The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “How many girls were in North Massachusetts Hall, Christina?”

  She thought. “About fifty. Maybe a few less.”

  “And of those, how many would have been freshman girls like you?”

  “Maybe twenty. Upper-class women sometimes move off campus or into sorority houses.”

  “I see.” Judith smiled. “Do you remember meeting a freshman woman named Heather Pratt at the beginning of the fall term? She would have just moved into North Massachusetts Hall, like you.”

  Christina Flynn shook her head vigorously. “No. I mean, possibly I did meet her. They had parties for the new girls in the common room. But I don’t remember meeting her. I’ve tried, but I don’t remember.”

  “Okay,” said Judith. “Christina, do you remember buying a new address book for yourself when you arrived at college for your freshman year?”

  She bit her lip. “I really don’t remember. I know you asked me before, but I don’t remember. I might have.”

  Judith went to the evidence table. Under Charter’s apathetic gaze, she found the address book in its plastic bag. “An address book like this?”

  Christina took it. Naomi saw recognition fall over her face. “Oh … I think I did. I remember buying this at the Dartmouth bookstore!”

  Judith turned it over in Christina’s hands. “This thing on the cover? What is it?”

  “It’s the college crest. It says Vox Clamantis in Deserto. It means ‘A voice crying out in the wilderness.’”

  “Did you write your name inside, Christina?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Slipping the address book from its plastic bag, Judith opened its green cover. She showed it to the girl. “Did you write this?”

  Now Christina blushed again, even more fiercely. Naomi thought she looked as if she might cry.

  “Yes. That’s my writing.”

  “But it’s not exactly your name, is it, Christina?”

  “No,” she said, ducking her head. “I thought … This is embarrassing.”

  “It’s all right,” said Judith. “It’s important.”

  “I thought, when I went to college, I might try not to be so … In high school I was shy. And I’d never really been away from home before. And my family. And everybody I knew always called me Christina. Except my father. He calls me Tina. And I thought maybe now that I was in a place where nobody knew me, I could start with a new name. But I didn’t, really. I mean, I’m still Christina and everybody still calls me Christina.” She looked at Judith. “I don’t really remember any of this. I mean, it was two and a half years ago. I don’t remember losing my address book.”

  “But, looking at it, you do recognize that this was once yours,” Judith said gently.

  “Yes,” Christina said. “It was mine.”

  “You are the Chris Flynn whose name is written in this address book.”

  She sighed. She would never be that Chris Flynn now, Naomi knew. “Yes,” the girl said.

  Judith faced the jury. “Christina, how did you first learn about the case on trial in this courtroom?”

  She took hold of the ring around her neck and fiddled with it nervously. “I think one of my sorority sisters mentioned it. She was my roommate freshman year, in North Mass. She asked if I remembered this girl Heather who dropped out during freshman week. I didn’t remember. She didn’t remember her, either,” Christina said, a little defensively. “And the rest of it, I mean, what the trial was about, I didn’t know that part till you called me yesterday. I didn’t know till yesterday.”

  “So as far as you were concerned, this girl Heather and the crime for which she was on trial had absolutely nothing to do with you?”

  She looked at Judith in intense alarm. “No! It has nothing to do with me! I don’t know anything about it!”

  “And how did you learn that Heather Pratt was alleged to have had a child with a person named Chris Flynn, an allegation that arose entirely from an address book you had once lost?”

  Now she did cry, quite suddenly, with one hand pressed to her nose, her cheeks flushed deeply red. Beneath her fingers, her skin had a sheen of running tears. “Please!” She wept. “I don’t know anything about this! I don’t know her! I don’t even recognize her—is that her?” She pointed at Heather, who now, for the first time, had turned to Charter with a look of unmistakable triumph. “I don’t remember her at all if that’s her. Please”—she choked—“can I leave now? I don’t know anything about dead babies!”

  Judith looked at Hayes. “I’m finished,” she said mildly.

  Charter was asked if he had questions, and he rose and swayed for a moment, eyeing the by now sobbing girl in the frog-covered turtleneck: Chris Flynn. He lifted one finger, as if to point it in accusation, but there was too much laughter, and the sound of the laughter first competed with and then muted the tears of Christina Flynn. In the jury box they were not successful in silencing the laughter, and in the spectator seats they were not trying. Even Heather laughed. Naomi, watching the sad little girl in the witness seat, did not laugh. Charter had no questions. Christina Flynn walked away, wiping at her face with the back of her small hand.

  “Your next witness, Mrs. Friedman?” said Judge Hayes.

  Judith stood. She was going to call Heather now, Naomi knew—call her and make her recite her lines of denial: My baby was stillborn, I don’t know anything about the other baby—but Judith wasn’t talking. She stood transfixed, buoyed by the laughter, suppressed and unsuppressed. She looked at the jury box, letting her eye run over the men and women, their rhythmic shoulders and red, merry faces and shaking heads. Then at Charter, who was still and sagging in his chair. Then at Heather, who looked back at her, pleading and waiting. And finally at Hayes again.

  “The defense rests,” she said.

  ON GOOD FRIDAY morning, Gilman Warren, the Attorney General of New Hampshire, made his first and only appearance at the trial of NH v. Pratt, sitting not near Charter but rather noncommittally in the back of the room to watch the final arguments. The jury was out for thirty minutes. Twenty-five of them, Naomi later learned, were spent waiting for the right form to fill out.

  They made their way outside in a kind of rugby scrum around Heather, half-pressing, half-lifting her ahead through the people, Naomi and Judith on either side, Ella and her squadron of triumphant women running interference before. The cheer that rose to meet them interrupted Attorney General Warren’s speech to the cameras, and he turned them a grim face.

  “Will you be remounting an investigation into the death of the Sabbathday River baby?” somebody shouted over the din.

  Charter, leaning out in front, spoke with bitter restraint. “We had the right person on trial,” he said, glaring at Heather.

  “Mr. Warren? Is that your statement?”

  The attorney general spoke into a brush of microphones.

  “I think we’re all glad to put this sad case behind us,” he said, his voice oddly still. “We will not try any part of it again. And that is my statement. Thank you.” Then, leaving Charter motionless in his wake and cast adrift, Warren moved away down the steps.

  Naomi, watching him leave, thought at first that he must be truly, personally, bereft, so utterly was the sound of weeping enmeshed and in sync with his descent, and this is why nearly a minute had passed before she understood that it was actually Judith who wept, and not loudly at all but in a free way, and close by. She turned to Judith and saw that she had covered her face, like that day on the bench, but Naomi felt as helpless now as then. “Oh, Judith,” she said, and in reaching for her she took her hand off Heather’s wrist. The crowd came up around them, pushing at Heather, surging in a wave of white. Naomi felt herself take an involuntary step away. Then, this time by choice, a second step. The bodies of strangers pushed her in a different direction. Someone thrust a mass of roses into Heather’s arms.

  Part 5

  Pharaoh’s Daughter

  Your mother shows me a photograph of you got up in
lace. White crêpe-de-chine. White bonnet. White mittens. Once, on a street in Moscow, a woman pushed snow in my face when it seemed I might have been frostbitten.

  —Paul Muldoon, “White”

  In Memory of Thaddeus

  Wills (June 19-20, 1996)

  Chapter 46

  The Pond

  ON A HOT JULY AFTERNOON, NAOMI DROVE DOWN Sabbath Creek Road in her station wagon to return the last of Polly’s things. There were two socks, mismatched, the plastic pail from the bathtub, and a collection of small books found beneath her bed when she was rolling up the rug. None of these items—she was the first to admit—was precisely crucial, and the socks, for that matter, were probably outgrown, but Naomi needed to see Polly before she left. And, she supposed, she needed to see Heather, too.

  By now, people seemed to understand that Naomi was leaving, though how this understanding had come about she wasn’t sure, since she had not told anyone except Judith of her plans. It was not only time to go, she thought, but past time. For years she had groped, in her inefficient manner, for the catalyst of her own transformation and departure, a thing so bad, Naomi reasoned, that she would tear herself away in order to run from it. It had not been Daniel’s leaving. It had not been her failure with Nelson. It had not, in the end, even been Heather. Finally, it had not been a thing to run from at all, but a thing she was compelled to run to. Not, in other words, the babies she had pulled from the water, but her own baby, the one inside and growing.

  Sometimes over these past months she had wondered what she would miss when she was gone from this place, and was surprised to find, when she imagined her life in the city, that it was not the people who lingered—not Nelson, who was beautiful to her, and not even Judith, the only friend she had made in a decade here—but the look of the mountains, the blackish-green and sharp edges of the Whites, so raw and rough. It struck her only now that there was a specific smell to the air here which she had failed to discern, and failed to appreciate as it deserved. It struck her that pavement would never duplicate the bounce beneath the sole of the shoe that old mud and pine needles made, and to her own surprise, she mourned this.

  But she was going, anyway. The idea, formed in her the night of the verdict when she had handed Polly back to her mother, had grown over the next days, mutter to drone to din, until she found herself rushing to make arrangements, catching up to her own yearning. In a week’s time, now, the A-frame would be on the market and she would be back on the West Side. She wasn’t the only one, either. Ashley was already gone—back to Burlington with his wife and kids, to be anonymous in his indiscriminate love of women. Charter was gone—he had slunk back to Peytonville and was not missed. And Nelson was gone. His farmhouse was locked and empty. Naomi had no idea where he was.

  She had not been to Heather’s house since the day she had found the second baby, ten months earlier, and coming down the long drive she was surprised to see that the house gleamed, newly white with paint, its trim dark blue. Someone, in addition, had mowed the grass beside and behind the house, so that the back field had a graceful slope to it, and there was a lush summer garden by the back porch, with peas climbing a tepee of strings. There, bent over in an undershirt, a woman with short dark hair worked with her hands in the dirt. Not Heather, Naomi thought. A big yellow dog, lolling on the sun-warmed stone doorstep, lumbered over when the car stopped and thrust its wet nose against the window.

  “Amiga!”

  The woman came to the car, a spade in one hand. The other reached for the dog’s collar.

  “Amiga, down!”

  Naomi rolled down her window. “It’s Simone, isn’t it?”

  “Oh. Naomi, right?”

  “I was looking for Heather,” said Naomi. “I didn’t know you were living here.”

  “Since the end of spring term. We’ve been helping Heather get some things in order.”

  “The house looks great,” Naomi said. “Did you do that?”

  “Mostly Ella,” Simone said. “She’s good with tools. I planted the garden.”

  “That’s very good of you.” Naomi looked around. “Is Heather here?”

  She nodded. Naomi got out of her car and took Polly’s things. They found Heather on the back porch steps, watching Polly play in a sandbox that looked new. Heather was still too thin, but her hair was growing back and someone had given her a fairly flattering haircut. She looked up in surprise when Naomi rounded the house.

  “I didn’t hear you!” she said.

  “Yes. I’m afraid your Amiga’s not much of a watchdog.”

  “She’s Ella’s dog, really. She sleeps under Ella’s bed.” Heather didn’t get up. Naomi knelt by Polly.

  “Hello, sweetie-pod.” She didn’t want to say any more. She didn’t want to cry. Polly looked at her briefly and went back to work, filling and upending a bucket.

  “Polly, say hello,” her mother said.

  “No, it’s all right,” said Naomi. “I just brought some things I found.” She put them on the back step. “She used to love this book about fingers and toes.”

  “Thank you,” Heather said.

  Naomi sat beside her. “I didn’t realize Ella and Simone were living here.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t have gotten myself together without them,” Heather said quietly. “They really helped me. And the others. There was a bunch of women who came up from Boston and helped me fix the roof. They brought things for Polly, too. Simone planted the garden. I haven’t had a garden since Pick died. It’s wonderful.”

  Naomi smiled. “How long are they staying?”

  “Oh well, Simone’s going to France this fall on a language program, but Ella’s going to stay. And another student, a friend of hers who has a little boy. We’ll take turns looking after the children and going down to Hanover.”

  She turned to Heather. “Hanover?”

  “Mm,” she said, with a shrug. “I didn’t tell you, I guess. They took me back. At Dartmouth. It actually wasn’t a big deal at all. They had me down under ‘leave of absence,’ and you can keep that up for like ten years before they unenroll you. So I enter the freshman class in September.”

  Naomi stared at her. “Heather, that’s wonderful. That’s just the best news.

  “Well, I guess. I guess it’s the right thing to do. Ella says I have to start with myself. She says the best way to avoid being a victim is to cultivate power.” She looked at Naomi. “Do you think that’s true?”

  “I think every woman has to protect her own interests, and her children’s interests.”

  Heather nodded, but she looked glum. Polly, spotting the bath bucket, came to collect it from the step, and took it back to the sandbox.

  “I’m moving away,” said Naomi. “I’m going back to New York.”

  “I heard that.” Heather didn’t look at her. “I guess I won’t see you again.”

  “Oh, I’ll still be involved with Flourish, though Sarah Copley will run things for the time being. I’ll probably set up some kind of outlet in New York, to sell things down there. So I’ll be up and down.”

  “Ashley moved away, too,” said Heather in a small voice.

  “I heard that.”

  “Back to Burlington. I think nobody would hire him here. I think people were really mean to him.”

  Naomi said nothing.

  “It wasn’t his fault. I feel so badly about that, that he had to move. I should have been the one who moved.”

  Naomi, who did not see the logic of this, kept still.

  “After all, he didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Neither did you, Heather,” Naomi said wearily.

  Heather nodded quickly. She had heard this before. Suddenly she got to her feet.

  “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  What? Naomi thought. She stood. They left Polly in her sand and walked downhill. “What?” Naomi said. Then, looking ahead, she saw where Heather was taking her. She did not want to go there. “I know this,” she said. “I was here.”


  “No. I want to.”

  She walked on, and Naomi followed. Surely there was some rule of etiquette that precluded showing visitors the site of your baby’s stillbirth. Naomi moved in dread. “Heather? You don’t have to.”

  “Look,” said Heather. She had turned and was staring uphill, a look of amazement on her face. “Look how far from the house it is! I came all the way out here, in the middle of the night. Maybe I was remembering the night Polly was born. I walked then, too. Up and down the hill. I remember, I had Pick following me around, and the midwife. I guess it took my mind off the pain.”

  “Well,” Naomi said, “I guess that makes sense. You did what you’d done the last time you were in labor.”

  “But I wasn’t in labor. It didn’t feel like labor. Nothing felt the same as it had the first time, because everything was different. Pick was gone, and Ashley was gone. And from the time they left, there was this thing in their place.” She waved her hands over her abdomen, quickly, as if she were shaking her fingers. “I didn’t want it. It’s just like that woman said. That psychiatrist. I didn’t want it. I wanted to trade. I wanted the other things back—the things I had before I had this …” Heather stopped in frustration. She could not even name the thing she had so despised. “I didn’t really believe I could trade, but I wanted it so much.” She looked at Naomi. “And nobody knew about it. I didn’t tell Ashley. I didn’t tell anyone. I thought if anyone knew, they’d make me keep it, and I didn’t want to keep it. I hated it.”

  “Don’t, Heather,” Naomi said.

  “Don’t what?” Heather said sharply. “It’s all done now. It must have died from my hating it all those months, because when it came out, it was still. And it didn’t make a sound, either. I just pushed it out on the ground. It didn’t even hurt very much, if you want to know the truth. I’m telling you, it was already dead. I’d already killed it.”

  “Okay.” Naomi nodded. She desperately wanted to leave. “It was stillborn. You couldn’t help that.”