The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Listen,” she said, “I want to go to the bathroom.”

  He looked at her blankly, as if he didn’t understand.

  “The bathroom.” She felt as if she were in school. Was she supposed to raise her hand? “Please.”

  “Are you ill? More of your stomach flu, perhaps?”

  “No. I just … I need to use the bathroom.” She felt her face get hot. “To pee. All right?”

  “Soon,” he said. “Let’s try to move forward.”

  “Forward to what? I don’t even know what’s going on! I told you I didn’t have a baby, and I sure don’t know anything about that baby Naomi found. It wasn’t mine!”

  “Well, possibly you have some idea whose it was, then.”

  “I have no idea!” she shouted. “I don’t know whose. It could be anyone’s. It could be …” She knew she shouldn’t say this, but couldn’t interrupt herself. “It could be Sue Deacon’s, for all I know. Did you haul her in here?”

  He got to his feet slowly and looked down at her. He was not tall, but dense, graceless beneath his good gray jacket and slightly frayed tie. For the first time, something in his look made her feel irreversibly powerless, as if she had already been locked away for life at his specific mercy, and he a merciless man.

  “Please tell me,” Charter said, “that you are not accusing Sue Deacon of murdering that child.”

  Then, in addition to her fear, she felt ashamed.

  “I need a little break, Miss Pratt. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Please think carefully about how we are going to proceed.”

  And he left her, sweeping the files away from her off the table as he went, closing the door deliberately behind him.

  The room had changed in the past hour. It had seemed small when he led her in, a great table with a channel of space around the edges, and no windows, but now it felt downright stunted, as if it had been made for a person of abnormally minuscule dimensions. What could you do in such a little place but imprison people, or frighten them? Her bladder ached. She moved her feet beneath the table and brooded over its surface: beige flecked with other beige. The cinder blocks were painted beige, too. She watched the secondhand sweep around its course a few times. She was trying not to think about any of this.

  But the quiet prodded at her, the absence of human voices. She even, for a moment, missed his voice—Charter’s. There was not silence, precisely, but a hiss of air from the walls, through which no sound percolated. The clock, she thought, could no longer tell her exactly what time it was, since she found that she could no longer completely trust what it said. Not without evidence—something, some glimpse of the world. The world could have disappeared, she thought. It could have just gone away, as he had gone away, shutting the door behind it, leaving her in this beige tomb lit with fluorescent glare and lacking a toilet, and she wouldn’t ever see Polly again.

  So Heather started to cry, but softly, only for herself. She had yet to make any sense at all about this—not only about this man and this room and the police coming to her house, but about the baby herself. And the baby herself had begun to leave her, mercifully. Whatever parts of Heather she had taken along were justifiable losses, too, so long as the baby went and did not return. And Polly …

  Panic surged inside her. She jerked to her feet. She hadn’t heard Polly in … Oh, the clock was useless! Polly was gone. They had locked her in the room and gone away with her daughter. She had to get out.

  “Hey!” Heather shouted, first experimentally, then again, louder. She went around the table to the door. She banged on the door with her fist, then tried the knob. The door was locked. “Hey! I need to go to the bathroom!”

  Silence. Dread ran through her, but she backed away from the door, determined not to compound her fear by trying again, and again hearing nothing. She walked back around the table, one arm braced above it for support, and sat in her chair again. Then she put her head down. All this … this thing, this weird episode she was mired in, would pass away if she just kept going forward, and she would remember this night—it was night now, if the clock was even remotely right—as some strange and obnoxious inconvenience, like one of those nights when Polly was little and up at strange hours, reading darkness for day. Like an airplane trip must be, she thought, taking off in the night and arriving in the day, or vice versa. It wasn’t terrible, after all, but she wanted it over. When he came back, she would do whatever she could do to make it over. Whatever he wanted her to do. Her palms, cupped, made a bed for her forehead. Both were clammy. The door opened.

  Charter came in, followed by the sheriff, Erroll. Erroll was bigger, but he hung back and looked a little unsure. He even stood till after Charter had sat in his seat again. Charter slapped down the file in its place and flipped the top cover open, beginning to read, nonchalantly. Heather noted, with disbelief, an abandoned crumb in the corner of his mouth. Then Erroll closed the door and took the seat next to him.

  Heather said, “Listen, do I need a lawyer or something?”

  Nelson looked at Charter. Charter frowned. “I don’t know. Do you need a lawyer? Have you done something wrong?”

  “No!” said Heather.

  “Then why would you need a lawyer? I don’t understand.”

  She didn’t understand either. But she was scared. She wanted Polly, and she wanted to go home. She’d thought when you mentioned a lawyer they were supposed to stop, but he looked as if he had no intention of stopping.

  “All the same,” she said bravely, “I think I’d like to talk to one. If you don’t mind.”

  Heather saw Erroll lean close to Charter and speak in his ear. Charter’s face never changed. He expressed himself with one dismissive grunt.

  “I don’t think you understand, Miss Pratt. It’s certainly appropriate to call a lawyer if a person is under arrest. But that’s not the case here. You’re helping us, and as soon as you are finished helping us, you can go home. Don’t you want that?”

  “Yes,” said Heather poignantly.

  “All right, then.” He was complacent.

  “Where is Polly?” Heather said. Her voice came out harsh, but really she was just trying to get the words out.

  “Fine,” Charter said. Erroll glanced at him, then at the table.

  “Not how. Where?”

  He looked up. “I said she’s fine. Don’t worry.” And when he saw, to his apparent amazement, that even this wealth of information did not placate her, he sat back in his chair. “I’ve arranged for Polly to spend the night at Officer Franks’s house. She’ll be just fine.”

  Heather stared at him. Monologues of outrage raced over her tongue and fled, unspoken, leaving her depleted of language—even, incredibly, of anger. It was only as she had thought. They had taken Polly away, that was clear. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what she had to do.

  “I had a baby,” Heather said.

  Charter pursed his lips. “Really.”

  “I had a baby. I’m sorry I didn’t say so. But it died.”

  “Did it, now?” He reached into his breast pocket and extracted a pen. “You don’t mind if I write this down, do you?”

  She was breathing deeply. It hadn’t been hard, after all. Not as hard as she’d thought. So someone knew—the earth hadn’t blown apart.

  “We have a tape recorder in the office.” Erroll spoke for the first time. “I could—”

  “No,” said Charter. “Not necessary.” He turned back to Heather. “Your baby died.”

  “It was a miscarriage,” she said, because it had been, sort of. That was how she had come to think of it, these past weeks. A miscarriage of life. Wasn’t any death really a miscarriage of life?

  “And this occurred when?” he said, nodding slightly, as if he were only sympathizing with her.

  “Oh, a while back. Few months? Maybe. I don’t really remember. It was summer, anyway.”

  The pen waited. “In the summer,” he mused.

  “I was … I had it in the toilet. I felt sick in the middl
e of the night, so I went to the toilet and it … came out. I felt terrible,” she said, a little desperately.

  “I’m sure you did,” Charter said. “Can we go back, please?”

  Back, Heather thought dimly. There was no back.

  “When did you discover you were pregnant with this second child?”

  “Just after …” Just after her life had tacked in its course, she thought. Just after Pick had fallen asleep on the living-room couch and never wakened. Just after Ashley had told her she wasn’t strong enough to take him from his wife. Just after the before of her life had ended and the after had begun. “I don’t know exactly,” she said instead. “January?”

  “And whom did you tell about this pregnancy?”

  She had told no one, but he knew this already. Not the midwife, not Stephen Trask or Celia Trask, not Naomi Roth, who had thought she was such a good example to her daughter. Certainly not Ashley, who turned away from her now when they met, who crushed her heart with his jagged indifference. The truth was she had barely told herself about the baby inside her, there was so much mourning in the aftermath of that night. The baby, set ticking by so much sadness, was like a measure of the reach of that sadness out of the past, and it only got bigger instead of lessening and loosening its grip on her. She might have been getting better, but it only grew, taking up space and reminding her of what she had lost. She could not bear to think about it, but when she did it was with bitter resentment; how much more had she wanted back the things that had left her life, in place of this thing that had come?

  “I’m not really close to too many people that way,” she said now. “I can’t think of anyone I told.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Charter. “And you didn’t go see a doctor either, is that right? Good mother like you?”

  “I felt fine,” Heather said. “I did.”

  “Until your miscarriage, that is.”

  She looked up at him. “Yes. Until then.”

  “And you can’t remember when that was, exactly?”

  “No.” She looked for the crumb. It was still there. Staring at it helped her avoid his eyes.

  “Could it have been more recent than the summer? Last month or so, for example?”

  Heather shrugged.

  “Like, during your stomach flu, maybe? When you did all that throwing up and lost all that weight you never lost from having your fourteen-month-old daughter?”

  She swallowed. “I really need to go to the bathroom.”

  Erroll started to get to his feet.

  “Answer the question!” Charter shouted.

  Heather’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes. Sure,” she choked. “Now can I go?”

  “Take her,” he said nonchalantly. He was writing. Erroll opened up the door and waited for her to come around the table.

  The station was quiet but not empty. A policeman she recognized from her house was leaning against the wall of the corridor, merely watching her. Others were in a room she passed, talking softly, even laughing, drinking coffee, but not precisely doing anything. As if they were waiting, she thought vaguely, which was of course exactly what they were doing. They were waiting for her. The bathroom was on the other side of the entrance area, a single stall in a little room, not designated for men or women. Erroll reached in and turned on the light. He wouldn’t let her shut the door all the way.

  “I’ll just stand here,” he said, as if that were completely normal.

  She was too tired to argue. She went into the stall and pulled down her pants, checking reflexively for blood, but there hadn’t been blood for a few days now. She wondered when she would stop checking, or whether she would ever stop checking. She barely felt the relief of her bladder letting go. She could sleep, almost, or not so much sleep as just fall away from herself, right here. After a while they would come in and get her.

  It had been stupid to say she’d had the baby in the toilet. You couldn’t flush a baby that big away—they knew that, of course—so there was nothing gained by doing it. She still would have had to take the baby out of the toilet and put it somewhere. Charter would ask about that next. She had to use this time. This time out of his sight was precious. She had to think what to say when he asked her.

  “You all right in there?” Erroll said.

  Heather shuddered. She could barely remember what she had said already. She couldn’t imagine what she would say next.

  He walked her back to the room, back through the gauntlet of attendant policemen. She wondered where they had all come from. As far as she knew, Goddard itself only had one, or maybe two. When Erroll pushed back the door, Charter had a form in front of him, flat atop the manila files. He was tapping it with his fingers.

  “Like to send some of these men out to your place,” he told Heather without preamble. “Just informal. To have a look around.”

  “But why?” she said. “What are you looking for?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular,” he said evenly. “Like I said, it’s just informal. You’ll need to sign, though.”

  “Sign what?”

  He held it up, from where he sat, as if she could read that far.

  “Shouldn’t I have a lawyer if I need to sign something?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t see why,” said Charter. “A miscarriage isn’t against the law. Maybe a doctor, sure, but I don’t see what a lawyer can do about a miscarriage.”

  “Can I see it?” Heather said.

  He slid it across the table. It gave the police permission to search her house for any materials or objects relevant to the investigation. For the first time since she had told him about the baby, her heart leaped a little. She knew there was nothing to find.

  “I’ll sign this,” Heather said. He skitted his pen across the table, and she did. Charter handed the sheet to Erroll, who went out.

  “I’d like to talk a little more about the baby,” he said when they were alone again. “Bet you felt pretty bad about having a miscarriage.”

  “I did,” Heather said.

  “Especially when the baby was so far along.”

  She shrugged. She didn’t really think it mattered how far along it was.

  “So … what did you do when it happened?”

  Heather thought. She couldn’t think. “I don’t really remember,” she said finally.

  “You don’t remember,” Charter echoed. “You don’t remember what you did with the body of your baby.”

  The miscarriage, she noted dully, had become a dead baby. It seemed not much of a difference. Not worth fighting over, anyway.

  “Well, I was upset. It was the middle of the night. I don’t really remember.”

  “You remember it was the middle of the night, but you don’t remember what you did with the body of your baby.”

  He regarded her.

  “Did you, for example, take it out of the toilet?”

  “Well, I must have.” She tried to smile. “I mean, I couldn’t have left it there.”

  He didn’t smile back.

  “But you don’t exactly remember, because you were so upset.”

  “I was upset,” she recalled.

  “And maybe … well, I’m just thinking aloud here. Stop me if I’m off track. I’m just thinking how I would maybe have felt about having the baby in the first place. Like, sad, for example. Maybe even angry. After all, you had a lot on your plate. You already had a little kid to take care of. You knew your boyfriend was off having kids with his own wife and wouldn’t be around to help you. Plus your grandmother was gone. Understand she helped you out taking care of Polly. Freed you up in the afternoons, for example.”

  Heather looked at him. She noted, with a whiff of pride, that she had passed beyond being insulted by him.

  “And now that was all gone, and all you had was a dead baby in the toilet.”

  “Miscarriage,” she muttered.

  “Sure. But dead, right?”

  “It was dead,” Heather confirmed.

  “And you knew this for
a fact, because …”

  She gazed at him for a moment, uncomprehending.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it just occurs to me, you must have medical training of some kind, or you wouldn’t be exactly qualified to pronounce a baby dead. But maybe I’m wrong.” He shrugged.

  “It was dead!” Heather shouted.

  “Yes,” said Charter. “But before you killed it? Or after?”

  Her mouth went dry, then—it felt like—her whole head. She could not have spoken even if, by some extraordinary chance, she’d been able to think of what to say.

  “That’s the question,” Charter said. “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  “Listen to me,” said Heather, barely recognizing the steely timbre of her own apparent voice. “You can send every cop in New Hampshire to my house, but you’re going to be pretty disappointed. There is no dead baby in my house.”

  He gaped at her, sincerely amazed. “But of course there isn’t, Miss Pratt. How could there be? Your baby daughter is in a freezer in Peytonville. And whenever you’re ready to tell me how she got there, I’m ready to listen.”

  Chapter 20

  The Pound and River

  AT SOME POINT THEY LET HER SLEEP. DOWN AT the other end of the building, as far as you could get from Erroll’s office, which, given the size of the station house itself, wasn’t all that far, was a single room. A cell, she supposed, numbly. Not that it mattered. She would have taken a box, just to get away from him.

  The horror of what she’d been accused of doing refused to thoroughly sink in, but she hated him for saying it, nonetheless. For those first hours of the night they had remained this way, intractable on either side of the table, like heads of state who arrive at a negotiation determined not to negotiate. After a while, she simply refused to keep speaking, to answer even the most mundane of questions. Then she put her head down, literally, on her arms, and to even her own amazement fell promptly asleep. When she woke, it was because two men were half-leading, half-carrying her here.

  The sleep was merciful, dreamless and opaque. She barely distinguished the little room with its steel-framed single bed and scratchy wool cover, but dove back into oblivion, refusing any stray fragments of thought—her daughter, the unnamed baby—until she was numb and away. There was no clock in the room, of course. A policeman sat in a chair by the door, and the station was quiet. She hoped they would never come back.