Midwives (42 page)

“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.