Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Never did a mother die.

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

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

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

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

  "Friday morning?" my mother asked.

  "Yup. Friday morning."

  "She was that concerned?"

  "Evidently."

  "Why didn't she just call me?"

  "Didn't she?"

  "No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "She didn't."

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

  "I believe so."

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

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

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

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

  "I believe I know her well."

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

  "No, not long at all."

  "About six months?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Avoiding you. Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

  "And then?" My father again.

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

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

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

  "She called Asa?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  . . .

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

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

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

  "You're up late," she said.

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

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

  "Anything interesting in here?"

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

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

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

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

  "Probably."

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

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

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

  "No, I didn't know."

  "Yup."

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

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

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

  "Fine."

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

  "Strange?"

  "Did you miss him?"

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

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

  "Nope. Not exactly."

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

  "I will."

  "Promise?"

  I rolled my eyes. "Mom!"

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

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

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

  "I promise," I said.

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

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

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

  "They work?"

  "You bet."

  "What did Dr. Hewitt want?"

  "You weren't listening?"