by Jodi Picoult
When he did not smile, or touch me, or do anything but sit frozen across from me, I began to panic. Maybe Katie had it right; maybe the best thing would have been to wait a few days, if not more. “So,” I said, my voice shaking. “What are you thinking?”
He reached across the seat and tugged my hand away from the place where it covered my stomach. He edged up the hem of my sweatshirt and leaned forward, and then I felt his kiss low against my belly.
The breath I did not realize I’d been holding rushed out in a great flood of relief. After a moment I cradled his head in my hands, sifting strands of his hair through my fingers, as Coop wrapped his arms around my hips and held tight to the two of us.
* * *
He insisted on walking me to the door of the Fishers’ house. “I’m not handicapped, Coop,” I argued. “Just pregnant.” But the feminist in me rolled over, secretly thrilled to be treated like spun sugar.
At the porch, he took my hands and turned me to face him. “I know this part is supposed to come before you actually make the baby, but I want you to know I love you. I’ve loved you so long I can’t remember when it started.”
“I can. It was after the Kappa Alpha Theta San Juan Night party, somewhere between you diving into the grain alcohol and the naked blow pong tournament.”
Coop groaned. “Let’s not tell him how we met, okay?”
“What makes you so sure it’s a he?”
Suddenly Coop stilled and held his hand up to his ear. “Do you hear that?”
I strained, then shook my head. “No. What?”
“Us,” he said, kissing me lightly. “Sounding like parents.”
“Scary thought.”
He smiled, then cocked his head and stared at me. “What?” I asked, self-conscious. “Do I have spinach between my teeth?”
“No. It’s just that I’m only going to get this moment once, and I want to remember it.”
“I think we can arrange for you to walk me into the house a few more times, if it’s that important to you.”
“God, can’t a guy get a break? Do all women talk this much, or is it just because you’re an attorney?”
“Well, if I were you I’d say whatever it is you’re going to say, because Adam’s liable to get sick of waiting in the car and drive back to Philly without you.”
Coop cupped my face in his palms. “You’re a pain in the ass, El, but you’re my pain in the ass.” His thumbs smoothed over my cheeks. “Marry me,” he whispered.
I brought my hands up to grasp his wrists. Over his shoulder, the moon was rising, a ghost in the sky. I realized that Coop was right: I would remember this moment with the same level of detail and clarity that came to mind when I thought back to the last time Coop had asked me to share his life; the last time I’d told him no.
“Don’t hate me,” I said.
His hands fell away. “You are not doing this to me again. I won’t let you.” A muscle jumped along his jaw as he struggled for control.
“I’m not saying no. I’m just not saying yes, either. Coop, I just found out about this. I’m still seeing how the word mother fits. I can’t try on wife at the same time.”
“Millions of other women manage.”
“Not quite in this order.” I smoothed my hand over his chest, hoping to soothe. “You told me a little while ago I could take a while to think. Does that still hold?”
Coop nodded, and slowly let the tension drain out of his shoulders. “But this time, you won’t be able to get rid of me so easily.” Then he splayed his hand over my abdomen, where part of him already was, and kissed me good-bye.
* * *
“You were gone for so long,” Katie whispered from her bed. “Did you tell him?”
I stared up at the ceiling, at the small yellow stain that reminded me of Abraham Lincoln’s profile. “Yeah, I did.”
She came up on one elbow. “And?”
“And he’s happy. That’s it.” I refused to let myself look at her. If I did, I would remember Adam’s expression when he first heard about their baby, Adam’s sorrow as he knelt at the grave. I couldn’t trust myself to keep from Katie the news that Adam Sinclair was home again.
“I bet he couldn’t stop smiling,” Katie said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I bet that he looked into your eyes.” Her voice grew more dreamy. “I bet he told you that he loved you.”
“As a matter of fact—”
“And he put his arms around you,” Katie continued, “and said that even if everyone else turned their backs, even if you never saw your friends or family again, a world with only you and him and the baby would feel downright crowded because of all the love that would be stuffed into it.”
I stared at Katie, at her eyes shining in the darkness, her mouth twisted in a half smile somewhere between rapture and remorse. “Yes,” I said. “It was just like that.”
FIFTEEN
Ellie might never have made it out the door on Monday morning, if not for the chamomile tea. She finally managed to get downstairs after a sleepless night and morning sickness, and found the steaming mug on her plate with a few saltines. By that time, the others had left the breakfast table; only Katie and Sarah remained in the kitchen cleaning the dishes. “You understand we have to drive in with Leda today,” Ellie said, steeling herself against the smell of leftover food. “Coop’s meeting us at the courthouse.”
Katie nodded, but didn’t turn around. Ellie glanced at the women’s backs, thankful that Katie had known enough to spare her the sight of a platter heaped with eggs and bacon and sausage. She took a tentative sip of the tea, expecting her stomach to heave again, but curiously the nausea ebbed. By the time she finished, she felt better than she had all weekend.
She did not want to harp on the pregnancy, especially not today, but she felt duty-bound to acknowledge Katie’s thoughtfulness. “The tea,” Ellie whispered, as they climbed into the backseat of Leda’s car twenty minutes later. “It was just what I needed.”
“Don’t thank me,” Katie whispered back. “Mam made it for you.”
For the past months, Sarah had been piling her plate at mealtime as if she were a sow to be fattened up for the kill; the sudden change in menu seemed suspicious. “Did you tell her I’m pregnant?” Ellie demanded.
“No. She made it for you because you’re worried about the trial. She thinks chamomile settles your nerves.”
Relaxing, Ellie sat back. “It settles your stomach, too.”
“Ja, I know,” Katie said. “She used to make it for me.”
“When did she think you were worried?”
Katie shrugged. “Back when I was carrying.”
Before she could say anything else, Leda got into the driver’s seat and peered into the rearview mirror. “You’re okay with me at the wheel, Katie?”
“I figure the bishop’s getting used to making exceptions to the rules for me.”
“Is Samuel coming with us today or what?” Ellie muttered, peering out the window. “Being late on the first day of testimony doesn’t usually sit well with judges.”
As if she had conjured him, Samuel came running from the field behind the barn. The jacket of his good Sunday suit hung open, his black hat sat askew on his head. Pulling it off, he ducked into the seat beside Leda. “Sorry,” he muttered, twisting around as Leda began to drive. He handed a tiny, fading sprig of clover to Katie, the four leaves of its head lying limp in her palm. “For luck,” Samuel said, smiling at her. “For you.”
* * *
“You have a nice weekend?” George asked as they took their places in court.
“It was fine,” Ellie answered brusquely, arranging the defense table to her satisfaction.
“Sounds like someone’s cranky. Must’ve gone to bed too late last night.” George grinned. “Guess you were partying till the cows came home. What time do they come home, anyway?”
“Are you finished?” Ellie asked, staring at him with indifference.
“All rise! The Hon
orable Philomena Ledbetter presiding!”
The judge settled into her chair. “Good morning, everyone,” she said, slipping on her half-glasses. “I believe we left off on Friday with the prosecution resting its case, which means that today, Ms. Hathaway, you’re on. I trust you’re ready to go?”
Ellie rose. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Excellent. You may call your first witness.”
“The defense calls Jacob Fisher to the stand.”
Katie watched as her brother entered the courtroom from the lobby, where he’d been sequestered as an upcoming witness. He winked at her as he was being sworn in. Ellie smiled at him, reassuring. “Could you state your name and address?”
“Jacob Fisher. Two-fifty-five North Street, in State College, Pennsylvania.”
“What’s your relationship to Katie?”
“I’m her older brother.”
“Yet you don’t live at home with the Fishers?”
Jacob shook his head. “I haven’t for several years, now. I grew up Plain on my parents’ farm and got baptized at eighteen, but then I left the church.”
“Why?”
Jacob looked at the jury. “I truly believed I would be Plain my whole life, but then I discovered something that meant just as much to me as my faith, if not more.”
“What was that?”
“Learning. The Amish don’t believe in schooling past eighth grade. It goes against the Ordnung, the rules of the church.”
“There are rules?”
“Yes. It’s what most people associate with the Amish—the fact that you can’t drive cars, or use tractors. The way you dress. The lack of electricity and telephones. All the things that make you recognizable as a group. When you’re baptized, you vow to live by these conditions.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I was working as a carpenter’s apprentice, building bookshelves for a high school English teacher over in Gap. He caught me leafing through his books, and let me take some home. He planted the thought in my mind that I might want to further my studies. I hid my books for as long as I could from my family, but eventually, when I knew I would be applying to college, I realized that I could no longer be Plain.”
“At that point, what happened?”
“The Amish church gave me a choice: Give up on college, or leave the faith.”
“That sounds harsh.”
“It’s not,” Jacob said. “At any point—today, even—if I went back and confessed in front of the congregation, I’d be accepted back with open arms.”
“But you can’t erase the things you’ve learned at college, can you?”
“That’s not the point. It’s that I’d agree to yield to a set of circumstances chosen by the group, instead of trailblazing my own.”
“What do you do today, Jacob?”
“I’m getting my master’s degree in English at Penn State.”
“Your parents must be quite proud of you,” Ellie said.
Jacob smiled faintly. “I don’t know about that. You see, what commands praise in the English world is very different from what commands praise in the Plain world. In fact, you don’t want to command praise if you’re Plain. You want to blend in, to live a good Christian life without calling attention to yourself. So, no, Ms. Hathaway, I wouldn’t say my parents are proud of me. They’re confused by the choice I’ve made.”
“Do you still see them?”
Jacob glanced at his sister. “I saw my parents for the first time in six years just the other night. I went back to their farm even though my father had disowned me after I was excommunicated.”
Ellie raised her brows. “If you leave the Amish church, you can’t stay in touch with those who are Amish?”
“No, that’s the exception rather than the rule. Sure, having someone around who’s excommunicated can make things uncomfortable for everyone else, especially if you all live in the same house, because of the Meidung—shunning. One of those church rules I was talking about says that members of the church have to avoid those who’ve broken the rules. People who’ve sinned are put under the bann for a little while, and during that time, other Plain folks can’t eat with them, or conduct business, or have sexual relations.”
“So a husband would have to shun his wife? A mother would have to shun her child?”
“Technically, yes. But then again, when I was Plain, I knew of a husband who owned a car and was put under the bann. He still lived with his wife, who was a member of the church—and even though she was supposed to be shunning him, they somehow managed to have seven children who all got baptized Amish when it came time. So basically, the distancing is up to the individuals involved.”
“Then why did your father disown you?” Ellie asked.
“I’ve thought a lot about that, Ms. Hathaway. I’d have to say that he was doing it out of a sense of personal failure, as if it were his fault that I didn’t want to follow in his footsteps. And I think he was terrified that if Katie continued to be exposed to me on a regular basis, I’d somehow corrupt her by introducing her to the English world.”
“Tell us about your relationship with your sister.”
Jacob grinned. “Well, I don’t imagine it’s that much different than anyone else with a sibling. Sometimes she was my best buddy, and other times she was the world’s greatest pain in the neck. She was younger than me by several years, so it became my responsibility to watch over her and teach her how to do certain things around the farm.”
“Were you close?”
“Very. When you’re Amish, family is everything. You’re not only together at every meal—you’re working side-by-side to make a living.” He smiled at Katie. “You come to know someone awfully well when you get up with them at four-thirty every morning to shovel cow manure.”
“I’m sure you do,” Ellie agreed. “Were you two the only children?”
Jacob looked into his lap. “For a while, we had a little sister. Hannah drowned when she was seven.”
“That must have been hard for all of you.”
“Very,” Jacob agreed. “Katie and I were minding her at the time, so we always felt the blame fell on our shoulders. If anything, that brought us even closer.”
Ellie nodded in sympathy. “What happened after you were excommunicated?”
“It was like losing a sister all over again,” Jacob said. “One day Katie was there to talk to, and the next she was completely beyond my reach. Those first few weeks at school, I missed the farm and my parents and my horse and courting buggy, but most of all, I missed Katie. Whenever anything had happened to me in the past, she was the one I’d share it with. And suddenly I was in a new world full of strange sights and sounds and customs, and I couldn’t tell her about it.”
“What did you do?”
“Something very un-Amish: I fought back. I contacted my aunt, who’d left the church when she married a Mennonite. I knew she’d be able to get word to my mother and to Katie, without my father hearing about it. My mother couldn’t come to see me—it wouldn’t be right for her to go against her husband’s wishes—but she sent Katie as a goodwill ambassador, about once a month for several years.”
“Are you telling me that she sneaked out of the house, lied to her father, and traveled hundreds of miles to stay with you in a college dormitory?”
Jacob nodded. “Yes.”
“Come on now,” Ellie scoffed. “Going to college is forbidden by the church—but behavior like Katie’s is condoned?”
“At the time, she wasn’t baptized yet—so she wasn’t breaking any of the rules by eating with me, socializing with me, driving in my car. She was just staying connected to her brother. Yes, she hid her trips from my father—but my mother knew exactly where she was going, and supported it. I never saw it as Katie trying to lie and hurt our family; to me, she was doing the best she could to keep us together.”
“When she came to State College for these visits, did she become—” Ellie smiled at the jury. “Well, for lack of a better term—a party animal?”
>
“Far from it. First off, she felt like she stood out like a sore thumb. She wanted to hole up in my apartment and have me read to her from the books I was studying. I could tell she was uncomfortable dressed Plain around all the college students, so one of the first things I did was buy her some ordinary English clothing. Jeans, a couple of shirts. Things like that.”
“But didn’t you say that dressing a certain way is one of the rules of the church?”
“Yes. But, again, Katie hadn’t been baptized Amish yet, so she wasn’t breaking any rules. There’s a certain level of experimentation that Plain folks expect from their children before they settle down to take the baptismal vow. A taste of what’s out there. Teenagers who’ve been brought up Amish will dress in jeans, or hang out at a mall, go to a movie—maybe even drink a few beers.”
“Amish teens do this?”
Jacob nodded. “When you’re about fifteen or sixteen and you come into your running-around years, you join a gang of peers to socialize with. Believe me, many of those Plain kids take up stuff that’s a lot riskier than the few things Katie experienced with me at Penn State. We weren’t doing drugs, or getting drunk, or party hopping. I wasn’t doing that myself, so I certainly wouldn’t have been dragging my sister along. I worked very hard to get into college, and I made some wrenching decisions in order to go. My primary reason for being at Penn State was not to fool around, but to learn. Mostly, that’s what Katie spent time doing with me.” He looked at his sister. “When she came to see me, I considered it a privilege. It was a piece of home, brought all the way to where I was. The last thing I would have wanted to do was scare her away.”
“You sound like you care very much for her.”
“I do,” Jacob said. “She’s my sister.”
“Tell us about Katie.”
“She’s sweet, kind, good. Considerate. Selfless. She does what needs to be done. There is no doubt in my mind that she’ll be a terrific wife, a wonderful mother.”
“Yet today she’s on trial for murdering an infant.”
Jacob shook his head. “It’s crazy, is all. If you knew her, if you knew how she’d been brought up, you’d realize that the very thought of Katie murdering another living being is ridiculous. She used to catch spiders crawling up the walls in the house, and set them outside instead of just killing them.” He sighed. “There’s no way for me to make you understand what it means to be Plain, because most people can’t see past the buggies and the funny clothes to the beliefs that really identify the Amish. But a murder charge—well, it’s an English thing. In the Amish community there’s no murder or violence, because the Amish know from the time they’re babies that you turn the other cheek, like Christ did, rather than take vengeance into your own hands.”
