Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

“Changing the topic,” Coop said. “Good old Ellie.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You heard me.” He shrugged. “You’ve been doing it for years.”

Eyes narrowing, I turned toward him. “You have no idea what I’ve been doing-”

“That,” he interrupted, “was not my choice.”

I crossed my arms, annoyed. “I understand this is a professional hazard for you, but some people prefer not to drag up the past.”

“Still touchy about what happened?”

“Me?” I laughed, incredulous. “For someone who says he’s forgiven me, you sure as hell harp on our history together.”

“Forgiving and forgetting are two completely different things.”

“Well, you’ve had twenty years to put it out of your mind. Maybe you could manage to do that for the length of time you’re involved with my client.”

“Do you really think I’m driving way the hell out here twice a week to meet pro bono with some Amish girl?” Coop reached out and cupped my cheek with his palm, my anger dissolving in the time it took to draw a startled breath. “I wanted to see you, Ellie. I wanted to know if you’d gotten what you wanted all those years ago.”

He was so close now that I could see the sparks of gold in his green eyes. I could feel his words on my skin. “You take your coffee black,” he whispered. “You brush your hair a hundred strokes before you go to bed. You break out in hives if you eat raspberries. You like to shower after you make love. You know all the words to ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ and you keep quarters in your pockets at Christmastime, to give to the Salvation Army Santas.” Coop’s hand slid to the back of my neck. “What did I leave out?”

“A-T-T-Y,” I whispered. “My ATM password.”

I leaned toward him, tasting him already. Coop’s fingers tightened, massaging, and as I closed my eyes I thought how many stars there were here, how deep the night sky was, how this was a place where you could lose yourself.

Our lips had just touched when we broke apart again, startled by the sound of footsteps running down the driveway.

We had followed Katie on foot for nearly a mile now, stumbling along in silence so that she wouldn’t see us. She was the one who was carrying the flashlight, however, so we were clearly at a disadvantage. Coop held my hand, squeezing it in warning when he saw a branch in our path, a rock, a small rut in the road.

Neither of us had spoken a word, but I was certain that Coop was thinking the same thing I was: Katie was off to meet someone she didn’t want to meet with me around. Which left Samuel out of the running, and cast into perfect light the absent, unknown father of her baby.

I could see a farmhouse rising in a gray mountain just beyond us, and wondered if that was where Katie’s lover lived. But before I could speculate any further, Coop yanked me to the left, into a small fenced yard that Katie had entered. It took a moment to realize that the small, white stones were actually grave markers-we were in the cemetery where Sarah and Aaron had buried the body of the dead infant.

“Oh, my God,” I breathed, and Coop’s hand came up to cover my mouth.

“Just watch her.” His words fell softly into my ear. “This could be the wall tumbling down.”

We crouched at a distance, but Katie seemed oblivious, anyway. Her eyes were wide and slightly glazed. She propped the flashlight against another marker, so that it formed a spotlight as she knelt down on the freshly packed grave and touched the headstone.

STILLBORN, just as Leda said it read. I watched Katie’s finger trace each letter. She hunched over-was she crying? I started toward her, but Coop held me back.

Katie lifted what looked like a small hammer and a chisel, and touched it to the stone. She pounded once, twice.

Coop couldn’t stop me this time. “Katie!” I called, running toward her, but she did not turn around. I squatted beside her and gripped her shoulders, then pulled the chisel and hammer out of her hands. Tears were running down her face, but her expression was perfectly blank. “What are you doing?”

She looked at me with those vacant eyes, and then suddenly reason rose up behind them. “Oh,” she squeaked, covering her face with her hands. Her body began to shake uncontrollably.

Coop swung her into his arms. “Let’s get her home,” he said. He started toward the cemetery gate, Katie sobbing against his chest.

I knelt at the grave, gathering the chisel and the hammer. Katie had managed to chip off some of the carving on the stone. A pity for Aaron and Sarah, who had paid dearly for that marker. I traced the remaining letters: STILL.

“Maybe she was sleepwalking,” Coop said. “I’ve had patients whose sleep disorders wreaked havoc on their lives.”

“I’ve been sleeping in the same room with her for two weeks, and I haven’t seen her get up once to even go to the bathroom.” I shivered, and he slid his arm around me. On the small wooden bench at the edge of the Fishers’ pond, I moved infinitesimally closer.

“Then again,” he hypothesized, “maybe she’s starting to realize what happened.”

“I’m missing the logic here. Why would admitting that you’d been pregnant lead to defacing a gravestone?”

“I didn’t say she admitted it to herself. I said she’s starting to take in some of the proof we’ve been throwing at her, and in some way, she’s trying to reconcile it. Unconsciously.”

“Ah. If the headstone for the baby isn’t there, the baby never existed.”

“You got it.” He exhaled slowly, then said thoughtfully. “There’s enough here, Ellie. You’ll be able to find a forensic shrink who’ll back you up on an insanity defense.”

I nodded, wondering why Coop’s support didn’t make me feel any better. “You’re going to keep talking to her, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll do whatever I can to break the fall, when it comes. And it’s coming.” He smiled gently, adding. “As your psychiatrist, I have to tell you that you’re getting too personally involved in this case.”

That made me smile. “My psychiatrist?”

“With pleasure, ma’am. Can’t think of anyone else I’d rather treat.”

“Sorry. I’m not crazy.”

He kissed a spot behind my ear, nuzzling. “Yet,” he murmured. He turned me in his arms, letting his mouth travel over my jaw and my cheek before resting lightly against my lips. With a little shock I realized that after all these years, after all this time, I still knew him-the Morsecode pattern of our kisses, the places his hands would fall on my back and my waist, the feel of his hair as my fingers combed through it.

His touch brought back memories and left a litter of new ones. My heart pumped hard against Coop’s chest; my legs twined over his. In his arms, I was twenty again, the whole world spread in front of me like a banquet.

I blinked and suddenly the pond and Coop came back into focus. “Your eyes are open,” I whispered into his mouth.

He stroked my spine. “The last time I closed them, you disappeared.” So I kept my eyes wide, too, and was stunned by the sight of two things I’d never thought to see: myself, coming full circle; and the ghost of a girl who walked on water.

I pulled back in Coop’s arms. Hannah’s ghost? No, it couldn’t be.

“What is it?” Coop murmured.

I leaned into him again. “You,” I said. “Just you.”

Sometimes, when Jacob Fisher was sitting in the tiny closet-sized office he shared with another graduate student in the English department, he pinched himself. It was not so long ago, really, since he had hidden Shakespearean plays under bags of feed in the barn; since he had stayed up all night reading by the beam of a flashlight, only to stumble through his chores the next morning, drunk with what he’d learned. And now here he was, surrounded by books, paid to analyze and teach to young men and women with the same stars in their eyes that Jacob had had.