Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

Her jaw dropped-guilty as charged.

“Correction,” I said. “Where are we planning on going?”

She drew herself to a sitting position. “On Saturday nights, Samuel comes,” Katie confessed. “We visit on the porch, or in the living room. Sometimes we stay up until morning.”

Well, whatever “visiting” encompassed, I already knew that it didn’t include having sex. Katie’s embarrassment stemmed from a basic Amish principle about dating-it was strictly your own business, and for some reason I didn’t understand, Plain teens went out of their way to pretend that they were doing anything but meeting their boyfriend or girlfriend.

Katie’s eyes gleamed in the dark, her gaze focused on the window. For a moment, she looked so much like any other lovesick teenager that I wanted to touch her; just cup my hand over the curve of her cheek and tell her to make this moment last, because before she knew it she’d be like me, a witness to someone else’s moment. I didn’t know how to say that, given the circumstances, Samuel might not come. That the baby she could not admit to bearing had changed the rules.

“Does he throw pebbles? Or use a ladder?” I asked softly.

Realizing I was not going to give her secret away, Katie smiled slowly. “A flashlight.”

“Well.” I felt duty-bound to dispense some advice for the upcoming tryst, but what could I say to a girl who’d already had a baby and was accused of killing it? “Be careful,” I said finally, settling under the covers again.

I slept fitfully, waiting to see that flashlight beam. At midnight, Katie was still lying awake in bed. At two-fifteen, she got up and sat in the rocking chair beside the window. At three-thirty, I knelt down beside her. “He’s not coming for you, sweetheart,” I whispered. “In less than an hour, he’ll have to start the milking.”

“But he always-”

I turned her face so that she was looking at me, and shook my head.

Stiffly, Katie got up and walked to bed. She sat down and traced the pattern of the quilt, lost in her own thoughts.

I had seen the looks on clients’ faces at the moment they were sentenced to five years, ten, life in prison. In most cases, even when they knew it was likely to be coming, the truth hit them like a wrecking ball. Sentencing would be a piece of cake for Katie, compared to this: the understanding that her life would no longer be as it once was.

She was quiet for a long time, running her finger over the seams of her handiwork. Then she spoke, her voice rising thin as a trail of smoke. “When you’re quilting, one missed stitch ruins the whole bunch.” With a rustle of covers, she turned to me. “You pull on it,” she whispered, “and they all unravel.”

Aaron and Sarah spent the Sunday off from church visiting friends and relatives, but Katie and I declined their invitation to come along. Instead, after we finished the chores, we went to the creek to fish. I found the rods just where she said they’d be in the shed and met her in the field, where she was overturning a clod of earth to pluck out worms for bait. “I don’t know,” I said, watching them wriggle pink over her palm. “I’m having second thoughts.”

Katie dropped several into a small jelly jar. “You said you used to fish when you were a kid, here on the farm.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that was a thousand years ago.”

She smiled up at me. “You always do that. Make yourself out to be some old woman.”

“Get back to me when you’re thirty-nine, and tell me how you feel.” I walked at her side, the rods canted over my shoulder.

The creek was running strong, thanks to a few days of rain. The water tumbled over rocks, forked around sticks. Katie sat down at the water’s edge and took a worm out of the jar, then reached for one of the poles. “When Jacob and I used to have fishing contests, I always caught the biggest-Ouch!” Drawing back her hand, she popped her thumb into her mouth to suck away the blood. “That was stupid of me,” she said a moment later.

“You’re tired.” She lowered her eyes. “We all do crazy things when we care about someone,” I said carefully. “So you waited up all night. So what?” I reached for a worm, swallowed, and baited my own hook. “When I was your age, I got stood up before my senior prom. I bought a hundred-and-fifty-dollar strapless dress that wasn’t beige or cream, mind you, but ecru, and I sat in my room waiting for Eddie Bernstein to pick me up. Turns out he’d asked two girls to the dance and decided that Mary Sue LeClare was more likely to put out.”

“Put out?”

I cleared my throat. “Um, it’s an expression. For having sex.”

Katie’s brows rose. “Oh, I see.”

Uncomfortable, I dunked my line into the water. “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

“Did you love him? Eddie Bernstein?”

“No. The two of us were always vying for highest grade-point average, so we got to know each other pretty well. I didn’t fall in love until I got to college.”

“Why didn’t you get married then?”

“Twenty-one is awfully young to get married. Most women like to have a few years to get to know themselves, before getting to know marriage and children.”

“But once you have a family, there’s so much more you learn about yourself,” Katie pointed out.

“Unfortunately, by the time I came around to that way of thinking, my prospects had dimmed.”

“What about Dr. Cooper?”

I dropped my fishing rod, then grabbed it up again. “What about him?”

“He likes you, and you like him.”

“Of course we do. We’re colleagues.”

Katie snorted. “My father has colleagues, but he doesn’t sit a little too close to them on the porch swing, or smile extra long at something they’ve said.”

I scowled at her. “I would think that you, of all people, would respect my right to privacy regarding my own personal affairs.” Affairs, I thought. Wrong word.

“Is he coming here today?”

I started. “How would you know that?”

“Because you keep looking up the driveway, like I did last night.”

Sighing, I decided to come clean. If nothing else, maybe it would spur her to honesty. “Coop was the boy in college. The one I didn’t marry when I was twenty-one.”

She suddenly leaned back to pull a thrashing sunfish out of the brook. Its scales caught the sunlight; its tail thumped between Katie and me. She lifted it with her thumb in its mouth, and set it into the water for a second chance.

“Which one of you quit?” she asked.

I didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “That,” I said softly, “would have been me.”

“I wasn’t feeling well at dinner,” Katie told us, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond Coop’s shoulder. “Mam told me to go on up and lie down, and she’d clean the dishes.”

Coop nodded, encouraging. He’d been here for two hours now, interviewing Katie about the night of the alleged murder. To my great surprise, Katie was being cooperative, if not forthcoming.

“You felt sick,” Coop prompted. “Was it a headache? Stomachache?”

“It was chills all over, with a headache. Like the flu.”

I hadn’t had children myself, but those symptoms seemed to suggest a virus rather than impending labor. “Did you fall asleep?” Coop asked.

“Ja, after a little bit. And then I woke up in the morning.”

“You don’t remember anything between the time you went to bed sick, and the time you woke up in the morning?”

“No,” Katie said. “But what’s so strange about that? I don’t usually remember anything between when I fall asleep and I wake up, except a dream every now and then.”

“Did you feel sick when you woke up?”

Katie blushed furiously. “A little.”