“No!” Heather screamed. “Don’t say that!”
“So I understand why you wouldn’t want to leave it there,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “It’s what I would feel, too. And I’ll tell you, if it were me, I would want to put it pretty far away. At least as far as the river. Yes?” He looked for confirmation, but went on without it. “I’d take it straight to the river, is what I’d do. Because the river would take it away, wouldn’t it? The river would take your baby downstream and away from your life and your daughter’s life, and you wouldn’t have to think about it again.” He sighed, contemplative. “That must have felt wonderful to you.”
Heather shook her head. She was weeping openly now, messy and loud. She no longer had the strength to wipe her face.
“Could I …” She trailed off.
“Yes?” Erroll said.
“Could I please,” she sobbed, “just take you out? I’ll show you. I put the baby into the pool. It’s still—”
“But why?” Charter said wearily. “Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of all this?”
She was. So tired.
“Heather,” he spoke in yet another voice, “I have to tell you something. I admire you. And I know you’ve been through a lot, and without any help. Know you’re smart, too. I heard you’d been to college, and I can see why. But this won’t go away just from your being strong. Can I explain this to you?”
She looked up, her face streaked and running.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Charter said. His fingers were interlaced. He had put his pen aside. “You’re thinking, I can get through this. You’re thinking if you answer my questions right, you can somehow find your way through this night and this problem we have, and you’ll get to leave here and go back to your life. But you won’t. It isn’t going to be like that. Your life is going to be different from now on, no matter what happens in this room. No matter”—he put up his fingers like quotation marks—“how you do.” He gazed at her steadily. “You can’t think about getting back to your old life now. It’s gone.”
He paused. They all listened to her weep.
“Also, you can’t stay here. Well, we can’t stay here forever, you know that. We’re all tired, and we need to have progress. I only interrogate a witness once. I can’t just keep coming back to you and waiting for you to do this right. You have to do it right this time, Heather.” He looked at her. “So we can’t go back and we can’t stay here.” He shrugged. “You see, this isn’t really very complicated, because what I’m saying isn’t the same thing as saying your life is over. Your life, Heather, is far from over. You can have a long life, and a good life. It just isn’t going to be the same life you had before. Your job now is to go forward.”
“How?” she stumbled. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“Well, think about it. Your baby is dead. Nothing’s going to bring her back. And people … well, people are going to think what they think. There’s nothing you can do about that. Certainly, nobody’s going to think better of you for doing what you said you did with the baby than for doing what you really did, but people respect you, at least, for telling the truth. And if they can’t be compassionate about how bad it was for you, and maybe how confused you were, then that’s their problem. So you see, there’s really no reason not to just get it all off your chest.”
“No.” She was stiff, her head, the muscles of her face pinched and hard. “There’s nothing.”
“There is,” he said. He seemed to sigh. “Listen. Can I tell you something about myself?”
She didn’t really want to know anything about him, but she knew the right answer to his question. She nodded.
“There are things I’ve learned. About guilt, Miss Pratt. I’ve learned about guilt because no matter how many different kinds of wrong there are in the world, there is only one kind of guilt. Its dimensions might change. Its magnitude. But in essence there’s just one guilt. For example, I step on your toe. I feel bad about it and I apologize. The next day, I get behind the wheel of my car while I’m inebriated, and I run into you and kill you. What I feel in the second case is precisely the same emotion as the one I felt for stepping on your toe. But”—he leaned forward slightly—“but it’s grown. It’s the same gall. The same distress, but vaster, denser. Guilt is internal, Miss Pratt. It doesn’t depend on other people telling us how wrong what we did was. If you don’t feel it to begin with, it doesn’t matter how many people line up to say you were wrong—you’ll never feel it. But if you do feel it, you’ll feel it whether it’s my foot or my life. Or your baby’s life. This is what I’m trying to say.”
The bright sheen of his forehead. She saw the glint of scalp through his skein of steel-colored hair.
“The people who never feel it? I don’t know what it is about them. Something chemical that’s off in some way. Maybe it’s genes. They say everything is genes. But thank God, it’s rare to find a person like that. You’re not a person like that.”
Heather frowned. Was that good, then? To feel guilty?
“And here’s the other thing I want to tell you about guilt. If you feel it, and you hide that feeling, guilt destroys you. It destroys you. Believe me, I know about this, Miss Pratt. It’s terrible to watch a person tear themselves up. They go around, denying, denying, but inside it’s killing them. But you think, What else is there to do? I mean, what’s the point of confessing your guilt? It doesn’t undo the crime, right? It can’t give you another chance not to do the thing that you feel so bad about. No. But it does something else.”
“What?” Heather said.
He leaned forward, his palms flat against the wooden tabletop. She watched his fingers spread.
“It makes you strong. It makes you healed.” Charter shook his head solemnly. “I’ve seen this, not many times, it’s true, because not many people are brave enough to own their guilt. But those few times, it’s been like salve to a wound. The wound of their guilt,” he said. “The person who says, Yes, I’ve done this. Yes. It was wrong and I know it was wrong, and I’m sorry. This person will be forgiven by the person whose forgiveness she needs most of all, and that’s herself.”
“But,” Heather said, perplexed, “surely the person who ought to forgive her is the one she hurt, right?”
“That’s important,” he said, pleased to have engaged her at last. “But don’t underestimate the importance of forgiving yourself. And you need to ask forgiveness before you can get it. And you need to admit what you did before you can ask forgiveness. It’s so simple, Miss Pratt.”
Heather stared at him. Her bearings were gone. She wanted forgiveness. She wanted sleep, and her daughter’s warm back under the palm of her own hand. God, she wanted to be done with this.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she whispered. “Oh, I didn’t. I’d say so if I did. And I’d ask for forgiveness, too.”
Charter closed his eyes. He shook his head, frowning. For a few long breaths he said nothing at all. Then he sat back in his chair.
“There’s something else,” Charter said. “I mean, I think you deserve to know.”
Heather looked up, not hopeful, but mildly curious.
“Well, there’s Polly.” He shrugged.
“Polly,” she said dully.
“Well, yes. I can hardly see how they’ll let you just take her home again, without our getting this cleared up.”
Erroll turned to look at him. Charter put a hand up without turning and continued.
“They couldn’t do that. You see that, don’t you? We have to get this settled first, and telling the truth about what really happened is a big step to getting it settled. The sooner you do it, in other words, the sooner you’ll be able to move ahead with things. But until then …” He sighed.
“I can’t have Polly back?” She was numb.
“We need to do this, Heather.”
“I want—”
“I know,” he said reassuringly. “I know that. But first we need to. Remember what I said. We
go forward now. We don’t go back.” He paused. “You see, a lot of people would feel that a mother who had the kind of experience you had really had to have been suffering, and she might need a doctor’s care. They couldn’t feel right about letting her go back to taking care of a little child until a doctor said it was all right. You understand?”
“No,” Heather said bluntly.
“You love her,” Charter said.
She nodded. She loved her. Polly was the only thing she could love now.
“And you want her back, don’t you?”
“Yes. Please.” She cried.
“Then you know what you need to do, don’t you?”
And she did. For the first time, clear as water, she did. Whatever it took. “All right,” she told them.
Charter got to his feet and opened the door. A minute later he was back with a little man and a typewriter. They all watched the man plug in the machine and roll the paper up.
“We’re going to take your statement now,” Charter said affably. “Do you want to do it yourself or do you want me to help you a bit.”
“Help me,” said Heather.
“Okay. I’ll say something and you say yes if it’s true. Remember that this is your sworn statement, and you’ll be signing it. So it’s important we don’t put anything in that didn’t happen just that way. You understand?”
She understood.
“My name is Heather Ruth Pratt and I was born May 1, 1965. Correct?
“Yes.”
“I live in the farmhouse on Sabbath Creek Road. This is the house left to me by my grandmother”—down at his notes—“Mrs. Polly Bates Pratt.”
Heather nodded.
“This is correct?” Charter said, a little peevishly. “I want to be sure.”
“It’s correct,” she said. Charter looked at the man, who typed.
“I am employed as a craftsman at Flourish, Incorporated, in Goddard.”
“Yes,” Heather said.
“I had a sexual relationship with Ashley Deacon, who is a married man, from October of 1983 to January of this year, 1985. I am the mother of a daughter, Polly Pratt, born in August of 1984, now fourteen months old.”
Heather nodded. The little typist worked, his head down.
“At the end of last year or the beginning of this year, I became pregnant for the second time. I did not seek prenatal care for this child. I did not tell anyone I was pregnant.”
“No, that’s right,” Heather said. It all felt so far away.
“On the night of …” He took out a pocket calendar and studied it. He looked up. “Does September 17 sound about right? That was a Tuesday night.”
Heather shrugged. “It sounds right.”
“On the night of Tuesday, September 17, I went into labor in the middle of the night. I went outside into the field behind my house.”
“The back field,” Heather corrected, as if this were important.
“The back field,” Charter agreed. “I had my baby alone and unassisted.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”
“I did not bring my baby into the house after it was born.”
Heather looked at him. “What?”
“Oh, was that wrong?” he said. “Did you bring the baby into the house?”
“Well, no. I said what happened.”
“So all right. I did not bring my baby into the house. I returned to my house without the baby.”
“You forgot to say that it was dead.” Heather frowned.
“But you need to confine the statement to what you know,” Charter explained. “You said yourself, you’re not a doctor. Didn’t you say that?”
“I’m not a doctor,” Heather agreed.
“So then we can’t enter an opinion about that. Now let’s go on with the statement, yes?”
She nodded.
“I went back to the field with a sharp object, to make sure the baby was dead.” He paused. “Which one?”
“Excuse me?” She looked confused.
“Which one of these?” He gestured, as if he were trying to sell her one. “Will you show me the one you used?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, because the fact was she didn’t remember anything about a sharp object at all.
“Try,” he said stiffly, and of course she wanted to please him. After all, he was the one who was going to get Polly back for her. She leaned forward out of her chair and looked at them. They were so hard and pointed. She didn’t like the look of any of them. Pick had not liked her using the ice pick on the refrigerator; she’d warned Heather that she could get electrocuted that way. The nails and the awls she didn’t recognize. But the needles—Heather remembered how they’d flashed in the firelight when Pick worked, and that lavender sweater twitching, growing as the two needles clicked. Blue needles, Heather recalled, that time. She thought of her grandmother’s hands on those needles, misshapen and stiff, but moving, clicking. If Pick were here, she thought, this would not be happening. Whatever this was, it would not be happening.
Heather got up out of her seat and touched one of the blue knitting needles. She felt its round chill inside the plastic, intractable and hard.
“Thank you,” Charter said. He picked it up by the corner of the plastic bag and hurriedly jotted something on the label. He turned back to the typist. “I stabbed the baby once in the chest. Yes?”
Heather shrugged.
“Yes? I think you’d better say yes or no.”
“Yes,” said Heather.
“Then I carried the baby’s body across the field to the Sabbathday River.” He paused. “Did you throw it in? Or just lay it in?” He waited. “I don’t want to get it wrong, Heather.”
She looked up at him. It was the first time he had used her first name. It must mean he liked her a little, she thought, utterly grateful. She didn’t want to disappoint him now.
“I laid it in. Like …” She trailed off.
They all waited silently.
“Like Moses,” Heather said. She started to cry again. “When she found that baby, Naomi, I just felt so …” She pushed at the tears, moving each out of the way for the next. “I felt it was mine. I knew, deep down. I felt …”
“Sorry?” Charter suggested.
“Oh, God,” cried Heather. “I am so sorry.”
They listened to the typist finish his clatter. He rolled the statement out, and Charter looked it over. “You’ll need to sign,” he said, sounding tired. She felt awful to have put him through this, all of them. The men who’d been out at her house, and Erroll, who was pale from going without sleep. And Naomi. What would Naomi think of her now?
“What’s going to happen?” she said.
“We’ll take you down to Peytonville,” said Charter. “You’ll be able to rest, and see the doctor.”
“And Polly?” For an instant, she wondered if they would let Polly come with her.
“We’ll find a place for Polly till this is over,” said Erroll, breaking in. “Maybe you know someone.”
“There are channels,” Charter said icily. “Proper channels. We can’t just—”
“But it would be better for Polly to be with someone familiar. I think we can all agree on that.” He didn’t look at his superior. He looked at Heather.
“Thank you,” she said. “It would be.”
“But who?” Charter was sharp. “You said yourself you don’t have any friends.”
Heather started. Had she said that? Was it true?
She tried to think. Celia and Stephen would take Polly, of course, but Heather didn’t think Stephen would help her now, and Celia didn’t like her. Heather closed her eyes.
Even Naomi would be ashamed of her now. Especially Naomi, Heather thought. And yet the memory of Naomi’s words to her nine months before suddenly came back again, unbidden. About how strong she was, and what a good example. A homegrown feminist, Naomi had called her, not that Heather was wild about that word. For the briefest moment something inside Heather surged
with hope. If only there could be someone to say these things to Polly, too, even though Polly was too young to really understand. Someone to speak well of her, though it seemed incredible that anyone ever might.
But Naomi was from another place. Not from here. It wasn’t, she knew, a place where people stabbed their infants and laid them in the river, but even so Naomi might understand what Heather had done. It was more than Heather herself ever would.
She held the paper in her hand, but the words blurred before her, obscured by the one good thing she could do. It made her blindingly happy.
“I want Polly to go to Naomi Roth,” she told them. It was not a request. She smiled easily. Then she took a pen and confessed to the murder of her child.
Chapter 21
The World Overhead
THE DINNER PARTY ENDED EARLY. NAOMI WOULD have denied it, if asked, but she keenly wanted Judith and Joel to leave, and soon they did. She couldn’t have blamed them; there’d been a damper on the evening since Mary Sully’s call, and Naomi, in her bitterness and disbelief, had tumbled out all the story she knew to her guests, alternately raging and mourning. Heather was marked, she told them, by being different. Only that. She saw how the women at work threw themselves into shunning her, and how Heather merely ignored their judgment. She saw how Heather, while not precisely beautiful, had that indefinable shimmer that drove women wild. Heather, she told them, could not possibly have done what Mary said she’d done. Heather was the town’s designated sacrifice, its lottery winner under a shower of stones.
They stared at her, looked at each other, and said good night.
Once they’d gone, she piled the dishes, running the melted Häagen-Dazs down the drain and shoving the pot of leftover stew straight into the fridge. In the aftermath of the ruined party, her house seemed small again, its absurd shape and proportions restored from the brief interlude of voices and laughter and shared food to this, its customary detachment. It had always been one of the features of her A-frame that it sat in its wooded depression unseen by any other house, as if the world had passed overhead while it—while she—sat here, hunkered down in hiding. She thought, sometimes, of how the immense iceberg had covered all New England before retreating—“retreating” was the word they used—back to its lair in the polar cap, carving mountains out of the land in its wake. She imagined what it would have been like to live down here at that long moment and look up into the great ice overhead, a frozen caul over the world with a single, tiny living thing hidden away beneath. In planetary time, Naomi thought, looking dumbly at the smears of stew, the crumbs of bread on her dining table, this wouldn’t figure much. But Heather.
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