Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

Ellie shuffled her papers together while George clicked his pen and hooked it back inside his suit jacket pocket. “So,” he said, smirking. “How’s the milking going?”

“You oughtta know, farm boy.”

“I may be a country lawyer, Ellie, but I got my degree in Philly, just like you.”

Ellie stood. “George, do me a favor and find someplace to go. I’ve seen enough horse’s asses in the past few weeks.”

George laughed and picked up his portfolio, then held the door open for Ellie. “If I had as shitty a case as you do, I guess I’d be in a foul mood, too.”

Ellie walked past him. “Don’t guess,” she said. “You’re bound to be wrong.”

• • •

Coop had asked Katie to walk him through the days leading up to the birth, hoping to jar a memory, although in an hour’s time there had been no major breakthroughs. He leaned forward. “So you were doing the wash. Tell me what it felt like when you bent down to reach into that basket of wet clothes.”

Katie closed her eyes. “Good. Cool. I took one of my Dat’s shirts and rubbed it on my face, because I was so hot.”

“Was it hard to bend down?”

She frowned. “It hurt my back. I felt a crick in it, like I sometimes do before it’s my time of the month.”

“How long had it been since your time of the month?”

“A long time,” Katie admitted. “I thought about that when I hung my drawers up to dry.”

“You knew that skipping menses was a sign of pregnancy,” Coop said gently.

“Ja, but I’d been late before.” Katie picked at the hem of her apron. “I kept telling myself that.”

Coop’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because . . . because I . . .” Katie’s face contorted, reddened.

“Tell me,” he urged.

“When I first missed my time,” Katie said, tears streaming down her cheeks, “I told myself not to worry about it. And then I stopped worrying, for a little while. But I was so tired, I could barely stay awake after dinner. And when I put on my apron, I had to work hard to make the straight pins go through the same holes as always.” She took a shuddering breath. “I thought-I thought I might be-but I wasn’t big like my Mam with Hannah.” Her hands moved to her belly. “This was nothing.”

“Did you ever feel something moving inside you? Kicking?”

Katie was silent for so long Coop was about to ask another question. Then, suddenly, her voice came, quiet and sad. “Sometimes,” she confessed, “it would wake me up at night.”

Coop lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Katie, on that day you hung the laundry, on that day your back hurt so much, what did you know?”

She looked into her lap. “That I was pregnant,” she breathed.

Coop stilled at the admission. “Did you tell your mother?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

She shook her head. “The Lord. I asked Him to help me.”

“What time that night did you wake up with cramps?”

“I didn’t.”

“All right,” Coop said. “Then when did you go out to the barn?”

“I didn’t.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Katie, you knew you were pregnant when you went to sleep that night.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think you were pregnant the next morning?”

“No,” Katie answered. “It was gone. I just knew all of a sudden.”

“Then something must have happened between that night and the next morning. What happened?”

Katie blinked back fresh tears. “God answered my prayers.”

By silent agreement, neither Ellie nor Coop spoke of the fiasco in his apartment a few nights earlier. They were colleagues, polite and professional, and as Ellie listened to Coop talk about his session with Katie, she tried not to feel as if something was missing.

In the privacy of the barn, Coop watched the wheels turn in Ellie’s mind as she analyzed Katie’s admission of pregnancy. “She cried?”

“Yeah,” Coop answered.

“That would be evidence of remorse.”

“She cried, but not about the baby-about the mess she’d gotten into. Plus, she’s still amnesiac about how she became pregnant. And instead of a birth, we have divine intervention.”

Ellie smiled a little. “Well, that would be a novel defense.”

“What I’m saying, Ellie, is that you shouldn’t be throwing a victory party just yet. She hid a pregnancy, and today she admitted to it. First off, that’s shady. Often amnesia victims present false memories-the story they’ve heard from the press and from the family, and worse, once they tell it they believe this new story fiercely, when it may not be accurate at all. But, just for the hell of it, let’s say that Katie’s on the square here, and truly did just remember being pregnant. Maybe there will be more admissions, as her defense mechanisms break down. But maybe there won’t be. What just happened is therapeutic for Katie, but not for you and your defense-no one ever doubted that she had the baby, except for Katie herself. And hiding a pregnancy isn’t normal, but it’s not outside the range of the law, either.”

“I know what she’s on trial for,” Ellie snapped.

“I know you do,” Coop said. “But does she?”

Adam stood behind her, his hands fisted over her own on the dowsing rods. “You ready?” he whispered, as a barn owl cried. They stepped forward, walking the perimeter of the pond, their shoes crunching on the dry field grass. Katie could feel Adam’s heart pounding, and she wondered why he too seemed on edge; wondered what on earth he had to lose.

The rods began to shake and jump, and Katie instinctively drew back against Adam. He murmured something she did not hear, and together they fought to hold onto the sticks. “Take me back there,” he said, and Katie closed her eyes.

She imagined the cold of that day, how you could pinch together your nostrils and feel them stick, how when you removed your mittens to lace up your skates, your fingers grew thick and red as sausages. She imagined the whoop of delight Hannah had let out when she skated off to the center of the pond, shawl flying out behind her. She imagined her sister’s bright blond hair glinting through her kapp. Most of all, she remembered the feel of Hannah’s hand in hers when they walked down the slippery hill to the pond, small and warm and utterly trusting in Katie’s ability to keep her from falling.

The pressure on the dowsing rods stopped, and Katie opened her eyes when Adam sucked in his breath. “She looks just like you,” he whispered.

Hannah skated away from them, making figure eights about six inches above the surface of the water. “The pond was higher then,” Adam said. “That’s why she seems to be floating.”

“You see her,” Katie murmured, her heart lifting. She dropped the dowsing rods and threw her arms around Adam. “You can see my sister!” Belatedly suspi cious, she drew back to quiz him. “What color are her skates?”

“Black. And they look like hand-me-downs.”

“And her dress?”

“Kind of green. Light, like sherbet.”

Adam led her to the bench at the edge of the pond. “Tell me what happened that night.”

Katie painted with words: Jacob’s escape to the barn, the spangles on the figure-skating champion she’d been dreaming about, the scrape of Hannah’s blades on the thin patches of ice. “I was supposed to be looking out for her, and instead all I could think of was me,” she said finally, miserably. “It was my fault.”

“You can’t think that. It was just something horrible that happened.” He touched Katie’s cheek. “Look at her. She’s happy. You can feel it.”

Katie lifted her face to his. “You’ve already told me that the ones who come back, the ones who become ghosts, have pain left behind. If she’s so happy, Adam, why is she still here?”