Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

“You have to,” Adam said thickly, “because I wasn’t there. And I need to know.”

Katie pressed her lips together and gave a tight little shake of her head. She sank down into a chair and curled forward, her arms crossed over her stomach.

Adam reached for her hand and kissed the knuckles. “We’ll figure this out,” he said. “After the trial, somehow, it’s all going to work out.”

She let his voice wash over her with the same spiritual cleansing that she’d felt at Grossgemee, communion services. How she wanted to believe him! Lifting her face to Adam’s, she started to nod.

But something flickered in his eyes, the smallest dance of doubt, so brief that had Adam not turned away quickly, Katie might have put it from her mind. He had said he loved her. He had told a jury. He might not admit it in court, but here in private, he would allow himself to wonder if the reason Katie could not remember what had happened to their baby was because she’d done something unspeakable.

He kissed her gently, and she wondered how you could come so close to a person that there was not a breath of space between you, and still feel like a canyon had ripped the earth raw between your feet. “We’ll have other babies,” he said, the one thing Katie could not stand to hear.

She touched his cheeks and his jaw and the soft curve of his ears. “I’m sorry,” she said, unsure for what she was apologizing.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Adam murmured.

“Adam-”

Touching his finger to her lips, he shook his head. “Don’t say it. Not just yet.”

Her chest tightened, so that she could barely breathe. “I wanted to tell you he looked like you,” she said, the words tumbling bright as a gift. “I wanted to tell you he was beautiful.”

Adam stepped out of the bathroom stall and began to wash his hands. His head was still full of thoughts of Katie, of the trial, of their baby. He was only marginally aware when another man stepped up to wash at the sink beside him.

Their eyes met in the mirror. Adam regarded the man’s broad-brimmed black hat, the simple trousers, the suspenders, the pale green shirt. Adam had never met him before, but he knew. He knew the same way that the blond giant who seemed unable to tear his eyes away from Adam knew.

This was the one she was with before me, Adam thought.

He had not been in the courtroom; Adam would have remembered him. Perhaps he was opposed to it for religious reasons. Perhaps he was sequestered, and would be on the witness stand later.

Perhaps, like the prosecutor had suggested, he had stepped in after Adam left to take care of Katie.

“Excuse me,” the blond man said in heavily accented English. He reached across Adam toward the soap dispenser.

Adam dried his hands on a paper towel. He nodded once-territorially, evenly-at the other man, and tossed the crumpled paper into the trash.

As Adam swung open the bathroom door to reveal the busy hallway, he looked back one last time. The Amish man was reaching for his own paper towel now, was standing in the very spot that Adam had been just a moment before.

Samuel’s fingers fumbled on the doorknob as he entered the tiny conference room where Ellie had said he’d find Katie. She was there, yes, her head bent over the ugly plastic table like a dandelion wilting on its stem. He sat down across from her and set his elbows on the table. “You okay?”

“Ja.” Katie sighed, rubbed her eyes. “I’m okay.”

“That makes one of us.”

Katie smiled faintly. “You’re on the stand soon?”

“Ellie says so.” He hesitated. “Ellie says she knows what she’s doing.” Samuel got to his feet, feeling oversized and uncomfortable inside such cramped quarters. “Ellie says I have to bring you back, now, too.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Ellie,” Katie said sarcastically.

Samuel’s brows drew together. “Katie,” he said, that was all, and suddenly she felt small and mean.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she admitted. “These days, I don’t know myself.”

“Well, I do,” Samuel said, so perfectly serious that it made her grin.

“Thank goodness for that.” Katie did not like being in this courthouse, being so far away from her parents’ farm, but knowing that Samuel was feeling just as out of place as she was somehow made it a little better.

He held out his hand and smiled. “Come on now.”

Katie slipped her fingers into his. Samuel pulled her out of the chair and led her out of the conference room. They walked hand-in-hand down the hallway, through the double doors of the courtroom, toward the defense table; neither one of them ever thinking it would be all right, now, to let go.

The night before testimony began for Katie’s defense, I had a dream about putting Coop on the stand. I stood in front of him in a courtroom that was empty save for the two of us, the lemon-polished gallery stretching behind me like a dark desert. I opened up my mouth to ask him about Katie’s treatment, and instead, a different question flew out of my mouth like a bird that had been trapped inside: Will we be happy ten years from now? Mortified, I pressed my lips together and waited for the witness to answer the question, but Coop just stared into his lap. “I need a response, Dr. Cooper,” I pressed; and I approached the witness stand to find Katie’s dead infant stretched across his lap.

Questioning Coop as a witness rated high on my scale of discomfort-somewhere, say, between suffering a bikini wax and braving bamboo slivers under the nails. There was something about having a man locked in a box in front of me, at my mercy to answer any inquiry I threw at him-and yet to know that the questions I’d be asking were not the ones I truly needed answered. Plus, there was a new subtext between us, all the things that had not yet been said in the wake of this knowledge of pregnancy. It surrounded us like a sea, pale and distorting; so that when I saw Coop or listened to him speak, I could not trust my perception to be accurate.

He came up to me minutes before he was scheduled to take the stand. Hands in his pockets, painfully professional, he lifted his chin. “I want Katie out of the courtroom while I testify.”

Katie was not sitting beside me; I’d sent Samuel to retrieve her. “Why?”

“Because my first responsibility is to Katie as a patient, and after that last stunt you pulled with Adam, I think she’s too fragile to hear me talk about what happened.”

I straightened the papers in front of me. “That’s too bad, because I need the jury to see her getting upset.”

His shock was a palpable thing. Well, good. Maybe this was the way to show him that I wasn’t the woman he expected me to be. Turning a cool gaze on him, I added, “The whole point is to gain sympathy for her.”

I expected him to argue with me, but Coop only stood there, staring at me for a moment, until I began to shift beneath his regard. “You’re not that tough, Ellie,” he said finally. “You can stop pretending.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it is.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” I cried, frustrated. “It’s not what I need now.”

“It’s exactly what you need, El.” Coop reached out and straightened my lapel, gently smoothing it down, a gesture that suddenly made me want to cry.

I took a deep breath. “Katie’s staying, that’s that. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a few minutes by myself.”

“Those few minutes,” he said softly. “They’re adding up.”

“For God’s sake, I’m in the middle of a trial! What do you expect?”

Coop let his hand trail off my shoulder, over my arm. “That one day you’ll look around,” he said, “and you’ll find out you’ve been alone for years.”