Midwives (31 page)

“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.

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.”