Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

“What’s harder to swallow, Coop: that a young, frightened girl snapped and smothered her baby without realizing what she was doing-or that a stranger came into the barn at two in the morning, after a girl had given birth two months shy of her due date, and murdered the baby while she was asleep?”

“Insanity defenses rarely win, El.”

“Neither does reasonable doubt, when it looks absolutely unreasonable.” They had reached the pond, and Ellie sank down onto the iron bench and drew up her knees. “Even if she didn’t kill that baby, the best way to get her to walk is to convince the jury that she did, without cognitively knowing what she was doing. It’s the most sympathetic defense I’ve got.”

“Hell, lawyers lie all the time,” Coop said.

She snorted. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve done it . . . God, I can’t even count by now.”

“You’re damn good at it, too.”

“Yeah,” Ellie said. “That I am.”

Coop reached for her hand. “Then how come it’s eating you up inside?”

She let the façade drop, the one she’d been holding in place since explaining to Katie that they were going to use the insanity defense to get her off, even though she wasn’t insane.

“You want me to tell you why it’s killing you?” Coop said easily. “Because pleading insanity means Katie did it, even if she was cognitively off on Mars. And deep down, you just like Katie too much to want to admit that.”

Ellie sniffed. “You’re way off base. You know what a client relationship is like-personal feelings don’t enter into it. I’ve managed to keep a straight face while I told a jury that a child molester was a pillar of the community. I’ve made a serial rapist look like a choirboy. It’s what I do. What I personally feel about my clients has nothing to do with what I say to defend them.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

That stopped Ellie flat. “I am?”

“Yeah. The issue here is that a long time ago, Katie stopped being a client. Maybe from the very start, even. She’s related to you, however distantly. She’s likable, young, confused-and you’ve fallen into the role of surrogate mother. But your feelings for her are a mystery, because for all intents and purposes she discarded something you’d kill to have-a child.”

Ellie squared her shoulders, ready to laugh this observation off, but found that no smart comment sprang to her lips. “Am I so easy to read?”

“No need,” Coop murmured. “I already know you by heart.”

“So how do I fix it? If I don’t separate my personal relationship with her from my professional one, I’m never going to win her case.”

Coop smiled. “When are you going to learn that there are all kinds of ways to win?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, wary.

“Sometimes when you think you’ve lost, you actually wind up coming out far ahead.” He grasped her chin in his hand, and kissed her lightly. “Just look at me.”

Ellie did. She saw the remarkable Caribbean green of his eyes, but more importantly, the history in them. She saw the little scar beneath his jaw that he’d gotten in a bicycle fall at age six. And the crease in his cheek that would cave into a dimple at the slightest hint of a smile.

“I’m sorry for what I said to you the other night,” Coop said. “And I think I’ll even cover my ass by apologizing for what I just told you now, too.”

“I probably needed to hear it. And every now and then, to be slapped up the side of the head, most likely.”

“I should warn you now, I’m not that kind of man.”

She leaned toward him. “I know.”

Their kisses were frantic and close, as if they were intent on getting inside each other’s skin. Coop’s hands roamed over her back and her breasts. “God, I’ve missed you,” he breathed.

“It’s only been five days.”

Coop stopped abruptly, then touched her face. “It’s been forever,” he said.

With her eyes closed, she believed him. She could imagine the music of the Grateful Dead crackling across the courtyard, wafting through the open window of her dorm room, where she and Coop lay tangled on the narrow bed. She could still see the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway of the closet, a crystalline rainbow, and the beady eyes of the squirrel who perched on the windowsill, watching them.

She felt him peel off her shirt and unsnap her shorts. “Coop,” she said, suddenly nervous. “I’m not twenty anymore.”

“Damn.” He continued to push her shorts down. “I guess that means I’m not, either.”

“No, really.” She took his hand from the waistband of her shorts and brought it to her mouth. “I don’t look like I used to look.”

He nodded sympathetically. “It’s that scar, isn’t it-the one from your pacemaker surgery?”

“I didn’t have pacemaker surgery.”

“Then what are you worried about?” He kissed her lightly. “El, if you weighed two hundred pounds and had grown hair on your chest, I wouldn’t care. When I look at you, no matter what I should be seeing, I’m picturing a girl who’s still in college-because the minute I fell in love with you, time stopped.”

“I don’t weigh two hundred pounds.”

“Not an ounce over one-eighty,” Coop agreed, and she hit him on the arm. “Are you gonna keep distracting me, or are you going to let me make love to you?”

Ellie smiled. “I don’t know. Let me think on it.”

Grinning, he kissed her. Her arms twined around his neck, and she pulled him closer. “You know,” he said, the words hot against her skin, “you weren’t twenty when I undressed you the other night, either.”

“No, but I was drunk.”

Coop laughed. “Maybe I ought to try that. Because this damn bench is hard enough to make me feel every single one of my thirty-nine decrepit years.” In a quick move, he pulled her off the seat, rolling so that he’d bear the brunt of the fall as they went down on the grass.

Ellie landed on top of him, her legs sprawled, her face an inch from Coop’s. “Are you gonna keep distracting me,” she murmured, “or are you going to let me make love to you?”

Coop’s arms tightened on the small of her back. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and touched his lips to hers.

Katie was sitting at the table, nursing a glass of fresh milk from the ubiquitous pitcher in the refrigerator, when Ellie crept into the house like a teenager. Seeing the light, she poked her head into the kitchen. “Oh,” she said, surprised to find Katie there. “Why are you up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Katie said. “How about you?” But she knew, from the moment she’d seen Ellie, where she had been and what she’d been doing. The grass in her hair; the color in her cheeks. She smelled of sex.

For a moment Katie was so jealous she felt it rise inside her like a tide, and she couldn’t take her eyes off Ellie because all she wanted was to feel what Ellie was feeling now. It was marked on her, as sure as if his touch still glowed fluorescent on her skin.

“I went for a walk,” Ellie said slowly.

“And you fell.”

“No . . . why?”

Katie shrugged. “How else would you have gotten leaves in your hair?”

Self-conscious, Ellie reached up. “What are you,” she said with a smile, “my mother?”

Katie thought of Ellie, being touched and held and kissed. She thought of Adam, and instead of the soft swelling she usually felt in her lower stomach there was just a bitter ball. “No. And you’re not my mother, either.”

Ellie stiffened. “That’s true.”

“You think you are. You want me to crawl up on your lap and cry my heart out so you can make it all better. But you know what, Ellie? Mothers don’t have the power to make it all better, no matter what you think.”