BEDFORD: I guess.

HASTINGS: A hundred-watt bulb?

BEDFORD: Most of the time.

HASTINGS: Most of the time?

BEDFORD: If the bulb blew and we had a hundred-watt bulb in the house, that's what we'd use. If we didn't, we'd use the next best thing. Maybe a seventy-five-watt bulb.

HASTINGS: The night Veil was born, you had a hundred-watt bulb in that lamp, is that correct?

BEDFORD: Yes, I think so.

HASTINGS: It was intense?

BEDFORD: Yes, sir,

HASTINGS: (at State's diagram, presses a finger on the dot signifying Mrs. Danforth and a finger on the dot representing the lamp on the night table) And we're in agreement that this is the right spot in the room for the lamp, and the right spot for Sibyl?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: And the lamp was on?

BEDFORD: The lamp was on.

HASTINGS: Where was the shadow?

BEDFORD: The shadow?

HASTINGS: A lamp bright enough for reading will always cast a shadow. Isn't that right?

BEDFORD: I guess so.

HASTINGS: Well, Sibyl had a lamp with a hundred-watt bulb in it right behind her, and when she hunched over your wife-her upper body exactly between that lamp and your wife-there had to have been a shadow. Correct?

BEDFORD: It would seem so.

HASTINGS: The night your son was born-Veil-where would the light from the hundred-watt bulb behind Sibyl have cast its shadow?

BEDFORD: On the bed.

HASTINGS: Please look at the diagram of the bedroom. Where on the bed would that shadow have fallen? (Presses finger in middle of bed) Here?

BEDFORD: Probably.

HASTINGS: Where is my finger?

BEDFORD: On the bed.

HASTINGS: What part of the bed?

BEDFORD: The middle.

HASTINGS: What was in the middle of the bed the night your son was born?

BEDFORD: My wife, of course. It's where she lab-

HASTINGS: The shadow from the lamp fell on your wife?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: On her torso?

BEDFORD: I guess.

HASTINGS: Thank you. Do you remember what Sibyl was wearing that night?

BEDFORD: I think she was wearing a sweater and blue jeans. A heavy sweater.

HASTINGS: A ski sweater?

BEDFORD: I've never skied.

HASTINGS: But a heavy sweater?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: Do you remember what color it was?

BEDFORD: No, sir.

HASTINGS: (shows article of clothing to state's attorney and Judge Dorset; sweater is admitted into evidence) Your Honor, Defense's three for identification. Is this the sweater Sibyl was wearing?

BEDFORD: I think so.

HASTINGS: What color is it?

BEDFORD: Navy blue. And the snowflakes around the shoulders and collar are white.

HASTINGS: But it's mostly navy blue?

BEDFORD: Mostly.

HASTINGS: (shows sweater to jury and puts it on evidence cart) We've established that Veil was born sometime between six-fifteen and six-twenty in the morning. Correct?

BEDFORD: Correct.

HASTINGS: Did you sleep at all the night before?

BEDFORD: No, I did not.

HASTINGS: Had you napped the day before? In the afternoon, maybe?

BEDFORD: No.

HASTINGS: Do you remember what time you got up the day before? Thursday?

BEDFORD: Not exactly. But it was probably around six-thirty.

HASTINGS: So you'd been up all night when your son was born?

BEDFORD: That's right.

HASTINGS: In fact, you'd been awake for just about twenty-four hours.

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: Were your eyes tired?

BEDFORD: I don't remember thinking they were.

HASTINGS: Might they have been?

TANNER: Objection.

DORSET: I'll allow it.

HASTINGS: After being awake for twenty-four hours, might your eyes have been tired?

BEDFORD: It's possible.

HASTINGS: Thank you. Now, you've told the court that you think you may have seen this bit of blood spurt, despite the fact that you were almost seven feet away when it happened. Am I correct?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: And despite the fact that your wife's stomach was covered in shadow. Correct?

BEDFORD: Yes.

HASTINGS: And despite the fact that you would have been seeing this blood against the backdrop of a navy blue ski sweater. Right?

BEDFORD: Yes, but-

HASTINGS: And despite the fact that you had been awake all night long. No, not just all night. A full twenty-four hours. Is that the testimony you actually want the jury to believe?

BEDFORD: I know what I saw.

DORSET: Does counsel have any further questions for the witness?

HASTINGS: Yes.

DORSET: Then please proceed.

HASTINGS: Did you believe your wife was dead when you went to the window?

BEDFORD: Oh, yes.

HASTINGS: Did you love her?

BEDFORD: Of course.

HASTINGS: Were you sad?

BEDFORD: Good Lord, yes!

HASTINGS: Were you very sad?

BEDFORD: Yes

HASTINGS: And was it in that frame of mind that you think you saw blood spurt?

BEDFORD: Yes, but I was not hysterical. I'm telling you, I know what I saw.

HASTINGS: And yet, did you make any effort-any effort at all-to stop Sibyl when you saw the blood?

BEDFORD: No, as I told Mr. Tanner, I thought it was normal. I assumed my Charlotte had passed away, and this was just… just what the body did…

Stephen had told my parents while they were discussing strategy the night before that there would be two issues with Asa's testimony: what the man could have seen, and what the man would have seen. Stephen was firmly convinced that no husband in his right mind would actually have brought himself to witness a knife going into his dead wife's belly, and that was the real reason Asa had gone to the window. But first, he told my parents, he would cast doubt upon what Asa could have seen from the bedroom that morning.

Stephen's cross-examination of the reverend began right after lunch and continued until we recessed for the day. There were moments that afternoon-brief but thrilling-when I was convinced with the confidence of a teenager that Stephen had persuaded every soul in the courtroom that it wasn't logical to believe Asa Bedford would actually have watched his wife's cesarean, and it was unlikely he could have seen blood spurt even if illogic had somehow prevailed. No man in Asa's position, I told myself, could be completely sure of what he had seen, and-perhaps more important-no man would have been willing to watch.

But when the cross-examination was over, the fact remained that Asa Bedford was still a clergyman: In our corner of the Kingdom in 1981, this meant his words had weight. Great weight, despite the eccentricities of his church's dogma. I thought Stephen's cross-examination had been wonderful, but when we all went to our separate homes for dinner, I nevertheless feared one cross-examination-even a good one-could not undo a week of damaging medical testimony and the memories of the minister.

When girls are little, their dolls are likely to be babies, not Barbies.

So said Stephen Hastings. Stephen, of course, had no children.

But this didn't stop him from having strong opinions about how children thought and what they believed. After all, he said one night when my father challenged him, he had been one himself. Stephen would readily admit that he hadn't the foggiest notion of how one should raise a child-how to discipline one, or reward one, or simply smother one with love-but he insisted he understood well the logic that informed a child's mind. A girl's mind as well as a boy's.

And Stephen was convinced that little girls loved baby dolls-plastic infants that demanded no maintenance. No rocking, no feeding, no changing, no watching. No work. Only mock howls, play colic, pretend pangs of hunger. Imaginary dirty diapers. Make-believe mess. Eventually, he said, baby dolls would drop off the child's radar screen. Older dolls might or might not, depending upon whether the little girl discovered Barbie and Skipper and Ken. But plastic babies-and the instinctive desire to nurture something small and needy-did. Some girls got the nurture bug back when they began puberty, and used baby-sitting as a substitute. Others didn't rediscover the desire to mother until they were adults themselves, and the primordial need to dispose of the diaphragm and continue the species overwhelmed all reason.

And then, of course, there were those girls who became mid-wives: girls who could not get enough of the tiniest of babies-the newborn-girls who would grow into women who absolutely reveled in the magnificent but messy process of birth.

As spring became summer and Stephen steeped himself in the culture of home birth, he concluded that the principal difference between the woman who becomes an ob-gyn and the woman who becomes a midwife had less to do with education or philosophy or upbringing than it did with the depth of her appreciation for the miracle of labor and for life in its moment of emergence. Women who became doctors viewed themselves as physicians first, ob-gyns second. He felt that when these girls began focusing seriously on what they wanted to be when they grew up-in high school or college-they probably decided originally that they simply wanted to be doctors. Then, perhaps in medical school, they narrowed in on obstetrics.

Those girls who became midwives, on the other hand, knew midwifery was their calling at a very early age, or-as my mother's path suggested-had one profound, life-changing experience involving birth that pulled them in. Stephen was adamant that the women who became ob-gyns loved babies no less than midwives, but they were the type who were more likely at a young age to trade dolls that one dressed for toy cribs for dolls that one dressed for pretend formals.

Certainly Stephen was on to something in my case, at least when it came to dolls. My dolls stayed babies barely beyond my arrival in first grade; almost overnight that year they became a small world of Barbies obsessed with clothing and cars and the color of their hair. I even had a Nurse Barbie, although to be honest she spent most of her time with Ken with her clothes off.

Yet did I become an obstetrician simply because I wanted to be a doctor, and I happened to grow up in a house that made me comfortable with the anatomic terrain? I doubt it. And after watching the way some ob-gyns clinically picked my mother apart in the courthouse-using the third person as if she weren't sitting merely a half-dozen or so yards away-it's arguable I might have developed such a visceral distaste for the entire profession that I would have become anything but a baby doctor.

To this day, some of my mother's friends think I've betrayed her by becoming an ob-gyn. There are two midwives in Vermont who won't speak to me, or to the midwives who use me as their backup physician. But as I've said to all those midwives from my mother's generation with whom I've remained friends, or to those midwives of my generation with whom I've become friends, my choice of profession was neither an indictment of my mother's profession nor a slap at her persecutors. Clearly her cross was a factor in my decision-all my C-sections have been upon inarguably living women, each one properly anesthetized and prepared for the procedure-but as a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist says, motives don't matter: Most of the time we don't even know what our motives are. And while I learned from my mother that how babies come into this world indeed matters, I learned from her detractors the ineluctable fact that most babies come into this world in hospitals. In my opinion, I do a lot of good in delivery rooms and ORs, and while I don't use an herb like blue cohosh, I've never once had a prenatal exam that took less than half an hour. I get to know my mothers well.

Stephen brought in the specialists fast, even before my mother was charged with a crime. In addition to a photographer to chronicle the cuts and bruises my mother received crawling around the ice by her car, he immediately hired an accident reconstructionist to examine the slope and width of the Bedfords' driveway. He wanted to be sure there could be no doubt in a jury's mind that my mother had done everything humanly possible to try and transfer Mrs. Bedford to the hospital the night that she died, but the driveway had been a mess and the roads impassable: My mother did what she did because she hadn't a choice.

And he probably spent entire days on the phone those first weeks, tracking down midwives around the country who'd been tried for one reason or another-practicing medicine without a license, illegal possession of regulated drugs-and interviewing their lawyers. He found forensic pathologists and obstetricians who could serve as our expert witnesses should they be needed, some willing to come from as far away as Texas.

And although Stephen may not have been particularly interested in the specifics of how high blood might spurt, there were some medical issues that mattered to him greatly-including, of course, Charlotte Fugett Bedford's cause of death. Stephen wanted to be sure that we had our explanation for why the woman had died, especially after the autopsy was complete and it was clear that the State was going to contend there had been no cerebral aneurysm, and that the cause of death was therefore Sibyl Danforth.

With the help of his specialists, in those first weeks Stephen began developing lists: long litanies of the complications that can occur in any birth, home or hospital; anecdotes from my mother's professional history that demonstrated her unusually high standards of care; incidents that suggested that the medical community had a vendetta against home birth, and my mother was merely a scapegoat-tragic, but convenient.

The specialist who became most involved with us as a family, however, actually knew as little about home birth in the beginning as Stephen. She was, in fact, more of a generalist, since her specialty was getting information. Patty Dunlevy was a private investigator, the state's first female PI. Stephen Hastings chose her as his investigator first and foremost, he said, because she was without question the best in Vermont. But given the issues surrounding my mother's case, we all understood the fact that she was a woman wouldn't hurt either.

Patty fast became a role model of sorts for Rollie McKenna and me. We met her together, on a Wednesday afternoon less than a week after Charlotte Bedford had died. The two of us were grooming Witch Grass in the section of the McKennas' paddock nearest the road when Patty's white car-a squat but sleek foreign thing caked with mud, a good-sized ding on the door, a spiderweb crack in the windshield-squealed to a stop in the dirt by the fence. The woman driving leaned across the empty passenger seat, pulled off the mirrored sunglasses she'd been wearing, and rolled down the window to ask if either of us knew where someone named Sibyl Danforth lived.

New paranoias die even harder than old habits (especially when the paranoia's grounded in reality), and my immediate fear was that this woman was a reporter. So despite the mistake I had made only two days before when Stephen Hastings appeared at our front door, I responded to the woman's question with an inquiry of my own.

"Does she know you're coming?" I asked warily.

"Sure does. You must be her daughter."

"What makes you think so?"

"You're looking out for her. I'm Patty Dunlevy. I work with Stephen Hastings-your mom's lawyer."

The woman was in her late thirties or early forties, but her hair was still an almost electric strawberry blond. That afternoon she was wearing a golf-course-green headband to keep her mane from her face, and the sort of tailored black leather jacket one was more likely to find on the back of a Park Avenue debutante at a dance party than a biker at a Hell's Angels rally. But we'd learn quickly that Patty was a chameleon, which was one of the reasons she was so good at what she did. I know when she interviewed my mother's clients or other midwives that spring and summer she was likely to be dressed in billowy peasant skirts or broken-in blue jeans; when she visited physicians or hospital administrators, especially the hostile ones, she'd appear in madras skirts and low-heeled pumps, with crisp, well-ironed blouses. Patty clearly liked her mirrored sunglasses and black leather jacket, but she also understood they were a needless occupational encumbrance with many of her sources, and was careful to make sure her first impressions were perfect.

And once I understood that Patty Dunlevy wasn't a reporter, I liked her right away. Rollie and I both did. Her car was both a reflection of her work ethic-style tempered with labor-and the remarkable way the woman herself was one of those walking centers of inexorable gravitation: After I'd informed Patty that she was indeed looking for my mother, I did not simply provide directions to our home, I climbed into the car and served as copilot for the five hundred yards separating the McKennas from the Danforths.

"How's your mom doing?" she asked, as Rollie and Witch Grass grew small in the rearview mirror.

"I guess fine."

"What a nightmare. You don't know how awful I feel for her."

"What do you do with Mr. Hastings? Are you a lawyer, too?" I asked, settling into the bucket seat in her car.

"Nope. I'm an investigator."

"A detective?"

"More or less. I work with lawyers to get the poop they can't."

An image passed behind my eyes of Patty Dunlevy sitting in her squat little car in the parking lot of one of the motels out by the Burlington airport. She was using a camera with a lens the width of a bazooka to photograph illicit lovers through dusty, half-open venetian blinds.

"What sort of poop?" I asked.

Her answer suggested that she'd heard the apprehension in my voice.

"Oh, all sorts. It might be something incredibly mundane like getting a confirmation of a power outage from an electric company. Some phone records. Or it might be something a little more interesting like getting background on a hostile witness. The sort of thing that just might discredit someone a tad. But I'll tell you point-blank what I tell everyone: I don't do adultery and I don't do divorces."

"What are you going to… do for my mother?"

She smiled. "Well, for starters, I'm going to get from her the name of every single person on this planet who will say something nice about her if we ask them to testify. Then we'll begin figuring out exactly what I'm going to do for her."

"You'll have a long list, you know."

"Of people who like her? Terrific. It's always a special treat when Stephen actually has me working for the good guys."

…

I'm not superstitious now, and I wasn't in 1981. In my mind, it is merely ironic-not symbolic-that Charlotte Fugett Bedford went into labor on the thirteenth of March, and that the results of the written autopsy arrived on the first day of April. April Fools' Day. The former a day of bad luck, the latter a day of bad jokes.

April 1 was a Tuesday that year, and in my parents' attempts to give our lives a small semblance of normalcy, they had insisted I try out for the junior varsity track team as we'd discussed throughout the winter. I always thought I was a pretty good athlete, and I was confident my legs were strong from my years of riding Witch Grass. I hadn't yet begun to imagine whether I'd be running long distances or sprinting short ones, but I knew I'd like the way I looked in those shorts.

Tryouts began on Tuesday, and so I didn't get home that afternoon until close to dinner. But there had been enough conversation about the imminent submission of the written autopsy in our house in the weeks since Charlotte Bedford had died that I could tell instantly by my parents' silence and the presence of a bottle of scotch on the kitchen table that its final conclusions had offered only bad news.

As my mother rose from her seat and began to serve dinner-a beef stew that none of us touched, despite the fact that we all understood it would be the last heavy stew of the winter-my father told me what I already knew. The medical examiner had found no signs of a stroke, no indications of a seizure. Immediate cause of death? Hemorrhagic shock due to a cesarean section during home childbirth.

Chapter 12.

Birth is a big miracle foreshadowed by lots of little ones. Conception. Little limbs. Lanugo. A fingerprint, hard bones. The quickening. The turning. The descent.

I will never forget the moment of quickening with Connie. She was thirteen or fourteen weeks old. I was bundled up in this monster sweater that hung down to my knees. Lacey Woods had brought it back from somewhere in Central America, and it had this vaguely Aztec eagle on the back. It was beautiful, and so heavy that it kept me warm even outside on the sort of cold December day on which Connie made herself known.

I was sitting on one of the tremendous rocks in Mom and Dad's backyard, one of the ones that faced the ski resort on Mount Republic. Rand and I had decided by then we were going to get married, but the little one inside me wasn't the reason. She-of course, then it was still he or she, we hadn't a clue whether we'd be blessed with a boy or a girl-was just the signal that we might as well do it sooner rather than later.

The sun was already behind Republic, even though it wasn't quite four o'clock yet, and it was getting really chilly. They'd made some snow on the trails at the ski resort, but otherwise the ground was still brown, and so the mountain looked a little bit like a volcano that made this weird white lava.

I hadn't climbed those rocks since I was in high school, and sitting there made me feel like a very little girl. And then, suddenly, I felt this tiny flutter a bit below my belly button. A tadpole flicking its tail. A ripple, a wave. Instantly that image of the tadpole-an image I'd probably pulled from some high-school biology textbook-changed to that of a newborn baby. I knew my baby at that moment looked nothing at all like a newborn, but that was what I pretended was fluttering inside me. A psychedelic little person doing the breaststroke in a lava lamp. A bubble bouncing euphorically, but in slow motion, around in my tummy. I saw a newborn's pudgy fingers flicking amniotic fluid with a whoosh, I saw little feet smaller than baking potatoes gently splashing my own water against me, and I wrapped my arms around me and hugged my baby through my belly.

Oh my God, was I happy. I remember I just sat on that rock grooving on the little person-my little person-inside me. Of all the little miracles that build to that big one, the birth itself, my favorite must be the moment of quickening. All these emotions and expectations and dreams for your baby just roll over you like so much surf.

And quickening really is the perfect word to describe it, because your heart races, and the pace of the pregnancy just takes off.

Some mothers experience the quickening as early as twelve weeks, others are much further along. Sixteen weeks is common in my experience, but some women don't feel it until they're through a good eighteen weeks. It really doesn't matter, except that those women who have to wait have to worry. It's inevitable, a mother can't help it. You want to feel your friend, you want to know he or she's there.

Of course, there may be one nice thing that comes with a later quickening. After all that anxiety, the high must be amazing when it finally arrives. Absolutely, unbelievably, outrageously amazing.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

APRIL IS NEITHER WHOLLY SPRING nor wholly winter in Vermont. It's common for there to be flurries-maybe even a few inches of heavy, wet snow-one day, and then hot sun and temperatures in the high sixties the next. The crocuses and tulips emerge, endure the schizophrenic weather about as well as everything else (they flower, they sag, they perk up and flower), blooming blue or yellow against brown grass one day, and then against green the next.

Vermonters don't manifest their reactions to the abrupt changes in weather as dramatically as flowers, but we do feel them inside and show them outside. We might not bother to shovel our walks or plow our driveways after an April snow shower-the snow will melt soon enough-but we will sweep it away from the front porch or front steps, and the idea of taking a broom to sopping white blankets when the rest of the world seems well into spring makes even the most resilient among us shake our heads with disgust. And with the exception of the sugar makers hoping for one last frenzied maple sap run, as a group we all sigh when we awake and discover that our roofs were covered once more with snow as we slept: By midmorning those drapes will slide off the slate or sheet metal, rolling like avalanches down the pitch, creating snowdrifts that torment us for days.

When the sun is strong and the air is warm, however, we shout greetings to one another down the lengths of long driveways and from the windows of our cars as we pass; we hold our heads high as we walk, staring up into the sky with our eyes shut and our faces widened by smiles. We breathe in deeply the summery air, but this sort of inhalation doesn't result in a sigh; it's a precursor to a purr, or the moans one might make during a backrub.

We no longer mope, we no longer grouse. We are filled with energy.

Although my family understood on the first of the month that my mother would be charged with a crime, it wasn't until a little later in the month that the State had determined exactly what that crime-crimes, actually-would be. Consequently, throughout the first week and a half in April our emotions rode a roller coaster with more pronounced peaks and dips than even our almost malevolently capricious weather could erect on its own.

Stephen had warned my parents on the very first day they had met that the State might suggest that my mother had willfully killed Charlotte Bedford, and she should therefore be charged with second-degree murder. The difference between second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter was no small distinction: Second-degree murder came with a decade in prison if there were mitigating factors on the defendant's side, and up to a lifetime if there weren't. Involuntary manslaughter, the charge Stephen thought was likely, merely implied that my mother had acted with absolutely wanton or gross negligence, but at least she hadn't consciously decided to kill anybody. Murdering Charlotte Bedford was not her intention in this case, it was just an unhappy accident and therefore came with a mere one to fifteen years behind bars, and a possible three-thousand-dollar fine.

There was never any doubt about the lesser charge, however, the misdemeanor: practicing medicine without a license. That, Stephen said, was inevitable.

Nevertheless, despite Stephen's warning-and his reassurance that a charge of second degree was unlikely-the first time Bill Tanner suggested that the State might try seriously to build the case that my mother's actions were willful, my father grew furious, my mother grew frightened, and they both grew confused. I sat on the stairs of our house one night, listening as they spoke to Stephen on the telephone-my mother from the phone on the first floor, my father from the phone on the second.

"I know what the words intentional and involuntary mean to a normal person," my father was saying. "I want to know what the hell they mean to lawyers… I see… A precedent? Are you telling me this kind of thing has happened before?… Uhhuh… The woman was already dead, for God's sake. Why would Sibyl have thought a C-section would kill her?…"

A moment later my mother added, her voice almost frantic, "How can they say that? I'd already told Asa she'd died!" but I can't imagine Stephen got far into a response to her exclamation, because my father almost immediately cut in again.

"I thought if you killed someone you were supposed to have a motive… But there's no goddamn reason why she would have 'desired to effect the death' of that woman, there's just no reason!… That's stupid, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard… Well, it's still stupid. I hope they do say that, because they wouldn't have a fucking chance of winning. Right? Right?"

When it was clear that the conversation was winding down, I left my perch on the stairs and went into the living room, and acted as if I'd been reading my biology textbook all along. Almost immediately my father came downstairs and joined my mother in the kitchen.

"I'm sorry I lost my temper," he said, and I heard him opening the cabinet with the liquor.

"You couldn't help it," my mother said softly. "Probably happens all the time to him."

"People blowing up?"

"I guess."

"He didn't seem to mind."

"Nope."

The freezer door shut with a pop, and the ice cubes struck the sides of the glass before splashing down in a puddle of scotch at the bottom.

"Let me make sure I've got this right," my father said, and he pulled one of the kitchen chairs away from the table, sliding it along the floor with a brief squeal. "They're going to say you killed Charlotte Bedford on purpose-"

"They might say that. Apparently they haven't decided anything."

"Okay, they might say you killed Charlotte Bedford on purpose."

"I guess."

"To save the baby."

"Yes. They might say I thought Charlotte was going to die, but I had to know full well she was alive when I did the cesarean."

"You had to…"

"I had to. I couldn't possibly do what I do for a living without being able to tell the difference. I couldn't possibly have made such a… a mistake."

"And you did it to save the baby…"

"The C-section? Yup. So they think."

A long silence. Then an echo from my father: "Yup. So they think."

I couldn't see either of my parents from my spot on the couch, but I envisioned my father swirling his drink in his hand, and my mother sitting perfectly still with her arms folded across her chest. I knew those actions and poses well.

"Sib?" my father continued after another quiet moment.

"Yes."

"I want to ask something."

"Of Stephen or me?"

"You. And I'll only ask it this one time, and I'll never ask it again. But I have to know. I have to ask-"

"Don't even think of it, don't even think of asking it. I can't have you doubting me, too."

"You answered it. That's all I wanted to hear."

"Don't doubt me, Rand."

"I don't."

My mother had spent almost uncountable days and nights bringing life into the world. It didn't seem fair to me that her trial revolved around the notion that she could mistake it for death in the end.

Here's how our emotional roller coaster worked: No sooner had my parents begun to pull themselves up from the almost debilitating despair and self-doubt inspired by the possibility of a second-degree murder trial than Stephen reassured them that the charge was unlikely. Instead of working their way slowly to the crest of the ride over days, they were yanked abruptly to the top in an instant-my mother first, in an afternoon visit from Stephen, my father that night when he came home from work.

Almost as if we'd been diagnosed with a terminal disease, the sort of news that would once have appalled us was thrilling. I'm in remission, I might have two whole years to live? That's wonderful! Involuntary manslaughter only? Oh my, that's great!

I was surprised when I came home from track practice one afternoon later that week to find my mother and Stephen sitting on the front porch of our house. It was one of those wondrous April days with a hot sun shining above cold, still-sloshy ground, and as late as five in the afternoon one could still sit comfortably outside on a deck or a stoop that faced west.

My mother and Stephen were each sitting with their backs against one of the white posts that supported the porch roof, their legs bent at the knees into pyramids. They stopped talking and smiled at me when they saw me at the end of our driveway, and I could sense the lawyer had arrived with good news.

Was I surprised that Stephen had come all the way from Burlington to meet with my mother-a drive closer to ninety minutes than an hour-rather than call? I was, briefly. And it was that night at dinner that my father made the first of a great many catty comments about Stephen that I believe he came to regret. But my first reaction when I saw Stephen sitting there that moment was that he would be a good friend for my mother, and he would certainly do his best to protect her. If he had feelings for her that most attorneys would have deemed unprofessional, that could only be to our benefit.

They both stood when I got to the beginning of the walkway, and my mother started forward as if to kiss me when I got to the steps. She stopped suddenly, however, as if she feared I'd be embarrassed if she kissed me in front of Mr. Hastings. She was right, I would have been. But I was probably equally embarrassed by the way she had bobbed her head forward like a wild turkey, and almost would have preferred she'd given me that kiss.

"How'd it go today, honey?" she asked, referring to practice.

"Good. Fine."

"Legs sore?"

"Nope. Not a bit."

"Your mom tells me you made the track team," Stephen said.

"Just the junior varsity," I told him, a meaningful correction in my mind.

"In eighth grade, that's still a mighty accomplishment," he said.

I nodded and stared at my sneakers, my way then of graciously accepting a compliment.

"Mr. Hastings is here to tell us what's going on," my mother explained.

"Us? Is Dad home?" I looked back at the driveway, wondering if somehow I had managed to walk past my father's Jeep without noticing it. I hadn't; there was no Jeep there. Just Stephen's dignified but boxy gray Volvo.

"No, not yet. I only meant us, our family."

"Oh."

"Mr. Hastings says I'm not in as much trouble as we thought the other night." She offered a tiny grin that seemed sincere and brave to me at the same time, but I think now was probably ironic. My parents had tried to explain to me as best they could the distinctions between second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, an intentional killing versus merely reckless and illegal behavior, and while much of what they had said made perfect sense, a lot of it was still completely unfathomable to me those first weeks in April, and I still reduced my mother's plight to one fundamental vision: Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. The exact image came from a painting in our encyclopedia, and it was horrid: a beautiful woman a bit younger than my mother, standing in a midwifelike peasant dress, her face stoic-almost superhumanly heroic-as yellow and red flames turned brown wood black. Joan's skin had not yet begun to blister, but the heat from the flames was causing her to sweat, and some in the crowd around her were standing atop her dead horse to get a better view of her death.

My mother was no saint in my eyes, even then: I was still troubled by the way her pregnant mothers always seemed to come before me. But I believed she had done absolutely nothing wrong in the case of Charlotte Bedford, and certainly didn't deserve to be consumed by the fire that suddenly surrounded her. And so when she said she seemed to be in less trouble-so much less trouble that Stephen had driven all the way out to our house in Reddington-I immediately assumed she must have been granted a complete pardon, and the bonfire was being disassembled. That man named Bill Tanner had come to his senses. Asa Bedford had come to his senses. That Anne Austin-despicable, lying, traitorous Anne Austin-had come to her senses.

"What happened?" I asked, and the expectant joy in my voice was so apparent that instantly both adults began shaking their heads to calm me down.

"It's good news, Connie, don't get us wrong," my mother said quickly, "but neither of us should start spinning cartwheels on the lawn."

I hadn't done a cartwheel in at least five or six years, and I couldn't imagine that my mother had done one in decades, but I kept the thought to myself. Perhaps if Stephen hadn't been present I would have said something flip, but he was there and so I simply nodded and waited for her to continue.

"There are still a lot of people out there who are even more freaked out about Charlotte's death than we are, if that's possible, but at least it looks like they don't think your mom is a"-and she paused as she pulled from within her the strength she needed to verbalize the word-"murderer."

And then quickly she grinned, and added through lips parted in sarcasm, "They just think your old lady's one really lousy midwife."

Stephen bent to wipe some dry dirt from his one-click-above, shiny black loafers, and said, "Sibyl, I don't think that anyone believes that."

"Pardon me. They just think I can't tell if a woman is dead or alive."

"They think that once-one time-you made a mistake."

"A gross mistake. A reckless mistake."

Stephen stared at my mother, and I could see by the expression on his face that he was trying to put the brakes on her emotions, to calm her down for my benefit. He then turned to me, his hands behind his back as he leaned against the post, and said, "Assuming this whole nasty ordeal ever goes to court, it probably won't be a murder trial. That's the news."

I thought for a moment, the words murder and manslaughter and willful a tremendous jumble in my mind. I tried to remember all the distinctions. Finally I gave up and asked, "What kind of trial will it be?"

"Involuntary manslaughter. At least that's what it looks like the charge will be right now."

"Do you understand what that means, sweetie?" my mother asked.

"Sort of."

"Sort of, but not completely?"

"Yup."

"What that means," Stephen continued, "is that the State is going to say your mom was responsible for Mrs. Bedford's death, and she acted illegally when she did the C-section. But it was an accident. She didn't mean to hurt anyone."

"If they think it was an accident, why are they bothering to have a trial?"

"Just because something is an accident doesn't mean it isn't also a crime."

"That's the manslaughter thing, right?"

"The involuntary manslaughter thing. That's right."

Fifteen years. For an accident. I stood there, trying to absorb a number of years longer than I'd been alive.

"When will the trial begin?" I asked.

"Months from now. Hopefully years," Stephen said.

"Years?"

"If it even goes to trial."

"Stephen, I don't want this thing to drag on for years," my mother said.

"Delay is our friend, Sibyl."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "A case like this always starts out with a lot of prosecutorial energy, and it always loses momentum over time. It's a fact of nature. Bill has to focus on prosecuting the real bad guys, not some nice lady midwife and mother like Sibyl Danforth. And all of those doctors who seem so angry right now will move on to other things. Let's assume nobody else dies in a home birth: Eventually they'll lose interest. Eventually the press will lose interest. Besides, the longer you're out on bail without any problems, the more likely you are to walk away with probation even if you're found guilty."

"Bail," my mother murmured, not so much a question as it was perhaps the first dawning comprehension that along with a charge would come an arrest.

"It's one of those strange absolutes no lawyer completely understands. But delay always benefits the defense. It really does. The last thing we want is for this thing to go to trial before Christmas-or even next spring."

My mother took long strands of her dirty blond hair between her thumb and fingers and contemplated the brownish lengths as if she disliked their color. Bringing the tips close to her eyes, she said to me, "We probably won't eat till late, honey, so why don't you go inside and make yourself a snack?"

I've never had any sort of weight problem, but like many teenage girls I snacked on low- and no-cal products. And so it was a diet cola and a bowl of freezer-burned chocolate ice milk that I brought with me to the dining room, the best room from which to eavesdrop upon a conversation on our porch. Just because my mother didn't want me to hear what she and Stephen were saying didn't mean that I didn't want to listen.

The storm windows were still sealed for the winter, but there was one on the far side of the curio cabinet close enough to the front steps that I could sit beneath it and hear clearly the adults' conversation through the two layers of glass.

I sat against the wall with my ice milk in my lap, careful that my head remained below the sill.

"What makes you think this thing might not go to trial?" my mother asked as I settled in.

"We just might not have to."

"Of course we will."

"What makes you say that?"

"I've delivered too many babies over the years, and pissed off too many doctors. They're not going to let me off the hook."

"First of all, Bill Tanner has a spine. He's not proceeding because some ob-gyn has a grudge against you-"

"We're not talking about some ob-gyn, we're talking about lots of them. We're talking the entire medical board."

"I understand that. I know there are some doctors who don't approve of home birth-"

"Or of midwives."

"Or of midwives. But whatever else I think or don't think about Bill Tanner, he's not the type who would proceed unless he honestly believed a crime had been committed. He's not doing all this just because you've pissed off some doctors."

"But that's a factor."

"At best, a small one. They may have alerted him on some level that in their eyes there's a problem, but it's his decision to go forward."

"Then why do you think we might not have to go to trial?"

"Perhaps we can settle things ahead of time."

The conversation went quiet, and I held my spoon in the air. I was afraid they knew I was listening, and I didn't want the sound of the spoon on the bowl to give me away. But then my mother spoke, and I realized she was just digesting the idea of a settlement.

"What does that mean?" she asked. "I pay a fine and I get on with my life?"

"No, it's more complicated than that."

"Tell me."

I heard Stephen laugh, a sort of self-deprecating chuckle. "You want to know too much too soon. You're moving too fast for me."

"I want to understand my options."

"It's too soon. I don't even know your options. It depends on what kind of case the State has. What kind of case we have."

"Give me an example, then."

"An example? An example of what?"

"A settlement."

"Settlement's a civil term. Not a criminal one."

"You used it, Counsel."

"If I did, I'm sorry. But I think I only said settle."

"You lawyers are all alike," my mother said lightly. "You'll argue over the smallest points."

"God, I hope you haven't had to deal with that many lawyers in your life that you can generalize with accuracy."

"Oh, a few. But it's usually just been to defend me those times I've killed people by mistake."

"Seriously, have you ever needed a criminal lawyer before?"

"I told you the day we met that I hadn't."

"I only asked if you had any prior convictions-not if you'd ever used a criminal lawyer."

"Good Lord, of course I haven't! When would I have needed a criminal lawyer?"

"I don't know. That's why I'm asking."

"No, Stephen, this is a new experience in my life, I assure you."

"I'm your first."

"You're my first."

"I'm flattered."

"An old lady like me can flatter you? God, you've been divorced too long."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-four."

"A mere babe in the woods."

"Oh, I don't think so. I'm definitely too old to throw around expressions like 'old lady' and 'old man' the way I once did."

"I think it's the expressions that have aged badly. Not you."

"You're biased."

"Because I like you?"

"Because you weren't exactly a part of the counterculture."

"You don't think I was a revolutionary?"

"No way."

"A hippie?"

"Isn't that word awful? I can't believe we ever used it seriously."

"We didn't, Sibyl. At least I didn't."

"I'll bet you were a real hippie-hater back then. I'll bet we drove you crazy."

"I didn't hate hippies! I didn't even know any hippies. Why would you think I'd hate them?"

"Because you're so unbelievably uptight. Look at your shoes."

"I'm not uptight."

"You think so?"

"I do."

"Okay, let's see. Ever smoked grass?"

"Yes."

"A lot?"

"I didn't like it. So I didn't do it again."

"So you did it once."

"Or twice, maybe."

"In Vietnam or Vermont?"

"Vietnam."

"That doesn't count."

"Why?"

"I've always envisioned that place as so totally horrible you had to smoke dope like air just to survive."

"It was horrible if you were in the jungle. I wasn't."

"So you didn't have to smoke dope?"

"Well, at least not to survive."

"But you didn't want to either."

"It seems to me, Mrs. Danforth," he said with professorial gravity, "that any movement that uses an illegal drug as its principal criterion for membership or inclusion is a movement not worth joining."

"Okay. Here are some easy ones. Ever spent a week in a commune?"

"Thankfully not."

"Slept in a van?"

"Nope."

"Been barefoot?"

"Of course."

"For days at a time?"

"Hours. Maybe."

"Worn beads?"

"Not a prayer."

"That's fine. Let's get a little more serious: Ever tried to connect with the Black Panthers? Maybe help set up a volunteer breakfast program for hungry families in Boston?"

"You did that, I suppose?"

"I did. Ever put together prenatal information pamphlets for poor Vermont women, and then gone house to house and trailer to trailer for days to make sure people got them?"

"Did that too, eh?"

"I did. Or how about just feeling the most incredible, awesome love for people-all people-just because they're human and therefore amazingly magic? Ever felt that?"

"Probably not sober."

"Or just wanting the world to stop caring about things? Possessions? Status? Wanting us all to stop judging each other by what we own?"

"I like what I own, Sibyl," Stephen said, trying to make light of her passion, and then I heard him yell in mock pain.

"Do you always hit your lawyers?"

"That didn't hurt," my mother said, and she was laughing.

"Trust me, it did."

"I did those things, I felt those things," my mother said, ignoring him. "I was with people like Raymond Mungo and Marshall Bloom. I really believed the war was wrong."

"I believe you did."

"I grew up in Vermont-not Westchester County or some town-house in Back Bay. I actually knew boys who went to Vietnam. A lot of them. Most of the boys in my high-school class went there. For me, the war wasn't just some trendy thing to protest against. I was worrying about boys I knew well-sometimes very well-as well as villagers I'd never met."

"Boys like me."

"Yes, boys like you. Being a hippie wasn't just about bouncing around without a bra, or having a lot of sex with boys you barely knew. It's really easy today to look back on those years and make fun of us for our clothes or drugs or silly posters. But at its best, the whole… era was about trying to make the world a little less scary."

A floorboard squeaked as one of the adults outside stood up. A shadow passed across the sill, and Stephen's voice grew closer.

"I didn't mean to make fun of the things you did," he said.

"You didn't make fun of anything. I was just telling you."

I then heard the wood shift under my mother's weight as well, as she stood up beside him. The two were silent for a long moment and I envisioned them watching the sun set, or staring into the shadows shaped like ice cream cones that were cast by the line of blue spruce at the western edge of our lawn.

"You never told me how we might settle," she said finally.

"I didn't, did I?"

"No."

"Okay, let's see," Stephen began, those first words offered at the end of a long sigh. "Here is where the idea of small-town Vermont has always been most real to me. Bill and I know each other, and we know the system. When I used the word settle, I meant negotiate. Or bargain. Depending on what the State has or doesn't have in the way of a case, I can imagine me sitting down with Bill at some point this spring and saying to him, 'Bill, we both know we can settle this thing now, or we can make all our lives unduly hard in six months with a trial.'"

"What would we be negotiating?"

"It might be the charge. And if we agree on that, it might be the sentence."

I flinched at the word sentence, and clearly my mother had, too. "The sentence?" she said, a tiny but unmistakable sliver of panic shooting through her voice. "I haven't done anything wrong!"

"Everything I'm saying here is conjecture, Sibyl. This is all just… just talk. Okay?"

"I don't think I like this kind of talk."

"Well, a sentence may not even be an issue. So let's not talk about it now. Fair enough?"

"No, I want you to go on."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. The idea that we're already sentencing me freaked me out there for a second, but I'm fine now."

"Okay. Here's one way we might settle this thing. We plead guilty to a charge of practicing medicine without a license-a misdemeanor-and we pay a fine. No big deal, at least not in the greater scheme of things. Then on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, we accept a deferred sentence. Let's say two or three years and another small fine, but no conviction at the end of the deferment. How does that sound?" Stephen asked, and I could tell that he thought he had just painted a wonderful scenario for my mother, one that he believed would restore her confidence and mood.

"Tell me what a deferred sentence is," she said simply.

"You plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. Usually, that would mean imprisonment for one to fifteen years. Not in this case. A deferred sentence is a postponement of the sentencing by-in my example, anyway-two or three years. If at the end of that time you've met all of the conditions for the deferment, there's no jail time and no record. Just the fine."

"What's a condition? Something like house arrest?"

"God, no! You'd come and go as you pleased, your life would be completely normal. Maybe you'd do some community service. But mostly you'd just be expected not to break any laws during the deferment or-and I think this is inevitable-work as a midwife."

"And after two or three years?"

"It would be like nothing happened."

"It will never, ever be like that. Not under any circumstances."

"I mean in the eyes of the law."

"So if I give up my practice for a few years, the State will back off? Is that right?"

"That's one… possibility."

"And there'd be no record?"

"On the charge of involuntary manslaughter. In the stew I just cooked up, you've pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license."

"And that's a misdemeanor?"

"Astonishingly, yes."

"Is this… stew likely?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you don't think so, do you?" my mother said. We had both heard the doubt in Stephen's voice.

"Sibyl, I just don't know. For all I know, it's possible. Maybe probation is possible-"

"Probation?"

"Let's suppose the State has an airtight case, a case we just can't win. There's no way. In return for no jail time we plead guilty, and you get a suspended sentence and a couple years' probation. Again, your life goes on more or less as it always has, except there's this probation officer you see every so often, and you give up midwifery."

Slowly, sounding at once oddly drugged and unshakably determined-each syllable in each word a declaration itself-my mother said, "That's not an option, Stephen. I could never give that up. I never will give that up."

The sun was well below the evergreens now, and the room around me was growing dark.

"I doubt it will even come to that," Stephen murmured after a minute.

"You don't believe that. You believe that it will."

"I don't know. And I won't know for months."

"Months…"

"Perhaps even longer. Like I said, delay helps us a lot more than them."

"I don't want this to drag on."

"I understand."

"And I won't stop birthing babies."

I heard the sound of my father's Jeep as he pulled into our driveway and then turned off the engine.

"I think you'll have to, Sibyl. At least for a while."

"Until the trial?"

"Or until we settle with the State."

"And you say that could be months."

"At the very least."

The Jeep's door slammed, and I saw the shadow of my mother's arm as she waved at my father.

"Please, Stephen," she said, her voice not loud enough for my father to hear, "get this over and done with fast. As quickly as possible."

"The longer it-"

"Please, Stephen," she said again. "Fast. For the sake of me and my family: Get this over with fast."

Years later when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer-an adenocarcinoma, the sort a nonsmoker's most likely to get-I saw my father become an exquisite caregiver. I saw a tender person inside him emerge and purchase a Vita-Mix blender, and prepare her broccoli shakes and carrot juice in the middle of each afternoon. My mother told me he did all the laundry and the grocery shopping when she became unable, and I saw how he filled the house with fruit. I know he drove often to the department store in Burlington to buy my mother turbans and hats and scarves. And, toward the end, on occasion I saw him sitting patiently beside her as she did crossword puzzles in bed, keeping her company as a listener at once active and serene. Sometimes that bed was in their bedroom, sometimes it was in the hospital.

He was, I can write without reservation or qualification, an exceptional cancer coach: part nurse, part dietitian, part partner and soul mate. Part Knute Rockne.

But, of course, my mother was not diagnosed with cancer in 1981, she was charged with a felony. She was accused of taking one life when she was supposed to be facilitating another's arrival.

Consequently, my mother didn't need a nurse or a dietitian or a cancer coach, she needed a lawyer. And so I think it was natural that to a large extent that role of caregiver fell more upon Stephen Hastings's shoulders than upon my father's, and that my father was jealous: He wanted to help. He wanted responsibilities. He wanted more things to do.

I watched my parents carefully the night Stephen stopped by with his news, and it was clear that my mother had lost sight of the good tidings he'd brought her behind the bad. Undoubtedly she was relieved that in all likelihood the State would charge her with involuntary manslaughter instead of second-degree murder, but this information had been overshadowed by the idea that she would have to stop birthing babies for some period of time. Perhaps forever.

Looking back, I realize my mother's reaction probably shouldn't have surprised me: A criminal charge was an abstract thing to her, something she couldn't fully comprehend. But midwifery was her calling, it was what she had chosen to do with her life. The very notion that she'd have to close her practice-even temporarily-caused her more anxiety than her lawyer's news about the charge brought relief.

"What am I supposed to do, tell someone like May O'Brien that I can't help her have her baby?" she asked my father that night as she picked at the food on her plate.

"I guess you'll have to refer her to someone else," my father said. "Maybe Tracy Fitzpatrick."

"Tracy lives in Burlington, for God's sake. She's too far away for most of my mothers."

"What about Cheryl?"

"Cheryl Visco doesn't have a moment to breathe; she couldn't possibly handle anybody else. Besides, she lives too far away, too."

"What about-"

"And I have relationships with these women-that's what counts! They trust me, not Cheryl or Tracy. They don't even know Cheryl or Tracy. And what about someone like Peg Prescott? She's due next month. What am I supposed to say to her? 'Well, Peg, it's no biggie. Just go to the hospital delivery room, and some doctor you've never seen before will take good care of you. No biggie, no biggie at all.' She will freak, she will absolutely freak."

Without looking up from his plate, my father asked, "What did Stephen say you should do?"

"He didn't have a solution."

"Really?"

"Really."

"We stumped the stars?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm just surprised. I thought our hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer had the answer to everything."

"Did I miss a step somewhere? Did Stephen say something to you today that pissed you off?"

"Do I sound pissed off?"

"Yes, you do."

I tried to remind my parents of my presence before their fight could escalate, rising from the table on the pretext of getting another glass of skim milk. I asked them if either wanted anything from the refrigerator while I was up.

"Honestly, did Stephen say something that angered you?" my mother continued after she'd told me she was fine and my father had remained silent.

"No."

"Then why this tone?"

"I just think it's… it's odd that he drove all the way out here this afternoon."

"What's odd about it? He's our lawyer."

"Maybe odd is the wrong word," my father said. "It just seems to me that he shouldn't be driving all the way out here to give you information he could just as easily give you on the phone. It seems financially irresponsible. It seems like he's awfully cavalier with money. With our money."

"Maybe lawyers don't charge for driving."

"And maybe there's a fish with wings out back in the pond."

"If I worked in Burlington, I'd want to get away as much as possible," I said as I sat back down. I didn't believe that at all-as a matter of fact, at that age I thought working in Burlington was positively glamorous-but it seemed to me the sort of thing my parents liked to hear, and it might help keep them civil.

"Is that so?" my mother asked me. She smiled slightly, and it was clear she didn't believe a word I'd said.

"Yup. Get away from all that noise. All those cars."

"All those record stores," she added. "That big mall with all those clothing stores on Church Street."

"I'm not saying a city's all bad," I explained. "It's just that if you're there every day, it's probably fun to come out here every once in a while."

"I agree," my mother said, touching my hair fondly for a moment.

My father tried to glare at me, but he appreciated my intentions too much to be angry at me for siding with my mother. He smiled, too, as he raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, fine. Maybe his little visit here this afternoon didn't cost us a penny."

"Obviously it cost something," my mother said.

"Oh, maybe not," my father said, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. He leaned across the table and kissed her once on the forehead. "Maybe April mud is a great lure for a poet like our lawyer. Maybe it's downright seductive. Maybe it was the beauty of our mud alone that drew Stephen here."

While my father and I were watching television together after dinner, we heard my mother on the telephone with one of her midwife friends in the southern part of the state. It seemed that one of my mother's newer patients, a college professor at the end of her first trimester, had been unable to hide her discomfort and nervousness around my mother at a prenatal appointment that morning. The woman's blood pressure had been much higher than the first time my mother had taken it, a month earlier.

After a lengthy discussion-interrogation was the exact word my mother had used on the phone that night-about all of the things that could go wrong during a home birth, the patient had started asking very specific questions about what had occurred up in Law-son. As Stephen had advised her, my mother had refused to talk about that. Apparently my mother and the professor had eventually agreed that she should reconsider her decision to have her baby at home, and think about whether she might be happier after all delivering the child with a doctor in a hospital.

Recalling the conversation with her friend had saddened my mother, and my father and I both heard my mother's voice go brittle. When she hung up the phone, my father went into the kitchen and rocked her in his arms for a long time.

Chapter 13.

I do the supermarket shopping, as if nothing happened. It's surreal. I push my cart up and down the aisles, and I nod at people and they nod at me. I pick out fruit, which is never easy this time of year, and I try and find things I think Connie will eat.

Yesterday Rand and I figured out the monthly bills, and we paid them. We made sure there was enough money in the checking account, as if life were still completely normal and our biggest worry was bouncing a check.

And today I ordered a pair of blueberry bushes from the nursery, and Rand ordered three cords of wood. He said he hoped we could have them by Memorial Day so he could have them stacked by the Fourth of July. That's Rand: only guy I know who has his winter wood stacked before summer's even gotten a serious dent.

Actually, the supermarket shopping is a little different now. It doesn't feel like it's taking longer, but I know I spent more time in the grocery store today than I have in years. It wasn't intentional, it just happened. I pulled into the parking lot around one-thirty, and it was almost three o'clock by the time I got out. An hour and a half. I think it usually takes me about forty-five minutes.

It's not that the lines were so long, or people stopped me to talk. If anything, it seems like people go out of their way these days not to stop me to talk. They nod when they see me, and then stare with this amazing intensity at the label on the canned peas or beans in their hand so they don't have to make any more eye contact with me than necessary and risk a conversation. It's weird.

So I don't know exactly why the shopping took so long today. I just went about my business, but I guess I was moving in incredibly slow motion. Me and my cart, just moseying along the store aisles. But I have a theory. I once read somewhere that work takes up as much time as you can give it. If you give a job thirty minutes, for example, you'll do it in thirty minutes. But if you can give it an hour, it'll take an hour. That makes sense. And I think that's what happened today at the grocery store. Normally I would have done the shopping in less than an hour because I'd have to be home for prenatals. I'd have two or three mothers scheduled between, say, two-thirty and five, and I'd have to be back to check weight and pee, and to listen to fetal heartbeats. I'd have to be back to measure bellies and look for edema.

Nope, not today, not anymore. At least not while I'm-and I love this expression-"out on conditions." What a concept. With a completely straight face, like he was explaining to me a tax code or something, the judge set five conditions for my "release." First, he said, I had to agree to appear in court and I had to keep in touch with my lawyer. Those two made sense.

But then, like I'm this hardened criminal and I go around holding up convenience stores on a weekly basis, he said I couldn't commit another crime (like I'd committed one in the first place!) and I couldn't do any illegal drugs (which I don't think was a reference to the fact that I'll smoke a joint when offered one if I'm not on call, but was merely one more way of getting in a dig).

The only condition that really bothers me-no, it doesn't bother me, it pisses me off and scares the hell out of me at the same time-is the midwifery one. I'm not allowed to practice my craft until this trial is over. That's the one that hurts. I'm not allowed to birth any babies, I'm not allowed to tend to any mothers.

So today instead of learning if May O'Brien had felt her little one kick or Peg Prescott's cervix had begun to thin, I did the grocery shopping. I bought beets. I looked at bottles of salad dressing. I picked out sodas with sugar for Rand, and sodas without sugar for Connie.

And I guess I did it all at the pace of a dead person.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

MY MOTHER WAS CHARGED with involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license on Wednesday, April 9, a little over a week after the medical examiner had filed the final autopsy report. We knew on Tuesday night she'd be arrested the next day, and I spent all of French class and most of algebra on Wednesday morning envisioning what was occurring at that moment at my home-as well as in a police cruiser, and at the courthouse to the north in Newport.

Stephen had come to our house again on Tuesday, arriving this time at the end of the day and staying through dinner. My father seemed less concerned with the idea that the lawyer's meter was running than he had been the week before, given Stephen's reason for coming to Reddington and the gravity of his news. Moreover, that night he was able to walk us all step-by-step through the process my mother would endure the next day, and make it seem like a series of tedious but commonplace formalities, rather than a series of increasing indignities that could lead eventually to jail.

Nevertheless, the idea that my mother was being arrested fueled the darkest parts of my adolescent imagination, at the same time that it absolutely terrified the part of me that was still a little girl. One moment I saw my mother subjected to the sort of violent police brutality I had glimpsed on the news, and the next I saw myself as a motherless child, a lonely latchkey kid stretched tall in a teenager's body.

As the daughter of a midwife, of course, I had spent long hours and afternoons alone, so the idea of an absentee mother shouldn't have terrified me. But that morning in school it did, especially since my mother had adamantly refused to allow either Stephen or my father to drive her to Newport so she could discreetly turn herself in. Despite Stephen's assurances that turning herself in in no way implied guilt or culpability, she insisted that the State would have to come to Reddington to get her.

"If they want to arrest me, they'll have to come here," she had said Tuesday night, without looking up from the plate of food in which she had no interest.

Consequently, to prevent the worst visions from completely clouding my mind Wednesday morning, over and over I ran through the scenario Stephen had presented, trying to focus on the sheer banality of what my mother was experiencing at that moment.

A Vermont state police cruiser from the barracks in Derby was driving to our home in Reddington, twisting along Route 14 through Coventry, Irasburg, and Albany. The rack of lights on the roof was flashing, but the siren was silent. It was passing the cars that were sailing along at the fifty-mile-per-hour speed limit, and flying past the pickups and milk tankers lurching along at thirty-five. It slowed as it passed the general store and the church in the center of Reddington, and then turned into our long dirt driveway. It coasted to a stop behind my mother's station wagon and beside my father's small Jeep. Two green-uniformed officers climbed from their cruiser and walked up the path to our front door, perhaps the very same two fellows who had appeared at our home the month before: Leland Rhodes and Richard Tilley. Politely they explained to my mother exactly why she was being arrested, citing specific dates and formal charges.

For brief moments I would see my French teacher and the blackboard behind him, but he would quickly disappear as my mind drifted back to the events occurring at my house. One of the two officers was placing my mother in handcuffs, and the other was leading her into the backseat of the cruiser. My father and Stephen Hastings were not allowed to sit with her on the drive north to Newport and had to follow the police car in their own vehicles.

They arrived at the police station during my algebra class. As the rows of X's and Y's on the paper before me were transmogrified from variables and vectors into abstract line drawings, my mother's fingers were inked, her prints recorded, and her face photographed from the front and the side. With the tips of her fingers still blue, she was then brought to the courthouse to stand before a judge. Stephen was allowed to remain beside her, but my father had to sit in one of the rows of benches that formed two square blocks behind her.

I imagined the judge behind a desk that was not merely huge but elevated above the rest of the furniture in the courtroom with comic-book absurdity. I saw him staring down at this lawyer in a Burlington-type big-city business suit and this woman in a dress with blue irises and pearls and lipstick. At Stephen's suggestion, my mother had endeavored to look as suburban and unthreatening as possible, and so she was wearing the pearl necklace and lipstick that usually appeared only on special occasions like weddings and New Year's Eve dinner parties.

Stephen had taken great pains at dinner the night before to make it clear to us that my mother would not go to jail the next day for one single moment, so Wednesday morning I was at least saved from visions of steel bars and cell blocks. But I did hear the judge's voice as often as I heard my math teacher's, and that voice was stern: the sort of voice that can still be heard sometimes from the tall pulpits, reminding New Englanders that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God. Sadly, I did not see the judge as a kind of impartial referee and arbitrator, someone who, it was conceivable, might actually become an ally of Sibyl Danforth's. Instead I conjured a judge who cared solely about conviction and punishment, and so when he spoke it was simply to agree with that unreasonably evil Bill Tanner, or to harangue my mother for taking the life of a patient.

The only snippet of conversation I heard in my mind that I knew reflected the reality of what was occurring in Newport was the response to the question from the bench "How do you plead?" Stephen was to speak for my mother at the arraignment, and so it was he who would answer, "Not guilty." My mother would have absolutely no lines that day in the drama of which she was the reluctant star.

At that point, I assumed, my parents and Stephen would leave the courthouse, and my father would drive my mother home.

The reality, I would learn later, had been in a small way somewhat better than my fantasies, but in one important way far worse. The small way? Judge Howard Dorset was no Jonathan Edwards-like preacher, no Calvinist voice from on high who took pains to inform my mother of the yawning, flaming pit before her. Months later when the trial was in progress, I would in fact discover that I rather liked the sound of Dorset's voice, especially the way as a native of northern Vermont he would occasionally stretch words like stairs and pairs into two syllables, or business into three.

Nevertheless, my mother had to endure one astonishing moment for which Stephen had not prepared her: the conditions of release. Stephen had made it clear that my mother would have to give up midwifery until the trial was over or the case was settled, but otherwise he had led her to believe the discussion of bail wouldn't be contentious.

In actuality, it was.

Bill Tanner argued that "a midwife by her very nature demonstrates a reckless disregard for authority, and for the established medical norms of our society. A midwife is by nature an outlaw, someone who cavalierly puts women-and babies-at risk on a daily basis for no other reason than a mindless and backward distaste for the protocols of modern medicine." My mother was a good example: an irresponsible ex-hippie in a little hill town, tooling around northern Vermont in a beat-up station wagon. A woman with no formal medical training, she nevertheless ran around with syringes and surgical silk, with drugs like Ergotrate and Pitocin, while feigning the sort of expertise it took doctors years to acquire.

"Sibyl Danforth has a long history of challenging the State, first as a war protester and now as a midwife," Tanner said. "Given that history, and given the fact that she is now facing fifteen years in prison if convicted, the State believes there is a real and significant danger of flight."

"Your Honor, we all know there's no risk of flight. None at all. My client has lived in the same house for almost a decade, and in the same town almost her entire life," Stephen said.

"Moreover, Mrs. Danforth faces the loss of her practice-such as it is," Tanner interjected.

"And let's not forget she's a mother. She has a daughter in school here in Vermont whom she loves very much. And she has a husband with an established architectural practice. This is where her life is, this is where her roots have grown deep and taken hold. Mrs. Danforth isn't going anywhere."

"She has no job, Your Honor, her career's in shambles. Her reputation has been irrevocably tarnished. There are just so many reasons for her to leave the Northeast Kingdom that we know there's a very great risk of flight. And so we'd like to see bail reflect that. The State would like to see bail set at thirty-five thousand dollars."

"That's absurd," Stephen said. "Just ridiculous."

"Not at all. Your Honor, thirty-five thousand dollars is roughly half the appraised value of the Danforths' home. We believe it's a sum sufficient to ensure that… that nothing happens to all those deep roots."

Judge Dorset, my father told me, gave Bill Tanner what my family called the hairy eyeball: a chastising look in which someone rolls his eyes up so far into his head that the eyes and the brows become almost one.

"A tragedy has brought us all here," the judge said, "and we are probably about to embark upon a long road together. I, for one, can do without such hyperbole as 'outlaw' this early into the process, especially since I expect I will witness even more grandiloquent and dramatic license later on. My sense is defense counsel is correct when he tells me Mrs. Danforth has no plans on leaving, and I see no reason to impose a monetary condition for release."

Then in a voice that suggested he did this all the time-that most of the conditions were standard and he could recite the list by rote-Dorset outlined the terms of my mother's freedom.

It was the summer of motions. My mother had been arrested and charged in the first third of April, but the wheels of justice roll slowly indeed-a snowplow going uphill in a snowstorm-and it wasn't until early July that all of Stephen's and Patty Dunlevy's activity seemed to have any direction.

In July and August, however, the State's moves and Stephen's countermoves gathered momentum, and suddenly that snowplow was barreling downhill on completely clear, dry roads. Just after the Fourth of July weekend, Stephen filed a motion to have the case dismissed, arguing that even when all of the evidence was viewed in the best possible light for the State, there was still absolutely no case. He said we would lose on this motion, which we did, but it would give him an opportunity to hear Bill Tanner's arguments and listen to some of his experts.

Two weeks after that Stephen filed a motion to have my mother's statement from the night the state troopers came to our door suppressed-that conversation the State referred to with inappropriate glee as her confession. Stephen said the odds were we would lose this one, too, but he thought there was at least a small chance we could keep her first formal recollections of Charlotte Fugett Bedford's death from becoming evidence: The troopers, he insisted, had completely dominated the atmosphere in the house, yet had failed to make it clear to my mother that she should have an attorney present before she opened her mouth.

Had my mother raised the question of a lawyer that night in March instead of my father, we might have won; had my father brought the issue up before my mother was well into her statement, we might have won. Neither happened, and my mother's remarks became a part of the State's case.

Then Stephen filed a motion to obtain Charlotte Bedford's medical records going back to her childhood in Mobile, Alabama, and her years with Asa in Blood Brook and Tuscaloosa. This motion he won.

And he argued that we should be allowed access to the woman's correspondence that winter with her mother and her sister, as well as the audiotapes Asa made of the Sunday services at his church for the parishioners who were unable to attend due to weather or illness. After speaking to members of Asa's church, Patty had concluded that Charlotte was sicker than she had let on with my mother; Stephen wasn't sure whether this information would be relevant or, if it was, how we would use it when the time came, but it was information that mattered to him, and he wanted evidence. In those letters or in those services-as Asa or another parishioner asked for prayers for the sick or needy-might be a suggestion of the sort of frailty Charlotte hid from my mother.

Stephen won this motion as well, and Patty spent a weekend in August listening to tapes of Asa Bedford-fiery fundamentalist-and of his congregation.

And then there were the plea negotiations, although the two sides were always so far apart it never really looked as if a compromise or bargain was possible. At one point Stephen had my mother willing to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter if the State would offer a deferred sentence of five years. The idea of my mother giving up midwifery for five years astonished me, but it seemed reasonable to my father and Stephen, and they convinced her to accept it. Pressured by the medical board and emboldened by angry ob-gyns, however, the State would not offer a deferred sentence.

But, Bill suggested to Stephen, the State might listen to a mere year in jail and then a suspended sentence with probation-perhaps six more years-if my mother was willing to pay additional fines, perform community service, and never practice midwifery again.

As soon as the State reiterated its demand that my mother give up midwifery, of course, the negotiations inevitably broke down. It wasn't the specter of prison that made it impossible to settle, it was my mother's unwillingness to relinquish her calling.

"Don't you get it, Stephen, a woman's dead," our attorney told us Bill would remind him-as if he'd forgotten why they were meeting or speaking on the telephone.

"I haven't lost sight of that, Bill," Stephen said he would usually respond, "and my client is as saddened by that fact as anyone. But my client didn't kill her."

Sometimes Bill would hint to Stephen that the rage his client had heard the day she was arraigned was absolutely nothing compared to what she'd have to endure throughout a trial. And Stephen did all that he could to make sure my mother understood this.

"Doctors are a funny bunch. They just don't approve of people without medical degrees delivering babies," Stephen said a number of times that summer, always as a warm-up to his warning that the State would say astonishingly mean things about midwifery and my mother. By Labor Day his expression "Doctors are a funny bunch" had become a running joke in our household, a bit of gallows humor as the trial loomed near.

For all of us, of course, that humor veiled both fear and anger. In July I began to experience the first shooting pains up and down the left side of my back that dog me still, pains that made it excruciating to ride Witch Grass some days or swim in the river with Tom Corts on others. But given the fact that Sibyl Danforth was "that midwife who did the C-section," I didn't believe I could trust a doctor that summer, and I did not want to subject my mother to what I imagined would be the tension of having to take me to see one.

I've always liked stories that end with parents folding their children into their arms, or tucking them into sleep at the end of a day. They are many and they are varied.

I longed to be tucked in the summer I turned fourteen, an odd desire only in that I hadn't had any longings of that sort in at least half a decade before then, but a yearning wholly explicable when I contemplated the loss of my mother and the dissolution of my family.

Afternoons when I was alone in the house, I'd blast my stereo as loud as the speakers and my ears could bear. I'd cocoon inside the music, the noise and vibrations sheltering me from the worst of my fears. Rock music has never been a particularly subtle form of expression, but it's unquestionably noisy and prone to anger. That summer, in most ways, I was much closer to woman than girl; being lost below waves of anger and noise was about as close to being tucked in as I could hope to get.

I spent lots of time with Tom, much more so than during the school year. We would spend evenings together when he returned from the ski resort where he was working once again, and whole afternoons on his days off. We swam together in the river, often with Sadie Demerest and Rollie McKenna and the boys who passed through their lives that summer. A road followed the river almost exactly, builders and pavers choosing to align the asphalt path with the aqua, but the water was hidden from the road by steep banks that slid twenty feet down, and by thick walls of maple and pine and ash. On a hot day, there might be thirty of us from the high school sunning ourselves on the rocks smack in the middle of the water, or bobbing in the deep pools between the boulders. On a cool or cloudy afternoon, there might be as few as four or five of us, depending upon whether Rollie or Sadie had brought a boy with her that day.

At any given moment that summer, I was as likely to be found experimenting with eyeliner with Rollie, as with marijuana with a half-dozen girlfriends at one of the places at the edge of the forest or far corners of the fallow meadows that had become our designated places to hang out.

Tom turned sixteen early in August and started to drive, which I think terrified my parents as much as anything that summer, because that meant we could actually drive ourselves to movies or one of the diners near the ski resort. Tom didn't have a car of his own, but an advantage of coming from a family that owned an automotive garage and graveyard was that he always had one at his disposal. Some were in better shape than others, but they all ran.

If my parents had not reached a point where they pined to see Tom someday as a son-in-law, they had grown from merely tolerating him to sincerely liking him. Once we had begun going steady during the school year, well before Charlotte Bedford had died, he began coming over to our house with some frequency. Usually my mother was busy with one of her patients in the part of the house that served as her office or she was off somewhere delivering a baby, and we always had the privacy to neck and listen to records. I think it speaks well of the young Tom Corts that he continued to come around even after Charlotte Bedford died. In the spring and summer between my mother's arraignment and trial, he dropped by especially often, both because he understood I needed him and because he wanted to show his alliance with my family. I know my parents appreciated that. My mother actually baked a cake for him the night before he turned sixteen.

And showing his alliance with my family demonstrated no small amount of maturity and spine. My mother's calling had always had the capability of eliciting strange and strong reactions in people, ranging from those parents who wouldn't allow their little girls to play at my house when I was very young because they feared my mother would whisk us all off to a birth, to my teenage friends who assumed-optimistically but mistakenly-that among the alternative or New Age herbs my mother used on a regular basis were marijuana and hashish. After one of my mother's mothers had died, all of the small communities in which I lived-my village, my school, my circle of friends-were split. Some folks saw Charlotte Bedford's death as an indictment of midwifery generally, and of my mother's irresponsibility specifically: This was bound to happen, you know, their gazes said when they ran into me at the front counter of the general store, or in the locker room as I got dressed after track. Other people would go out of their way to show their support for my family as we endured what they viewed as a lynching: You're all in our thoughts and prayers, they would tell me, sometimes giving me bear hugs at the pizza parlor in St. Johnsbury or as I helped my father empty our trash at the town dump.

The second group, I'm sorry to say, was considerably smaller than the first. I spent most of that calendar year under the critical gaze of assistant gym teachers, town clerks, checkout ladies at the supermarket, the fellows who pumped gas, and-all too often-the parents of the girls I thought were my friends, or the parents of the children for whom I baby-sat. I could never prove this, but I believe in my heart that Mrs. Poultney abruptly stopped calling me to take care of Jessica the last week of March because of the role she believed my mother had played in another woman's death.

Tom Corts, however, never wavered, and so some afternoons I daydreamed of him tucking me in at the end of the day, or sitting in the rocker beside my bed through the night as I slept. In hindsight those daydreams have led me to wonder on occasion if they were part of some peculiar attempt to forestall an adult sexual relationship with Tom, but most of the time I know that isn't the case. That summer we went well beyond the enthusiastic groping through sweatshirts and cardigans that had marked our spring, but Tom wasn't pressuring me to sleep with him and I was feeling no particular urgency either.

I think instead I daydreamed of Tom watching over me in a vaguely fatherly capacity because I could no longer be protected that way by my own father. Just as Tom had turned sixteen that summer, I had turned fourteen, and that meant I could no longer be held and embraced and cuddled by my dad in the way I once was. I would have used the word weird at fourteen to describe any such desire on my part or show of affection on his, well aware that the word was imprecise. But precision with the language of need is impossible at fourteen, and I feared anything I might say would be misconstrued-or, worse, would reflect a deviance inside me that was at once dangerous and unhealthy.

The fact is, despite the anger that coursed through my father at those moments when he viewed himself as abandoned by his spouse, the midwife, it was indeed my father who taught me how to tease a troll's neon-pink hair. It was my father who was there the Saturday I slid headfirst down a metal slide onto a tent stake and needed seventeen stitches along my cheek. It was upon my father's lap that I watched hours and hours of Sesame Street on a TV with fuzzy reception. My father was of a generation that had yet to understand the profound importance of the frequent squeeze, but he still knelt to hold me relatively often, and I can remember being lifted as a tiny girl into his arms and being hugged. To this day I do not mind at all being held by a man with some stubble on his cheeks.

For Tom's sixteenth birthday, I used up weeks of baby-sitting money to buy tickets to a rock concert in Burlington. Soon after his birthday we went, just the two of us for a change, and we had hours together alone going and returning in a giant Catalina of a car. I turned up the volume on the eight-track tape player that dangled underneath the glove compartment, and curled my legs up against my chest. The Catalina had a couch the size of the general store's freezer case, but Tom was near and the music was loud, and the trip to and from Burlington inside that car offered the sort of vaguely womblike escape I was craving.

Since we happened to be going to Burlington, my mother asked us to drop off an envelope with Stephen Hastings and pick up a banker's box of her files. Stephen had had the files for months, and had photocopied the materials he needed.

My mother probably expected me to peek inside the envelope, and I didn't let her down. She was returning to Stephen Xeroxes of Charlotte Bedford's medical files, part of the history Stephen had petitioned the court that summer to see. My mother had scribbled her thoughts in blue pen on some of the documents, and now that I'm a physician and the trial has passed, the things she circled make sense. In the car that afternoon, however, the notion that Charlotte had been treated five years earlier for iron-deficiency anemia meant little, as did a Mobile, Alabama, doctor's prescription in 1973 for a drug I could not even begin to pronounce at the time: hydrochlorothiazide, an inexpensive diuretic used to control hypertension.

Apparently my mother had treated Charlotte for anemia while the woman was in her care, but not for high blood pressure; apparently Charlotte's blood pressure had not been high enough to alarm her. But, then, it also didn't appear that Charlotte had thought to share with my mother the fact that she'd been treated for the disorder in the past.

Stephen's law firm comprised two Victorian homes that shared a driveway at the edge of the campus of the University of Vermont. The buildings were in the hill section of Burlington, the mannered, elegant, and tree-lined streets at the top of the hill that towered over the commercial section of the city. In the nineteenth century, when Burlington was a thriving Lake Champlain lumber and potash port, the wealthier merchants and more successful businessmen had built homes for their families on the hill above the city proper.

I hadn't expected to see Stephen when we arrived. I had assumed I would simply drop off the envelope with a receptionist, pick up the banker's box, and leave. But after I explained to the woman at the front desk who I was, she said Stephen would be disappointed if he didn't get a chance to come out and say hello. She said he was in the middle of a meeting with an investigator, but the meeting had been going on all afternoon. When she went upstairs to find him, I went back out to the car to get Tom so he wouldn't have to sit there alone, baking in the sun while wondering where I was.

Stephen had been meeting with Patty Dunlevy, and the two of them came out to greet me, Stephen in a crisp navy-blue business suit, Patty in sandals and the sort of flouncy peasant dress I usually associated with my mother's midwife friends. It seemed odd for the woman I'd first met in mirrored sunglasses and a black bomber jacket to be wearing a styleless muumuu, and I must have stared. She took my elbow conspiratorially with one arm and, motioning toward her dress with the other, said, "Isn't this thing hideous? I bought it at a secondhand shop in the North End. But I spent the morning with some more of your mom's moms, and I figured I should look the part."

"The part?" I asked.

"You know, a home-birthy sort. Peace, love, tie-dye. Alternative medicine. Let's barter since I'm broke. I can't pay you, but my husband's a carpenter who will build you the most amazing bookshelves you've ever seen if you deliver my baby."

She talked fast, and her voice was filled with pleasure.

"You should have been an actress," Tom said.

"Brother, I am."

Stephen gave us a tour of the building we were in, and there were moments when I expected to find velvet ropes cordoning off some of the shining hundred-year-old tables and wooden break-fronts that served now to store files: I expected to be told, "George Washington sat here," or "Ethan Allen ate there." The couches were elegant but plush: I could have slept comfortably on any one of them. The chairs behind all of the desks were leather; all of the pens on the blotters were silver or gold. Computers were uncommon then, but they nevertheless seemed to be everywhere.

Finally we passed the conference area in which Patty and Stephen had been working. I don't believe he had intended to show us in, but I didn't realize that at the time; the two adults were a step behind us, and in my awkward fourteen-year-old sort of way I blundered into the dark paneled room, with Tom right beside me. Lit by a chandelier with grapefruit-sized globes, the area looked as if it had once been two separate bedrooms. There was a long, wide table in the center of the room, buried leagues below piles of yellow legal pads, file boxes, and newspaper clippings. The walls were covered with white poster paper on which Stephen and Patty had scribbled notes and names in Magic Marker. There must have been two or three dozen pieces of that paper hung on the walls with thick strips of masking tape.

Before Stephen or Patty could even begin to explain to us what they were doing or escort Tom and me back into the hallway, words and phrases and the names of people I knew popped out at me from the walls. I recognized that one sheet was filled with the names of midwives, and another with families whose children my mother had delivered. There was a sheet filled with names of doctors, and then one beside it with only one: my mother's backup physician, Brian "B.P." Hewitt. There was a page titled "Pathologists," and another with the strange and ominous-sounding word "vagal." And while it crossed my mind that the word might be some sort of abbreviation or modest abridgment for vaginal, something about the words underneath it-bradycardic, blackout, CPR, C-section-led me to conclude it wasn't.

"Connie, do keep all of this to yourself, won't you?" Stephen said suddenly, when he realized I was staring and reading.

"Oh, sure."

And as quickly and as casually as Tom and I had mistakenly wandered into the room, he ushered us out, telling us, "We kept the kitchen downstairs. It's nice to work in a place with a kitchen. Know what I mean?"

After my mother had completed the cesarean, she took the time to sew up Charlotte Bedford's body. This has always impressed me. Yet in my mother's notebooks, especially in those long entries she wrote in the weeks after Charlotte's death when she was trying to understand what had happened, there is only one sentence about that particular moment in the tragedy:

"Her body was too big to wrap in a blanket, so I sewed it up the best I could."

Read in a vacuum, independent of the rest of the notebooks, the sentence seems somewhat peculiar: neither illogical nor insane, but slightly odd. As if my mother has made some connection understood only by her. As if a link or a clause between blankets and sutures is missing.

The link appears in a notebook entry written almost three years earlier, an entry about different parents and a different birth:

Their baby was born dead, and the poor, poor thing was the most deformed creature I've ever seen. His intestines were on the outside. But of course his parents wanted to see him. And so I swaddled him in this little baby blanket one of his aunts had made, wrapping the little guy from his feet up to his nose because-if everything else wasn't bad enough-he was also missing the lower half of his jaw. I didn't cry when I was delivering him, because I'd known for a few hours he would be born dead, but I did when I had him wrapped and was showing him to his mom and dad. He looked so peaceful and so happy. Suddenly I was weeping.

At some point after my mother had delivered Veil, she returned to Charlotte's body. It wasn't right away, because first she had to tend to the baby, initially a pale, limp thing that seemed likely to die. She had to, as some midwives say, "work that baby hard." Vigorously rubbing the newborn's back, suctioning mucus, hitting the bottoms of his feet. Suctioning more mucus. Talking to him, asking his father to talk to him.

I imagine my mother telling Asa, "Say something. He needs to hear your voice! Talk to him!" Neither Asa nor Anne ever mentioned such an exchange during the depositions or the trial, however, and my mother never told me of one.

Nevertheless, it is clear that in those first minutes after Veil arrived, my mother was focused solely on getting the child to breathe. Obviously she succeeded.

And when it was clear that the child would live, she handed Veil to his father and started ministering to him. She held Asa, first standing and then sitting. The two adults-with the boy in his father's arms-slid down the wall beside the window until they were on the floor, the small of their backs against the baseboard trim. My mother's arms never lost their hold on the pastor.

Anne said she heard my mother tell Asa over and over that the baby was beautiful, and might have said a couple of times, "It's all right. Shhhh. It's all right."

Asa was crying, his shoulders rising and falling as he gasped for air in the midst of his sobs.

And at some point on the bed, Charlotte's body stopped bleeding. When the autopsy was conducted, the medical examiner would find just about seven hundred and fifty milliliters of blood in the peritoneal cavity. Imagine more than two pints of milk. And then there were the unmeasurable waves of blood that had rolled from the incision-and overflowed from inside the abdomen-onto the bed, soaking the sheets and mattress and the pillow my mother had used like a sponge, until the white bedding looked burgundy.

When my mother finally stood and returned to that bed and the body upon it, no one looked at his or her watch or noticed the time on the clock on the nightstand. But given Asa and Anne and my mother's agreement that it had been ten minutes after six when something happened-when Charlotte's chin shot up as she pushed, and Asa watched his wife's eyes roll up into her head-everyone agreed it was probably between twenty to seven and quarter to seven when my mother stood for a long moment with her hands rubbing the back of her neck, and stared down at Charlotte's brutalized body.

If I have interpreted the remark in my mother's notebook correctly, the idea passed through her mind to simply wrap the body in a blanket. Perhaps she would have folded the skin back over the wound first. Perhaps not. But she wanted to cover the body; she didn't want it left exposed and cold and so very open.

But in my mother's mind the body was too big to be swaddled, and so she repaired it. There were still towels folded on a chair in a corner of the room, and my mother took one and patted the area around the incision dry. Sterility no longer mattered. She then put the towel on a corner of the mattress at the foot of the bed and went to her birthing bag for her catgut. Her tweezers. Her curved needle and needle holders.

And she began to work. Sealing the wound took three packages of dissolvable sutures.

When the medical examiner testified, he noted that my mother had not concerned herself with repairing the damage to the uterus; she had not stitched the spot where she had torn open the womb. He didn't present this information as an indication that my mother's work was shoddy, or to convey the idea that she was disrespectful of the dead. On the contrary, he said my mother's sutures were "professional and tight. Her work was perfectly capable."

His point-the State's point-was simply that my mother was not attempting to save Charlotte's life when she sewed the body back together; she understood that Charlotte was dead. By that point, my mother was simply concerned with the cosmetics.

When my mother was giving her own testimony, Stephen asked her why she had bothered to sew up a body she knew was dead.

"I couldn't leave her like that," my mother said. "It wouldn't have been fair to her, and it wouldn't have been fair to her family."

"Her family?" Stephen asked, expecting her to clarify that she had meant Charlotte's husband, or, perhaps, Charlotte's husband and her family in the South.

"Asa and Veil," my mother said, beginning one of the many exchanges between the two in which Stephen thought he knew exactly what my mother was going to say, while my mother assumed that whatever she was going to say was completely harmless. Sometimes she was right, sometimes she wasn't.

"But mostly Veil. How we come into this world means more than any of us understand," my mother continued. "So I wanted to be sure that Veil saw his mother: I wanted to be sure he had a picture with him for life of how incredibly sweet and pretty and peaceful-just amazingly peaceful-her face was. Even then. Even after all she'd been through. Even at the very, very end."