Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

“You’re right. I can blame it all on this bug I’ve caught.”

Katie set down the hairbrush and smiled shyly. “You’re not sick, Ellie. You’re pregnant.”

“Clearly, it’s wrong,” I said to Katie, holding out the stick from the pregnancy test kit.

Katie, squinting at the back of the box, shook her head. “You waited five minutes. You watched the little line appear in the test window.”

I tossed the stick, with its little pink plus sign, onto the bed. “I was supposed to pee for thirty seconds straight, and I only counted fifteen. So there you go. Human error.”

We both looked at the box, which contained a second stick. At the pharmacy the deal had been two for the price of one. All it would take for proof was one more trip to the bathroom, five more interminable minutes of destiny. But both Katie and I knew what the results would be.

Things like this did not happen to forty-year-old women. Accidents were for teenagers caught up in the moment, rolling around the backseat of their parents’ cars. Accidents were for women who considered their bodies still new and surprising, rather than old, familiar friends. Accidents were for those who didn’t know better.

But this didn’t feel like an accident. It felt hard and hot, a nugget nestled beneath my palm, as if already I could feel the sonic waves of that tiny heart.

Katie looked into her lap. “Congratulations,” she whispered.

• • •

In the past five years, I had wanted a baby so much I ached. I would wake up sometimes beside Stephen and feel my arms throb, as if I had been holding a newborn weight the whole night. I would see an infant in a stroller and feel my whole body reach; I would mark my monthly period on the calendar with the sense that my life was passing me by. I wanted to grow something under my heart. I wanted to breathe, to eat, to blossom for someone else.

Stephen and I fought about children approximately twice a year, as if reproduction were a volcano that erupted every now and then on the island we’d created for ourselves. Once, I actually wore him down. “All right,” he’d said. “If it happens, it happens.” I threw away my birth control pills for six consecutive months, but we didn’t manage to make a baby. It took me nearly half a year after that to understand why not: You can’t create life in a place that’s dying by degrees.

After that, I’d stopped asking Stephen. Instead, when I was feeling maternal, I went to the library and did research. I learned how many times the cells of a zygote divided before they were classified as an embryo. I saw on microfiche the pictures of a fetus sucking its thumb, veins running like roads beneath the orange glow of its skin. I learned that a six-week-old fetus was the size of a strawberry. I read about alpha-fetal protein and amniocentesis and rH factors. I became a scholar in an ivory tower, an expert with no hands-on experience.

So you see, I knew everything about this baby inside me-except why I wasn’t overjoyed to discover its existence.

I didn’t want anyone on the farm to know I was pregnant-at least not until I broke the news to Coop. The next morning, I slept late. I managed to make it out to a secluded spot behind the vegetable garden before I started dry heaving. When the smell of the horse grain made me dizzy, Katie wordlessly took over for me. I began to see her in a new light, amazed she had hidden her condition from so many people, for so long.

She came to join me outside the barn. “So,” she asked briskly, “you feeling poor, still?” She slid down beside me, our backs braced by the red wooden wall.

“Not anymore,” I lied. “I think I’ll be okay.”

“Till tomorrow morning, anyway.” Katie dug beneath the waistband of her apron and pulled out two teabags. “You’ll be needing these, I figure.”

I sniffed at them. “Will they settle my stomach?”

Katie blushed. “You put them here,” she said, grazing her breasts with the tips of her fingers. “When they’re too sore to bear.” Assessing my naïveté, she added, “You steep them, first.”

“Thank God I know someone who’s already been through this-” Katie reared back as if I’d slapped her, and too late I realized what I’d said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she murmured.

“It’s not okay. I know this can’t be easy for you, especially in the middle of the trial. I could say that you’ll have another baby of your own one day, but I remember how I felt every time one of my pregnant, married friends said something like that to me.”

“How did you feel?”

“Like I wanted to deck her.”

Katie smiled shyly. “Ja, that’s about right.” She glanced at my stomach, then away. “I’m happy for you, Ellie, I am. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. And I keep telling myself that my Mam lost three babies, four if you count Hannah.” She shrugged. “You can be happy for someone else’s good fortune, but that doesn’t mean you forget your own bad luck.”

I had never been more aware than I was at that moment of the fact that Katie had wanted her baby. She may have put off having it, she may have procrastinated owning up to her pregnancy-but once the infant was born, there had never been any question in her mind about loving it. With no little amazement I stared at her, feeling the defense I’d prepared for her trial dovetail into the truth.

I squeezed her hand. “It means a lot to me,” I said. “Being able to share this secret with someone.”

“Soon you’ll be able to tell Coop.”

“I guess.” I didn’t know when or whether he’d be by this weekend. We hadn’t made any official plans when he dropped us off at the farmhouse on Friday night. Still annoyed after my refusal to move in with him, he was keeping his distance.

Katie wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. “You think he’ll be happy?”

“I know he will.”

She looked up at me. “Suppose you’ll be getting married, then.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about that.”

“I bet he’ll want to marry you.”

I turned to her. “It’s not Coop who’s holding back.”

I expected her to stare at me blankly, to wonder why on earth I’d shy away from the obvious, easy path. I had a man who loved me, who was the father of this child, who wanted this child. Even I didn’t understand my reluctance.

“When I found out I was carrying,” Katie said softly, “I thought about telling Adam. He’d gone away, sure, but I figured that I could have dug him up if I put my mind to it. And then I realized that I really didn’t want to tell Adam. Not because he would have been upset-ach, no, the very opposite. I didn’t want to tell him because then all the choices were gone. I’d know what I had to do, and I would have done it. But I was afraid that one day I’d look down at the baby, and I wouldn’t be thinking, I love you . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and I turned to catch her gaze, to finish her words. “I’d be thinking, how did I get here?”

Katie stared at the flat expanse of the pond in the distance. “Exactly,” she said.

Sarah headed toward the chicken coop. “You don’t have to do this,” she told me for the third time.

But I was feeling guilty about having slept the morning away. “It’s no trouble at all,” I said. The Fishers kept twenty-four hens for laying. Tending to the chickens was something Katie and I did in the mornings; the chore involved feeding the birds and gathering the eggs. I had been pecked hard enough to bleed at first, but finally learned how to slide my hand under the warm bottom of a chicken without suffering injury. In fact, I was looking forward to showing Sarah that I already knew a thing or two.