Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Page B

courtroom with Anne, her testimony made even me doubt my mother for a brief moment—was ask Asa what he wanted to do. She never asked the father if he wanted her to try and save the baby. If he had said no, she could have done it anyway, if that’s what she wanted; but if he had said yes, she at least would have had complicity.
    And she never placed the Fetalscope back upon Charlotte’s stomach to see if there was still a fetal heartbeat. Of course, the baby would prove to be alive, but not checking one last time before she did what she did—it surprised and shocked even the novice midwife.
    And from the moment Asa and Anne returned to the bedroom until the moment my mother began to cut, she never checked one last time to see if Charlotte had a pulse or a heartbeat. Maybe she had—as she said under oath—checked just before they returned with the knife. But neither the father nor the apprentice witnessed my mother make sure Charlotte was dead before she plunged a kitchen knife into the woman.
    “What do you mean?” Asa asked my mother, after she said to him that they had no time. He saw her wipe her eyes, and he would say later there was something about the motion that suggested to him my mother had just had some sort of breakdown. It was a frantic gesture, as if she thought she could heave tears across a room.
    “The baby’s only got a few minutes, and we used most of them on Charlotte!”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Save your baby!” My mother’s voice was shrill, both Asa and Anne thought, and Asa said in court he wondered if she was hysterical. My mother insisted that if her voice was shrill, it was not because she was hysterical: It was because she wanted to snap Asa to attention.
    “Save the baby?”
    “Save
your
baby!”
    My mother had already pushed the old nightgown in which Charlotte had been laboring up around her neck when she had been trying to restart her heart, so there were no clothes to remove before performing the cesarean section. Asa stood up and walked behind my mother as she turned on the reading lamp by the bed for the first time that night.
    “Is she dead?”
    “God, Asa, yes! Of course!”
    Was she? We’ll never know for sure. The medical examiner would be one of many state witnesses who would say it was medically possible that Charlotte Fugett Bedford’s heart may havestopped for a moment, but my mother’s diligent CPR had revived it—and, for a time, revived the woman. But there was no doubt in Asa’s or Anne’s minds that my mother believed Charlotte was dead.
    When my mother said to Asa that—yes, of course!—his wife was dead, he nodded, and my mother took that motion as an assent. Certainly Asa made no effort to stop her. He lumbered slowly to the window without saying a word and looked into the sky, which seemed destined to remain dark forever.
    My mother would say later that in the early-morning hours of March 14, she performed the emergency cesarean because she couldn’t bear to see two people die. She just couldn’t bear it. And Charlotte was dead without question.
    Was my mother wrong? Anne thought so, just as the medical examiner certainly believed there was room for doubt. Asa was standing by the window when my mother made the first cut, but he said later that—like Anne—he saw blood spurt.
    Blood powered, the state’s attorney would insist, by a pumping heart.
    But Anne said nothing at the time, too young to be sure of what she had seen. It would be hours before she would pick up the phone, confused, unable to sleep, and call my mother’s backup physician. She would later say she could not believe blood would have spurted like that from a dead woman, but my mother’s attorney said there was probably another reason she called Dr. Hewitt: Stephen Hastings always viewed Anne as a nervous rat jumping from the
Titantic
.
    She made that critical phone call late in the morning, while miles away in Burlington the medical examiner was in the midst of his