Plain Truth

by Jodie Picoult

  “What’s harder to swallow, Coop: that a young, frightened girl snapped and smothered her baby without realizing what she was doing-or that a stranger came into the barn at two in the morning, after a girl had given birth two months shy of her due date, and murdered the baby while she was asleep?”

  “Insanity defenses rarely win, El.”

  “Neither does reasonable doubt, when it looks absolutely unreasonable.” They had reached the pond, and Ellie sank down onto the iron bench and drew up her knees. “Even if she didn’t kill that baby, the best way to get her to walk is to convince the jury that she did, without cognitively knowing what she was doing. It’s the most sympathetic defense I’ve got.”

  “Hell, lawyers lie all the time,” Coop said.

  She snorted. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve done it . . . God, I can’t even count by now.”

  “You’re damn good at it, too.”

  “Yeah,” Ellie said. “That I am.”

  Coop reached for her hand. “Then how come it’s eating you up inside?”

  She let the façade drop, the one she’d been holding in place since explaining to Katie that they were going to use the insanity defense to get her off, even though she wasn’t insane.

  “You want me to tell you why it’s killing you?” Coop said easily. “Because pleading insanity means Katie did it, even if she was cognitively off on Mars. And deep down, you just like Katie too much to want to admit that.”

  Ellie sniffed. “You’re way off base. You know what a client relationship is like-personal feelings don’t enter into it. I’ve managed to keep a straight face while I told a jury that a child molester was a pillar of the community. I’ve made a serial rapist look like a choirboy. It’s what I do. What I personally feel about my clients has nothing to do with what I say to defend them.”

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  That stopped Ellie flat. “I am?”

  “Yeah. The issue here is that a long time ago, Katie stopped being a client. Maybe from the very start, even. She’s related to you, however distantly. She’s likable, young, confused-and you’ve fallen into the role of surrogate mother. But your feelings for her are a mystery, because for all intents and purposes she discarded something you’d kill to have-a child.”

  Ellie squared her shoulders, ready to laugh this observation off, but found that no smart comment sprang to her lips. “Am I so easy to read?”

  “No need,” Coop murmured. “I already know you by heart.”

  “So how do I fix it? If I don’t separate my personal relationship with her from my professional one, I’m never going to win her case.”

  Coop smiled. “When are you going to learn that there are all kinds of ways to win?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, wary.

  “Sometimes when you think you’ve lost, you actually wind up coming out far ahead.” He grasped her chin in his hand, and kissed her lightly. “Just look at me.”

  Ellie did. She saw the remarkable Caribbean green of his eyes, but more importantly, the history in them. She saw the little scar beneath his jaw that he’d gotten in a bicycle fall at age six. And the crease in his cheek that would cave into a dimple at the slightest hint of a smile.

  “I’m sorry for what I said to you the other night,” Coop said. “And I think I’ll even cover my ass by apologizing for what I just told you now, too.”

  “I probably needed to hear it. And every now and then, to be slapped up the side of the head, most likely.”

  “I should warn you now, I’m not that kind of man.”

  She leaned toward him. “I know.”

  Their kisses were frantic and close, as if they were intent on getting inside each other’s skin. Coop’s hands roamed over her back and her breasts. “God, I’ve missed you,” he breathed.

  “It’s only been five days.”

  Coop stopped abruptly, then touched her face. “It’s been forever,” he said.

  With her eyes closed, she believed him. She could imagine the music of the Grateful Dead crackling across the courtyard, wafting through the open window of her dorm room, where she and Coop lay tangled on the narrow bed. She could still see the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway of the closet, a crystalline rainbow, and the beady eyes of the squirrel who perched on the windowsill, watching them.

  She felt him peel off her shirt and unsnap her shorts. “Coop,” she said, suddenly nervous. “I’m not twenty anymore.”

  “Damn.” He continued to push her shorts down. “I guess that means I’m not, either.”

  “No, really.” She took his hand from the waistband of her shorts and brought it to her mouth. “I don’t look like I used to look.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “It’s that scar, isn’t it-the one from your pacemaker surgery?”

  “I didn’t have pacemaker surgery.”

  “Then what are you worried about?” He kissed her lightly. “El, if you weighed two hundred pounds and had grown hair on your chest, I wouldn’t care. When I look at you, no matter what I should be seeing, I’m picturing a girl who’s still in college-because the minute I fell in love with you, time stopped.”

  “I don’t weigh two hundred pounds.”

  “Not an ounce over one-eighty,” Coop agreed, and she hit him on the arm. “Are you gonna keep distracting me, or are you going to let me make love to you?”

  Ellie smiled. “I don’t know. Let me think on it.”

  Grinning, he kissed her. Her arms twined around his neck, and she pulled him closer. “You know,” he said, the words hot against her skin, “you weren’t twenty when I undressed you the other night, either.”

  “No, but I was drunk.”

  Coop laughed. “Maybe I ought to try that. Because this damn bench is hard enough to make me feel every single one of my thirty-nine decrepit years.” In a quick move, he pulled her off the seat, rolling so that he’d bear the brunt of the fall as they went down on the grass.

  Ellie landed on top of him, her legs sprawled, her face an inch from Coop’s. “Are you gonna keep distracting me,” she murmured, “or are you going to let me make love to you?”

  Coop’s arms tightened on the small of her back. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and touched his lips to hers.

  Katie was sitting at the table, nursing a glass of fresh milk from the ubiquitous pitcher in the refrigerator, when Ellie crept into the house like a teenager. Seeing the light, she poked her head into the kitchen. “Oh,” she said, surprised to find Katie there. “Why are you up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Katie said. “How about you?” But she knew, from the moment she’d seen Ellie, where she had been and what she’d been doing. The grass in her hair; the color in her cheeks. She smelled of sex.

  For a moment Katie was so jealous she felt it rise inside her like a tide, and she couldn’t take her eyes off Ellie because all she wanted was to feel what Ellie was feeling now. It was marked on her, as sure as if his touch still glowed fluorescent on her skin.

  “I went for a walk,” Ellie said slowly.

  “And you fell.”

  “No . . . why?”

  Katie shrugged. “How else would you have gotten leaves in your hair?”

  Self-conscious, Ellie reached up. “What are you,” she said with a smile, “my mother?”

  Katie thought of Ellie, being touched and held and kissed. She thought of Adam, and instead of the soft swelling she usually felt in her lower stomach there was just a bitter ball. “No. And you’re not my mother, either.”

  Ellie stiffened. “That’s true.”

  “You think you are. You want me to crawl up on your lap and cry my heart out so you can make it all better. But you know what, Ellie? Mothers don’t have the power to make it all better, no matter what you think.”

  Stung, Ellie narrowed her eyes. “This coming from a true expert on motherhood.”

  “I know more than you,” Katie shot back.

  “The difference between you and me,” Ellie
said evenly, “is that I would give anything to have a baby, and you couldn’t wait to get rid of one.”

  Katie’s eyes widened, as if Ellie had slapped her. Then, in a lightning change, they filled with tears that she wiped away with the backs of her hands. “Oh, God,” she said, keening, her arms crossed over her middle. “Oh, God, you’re right.”

  Ellie stared at her. “Did you kill the baby, Katie?”

  She shook her head. “I fell asleep. I fell asleep, I swear to you and to God, holding it.” Her face contorted with pain. “But I might as well have killed it, Ellie. I wished it away. I wished for months and months that it would just disappear.”

  She was doubled over now, sobbing so hard that she could not catch her breath. Ellie swore softly and embraced Katie tightly. “That’s just wishing,” she soothed, stroking the bright fall of the girl’s hair. “Wishing doesn’t make it happen.”

  Katie pressed her burning cheek against Ellie’s chest. “You’re not my mother . . . but sometimes I wish you were.” She felt what she expected to: Ellie’s arms closing around her with even greater force. Katie shut her eyes and imagined being held not by Ellie, but by Adam-her smile in his eyes, her name on his lips, her heart tight with the knowledge of being loved, no matter what.

  TEN

  Ellie

  O C T O B E R

  After three months with the Fishers, I sometimes found it hard to believe that not so long ago, I thought a crimper had something to do with curling one’s hair, and that being shocked referred to a person, rather than a bundle of wheat. Preparations for Katie’s trial fell, unfortunately, in the middle of harvesting season, and any hopes I harbored about getting support from her family in the creation of our insanity defense were quickly put to rest. In Aaron Fisher’s mind, getting the tobacco in on time and the silos filled were the household priorities.

  And like it or not, I was part of that household.

  I walked along behind Katie in the rich tobacco field, three acres so lush that they might have been a rice paddy. “This one,” she said, instructing me on which leaves were ready to pick.

  “They all look the same to me,” I complained. “They’re all green. Aren’t you supposed to wait until things start to go brown before you pick them?”

  “Not tobacco. Look at the size, here.” She snapped a leaf off and set it gently in a basket.

  “Think of all the lung cancer, right here in this field,” I murmured.

  But it didn’t bother Katie. “It’s a cash crop,” she said simply. “With dairy farming, it’s hard to turn a profit.”

  I bent down, ready to snap off my first leaf. “No!” Katie cried. “That’s too small.” She held up another, larger leaf.

  “Maybe I should just jump ahead to the next step. Stuffing it into pipes, or sticking the surgeon general’s warning on the box.”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “The next step is to hang it, and if you can’t figure out the picking, I’m not going to let you get close to a five-foot-long sharpened stick.”

  I laughed and bent to the plants again. As much as I hated to admit it, I was in better shape than I’d ever been in my life. My work as an attorney had always exercised my mind, but not my body; by default, living with the Fishers, I was stretching the limits of both. The Amish believed that hard physical labor was a basic tenet of living, and almost never employed outsiders as farmhands because they couldn’t live up to the standard workday. Although Aaron had never said as much to me, I knew he was expecting me to break down in a citified, sobbing puddle, or sneak from the fields for a glass of lemonade before harvest was finished-things that would point to the obvious fact I wasn’t one of them. All of which made me even more determined to do my share, if only to prove him wrong. To that end, I’d spent a week in early August standing bundles of wheat on end as the cutter spit them out, until my back was knotted and my skin was covered with chaff. I’d matched the rest of the family in that field, minute for minute. In my mind was the thought that if I earned Aaron’s respect on familiar, fertile ground, I might earn his respect on my own turf.

  “Ellie, are you coming or not?”

  Katie stood with her hands on her hips, her full basket planted between her feet. I’d been picking leaves as my mind wandered too, because my own basket was nearly filled. God only knew if the tobacco I’d chosen was ready for harvest-I took some of the bigger leaves and stuck them on top, so Katie wouldn’t notice. Then I followed her to the long shed that had been empty the few months I’d been living on the farm.

  There were large gaps in the slatted walls of the shed, so that the air traveled through in a light breeze. I sat down on a hay bale beside Katie and watched her pick up a skewer as tall as she was. “You poke the leaves through the stem,” she instructed. “Like cranberries on string, for your Christmas trees.”

  Now, this I could do. Balancing my own stick against the hay bale, I began to line the leaves up a few inches apart, so that they’d be able to dry. I knew that by the time we were finished, the small field of tobacco would be bare, all the leaves hanging on poles stacked to the rafters of this shed. In the winter, when I was long gone, the family would strip the tobacco and sell it down South.

  Would Katie be here to help?

  “Maybe when we’re done with this, we could talk about the trial.”

  “Why?” Katie said, her attention focused on piercing the stems of her leaves. “You’re going to say what you want to, anyway.”

  I let the comment roll off my back. In the months since Katie had been interviewed by the forensic psychiatrists, I had marched along with my insanity defense, although I knew it upset her. In her mind, she hadn’t killed that baby, so an inability to recall the murder had nothing to do with insanity. Every time I asked her for her assistance-with lines of questioning, with the sequence of events of that horrible night-she turned away. Her skittishness about the defense had turned her into a wild card, which made me even more grateful I hadn’t decided to go with reasonable doubt. For an insanity defense, Katie would never have to take the stand.

  “Katie,” I said patiently. “I’ve been in a lot more courts than you have. You’re going to have to believe me.”

  She stabbed a leaf onto the end of the stick. “You don’t believe me.”

  But how could I? Her story, since the beginning of this farce, had changed several times. Either I could make the jury think that was due to dissociation, or they would simply assume she’d been lying. Intentionally, I speared a leaf through the midpoint, instead of the stem. “No,” Katie said, reaching for it. “You’re doing it wrong. Watch.”

  With relief, I settled down into letting her be the expert. With any luck, even without help from Katie I would have enough testimony from Dr. Polacci to get her acquitted. We worked side by side in silence, the dust motes rising in the glow that filtered through the shed’s walls. When our baskets were almost empty, I looked up. “You want to pick some more?”

  “Only if you want to,” Katie answered, deferring-as the Amish always did-to someone else’s opinion.

  The door to the shed flew open, the sun backlighting a tall man in a suit. It had to be Coop; although he usually dressed casually when he visited Katie, occasionally he drove straight from the office-and at any rate, he was the only male I could think of who’d be wearing anything other than suspendered trousers. I stood, a smile on my face as he walked inside.

  “You,” Stephen said, grinning, “are one tough woman to find.”

  For a moment I could not move. Then I set down the stick and managed to find my voice. “What are you doing here?”

  He laughed. “Well, that’s not quite the hello I was thinking of during the drive, but I can see you’re meeting with a client.” Stephen offered his hand to Katie. “Hi there,” he said. “Stephen Chatham.” Glancing around the shed, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Is this some kind of occupational therapy?”

  I could barely grasp the fact that Stephen was here. “It’s a cash crop,” I said
finally.

  All the while, Katie was darting glances at me, wisely remaining silent. I could not look at Stephen without imagining Coop standing beside him. Stephen didn’t have Coop’s pale green eyes. Stephen looked too polished. Stephen’s smile seemed practiced, instead of a flag unfurled.

  “You know, I’m actually quite busy,” I hedged.

  “The only case I see you actively working on involves ten-packs of Marlboro Lights. Which is why you ought to thank me. I’m guessing that access to law libraries in Amish country is limited at best, so I took the liberty of pulling some verdicts for you to look over.” He reached into a portfolio and extracted a thick sheaf of papers. “Three neonaticides that walked under Pennsylvania law. One of which, believe it or not, was an insanity defense.”

  “How did you know I noticed up insanity?”

  Stephen shrugged. “This case is generating a lot of buzz, Ellie. Word gets around.”

  I was about to respond when Katie suddenly pushed between us, running from the shed without a backward glance.

  Sarah invited Stephen to dinner, but he didn’t want to accept the invitation. “Let me take you out,” he suggested. “We can go to one of those homey Amish places in town, if you want.”

  As if, leaving this household, the first thing I’d want to do is eat the same thing all over again. “They’re not Amish,” I said, just to be fractious. “Anyone who’s truly Plain wouldn’t advertise their religion on the sign.”

  “Well, then, there’s always McDonald’s.”

  I glanced into the kitchen, where Sarah and Katie were hard at work preparing dinner-a chore that I’d be helping with, had Stephen not arrived. Sarah peered over her shoulder at us, caught my eye, and turned away quickly in embarrassment.

  Folding my arms across my chest, I said, “How come you can’t eat here?”