Plain Truth

by Jodie Picoult

  He stood up, his hands locked behind his back. “However, we don’t need the defendant’s recollections to piece together the truth, because in this case, the facts speak for themselves. We know that Katie Fisher lied for years to her family about her clandestine visits to the outside world. We know that she concealed her pregnancy, gave birth secretly, covered up the bloody hay, and hid the body of her infant. We can look at the autopsy report and see bruises around the baby’s mouth due to smothering, the cotton fibers shoved deep in its throat, the medical examiner’s diagnosis of homicide. We can see the forensic evidence-the DNA tests that place the defendant and the defendant alone at the scene of the crime. We can point to a psychological motive-Ms. Fisher’s fear of being shunned from her family forever, like her brother, for this transgression of giving birth out of wedlock. We can even replay the court record and listen to the defendant confess to killing her child-an admission made willingly, which the defense then desperately tried to twist to its advantage.”

  George turned toward Ellie. “Ms. Hathaway wants you to think that because the defendant is Amish, this crime is unthinkable. But being Amish is a religion, not an excuse. I’ve seen pious Catholics, devout Jews, and faithful Muslims all convicted of vicious criminal acts. Ms. Hathaway also would like you to believe that the infant died of natural causes. But then, why wrap up the body and hide it under a pile of blankets-actions that suggest a cover-up? The defense can’t explain that; they can only offer a red-herring testimony about an obscure bacterial infection that may have led to respiratory failure in a newborn. I repeat: may have led. But then again, it may not have. It may just be a way of covering up the truth: that on July tenth, Katie Fisher went out to her parents’ barn and willfully, premeditatedly, and deliberately smothered her infant.”

  He glanced at Katie, then back at the jury. “Ms. Hathaway would also like you to believe one other falsehood-that Katie Fisher was the only eyewitness that morning. But this is not true. An infant was there, too; an infant who isn’t here to speak for himself because he was silenced by his mother.” He let his gaze roam over the twelve men and women watching him. “Speak up for that infant today,” he said.

  George Callahan’s father, who had won four consecutive terms as the district attorney in Bucks County a few decades ago, used to tell him that there was always one case in a man’s legal career he could ride all the way into the sunset. It was the case that was always mentioned in conjunction with your name, whenever you did anything else noteworthy in your life. For Wallace Callahan, it had been convicting three white college boys of the rape and murder of a little black girl, right in the middle of the civil rights protests. For George, it would be Katie Fisher.

  He could feel it the same way he could feel snow coming a day ahead of its arrival, by a tightening in his muscles. The jury would find her guilty. Hell, she’d found herself guilty. Why, he wouldn’t be surprised if the verdict came back before suppertime.

  He shrugged into his trench coat, lifted his briefcase, and pushed out the doors of the courthouse. Immediately reporters and cameramen from local networks and national affiliates engulfed him. He grinned, turned his best side to the majority of the video cameras, and leaned in to the knot of microphones being shoved beneath his chin.

  “Any comments about the case?”

  “Do you have a sense of how the jury will find?”

  George smiled and let the practiced sound bite roll off his tongue. “Clearly, this will be a victory for the prosecution.”

  “There’s no question in my mind that this will be a victory for the defense,” Ellie said to the small group of media reps huddled in the parking lot of the superior court.

  “Don’t you think that Katie’s confession might make it hard for the jury to acquit?” one reporter yelled out.

  “Not at all.” Ellie smiled. “Katie’s confession had less to do with the legal ramifications of this case than the moral obligations of her religion.” She politely pushed forward, scattering the reporters like marbles.

  Coop, who had been waiting for her impromptu press conference to finish, joined her as she made her way to Leda’s blue sedan. “I ought to just stick around,” she said. “Chances are the jury will be back by the time we finish grabbing a bite.”

  “If you stick around, Katie’s going to be bombarded with people. You can’t keep her locked in a conference room.”

  Ellie nodded and unlocked the door of the car. By now, Leda and Katie and Samuel would be waiting for her at the service entrance of the court.

  “Well,” Coop said. “Congratulations.”

  She snorted. “Don’t congratulate me yet.”

  “But you just said you’re going to win.”

  Ellie shook her head. “I said it,” she admitted. “But the truth is, Coop, I don’t know that at all.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Ellie

  A full day later, the jury still had not returned a verdict.

  Because of my lack of proximity to a working phone, Judge Ledbetter ordered George to let me borrow his beeper. When the verdict came in, she would page me. In the meantime, we could all return home and go about our business.

  I had been in situations before with a hung jury. It was unpleasant, not only because it automatically guaranteed that we’d have to go through the rigmarole of a second trial, but also because until the verdict came back, I became obsessed with second-guessing my defense. In the past, when it took some time for a jury to return, I’d try to distract myself with the other cases I was working on. I would go to the gym and pound on a Stairmaster until I could barely move, much less think. I’d sit down with Stephen, who would walk me through the case to see what I might have done differently.

  Now, I was surrounded by the Fishers-all of whom had a vested interest in the verdict, and none of whom seemed to notice that it hadn’t been returned yet. Katie continued doing her chores. I was expected to help Sarah in the kitchen, to make myself useful in the barn if Aaron needed me, to carry on with life even though we were anticipating a momentous decision.

  Twenty-eight hours after we’d left the courthouse, Katie and I were washing windows for Annie King, an Amish woman who’d fallen and broken her hip. I watched Katie for a moment, tirelessly dipping her cloth in alcohol solution and scrubbing it over the glass, wondering how she could find the strength to help someone else when her own emotions had to be overwhelming right now. “Isn’t this bothering you?” I said finally.

  “My back?” Katie asked. “Ja, a little. If it hurts you too much, you can rest a bit.”

  “Not your back. The fact that you don’t know the outcome of the trial.”

  Katie let the cloth slip into the bucket and sank back on her heels. “Worrying isn’t going to make it happen any quicker.”

  “Well, I can’t stop thinking about it,” I admitted. “If I was facing a murder conviction, I don’t think I’d be washing someone else’s windows.”

  Katie turned to me, her eyes clear and filled with a peace that made it nearly impossible to turn away from her. “Today Annie needs help.”

  “Tomorrow, you might need it.”

  She looked out the sparkling window, where women were busy hauling cleaning supplies from their buggies. “Then tomorrow, all these people, they will be with me.”

  I swallowed my doubts, hoping for her sake she was right. Then I stood up, leaving my rag draped over the bucket. “I’ll be right back.”

  Katie hid her smile; the incredible number of times I went to the bathroom these days had become a running joke. But it wasn’t funny moments later, when I sat on the toilet, when I looked down and realized that I was bleeding.

  Sarah drove her buggy to the community hospital, the same one Katie had been brought to by ambulance the day she’d given birth. In the back, being jostled, I tried to tell myself that this was normal; that this happened all the time to pregnant women. I pressed my fist against the cramps that had started up in my abdomen while Katie and Sarah sat on the bench in th
e front, whispering in Dietsch.

  I was taken into the ER, questions hammering at me from every direction. Was I pregnant? Did I know how far along I was? A nurse turned to Katie and Sarah, hovering uncomfortably at the edge of the curtain. “Are you relatives?”

  “No. Friends,” Katie answered.

  “Then I’ll have to ask you to wait outside.”

  Sarah caught my eye before she turned away. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Please,” I whispered. “Get Coop.”

  The doctor had pianist’s hands, long white fingers so delicate that they seemed like flowers trailing over my skin. “We’re going to do some blood tests to confirm your pregnancy,” he said. “Then we’ll get you in for an ultrasound, to see what’s going on.”

  I hiked myself up on my elbows. “What is going on?” I demanded, with more force than I thought I’d have. “You have to have some idea.”

  “Well, the bleeding is fairly heavy. Based on the date of your last period, you’re most likely about ten weeks along. It’s possible that this is an ectopic pregnancy, which is very dangerous. If it’s not, your body may just have started to spontaneously abort.” He looked up at me. “Miscarry.”

  “You have to stop it,” I said evenly.

  “We can’t. If the bleeding slows or stops on its own, that’s a good sign. If not . . . well.” He shrugged and looped his stethoscope around his neck. “We’ll know more in a little while. Just try to rest.”

  I nodded, lying back, concentrating on not crying. Crying wouldn’t do me any good. I stayed perfectly still, breathing shallowly. I could not lose this baby. I could not.

  Coop’s face was a ghostly white as the ultrasound technician swabbed gel on my belly and pressed what looked like a microphone against my skin. On the computer screen a wedge of static began to form into round balls that shifted and changed shape. “There you go,” the technician said, marking with graphic arrows the tiniest circle.

  “Well, the pregnancy isn’t in a Fallopian tube,” the doctor said. “Blow that up.”

  The technician enlarged the area. It did not look like a baby; it did not look like much of anything but a grainy curl of white with a black dot in its middle. I turned to the doctor and the technician, but they were not saying a word. They were staring at the screen, at something that was apparently very wrong.

  The technician pushed harder against my belly, rolling the wand back and forth. “Ah,” she said finally.

  The black dot was pulsing rhythmically. “That’s the heartbeat,” the doctor said.

  Coop grasped my hand. “That’s good, right? That means everything is all right?”

  “We don’t know what makes someone miscarry, Dr. Cooper, but nearly a third of early pregnancies do. Usually it’s because the embryo isn’t viable, so it’s for the best. Your wife is still bleeding heavily. All we can do now is send her home and hope things turn around in the next few hours.”

  “Send her home? You’re just going to send her home?”

  “Yes. You should stay off your feet. If the bleeding hasn’t slowed by morning, or if the cramps intensify, come back in.”

  I stared at the screen, frozen on that small white circle.

  “But the heartbeat,” Coop pressed. “That’s a positive sign.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, the bleeding is a bad one.”

  The doctor and technician left the room. Coop sank down on a chair beside the examination table and spread his fingers over my stomach. I covered his hand with my own. “I’m not letting go of this baby,” I told him firmly. And then I let myself cry.

  Coop wanted to take me to his apartment, but it was too far away. Instead, Sarah insisted we come back to the farmhouse where she could watch over me. “Of course, you’ll come too,” she told Coop, which was why he allowed the decision to be made.

  He carried me up to the room I shared with Katie and set me gently on the bed. “Here,” he said, arranging the pillows behind my head. “How’s that?”

  “Fine.” I looked at him and tried to smile. He sat down on the edge of the bed and twined his fingers with mine. “Maybe this is nothing at all.”

  I nodded. Coop worried the edge of the quilt through his hands, looking at the nightstand, the window, the floor-anywhere but at me. “Coop,” I said, “do me a favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want you to call Judge Ledbetter. Let her know what’s going on, just in case.”

  “For God’s sake, Ellie, you shouldn’t even be thinking about that now.”

  “Well, I am. And I need you to do this.”

  Coop shook his head. “I’m not leaving you.”

  I touched his arm, whispering the words neither one of us wanted to hear. “There is nothing you can do.”

  I turned my head away, and a moment later I heard his footsteps as he left the room. But too quickly, the door opened again. Expecting Coop, I opened my eyes, and found Sarah pouring a glass of water from a pitcher.

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She shrugged. “I’m sorry this is happening, Ellie.”

  I nodded. However she might have felt about having yet another unwed mother-to-be in her household, she was gracious enough to offer sympathy to me right now.

  “I lost three babies between Katie and Hannah,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. “I never did understand why they say it that way in English-lose a baby. You know right where she is, don’t you? And you’d do anything to keep her there.”

  I stared at her, this woman who understood what it was like to be at the mercy of your own body, what it was like to have no control over your own shortcomings. It was just like Katie had said-it didn’t matter if it was accidental; you felt guilty all the same. “She’s real to me, already,” I whispered.

  “Well, ’course she is,” Sarah agreed. “And you’re already willing to move heaven and earth for her.”

  She bustled around the room. “If you need anything, you just call, you hear?”

  “Wait.”

  Sarah paused at the door.

  “How . . .?” I was unable to form the question, but she understood me anyway.

  “It’s the Lord’s will,” she said quietly. “You get through it. You just never get over it.”

  I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered, the sun was nearly setting and Coop was sprawled on Katie’s bed across the room. As I stirred, he sat up and knelt beside me. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay. The cramps are gone.”

  We looked at each other, afraid of what that might mean. “I called the judge,” Coop said, quick to change the topic. “She said the jury is still deliberating, and that if necessary she’d keep them sequestered until you were up and about.” He cleared his throat. “She also said she’s praying for us.”

  “That’s good,” I said evenly. “We can take all the help we can get.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Coop picked at a thread on the quilt. “I know this isn’t the time, and I know that I promised I wouldn’t do this, but I want you to marry me. I’m not the lawyer here, so I don’t have any fancy arguments to convince you. But when Katie called me today from the hospital, I couldn’t breathe. I thought you were in an accident. And then she said it was the baby, and all I could think was, Thank God. Thank God it wasn’t Ellie.

  “I hate myself for that. I wonder if I deserve this, just because of what popped into my head. And now I’ve been imagining this baby, this gift that I didn’t expect to have in the first place, getting taken away. If it happens, El, it’s going to hurt so badly-but it’s nothing compared to the way I’d feel if you were taken away. That . . .” he said, his voice breaking, “that I wouldn’t make it through.”

  He brought my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles. “We’ll have more babies. They won’t be this one, but they’ll be ours. We can have ten of them, one for every room in our house.” Coop raised his face. “Just tell me that you want to.”

  I had once left Coop becaus
e I wanted to see if I could be the best, if I could make my own way in the world. But living for months with the Fishers made me see the value of intrinsically knowing there was someone to help me up if I stumbled.

  I had turned Coop down a second time because I was afraid that I’d only be saying yes out of responsibility, because of the baby. But there might not be a baby, now. There was only me, and Coop, and this terrible ache that only he could understand.

  How many times would I throw this away, before I realized it was what I had been looking for all along?

  “Twelve,” I answered.

  “Twelve?”

  “Twelve babies. I’m planning on a very large house.”

  Coop’s eyes lit up. “A mansion,” he promised, and kissed me. “God, I love you.”

  “I love you too.” As he climbed onto the bed with me, I started to laugh. “I’d love you more if you helped me into the bathroom.”

  He grinned and looped his arms around me, carrying me down the hall. “Can you do this yourself?”

  “I’ve gotten very good at it after thirty-seven years.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant,” he said gently.

  “I know.” We stared at each other for a moment, until I had to turn away from the sorrow in his eyes. “I can handle it, Coop.” I closed the door behind myself and hiked up my nightgown, steeling myself for the sight of another heavily soiled sanitary napkin. When I glanced down, I started to cry.

  With a crash, Coop burst into the bathroom, wild-eyed and frightened. “What? What is it?”

  The tears kept coming; unstoppable, overwhelming. “Make that thirteen babies,” I said, a smile unraveling across my face. “I think this one might be staying.”

  NINETEEN

  It wasn’t until George Callahan had gone through a bottle pack of Zantac that he realized this case was literally eating him alive. His sure thing, it turned out, was not necessarily so sure. He wondered which juror was hanging up the others-the fellow with the Claddagh tattoo? The mother of four? He wondered if he had enough time to run to the pharmacy after lunch, or if he’d be called in for the verdict the minute he got on the highway. He wondered if Ellie Hathaway had lost three nights of sleep, too.