Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

“Must be hard, being stuck here away from home.”

“Is that John Joseph Cooper the psychiatrist asking?”

He started to say something, then shook his head. “Nah. Just Coop, the friend.”

I shrugged, deliberately looking away from his careful gaze. “There are things I miss-my coffee maker, for one. Downshifting in my car. The X-Files, and ER.”

“Not Stephen?”

I had forgotten that the last time I saw Coop, we’d been with our significant others. We met in the lobby during the intermission of a performance by the Philadelphia Symphony. Although we’d been in touch occasionally for business reasons, I had never before met his wife, who was fine-boned and blond, and fit against his side as neatly as a matched jigsaw puzzle piece. Even after all those years, just the sight of her was a sucker punch.

“Stephen isn’t in the picture,” I admitted.

Coop regarded me for a moment before saying, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I was a grown-up; I could get through this. Taking a deep breath, I summoned a smile and clapped my hands on my knees. “Well. You didn’t come all the way out here to talk to me-”

“But I would have, Ellie,” Coop said, his voice soft. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

It would have been easy to pretend that I had not heard him; to simply launch into a discussion about Katie. But you can’t speak to someone partly responsible for making you who you are without unearthing a little bit of that history. Maybe Coop had forgiven me, but I hadn’t.

Coop cleared his throat. “Let me tell you what I found out about Katie.” He dug in a briefcase and pulled out a pad of yellow legal paper covered with his chicken-scratch handwriting. “There are two camps of psychiatric explanations for neonaticide. The minority attitude is that women who kill their newborns have gone into a dissociative state that lasts throughout the pregnancy.”

“Dissociative state?”

“A very concentrated focus state, where a person blocks out all but the one thing they’re doing. In this case, these women fracture off a bit of their consciousness, so that they’re living in a fantasy world where they’re not pregnant. When the birth finally occurs, the women are totally unprepared. They’ve dissociated from the reality of the event, experiencing memory lapses. Some women even become temporarily psychotic, once the shock of the birth slams through that shell of denial. In either case, the excuse is that they’re not mentally present at the moment of the crime, so they can’t be held legally accountable for their actions.”

“Sounds very Sybil to me.”

Coop grinned and handed me a list of names. “These are some psychiatrists who’ve testified the past few years with the soft approach. They’re clinical psychiatrists, you’ll see-not forensic ones. That’s because the majority of forensic psychiatrists who deal with neonaticides say the women are not in a dissociative state-just detached from the pregnancy. They feel dissociation might occur at the moment of birth. Plus, even I’d tell you that some dissociation is entirely normal, given the pain of childbirth. It’s like when you cut yourself chopping vegetables, and you kind of stand there for a second and say, ‘Wow, that’s a deep one.’ But you don’t go chopping off your hand after that to eliminate the problem.”

I nodded. “Then why do they kill the babies?”

“Because they have no emotional connection to them-it’s like passing a gallstone. At the moment of murder, they aren’t out of touch with reality-just frightened, embarrassed, and unable to face an illegitimate birth.”

“In other words,” I said flatly, “patently guilty.”

Coop shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you how insanity defenses go over with a jury.” He handed me another list, this one three times as long as the first. “These psychiatrists have supported the mainstream view. But every case is different. If Katie’s still refusing to admit to what’s happened in the face of a murder charge and medical evidence of pregnancy, there may be something more at work creating that defense mechanism.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that. Is there any way to find out if she was raped?”

Coop whistled. “That would be a hell of a reason to get rid of a newborn.”

“Yeah. I’d just like to be the one to find out, instead of the prosecutor.”

“It’s going to be tough, so many months after the fact, but I’ll keep it in mind when I’m talking to her.” He frowned. “There’s another option, too-that she’s been lying all along.”

“Coop, I’m a defense attorney. My bullshit meter is calibrated daily. I’d know if she was lying.”

“You might not, El. You have to admit you’re a little close to the situation, living here.”

“Lying isn’t one of the hallmarks of the Amish.”

“Neither is neonaticide.”

I thought of the way Katie would blush and stammer when she was confronted with something she didn’t want to talk about. And then I thought of how she’d looked every time she denied having a baby: her chin jutting straight, her eyes bright, her focus right on me. “In her mind, that baby never happened,” I said quietly.

Coop considered this. “Maybe not in her mind,” he answered. “But that baby was here.”

Katie fisted her hands in her lap, looking as if she’d been sentenced to an execution. “Dr. Cooper just wants to ask you some questions,” I explained. “You can relax.”

Coop smiled at her. We were all sitting by the creek, far enough away from the house for privacy. He slipped a tape recorder out of his pocket, and I quickly caught his eye and shook my head. Unfazed, Coop reached for his pad instead. “Katie, I just want to start off by telling you that whatever you say isn’t going to go beyond us. I’m not here to tattle on you; I’m just here to help you work through some of the feelings you must be having.”

She looked at Ellie, then back at Coop.

He grinned. “So-how are you feeling?”

“All right,” she said, wary. “Good enough that I don’t need to talk to you.”

“I can understand why you feel that way,” Coop responded pleasantly. “A lot of people do, who’ve never spoken to a psychiatrist. And then they figure out that sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger about personal things than it is to talk to a family member.”

I knew Coop was watching the same things I was-how Katie’s spine had become just a little less stiff, how her hands had uncurled in her lap. As his voice continued to wash over her, as his eyes held hers, I wondered how anyone stood a chance of keeping secrets from him. There was an affability to Coop, an effortless charm, that immediately made you feel like you had an intimate connection to him.

Then again, I had.

Shaking my attention back to my client, I listened to Coop’s question. “Can you tell me about your relationship with your parents?”

Katie looked at me as if she didn’t understand. What was a perfectly normal question for a clinical interview seemed silly, given the Amish. “They are my parents,” she said haltingly.

“Do you spend a lot of time with them?”

“Ja, out in the fields or in the kitchen, at meals, at prayer.” She blinked at Coop. “I’m with them all the time.”

“Are you close to your mother?”

Katie nodded. “I’m all she’s got.”

“Have you ever had seizures, Katie, or head trauma?”

“No.”

“How about very bad bellyaches?”

“Once.” Katie smiled. “After my brother dared me to eat ten apples that weren’t ripe.”

“But not . . . recently?” She shook her head. “How about losing big chunks of time . . . you suddenly realize that hours have passed, and you can’t remember where you’ve been or what you’ve done?”