Midwives

Chapter 14.

Stephen and Rand want me "pumped up." "Fired up." "Psyched." They want me ready for a fight.

I think they're talking like that because it's football season, and we hear those expressions all the time. But it sounds very strange coming from Rand, because he's never really been into football. Like me, he's always seen it as this totally bizarre form of organized violence.

But he's a man, and so I think that's the only language he has to inspire me; those are the only words that he knows.

Of course, the sport is everywhere suddenly. At least it seems that way in this part of the county. The football team at Connie's high school has won its first three games this fall, which wouldn't be a big deal in some areas, but it is around here. Someone told me this is a team that never wins, and suddenly it's won three games in a row, and it's won them in a big way. I gather the victories were very one-sided.

Stephen's a little better about the "Get psyched!" stuff, probably because he sees people like me who are scared all the time. It's part of what the guy does for a living. He has to keep me from completely falling apart, and so he seems to know just how far to push me with questions when we're together, and exactly when to back off and give me some space.

He's also a bit of a mimic. That's not the right word at all, because it makes him sound like a parakeet or a monkey. Or some sort of entertainer. All I mean is that it's clear he listens to me very carefully, and not just what I say: He listens to how I say something, the exact words I use. And then, a few minutes later, I'll hear a word or expression come back to me.

I was at his office this morning, and I was explaining to him what goes on in my opinion in the first stage of labor. I said to him how each surge has the potential to change a mother, and eventually one will. I told him how a woman at that stage might go from being this totally serene person in touch with everything around her, to this frenzied animal unaware of anything but her own physical reality. Her surges. The way her body is changing. And that's part of the deal, the giving up of everything-and I mean everything-but the demands of labor. A woman's body knows what it's doing, I said, and she just has to let it do its own thing.

Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later we're talking about this ob-gyn who actually believes in home birth-of course his practice is nowhere near Reddington, that would be way too much to ask-and what he's going to say on the stand. And Stephen says to me, "He's this totally serene guy. You'll like him." And then, a couple minutes later when we're talking about the time he's devoted to researching my case, he says, "I've done this often enough that I know instinctively how deep to dig into something, and instinctively when to let something go. It's just a part of doing my thing."

Does Stephen do this on purpose? Damned if I know. But I like it, it makes me feel good. And it's a whole lot better than the football stuff, which-like Rand-he sometimes resorts to, especially now that the trial's about to begin and he's afraid I'm not "fired up" enough.

I want to tell him-I want to tell him and Rand both-that it's hard to get "fired up" when most of the time I'm just too busy being scared to death. But I think all they'd do then is worry about me even more than they already do, and try and "pump me up." Get me ready to fight or hit back or whatever it is football people do.

Besides, I think if I told them how frightened I am, the floodgates would open. Suddenly I'd be telling them that I'm scared I'm going to jail. I'm scared I'm going to have to give up my practice. And-and this fear wasn't so bad in the spring, it's only in the last month or so that it's really crept up on me-sometimes I'm scared I might have made a mistake in March. It's possible. What if Charlotte Bedford really was still alive?

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

NEWPORT SITS AT the southern tip of Lake Memphremagog, a thin, cold lake that stretches thirty miles north to south. Perhaps a third of the lake is in the United States, while the rest is north of the border in Canada.

Before my mother's trial began, I hated that lake. By the time it was over, I loathed it.

As a child there were some obvious reasons to despise it. It was hard to spell and impossible to pronounce. I know now that the name is the Abenaki term for "beautiful waters," but in grade school it was merely a long chain of syllables, at once incomprehensible and unpleasant.

Even as a teenager, however, even when I was no longer intimidated by the phonetics of the word, I disliked the lake. It always looked to me like the sort of lake that liked to swallow swimmers and small boats whole. Those few times when I was taken swimming there with my friends, its waters always felt more frigid than its neighbors'-especially inviting little places like Crystal or Echo Lake-and its currents more dangerous.

And I don't think I ever saw the lake when its waters weren't choppy.

There were also myths about Memphremagog, some involving a giant lizard much more menacing than the benign monster said by some to swim in Lake Champlain, and some involving a particularly gruesome thing that could live as comfortably on the shore as it did underneath those dark waters, and would mutate into the form of its prey: fish or dogs or baby deer. That's how it killed them. Although I never believed any of these tales, they did reinforce in my mind my conviction that the lake was an unhappy place of which I wanted no part.

Most people aren't like me, however; most people think highly of Lake Memphremagog. And most people who spend any time at all in the courtroom of the Orleans County Courthouse are very glad the city of Newport meets the lake where it does. The courthouse sits on the top of the bluff on Main Street, and the courtroom is on the third-and, therefore, highest-floor of the century-old stone-and-brick box. The courtroom has three monstrously large windows facing the lake, a mere three blocks to the north. Jurors are granted a panoramic view of the waters, and the shapes and summits of Owl's Head and Bear Mountain in the distance. I imagine in trials less demanding or notorious than my mother's, jurors have stared themselves to sleep as they gazed at those waters.

Even during my mother's trial, however, jurors on occasion used Lake Memphremagog as a place upon which to focus when they wanted to be sure to avoid eye contact with my mother, or when an exceptionally grisly piece of evidence was on display. For me, this was just one more reason to hate the lake.

As the defendant, my mother had a spectacular view of the waters: She and Stephen shared a table by the window, and Stephen always took the seat toward the center of the courtroom so that he could rise and pace without having to climb around my mother or draw undue attention toward her. And as the defendant's daughter, I sat in the front bench-the one directly behind her-which meant the lake was an unavoidable and inescapable presence in the corners of my eyes as well. Even when my father took the "window seat," the shadow of the lake remained with me: The windows were that tall and wide and clean.

Fortunately, my mother did not share my dislike for Lake Memphremagog. With an awareness of how the media approached her trial and the role image would play in its history, she said something to my father and Stephen and me one night when we were leaving the courthouse that indicated in her mind the lake was not merely an impartial witness to the events occurring on the third floor of a building a few blocks from its shore, it was actually an ally of hers of sorts. The sun was low as we walked to our cars, but it had not yet set. It was probably close to five-thirty.

"Look where she's standing," my mother said, and she motioned toward the reporter from the CBS affiliate in Burlington who was speaking at the moment to a TV camera, "and look what's going to be in the background. That's where they all stand. Have you noticed? Day after day, every single one of them. Even that lady from the Boston station who only spent an afternoon here. Isn't that something? They all stand right over there somewhere."

We had not noticed it before-at least I hadn't-but we all understood instantly what my mother meant: The woman was standing across the street from the courthouse, instead of in front of the building itself, or on its steps. Someone-either the reporter herself or her partner with the camera-had apparently decided they would rather have the lake in the background than the Orleans County Courthouse.

"Everyone who isn't here who thinks about this will remember that water," my mother continued, "everyone who sees it on TV. Tomorrow or next week or whenever, that's what they'll remember when they picture this whole thing. That lake. That amazing and mysterious lake."

Any hopes Stephen had that the trial would not commence before Christmas had evaporated by the time the Labor Day weekend approached. We all knew it would be a fall affair. And only two days after Labor Day itself, the first Wednesday of September, we were officially informed of the date of the trial. It would begin Monday, September 29, and Stephen expected it would last at least two weeks. Maybe three.

During that unusually hot, arid summer-a July that wilted flower gardens early and stunted the corn, and an August that dried up a good many of our neighbors' wells-the case never lost what Stephen had referred to once around my mother as its "prosecutorial energy."

If anything, that person named Tanner seemed to me more rabid than ever as autumn arrived, as interested in persecuting my mother as he was in prosecuting her. And while in hindsight I know this was largely the perception of a teenager who didn't understand that "deposition" is merely a lawyer's term for court-sanctioned harassment, or the ways both the defense and the prosecution leverage court appearances for pretrial publicity, I know also there was some validity to my paranoia: Bill Tanner really was furious, Bill Tanner really was out for blood.

Neither Tanner nor his staff could believe that my mother had rejected the State's offer of a mere year in jail (of which she'd probably only serve six or seven months) and six years of probation in return for a guilty plea on the charge of involuntary manslaughter. If six years on probation sounded like a long time, they still thought it was a tremendously magnanimous and merciful offer: Despite the fact that Charlotte Bedford was dead, my mother would go to prison for barely half a year. Yes, she was expected to give up midwifery, but to them, that was a small price. It just didn't get any better than this, they must have thought; a deal couldn't get much sweeter.

Meanwhile, when the rumor of Tanner's offer circulated throughout the medical community, many doctors-especially obstetricians-were livid. Absolutely livid. The whole idea that a hippie midwife had killed some woman with a bedroom C-section (and in their diatribes, this was indeed the essential scenario) and might only go to jail for a few months had a good number of physicians enraged beyond reason. It seemed to me that some of them were spending more time writing editorials or letters to newspapers than they were practicing medicine, and Stephen took to calling the State Medical Board "the Furies," a shorthand reference even I understood.

Looking back, I still find it astonishing that so many doctors were so clearly unwilling to heed their own advice about stress.

From the window in my parents' bedroom, the one that faced our backyard and-in the far distance-Mount Chittenden, I watched my mother and Stephen sit back in two Adirondack chairs in the corner of the lawn by the porch. They'd moved the chairs so they were side by side and they could see the sun set through the damp fall air.

"Being pretty can be a disadvantage with a jury," Stephen was saying, and he stretched his legs through the leaves on the ground by his feet.

"You think too much. You think too much about the damnedest things."

"That's my job."

"Well, I don't think we need to worry that I'm so pretty we're at a disadvantage."

"It will be a factor in the voir dire. That's all I'm saying."

"The what?"

"The jury selection."

"The way your mind works. Unbelievable."

"I hope that's a compliment."

"I'm not sure. I just find it incredible."

"My mind?"

"This process. The very idea that because you think I'm pretty-"

"It's the idea that the jury will think you're pretty. What I think is irrelevant."

"Hah!"

"They will, Sibyl. You are an undeniably pretty woman. Undeniably. And with some jurors that will be an asset. With others, it will be a problem we'll have to overcome."

My mother and Stephen dangled their arms over the sides of their chairs, and their fingers picked at the grass just this side of dormancy and the fallen leaves that had begun to dry. Sometimes the tips of their fingers touched, occasionally the backs of their hands grazed. I wondered if they were savoring those brief, brief seconds when their skin brushed together.

"You're really going to let Connie watch?" my grandmother asked my mother one Saturday in mid-September, as if I weren't there having lunch with the two of them at our kitchen table.

"We're really going to let Connie watch," my mother said.

I imagine in her younger days my grandmother had been an extremely tolerant woman. Her daughter, after all, had dropped out of Mount Holyoke to live with an older man on Cape Cod, and then spent a winter with the Black Panthers in Boston. When Sibyl had finally returned to Vermont, she got pregnant before she got married, and she'd done both very young. And even if this had been "the sixties"-an umbrella rubric for a variety of excesses and an excuse for all sorts of otherwise antisocial behaviors-one might have expected a certain amount of mother-daughter tension. But they always insisted there had been none, a point of family history my father says he can corroborate from at least the moment he entered my mother's life.

By the time Charlotte Fugett Bedford died, however, my grandmother had grown more conservative. Her own husband, my grandfather, had died ten years earlier, and a decade of living alone had made her slightly skittish, wary, and quick to frown or find fault. And, of course, the woman who watched her daughter on trial was considerably older than the woman whose daughter had dropped out of college: She had aged from her early fifties to her mid-sixties, and she was no more exempt from the anxieties of age than anyone else.

Nevertheless, my Nonny-my name for her, even at fourteen-was still a warm and energetic woman when I was growing up. My mother's tendency to hug friends on sight was at least partly genetic, and I'll never lose my love for the vaguely floral, vaguely antiseptic smell of my Nonny's hair spray: I'd get a strong whiff of it with every embrace.

In any case, when it was clear that the charges against my mother would not be settled without a trial, Nonny tried hard to convince my parents to keep me away from the courtroom. She thought it would be a scarring experience, and while there were certainly people attending the trial who would have agreed with her-especially in light of my eventual breakdown-my parents knew how desperately I wanted to be there. Moreover, I think they realized that it would be equally scarring for me to hear important details second-hand in the girls' bathroom at school. And so it didn't matter that I'd miss two (and perhaps three) weeks of classes; it didn't matter that I'd see all sorts of frightening pieces of evidence; it didn't matter that I'd hear truly terrible things said about my mother, or have to watch a variety of witnesses in all likelihood sob on the stand.

No one, after all, expected Asa Bedford to keep his composure throughout the entire proceedings, or Anne Austin to endure without tears what Stephen himself said would be a "withering search-and-destroy, free-fire, relentlessly savage" cross-examination. And I think both my father and Stephen had begun to wonder by September how even my mother would do. We could all see she was growing quiet and morose-not so much gloomy, as tired beyond the rejuvenating powers of sleep-and in their own ways they were constantly trying to rally her spirits.

Yet absolutely none of this mattered, because my parents understood how badly I wanted to attend the trial. It seemed to me I had a moral responsibility to be present; in my mind, my appearance was an important show of solidarity with my mother.

Besides, Stephen wanted me there.

"Stephen thinks Connie here will be very helpful," my mother said to her mother, and she gave my arm a small squeeze. Don't you worry about Nonny, that squeeze said: You're going.

"Helpful? Helpful how?"

"Connie will be a constant reminder for the jury that I'm not just some faceless defendant. I'm not just some midwife. I'm a mother. I have a daughter, a family."

Nonny had turned the last carrots from her vegetable garden into a salad with raisins and walnuts, and while the carrots were supposed to be shredded, the blender my grandmother used was older than I, and the salad still had a great many large orange chunks. I watched Nonny methodically chew one of those pieces while she thought about my mother's explanation, and noticed there was some dry dirt on the cuffs of her light-blue cardigan. From her garden, I thought. She'd probably harvested the carrots we were eating that very morning.

Her voice more quizzical than dubious, more puzzled than angry, Nonny finally said, "And that means they'll have mercy?"

"This is not about mercy!" my mother snapped back.

"It's about-"

"I don't need mercy."

"Then what does that lawyer of yours mean? Why does he want Connie there so badly?"

"'That lawyer of yours'? Mother, must you put it that way? It sounds horrible. It sounds like you think he's some sort of charlatan."

Nonny sighed, and rubbed the arthritic bulbs of her long fingers. My mother and I both knew that Nonny did not think Stephen was a charlatan. How could she? If she meant anything at all by her diminution of Stephen Hastings to "that lawyer of yours," if there was anything at all behind the remark, it was probably a vague apprehension triggered by the way my mother's voice seemed to rise whenever she said the word Stephen, the way the word was tinged with promise and colored by hope when it came from her lips.

"I just don't think Connie should be there," Nonny said after a moment, wrapping her hands together in her lap. "If you don't need… mercy or sympathy or something, I don't see why you should bring a fourteen-year-old girl into that courtroom."

"It makes Mom a real person," I chimed in, paraphrasing a remark I had overheard Stephen make to my parents earlier that week. "And that makes it harder to convict her. Juries don't like to convict the kind of real people who might be their neighbors."

Both of the adults turned toward me.

"You weren't doing your homework Wednesday night, were you?" my mother said, trying hard to look stern.

"I did my homework Wednesday night."

"Yeah, after Stephen left you did your homework," she said. She then turned to my grandmother and continued, "Connie will be with me because I love her and I want her there-as long as she wants to be there. She's come this far with us, she may as well see it through."

I woke up in the middle of the night a few days before the trial began, and through the register in the floor I could see the light on in the den below. It was almost two in the morning. For a moment I assumed my mother or father had simply neglected to turn off the light before coming upstairs, and while that would have been uncharacteristic behavior from either of them, these were unusual times. We all had a great deal on our minds.

I rolled over, hoping to fall quickly back to sleep, but I thought I heard something in the den. Something as intangible as a rustle, as imperceptible as a draft. An eddy, perhaps, whorled, drifting up from the basement through the cracks between the floorboards. Had the curtains merely shivered? Or had someone exhaled, a faint tremor in his or her breath?

I climbed out of bed and crouched by the register in my nightgown. If there were people in the den, they were not on the couch, which-along with the coffee table and a part of the woodstove's hearth-was about all I could see through the wrought-iron grate.

I was neither frightened nor cold, but when I decided I'd go downstairs, I started to tremble: Connie Danforth, just like a heroine in one of those ridiculous slasher movies my friends and I were always watching, that idiot camp counselor who went alone into the woods at night, shining her flashlight before her as she practically beckoned the psycho killer in the hockey mask to come get her.

The stairs remained silent as I walked upon them, largely because I knew exactly where to step to avoid their idiosyncratic creaks and groans. I told myself I was going downstairs to get a glass of milk. If anyone asked what I was doing-and why would someone, it was my house-I would say just that: I'm getting a glass of milk.

The lights were off in the dining room and the kitchen; I saw the mudroom was dark. Perhaps my parents really had simply left the light on. Perhaps I had heard nothing more than one of the strange breezes that blow through an old Vermont house as the seasons change or the northern air grows cold.

I paused outside the kitchen entrance to the den, my back flush against the refrigerator, and felt its motor vibrate against my spine. I half-expected to hear a voice call out to me. I wondered if I'd hear, suddenly, an exchange between people in that room. Hearing neither, I pushed off the refrigerator with the palms of my hands and turned toward the den.

There I saw my father, alone with easily a dozen small stapled packets of papers scattered around him on the floor in one corner. Xeroxes of some sort. He was still wearing the business shirt he had worn to his office that day, and the same light-gray slacks. He was sunk deep into the rocking chair by the brass floor lamp.

"What are you doing up, sweetie?" he asked when he saw me in the doorway. He looked worried that I was awake.

"I'm getting a glass of milk."

"Couldn't sleep?"

"No. I mean, I woke up. And I decided I wanted a glass of milk."

He nodded. "Know what? I think I'll have one with you. Then I should probably go to bed myself."

"Is that work?" I asked, motioning toward the clusters of papers surrounding him on the floor.

"These? No, not at all. They're precedents. Legal precedents. They're some of the cases your mom's lawyer had researched while putting her defense together."

I picked up one of the stapled packets, a sheaf of nine or ten pages titled "State v. Orosco." I skimmed the lengthy subtitle, an incomplete sentence that seemed to me a study in gibberish: "Certified questions as to whether information and affidavit in involuntary manslaughter case were insufficient following denial of motions to dismiss and to suppress statements."

"You've been reading these?" I asked, astonished that he would punish himself so.

"Yup."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Because I love your mother. And I want to understand what Stephen's doing to defend her."

He stood and led me to the kitchen where I'd been only moments before, my mind rich with unspeakable suspicions, and pulled from the refrigerator a cardboard container of milk.

Chapter 15.

I didn't think I'd be scared once this thing began, but I am. I thought I'd get over it once I got here, once I was settled down in my chair. I was wrong. Or maybe I was just kidding myself the last few weeks.

All day long I tried to focus on the little things in the courtroom to take my mind off the big ones, even though I know I'm supposed to be paying attention like there's no tomorrow.

"No tomorrow." I wish I hadn't thought of that expression. It's hateful.

But there were times I couldn't do it, times I just couldn't pay attention. Or maybe I should say I wouldn't-there were times I just wouldn't pay attention. Some moments, I just found it easier to think about nothing but the incredible chandelier this courtroom has than the idea that I might be in prison somewhere when my sweet baby is in college or when she has her first baby.

I want to be there when she has her first baby so much.

I want to be there when she has all her babies.

And when the idea that I might miss out on something like that crossed my mind today, I'd zone out as fast as I could and focus on something else. Anything else. Like that chandelier. I'd seen the courtroom before when I was charged back in the spring, but I hadn't looked around that day and so I hadn't noticed the chandelier. After all, all I'd really done that morning was breeze in in my little spring dress while Stephen said, "Not guilty, Your Honor." Took about two seconds.

But I saw the chandelier today, I couldn't miss it. And it's a beauty, it really is. A huge wrought-iron thing that hangs down from smack in the center of the ceiling. The bulbs sit inside these delicate glass tulips, and the metalwork is a series of the most amazingly graceful curlicues and swirls. A lot of times, it was just so much easier for me to get a picture in my head of those tulips or those swirls than the faces of the people being asked all sorts of questions about home birth and midwifery. Stephen and Bill Tanner must have talked to thirty or thirty-five people today, and they still haven't agreed upon who will be on the jury and who won't.

So, as Stephen said, "We get to do this again tomorrow." I just can't believe it.

I think there were four or five people up there today who hated me without even knowing me. That wouldn't have bothered me once. Before Charlotte died, I don't think it fazed me a bit when I came across a person who hated me for what I did. I think I viewed it as their problem, not anything I needed to lose sleep over. It was like, "Hey, you deal with it. That's your trip, not mine."

But it really freaked me out today. It really frightened the hell out of me.

From where I sit, I can see Lake Memphremagog, and every so often this afternoon when a possible juror was explaining how all of his children had been born in a hospital because it's safer, I'd try to get a picture of the water in my mind. Then I could stare at the guy and look like I was listening, when all I was seeing was the lake.

I'll bet that water's cold right now, incredibly cold.

This just isn't a good time of the year for a trial like this. At least for me. Everything's dying, or going brown. I didn't used to mind the fall. I do this year. That's another thing that seems to be different with me since Charlotte died. Suddenly I dislike the fall.

There were moments today when I found myself staring at the water in the lake and getting the chills when I thought about where I might be when it freezes.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

DOCTORS DO NOT PROTEST, they lobby. They are not the sort of people who will stand around outside a courthouse with placards and sandwich boards, or hold hands and sing rally songs. Mid-wives, on the other hand, are. Midwives are exactly the sort of folk who will use public spectacle to make a political point.

And so while doctors made their presence felt in a variety of powerful ways before and during my mother's trial-they just loved to testify-they did not stand on the steps of the Orleans County Courthouse.

That responsibility fell upon the midwives.

The Monday my mother's trial began, my family was greeted in Newport by somewhere between sixty and seventy people, counting the midwives and their clients. There were women whose faces I recognized, like Cheryl Visco and Megan Blubaugh, Molly Thompson and Donelle Folino, and there were a great many women and men I'd never seen before, but who, apparently, believed passionately in a woman's right to labor in her own bedroom. There were some of my mother's patients there as well, faces I remembered from prenatal exams at our house as recently as the previous winter. Inside, we'd soon discover, were even more of my mother's clients, quietly knitting or nursing in the three back benches.

We saw the supporters as soon as we drove down Main Street that morning, standing like a phalanx along both sides of the courthouse steps and in long lines on the grass that extended out from the walkway to the front door. We had driven to Newport in my mother's distinctive old station wagon, and so we were recognized immediately, and a cheer went up as we coasted into the parking lot between the courthouse and the lake.

"Set Sibyl free, let babies be!" was the first chant we heard from the group, and we heard it the moment we emerged from our car. Of all the chants we'd hear over the next few weeks (and we'd hear many), that one was my least favorite. It implied my mother wasn't free; it suggested prison and confinement and my family's destruction.

Unfortunately, to this day it's the one I hear most often in my head. The others-either doggerel that linked hospitals with laboratories, or ditties that elevated home birth to a religious rite-come back to me when I think hard about those weeks, but they don't pop into my head today like bad songs while I'm seeing patients or brewing coffee.

As planned, Stephen and a young associate from his firm were already waiting for us in the parking lot when we arrived. There had been a frost the night before, so even though the sun was well up by eight-thirty, the air still felt cool and I could see Stephen's breath when he spoke.

"You have some fans," he said, motioning toward the demonstration across the street.

My mother smiled. "Are you behind this?"

"God, no! We made sure we'll have some friends once we get inside the courtroom-quiet friends-but those campers over there came on their own. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy they're here, but I had nothing to do with it."

The adults all shook hands, and I was introduced to Stephen's associate, a man a few years his junior named Peter Grinnell. Peter lacked Stephen's polish, and it was clear he had a liking for fried dough and sausage heroes-the epicurean specialties of the town and county fairs that begin in Vermont in early August and continue until the first weekend in October. His hair was thin, his skin unhealthy, and he needed to lose a good thirty or forty pounds.

I couldn't imagine where this fellow fit into the dignified-downright intimidating-law firm I'd seen a glimpse of that day in Burlington; I was surprised someone like Stephen even wanted him working there. Peter was wearing an overcoat, so I couldn't see his suit, but I found myself hoping it was, as Stephen would say, one click above whatever Bill Tanner would be wearing.

"How do you feel, Sibyl?" Stephen asked.

My mother shrugged. "I can feel my heart beating pretty fast. But I think I'm okay."

"Fired up?"

"No, Stephen, you know I'm not," she said, shaking her head, and she sounded almost resigned. "I'm not a fired-up kind of lady."

"They are," he said, and he pointed with his thumb like a hitchhiker at the midwives and home birthers behind us.

"They're not me."

"Well, you look-" Stephen stopped himself midsentence, a pause that was at once awkward and uncharacteristic for my mother's lawyer. "You look like you're ready," he said finally.

What Stephen meant to say, I've always assumed, was that my mother looked beautiful. Or heroic, perhaps. Or courageous. Because my mother did look, at least to me, like all of those things. She seemed tired and she was pale, but looking back, I think I understand in a twisted way why at least one nineteenth-century convention of female beauty was vaguely tubercular-why, even at the end, Bram Stoker's Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker were still considered lovely. My mother had a cornflower-blue clip holding back her blond hair, and she was wearing a modest, almost schoolgirl-like green kilt she'd bought specially for the occasion. Unlike the other midwives both inside and outside the courthouse, she wore leather loafers and stockings.

But I think Stephen stopped himself because my father was present. He probably would have told my mother exactly how attractive he thought she was had the two of them been alone.

"Sure, I'm ready," my mother said. "I don't really have a choice now, do I?"

"No. Guess not."

My mother nodded, and my father wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

"It's cold out here," he said to the lawyers and me. "Let's go inside."

"Grandma's not here yet," I said, speaking to no one in particular.

"Is your grandma the type who could find her way into the courtroom?" Stephen asked.

Before I could answer, my father said he would walk with us as far as the front door of the courthouse and then wait for grandma there. And so amidst the aroma of fresh paint and poster board, the five of us made our way through a small sea of women in paisley peasant skirts and babushkas, men with beards that fell halfway down their chests, and dozens and dozens of male and female feet in heavy wool socks and sandals.

I hadn't realized that Charlotte Fugett Bedford had a sister and a brother-in-law. Somehow I had missed the detail that she had a mother.

And no one had told me that the three of them had traveled from Alabama to Vermont to sit in a bench behind Bill Tanner and his deputy and watch my mother's trial.

But when I walked into the courtroom, I knew instantly who they were. No one had to tell me. The two women had more than a vague resemblance to their dead kin, and the way the younger woman leaned into the younger man for support suggested marriage. And all three of them were wearing clothing too summery and thin for Vermont in the last week of September.

I saw them before they saw me, and so that first morning I was able to look away before our eyes met and I would have to acknowledge the sadness that had scarred their faces. Although I don't believe I had ever viewed the Fugetts or the Bedfords as possessing the sort of evil Bill Tanner embodied, somehow that summer I had managed to forget or ignore that my mother was not the victim in this tragedy, or that-in most people's eyes-she was not the only one who was suffering.

Twenty-eight possible jurors were sat by the bailiff in four rows of seven: Two of those rows were in the raised jury box itself, and two more were in wooden chairs with cushioned seats directly before it. That meant the first two rows were lower than the pair in the jury box, and so that side of the courtroom looked a bit to me like a movie theater. The seats had a downhill sort of slope.

In addition, another dozen possible jurors were seated in the two benches in the courtroom nearest the jury box, and as the morning progressed and Bill Tanner asked a seemingly endless number of questions, some of them took the place of their peers in the rows along the side of the courtroom.

The goal was to find twelve jurors and two alternates whom both Stephen Hastings and Bill Tanner would accept. Each side was allowed to strike up to six people without offering the judge a reason, which meant that if there were only one or two challenges for cause-the elimination of a possible juror for reasons as dramatic as an admitted bias, or as pedestrian as a doctor's appointment during the trial that simply could not be rescheduled-a jury could be built from that first group of twenty-eight people.

Of course, it rarely happened that way, and my mother's trial was certainly no exception. There was no limit to the number of possible jurors who could be eliminated for cause, and the lead attorneys on both sides seemed to be quite good at rooting out reasons to have people excused that would not demand they use any of their six precious preemptory strikes.

Perhaps somewhere in the files in the basement of the Orleans County Courthouse, or on a floppy disk or computer in one of the offices on the building's second or third floors, exist the names of the couple of dozen women and men who were part of that original late-September pool. Perhaps not. But many of the names of that first twenty-eight (and of the reinforcements who joined them, as one by one Stephen or Bill Tanner excused someone after eliciting yet another reason why that individual could not objectively or logistically sit in judgment upon my mother) have blurred in my mind with the names of the final fourteen.

Not the faces, however; I still know the faces and features of that final fourteen well. Moreover, I know-or at least I believe I know-exactly whom Stephen was happy to have sitting in the jury box for two weeks, and exactly who made him uncomfortable.

"Would you want people on the jury who love the idea of a home birth, or people who think it's an incredibly foolish notion?" Stephen asked my parents and me the Thursday night before the trial started. Stephen had taken my family to dinner at a French restaurant in Stowe, the sort of place that had me pulling blouses and skirts from my closet for forty minutes before I found a combination that I thought was at once appropriately elegant and sufficiently cool. Stowe was slightly closer to Reddington than Burlington, but it was still vaguely equidistant between the two, and I imagine Stephen was hoping a dinner out would rally my mother's spirits before the trial finally began.

We had finished eating and the three adults were sipping their coffee when Stephen broached the subject of the jury's configuration.

As if he were a law school professor and the Danforth family a small group of students, he continued, "What do you think: Would you want a group who thought home birth was a perfectly safe proposition, or a group who thought it riskier than landing an airplane in a hurricane?"

"I suppose I'd want people who approved of home birth," my father said quickly. "They'd be more sympathetic."

"More sympathetic to Charlotte or Sibyl?"

"Sibyl," my father answered, and instantly I began to fear that the conversation was about to take one of those turns that I dreaded. I couldn't tell if my father's answer was wrong and his mistake would embarrass-and then anger-him, or if the discussion would deteriorate simply because the subject was so volatile. But I knew I didn't like the way Stephen put down his coffee cup and shrugged after my father blurted out my mother's name.

"Maybe those are the sort of people we'll want," Stephen said slowly, "but maybe not. Obviously my partners and I have gone around and around on this one. Personally, I want to see the jury stacked with people who believe home birth is a reasonable way to have a baby. But I have two partners who are quite convincing when they argue that I should try and get a group who thinks the idea of having your baby in your bedroom is a terrifically stupid stunt, a group who…"

"A group who what?" my mother asked Stephen when he paused.

"Forgive me, Sibyl," Stephen said, taking a deep breath before finishing his thought. "A group who thinks the idea of home birth is so… dangerous that Charlotte Bedford got what she asked for."

My mother tilted her head and rested the fingers of one hand on the small of her neck. I remember that all of the tables in the restaurant-filled that evening with the sort of wealthy, elderly couples who packed Vermont in the fall to watch the leaves grow yellow and gold and fantastic shades of red-seemed to become quiet around us, and suddenly I no longer even heard the tapes of classical music that had been playing throughout our meal. I heard a high ringing in my ears, and I wondered what would happen first: Would my mother cry, or would my father snap at Stephen?

I was wrong; neither occurred. I believe my father might have been about to tell Stephen angrily that his remarks were out of line, but my mother spoke first. Though tired, though unwilling to buck up in the sort of physical, visible ways the men around her wanted, my mother was still very strong.

"I don't think that would be very smart," she said, her voice soft but firm. "I don't think it will do any of us any good to make my mothers or me look like idiots."

Stephen nodded, and the music and conversation and the sound of silverware on fine china returned. "I agree. I'm just telling you what some of my peers believe," Stephen said.

My father sat back in his chair. "So I was right. You'll fill the jury with people who believe in home birth."

"I doubt I can 'fill' it with them. But if I find people who seem to think that way, I'll try and keep them." He turned to face my mother directly and continued, "I'm sorry. I was simply hoping to convey how complicated all of this is, even for me."

"Even for you," my father said. "Imagine."

"As a lawyer, Rand. That's all I meant."

"I understand."

Stephen sighed. "I've probably swallowed half my shoe already. But at the risk of putting even more in my mouth, I'll tell you something else: Right now I probably understand better who I don't want on the jury than who I do."

"And that is?" my father asked.

"Well, let's see. First of all, I'm going to try and stay away from women of childbearing age. I'm not sure they could separate themselves from the victim. And I don't want any nurses or doctors or EMTs. No volunteers from town rescue squads. The last thing we need are people who aren't nearly as knowledgeable as they think they are trying to second-guess Sibyl. And, of course, there won't be a soul on the jury who's ever been anywhere near a bad birth experience-ever had one, or seen one, or heard about one real close to home. That I can assure you."

"Will you want more men or women?" my father asked. My mother's fingers were still resting upon her neck, and although she was staring right at Stephen-and probably had been since he apologized a moment earlier-I don't think she saw him. I'm sure on some level she was listening, and I'm sure she would have jumped back into the conversation if she needed to defuse a bomb smoking between her husband and her attorney; otherwise, however, she seemed content to sit quietly and let the two men waste energy on conjecture.

"It's not as simple as a male-female thing. I wish it were. I think in this case it's more important to get smart people."

"Because of the experts?"

"Yup. A smart person will hang in there when they're hearing testimony about something like standards of care. Or what the autopsy showed-and didn't show. And smart people won't automatically assume that the State's doctors or experts have more credibility than ours."

And so when the lawyers began building a jury-asking question after question of the farmers and store clerks and elderly loggers who comprised the pool-I understood whom we wanted on the panel and whom we did not. I sat in the first row of benches directly behind my mother and Stephen and Peter Grinnell, with my father on one side of me and my grandmother on the other, and I made a list in my mind of who I hoped would be left in the end in the jury box.

A pair of law clerks from Stephen's firm and Patty Dunlevy sat with my family on our bench, but the three members of Charlotte's family had their bench to themselves. People wanted to give them their space. Otherwise there were no free seats in the courtroom.

The Danforth and Fugett family benches were in the same row, but our families were buffered by a wide aisle and the private investigator and the clerks. Only when I was studying the pool of jurors sitting along the part of the wall nearest the door was there any risk that a part of the Alabama contingent might turn a head and I'd be caught staring, or I'd have to look instantly away to avoid what I feared would be a hateful glare.

One of the few times I was watching the Fugetts, however, a moment just after the original group of twenty-eight jurors had been seated, I realized one important part of their family was absent. I leaned around my grandmother and asked the clerk beside her, a young woman I'd been told was named Laurel, "Where's Reverend Bedford?"

"He'll be testifying," she whispered, "so he's sequestered. He won't be in the courtroom until we get to the closing arguments."

"Will Foogie come?"

"Foogie?"

"The little boy," I answered, and then, remembering there were actually two little boys now, added quickly, "the older boy."

"You mean Jared, don't you? No, he won't be here. At least I wouldn't think so."

I fell back against the bench relieved. It was bad enough having to sit within ten or twelve yards of Charlotte's sister and mother; it would have been almost unendurable to watch a lonely widower with one of the two young sons he was now forced to raise on his own.

"This is no small distinction," Bill Tanner said to the jury pool, pacing slowly between his table and the high bench behind which the judge sat. "An important part of your job will be to understand the difference between reasonable doubt and all conceivable doubt-there's a difference-and to render a verdict accordingly."

I had no idea whether Tanner was a fly fisherman, but I knew enough adult men in Reddington who fished that I imagined at the time that he was: He walked as if he were wading through shallow water, stepping high and moving with care. He was tall and thin, and in front of a jury he spoke like a grandfather. He seemed patient and methodical, the sort of fellow who would tie a fly with meticulous care and then stand happily in a river casting his line for hours.

I had heard Tanner's voice twice before on the television news, but that morning was the first time I heard it live, and the first time I heard him speak at length: It was hard to believe this pleasant man was capable of saying the terrible things about my mother he already had, or that he would soon say much worse.

His hair was mostly gray, and his face deeply lined. He often held his eyeglasses by an earpiece in one hand as he spoke, exposing deep red marks along the sides of his nose where they usually rested. I guessed he was somewhere in his late fifties.

"What about you, Mr. Goodyear? Would you feel you had to have one-hundred-percent certainty of a person's guilt before you could convict him, or would the elimination of all reasonable doubt do?" he asked.

"Nothing in this world is a one-hundred-percent sure thing," he answered. Earlier in the morning he had mentioned he was a pressman for a printer in Newport, and his fingertips were discolored by ink.

"Except taxes," Tanner said. Although he was holding his eyeglasses in one hand, he was holding a piece of paper with a grid on it in the other. The grid listed the possible jurors by row, so Tanner knew all of the people by name.

"Do you have any children, Mr. Goodyear?"

"Two boys."

"How old are they?"

"One's ten and one's seven. No, eight. He's about to turn eight. Next week."

"You're married?"

"Yup. For twelve years."

"What does your wife do?"

"She works two days a week at the school cafeteria. And the rest of the time she raises the boys."

"You grow up around here?"

"I did."

"Lucky man," he sighed. "We have here one of the most beautiful parts of the state."

"I think so."

"Where were you born?"

"Newport."

"In this very city?"

"Yup."

"Hospital?"

"Uh-huh."

"Your boys? How about that? Where were they born?"

"Same hospital."

"North Country?"

"Yup."

These days, we envision lawyers using podiums and microphones. Back then in our corner of rural Vermont, that wasn't the case. Like stage actors, the lawyers spoke loud enough to be heard, and they did it without seeming to raise their voices. They held their notes in their hands when they spoke, and if they needed a place for papers, they used their tables.

"Were the labors easy? Hard? Somewhere in between?"

"They were easy for me," Mr. Goodyear said. "I was at my wife's sister's house eating dinner one time, and in the waiting room with both our families at the other."

"Were they easy for your wife?"

"I guess they were. We got two good boys out of 'em."

"Did you and your wife consider having the boys at home?"

"You mean instead of a hospital?"

"Yes. That's exactly what I mean."

Goodyear smiled. "No, sir. I don't believe that idea even crossed our minds."

"Let's see," Tanner said. "I haven't visited with Golner. Julia Golner. How are you this morning, Mrs. Golner?"

"I'm fine."

"Do you work, Mrs. Golner? Or have you retired?"

"Oh, I stopped working seven years ago. I'm sixty-eight years old, Mr. Tanner."

"Does your husband work?"

"He passed away."

"I'm sorry. Was this recent?"

"No. Nineteen seventy-five."

"Do you have children?"

She beamed. "Seven. And fifteen grandchildren-my lucky number."

"Were you born in Vermont?"

"Yes."

"In a hospital?"

"No. I was born in nineteen thirteen. I was born before the World Wars. Both of them!"

"So you were born at home?"

"I was born in my mother and father's bedroom, in the farmhouse they lived in for years and years in Orleans."

"How about your children? Were they born at home, too?"

"No. Some were. But not all."

"Would you tell me about that?"

In a saga of live births and miscarriages that would have continued without pause for two decades had her husband not enlisted in the army in 1943, Mrs. Golner offered an informal history of labor in the Northeast Kingdom between 1932 and 1951, and its migration from home to hospital. She told the court she had had four children before the Second World War in her bedroom, and at least that many miscarriages. She had then had three children after the War, and two more "souls" who never made it through the first trimester.

Those postwar babies had arrived in hospitals: "I don't know why that was," she said. "I guess we all just decided after the War it was better that way. Safer, I guess."

"I spent three years in the Pacific. I fought on Iwo Jima."

"Wounded?"

"Nope. I was lucky," Mr. Patterson told the state's attorney. A burly man in a turtleneck and a blue sweater that clung to his bulk like a second skin, he sat with his arms folded defiantly across his chest.

"Your time in the Pacific: Is that why you say you have little… patience with people who opposed the war in Vietnam?"

"No. Even if I hadn't been given the opportunity to serve my country, I would expect others to step forward when asked. And we both know a lot didn't."

"Step forward."

"That's right."

"In the sixties and early seventies."

"Yes."

"Suppose there was a witness you didn't like, Mr. Patterson. Personally. Could you be fair?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, let's say one side or the other has someone testifying who rubs you the wrong way. Would you listen to their testimony with an open mind?"

"Yes. It seems to me I would have to. It would be my duty," Mr. Patterson said, but before he had even finished speaking I knew Stephen would draw a line through the fellow's name.

When we left the courtroom for lunch, we passed by a row of women in the back bench who were starting to nurse their babies. The littlest ones had not been delivered by my mother, since she had stopped practicing almost six months earlier. But there were two babies there my mother had caught in the weeks or months before Charlotte Bedford died, bigger infants between six and nine months old. I watched them at their mothers' breasts for a moment before I saw something infinitely more interesting to me: Some of the reporters, even the female ones, were trying desperately to talk to members of the group during the recess without allowing their eyes to fall below the nursing mothers' foreheads. It was as if they were trying to interview the wall behind them.

My mother had cinnamon toast and hot chocolate for lunch in a diner, and insisted we stop by the florist on Main Street to look at the fall wreaths on display. When she spoke, she talked of the foliage that year, and the lines of cars with out-of-state plates parked in some spots along the country roads. She thought the maples were a more vibrant red than usual, and clearly this pleased her.

Stephen and his little staff never left the courthouse, with the exception of the law clerk named Laurel. She stayed with us when we went to lunch, and it seemed to me her principal responsibility was to help us push by the reporters and tell them with a smile that we had nothing to say.

"I think you're all doing very well," she told us as we stood for a moment on the sidewalk outside the flower shop's glass window. "I think you make a very good presentation as a family."

My grandmother beamed and my mother nodded, as if she found great meaning in Laurel's observation. She gave the clerk that smile she had developed like new wrinkles over the past half-year-a smile that was part incredulity and part patience. "Well, you know," she said, her voice completely serious, "we've had a lot of years to get that look just right."

Once, weeks earlier, I'd peeked out my parents' bedroom window to watch my mother greeting Stephen as he arrived at our house at the end of the day. I had heard a car pulling into our driveway, and so I'd put my homework aside and crossed the house to one of the rooms that faced the front of our home. At breakfast my father had said he wouldn't return until seven or seven-thirty that night, and I'd wanted to see who was stopping by at five in the afternoon.

It was Stephen. By the time I got to the window, my mother was already outside, strolling down the walk to greet him. She was moving slowly, with the gait of a sleepwalker, or someone preoccupied beyond reason. But I was nevertheless struck by the fact that she had left the house to meet his car: She may have lacked the giddy stride of a young girl in love, she may have been worn down by the wait for the trial, but she still had some desire to give air to those few pleasant sparks life would yet drop before her.

When Stephen emerged from his car, my mother was already there. She let him take both of her hands in his, and they stood there for a moment with the car door open, the proximity of their legs curtained from me by gray steel.

…

"Who has the burden of proof?" Stephen asked Lenore Rice, a young woman who worked at the Grand Union in Barton. Lenore was probably six or seven years older than I was, but she didn't look it: She was a small person with petite, barely pubescent features.

"I don't know what that is," she answered.

"Burden of proof is a legal term," Stephen began slowly, but without condescension. "We have two sides in this courtroom, the defense and the State. I represent the defense, and sitting over there, Mr. Tanner represents the State. One of us will have to prove something inside these walls over the next few weeks, and one of us won't. Am I the one who has to prove something?"

"Why, yes," she said. "Of course."

"And what would that be?"

"That your person is innocent."

Stephen nodded, and sat for a moment at the edge of the defense table. Peter handed him the grid listing by row the prospective jurors before he requested it.

"Mr. Anderson, do you agree with Miss Rice?" Stephen asked after glancing at the sheet of paper. "Do you agree that I have to prove something in these proceedings?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"A person is innocent until proven guilty."

"Indeed," Stephen said, standing and walking toward the first row of the panel. "That's exactly right. What do you do, Mr. Anderson?"

"I'm an electrician."

"Thank you. Don't go anywhere, we'll talk some more in a moment. Miss Rice, what do you think of what Mr. Anderson has just said? Have you changed your mind?"

"About what?"

"About whether I have to prove my client is innocent."

"Well, he says you don't."

"Actually, it's not Mr. Anderson who says I don't, it's our entire philosophy of jurisprudence. Our system of justice. In this country, a person is innocent-absolutely innocent-until proven guilty. If you are a juror, you need to begin this trial with the presumption that the defendant is innocent. Are you okay with that, Miss Rice? Can you do that?"

She looked down into her lap. "I don't know," she mumbled.

"You don't know?"

"It seems to me someone wouldn't be here if he didn't do something wrong."

Stephen turned to Judge Dorset. "Your Honor, may I approach the bench?"

The judge nodded, and both Stephen and Bill Tanner stood before the high wooden barricade and whispered with Dorset for a long moment. When they were finished, the judge murmured something to the bailiff. Tanner then retreated to his seat, and Stephen returned to the edge of his table.

"Miss Rice, you are excused. The court thanks you very much for your willingness to spend the day with us," Judge Dorset said.

The young woman stood, looking more recalcitrant than relieved, and the bailiff called juror number thirty-two to come forward from one of the rear benches to take her place. Lenore Rice was the fourth person either Stephen or Bill Tanner had not wanted to see among the final fourteen jurors, and had managed to have excused for cause.

"It's made from organic soybeans," Nancy Hallock said.

"And you use it instead of milk?" Stephen asked.

"Yes. We don't have any animal products or by-products in our house."

"No meat?"

The woman shivered. "Yuck. God, no."

"Your family are all strict vegetarians?"

"Well, my husband and I are. We don't have any children."

"May I ask how old you are?"

"You may. I'm forty-one."

"Do you plan on having children?"

"I think there are enough people on this planet, don't you? If we decide to have any children, we'll adopt them."

When I wandered into my mother's office to kiss her good night after the first day of jury selection, she was scribbling in her personal diary at her desk. She had never hidden the fact that she'd been keeping a journal for years, and the loose-leaf binders she used-thick three-ring notebooks covered with thin layers of blue fabric, just like mine-filled the lowest shelf of a bookcase behind the desk. She trusted my father and me to respect her privacy.

"Do you want more hot water before I go upstairs?" I asked, and motioned toward her half-filled mug of tea.

"No, I'm okay," she said, and she put down her pen and sat back in her chair. "You were so quiet at dinner tonight. Everything okay?"

I shrugged. "Guess so."

"What did you think of your mom's first day in court? Pretty dull stuff, isn't it?" she said, hoping to downplay the significance of what I was witnessing.

"I thought it was pretty cool."

She smiled. "At your age, you're only supposed to think rock concerts and cute boys are cool."

"They are, too."

"Have you spoken to Tom tonight?"

"Uh-huh."

"Did you tell him about today?"

"Only the things Stephen said it was okay to discuss," I lied. In actuality, I had told Tom every detail I could remember.

"Glad you're there?"

"Yeah, I am."

She put down her pen and stretched her arms over her head and behind her back, and her fingertips grazed the bookcase. In addition to her personal notebooks, the bookcase was filled with treatises on birth-books with titles like Spiritual Midwifery and Heart and Hands-and the journals in which my mother kept the medical records of her patients. I knew there were even more records in the wooden filing cabinet beside the bookcase, many of which had been taken by subpoena by the State.

"I'll bet it makes you want to be a lawyer when you grow up," she said, and she rolled her eyes.

"Or a midwife."

"Right. Or a midwife."

From where I stood I could see the lines and lines of blue ink that rolled over the white pages like waves. She wrote on the front and back of each sheet, so when the notebook was opened flat the effect was vaguely reminiscent of a very large book.

"Think this will be over soon?" I asked.

"Oh, I think so, sweetheart," my mother said, her voice tinged with concern for me. Instantly I regretted my question. "Stephen says the trial should only last two weeks."

"And I'm sure we'll win," I said, hoping to give her the impression I was so confident that-on top of everything else-she needn't worry about her fourteen-year-old daughter.

"Oh, I'm sure we will, too," she said.

"And then everything will get back to normal."

She opened her mouth to speak, and I heard in my mind the echo-Sure, Connie, sure. Then everything will get back to normal-but no words came out, not even a whisper. Instead she nodded, but we both knew in our hearts that Charlotte's death had changed everything forever. For my mother, nothing would ever be normal again.

Chapter 16.

They finally finished selecting the jury this afternoon. I think the lawyers would have kept asking questions into Wednesday, but the judge had heard enough by lunchtime today, and both sides agreed at three o'clock to make their picks.

Vermont is a small state, and Stephen was sure that a lot of the group would be excused because they knew me or Charlotte, but that only happened one time. And it wasn't like the guy really knew either of us. He'd gone to visit Asa's church one Sunday to see if it would be a good congregation for his family-he'd decided it wasn't-and he'd shaken Asa's hand when the pastor was greeting everyone as they filed out after the service.

There are two people on the final jury who were born at home, but that's just because they're in their sixties-they were born when it was still pretty rare up here to go to a hospital to have a baby.

There were also a couple of people in the big pool at the beginning who had had their babies at home, one who I'm pretty sure used Molly Thompson, but they were both dismissed. Behind me, I heard Rand swear under his breath when their numbers were called and they were excused, a little "Damn!" that I'm sure only Peter and I picked up, but I turned around anyway to give him a little wink that said, It's okay, it doesn't matter.

But of course it does.

Stephen doesn't want me turning around to wink at my family or look at the people behind us, but I still do sometimes. I can't help it, it's like a reflex. Sometimes I just have to see Connie. I winked once at her today, too. Just because.

I wish Connie were little again. I wish she were little and I were young-maybe not newborn little, although I did love swaddling the warm and gurgling and incredibly tiny thing she once was. I wish Connie were maybe two or three again, when she was this beautifully funky little person who loved to dance and spin and climb all over the couch like it was a mountain, and was always singing words to songs with the little twists Rand and I made up:

"Twinkle, twinkle, little moon. Won't you brighten Connie's room?"

Connie was the best hugger when she was two. Just the best. She'd wrap her little arms around my neck and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze: "Hug, Mommy!" I loved that so much.

And when Connie was two, all of this stuff I'm putting my family through right now was still years and years away. I wish it could be that way again. I wish my life weren't this record album someone gave me that's almost over, and only the first couple of songs were any good.

Does that sound selfish? I'm sorry if it does, because I don't mean to sound selfish, or like I'm this pathetic victim who's been screwed by some cosmic disc jockey or record producer. I know what mistakes I've made, I know where I've screwed up.

Sometimes this week I've turned around to look at Charlotte's family, too, at her sister and her mother. Charlotte's sister bites her nails just the way Charlotte did. She keeps her fingers straight. We made eye contact a couple of times today, and I thought she was just going to break down and sob when we did.

Seeing her face and sitting so close to her has made me feel absolutely pregnant with guilt. I feel it growing inside me, I half-expect to touch my tummy with my left hand and feel something move. A little kick. One of those hiccups.

Charlotte's sister despises me. Both she and her mom despise me. It's a terrible feeling to be despised, and alone in my room when the world is asleep-at least my world-it seems like I've earned this.

And yet the weirdest thing is, Charlotte's family probably wouldn't hate me so if I hadn't tried to save Veil. The nephew of one, the grandson of the other.

Stephen says by the time this thing is over, everyone will understand that. He says he'll make sure everyone will see that I could have let that little baby die right there inside his mother, and if I had, none of us would be here right now. He'll show them it would have been an even worse tragedy because two people would have died instead of one, and yet no one would be sitting around inside a courtroom all day long pointing fingers at everyone else.

I haven't seen Veil since he was born. Will he, too, grow up to despise me? Will he, too, blame me for killing his mother?

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

ALL SUMMER AND INTO the fall I had been afraid that Bill Tanner could send my mother to prison and destroy my family. But it wasn't until the first Wednesday morning of the trial when I looked out the window of the courtroom and saw the gunmetal gray clouds rolling in from the northwest that I began to fear the man was sufficiently powerful to control the weather, too. The skies darkened and the room grew dim as he launched into his opening argument, and to this day the state's attorneys in Orleans County shake their heads and laugh when they tell stories of the way Bill Tanner timed his outline of the case against Sibyl Danforth to coincide with a cloudburst.

Outside of the courtroom, of course, to the shoppers on Main Street in Newport or to the leaf peepers wandering the back roads in Jay, it was just another rainy day in autumn. It was only to those of us in the third-story courtroom with the panoramic views of lake and mountains to the north that it seemed to have unnerving supernatural significance.

"No one is going to tell you that Sibyl Danforth is an evil person. No one is going to tell you that she is a cold-blooded murderer," Tanner said. "If anything, you're going to hear from the defense what a fine person she is… what a remarkable person she is. For all I know, they're going to tell you she's an excellent mother, the perfect wife. Maybe she is. Maybe she isn't. For your purposes, however, none of that matters. None of it.

"Sibyl Danforth has been charged with practicing medicine without a license, and she has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. No one is saying she murdered anybody. But she did kill someone. That's a fact, and that's what matters.

"A young woman is dead and buried in an Alabama cemetery because of Sibyl Danforth, and a father is faced with the daunting task of raising two small boys on his own. Imagine: Little Jared Bedford only enjoyed the unique and nurturing love of his mother for seven years. Seven short years. Even worse, his baby brother, Veil-a baby who, mercifully and miraculously, survived both Mrs. Danforth's incomprehensible negligence and her cavalier use of a kitchen knife-will never, ever know the woman who should have raised him: Charlotte Fugett Bedford."

Tanner shook his head and sighed before continuing. "Charlotte Fugett Bedford is dead because of Sibyl Danforth. Undeniably. Indisputably. Incontrovertibly. A twenty-nine-year-old woman is dead because of Sibyl Danforth's criminal recklessness. And if Mrs. Danforth is not the sort of person who would take a handgun and shoot one of you over money or drugs or… or in a crime of passion, it is upon her shoulders that the death of Charlotte Bedford rests. Sibyl Danforth killed her. Pure and simple: Sibyl Danforth killed her. That's why we're all here right now."

The fly fisherman looked at specific jurors as he spoke, as if he were eulogizing a river they'd once fished together that was now dry or polluted beyond use. For emphasis, he would occasionally pause and look out the window at the storm clouds, but he always seemed to turn back toward the jury when he had a particularly dramatic point he wanted to make.

"The defense is going to try and convince you that this is a complicated case with a lot of gray in it, and they are going to parade into this courtroom a whole lot of so-called experts who have probably never set foot in Vermont before. Never. But you will soon see this case isn't so complicated.

"We will show you that from the moment Charlotte and Asa Bedford sat down with Sibyl Danforth to discuss the notion of having their baby in their home, Mrs. Danforth behaved with the sort of gross irresponsibility that could only result in tragedy.

"Should Charlotte Bedford have even been allowed to have her baby in her bedroom in the first place? We will show that other midwives-as well as probably every single reasonable physician on this planet-would have said no. The risk was too great.

"Did Charlotte and Asa understand this risk? It is clear they did not. Either Mrs. Danforth did not appreciate the risk herself or she chose not to share her knowledge of the risk with her clients; either way, she never warned the Bedfords of the dangers of their decision.

"On the day that Charlotte Bedford went into labor, did Sibyl Danforth even demonstrate the common sense to consider the weather? No, she did not. Did a woman born and raised right here in Vermont, a woman who must know the… the orneriness and capriciousness and downright uncertainty of Vermont weather, discuss with the Bedfords the chance that they'd be trapped in their home in the event that something went wrong? No. She did not."

The rain had not yet begun to drum against the wide glass windows opposite the jury box, but I noticed a few of the jurors looked past Bill Tanner at the ominous sky outside. I couldn't help but do so, too.

"And then that night," he said, "when she realized that because of her own astonishing lack of foresight she and a woman in labor were cornered in a bedroom miles and miles from the help a hospital would have provided, what did Mrs. Danforth do? She had Charlotte push… and push… and push. Hours beyond what any doctor would have allowed, she had Charlotte push. Hours beyond what a healthy woman could have endured, she had her push. Without anesthesia. Without painkillers. She had her push."

My mother moved little during the onslaught. Occasionally she turned toward the lake, and she might have been watching the whitecaps the storm had churned up, but she sat stolidly with her hands clasped before her on the table. Once in a while Stephen or Peter wrote something down, but my mother never even reached for her pen. It was as if she were anesthetized, or had grown inured to hate. Although my father and I both grew flushed with rage, she seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

"Sibyl Danforth had the poor woman push for so long that she thought she had killed her! She actually believed she had had one of her mothers push for so long, so nightmarishly long, that the woman had finally died. Pushed to death, so to speak. The irony? Sibyl Danforth hadn't pushed her to death. She almost had. But not quite. Charlotte Bedford did not die from pushing. It took a ten-inch knife with a sparkling six-inch blade to do that.

"You will all see-and I am sorry beyond words to say this-when we are done, that one woman is dead because the individual sitting at that table over there took a kitchen knife and brutally gouged open Charlotte Bedford's stomach in the poor woman's own bedroom, and she did so while the woman was still breathing."

He eyed my mother and then shook his head in disgust. My mother didn't flinch, but beside me my father did. He crossed and recrossed his legs.

"This crime is appalling on many levels, but you will find two especially galling: Charlotte Bedford would not have died in a hospital. This is clear. And Charlotte Bedford would not have died had she been cared for throughout her pregnancy by a physician. Obviously, Sibyl Danforth is not a doctor. She is a midwife. And while the women who call themselves midwives claim to have all sorts of arcane knowledge, while they claim to be able to deliver babies, in reality they know little more about medicine than you or I. Sibyl Danforth has never been to medical school. She has never been to nursing school. She does not have a license to practice medicine. In fact, she has so little medical training of any kind that between six and six-thirty on the morning of March fourteenth, she couldn't even tell the difference between a living woman and a dead one! Let's face it, Sibyl Danforth is no more certified to deliver babies than the woman at the stationery store who sold me my newspaper this morning, or the teenage boy who filled my car with gasoline!"

Tanner paused to let the vision grow real in the jurors' minds: a teenage boy with acne and a baseball cap and grubby hands delivering a baby.

In the momentary silence, however, I heard the sound of a baby about to nurse in the back of the courtroom, and I was glad. An adolescent grease monkey was a powerful image, but it seemed to me it paled before a nursing newborn. The little thing behind us cried briefly with hunger, then cooed when her mother opened her blouse and she saw the breast from which she was about to eat.

When Tanner resumed, he stood up straight and rested one hand on the rail of the witness stand, then empty. "The defense might insist that this trial is about the way the medical profession has stolen the process of birth from the women to whom it rightly belongs," he said, his voice growing more animated as he approached what I assumed would be a crescendo of sorts. "Well, that's hogwash. They might argue that this trial is about the right of pregnant women to choose to have their children at home. That's hogwash, too.

"This trial is about one thing, and one thing only: Sibyl Dan-forth's pattern of irresponsibility and misjudgment, a pattern that led inevitably to the mistake that cost Charlotte Bedford her life. The definition of involuntary manslaughter in Vermont is clear-you have heard it from the judge-and the case before you is a horrifying but altogether perfect example: Sibyl Danforth was grossly negligent. Sibyl Danforth engaged in conduct which involved a high degree of risk of death. And on the morning of March fourteenth, 1981, she indeed caused the death of Charlotte Fugett Bedford-as the statute says, 'another human being.'"

Tanner might have been about to say more, but the storm spared him the effort: Almost on cue, perhaps a second after quoting the statute, a gust of wind slammed the first sheet of rain into the picture windows behind him with such force that it sounded like thunder and shook the glass.

I was only one of many women and men in the courtroom who gasped.

At my high school, we were allowed to miss study hall up to three times a quarter if we had a valid excuse like a doctor's appointment or-apparently-the involuntary manslaughter trial of one's girlfriend's mother. By passing on the study hall before lunch and skipping the history class that came after, Tom was able to string together almost three consecutive hours to drive up to Newport and surprise the Danforth family as we emerged from the courthouse. My parents invited Tom to join us at a restaurant, but he had brought with him sandwiches and soda and a vision of an autumn picnic for two, and they let us go our own way for an hour.

"Just don't talk to any reporters," Stephen said to us as we left the adults. "Please. In fact, don't talk to anyone… please."

It was still pouring, so Tom and I ate our sandwiches in the front seat of the rusty Sunbird his older brother had finished repairing but would not be picked up by its owner until the end of the week. He had double-parked beside the Newport Library, an austere brick, almost imposing monolith across Main Street from the courthouse.

During most of our lunch we didn't speak of the trial, although I don't believe either of us was explicitly or consciously avoiding the subject. He'd asked how it was going as soon as we were seated in the automobile, and I'd told him what a mean son of a bitch Bill Tanner was, but then we'd moved on to other subjects: The fact that Sadie Demerest was going to break up with Roger Stearns. The fear we had that our football team would lose its first game that Friday night to St. Johnsbury, a much bigger school with, we had to assume, a much bigger and better team. The idea that Chip Reynolds was experimenting with the little tabs of acid his older brother was always bringing back from Montreal, and our firm belief that he was headed for trouble.

The rainstorm I'd watched that morning in the courtroom had come in from the north, and Tom told me of the armies of Canadian geese he'd seen flying south before it: I imagined great honking gray Vs in the sky, and in my mind I saw them flying overhead in wave after wave. He told me his uncle had gotten his first partridge of the year that day, a quick shot up on Gary Road just before breakfast, and he laughed at his uncle's pride in shooting a bird that "probably weighed about as much as a Snickers bar."

Before we parted, as I pushed the wax paper I'd crumpled into a ball into the bottom of my brown bag, I asked him if people in school were talking about the trial.

"I know one class, senior humanities, talked about it for a good forty-five minutes this morning. Made a lot of us wish we were a year older."

"You mean in class? They talked about it in class?"

"Honest to God. Garrett Atwood told me," he said, referring to a senior basketball player who was dating my precocious friend Rollie.

"And they were talking about the trial?"

"Not so much the trial," he said, pressing the smoldering tip of his cigarette into the ashtray, "as the way it's all so… so tragic. Mrs. Bedford being married to a minister and all."

I don't believe the word irony was a part of either of our working vocabularies back then, but I knew exactly what he meant.

"Did Garrett tell you how it ended?"

"I don't think the discussion really went anywhere, except a couple of girls ended up crying."

"For Mrs. Bedford? Or her husband?"

"Both. And for you and your mom."

"That's so sad."

"The whole thing's sad. Of course, Mr. Rhymer's a smart guy, and he kept everyone from getting hysterical. But Garrett said everybody still left feeling like this is one of those horrible things we're just not meant to understand."

"What about outside of class? Were people talking about it outside of class, too?"

"Well, yeah. Because you're not in school. But let's face it, if you were there, people would probably still be talking-just not when you were around," he added.

"What are they saying?"

He shrugged. "Oh, mostly that they think it's unfair what's going on. Most girls are saying they think it's A-OK to have a baby at home, and someday they probably will."

He didn't look at me as he spoke; he stared straight at the still-smoldering butt of his cigarette, and I knew instantly he was lying. I knew it with an intuitive, instinctive conviction. I knew, in fact, that exactly the opposite was true. The girls, when they spoke of me or my mother's situation at all, were sharing their fears about childbirth in general, and their astonishment that anyone would be stupid enough to try such a thing in their home.

"Like many midwives, she was probably viewed by the village with a mixture of awe and envy, fear and respect," Stephen said, referring to a late-eighteenth-century midwife whose diary he had studied. The woman had practiced in central New Hampshire, and her two-hundred-year-old diary had been discovered and published when I was in the sixth grade. Although I had not read the book, my mother and her midwife friends had, and the woman-Priscilla Mayhew of Fullerton-had become both a small saint and a large role model in their eyes.

"That's how it's always been with midwives," he said with dignified authority, pacing calmly before the jurors. "To some people, they're witches-or, these days, strange and somehow dangerous throwbacks to another era. But in the eyes of other people, they're healers. Not surprisingly, it always seems to be the women who see them as healers, and the men who are quick to cry witch. Or shaman. Or meddler. Midwives, by their very nature and profession, have always challenged authority; they've always been a bit too independent-in the eyes of men, anyway. The history of midwifery in America is filled with the names of women lionized by their own gender and ostracized by men. Names like Anne Hutchinson. That's right, Anne Hutchinson. The first religious leader in Colonial America who was a woman was also a midwife.

"In addition to having a brilliant mind, Anne Hutchinson had the strong heart and gentle hands of a midwife. And she had followers. So what happened to Anne? The men-the men-of Massachusetts banished her to the rough woods that with her help would become the fine state of Rhode Island.

"Did they ask the mothers how they felt about this? No. Of course they didn't," Stephen continued, and he shook his head and smiled at the jurors, offering them a grin that said, I'm not surprised, are you?

I followed his gaze to the group, hoping to see that they were as disgusted as he. I couldn't tell. Vermonters would make good poker players if they ever decided to give up military whist, and this particular batch of farmers and florists, schoolteachers and chimney sweeps, loggers and secretaries and journeyman carpenters was not atypical: They sat unmoving, many with their hands in their laps, their faces almost uniformly reserved, businesslike, and indecipherable.

There were seven women and five men on the jury. Both alternates were women, and so the box looked deceptively female. No one in the group had ever tried to have a baby at home, although I knew two of the three older women on the jury had themselves been born there. There were no doctors or nurses in the box, as Stephen desired, but obviously there were no midwives either, or people who were even related to midwives.

One man knew one midwife, but not very well, and another fellow-the part-time chimney sweep and part-time roofer-scraped the creosote regularly from the chimneys in one midwife's house. But he couldn't recall the two of them ever discussing birth while he was there.

Nobody on the jury worked at food co-ops or frequented natural-food grocery stores. Nobody said they had ever lived on communes.

There was one woman of childbearing age on the jury, the principal demographic Stephen was hoping to avoid. She was a woman in her late twenties with stylish red hair and the sort of makeup one usually saw in Vermont only on tourists visiting from New York City. She was a mother with children three and six years old, and plans to have more. She worked as a secretary at a ski resort, but none of us thought she did it for the money. Moreover, her grandfather had been a physician, and so she worried Stephen as much as anyone on the jury. She was smart, articulate, and properly-or improperly-inspired, she was the sort who could dominate deliberations.

Unfortunately, there had been panelists far worse from our perspective, and so she had stayed.

Stephen held up Priscilla Mayhew's diary for the group again, a hardcover book with a glossy dust jacket. There was a painting of a wooden birthing stool on the front, which was a source of endless frustration for my mother. Apparently it was highly unlikely Priscilla Mayhew had ever used such a thing, and a careful reading of the diary made that clear.

"Now, by the standards of late-twentieth-century America, was Mrs. Mayhew's maternal mortality rate high?" Stephen asked the jury rhetorically.

"Yes. By our standards it was. By our standards it was unacceptably high. Mrs. Mayhew witnessed one maternal death for every one hundred and ninety-two happy, healthy babies she delivered. Roughly two hundred years later, in 1981, barely one in ten thousand mothers dies while giving birth. And yet as recently as 1930, as recently as fifty years ago, in the United States one woman in one hundred and fifty died as a result of childbirth. One out of one hundred and fifty. You can look it up at the National Center for Health Statistics. Is there an irony here? You bet.

"In the United States in 1930, most of those women were laboring in hospitals, and they were laboring in the care of physicians.

"In other words, Priscilla Mayhew, eighteenth-century midwife, had a dramatically lower mortality rate than physicians practicing as recently as 1930.

"And while obstetrics has made impressive leaps in the last fifty years, the statistics show that today a planned home birth is every bit as safe as a hospital one-for babies as well as for mothers," Stephen said, striding toward the table where my mother and Peter were sitting. Peter handed him a piece of paper with columns of figures.

"The numbers in this research may surprise you, but here they are. In a recent study, one-point-three babies died out of every one thousand born at home, while one-point-seven died out of every one thousand born in some Minnesota hospitals… or two-point-four in one particular New York State hospital.

"My point? The people who are prosecuting Mrs. Danforth are going to be insisting that home birth is not merely irresponsible, it's insane. Well, you're going to see that they're wrong. It may not be the right choice for some women, but it's no more dangerous for most than a hospital birth. Let's face it, women have been having babies in their homes since, well, since the beginning of time. And until recently, they were cared for by the likes of Priscilla Mayhew: knowledgeable, tireless, loving midwives. Women who dedicated their lives to their sisters in labor. Who were these women?

"There's one sitting right before you. Sibyl Danforth. As you know, Sibyl Danforth is a midwife. You will learn that she is a knowledgeable midwife. A tireless midwife. A loving midwife.

"Most important, you will learn that she is an excellent midwife.

"You will learn that statistically her babies did every bit as well as babies born at North Country Hospital, and her mothers actually did better. That's right, her mothers did better. They had fewer episiotomies, fewer lacerations, and fewer surgical interventions," he said, meaning cesarean sections. He had explained to my family that he was going to use euphemisms wherever possible in the beginning-words like lacerations, for example, instead of perineal tears-and he was going to avoid the word cesarean at all costs. That word, and all it connoted, would become a fixture in the trial soon enough, he had said.

"In all of her years of delivering babies and tending to mothers, only one woman died. Charlotte Bedford.

"And please understand, we are not going to tell you that her death isn't a tragedy. It is, my God, of course it is," Stephen said, and he ran his hand over the lacquered wood at the edge of the court reporter's desk. Almost all of the wood in the courtroom was so sleek that it shined, especially the dark amber posts that bordered the doors like Doric columns.

"And no one is sadder about that fact than Sibyl Danforth. Is Charlotte Bedford's family devastated by the loss? Yes. Any family would be. But Sibyl Danforth is devastated, too. After all, Sibyl Danforth saw her die. She was there, she was present in the room. She saw the woman die.

"But Sibyl Danforth did not kill her, and that is what this case is all about," he said, and he paused. For a long moment he stood perfectly still before the jury box in his banker's gray, one-click-above business suit, unmoving. His back was absolutely straight, his hands were at his sides, and for the first time that day I was reminded that Stephen was a war veteran.

And then abruptly he spread both arms to his sides, and with a sudden flourish brought them down hard onto the rail before him, so near to one juror that the young man flinched when they hit.

"For God's sake, Sibyl Danforth didn't kill someone," Stephen said, "she saved someone. Sibyl Danforth didn't take the life of one young woman that morning in Lawson, she saved the life of one baby boy. That's what happened, that's the truth: She rescued a baby from his dead mother.

"The State, of course, is claiming otherwise, insisting that Charlotte Bedford was alive when Sibyl Danforth performed the rescue. Where did this allegation come from? The opinion of a terrified, exhausted, and naive twenty-two-year-old woman, that's where: a woman who hadn't yet seen a dozen births, but had just endured the drama of her young life. The State is going to ask you to take the word of this twenty-two-year-old apprentice over that of the defendant, an experienced midwife who has safely delivered over five hundred babies. A woman who probably knows more about cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency medical treatment than most paramedics.

"Make no mistake: Sibyl Danforth knows about birth, but she also knows about death. She is too well trained to confuse a live person with a dead one. Charlotte Fugett Bedford was dead when Sibyl Danforth saved the life of the child in her womb."

He turned toward my mother and pointed at her: "This woman isn't a felon, she's a hero! Her actions weren't criminally negligent, they were courageous! She's courageous!"

It hadn't rained since just before lunch, but the skies showed no signs of clearing. Stephen paced toward the window, looked briefly at the clouds, and then stared at the jury from across the courtroom.

"There are risks to birth, and there are risks to home birth," he said, his voice even, almost wistful. "You know that, and so did Charlotte Bedford. Both she and her husband knew the risks. The State insists that Mrs. Danforth did not share with them the risks. We will show you the State is wrong.

"The State says what Mrs. Danforth did was practice medicine without a license. We will show you that she did only what any decent and courageous person-perhaps any of you-would do, given the same horrifying choice: Two deaths. Or one.

"Finally, the State is going to tell you that Charlotte wouldn't have died had she labored in a hospital. We'll never know that. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because Charlotte Bedford made the informed decision to have her baby at home. And you will see that when Charlotte Bedford's labor failed to progress the way my client would have liked, my client indeed did everything in her power to get the woman to a hospital. Everything. Unfortunately, ice and wind and rain conspired against her.

"Charlotte Bedford's death is a tragedy. We know that. The State knows that. But given Charlotte and Asa Bedford's desire to have their child at home, a right protected by the state of Vermont, it was unavoidable-as you will see.

"The only reason my client is even on trial is because we have doctors in this state who want to see home birth disappear as an option; they want the whole idea to go away. They want to see every baby in this state born in a hospital. The whole idea that a midwife can do what they do-and do it better-drives some of them crazy, and so they're persecuting my client. A woman who is an excellent midwife. And I use the word persecute advisedly: They're not just prosecuting Sibyl Danforth, they're persecuting her. Her and her… kind.

"Doctors are doing now to Sibyl Danforth exactly what men have done to midwives for centuries, since the days when Anne Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts. They're trying to drive Sibyl Danforth away. And they're trying to do it by charging her with crimes she didn't commit."

He nodded at the judge and then murmured a soft thank you to the jury. He then took his seat beside my mother and rested his chin in his hand.

At the time I thought it had been a powerful and impressive argument, and although almost two weeks of testimony still loomed, I certainly would have resolved to acquit my mother of all charges had I been sitting in the jury box. But there was something gnawing at me when Stephen sat down, and it wasn't until my family was driving home and I was alone with my thoughts in the backseat of the car that I figured out what it was: Although Stephen had said in a variety of eloquent ways that my mother did not kill Charlotte Bedford, he never did say exactly why the poor woman had died.

Chapter 17.

I could probably figure out roughly the number of times I've reread what I wrote on March 15. I'd just have to count on a calendar the number of days that have passed since then to get a good estimate, because few days have gone by when I haven't looked at that entry. I think I started writing about four-thirty in the morning because I couldn't sleep, and I don't think I stopped until Rand got up a couple hours later. It was the Saturday we met Stephen.

That entry's like a car accident to me. I'm drawn to it, I find myself staring at the words.

When Stephen and Bill Tanner were giving their opening arguments today, they each had their own versions of what happened, and I kept thinking of mine-what I wrote on the fifteenth. After all this time, it seems to me that mine's become just one more version, too. I have a version, and Asa has a version, and Anne has a version. And we expect these twelve people to make some decision about what really happened, when even we can't agree.

Did I really love catching babies once in my life? God, I know I did, because I did it for years. And my diary is filled with the ways I loved it; I can run my fingers over the words-my words. But I haven't caught a baby in months now, I haven't felt a mother's surge while she's in labor since the spring.

And I just can't remember anymore what it felt like.

All that pleasure I once experienced has gotten to be like pain, the sort of sensation you just don't remember very well when it's over and done with. Very few of us really remember pain when it's gone; we can't recall how awful it was. That's what all the pleasure I once got from birth has become: a vague word that doesn't mean very much.

Next week I'm going to sit on the witness stand and I'm going to tell everyone what I think happened, and I'll probably find it in me to be really cool and together about it. I'm sure I'll be every bit as confident about what happened as Stephen wants me to be, because that's what I have to do now for my family.

But the truth of the matter is, I just don't have any idea anymore what really happened.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

IN THE WEEKS BEFORE my mother's trial and the weeks of the trial itself, it was all my parents could do to take care of themselves. Their teenage daughter was certainly not the lowest priority in their lives, but, understandably, their attention was not focused upon me.

During the nights the trial was under way, I was supposed to be home in my room doing the sort of reading that the adults around me had concluded did not demand either class discussion or an academic's explanation. The school's guidance counselor had met with my teachers and my mother the week before the trial began, and everyone had agreed I'd try and keep up with my English and history, and then catch up in math and science and French when all this had passed.

Looking back, I'm astonished that anyone would have demanded such a thing. The adults were exhausted after each day in court, and so was I: After watching my mother savagely attacked for six to eight hours, I was in no condition to work.

Likewise, my parents were too tired to discipline me, too spent to even remind me that I was supposed to be doing my homework.

Consequently, I spent a good part of the night after the opening arguments, the first Wednesday of the trial, in the McKennas' barn with Rollie and Tom and Garrett Atwood. The four of us were so stoned by ten o'clock that we were actually cupping our hands around the snout of poor Witch Grass and trying to blow the dope we'd just held in our own lungs into hers.

The horse got a little giddy, but not like us. The day's rain had left the inside of the barn damp, but Tom and Garrett had the testosterone-driven insight to bring blankets with them as well as marijuana, and Tom and I curled up to neck in one corner of the barn, while Rollie and Garrett found a nook of their own. Most of the clouds had moved on to the east, and a magnificent harvest moon lit the sky through the few that remained.

By the time I staggered home shortly before midnight, the only lights on in our house were upstairs in my parents' bedroom. I assumed they were waiting up for me, and would descend upon me the moment I opened the front door. And so with the inspired logic of a stoned teenager, I wandered around to the back of our home and pulled open the storm window on the side of my mother's office. I'd always suspected by the way my father surrounded the metal edges with caulking and Mortite each fall that the storm window didn't close properly, and I was right. It was easy to open it from the outside, and easy to pull myself over the ledge and crawl into the room.

Beside the window was my mother's desk, and in the moonlight I could see that one of her notebooks was open upon it. Earlier that evening she had apparently been writing.

I pushed shut the door, pressing it silently into its frame so no light would escape when I switched on the desk lamp. Had I not been stoned, I like to believe I would have respected my mother's privacy and left her diary alone, but I can't say for sure that's the case. And regardless of whether drugs can or should excuse bad behavior, there's no question they can often explain it. Hunched over the desk, I started to read, and when I saw what my mother had written about March 15, I flipped back the pages a full half a year.

In my parents' minds, I hadn't come home until two in the morning, because that was the time I finally stopped reading and decided to come upstairs. And though their room seemed silent when I started up the steps, their door opened the moment I reached the landing, and I realized they were both awake.

Had my mother not been on trial that moment, I probably would have been grounded through Thanksgiving. But she was on trial, and as angry as my parents were at me for worrying them and behaving irresponsibly, it was clear that they attributed my behavior to the strain of the trial and the long days spent in court. They blamed themselves more than me and took some comfort in the knowledge that I'd been no farther from home the whole time than Rollie's barn, and I'd been there with a group of other kids.

We were all cranky at breakfast the next morning from too little sleep, and only I had an appetite, but otherwise Thursday began the way the rest of the week had: My parents discussed what Stephen had said was likely to occur that day in the courthouse, and I listened and learned and worried.

The first witness Bill Tanner put on the stand wasn't a state trooper or doctor; it wasn't the medical examiner or a midwife.

It was a weatherman. The first person I saw testify under oath was the voice of Vermont Public Radio's twice-daily "Eye on the Sky," the principal source of weather information back then for most of us in the Northeast Kingdom. The fellow was shorter than I had imagined, but he was also much cuter. Listening to his voice in the car or some days over breakfast, I'd always envisioned a tall geeky man with glasses, when in reality he was a strong, stocky fellow with wavy blond hair and apparently perfect eyesight.

He couldn't have testified for more than twenty minutes; he was probably gone from the courtroom by nine-thirty. I was fascinated by the way one bailiff led him into the room and another swore him in. Tanner then made sure everyone on the jury understood that this man was probably Vermont's foremost expert on weather-a meteorologist who not only forecast the weather but also taught meteorology at a college in the northern corner of the state-and he'd spent all of March 12 and 13 warning his listeners about the rains and the cold that were approaching, and the tremendous likelihood that highways would freeze.

"Did you ever suggest that people should stay off the roads?" Tanner asked him.

"I did," he answered. "Wednesday afternoon and all Thursday I said the storm would be nasty and there would be lots of black ice. I said the conditions would be extremely hazardous."

Then for good measure Tanner played the weatherman's two-minute forecast from Thursday the thirteenth's lunchtime edition of the "Eye on the Sky," and we heard a taped version of the fellow saying exactly that.

"Her body was under a sheet, and it was pulled up to her neck," said Leland Rhodes, the state trooper who to this day comes to mind whenever I see a trooper's green car fly past me on the interstate. He sat on the stand with his shoulders straight and his wide-brimmed trooper's hat in his lap. His uniform was so crisp and well ironed that the fabric looked as unbending as the clothes painted on plastic dolls. Whatever distrust people have these days for police officers was untapped in our small corner of the Kingdom in 1981, and Rhodes was a powerfully honest figure.

Besides, as Tanner had gone to great pains to make clear to the jury, Rhodes had no reason to exaggerate or to lie.

"You knew she was dead?" Tanner asked.

"We knew from the radio call that she was dead before we arrived."

"The dispatcher had informed you?"

"That's right."

"Describe the condition of the bedroom," Tanner said, and beside me my grandmother flinched.

Before Rhodes could begin, however, Stephen stood to object: "Your Honor, this line of questioning is completely gratuitous."

Judge Dorset shook his head and said he would allow it. With the help of an occasional question from the state's attorney, Rhodes then told the jury what he had seen when he arrived at the Bedfords'. His voice remained forceful but calm, even when he was recalling particularly grisly details, and he spoke for close to an hour before he finished and Stephen was allowed a cross-examination.

Rhodes began with his discovery of the way my mother's station wagon was lodged in a snowbank, and how he and his partner had to walk slowly across the yard to the front door: They had thought the grass would offer better footing than the bluestone glazed over with ice.

No one answered the door when they knocked, but they had expected that, and they let themselves in and shouted up the stairs from the front hall. My mother called from the bedroom to join them on the second floor.

Although Rhodes noted that his watch said seven thirty-four, the drapes were still drawn in the bedroom, and only the floor lamp in the corner was on. The room, in his opinion, was depressing and dim and quiet except for Asa Bedford's hiccuplike sobs.

He said Anne Austin was seated in a chair against one wall, rocking the baby in her arms. He thought the baby was asleep. Asa was sitting on the bed by his wife, his body partway hunched over hers, and my mother was sitting behind him, rubbing his shoulders as he cried.

Rhodes usually spoke directly to the jury or to Tanner. After watching other witnesses over the next week and a half, it became apparent even to me that Rhodes-like many police officers-testified often and was comfortable in the witness stand.

"Tell us about the items you found in the room," Tanner suggested, and Rhodes obliged. He began with the basics of any home birth, the sorts of things that might just as easily have peppered the aftermath of an experience my mother would have viewed as exquisitely beautiful: A box of fresh sanitary pads, and a waste-basket filled with used ones. A rectal thermometer. A bulb syringe, still partially filled with mucus. An opened tube of a jelly lubricant. A glass of water with a straw in it. Metal clamps. A Dixie cup of orange juice. Scissors. A pie plate in which the placenta would have been received. A needle. A vial of Pitocin. Paper towels. Three brown paper grocery bags in which the Bedfords had sterilized the sheets and blankets and towels they had carried into the bedroom, and then all of those linens themselves, some folded and fresh, some dark red with dried blood.

He said he saw a pillow that he imagined belonged on a couch downstairs, because it was such a deep crimson it didn't match anything in the bedroom, but then he realized the pillow was soggy with blood. A moment later he noticed an empty packet of sutures on the nightstand, and the blood on the sheet upon Mrs. Bedford, some of the patches so thick that Rhodes said they looked more like scabs than stains.

"Did you see the knife?" Tanner asked.

"Not right away."

"Why not?"

"It had been removed from the bedroom."

"Do you know who removed it?"

"Mrs. Danforth said she did."

"Where did she take it?"

"We found it in the kitchen."

"Did she tell you why she brought it there?"

"She said she didn't want the woman's husband to have to continue looking at it."

"What condition was the knife in?"

"It was completely clean. All the blood and tissue were gone from the blade, and there were still soap bubbles in the sink."

Tanner then strolled back to his table, and his deputy handed him a clear acetate filled with handwritten papers. At the table before me Stephen reached for what I assumed was a photocopy of the same document.

He brought the acetate forward to Rhodes and said, "Let me show you what has been marked State's seventeen for identification. Do you recognize it?"

"I do. It's the statement Corporal Tilley and I took from Mrs. Danforth the night of the incident."

Tanner nodded, and moved for the admission of the statement into evidence. Stephen immediately objected, arguing as he had in a motion that summer that the statement was inadmissible because it had been taken without an attorney present. But he was overruled because in the judge's opinion the issue had already been resolved, and Rhodes took the court through what my mother had told the troopers that very first night.

"Did Anne Austin say anything to you that might have led you to believe Sibyl was responsible for Mrs. Bedford's death?" Stephen asked Rhodes shortly before lunch.

"Do you mean the morning we got there?"

"Yes, I mean that morning."

"No."

"What about Asa Bedford? Did he tell you he thought my client had done something… wrong?"

"No."

"Could he have? Did he have an opportunity?"

"I guess."

"But he didn't."

"No."

"Not even when you two were alone in the kitchen around ten after eight."

"No."

Stephen stared at him but remained silent, and allowed the trooper's answers to linger in the room a long moment.

Once when Leland Rhodes was testifying, as he and Stephen were arguing over whether the trooper had even viewed the Bedfords' house as a crime scene when he first arrived, Charlotte's sister began to sob. These were not unobtrusive tears, these were the sorts of whimpers that left unchecked would grow loud.

Almost simultaneously Stephen and Tanner approached the bench, and for a short moment the judge and the lawyers whispered with their backs to us. When they were through and the lawyers had returned to their tables, Judge Dorset said to the courtroom, his eyes roaming from one side to the other, that he understood well the way trials tend to provoke strong emotions, but everyone present needed to keep their feelings to themselves, and anyone who couldn't would be asked to leave the courtroom.

Charlotte's brother-in-law hugged his wife against his chest with one arm, and slowly she settled down. Stephen and the trooper resumed their debate, and although my mother was absolutely convinced that the idea hadn't even crossed Rhodes's mind that morning that a crime might have occurred, the trooper just kept repeating, "A woman was dead, and I knew the medical examiner would be the one to determine the cause of death."

Later that day Peter Grinnell told me that as pleased as Stephen had been when Charlotte's sister finally quieted down, Bill Tanner was probably even happier: The last thing the prosecution wanted was a mistrial because some family member couldn't stop crying.

Two weeks before the trial began, I listened to my mother on the phone with Stephen Hastings. It was late: The dinner plates were tucked in the dishwasher, my father was upstairs in bed. My mother had already taken a bath.

"Sure, I've met male midwives," she was saying, and I wondered if she knew I was nearby. She was curled up on the couch in the den in a cotton nightgown, and I'd come downstairs for a history book I'd left on the kitchen counter.

"No, not anymore," she continued. "I don't think there are any more right now in Vermont or New Hampshire. The few there were went on to other things."

I might have gotten the textbook and then left, but I heard her giggle, and the sound of her laughter had become so rare that I was unable to leave without hearing more.

"You'd be terrible, Stephen, just god-awful. You view breasts like a teenager. I hate to think of the way you'd handle a prenatal! You'd have too much fun… Yes, but it's not that kind of fun… Maybe someday I will, sure… With books and pictures… With books and pictures only…"

I'd seen my mother flirt lightly with the men she and my father had known for years, the male halves of the couples that formed their circle of friends, but I'd never imagined her flirting with one on the phone. Perhaps because my father was absent, perhaps because she was wearing a thin, almost transparent nightgown, this seemed more illicit to me, and I found myself frozen in something like wonder.

"It's not an aphrodisiac, I promise. I don't think male ob-gyns go home hot and bothered, do you?… Well, you're a pervert… Then maybe you're all perverts! But I don't really think so. Fortunately, the kind of men who become midwives or ob-gyns don't have your uniquely weird one-track mind," she said, and for a brief moment her voice had the sparkle that once brightened most of her conversations.

"Hold on, will you, Stephen?" she said suddenly. "Connie? Is that you, sweetie?"

I stood perfectly still until she started speaking again. When she did, finally, I turned and tiptoed back up the stairs as fast as I could.

Perhaps because I had a vision in my mind of how most of my mother's midwife friends dressed-the jeans and the sweaters, the big boots and the sandals, the endless number of peasant skirts that must have come from walk-in closets the size of bedrooms-I was unprepared for the two women who testified just after lunch: a midwife, followed by an ob-gyn who had once been a midwife.

The midwife, Kimberly Martin, even looked like a doctor to me. She was wearing a woman's blue business suit, and she had short, fashionably teased hair. It was easy to see her in loose hospital scrubs.

I also noticed she had an engagement ring on her finger but no wedding band, which surprised me as well: She was probably a good ten years older than my mother, and apparently about to be married.

"How long have you been a certified nurse-midwife?" Tanner asked her.

"Fourteen years."

"Would you tell us what it means to be a certified nurse-midwife?"

"First of all, we're all registered nurses. That's basic. We have formal medical training. Secondly, we've all graduated from one of two dozen advanced-education programs around the country that focus on women's health care and midwifery. Third, we've all passed the certification exam given by the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Finally-and personally, I believe this is very important-we all meet the requirements of the health agencies or medical boards of the state where we practice."

"And you have still more training, don't you?"

"Well, yes, I have a master's. From Marquette."

"Are you a member of the American College of Nurse-Midwives?"

"I am. This year I'm also part of the Division of Accreditation."

Tanner smiled as if he was pleasantly surprised, and I wondered if he hadn't known this detail. "How many nurse-midwives are there in this country?" he asked.

"About twenty-five hundred."

"Do most nurse-midwives deliver babies at home?"

"Oh, no, just the opposite's true. The vast, vast majority of us work in hospitals or birthing centers-almost ninety-five percent of us."

"What about you?"

"I have delivered babies at home, but I haven't since I was much younger. I prefer birthing rooms in hospitals."

"Why did you stop delivering babies at home?"

"In my opinion, it's needlessly risky."

"Did you have a bad experience?"

"Thank God, I didn't."

"What made you think it was dangerous?"

"Education. The more I learned about obstetrics, the more I realized that allowing a woman to have a baby at home exposed everyone-mother and infant-to completely unnecessary hazards."

…

"You said roughly ninety-five percent of nurse-midwives work in hospitals and birthing centers. So that means roughly five percent don't?" Stephen asked Kimberly Martin.

"Yes."

"That five percent: Do they work in homes?"

"Yes."

"Do they have a higher infant mortality rate than the rest of the group?"

"No, they don't."

"About the same?"

"The numbers are small, so it's hard to make a statistical comparison."

"Bearing in mind the numbers are small: About the same?"

"Yes."

"How about maternal mortality? Do you see a greater incidence of maternal mortality among midwives delivering babies at home?"

"No."

"In fact, did any nurse-midwife in your organization see any woman die in home childbirth last year?"

"I don't think so. But that doesn't diminish-"

"In fact, none died, Miss Martin," Stephen said, cutting the woman off before she could elaborate on her answer. "Did you know Bell Weber?" he then asked.

"I did."

"Would you tell us who she was?"

"She was a nurse-midwife. She died this summer in a car accident."

"Did she deliver babies at home?"

Martin nodded. "In Maryland."

"Was she a member of your group?"

"Until she died."

"Was she on the Division of Accreditation with you?"

"Yes."

"Was she on any other committees for the American College of Nurse-Midwives?"

"She was chairing the home birth committee."

"Your organization has a home birth committee? Really?"

The midwife looked annoyed with Stephen, disgusted at the flippant way he'd asked the question. "Obviously we have such a committee."

"Is that because some midwives in your group still choose to practice there?"

"Yes."

Stephen nodded. "Does the American College of Nurse-Midwives formally oppose home birth?"

"No."

"Thank you."

Kimberly Martin was followed by another woman who had once caught babies in people's bedrooms, and then, apparently, decided this wasn't a particularly good idea. A few minutes after she began answering Bill Tanner's questions, I must have looked worried or nervous, because Patty Dunlevy turned to me and whispered that we had experts, too, and ours would be every bit as impressive as these people.

But that afternoon it was hard for me to believe we'd have anyone as accomplished as Dr. Jean Gerson. Thirty years earlier Jean had been a young midwife delivering babies at home; now she was an ob-gyn affiliated with a teaching hospital in Boston, a faculty member at Boston University's School of Medicine, and the author of two books on prenatal care.

She had also written extensively about the history of birth in America. It was she who reminded us early in her testimony that while labor is natural, it's dangerous: "Let's face it," she had added, "there was a time when women and babies died all the time in labor."

Dr. Gerson had reviewed the medical history Charlotte Bedford had supplied my mother the summer Veil was conceived, and she had examined the records my mother had kept, charting the woman's progress. And she told the jury that no responsible person, doctor or midwife, would have allowed Charlotte Bedford to labor at home. It was clear based on her first labor that she was a poor candidate for home birth, and it was evident during the pregnancy that she was too frail for the ordeal. She wasn't gaining enough weight, and she was anemic.

Moreover, Dr. Gerson was positively telegenic. She was a handsome, dignified woman who smiled when she spoke, the sort of person who was instantly likable at even the sort of distance-figurative as well as literal-that separated defense and prosecution tables in a courtroom. Years later when I was in medical school, I would recall her face and her voice, and I would find myself wishing I had gone to B.U.

Ironically, a part of my mother's defense was the fact that Charlotte was indeed an imperfect candidate for a home birth, but not because she was anemic: Stephen planned on making an issue of the fact that Charlotte had been treated for hypertension in Alabama but had never shared this information with my mother. And so when he stood to begin his cross-examination of Dr. Gerson at the end of the day, the sun so far to the west that the courtroom was lit almost solely by the big chandelier and the sconces along the walls, we all expected the two would have a brief and perfunctory conversation.

"Are many pregnant women anemic?" Stephen asked her, and I was surprised by the energy that still filled his voice. It may have been because I had been up so late the night before, and it may have been due to the stress, but I was exhausted. I couldn't imagine where Stephen got his strength.

"I wouldn't say many are 'anemic,' but I would say that many experience some small degree of anemia," she answered.

"Why is that?"

"When a woman is pregnant, her blood volume increases. Sometimes it increases by as much as half. And so there's a natural dilution, and a natural anemia."

"Is it treatable?"

"Yes."

"How?"

A newborn baby in the back of the courtroom started to whine and fuss, and I heard the sound of the long zipper on the front of his mother's dress. I saw many of the jurors glance reflexively in the woman's direction, and then Judge Dorset looked that way, too. Almost instantly all of the men turned away when they saw the woman place the nipple on her full breast into the infant's mouth, deciding to stare intently at Stephen or the doctor instead.

"Iron tablets. Ferrous sulfate, usually."

"Any side effects?"

"Indigestion sometimes. Often constipation."

"You said you've reviewed how Sibyl treated Charlotte Bedford's anemia, correct?" Stephen asked.

"That's right."

"What did Sibyl do?"

"She had her take iron tablets."

"Did her condition improve?"

"Not enough to merit-"

"Did Charlotte Bedford's condition improve?"

Dr. Gerson offered a broad smile that suggested to me-and I have to imagine to the jury as well-that she wouldn't stoop to Stephen's level of discourtesy and debate. If he wanted to interrupt her and cut her off, her smile said, fine. It made no difference to her.

"Yes," she said.

Stephen asked the court officer who was standing beside the rolling cart upon which Bill Tanner was piling his evidence for the medical records the State had just entered. He then handed the physician two sheets of paper lined with boxes and graphs.

"Do you recognize these?"

"They're the records your midwife kept of the deceased."

"These are the records you examined?"

"A part of them, yes."

"What are their dates?"

She adjusted her eyeglasses slightly and then answered, "One is from September fifteenth, 1980, and one is from February twelfth, 1981."

"I want to focus on the hematocrit values," Stephen said, referring to the term the medical community uses to describe the percentage of blood occupied by red corpuscles. All of us in the courtroom had learned the term during the first part of Dr. Gerson's testimony. "What was Charlotte Bedford's hematocrit value in September?"

"Thirty-one percent."

"What is it normally?"

"Oh, around forty-two in most women. Slightly lower in a pregnant woman."

"How about February? What was the woman's hematocrit in February?"

"Thirty-five."

"Is that an improvement?"

"A slight one."

"When one of your patients-a pregnant woman-has a hematocrit value of thirty-five, do you anticipate a bad outcome?"

"That's an odd question, and I'm not sure it's relevant. After all, I deliver babies in hospitals. If you mean, would it affect my handling of the woman's preg-"

"I'll repeat the question: Would you anticipate a bad outcome?"

Dr. Gerson was silent for a moment. Finally she said simply, "No."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Stephen paced toward the windows with his hands behind his back. When he had put some distance between himself and the witness, he turned back toward her and asked, "You told us earlier that Charlotte Bedford's blood pressure was slightly higher than normal. Am I correct?"

"Yes."

"How would you have treated it?"

"I would have watched it very carefully. Perhaps placed her on bed rest. I don't know if I would have prescribed an antihypertensive. I might have."

"Would you have looked for protein in the urine?"

"Yes indeed."

"Based on those records, did Sibyl?"

"Apparently."

"Thank you. Is there any indication in Charlotte Bedford's medical records that she had ever been treated for hypertension in the past?"

"I didn't see any."

Slowly Stephen began to walk back toward her. I'd seen him do this enough during the day that I knew it was all part of a strategy of irritation and intimidation: He was about to invade the good doctor's personal space, practically leaning into the witness box with her.

"Am I correct that there's a box on the form that says 'Patient's History'?" he asked as he approached.

"Yes, there is."

"And it lists a variety of… conditions?"

"It does."

"What has been circled in the box?"

The doctor looked at the form and then read from it, "Bladder infections. German measles." When she looked up, Stephen was directly beside her, standing catty-corner so the jury could see both of their faces.

"That's it?"

"That's right."

"Have the words 'high blood pressure' been circled?"

"No."

He nodded and prepared for the kill. Sometimes, of course, even the best hunter misses his mark; sometimes the lion charges abruptly and flusters even the coolest rifleman. This would be one of those moments. And while Stephen would ask to have Dr. Gerson's remarks stricken from the record, and while the judge would agree, the jury had not missed what occurred and I could not imagine they would forget it when they were deciding my mother's fate.

"There is no indication that Charlotte Bedford shared her history of high blood pressure with Sibyl, is there, Doctor?"

"Bottom line, Counsel," the doctor said, speaking quickly but calmly, her voice gently condescending, "is that the records show the poor woman had symptoms of both anemia and high blood pressure. Both. No doctor or midwife in her right mind would ever have allowed that woman to labor at home."

We drove home Thursday night with the car's heater on, and I sat in the backseat with my knees curled up to my chest and my coat draped over me like a blanket. The heater in my mother's car could still warm the car like a woodstove, but during the previous winter it had developed a tendency to rattle, as if a piece of thick paper were caught somewhere in a vent.

My parents said little to each other, as they had most of the week. I imagine they were too spent to talk, and even if they had the energy, I doubt they would have known what to say. Occasionally my father would try and cheer up my mother by observing how Stephen had done a fine job taking apart one witness, or how the damaging testimony of another would be negated when Stephen began our defense.

Usually my mother would just mumble her agreement and stare at the trees we could see in the twilight.

When we got home, however, there were glass vases of roses awaiting my mother on the kitchen counters: a bunch of red ones, a bunch of yellow, a bunch of pink. My father had had them delivered during the day, and each vase had a large card beside it he'd made himself with old photos of the two of them, architectural blueprint paper, and the binder clips I knew he used for capabilities presentations for prospective clients. The cards were beautiful, and my mother was touched.

Later that night when they were passing my bedroom on the way to theirs, my mother was still talking about the cards and the flowers, and I found myself bragging about my father in phone calls to Rollie and Sadie and Tom.

Friday morning began with the testimony of a woman whose little baby my mother had hoped to deliver, but who had wound up giving birth via cesarean in a hospital instead. It had been a hard, unpleasant labor, and she said my mother had demanded she push for almost half a day: ten and a half hours of pushing and resting, pushing and resting, before my mother had finally-to use this woman's word-"allowed" them to leave for the hospital.

We were then treated to a man who insisted my mother had never warned him or his wife that there were greater risks involved with a home birth than with a hospital one. According to this fellow, he and his wife would never have tried to have their child at home had my mother been appropriately candid. Although the State was not allowed to ask the fellow how his baby's birth had turned out, my parents and I had to sit in agony throughout his testimony, aware of the fact that his infant was one of the tiny few whom my mother caught dead.

And, as lunch approached, the State squeezed in one more witness, a doctor who explained to us all what a prolonged second-stage labor meant, and the dangers it posed for the mother. The doctor was a researcher with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Washington, D.C., an organization of which I am now, ironically, a dues-paying member. Like Dr. Gerson, he viewed labor as a dangerous circus stunt: He was the witness who in one especially rare moment of rhetorical flourish compared a hospital to a car seat, and then jumbled a car accident and a kitchen appliance.

But it was clear the jury got the point, and thought Dr. Geoffrey Lang was a wise and compelling man.

In another particularly brutal exchange from my mother's perspective, he managed to simultaneously explain why pushing too long endangered a woman, while casting yet one more aspersion upon my mother's competence: "It's perfectly reasonable that someone with the limited training of a midwife would suspect a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Obviously, that's not what occurred in this case, but someone with only rudimentary obstetric education might think such a thing."

"What did occur?" Bill Tanner asked, and for the first time I heard spoken the word I'd seen written the month before on a wall in Stephen's office. Vagal. It was one of the words and expressions Tom Corts and I had seen scribbled in sprawling Magic Marker letters on the large sheets of white poster paper.

"She-and this is a shorthand term some doctors I know use in conversation-vagaled. She vagaled out." With clinical formality, he then began laying the groundwork for the testimony we would hear that afternoon from the medical examiner.

"You went easy on Farrell," my father told Stephen as we picked at our food during the recess for lunch. Farrell was the father who said my mother hadn't been clear about the risks that come with a home birth.

"He really wasn't all that damaging," Stephen said, and he asked Peter Grinnell to pass him a paper napkin from the metal box against the diner's wall.

"He made it sound like Sibyl hides things," my father continued.

Stephen touched a tip of the napkin to his tongue and then rubbed the moist paper over an ink smudge on the back of his hand. "Think so?"

"Yeah, I do. Don't you?"

Stephen looked at the skin on his hand and folded the napkin again and again until it was roughly the size of a quarter. "It seemed a lot worse to you than it was. The jury doesn't know that he and his wife had one of those bad outcomes."

The food on my father's plate, a grilled cheese and coleslaw, looked exactly as it had when the waitress brought us our lunches. The sandwich remained a pair of flat, butter-burned triangles, and the mound of coleslaw still held its ice-cream-scoop shape.

"What about that doctor?"

"Lang? I thought we went at it pretty good."

Peter signaled for the waitress to bring the check to our booth.

"I wish we'd done more."

"I made sure the jury understood that every word he said was conjecture. And I made sure they realized the guy never even saw the woman's body. Tell me, what more would you have wanted?" There was no edge to Stephen's question, no trace of irritation.

"He was a horse's ass. I wish we'd made that clear."

Stephen nodded, letting my father's frustration roll over him like a wave. When he saw the waitress drop the bill on the table by Peter, he reached inside his suit jacket for his wallet.

"Well, we'll get 'em this afternoon then," he said, and he sounded to me like my high-school track coach.

"Look," my mother said, her voice strangely groggy as she gazed out the window at Lake Memphremagog. "There must be something flat floating out there. Look at the seagulls."

Perhaps a hundred yards into the lake, dozens of seagulls were standing on the surface of the water-not floating or bobbing as one might expect, but standing with their small legs extended below them on pieces of driftwood. We all turned, and as I did I looked at my mother's eyes, and something about them suggested she hadn't heard a word my father and Stephen had said.

Chapter 18.

I doubt I'll ever talk to Anne again, so I guess I'll always be wondering: What did she think would happen when she picked up the phone and called B.P. Hewitt? Did she expect something different? Or did she get what she wanted?

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

ANNE AUSTIN HAD NOT worked with my mother for very long, and so she had not become a part of our lives the way her predecessors had. Heather Reed, for example, was no substitute for a big sister, but she spent close to six years on the periphery of our family-days and days doing prenatals in the room off the kitchen, dinners at our house almost weekly, the evenings she would baby-sit me when my mother and father would be out someplace together-and there was little of importance I wouldn't have shared with her when I was in elementary school. Heather always seemed to know when I'd been fighting with Rollie or Sadie, she was an unfailing source of help with my homework, and she was a strong shoulder in times of trouble.

But I had barely known Anne Austin when Charlotte Bedford died. Over the years it has become difficult for me to differentiate my opinion of the woman after the turmoil from my opinion of her before it, and to remember that I did not always despise her. But the fact is, Anne had only been a part of our lives for one winter when Charlotte died; she had only been assisting my mother since the previous December. She'd had dinner at our house two or three times, and on occasion I'd seen her coming and going on those days my mother had pregnant women stopping by for their checkups. She had struck me, I believe, as a sweet but mousy thing with brown hair she kept short: the sort of woman I came across once in a while in college who would trade a party on a Saturday night for an evening bent over books in the science library, yet would still fail to do very well on the exam. The trade, more often than not, was triggered by shyness rather than drive, and an organic chemistry test was merely a reasonable excuse to avoid loud music and aggressive boys.

But I don't think when I first met Anne I thought she was self-righteous or smug; I don't think I thought she had it in for my mother. That impression grew during the summer and fall as my mother's trial approached, and I'd hear the adults discussing once more what had occurred the night of the thirteenth and the morning of the fourteenth.

"And that's when you broke her water," Stephen said to my mother on one of those occasions, referring to Charlotte, when the two of them were alone in the kitchen.

"That's right."

"And what did Anne ask?"

"She didn't ask anything."

"But she said something…"

"She said, 'I don't understand why you did that.'"

"And it wasn't meant as the sort of question an apprentice might ask her midwife? It wasn't a… a part of the learning process?"

"No. She was irritated with me. She thought I was intervening."

"Intervening?"

"Interfering with the natural process."

"Was that the first time she had gotten mad at you?"

"She didn't get mad at me. She was just annoyed."

"First time?"

My mother laughed. "Good Lord, no!"

"She was often annoyed with you?"

"Anne has just read too many books and been around too few births," my mother said, and although I was listening from a perch on the steps in the front hall, I was sure she was rolling her eyes.

Anne was twenty-two when she came to my mother, and until that winter she hadn't seen a baby crown or caught a newborn once in her life. But she had visions in her mind of what a perfect birth was like, and it was clear from the dinners we shared that she had indeed read copiously about the subject. Under my mother's tutelage she studied hard, and my mother thought she was a fine apprentice, despite Anne's periodic frustration with what she viewed as my mother's tendency to intervene. Anne wanted desperately to become a midwife, and there was no reason to believe that someday she wouldn't succeed.

By the time the trial began, however, she had grown in my mind from a mousy little midwife-wannabe to an arrogant traitor of almost theatric proportions: pietistic, self-important, and-for reasons I couldn't fathom-bent upon the destruction of my family. She had left Vermont the weekend Charlotte Bedford died, apparently coming back only twice before the trial: once for a deposition and once to pack up the possessions she had left in the room she was renting from a college professor in Hardwick.

But when she had first phoned B.P. Hewitt-my mother's backup physician-six and a half months earlier, I doubt she hated my mother. I doubt she hated her even after B.P. tried to reassure her that she had not witnessed a cesarean on a living woman. When she picked up her phone to call the physician, I tend to doubt she even understood the fusion she was about to trigger, the linear progression of events she was about to unleash-a progression which, in hindsight, could not possibly have had a good end for my family. But for all I know, her intentions may even have been kind, her desires noble: A woman was dead, and something had to be done.

Yet the stakes must have grown large for Anne Austin that morning, and I would not be surprised if even today she cannot fully explain why she did what she did. Perhaps she thought that B.P. would share her first phone call with my mother, and that would effectively end her apprenticeship. After all, how could my mother ever trust Anne again after she had called her backup physician behind her back?

And so she had to convince herself that she was right, my mother was wrong. She'd call Asa Bedford, find out what he'd seen. And then, once she had broached her fears to the husband, fears reinforced by his own horrific memories-spurts of blood from the woman on the bed-she had to call the state's attorney. She had to. Perhaps she feared that the reverend would if she didn't, and then she herself might be charged as an accessory to a crime. She was, after all, the midwife's apprentice. She'd even gone with Asa to get the knife.

No, I really don't believe Anne Austin hated my mother when she started her phone calls that bitter morning in March. But I do believe she grew to hate her over the summer; I do believe she learned to despise her. She had to; her mental health demanded it. How else could she have justified the pain she was inflicting upon my mother and upon my family? How else could she have lived with herself?

By the time the trial began, I am quite sure in Anne's mind my mother was a sloppy and dangerous midwife, and deserving of the punishment before her.

I could see it the moment she arrived in court Friday afternoon, just after we'd all stood for the jury and judge and then retaken our seats. She marched to the witness stand, careful to stare straight ahead, but I could still see the loathing she had for us all sparkle in her round dark eyes, and the way she had her jaw set against us.

She and my mother hadn't spoken since they left the hospital in Newport that Friday morning in March; they hadn't said a single word to each other. I watched my mother study Anne as she was directed across the front of the courtroom and sworn in by one of the court officers, and it was as if my mother were seeing for the first time a twin she hadn't known before existed, or a rare and frightening animal in a zoo-the sort of creature that would cause one to run or cringe were there not steel bars as a buffer. My mother slowly swiveled her chair so she was facing Anne directly, and for one of the few times in the trial I actually saw her whispering to Peter and Stephen when the shock of seeing Anne finally wore off.

My mother seemed to be more perplexed than angry. Occasionally she shook her head slightly, a small gesture that seemed to me to be asking Anne, Why are you doing this to me?

Anne's voice had a slight trace of Boston I hadn't recalled from the winter, and it made her seem stronger, more authoritative. She was small-boned and she looked tired, but the young woman-a mere eight years older than I-sat up straight and spoke well, telling the jury in measured tones of the horrors she had witnessed, and how my mother had used a kitchen knife to cut open the stomach of a living woman in Lawson.

It was during Anne's testimony that the jury began growing uncomfortable, and began to steal glances at my mother. Although Anne did not begin speaking until the afternoon of the fifth day, the trial's first Friday, and although the panel knew well the outline of what had occurred in the Bedfords' bedroom, they had not yet heard an account from an eyewitness. And as Anne answered question after question Bill Tanner asked, I think Charlotte Bedford grew real for the first time in some of the jurors' minds.

In all likelihood, that was Tanner's plan. All of the individuals the State had put on the stand so far were mere warm-ups for the final three, a troika of powerful witnesses who in theory would seal my mother's fate. Anne Austin and the medical examiner on Friday afternoon. The Reverend Asa Bedford on Monday morning. Even at fourteen I understood instantly the logic of this progression: The first witness, the one who had initiated the litigious part of this saga, recounts the nightmare she saw. The second, an expert with powerful credibility, explains the exact cause of death. And the third, the one who had lost the most, serves as the medley's anchor.

What I did not appreciate until later that Friday (and what I might not have appreciated for years had Patty Dunlevy not explained it to me) were the subtleties of Tanner's order. The last witness the jury would hear before the weekend-two full days during which they would stew upon all they had seen and heard the first week-would be the coroner giving the State's version of the cause of death. Then, if the State had any fears that their case had lost momentum over the weekend, they knew that on Monday morning they had the widower left, a grieving but articulate pastor who was-to take liberty with a cliche-very much accustomed to public speaking.

By the time Stephen had an opportunity to cross-examine Anne, most of the jurors must have had a picture in their minds of Sibyl Danforth as an alarmingly slipshod midwife, a woman whose carelessness would eventually cost one mother her life. Moreover, when they envisioned my mother on the morning Charlotte Bedford died, they must have imagined her as a lunatic: a midwife who became hysterical and panicked, a woman who temporarily lost her mind and grew capable of hacking apart a living woman in the final stages of labor. (Would things have ended differently if insanity had actually been my mother's defense? They might have for me, perhaps, but in the long run the outcome would not have been much different for my mother. And though I did not know then that Stephen had once broached the idea of temporary insanity as a possible defense, at the time my mother still believed she would resume her practice once the trial was over, and vetoed the discussion instantly. No one, she told Stephen, wanted a midwife who went certifiable under pressure.)

Like my mother, Anne dressed for court in an uncharacteristically conservative outfit: a white blouse, cardigan sweater, and gray skirt. No midwife-wannabe work shirts for her that day; no baggy dresses with monster pockets. She looked like a young bank teller from Burlington.

Throughout her testimony she had avoided looking at my mother, and I noticed that when Stephen stood up to begin his cross-examination, he remained behind his table so Anne would at least have to stare in my mother's general direction.

"Prior to Veil Bedford's delivery, you had only seen nine births, correct?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And none of them resulted in an emergency situation, right?"

"That's right."

"Veil Bedford's was the first, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Prior to March fourteenth, had you ever been in an emergency situation?"

"Like what?"

Stephen strolled behind my mother's chair so Anne would see her. At first she turned toward the lake and stared at the puffy white clouds floating by over Canada instead. "A car accident, maybe. Ever been in a car accident where people were badly injured? Or come across one?"

"No."

"Plane crash?"

"Of course not."

Stephen shrugged. "Train wreck? Man with a heart attack? Baby falling into a pool?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Never?"

"Never."

"And you've never been with an EMT or rescue squad volunteer in a life-and-death crisis, have you?"

"No."

"Charlotte Bedford was the first, wasn't she?"

"Yes, she was."

"And you've never witnessed surgery of any kind, right?"

"Like in a hospital?"

"Yes. Like in a hospital."

"No."

"Do you have any formal medical training?"

"You mean like at a college or something?"

"Yes. Exactly."

"Not yet, but I'm planning on-"

"Thank you, Miss Austin. You've never even taken an accredited first-aid course, have you?"

"No."

"And you don't know CPR, do you?"

"I know it a little. A few days after Charlotte died, I was going to start-"

"Are you formally trained and certified to administer CPR?"

"No."

Stephen raised an arm and I thought for a moment he was going to rest his hand gently upon my mother's shoulder, but he didn't. Instead he merely reached inside his suit jacket for a pen. "Was Charlotte Bedford the first person you ever saw die?" he asked, and for the first time that afternoon he raised his voice a notch and sounded ready for one of the confrontations he seemed to relish.

"Yes."

"When you saw the blood that resulted from Sibyl's attempt to save the baby, was that the first time you'd ever seen a body opened?"

"I'd seen pictures in textbooks."

"Please, Miss Austin, I didn't ask if you'd ever looked at a body in a book. Was that the first time you'd ever seen a body opened?"

"I guess."

"Yes?"

"Yes."

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

"Yes."

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

"No."

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

"It was the way it spurted."

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

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

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

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

"But if any of-"

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

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

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

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

"I guess."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When I saw the blood, yes."

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

"Like what?"

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

"No, she was unconscious."

"Did the body… shudder?"

"I didn't see that."

"You didn't see it shudder?"

"No."

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

"Not that I saw."

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

"Yes."

"But that was enough to alarm you?"

"It was."

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

"No."

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

"No."

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

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

"Overruled."

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

"No."

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

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

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

"No."

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

"I just didn't know what-"

"Miss Austin-"

"I just didn't-"

"Your Honor-"

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

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, I've always understood why a lawyer has faith in logical inference, the idea that one doesn't need to hear or see it rain overnight to know in the morning that it did rain if the cars and the ground and the trees are all wet.

And so I believe Stephen may have tried to kiss my mother by the way I heard her saying to him, "No, it's not just the place. It's everything. If I sent you those signals, I'm sorry. I'm really and truly sorry."

Before I became a doctor, I couldn't imagine why anyone would become a coroner. I assumed that anyone willing to spend that much time around corpses was inordinately fixated on death or-at best-had never outgrown a nine-year-old boy's interest in vampires and mummies and ghouls. Only after I'd started medical school did the fascinations of that job become apparent to me, and the reasons why so many profoundly-at least outwardly-normal people choose it as their life's work. It's like being a detective. And once you're past your first cadaver, human tissue loses its ability to shock, and organs and bones become routine.

When I was fourteen, however, I imagined a coroner had to be a very sick person. And so I was unprepared for the medical examiner for the state of Vermont when a bailiff escorted him between the two rows of packed benches in the courtroom mid-Friday afternoon, and led him to the witness stand. Terry Tierney looked like any one of the fathers I knew in Reddington who coached Little League baseball in the spring and Pop Warner football in the fall: energetic but patient in carriage, and downright unexceptional in appearance. He was a good decade older than my parents, with a black beard that was graying and eyeglasses very much like Stephen's.

He smiled when Bill Tanner greeted him, and-at Tanner's prodding-explained for the jury his litany of degrees and accomplishments. The two were so chummy that for a few moments I almost expected them to start discussing the deer hunting they could expect later that fall.

When they finally got around to the scene that had greeted Tierney when he walked into the Bedfords' bedroom back in March, however, all of that changed, and Tierney grew serious. He described the way my mother had stitched the exterior incision she'd made and then pulled the woman's nightgown back down over her torso.

"Did Mrs. Danforth tell you how Charlotte Bedford had died?" Bill Tanner asked.

"She said the lady had had a stroke."

"What did you think?"

"I thought it was possible. Anything's possible in a home birth."

"Objection!" Stephen said, shooting up from his seat, and the judge sustained it.

"When did you conduct the autopsy?" Tanner continued, as if there had never been an interruption.

"Later that morning."

"Did you find any indication that the woman had had a stroke?"

"No."

"If Charlotte Bedford had had a stroke, would you have been able to determine that from an autopsy?"

"Definitely. Absolutely."

"Why?"

Dr. Tierney sighed and gathered his thoughts. Looking back, I believe he was merely pausing to frame his answer in a way that would convey the details of postmortem dissection without sickening the jury. But at the time I thought his hesitation was driven by sadness.

"When I examined the brain, I would have found significant changes. I would have seen hemorrhaging-bleeding. The tissue would have softened; it would have gotten almost spongy."

"And you saw none of that-no bleeding, no softening-when you were examining Charlotte Bedford's brain?"

"No, I did not."

Tanner returned to his table, and his deputy handed him what I assumed were his notes.

"Did you examine Charlotte Bedford's abdominal area?"

"Yes."

"Beginning with the incision?"

"That's right."

"Including her reproductive organs?"

"Of course."

"You mentioned Mrs. Danforth had sewn up the skin where she had cut Charlotte open. Did she sew up her internal organs as well?"

"No."

"She didn't sew up the uterus?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Objection," Stephen said. "Calls for speculation."

"Sustained."

"So you found the uterus had not been repaired," Tanner continued.

"No, it had not."

"Could you tell where in the birth canal the baby had been when Mrs. Danforth pulled him from his mother?"

"No."

"Could you tell if the baby had descended at all in all those hours Mrs. Danforth forced Charlotte to push?"

"Objection, no one forced anyone to do anything."

"Sustained."

Tanner smiled for the jury's benefit, a grin more mischievous than chastened.

"Could you tell if the baby had descended at all in all those hours Charlotte was pushing?"

"No, I could not tell."

"Could you tell if there had been a placental abruption?"

"Yes, definitely. There were areas of hemorrhage."

"Was that the cause of death?"

"No. As it occasionally does, it had clotted over. Started to heal itself."

"Was it a factor in Charlotte Bedford's death?"

"It would become one indirectly."

Tanner glanced at his notes and grew quiet. Finally: "How so?"

"The woman had lost some blood during that event. Given the cesarean that would be performed a few hours later, it's impossible to gauge how much. But it was probably a significant amount."

"Meaning?"

"Her body was weaker. She wasn't as strong."

"Why might that matter?"

"As any mother knows, labor's hard work. Incredibly hard work. A woman needs all the strength she can muster, especially if something… something unforeseen occurs."

"Did something unforeseen occur in this case?"

"I assume you mean other than the poor woman dying."

"Right."

"Then yes, clearly something unforeseen happened."

"Based on the autopsy you performed, and all of the subsequent laboratory work, what do you think that something was?"

As if he were recalling an event as common as a drive home on slick roads in a blizzard-hazardous, perhaps, but an endeavor everyone in that courtroom had endured and could discuss comfortably at a dinner table-he said, "Well, although there was no medical evidence of a stroke, there were eyewitnesses who saw what apparently looked like a stroke to someone who wasn't a doctor. The woman twitched or spasmed, and then blacked out. The father saw it, the young lady-the apprentice-saw it, and of course Mrs. Danforth saw it. But I don't believe it was an aneurysm that caused the spasm."

"Do you have an opinion as to its cause?"

"Yes."

"Would you tell us what that is?"

"To use Dr. Lang's expression, I think the woman 'vagaled.'"

"Would you elaborate?"

"Right here, in the small of the back of our heads," Tierney said, motioning to the spot on his own head with his hand, "there is a pair of cranial nerves filled with motor and sensory fibers. Those are the vagus nerves. They innervate a variety of organs and muscles-the larynx, for example, and many thoracic and abdominal viscera."

"What does that mean in layman's terms?"

Tierney offered the jury a small, self-deprecating smile. "They communicate between the brain and the heart. They help to carry the information from the brain to the heart about how fast or slow it's supposed to beat. Now, like everything else in the body, the brain needs oxygen. And oxygen is carried to the brain in the blood-blood pumped, of course, by the heart. If the brain isn't getting enough oxygen-if it becomes what we call hypoxic-it doesn't function properly. Or at all. Obviously, there are lots of things that can cause a brain to become hypoxic, including even a planned medical event like general anesthesia. But another cause may be labor, and the way a woman has to push. You take in these very deep breaths, work very hard, and then you exhale at once. And you do this for hours. Suddenly, before you know it, your brain is going hypoxic."

"Is this dangerous?"

"Absolutely. If you strain enough and become sufficiently hypoxic, your heart can slow down or even stop. It's a sort of reflex mediated by the vagus nerve. Your heart stops and you pass out. As some doctors say, you vagal out."

"Can you die?"

"Oh yes, indeed one can. But women in labor almost never do, because a delivery room nurse or an ob-gyn knows exactly what the early symptoms look like, exactly what the first signs are. And it's very easy to treat: You simply have the laboring woman relax for a bit or-in an extreme case-you administer oxygen."

"What makes you think Charlotte vagaled?"

"First of all, she evidenced the symptoms of a person going hypoxic: She had a seizure, lost consciousness, and her heart stopped. That's what the eyewitnesses may have seen. Then, when we were looking for injuries to brain cells in the hippocampus, we saw significant evidence of hypoxia."

"What does that look like?"

"The nucleus of the cell becomes pycnotic-shrunken and dark and really rather unattractive. Meanwhile the cytoplasm of the cell body becomes a deep red, and looks almost glassy."

"So you're saying Charlotte Bedford was forced… you're saying Charlotte Bedford pushed for so long she went hypoxic. She vagaled."

"Yes."

"In your opinion, was that the cause of death?"

"Well, that's the thing, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"This is going to sound pretty ironic, given the reason we've all assembled here, but I believe Mrs. Danforth saved her life after she vagaled. I'm convinced that the CPR Mrs. Danforth performed-all those cycles-actually brought the woman back."

Dr. Tierney's opinion was not a surprise to our family, and my mother barely moved when he spoke. But it was a revelation to most of the crowd, and one of the mothers in the back row must have moved with such suddenness or gasped just loud enough that she woke her infant. We all heard a moment of crying, followed by the rustling we'd all become used to, as the infant's mother worked her way down the thin space between benches and then out of the courtroom.

"What makes you think so?" Tanner asked when the room had settled.

"The amount of blood in the peritoneal cavity-the abdomen. I mean, there were close to seven hundred and fifty milliliters in there."

"Over two pints?"

"Roughly. Plus there was all the blood outside of the wound: Around the incision. On the bedding. And, of course, on that pillow Mrs. Danforth had used to soak some up so she could see what she was doing. Find the uterus, I guess. In my opinion, there would not have been that much blood in the deceased's abdomen and around the bedding if the woman had been dead when Mrs. Danforth tried to perform a cesarean section."

"And so you believe Charlotte Bedford was alive when Mrs. Danforth performed the cesarean?"

"That's correct."

"In that case, what was the cause of death? How did Charlotte Bedford die?"

Dr. Tierney sighed and then looked right at the jury. "As I myself typed on the death certificate-the final one-she died of hemorrhagic shock caused by the cesarean section. In my opinion, it was Mrs. Danforth's C-section that killed her."

Chapter 19.

I don't toss and turn, it's not like that. Sometimes I don't even remember listening to Rand's breathing for hours, feeling the heat from his body under the blanket. But in the morning, it's often like I haven't slept. I'm cranky and tired and I go to rooms that are empty and cry.

Stephen says Charlotte's sister doesn't hate me. But he's not a woman, he's never been through labor. He's never seen life surge into a room at birth.

On this one he's wrong.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

I WANTED STEPHEN TO TEAR Tierney apart. I knew the medical examiner had been a devastating witness; I understood how powerful his testimony had been: He sounded intelligent and authoritative; he seemed unassailably reasonable. He looked good on the witness stand.

But I also understood that if Tierney's damage could be undone, most of the repair work would have to wait until the following week, when Stephen would put our own "experts" on the stand. Then, I hoped, everyone in the courtroom would see that Dr. Tierney was merely the Vermont coroner. He wasn't from Boston or New York City or Washington, D.C. Tierney's opinion was only one among many, and his was most certainly mistaken: Eventually the jury would be convinced that Charlotte Bedford had been dead beyond question when my mother decided to rescue little Veil.

Stephen, of course, would curry no favor with an Orleans County jury by undermining Tierney simply because he was from Vermont. And so most of his strategy during his cross-examination of the medical examiner late Friday afternoon was simply to lay the groundwork for his own forensic pathologists, and to suggest that there was going to be wide room for disagreement.

"You testified that Mrs. Bedford had about seven hundred and fifty milliliters of blood in her abdomen. Am I correct?" he asked at one point.

"About that, yes."

"If someone approached you and said a woman had died as a result of a cesarean section done under… under these circumstances, wouldn't you have expected more blood?"

Tanner stood to object, arguing that it was ridiculous to ask the coroner to conjecture about a hypothetical situation when there was an actual cesarean to discuss, but the judge allowed Stephen to proceed.

"Seven hundred and fifty milliliters is a good amount of blood," Tierney answered.

"But… but… if someone told you a woman had died from a C-section… wouldn't you have expected to find more than that?"

Tierney thought for a long moment. Finally: "I might have."

"Thank you. If you wanted categorical… indisputable… irrefutable proof that a cesarean section had been the cause of death, how many milliliters of blood would you want to discover in the abdominal cavity?"

Tierney nodded his head slightly as he pondered his response. "Perhaps one thousand," he said.

"Was there that much blood in Charlotte Bedford's abdominal cavity?"

"No."

"Thank you," Stephen said, and he started back to his table. "No further questions." For a brief second I thought this would mark the end of the day-and, therefore, the week-and I grew excited. This seemed to be a wonderful note on which to send the jurors home for the weekend.

But before Stephen had even retaken his chair, Tanner was on his feet for the prosecution's redirection.

"Two quick questions, Dr. Tierney, if I may," he began. "Given everything else you learned from the autopsy, and given the huge amounts of blood that were found outside of the abdominal cavity-such as all that blood Mrs. Danforth soaked up with the pillow-was seven hundred and fifty milliliters enough to convince you that the cesarean had been the cause of death?"

"Yes, most certainly."

"Given all of your experience, and all of the time you have spent on this particular case, do you believe the cause of death was the cesarean section performed by the defendant?"

"Yes, I do."

"Thank you," Tanner said, and Judge Dorset looked up at the clock on the far wall. It was well after five, and the first week of my mother's trial was about to be gaveled to a close.

Before we all left the courthouse and went our separate ways Friday evening, Stephen tried to reassure my parents that this would be the low point of the trial for us-literally, in terms of what my mother's prospects for acquittal appeared to be, as well as emotionally. After all, the State had presented virtually its entire case-the only remaining witness was the widower himself-while we hadn't even begun our defense.

Stephen warned us that during the weekend we could find ourselves preoccupied with what the jury was thinking, and we could become alarmed.

"Remember, there's still a long way to go," he said, and although I wanted to believe him, his reassurance was in conflict with another point I'd heard him make at least a half-dozen times: Our defense would take considerably less time than the prosecution's version. All we needed to do was plant reasonable doubt, and while-to use his metaphor-he wanted to be sure the roots were healthy and secure, he said doubt in this instance was one tough and sturdy little shrub.

The last thing he said before he climbed into his car was that he'd see us on Sunday, when he and Peter were going to come by and help my mother rehearse her testimony and prepare for the cross-examination.

As we drove back to Reddington, my mother asked me how I was doing, and I lied and said fine. Actually, I was fighting back tears. But my parents accepted my response at face value, and that was the extent of our conversation the whole ride home. A combination of fear and exhaustion prevented them from dissecting the testimony we'd heard that day or exploring the quiver that had crept into my voice.

As we approached our house, we saw in our headlights a conga line of parked cars just to the side of our driveway. The bumper sticker on the back of the last vehicle, a rusting pickup truck, signaled to all of us who had descended upon our home: MIDWIVES DO IT ANYWHERE!

The Vermont midwives, some of whom must have left the courthouse before Dr. Tierney finished his particularly lethal interpretation of events, had brought us dinner. Cheryl and Molly and Donelle and Megan and Tracy-names that will always conjure for me effusive women who hugged on sight, and could love without question or reservation or inhibition-had come to rally around my mother. Our stereo was blasting an eclectic dance tape that had Abba following the Shirelles, and Joni Mitchell beside Janis Joplin. The dining-room table was draped in a sky-blue tablecloth, and covered with candles, casseroles, and baskets of freshly baked bread.

Even Cheryl Visco, whose frequent presence at our house throughout the summer had come to annoy my father and me, was a welcome sight. She was as beautiful and powerful as ever, despite a week slouched in a bench in a courtroom: Her massive gray hair managed at once to sparkle like new metal, yet look as soft to the touch as cashmere, and her eyes went wide with joy when she saw us.

She wrapped her arms around me first, before even greeting my mother, as if performing an emotional triage by instinct.

"You are just too thin, even for a track star," she whispered into my ear.

"You're one to talk," I said.

When the other midwives saw we'd arrived, along with their partners and husbands and-in some cases-children, they started to clap for my mother. Cheryl put an arm around her shoulder and led her into the dining room as my father and I trailed a step behind them. Suddenly someone had stopped applauding long enough to give my mother a glass of wine and my father a scotch, and someone else was handing me a cold soda. I looked up to thank whoever had offered me the glass, and I saw it was Tom Corts.

"Want a beer instead? No one would care, you know," he said, and patted my shoulder in a way that was as sweet as it was awkward.

"How did you know about this?" I asked.

"Your mom's friend Cheryl called and got a hold of my mom," he answered, and motioned toward the older midwife.

I looked at the way she had begun cradling my mother in both of her arms, and at the smile she had somehow elicited from her-the sort of broad grin we rarely saw from my mother those days-and the tears I'd been fighting since we left the courthouse began streaming down my cheeks. My sobs were absolutely silent then, and in the chaos and joy that were filling our house no one but Tom was even aware that I was crying.

"Hey, you're home," he said nervously, unsure why I was crying and what he should do. "Everything's going to be okay now."

I shook my head, sure that nothing would ever be okay again. And then I took him by the hand and led him upstairs to my room, where I cried in his arms until all of my mother's friends finally left our house for the night, and the floor below us grew still.

I hadn't seen Asa Bedford since before his son was born and his wife died. There were always rumors floating through the northern part of the county in the summer and early fall that he was visiting Lawson for one reason or another, and whenever someone saw a balding, redheaded father with a baby and a boy, they were likely to suspect for a moment that the poor fellow was back in the state. But aside from when he gave his deposition that summer, I doubt he had ever actually returned: His family and Charlotte's family were all in Alabama, and a single parent with two children to raise can use all the help he can get.

When I saw him Monday morning, he looked like hell. Although he had never been a handsome man in my mind, he had always been so kind with Foogie and Charlotte-and so thoughtful of Rollie and me-that there was something attractive about him. It wasn't so much the pastoral serenity I've come across in other ministers in my life, as it was a profound sensitivity: I've no idea whether it was because of his apocalyptic leanings or in spite of them, but most of the time he was a very sweet man.

The Asa Bedford who was about to testify, however, looked tired and beaten and unendurably sad. There were deep black bags beneath his eyes, and his face had grown lines. There were streaks of white amidst the frizzy red halo that rolled partway around his head like a horseshoe, and his pale skin was tinged by gray. He'd aged, and he'd aged badly.

At the time I didn't know that the name Asa was the Hebrew word for physician, and I'm glad. Given the litany of doctors lined up against my mother, I probably would have taken the idea that Asa was one, too, as an extremely bad omen.

Early into his testimony, Tanner elicited select details about the pastor's life since his wife had died: The daily logistics-the difficulties-of being a widower with children. His inability to sleep. The fact that he was still not emotionally ready to return to the pulpit. He spoke in a soft, halting voice that betrayed no animosity toward my mother, but Asa was as human as the rest of us, and there had to have been a sizable reservoir of rancor inside him.

Then, as he had with Anne Austin, Tanner had the father recall step-by-step what he had witnessed the night and morning his son was born, building to key points he wanted to drive home for the jury.

"And so you asked Mrs. Danforth to try again?" Tanner asked.

"I just couldn't believe Charlotte had really… passed away. I just couldn't believe it. So yes, I asked her to try and revive Charlotte again. I think I said something like 'Can't you do more CPR?'"

Tanner nodded gently. As the morning had grown late and they had finally reached the moment in the story when Charlotte had died, Tanner had begun to speak very quietly, as if he wanted to make sure the jury understood that in addition to being a thorough and uncompromising protector of the People, he was also a gentle man who understood this was painful testimony for Asa Bedford. "What did Mrs. Danforth tell you?" he asked.

"She said she-Charlotte-was gone. She said she wasn't coming back." Bedford's voice never broke, but some moments he sounded as if he was still in shock.

"Did you believe her then?"

"Yes, sir, I did. But it was still like I'd been hit hard in the stomach and had had all the wind knocked out of me. Right out of me. I could barely breathe, and I… I remember I sort of sagged onto the floor and landed on my knees. I laid my head on Charlotte's chest, and I just stared up into her face. I just stared. I told her how much I loved her. Very much. Very, very much. And I told her how much I wanted her back."

"Did you stay that way with your wife a long while?"

"Oh, no. Not long enough. Not long at all. Mrs. Danforth said something like 'Let's move!' or 'Let's go!' At first I had no idea what she meant by that. I had no idea what she wanted to do. She sounded hysterical, and-"

"Objection."

"Sustained."

"Reverend Bedford," Tanner said, "what did Mrs. Danforth do next? What did she say?"

"Well, she was wiping her eyes and… and flailing her arms. She kept saying, 'We don't have any time, we don't have any time!'"

"What did you say?"

"I asked her what she meant."

"And she said?"

"She said… she said the baby only had a few minutes, and we had… used them… used most of them… on Charlotte."

"Did you understand then what Mrs. Danforth was planning?"

"No. It just hadn't hit me. I think I even asked her, 'What are you going to do?'"

"Did she tell you?"

"Sort of. She said she was going to save the baby. I think her exact words were 'Save your baby.' But my Charlotte had just died, and the idea of saving my baby and… cutting open Charlotte's stomach still weren't… linked in my mind. When I finally made that link a couple seconds later-when it dawned on me why she wanted that knife-I asked her again if Charlotte was definitely… dead."

With his southern accent he drew two syllables out of the word dead, and I found myself wondering how many of the jurors were hearing a southern accent in person for the first time. After all, the first time I'd heard a southern accent was in the Bedfords' house.

"And what did Mrs. Danforth tell you?"

"She said 'Of course.'"

"Meaning 'Of course she was dead.'"

"That's right."

"Did she ask you if you wanted her to try and save the baby?"

"No, sir."

"Did she ask you for your permission to perform a cesarean section on your wife?"

"No, sir, she did not."

"Before she began the cesarean, did you see Mrs. Danforth check to see if Charlotte had a pulse?"

"No."

"Did you see her check to see if there was a… a heartbeat?"

"No."

"Did you see her do anything to confirm that Charlotte had indeed… passed away?"

"No."

Tanner glanced briefly at my mother, shaking his head in disbelief. She turned away from him and gazed at the lake, while her mother-my grandmother-glared back at the state's attorney. My grandmother had grown angry that week, furious with anyone who would malign her daughter.

"What about the baby?" Tanner then asked the pastor. "Did she check to see if there was a fetal heartbeat?"

"You mean with the…"

"The Fetalscope."

"No, sir, I did not see her do that."

"So: You never saw her bother to confirm-"

"Objection."

"Sustained."

"You never saw her confirm that Charlotte was dead or that the baby was alive before she began the C-section."

"No."

"She just plowed ahead."

"Yes."

"What did you do during the operation?"

"I still thought Charlotte was… had… I still thought Charlotte had passed away, and I went to the window." He motioned toward the easel between his seat and the end of the jury box, which held an overhead drawing of the Bedfords' bedroom.

"Did you watch?"

"I watched some."

"Did you see the first incision?"

"Yes, sir."

"What do you remember about it-that first incision?"

"I remember the blood spurting," Bedford said, his voice rising for the first time during his testimony. "I remember seeing my Charlotte bleed."

I had gotten used to seeing Charlotte's family in the courtroom by the second Monday of the trial. I wasn't ready to wave and say with a sympathetic southern accent, "Hey, how ya doing?" but I no longer shied away from all eye contact. And as I glanced over there as their brother-in-law told his version of what had occurred, I could see in their eyes the fact that we-Sibyl Danforth and her family-were going to lose.

Certainly there were times during Stephen's cross-examination when my spirits would lift: when, for example, with painstaking detail Stephen enumerated all of the reasons why Asa Bedford could not have seen blood spurt or his Charlotte "bleed." But when Stephen was done, I still knew we were finished. Asa, after all, was a minister. As powerful as I thought the medical examiner's testimony had been on Friday, even a coroner's credibility pales before a pastor's.

The cross-examination lasted most of the afternoon, and when it was complete Tanner had a brief redirect. Bedford reiterated what he had seen, steadfastly insisting upon the existence and power of one small geyser of blood. And then it was over, and the State rested.

Chapter 20.

Lawyers have a language as cold as doctors'. But it's not the legal terms themselves that are so icy, it's the way they're used. It's the way those people speak when they're in the courtroom, the way they use even common words and names. Especially names.

Every time Stephen talks about me, he calls me "Sibyl." Every time he talks about Charlotte, she's "Mrs. Bedford" or "Charlotte Bedford." Or, simply, "the wife."

At the same time, Tanner is doing exactly the opposite: When he opens his mouth, I'm always "Mrs. Danforth" or "the midwife." Never, ever "Sibyl." And Charlotte, of course, is always… "Charlotte."

Stephen hasn't mentioned it, but it's a strategy both guys are using. Each lawyer is pitting Charlotte and me against each other, and trying to make one of us seem friendly and likable, and the other sort of aloof and formal and distant.

The thing is, I think at one time we were both pretty friendly. If Charlotte didn't have a lot of friends, it wasn't because she was aloof.

I'm supposed to testify Wednesday. Not on Wednesday. Wednesday. The difference, it sounds to me, is one of duration. Between all of the questions I'll have to answer for the two lawyers, I have a feeling I'm going to have to be "Sibyl" and then "Mrs. Danforth" for a long, long time.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

STEPHEN NEVER DOUBTED my mother would be an attractive and compelling witness. But he did not want her to be the final witness; he did not want to end with her the way Tanner had chosen to conclude with Asa Bedford. He wanted her sandwiched in the middle, between the road crew members and character witnesses who filled Tuesday's dance card, and the medical and forensic experts-our medical and forensic experts, the ones who either believed in their hearts my mother did the right thing, or were at least willing to say so for the right fee-lined up for Thursday.

Stephen said he wanted my mother to occupy the middle third of our defense so she would be an "accessible presence, a woman with a voice" for the jurors during most of it-especially the critical conclusion when our expert testimony was being presented. In his opinion, in the end this would still boil down to a battle of the experts, and so he wanted to wind up with people who had lots of degrees and dignified suits.

He hoped to complete his defense in three days, but he said it wouldn't be the end of the world if it lasted four. His principal objective when he looked at the calendar was to be done by the end of the week, so the jury wouldn't go home for the weekend with the fear that the trial was going to drag on forever.

I don't know exactly what Judge Dorset was expecting from my mother's midwife and client friends as Stephen prepared to present our version, but Tuesday morning before the jury was brought into the courtroom, he requested that all of the mothers who had babies wanting to nurse take their little ones outside the room when they grew hungry. Stephen objected, contending that changing the rules midstream sent a signal to the jury that somehow cast a negative light upon midwifery, home birth, and-of course-my mother. He also implied that the judge was risking a mistrial.

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

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

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

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

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

"Were you present at the autopsy?"

"No."

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

"No."

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

"Nope."

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

"Objection!"

"Sustained."

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

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

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

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

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

"In my judgment, he did."

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

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

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

"But you know nothing firsthand, do you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yup."

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

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

"I'm getting old."

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

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

"What do you think will happen?"

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

"When it's all over."

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

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

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

"Have you and Stephen talked about that?"

"It's come up, yes."

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

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

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

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

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

And then my tears became sobs.

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

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

To the jurors, of course, she might simply have looked guilty. She might simply have looked like a tired woman who couldn't sleep because of the blood on her hands.

But at least in the first two hours of her testimony, she spoke well. She was eloquent when Stephen asked her to explain why she had become a midwife, and why helping women to have their babies at home was important to her. She sounded like the most reasonable person in the world when Stephen asked her about the role hospitals usually played in her practice.

"If I see a danger, I will never let a mother's desire to have her baby at home-even if it's a really powerful desire-cloud my judgment. If there are any indications at all that the baby is in distress, I will always transfer the woman to the hospital."

"What about the mother?"

"Same thing. If there's a problem developing, we'll go to the hospital. A lot of people think midwives are anti-hospital or anti-doctor. We're not. I'm not. I have a great relationship with B.P.-Dr. Hewitt. I do what I do-I help ladies have their babies at home-because I know that I can depend on hospitals and doctors if a medical emergency develops."

And as reasonable as my mother sounded when she discussed hospitals, she was every bit as confident and unwavering when she offered her version of what had transpired on the morning of March 14.

"Did you check one last time to see if the woman had a pulse?" Stephen asked.

"Yes."

"Did you hear one?"

"No."

"Did you check one last time to see if she had a heartbeat?"

"Yes, absolutely."

"And did you hear one?"

"No, I did not."

"You did everything possible to make sure the woman was dead?"

"Oh, yes."

"What about the baby? Did you check to see if the baby was alive?"

"Yes, I did. I listened for a heartbeat with the Fetalscope. And I heard one," she answered, looking directly at Stephen as she spoke. She never allowed her gaze to wander toward my father and me, or toward the other side of the courtroom, where she might risk eye contact with Charlotte's family.

"I did everything I could before I began to try and be sure that Char-the mother-had died, but the baby was still alive," she answered.

"Where were the father and your apprentice when you checked? Were they with you?"

"No, they weren't in the room. I think they were still in the kitchen."

"Getting the knife?"

"That's right."

"So they never saw you check the woman or the baby?"

"No."

"But you did?"

"Yes. For sure."

Midmorning Tom Corts arrived in the courtroom, and I was both surprised and glad. With the exception of the small space beside the Fugetts, there were no seats left, and so he stood beside one of the court officers near the door, with his back flat against the rear wall.

It was sometime near eleven o'clock that my mother's answers started sounding less precise and some of her responses began to grow slightly fuzzy. She had been on the stand for close to two hours, answering questions for Stephen that ranged from such generalities as the sorts of words she might use to convey risk to parents at a first trimester meeting, to the specifics of why she had ruptured the membranes that dammed Charlotte Bedford's amniotic fluid.

"I didn't ask Asa in so many words, 'May I save the baby?' and maybe I should have, but at the time I was just focused on the baby-the baby and the mother-and that conversation seemed unnecessary," she said at one point, fumbling a bit as the adrenaline that had gotten her through most of the morning began to dissipate.

"Am I correct in saying that conversation was unnecessary because in your opinion Asa understood exactly what you were planning to do, and had therefore given his consent?" Stephen asked, trying to bail my mother out.

"Objection. Leading the witness, Your Honor."

"Sustained."

"Did you believe Asa had given his consent?"

"Yes," my mother said.

And then, a few moments later, when Stephen asked, "Did the father try and stop you?" she volunteered an answer that I know wasn't part of the script: "Asa was a husband as well as a father, and no husband in that situation would be in any condition to make any kind of decision."

"But in your judgment he made a… conscious decision not to stop you, correct?"

"Correct."

Before the day began, I had worried about the cross-examination, but never about my mother's direct testimony. I did now: I did not believe my mother wanted to be convicted, but as the morning drew to a close, some of her responses almost made it sound as if she no longer cared. Unfortunately, Stephen didn't dare end her testimony at that moment, because then the cross-examination would begin before lunch. I think Stephen thought it was paramount to keep her on the stand until close to noon so the cross-examination would not start until after lunch and he could use the noon recess to buck up her spirits and get her refocused.

Just before eleven-thirty, while still in the midst of her direct testimony, she slipped into one of her answers a sentence that none of us expected, and for which Stephen himself wasn't prepared. If it wasn't the single most damaging thing she could have said from our perspective, it was among the most surprising. It changed everything, and everyone in the courtroom knew it changed everything the moment she said it:

HASTINGS: And the father was still beside the window?

DANFORTH: Yes, he was sitting in the chair there, holding his baby in his arms. He was looking down at him, and Anne was right beside him-kneeling on the floor. From where they were they could see there was a body on the bed, but I know they couldn't see the… the incision, and I was glad. I thought it would have been too painful for them to have seen it. I don't recall actually turning out the light by the bed when I was through, but I looked at my notebooks the other day and I saw that I had.

Stephen immediately tried to clarify what she meant, asking, "You mean your medical notebooks, correct?" but it was too late.

"No," my mother answered slowly, her voice meek with shock. She knew instantly what she had done, and she knew what would happen. "My personal notebooks. My diary."

There was no dramatic rumble or murmur in the courtroom, because we were all too stunned to speak. All except Bill Tanner.

With a voice that sounded almost ebullient, he asked the judge if he could approach the bench, and then he and his deputy and Stephen and Peter all congregated before Judge Dorset. In my row, my father, my grandmother, Patty, and the two law clerks stared straight ahead in silence, trying to keep their emotions inside them. But I knew what they were feeling. Everyone in the courtroom knew what they were feeling, because everyone in the courtroom knew what this meant. Even if, like me, they didn't know exactly what the law was or what exactly would happen next, they all knew that my mother had just announced to the prosecution that there existed notebooks they had never seen that might have a direct-and devastating-bearing on her case.

…

This is the law: In the discovery process in the state of Vermont, Stephen Hastings was under no obligation to inform Bill Tanner that my mother's personal notebooks existed, or to turn them over to the prosecution.

This is the fact: My mother had told Stephen soon after they met that the notebooks existed, and he had read some of them-at least some of them, maybe whole years' worth. When he saw that some of the entries from mid-March could be construed as incriminating, he told her to stop keeping what was in essence a personal diary, and to never speak of the diary again until after the trial. She said she would abide by both requests, and then ignored both-one by design, and one by accident. My mother was simply incapable of not keeping a diary. She had kept one throughout her entire adult life, and it was probably unrealistic to expect her to stop chronicling her actions and emotions in the midst of the worst stress she would ever experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She asked, "You hungry?"

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

"I am. Isn't that unbelievable?"

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

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

Those entries would have to go, too.

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

For a second I considered flipping through the pages with my fingertips wrapped in Kleenex, but then I remembered the pages were already covered with my fingerprints from the week before. And so I decided I would only bother with tissue when I pressed down hard on the metal tabs at the top and the bottom of the binder that would release the key pages.

Tom had offered to go with us, but I was glad I'd said no. I felt bad enough about what I was doing; I wouldn't have wanted to involve anyone else.

I was shaking as I worked, a precursor of sorts to the trembling I'd experience while we awaited the verdict. I wasn't sure what law I was breaking, but I knew what I was doing was illegal. And I knew what I was doing was wrong.

When I returned to Patty's car I was still shuddering. I dropped the three notebooks onto the floor below the glove compartment and pushed them to the side with my feet as I climbed in. Five loose sheets of paper, folded down to the size of a paperback book, were pressed flat against my stomach, hidden under my blouse and my sweater and my jacket.

"Is that everything?" Patty asked, glancing down at the notebooks on the floor mat.

"That's everything," I said, the first of at least three times I can recall that I told that particular lie.

By the time we returned, my mother had completed her testimony and the court had recessed. Before taking the binders with him into his chambers, the judge told us he would let us know by one-thirty or two whether we could all go home for the day or whether the trial would resume midafternoon. If we were told to go home, it meant he was probably going to allow some or all of the notebooks, and Stephen and Bill Tanner would be granted a day to examine the entries; if we were asked to remain, it meant the judge had decided nothing in the notebooks was relevant and the State would not be allowed to see them.

Stephen was prepared to lose: He was prepared to lose both on the specific issue of the notebooks, and I think he was prepared to lose the case. He knew what my mother had written in March and-perhaps-early April: He probably knew that it only got worse.

And I think my mother was ready for defeat as well. I didn't believe at the time that my mother had slipped on the stand with the conscious hope that it would ensure a conviction-and even today I don't think she hoped for one on an unconscious level-but I think she had become resigned to that inevitability. Given the guilt in her own mind, she must have viewed her notebooks as all the evidence the State needed to convince the jury she had killed a woman in labor.

The difference in my mother's and Stephen's attitudes, if there really was one, is that Stephen still had some fight left in him. He was prepared to appeal a decision that allowed any part of the notebooks as evidence, and he was already modifying his strategy for his expert witnesses: It didn't matter whether Sibyl Danforth thought Charlotte Bedford was dead or alive, because Sibyl was merely a midwife. Our obstetric experts and forensic pathologists were positive, based on their years and years of medical experience, that the woman was dead by the time my mother made her first cut.

The principal issue he would have to overcome was my mother's testimony itself. Carefully he had elicited from her the idea that she had done everything she could to see whether Charlotte Bedford was dead, without ever having her say categorically that she was sure beyond doubt that the woman had died. That part of the transcript has become for me a small study in legal ethics:

HASTINGS: Did you check one last time to see if the woman had a pulse?

DANFORTH: Yes.

HASTINGS: Did you hear one?

DANFORTH: No.

HASTINGS: Did you check one last time to see if she had a heartbeat?

DANFORTH: Yes, absolutely.

HASTINGS: And did you hear one?

DANFORTH: No, I did not.

HASTINGS: You did everything possible to make sure the woman was dead?

DANFORTH: Oh, yes.

My mother hadn't lied, but if the notebooks were allowed, it would look to the jury as if she had, and not even Stephen Hastings's experts would be able to restore her credibility.

Consequently, our lunch was an extremely quiet affair, and even Patty Dunlevy was subdued while we awaited Judge Dorset's ruling. Occasionally my father or Stephen would try and bolster my mother's spirits as they had in the days immediately before the trial started, and once or twice Peter Grinnell tried to include Tom-who, despite everything else on her mind, my mother had somehow remembered to invite to lunch-in the conversation by asking him about school. But most of the time everyone sat around the wooden restaurant table in silence.

While the fears of the adults around me began and ended with the issue of whether Judge Dorset would allow the notebooks to be admitted as evidence, I had an additional worry as we ascended the stairs to the third-story courtroom to hear the judge's ruling. I was afraid he had discovered that pages were missing, and in a voice filled with fury and disgust he would ask Stephen or me what we had done with them. Throughout lunch and as we walked back to the courthouse, I had been sure that everyone around me heard the papers rustling beneath my clothes every time that I moved, and I was convinced the moment the judge saw me that he would be able to tell I was responsible.

When I'd gone to the bathroom at the restaurant, I'd considered ripping the pages to shreds and flushing them down the toilet, but I was afraid: If the judge discovered they were missing and insisted that they be presented, their continued existence might be my only hope for clemency. But as we wandered near the ladies' room at the courthouse, the idea crossed my mind once more to destroy them, and I told my parents I had to go to the bathroom and I would catch up with them in the courtroom in a minute.

Tom asked me if I was feeling okay, and I told him I was fine.

In the courthouse bathroom, however, I was again unable to bring myself to dispose of the notebook pages, although this time it was not merely a fear of the judge that prevented me. At some point, I assumed, my mother would get her notebooks back: Although it was unlikely I could ever press the folds from the pages and replace them in the diaries before she noticed they were missing, at the very least I could still return them to her. Someday, I imagined, she would forgive me for reading them-especially, I reasoned, if by some miracle she was acquitted.

But I did read the pages once more in that bathroom, and as I did I reassured myself that I was making the correct decision: I had to do everything I could to protect my mother and preserve our family.

Besides, my mother's conviction would not bring back Charlotte Bedford. It would merely destroy a second woman.

The jury was not present when Judge Dorset issued his ruling, but most of the spectators had reassembled.

None of us, of course, could see Stephen's or my mother's expressions when he spoke, but I assume if the spectators envisioned anything at all on their faces, they envisioned only relief: The judge ruled that there was nothing in the diaries that was relevant to my mother's testimony specifically, or to the case in general. The notebooks were a personal account of her life but had little relevance to the issues under examination and would therefore not be shared with the State.

Did Judge Dorset-who could stare directly into Stephen's and my mother's faces-see that in addition to relief there had to be surprise? He was an intelligent man, so I'm sure he did. I'm sure he saw disbelief in their eyes: My mother knew exactly what she had written at different points over the last seven months, and they both knew what she had written on March 15.

My mother and Stephen must have thought they had been given-inexplicably, and without reason-an astonishing gift from the judge, a gift that grew tangible when a court officer carried the three blue binders to the defense table and handed them over to my mother. A moment later the jury was brought back into the courtroom, my mother was returned to the stand, and Bill Tanner began his cross-examination.

Chapter 21.

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

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And this one?" my father asked.

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

"The weekend?"

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

"Are you going back to Burlington?"

"Nope."

"You're staying in Newport?"

"I am."

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

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

"To us?"

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

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

"Nope, not at all."

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

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

"In your experience?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wished Tom were there, but he had gone to school that day. Besides, I wouldn't have dared call him because that would have meant using the telephone, and the last thing any of us wanted was to be on the telephone if the jury came back with a verdict.

And of course the phone rang constantly that afternoon, which was an enormous source of frustration. The calls were always from reporters or my mother's friends, and by two-thirty my father was snapping at them all without discrimination-and no one who heard him could blame him.

Sometimes I heard people talking about the notebooks, but my mother never went to her office to look at them and I was relieved. As far as I knew, she had not opened them on Thursday night either, and so she still hadn't discovered what I'd done.

Would I have broken down as I did if the verdict had come in the following week, would my howls have been quite so loud if the jury had deliberated throughout the weekend? Would waiting the weekend-and therefore having to endure the myth that a long deliberation meant conviction-have caused the same sort of emotional explosion?

Perhaps, but we'll never know, because we were called at three-twenty with the news that we should return to the courthouse.

No one would venture a guess in my mother's presence what a four-hour deliberation actually meant, but I know I was feeling for the first time in well over a week that there was a chance my mother would be vindicated. I could tell Patty Dunlevy felt the same way, and it almost seemed that Stephen had regained his swagger.

But no one would speak of such things to my mother. In one of the strangest exchanges I heard in all of the months before the trial began and the two weeks of the trial itself, my grandmother asked my mother as we drove back to the courthouse, "Have you ever considered putting in another window in your examining room? I think the extra light would make the room much more cheerful."

"I haven't," my mother answered, apparently contemplating a future somewhat different from our fantasies. "But maybe someday when those prenatal posters are gone I'll hang some nice flowered wallpaper. Wallpaper with irises, maybe. Lots and lots of blue irises."

Looking back, I think it was the sheer speed of the deliberations that led to my cries in the courtroom.

By the time we had returned to Newport and climbed the stairs in the courthouse, by the time the judge had told the spectators that he would tolerate "no theatrics, disturbances, or dramatic reactions to the verdict" when it was read, by the time he had asked one of the bailiffs to escort the jury back into their long box and the rest of us were rising in our seats, I had concluded that my mother would be found not guilty on the one charge that mattered: involuntary manslaughter.

I don't think I really cared whether she was found guilty of the misdemeanor, of practicing medicine without a license.

Yet as the jury was being led in, that changed. That changed completely. None of the twelve jurors would look at my mother. They looked straight ahead of them as they walked, they looked at their shoes as they sat. They looked at the clock on the wall, they looked at the lake.

"Please be seated," the judge told us when the jury was back. "Good afternoon," he said to the group, and then turned to one of the court officers.

"Miss Rivers, do you have the envelope with the sealed verdict forms?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

"Would you please return that envelope to the foreman?"

My mother sat unmoving between Stephen and Peter, her hands clasped before her on the table. Beside me I saw my grandmother's hands were trembling.

"Mr. Foreman, would you review the envelope with the forms?"

The foreman had one good hand, and one with only a thumb. But over the years he had apparently become fairly dexterous with his six fingers: With the disfigured hand he used his thumb and palm to hold the envelope, and with the other he flipped through the papers.

"Are they the forms you signed? Are they in order?" Judge Dorset asked.

The foreman looked at the judge and nodded. And still none of the jurors would offer my mother a glance. Not one brief glance. They wouldn't even look at my father or me.

Please, I prayed to myself, -please, look at me, look at my mother. Look at us, look here, look here, look here. But none would, none did. And then one, the elderly Lipponcott woman, looked toward Bill Tanner, and I knew it was over and we had lost. My mother would be found guilty, my mother would go to jail. My theft of pages from my mother's notebooks had merely been one more meaningless gesture in a meaningless tragedy. Charlotte Bedford was dead, and my mother's life was essentially over. She would go to jail, she would never catch babies again.

And that's when I started to cry. It wasn't simply the pressure that caused me to scream and sob, it wasn't the waiting or the tension or the stress. It was the idea that the roller-coaster ride was finally coming to an end, and it was coming to an end with a long chain of cars-some holding Bedfords and some holding Danforths-smashed on the stanchions that were supposed to carry us all high above the craggy horrors of the earth.

I was not present when the verdict was read, I was with my grandmother and Cheryl Visco and Patty Dunlevy in a small conference room far down the hall. I have been told that when the judge asked my mother to stand and face the jury, Stephen helped her to her feet. Some of those present tell me that he held her elbow as the verdict became public, but others aren't so sure. With my father right behind him, I don't believe that Stephen would have done such a thing.

But I was wrong about so much; he may have.

If my mother believed the myth about juries Stephen had told us earlier that day in the parking lot, and if she had noticed that none of the jurors would look at her, then she may have been surprised by the verdict. I am told she nodded her head a tiny bit and sighed, and my family's relief was manifested much more visibly by my father: He murmured a "Thank you" so loud that people in the rows far behind him could hear it, and looked up toward the ceiling in gratitude and relief.

A long second later, when everyone in the courtroom had absorbed the verdict, there was the sort of spontaneous reaction that the judge chose not to stifle: Charlotte's sister and mother and the midwives started to cry. The midwives cried with joy, while the Fugetts sobbed for their dead sister and daughter and friend.

Some of the witnesses who had been kept from the courtroom through the largest part of the trial, people like Asa Bedford and Anne Austin and B.P. Hewitt, were in the room when the verdicts were announced, but none of them showed much reaction. Not even Asa. He hugged Charlotte's mother and rocked her, but his face remained impassive.

Later Bill Tanner would try and suggest that although my mother had been acquitted on the charge of involuntary manslaughter, the jury had still sent an important message to midwives about home birth: They had found her guilty of practicing medicine without a license, a signal that he said meant Vermont juries were not at all enamored with the idea of home birth.

That evening, however, neither the midwives nor my father cared that my mother had been found guilty of the misdemeanor. A two-hundred-dollar fine was absolutely nothing compared to a manslaughter conviction, and once more the adults played loud party tapes at our house, while I curled up on the couch in their midst and sipped herbal tea till close to midnight.

Even seven years after my mother's trial, many of her midwife friends feared that my decision to go to medical school would be seen by many people as an indictment of home birth. It was not. I became an ob-gyn at least in part because a woman's right to choose to have her baby at home was important to me, and I wanted to be sure there were always doctors on call who would support that decision.

I know there were other reasons as well, but those reasons are more difficult for me to articulate: They begin, on some level, with a desire to be around babies that is so strong it may be genetic, but they go deeper still. A need to know without reservation exactly when someone is alive and when someone is dead. Atonement. A desperate distaste for the whole idea of a C-section, combined with an occupation that will demand I perform the operation with regularity. Reparation. Compensation. Justice.

Some of my mother's midwife friends are aware that I have been writing this book, and they fear now that my recollections will be tinged by my profession. In their eyes, I am not the one who should tell my mother's story, and they want me to leave it alone.

If they knew what I know, if they had seen the notebooks and knew that I had stolen key entries, they would be more than fearful: They would be furious. They would most certainly not want this tale told.

But on the second Wednesday of the trial, my mother's story became my story, too. I know now my mother would want our stories told.

She discovered that someone had folded pages from her notebooks the Monday after the trial was over, just after I had left for school and my father had left for his office. Apparently her first thought was that Judge Dorset had removed them from the binder to read them carefully, and he was the one who had creased them. But the idea that the judge had spent any time at all with those entries and then ruled the notebooks were irrelevant didn't make any sense, it didn't make any sense at all. And so the idea crossed her mind that someone else was responsible, and that someone probably was me.

Midmorning she went to the general store for a newspaper, and her suspicions about me grew more pronounced. Toward the end of a news analysis of the trial, one of the jurors brought up the notebooks.

"We all knew the judge was reading her diary during the recess-that was pretty clear," the juror said. "And so we expected we'd get to hear what she'd written. But then the judge read it and didn't see anything incriminating in it. I can't speak for everyone else, but that mattered a lot to me."

When I returned home from school, my mother confronted me. She said she honestly didn't know whether she should be disappointed in me or proud beyond words. On the one hand, she saw in her daughter a teenage girl who would read someone else's private diaries and then have the audacity to break the law and obstruct justice. On the other hand, she was astonished by my courage and the risk I was willing to take on her behalf. She said she loved me either way, but then asked me a question that revealed yet one more emotion churning inside her:

"What do you think now of what I did?"

I told her I was glad she had saved the baby, but my answer was meaningless. We both understood it was the question that mattered, it was the inquiry that made clear the way our lives as mother and daughter were forever changed: I was fourteen years old, and I knew my mother's worst fear.

Before my father came home, my mother actually suggested that I should go forward and confess what I had done. I was a minor; the penalty couldn't be too severe, she said. Reform school, perhaps. She wasn't serious-just as I did everything I could to protect her, as my mother she would do everything she could to protect me-but for a few hours I hid in my room like a scared kitten, convinced that my mother was willing to destroy us both in a policy of familial scorched earth.

And yet she never even told my father what I had done. When she came to get me for dinner, she told me we would never again speak of what had become our crime.

And until she was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, we never did. It wasn't until her third afternoon of chemotherapy-one of the days that I drove her to the oncologist in Hanover, New Hampshire, and kept her company while the poisons were dripped intravenously into her arm-that she brought up the name of Charlotte Bedford.

"Is she why you're becoming a doctor?" my mother asked. "Or am I?"

"Both, I guess."

She nodded, and watched the clear tube where it merged with a needle and then her skin.

"I haven't opened my notebooks in years. I boxed them up when you went away to college. You probably knew that, didn't you?"

I rolled my eyes. "I guess I did."

Not long after she paid her fine, my mother returned to midwifery. She lasted almost a year, and for a time her life was filled with activity, if not exactly joy. There were the prenatals and the consultations, the women-sometimes women and men-coming and going at our house. It was clear to us all that she would be able to rebuild her practice.

But then her new clients started coming to term, and she had to start catching babies again. She discovered during her first delivery that the almost bewitching pleasure that birth had once held for her had been replaced by fear. Every time she encouraged a woman to push, she thought of Charlotte; every time she placed a warm hand on a laboring woman's belly, she was reminded of the imaginary line she'd once drawn with her fingernail from Charlotte's navel to her pubic bone.

And so she stopped. She delivered her last baby on a sunny afternoon in early November, after a labor that was intense but short, and largely uneventful. She was home in time for supper, and my father, my mother, and I ate dinner together. We knew it was the last birth, and my father toasted my mother and all of the beauty she'd brought into the world.

For a short while a rumor circulated in Vermont that my mother had left the profession she loved because of some agreement with Asa Bedford. The rumor implied that neither he nor the Fugetts would press a wrongful death civil suit against my mother if she agreed to give up midwifery, but there was no such agreement.

Asa decided against a civil suit almost immediately because-as he was quoted as saying in one article-he was "not interested in knowing the monetary value of my Charlotte's life." Besides, Asa was a good man and he was a minister: He knew as well as anyone to whom revenge really belongs.

Nevertheless, my mother never did catch another baby after that final November birth. Exactly as she had told her own mother she would, she pulled down those prenatal posters and covered the walls of what had once been her office with blue iris paper. She then read in that room and she quilted in that room, and I'm sure when the house was quiet she sat alone in that room and stared at the mountains in the distance. For a few more years she kept writing in her diary in that room.

And then, suddenly, she boxed up the binders and carried them up to the attic. I came home from college the Christmas of my freshman year, and I looked in on her study and saw the notebooks were gone, the shelves filled now with gardening books and decorating magazines.

"Do you know where I put the notebooks?" my mother asked me as the toxins dripped into her arm.

"The attic, right?"

"Right. They're yours if you want them. When the time comes."

I tried to laugh: "Mother, don't be morbid." But as a doctor and an emeritus midwife, we had both done our homework on her cancer, and while we had never verbalized the statistics aloud, we knew the prognosis was bleak. Her particular form of lung cancer was deadly. She had some chance for a brief remission, but virtually no chance of recovery.

"I didn't say the time is coming tomorrow. But I want you to know they're yours. Do with them as you will."

She was told she was in remission a mere four and a half months after her diagnosis, but the remission lasted barely a season, and she died five months after the cancer returned.

Of the men in my life the year I turned fourteen, it is only my father I continue to see regularly. And I have always been blessed to see him a great deal. He still lives in Reddington, and I've joined a practice in central Vermont, and so we've been able to have lunch or dinner at least once a week since my mother died. He no longer works: When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, he sold his part of what had become a fifteen-person firm.

Tom Corts did escape his family's automotive garage. He left for one of the state colleges while I was in high school, and we broke up soon after that. But our paths cross periodically as adults, because he works for a company that designs software for the medical community. He also attended my mother's funeral, a gesture that moved both my father and me.

Tom is married, I am not. Someday I hope I will be, too.

Until recently, I continued to see Stephen Hastings's name in the newspapers and his one-click-above strut on television. No more. Apparently as he has gotten older, he has chosen to do less criminal law.

For a long time my family received holiday cards from his firm every December, and for a few years they included notes that Stephen himself wrote. But then the notes diminished to a salutation, a wish, and a signature, and then the cards themselves stopped coming.

I don't believe my father missed them, but I am sure on some level my mother did.

I have never spoken to the Fugetts, but I did speak once with Asa Bedford. I went to see Mobile and the towns around it like Blood Brook, and I learned that Asa had eventually remarried and returned to the pulpit in an Alabama coastal town called Point Clear. I hadn't gone to Alabama planning to visit Asa, at least not consciously, but when I got there the desire to see him was almost overwhelming, and so I called him from a pay phone at a convenience store.

He said he was in the midst of packing for a ministerial conference upstate, but he certainly had a half hour for someone who'd come all the way from Vermont. He said he and his wife would be hurt if I didn't come by the parsonage. And so I did, and the three of us had iced coffee, and Asa and I spoke of our lives in the years since the trial.

Foogie, I learned, had recently moved to Texas so that he and his wife could be closer to her family. He was about to become a schoolteacher. And Veil, the little baby whose life my mother saved, had grown into a handsome young man, who, if he didn't exude such health and vigor and strength, would be the spitting image of his mother.

When Asa walked me to the door of the modest little house, we stood at the screen for a long moment and then he hugged me, patted my back, and wished me peace.

Chapter 22.

– from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

March 15, 1981

The room was really quiet, it was like even the ice and snow had stopped banging against the window. For a second I was aware of this chattering and I looked around figuring that Asa and Anne must have heard it, too. But they didn't, because it was in my head. It was my teeth.

My teeth were actually chattering. The room was perfectly warm, but my teeth were still chattering. I looked down at my hands, and they were trembling so badly the knife was shaking.

And so I inhaled really slowly and then exhaled. When I cut into Charlotte, I didn't want to be shaking so much I couldn't control the knife and accidentally hurt the baby. I then made a line with my fingernail from Charlotte's navel to her pubic bone, and reminded myself that doctors did these things all the time without hurting the baby. I've seen lots of C-sections in my life, because most of the mothers who I transfer to hospitals end up having them, and never once have I seen a doctor nick the fetus. So I told myself I just had to be incredibly careful, and then I went ahead.

I just did it, I pushed the tip of the knife firmly into the skin.

I don't think anyone but me saw the body flinch. At the time I just thought it was one of those horrible postmortem reflexes that you hear about in some animals, and so I went on. I thought the same thing when there was all that blood, and it just kept flowing.

After all, I'd checked for a pulse and I'd checked for a heartbeat, and there hadn't been one. So how could she have been alive? The fact is she couldn't, I thought to myself, and she wasn't. That's what I thought as I drew the knife down, and I know I was absolutely sure of that then.

But looking back on it now-a day later, after I've gotten some sleep-I just don't know. Whenever I think of that flinch, I just don't know…