The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “It wasn’t a big deal, really.”

  “But rather excessive lengths to go to, for a doll, I think.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought it was. I didn’t think …”

  “You didn’t think what, Ms. Roth?”

  “That it was anything else,” Naomi said lamely. Then she looked him squarely in the face. “I didn’t think it was a baby, Mr. Charter. I just thought some little kid might be missing her doll.” So sue me, she thought. And, purely for her own satisfaction: Go fuck yourself.

  “And yet”—he sighed—“as we all now know, it was indeed a baby. Will you tell us please how you made this discovery?”

  She concentrated, trying for a dispassionate, clinical pitch. “I touched the leg. It was very cold. I turned it over. She was …” And here words failed her abruptly. She was … what? Butchered? Incised? Pierced? Put down? “I knew,” she finally said, “that she was dead. A dead child.”

  “And a girl,” he prodded.

  “Yes. She was a girl.”

  “Ms. Roth,” he said disingenuously, “I imagine this must be difficult for you, but I’d like you to tell the jury what you remember about the baby you found. About her face, for example.”

  Her face? Naomi squeezed shut her eyes. She could not look very well at the face of the baby, its points of white flesh and open gray eyes, the dark hairs floating in water around the baby’s head. She realized now, after many months, that her understanding of the baby’s face had been first forgotten and then reassembled, a composite both antiseptic and impersonal: generic baby. Probably the baby she might describe would owe as much to the Gerber label as to what she had seen in the Sabbathday River. For the first time, she truly understood the vulnerability of memory. If Charter wanted pathos for the jury, she was incapable of delivering it, and not out of spite, either.

  She looked at him now. “You know, I don’t really remember the baby’s face very well. I’m trying to, but I’ve sort of forgotten and I don’t want to remember it wrong. She was very small and still, that I do remember. And very white.”

  “The experience of finding the body must have been unpleasant.”

  Naomi nodded in agreement, though she did not trust the sympathy in his voice for one instant.

  “It was. Awful.”

  “And what did you do when you found the baby’s body?”

  “I picked it up, of course. I ran to the road, back to my car. Then I wrapped it up and drove into town, to the police station.”

  “What did you wrap it in?”

  For a moment she stared at him, perplexed. Then she remembered: the sampler. A is for Apple. Grotesque, but surely a coincidence. Surely he wouldn’t try to make anything out of that.

  “I really don’t remember,” Naomi said bravely, and Charter smiled at her and went to the evidence table. He took his time, hovering over the plastic bags, gazing down in particular at the knitting needle placed at the end nearest the jury, all very unnecessary, since Naomi herself could see the sampler perfectly well from where she was sitting, one slash of red over faded linen. That’s it over there, she almost pointed.

  “Would this have been it?” Charter lifted the bag in question. The red ghost of an A under shining plastic.

  “Very likely,” Naomi said dryly.

  Charter entered the bag into evidence. The court reporter clicked. He held it out to Naomi.

  “What is this, precisely, Ms. Roth?”

  Well, it’s a contemporary example of American folk art, Mr. Charter, Naomi thought, a testament to the national character, and to artistry even in the face of deprivation, a form of expression available to girls and women who were denied education and sexuality, not to mention the right to work or control their own bodies or direct their own lives or leave fathers who beat them or husbands who beat them and Probably, when you got right down to it, sons who beat them, too. And isn’t it amazing that at the end of a long day of toil in a society that did not value her at all, a woman might have used the last hours before sleep and risk ruining her eyes to create something so useless and lovely as this sampler?

  “It’s a sampler, from my company.” She looked apologetically at the jury. “I direct a collective of artisans. We make these. Samplers.” She gestured lamely. “This one just happened to be in the back seat that day. I grabbed it and wrapped the baby up in it.”

  “But the baby was dead. Surely you knew that.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then why bother wrapping it up?”

  “Because,” Naomi began, and then she heard what she was about to say and shuddered. Because it was cold. Because I wanted to save her, for myself. “Oh, it was just a stupid thing to do.”

  “Did you perhaps think, I can help this poor baby? I can save her?”

  “I knew I couldn’t save her,” she told Charter crossly. “She was dead.”

  “Then why not just toss her in the back seat?”

  “She was only a baby,” Naomi said, horrified. Then she was horrified for a different reason. So easily trapped, after all. She did not look at Judith. Her face was hot now, and she could feel the shake in her jaw, tiny, then seemingly less tiny.

  “Only a baby,” Charter said cruelly. He walked back to his table and half sat, half leaned on it. “Just out of interest, which of your artisans made this particular sampler?” He touched it. The plastic crinkled.

  “Listen”—she leaned forward—“it only happened to be there. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  The judge leaned over. “You need to answer the question, Ms. Roth. Don’t anticipate, please.”

  “Thank you, your honor,” Charter said affably.

  “Well, as you know,” said Naomi tightly, “that particular sampler was made by Heather Pratt. I’d picked it up a few days before and hadn’t gotten around to bringing it in. I probably had a few other people’s work in the back seat, too, but I just happened to touch that one first.”

  He nodded sagely.

  “Well, let’s talk about Heather Pratt,” Charter said, as if the subject had come up naturally, and out of the blue. “How long have you known Heather Pratt?”

  “I’ve known Heather for about two years. Her work was brought to me by Stephen Trask. Heather had been working for Stephen at the sports center, but she wanted to change her job.”

  “You had not come across Heather before that?”

  “No reason I would have. She was in high school.”

  “Did Stephen tell you why Heather was interested in leaving her job at the sports center?”

  “No. But he would hardly be recommending her to me if there was anything terrible, would he?”

  “I suppose,” Charter said thoughtfully, “that depends on what you might call terrible.”

  Naomi frowned.

  “He didn’t, for example, tell you that Heather was an irresponsible employee?”

  “Absolutely not.” She sounded affronted, at least to her own ears.

  “Or that she had stolen from the sports center during her time there?”

  Naomi glared at him. “No. And I wouldn’t believe that.”

  “Or that she had engaged in physical altercations with clients of the sports center?”

  “No. I seriously doubt that,” she said harshly.

  “You do? That’s odd. Didn’t Heather Pratt have a very prominent mark on her cheek the first time you met her?”

  Naomi stopped short. Oh God—that was true. She ran into a rival embroiderer, Stephen had said. Damn Stephen Trask, she thought bitterly. What else hadn’t he told her?

  “That’s true,” she said quietly. “But I don’t have any idea how that happened.”

  Charter nodded. He seemed ready to move on.

  “And was there anything else noticeable about Heather Pratt when you met her? Anything physical?”

  Naomi squared her shoulders. “She appeared to be pregnant. She told me she was pregnant.”

  “Yet she was unmarried, wasn’t she?”

  “A m
arriage license,” Naomi said tightly, “has no effect on fertility that I know of.”

  But this, too, she saw right away, would not help Heather.

  “I mean, I didn’t know whether she was married or not. I didn’t feel it was any of my business.” I still don’t, she thought.

  “You employed Heather Pratt from that time, spring of 1984?”

  “Yes. She was … she is, an excellent employee. Responsible, considerate. She is extraordinarily skillful at needlework, and her work has become enormously popular. I think everyone who sees one of her samplers wants one for herself. She’s the only artisan at Flourish with her own waiting list, do you realize that? And she works hard. Very hard. She’s never been late with a single assignment. I’m glad I had the opportunity to hire her.”

  “Are you finished?” he said quietly.

  Naomi started. “What?”

  “Are you finished? Because you may have heard that this person has been accused of murdering two newborn infants, not being bad at sewing. She is, in fact, on trial for murdering two newborn infants, even as we speak. We are not here to talk about what a good employee she was.”

  Judith was on her feet. “In point of fact, your honor, it was Mr. Charter who brought up my client’s employment record with regard to her work at the sports center.”

  “That’s true, Mr. Charter,” Judge Hayes said. “Why don’t we all try not to overreact and just move along.”

  Charter, who could not glare at the judge, for his own sake, and could not glare at Judith without the jury seeing, glared at Naomi. Then he let it go.

  “Did there come a time, Ms. Roth, when you learned the identity of Heather Pratt’s lover? The father of her child?”

  “I was aware of rumors,” Naomi said. “I heard some of the other women speak about it. But I didn’t think it was their business any more than it was mine.”

  “Whom did these women name?”

  “Ashley Deacon,” Naomi said.

  “Someone known to you?”

  “Yes. I knew Ashley.” She paused. “He did work for me sometimes. Repair work. You know, contractor work. Both at home and at the mill. My office,” she said in explanation to the jury.

  “And did it seem likely to you that these rumors were true?”

  Naomi looked down at her hands. “I thought they might be true, yes. Certainly it seemed possible to me.”

  “Was Ashley Deacon a married man?”

  “Yes.” Naomi didn’t elaborate.

  “Your new employee was pregnant by a married man?”

  “Well, as I said, I didn’t speak to Heather about her private life, but that was the consensus, yes.”

  “And this did not detract from your good opinion of her, I take it.”

  “I’ve always felt,” she said archly, “that there was something to that saying ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’”

  “But judging aside,” Charter was smooth, “you obviously took an interest in this person. Did you not feel you could speak to her about these rumors? Or offer her help in some way?”

  “Heather didn’t need my help. She was perfectly independent. She was happy to be pregnant and looking forward to the birth of her baby. And she became a wonderful mother to her child.”

  “But becoming a mother, even a wonderful mother,” he said sarcastically, “did not prevent your friend from continuing her affair, did it?”

  “The affair continued,” Naomi said. “Though, again, I had no personal evidence of it. I understand that to be true.”

  “You understand that to be true.” He smiled. “Are you aware that Heather Pratt met Ashley Deacon almost daily at your own office and drove from your own parking lot into the woods, where she had sex with him?”

  “No,” Naomi said, but she rolled her eyes. So what?

  “Are you aware that this wonderful mother would take her daughter Polly along with her on these occasions? That the baby would remain in the car while her mother had sex a few feet away?”

  She glanced at Heather, whose eyes were wild. “No.” Naomi’s voice, slipping from her control, was softer.

  “Are you aware that shortly before 11:30 on the night of January the sixteenth of last year, Heather Pratt broke into your own mill, your place of business, in order to have sex in your attic?”

  Her face was numb, really, Naomi thought. She had better pinch it before it disappeared altogether. Judith was nodding, little nods, soft at the bottom and the top. Like: just get on with this, just get this over with, and so Naomi did, but really all she wanted was to go home now. “I didn’t know that,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “But forgiving.”

  “Certainly I forgive her. I can’t begin to imagine what the circumstances must have been.”

  “Does it really matter what the circumstances were?” he said. “Isn’t it enough that she broke into the office of her friend, who had supported her, to have sex?”

  “Circumstances always matter,” Naomi said shortly.

  “And you felt sorry for her, a little bit, didn’t you?”

  “I felt badly that she was receiving so little support from the community, and from her child’s father. Especially after her grandmother died, she got no support at all. So yes, I felt sorry for her, and I wanted to support her.”

  “You were her friend.”

  Naomi hesitated. If she said yes, he would get her somehow, because the true answer was no, and Charter knew that. But she had to say yes, otherwise they would wonder what she was doing here. He was drumming his fingers on the tabletop, enjoying her hesitation.

  “I was her friend. Not—” Close friends, she was about to say, but he cut her off.

  “Really her only friend, I think. Certainly one of very few.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And yet Heather really told you very little about herself, is that right?”

  Not that kind of friend, she almost said, but what other kind was there, really? “Yes,” she agreed.

  “She didn’t, for example, ever admit to you that she was involved in an adulterous relationship with Ashley Deacon, or indeed with anyone else.”

  “Anyone else?” Naomi said, her voice unmistakably snide. She was proud she’d had the wherewithal to muster this.

  “Yes, Ms. Roth. Or anyone else.”

  “I don’t believe there was anyone else, Mr. Charter,” she said tightly.

  “Ah,” he said archly. “But unfortunately, your beliefs are of very little value when it comes to your friend Heather Pratt. In fact, it’s rather remarkable how little of her life she chose to share with you, her only friend. Let’s see,” he went on with great disingenuousness, “she did not tell you who her daughter’s father was, am I right?”

  “Yes. I mean no.” Naomi shook her head, flustered. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “And she didn’t tell you that her affair ended in January of last year, is that so?”

  “Right,” she said.

  “And she didn’t tell you who else she was seeing at that time.”

  Naomi started to shake her head, furious, but Charter spoke again. “Did she tell you or not?”

  “She didn’t tell me about anyone else,” Naomi spat. “Because—”

  “Did she tell you,” he thundered, and Naomi went silent, “about the other man in her life? About Christopher Flynn?”

  Christopher … Naomi’s thoughts spun, catching on air. Christopher Flynn. She couldn’t think. She didn’t know anyone whose name was Christopher Flynn. Was there a Christopher Flynn, and if there was, what had he said? She looked over at Heather, who was shaking her head, amazed. What did she know about Christopher Flynn? Abruptly, Naomi hated Heather.

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” she said finally, her voice weak.

  “Come now,” he said, smiling. “You must know Christopher Flynn, the man who overlapped in your great friend’s life with her other lover, Ashley Deacon.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” s
he said again. “I swear, I’ve never heard it before.”

  Charter shook his head. “Somehow I’m not surprised.” He sighed dramatically. “Well then, given the fact that Heather evidently told you very little about her life, I don’t suppose she shared with you her very important news last January, that she was again pregnant. That she was expecting a second baby, or indeed twin babies, in September of last year.

  “No, you’re right. She didn’t tell me that,” Naomi said.

  He nodded. “And yet many of your neighbors, even those who were not intimate friends of Heather Pratt, did know that she was pregnant. Is that so?”

  “Evidently,” she conceded. She could not look at the jury now. It was humiliating, a gradual strip search before a captive audience.

  “In fact, when I came to see you in the weeks after your discovery of the baby in the river, in order to question you about Heather Pratt, it was because so many people had contacted me to let me know that Heather Pratt had recently been pregnant, and that she was no longer pregnant but that there was no baby, you insisted that I was wrong, didn’t you? You insisted that I was mistaken about Heather being pregnant a second time, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” she remembered, her hands pressing the sides of her thighs. She remembered that. Because he had been mistaken, even though he had apparently been right.

  “No, you told me. Heather Pratt had not recently been pregnant. And you knew that for a fact. Because you saw her every day, and she was such a good mother. Correct?”

  “I’m going to object,” Judith said loudly. “There’s no call for Mr. Charter to bully the witness this way. She’s trying her best to respond to questions.”

  “Yes,” Hayes said. “Sustained.”

  Charter smiled. “May I ask,” he said in a parody of chivalry, “whether you still feel that Heather Pratt was not, in fact, pregnant a second time?”

  Naomi swallowed and looked up. “No. That was wrong. I mean, I know I was mistaken about that,” she said quietly, with what she hoped was dignity.

  “You were mistaken,” he said happily. “Anything else you were mistaken about?” He waited for her, then he went on. “For example, that this girl who broke into your office was a good employee? That this girl who brought along her child when she had sex was a good mother?”