Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

She thought he meant tomorrow, when he left for Scotland. She thought he meant forever. But then she felt her body spinning tighter and tighter, and scattering like the bright white seeds of a milkweed. As she caught her breath, more leaves fell on them, a benediction. Adam lay by her side, smiling and stroking her hip. “You okay?”

Katie nodded. If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

He wrapped her in her shawl, and it made her feel physically ill. “No.” She pushed at his hands, shimmying away from the light wool. “I don’t want it.”

Sensing the change in her, Adam drew her closer. “Listen, now,” he said firmly. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn’t making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.

“Katie,” Adam said, his voice rough, “talk to me.”

But she wanted him to speak. She wanted him to carry her far away from here, and hold her close all over again, and tell her that two worlds could be bridged with a look, with a touch. She wanted him to say that she belonged to him, and that he belonged to her, and that in the grand scheme of things that was really all that mattered.

She wanted him to tell her that when you loved someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

Adam remained silent, searching her face. Katie felt the heat of him, of them, seeping between her thighs. They would not be going to Scotland together. They would not be going anywhere. She reached for her shawl and pulled it around her shoulders, knotting it just below the spot where her heart was breaking. “I think,” she said softly, “you’d better leave.”

• • •

Katie was finding it harder and harder to fall asleep. In those floating moments just before she drifted off, she would feel the scratch of hay under her thighs, or smell fear, or see the moon glinting off the stretched skin of her belly. She would think of the things she had told Dr. Polacci and Dr. Riordan and feel ill. And then she’d roll onto her side, to watch Ellie sleep, and feel even worse.

She hadn’t expected to like Ellie. At first, Katie had been furious to find herself stuck with a jailer who didn’t trust her, to boot. But as uncomfortable as Katie might have found the situation, Ellie must have found it even more uncomfortable. This was not her home; these were not her people-and as she had pointed out several times, now, usually in fits of anger, this was not a situation of her own making.

Well, it isn’t my fault, either, Katie thought. And yet she had seen that baby wrapped in the horse blankets. She had watched its coffin lowered into the ground. It was someone’s fault.

Katie had not killed the baby, she knew this as well as she knew the sun would come up in the morning. But then, who had?

There was once a homeless man who’d taken up shelter inside Isaiah King’s tobacco shed. But even if a vagrant had been in the barn that morning, he’d have no cause to take a newborn out of Katie’s arms, kill it, and hide it. Unless he was crazy, like Ellie was making her out to be.

Katie knew that she would have sensed if someone else was in the barn that morning. And even if she hadn’t, the animals would have. Nugget would have been whinnying for a treat, like he always did when a person came to call; the cows would have been lowing in anticipation of milking. From the little bits and pieces Katie could recall, there had only been calm.

Which meant someone had slipped in after her.

She had racked her brain over and over, wishing for something she could give to Ellie on a silver platter, some piece of evidence so strong that it would make everything clear. But who would have cause to be up at that hour?

Her father. The very thought shamed Katie. Her Dat sometimes came down to check on the cows due to deliver-but he was there to help give life, not take it away. Had he found Katie lying with a newborn-well, he would have been shocked, even angry. But justice for him would come from the church, not from his own hands.

Samuel. If he’d come early for the milking, he might have found her asleep in the barn with the newborn. For sure, he’d have every right to be upset. Could he have hurt the baby before he realized what he’d done? Impossible, Katie thought, not Samuel. Samuel didn’t jump to conclusions; he thought slowly. And he was too honest to lie to the police. Suddenly Katie brightened, remembering another alibi for Samuel: he always brought along Levi. He wouldn’t have been alone in the barn long enough to commit a crime.

But that left no one else-no one but Katie herself. And here, in the very deepest part of the night, she pulled the quilt tighter around herself and let herself wonder if Dr. Polacci and Ellie might be right after all. If you didn’t remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn’t?

Katie rubbed her temples. She drifted off to sleep, borne along on the memory of the high, thin cry of a baby.

The flashlight shining in her eyes woke Ellie. “For God’s sake,” she muttered, flinging a look at Katie, fast asleep, and then crossing to the window. If Samuel had come to tender an apology, it would have been nice for him to pick a time other than one in the morning. Ellie peered out the window, ready to give him a piece of her mind, and then realized that the man standing out in front of the house was Coop.

After dressing quickly in the shirt and shorts she’d had on the previous day, Ellie hurried down to meet him. She put her finger to her lips when she stepped onto the porch, and walked a distance from the house. Folding her arms across her chest, she nodded at the flashlight. “Samuel tip you off to that trick?”

“Levi,” Coop said. “The kid’s a real corker.”

“Did you come to show me that you understand Amish courting rituals?” As soon as she said it, she wanted to take it back. As if, after the way things had gone the other night, Coop might want to include her in anything even marginally resembling a courting ritual.

He sighed. “I came to say I’m sorry.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I would have called, but damn if I couldn’t find a listing for the Fishers. I had to find my handy-dandy flashlight and attend to the matter in person.”

Ellie felt a smile twitch at her lips. “I see.”

“No, you don’t.” He reached for her hand, pulling her down the path toward the pond. “I am truly sorry that things didn’t work out for you with Stephen. I never meant to humiliate you.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“You hurt me once, El. Badly. I guess on some level I wanted to make you feel as rotten as I did back then.” He grimaced. “Not very enlightened of me.”

Ellie faced him. “I wouldn’t have asked you to help with Katie’s case if I’d known you were still carrying a grudge, Coop. I thought after twenty years you would have moved past that.”

“But if I’d moved past that,” Coop reasoned, “it would mean I’d moved past you.”

Ellie could feel the night closing in around her. Crazy, she thought, a pulse hammering at her throat. This is crazy. “I noticed up insanity,” she blurted out.

Coop nodded, accepting the quick change of subject, and Ellie’s need for it. “Ah.”

“What does that mean?”

He stuffed the flashlight under his arm and tucked his hands in his pockets, striking off again as Ellie followed. “You know what it means, because you’ve probably thought it through yourself. Katie’s not insane. Then again, I suppose as her attorney you can tell the jury she’s Queen Elizabeth, if that’s bound to get her acquitted, and we all know she hasn’t got a drop of royal blood in her, either.”