Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

“In Paradise. Well, on the edge of it.”

Adam’s eyes lit up. “On the edge of Paradise,” he said, smiling. “Almost sounds like you’re in for a nasty fall.”

Katie bit her lower lip. She didn’t understand Adam’s jokes. Trying to change the conversation, she asked him if his degree was in English, like Jacob’s diploma.

“Actually, no,” Adam said. Was he blushing? “I work in paranormal science.”

“Para-”

“Ghosts. I study ghosts.”

If he’d taken off all his clothes at that moment, it couldn’t have shocked Katie more. “You study them?”

“I watch them. I write about them.” He shook his head. “You don’t have to say it. I’m sure you don’t believe in ghosts, like most of the free world. When I tell people what my doctorate is in, they think it’s from some TV correspondence course, with a minor in air-conditioning repair. But I came by it honestly. I started out as a physics major, theorizing about energy. Just think about it-energy can’t be destroyed, only converted into something different. So when a person dies, where does that energy go?”

Katie blinked at him. “I don’t know.”

“Exactly. It has to go somewhere. And that residue energy, every now and then, shows up as a ghost.”

She had to look into her lap, or else she was liable to confess to this man she hardly knew something she’d admitted to nobody. “Ah,” Adam said softly. “Now you think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t,” Katie said immediately. “I really don’t.”

“It makes sense, if you think about it,” he said defensively. “The emotional energy that comes from a tragedy impresses itself onto a scene-a rock, a house, a tree-just as if it’s leaving a memory. At the atomic level, all those things are moving, so they can store energy. And when living people see ghosts, they’re seeing the residue of energy that’s still trapped.” He shrugged. “There’s my thesis, in a nutshell.”

Suddenly Jacob reappeared, carrying a bucket of popcorn. He set it on Katie’s lap. “You telling her about your pseudo-academic pursuits?”

“Hey.” Adam grinned. “Your sister is a believer.”

“My sister is naïve,” Jacob corrected.

“That’s the other thing,” Adam said, ignoring him and turning to Katie. “You don’t bother trying to convince the disbelievers, because they’ll never under stand. On the other hand, if a person’s ever had a paranormal experience-well, they practically go out of their way to find someone like me, who wants to listen.” He looked into her eyes. “We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.”

In the middle of the night, Ellie awakened to a low moan. Pushing away the folds of sleep, she sat up and turned toward Katie, who was tossing softly beneath her covers. Ellie padded across the floor and touched the girl’s forehead.

“Es dut weh,” Katie murmured. She suddenly threw back her covers, revealing two spreading, circular stains on the front of her white night-gown. “It hurts,” she cried, running her hands over the damp spots on her gown and the bedding. “There’s something wrong with me!”

Ellie had friends-more and more of them, lately-who had gone through childbirth. They had joked about the day that their milk came in, turning them into torpedo-breasted comic book characters. “There’s nothing wrong. This is perfectly natural, after having a baby.”

“I didn’t have a baby!” Katie shrieked. “Neh!” She shoved Ellie away, sending her sprawling on the hard floor. “Ich hab ken Kind kaht . . . mein hatz ist fol!”

“I can’t understand you,” Ellie snapped.

“Mein hatz ist fol!”

It was clear to her that Katie wasn’t even really awake yet, just terrified. Deciding not to deal with this on her own, she started out the bedroom door, only to run into Sarah.

It was a shock to see Katie’s mother in her bedclothes, her cornsilk hair hanging past her hips. “What is it?” she asked, kneeling at her daughter’s bedside. Katie’s hands were clamped over her breasts; Sarah gently drew them down and unbuttoned the nightgown.

Ellie winced. Katie was swollen, so rock-hard that a thin blue map of veins stood out, with tiny rivers of milk leaking from her nipples. At Sarah’s urging, Katie passively followed her to the bathroom. Ellie watched as Sarah matter-of-factly massaged her daughter’s painful breasts, coaxing a stream of milk into the sink.

“This is proof,” Ellie said flatly, finally. “Katie, look at your body. You did have a baby. This is the milk, for that baby.”

“Neh, lus mich gay,” Katie cried, now sobbing on the toilet seat.

Ellie set her jaw and crouched down in front of her. “You live on a dairy farm, for God’s sake. You know what’s happening to you right now. You . . . had . . . a baby.”

Katie shook her head. “Mein hatz ist fol.”

Ellie turned to Sarah. “What is she saying?”

The older woman stroked her daughter’s hair. “That there’s no milk; and that there was no baby. Katie says this is happening,” Sarah translated, “because her heart’s too full.”

Let me just make this perfectly clear: I can’t sew. Give me a needle and thread and a pair of trousers to be hemmed, and I am more likely than not to stitch the fabric to my own thumb. I throw out socks that get holes in the heels. I’d rather diet than let a seam out, and that’s really saying something.

This is all a way of prefacing that when Sarah invited me to the quilting session she was holding in the living room, I wasn’t suitably excited. Things had been strained between us since the previous night. This morning she had wordlessly handed Katie a long strip of white muslin to bind herself. An invitation to quilt was a concession of sorts, a welcome into her world that had previously not been extended. It was also a plea to just let last night pass for what it was.

“You don’t have to sew,” Katie told me, pulling me by the wrist into the other room. “You can just watch us.”

There were four women plus the Fishers: Levi’s mother, Anna Esch; Samuel’s mother, Martha Stoltzfus; and two cousins of Sarah’s, Rachel and Louise Lapp. These women were younger, and brought along their smallest children-one an infant still swaddled, the other a toddler who sat on the floor at Rachel’s feet and played with scraps of fabric.

The quilt was spread across the table with spools of white thread scattered over its top. The women looked up as I entered the room. “This is Ellie Hathaway,” Katie announced.

“Sie schelt an shook mit uns wohne,” Sarah added.

Out of deference to me, Anna responded in English. “How long will she be staying?”

“As long as it takes for Katie’s case to come to trial,” I said. As I sat down, Louise Lapp’s little girl tottered to a standing position and lunged for the bright buttons on my blouse. To keep her from falling, I caught her up in my arms and swung her onto my lap, running my fingers up her belly to make her smile, reveling in the sweet, damp weight of a child. Her sticky hands grasped my wrists, and her head tipped back to reveal the whitest, softest crease in her neck. Too late, I realized that I was being overly friendly with the child of a woman who most likely did not trust me with her daughter’s care. I looked up, prepared to apologize, and found all the women now regarding me with considerable esteem.

Well, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. As the women bent to their stitches, I played with the little girl. “Do you care to sew?” Sarah asked politely, and I laughed.

“Believe me, you’d rather I didn’t.”

Anna’s eyes sparkled. “Tell her about the time you stitched Martha’s quilt to your apron, Rachel.”