Plain Truth

by Jodi Picoult

Katie nodded. "I'm all she's got."

  "Have you ever had seizures, Katie, or head trauma?"

  "No."

  "How about very bad bellyaches?"

  "Once." Katie smiled. "After my brother dared me to eat ten apples that weren't ripe."

  "But not ... recently?" She shook her head. "How about losing big chunks of time ... you suddenly realize that hours have passed, and you can't remember where you've been or what you've done?"

  At that, inexplicably, Katie blushed again and said no.

  "Have you ever had hallucinations--seen things that aren't really there?"

  "Sometimes I see my sister--"

  "Who died," I interrupted.

  "She drowned at the pond," Katie explained. "When I'm there, she comes too."

  Coop didn't even blink, as if seeing ghosts were the normal course of one's day. "Does she speak to you? Tell you to do anything?"

  "No. She just skates."

  "Does it bother you to see her?"

  "Oh, no."

  "Have you ever been very sick? Had to go to the hospital?"

  "No. Not until this last time."

  "Let's talk about that," Coop said. "Do you know why you were hospitalized?"

  Katie's cheeks flamed and she stared into her lap. "It was for a woman's problem."

  "The doctors said you had a baby."

  "They were wrong," Katie said. "I didn't."

  Coop let the denial roll right off his back. "How old were you when you started menstruating, Katie?"

  "Twelve."

  "Did your mother explain what was happening?"

  "Well, a little. But I knew. I'd seen the animals and such."

  "Do you and your parents talk about sex?"

  Katie's eyes widened, absolutely scandalized. "Of course not. It's not right, not until a girl's gotten herself married."

  "Who says it's not right?"

  "The Lord," she said promptly. "The church. My parents."

  "Would your parents be upset if they found out you were sexually active?"

  "But I'm not."

  "I understand. But if you were, what do you think would happen?"

  "They'd be very disappointed," Katie answered quietly. "And I'd be put in the bann ."

  "What's that?"

  "It's when you break a rule, and the bishop finds out. You have to confess, and then, for a little while anyway, you're shunned." Her voice lowered to a whisper. "You're cut off, is all."

  For the first time I saw it through Katie's eyes--the stigma of being an outcast in a community where sameness was so highly valued.

  "If you were in trouble, Katie, would you turn to your mother or father for help?"

  "I would pray," she said. "And whatever happened would be the Lord's will."

  "Have you ever drunk alcohol, or taken drugs?"

  To my great shock, Katie nodded. "I had two beers, once, and peppermint schnapps, when I was with my gang."

  "Your gang?"

  "Other young people who are my friends. We're called the Sparkies. Most Plain kids my age join up with a gang when they come into their Rumspringa ."

  "Rumspringa?"

  "Running-around years. When we're fourteen or fifteen."

  Coop looked at me, but I raised my brows. This was the first I was hearing of it. "So--what made you join the Sparkies?"

  "They were right for me. Not too crazy, but still fun. We have a few fellows who'll buy beer at the Turkey Hill and race their buggies after midnight down Route 340, but most of the wild kids would rather join the Shotguns or the Happy Jacks-- they hold hops, and drive around in plain sight, and really become Sod --worldly. We get together on Sunday nights and sing hymns, mostly. But sometimes," she admitted shyly, "we do other things."

  "Like?"

  "Drink. Dance to music. Well, I used to do that, but now I leave after the singing when things are getting a little crazy."

  "How come?"

  Katie fisted her hands in the grass. "Now I'm baptized."

  Coop's brows raised. "Haven't you been since you were a baby?"

  "No, we get baptized when we're older. For me, it was last year. We make the choice to stand before God and agree to live by the Ordnung --those rules I was talking about."

  "When you went to these singings, and drank and danced, did your parents know?"

  Katie looked toward the house. "All the parents know that the kids are up to something; they just look the other way and hope it isn't too dangerous."

  "Why would they accept behavior like this, but be disappointed by sexual activity?"

  "Because it's a sin. The singings--well, it's kind of like a fling with being English. Folks believe if their kids have a chance to try it once or twice, they'll still give up worldly things and take on the responsibility of living Plain."

  "Do most kids?"

  Ja.

  "Why?"

  "All their friends are Plain. And their family. If they don't join the church, they won't be like everyone else. Plus, they have to be bapti2ed, if they want to get married."

  "Do you? Want to get married?"

  "Who doesn't?" Katie said.

  Coop grinned. "Well, Ellie for one," he joked under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear. I was so busy turning over his words in my mind, and what they meant, that I nearly missed his next question.

  "Have you ever kissed a boy, Katie?"

  "Ja," she said, blushing again. "Samuel. And before him, John Beiler."

  "Samuel is your boyfriend?"

  Was, I thought.

  "Have you and your boyfriend ever had sexual intercourse?"

  "No!"

  Coop hesitated. "Does he kiss you anywhere but on the lips?"

  "On the neck," she murmured. "My forehead."

  "What about on your breasts, Katie? Your belly?"

  Katie inched her bare feet out from beneath her skirt and set them one by one into the running creek. "Samuel wouldn't do that."

  "Have you ever let anyone else kiss or touch you?" Coop gently pressed. When she didn't answer, he softened his voice even more. "Do you want to have babies one day, Katie?"

  She lifted her face, the sun lighting her cheeks and her eyes. "Oh, yes," she whispered. "More than anything."

  The moment Katie was out of earshot I verbally pounced on Coop. "What do you think?"

  He lay back on the grassy bank. "That I'm not in Kansas anymore. I need a crash course in Amish life before I evaluate her further."

  "When you find the university offering the night session, will you sign me up?" I sighed. "She said she wants children."

  "Most women who commit neonaticide do. Just not at this time." He hesitated. "Then again, it's also possible that to her, this baby never existed."

  "So you don't think she's lying. You think she really blocked out having that baby."

  Coop was silent for a moment. "I wish I could tell you for sure. The general public seems to believe that shrinks can tell better than the average Joe whether someone's lying through her teeth, but you know what, El? It's a myth. It's too early, really, to make a judgment. If she is lying, she's awfully good at it, and I can't imagine it was part of her upbringing."

  "Well, did you come up with anything conclusive?"

  He shrugged. "I think it's safe to say that she's not psychotic right now."

  "Ghosts notwithstanding?"

  "There's a big difference between a figment of one's imagination and a psychotic delusion. If her sister was appearing and telling her to kill her baby, or saying the Devil was living under the silo, that would be another story."

  "I don't care if she's psychotic now. What about when she delivered the baby?"

  Coop pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "It's clear she's blocking out the pregnancy, and the act that led to it, but you didn't need me to tell you that."

  "What about rape?" Ellie asked.

  "That's tough to call, too. She's so skittish about sex I can't figure out if it's due to religious background or t
o assault. Even having consensual sex with someone not Amish might be enough to put up a wall in Katie's mind. You heard how fearful she is of being shunned. If she developed a relationship with an outsider, she might as well kiss her Amish life good-bye."

  I had been there long enough to know that wasn't quite right. You were always welcomed back--you just had to admit to your sins. "Actually, she could confess, and go back to the church."

  "Unfortunately, just because others would forgive her doesn't mean that she would forget. She'd be carrying that around for the rest of her life." Coop turned to me. "Given her upbringing, it's not surprising that her mind is working overtime to block out what's happened."

  I flopped onto my back beside him. "She tells me she didn't kill the baby. She tells me she didn't have the baby. But there's proof that she did have the baby--"

  "And if she lied about the one thing," Coop finished for me, "then she's probably lied about the other. However, lying presumes conscious knowledge. If she's dissociating, she can't be blamed for not knowing the truth."

  Coming up on my elbow, I smiled sadly. "But can she be blamed for committing murder?"

  "That," Coop said, "depends on a jury." He tugged me upright. "I'd like to keep talking to her. Walk her through the night before the birth."

  "Oh, you don't have to do that. I mean, it's incredibly nice of you and far beyond the call of duty, but you must have more important things to do."

  "I said I'd help you, El, and I haven't exactly done a cracker-jack job yet. I'll drive out in the evenings and talk to her after leaving the office."

  "And meanwhile, your wife's sitting home eating dinner alone. Weren't you the one who told me psychiatrists are the ones who can't keep their own personal relationships together?"

  Coop nodded. "Yeah. Which is probably why I got divorced about a year ago."

  I turned toward him, my mouth dry. "You did?" He looked down at his shoes, at the rush of the creek; and I wondered why it was so easy to speak of Katie, and so difficult to speak of ourselves. "Coop, I'm sorry."

  He reached out to the bark of a tree and plucked off a neon inchworm, which curled tight as a drum in the hollow of his palm. "We all make mistakes," Coop said softly. He reached for my hand and held it up beside his, just as the worm began to move; traveling, stretching, a small bright bridge between us.

  It took me a half hour to convince Sarah that if I left Katie in her custody for the morning, I wouldn't be breaking any laws, and chances were incredibly slim that any representative of the court would come ambling by to realize I wasn't around. "Look," I said finally, "if you want me to gather up a defense strategy for Katie, I need flexibility."

  "Dr. Cooper drove out here," Sarah fretted.

  "Dr. Cooper doesn't have to bring half a million dollars' worth of laboratory equipment with him," I explained. In fact, I had worked so hard just to guarantee myself the two hours I needed to meet with Dr. Owen Zeigler that I was faintly disappointed to realize I had no desire to be in the neonatal pathology lab at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. I kept thinking of sick infants, dead infants, infants born at risk to women over forty, and all I wanted to do was hightail it back to the Fishers' farm.

  Owen, a man with whom I'd worked once in the past, had a Moon Pie face, a bright bald head, and a round middle that balanced on his knees whenever he hiked himself up onto one of the high stools in front of the microscopes. "The placental culture showed mixed flora, including diphtheroids," he said. "Which basically means there was crap floating around."

  "Are you saying it might have affected the results?"

  "No. It's perfectly normal, considering the placenta had been lying around in a barn."

  I narrowed my eyes. "Then tell me something that's abnormal."

  "Well, the death of the neonate. Looks like a live birth to me," he said, and my hopes plummeted. "Based on the hydrostatic test, air made it to the alveoli."

  "Speak English, Owen."

  The pathologist sighed. "The baby breathed."

  "That's a definite, then?"

  "You can tell if a newborn, even a premmie, has breathed air or just inhaled fluid, when you look at the alveoli in the lungs. They get rounded. It's more conclusive than the hydrostatic test itself, because lungs may float if artificial respiration was attempted."

  "Yeah, right," I muttered. "She gave it mouth to mouth, and then killed it."

  "You never know," Owen said.

  "So what made it stop breathing?"

  "The medical examiner is crying suffocation. But that's not conclusive."

  I climbed onto a stool beside the pathologist. "Tell me more."

  "There are petechiae in the lungs, which suggests asphyxia, but they could have formed before or after death. As for the bruising on the neonate's lips, all that means is that it was pressed up tightly against something. That something could have been the mother's collarbone, for all we know. In fact, if the newborn was suffocated with something soft, like the shirt it was wrapped in or the mother's hand, the findings are virtually indistinguishable from SIDS."

  He reached forward and took from my hand the glass slide I'd been absently playing with. "Bottom line: the baby could very well have died without anyone laying a hand on him. At thirty-two weeks, it's a viable neonate, but just barely."

  I frowned. "Would the mother have known if the baby was dying right before her eyes?"

  "Depends. If it was choking on mucus, she could have heard it. If it was suffocating, she'd see it gasping, turning blue." He turned off his microscope and slipped the slide--marked clearly BABY FISHER--into a small box containing others.

  I tried to imagine Katie paralyzed by fear, by the awareness of this tiny premature infant struggling to breathe. I pictured her watching it, wide-eyed, too stunned to intervene; and then realizing too late what had happened. I saw her wrapping it in a shirt and trying to hide it, before anyone could discover what had gone wrong.

  I envisioned her standing in a court of law, still, on trial for failing to seek proper medical attention after delivering the baby. Negligent homicide--not first-degree murder. But a felony, nonetheless; one that carried with it a jail sentence.

  Extending my hand to Owen, I smiled. "Thanks anyway," I said.

  On Saturday night, I headed upstairs at about ten o'clock and drew the green shades on the eastern side of the room. I took a shower and thought of Coop, wondered what he might be doing--seeing a movie? Eating out at a five-star restaurant? I was wondering if he still wore a T-shirt and boxers to bed when Katie came into the room. "What's the matter with you?" she asked, peering at my face.

  "Nothing."

  Katie shrugged, then yawned. "Boy, I'm tired," she said, but her bright eyes and the bounce in her step completely contradicted her words. As she walked into the bathroom, I turned off the bedroom light and crawled into bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Katie returned, sat down on the edge of her bed, and took off her boots. Then she slid between the sheets, fully dressed.

  I came up on an elbow, amused. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

  "I'm cold, is all."

  "There's another quilt in the closet, up on top." I thought of her rolling over in the middle of the night and having one of the pins that secured her dress jab her chest.

  "This is fine."

  "Suit yourself." I rolled over, staring at the wall, and suddenly remembered being sixteen years old and going to sleep in all my clothes, so that I could sneak out of the house when I saw the headlights of my best friend's car and go to the party a football jock was throwing while his parents were out of town. Sitting up, I glared at Katie's huddled body. "Where are you planning on going?"

  Her jaw dropped--guilty as charged.

  "Correction," I said. "Where are we planning on going?"

  She drew herself to a sitting position. "On Saturday nights, Samuel comes," Katie confessed. "We visit on the porch, or in the living room. Sometimes we stay up until morning."

  Well, whatever "
visiting" encompassed, I already knew that it didn't include having sex. Katie's embarrassment stemmed from a basic Amish principle about dating--it was strictly your own business, and for some reason I didn't understand, Plain teens went out of their way to pretend that they were doing anything but meeting their boyfriend or girlfriend.

  Katie's eyes gleamed in the dark, her gaze focused on the window. For a moment, she looked so much like any other lovesick teenager that I wanted to touch her; just cup my hand over the curve of her cheek and tell her to make this moment last, because before she knew it she'd be like me, a witness to someone else's moment. I didn't know how to say that, given the circumstances, Samuel might not come. That the baby she could not admit to bearing had changed the rules.

  "Does he throw pebbles? Or use a ladder?" I asked softly.

  Realizing I was not going to give her secret away, Katie smiled slowly. "A flashlight."

  "Well." I felt duty-bound to dispense some advice for the upcoming tryst, but what could I say to a girl who'd already had a baby and was accused of killing it? "Be careful," I said finally, settling under the covers again.

  I slept fitfully, waiting to see that flashlight beam. At midnight, Katie was still lying awake in bed. At two-fifteen, she got up and sat in the rocking chair beside the window. At three-thirty, I knelt down beside her. "He's not coming for you, sweetheart," I whispered. "In less than an hour, he'll have to start the milking."

  "But he always--"

  I turned her face so that she was looking at me, and shook my head.

  Stiffly, Katie got up and walked to bed. She sat down and traced the pattern of the quilt, lost in her own thoughts.

  I had seen the looks on clients' faces at the moment they were sentenced to five years, ten, life in prison. In most cases, even when they knew it was likely to be coming, the truth hit them like a wrecking ball. Sentencing would be a piece of cake for Katie, compared to this: the understanding that her life would no longer be as it once was.

  She was quiet for a long time, running her finger over the seams of her handiwork. Then she spoke, her voice rising thin as a trail of smoke. "When you're quilting, one missed stitch ruins the whole bunch." With a rustle of covers, she turned to me. "You pull on it," she whispered, "and they all unravel."

  Aaron and Sarah spent the Sunday off from church visiting friends and relatives, but Katie and I declined their invitation to come along. Instead, after we finished the chores, we went to the creek to fish. I found the rods just where she said they'd be in the shed and met her in the field, where she was overturning a clod of earth to pluck out worms for bait. "I don't know," I said, watching them wriggle pink over her palm. "I'm having second thoughts."