Midwives (20 page)

“You’re looking out for her. I’m Patty Dunlevy. I work with Stephen Hastings—your mom’s lawyer.”

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

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

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

“I guess fine.”

“What a nightmare. You don’t know how awful I feel for her.”

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

“Nope. I’m an investigator.”

“A detective?”

“More or less. I work with lawyers to get the poop they can’t.”

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

“What sort of poop?” I asked.

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

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

“What are you going to … do for my mother?”

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

“You’ll have a long list, you know.”

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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