The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  This was enough for Charter. He objected loudly and called Judith a bully, which, under the circumstances, was only accurate. Hayes agreed, but Nelson was shaken. He was looking at no one now. His fingers, enmeshed, gripped together.

  Judith took a moment, more to calm herself down than anything else. Then she adopted an air of sincere intellectual inquiry. “Officer Erroll, if Heather was going to the trouble of confessing to murder, why do you think she didn’t add the detail that she had had two babies instead of one?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I could answer that. It’s one of the things I wasn’t able to ask her in a second interview.”

  “I see.” She appeared to ruminate. “Do you think it might have slipped her mind that she had had two babies instead of one?”

  “I don’t know. She might have been confused when it happened.”

  “But not too confused to murder them by separate methods and dispose of their bodies in separate places.”

  “Maybe she was confused then, too.”

  This comment, Naomi could not help but notice, earned Charter’s silent displeasure.

  “Officer Erroll”—Judith seemed to sigh—“did my client, Heather Pratt, maintain throughout her interrogation that she was entirely innocent of the death of the infant we refer to as the Sabbathday River baby?”

  Nelson seemed to consider. His face grew slack, and he closed his eyes. “Not at the end, she didn’t deny it.”

  “Did my client Heather Pratt confess to having a stillborn baby whose body she placed in a pond?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said, with an air of defeat.

  “Did she offer to show you the pond where her baby was hidden, an offer that was rejected?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Was my client told that her daughter would be taken away from her if she didn’t admit stabbing a baby and putting it in the river?”

  “I don’t remember.” He just wanted it to be over, Naomi thought.

  “Did my client ask for an attorney to be present during this interrogation?”

  “Interview,” he muttered. He sighed. “I don’t remember.”

  “Did she in fact ask for a lawyer at least two times?”

  “I really don’t remember.”

  “Officer Erroll, you seem to remember very little about an interrogation that is of the utmost importance to my client.”

  He looked at her with great sadness. Naomi, to her surprise, was suddenly aware that her eyes were wet.

  “Officer Erroll, I have only one more question. Do you have any evidence at all, other than a name written in an address book that you found in Heather’s house, that a man by the name of Christopher Flynn exists and is at all involved in this case?”

  They waited. Nelson looked up at the ceiling, as if a better answer might be found there. But there was no other answer. “None,” he said.

  Chapter 36

  Dost Thou Know Thy Mother Now, Child?’

  THE PROTESTERS HAD CLEARED OUT BY THE TIME Naomi made it back to the courthouse with Polly, leaving—like the aftermath of a small but lethally poised cyclone—a fluttering of lavender leaflets scattered about. She paused for a minute and stooped, with Polly at her hip, to take up one of the pieces of colored paper, thinking Heather might like to know what friends she had and doubting—for now she knew well enough to doubt—that Judith had made this gesture. A wet breeze hugging the ground swept past her and moved on, and Polly put her face against Naomi’s jacket. “Hang on, sweetie-pod,” Naomi said. She hiked up the baby and the diaper bag and her own purse, and walked around the building to the jail entrance.

  At least Judith had set this up, and Naomi was only required to produce her driver’s license before being shown into an interview room. The guard, a densely built man who walked in a shuffle, held the door for her. In his other hand he carried, bizarrely, roses: three of them, each white, each wrapped separately. They were for her, he said, meaning Heather. He left them on the table on Heather’s side of the iron mesh. “A few came this morning, too,” he told Naomi, rolling his eyes. “Girl’s got a friggin’ fan club in San Francisco.”

  Heather was not yet there. Naomi set Polly down on her lap and pulled off her parka. Beneath it the baby wore one of the Mexican overalls Naomi had ordered. Naomi gave her one of her board books, which Polly began to fan against her hand, making little chirping, bird-like sounds, the incomprehensible music of the as-yet-inarticulate. Naomi took off her own jacket. The room, so like the room in which she had talked with Heather months before, seemed less strange than the first had, and she wondered vaguely if she was not somehow getting used to all this, if it were not all becoming normal: her normal life and Heather’s normal life and Polly’s normal life. If this was how it would be for all of them now: these strained meetings in queer rooms, with mesh between them. She had not said anything to Polly yet, but she took the little girl on her lap and said, with false brightness, “Mommy’s coming soon. Your mommy.”

  Polly, her face blank, took hold of Naomi’s sweater at the throat, curling her fingers over the fabric as if she were holding on to a subway strap. She had always been fond of this grip. The door on the other side of the grate creaked open.

  For an instant, Naomi wondered if Heather might have forgotten that she was coming, and whom she was bringing. Heather’s eyes, vague, came to rest on Polly as if she were only one piece of furniture in a crammed room, first gliding past her daughter to see what else might be here and then, by some process of elimination, returning. Naomi, unnerved, was still, but Polly sat riveted, her fingers stiff at Naomi’s throat.

  “Mommy,” Naomi said, and was abruptly embarrassed that Heather should hear this voice of hers—this mommy voice, which she had, after all, appropriated from its rightful source. So she said it again, more sternly. “Polly, here is your mother.”

  Polly did not move. Heather felt for her chair and pulled it out. Behind her, the door was shut with a metallic click. She sat and looked down at the flowers.

  “Who’s sending you flowers?” Naomi said, thinking perhaps Heather ought to be distracted and trying to sound normal.

  “Flowers?” Heather looked down at her own hands. The floral paper crinkled beneath her fingers. “I don’t know. I got a white rose this morning. From San Francisco. I don’t know anybody in San Francisco.”

  “Was there a note?” Naomi asked.

  “Yeah. But no name. It just said I should keep my spirits up.” She gazed mutely down at the three long cones of paper on the table. “How do they know who I am?” she said.

  Naomi, feeling a little unreal, only said, “What a nice thing, to be sent flowers. Even if you don’t know the person who sent them.”

  Heather looked up at her daughter. Her eyes seemed to focus slowly, as if adjusting to the light. There was a flicker of animation. “Polly,” Heather said. “Hi, sweetheart.”

  Polly remained stiff and still.

  “You remember Mommy?”

  Naomi, to her distress, felt the little girl draw even closer. Her hand gripped even tighter, the little nails scraping the skin of Naomi’s throat. “Polly”—her voice tried for warmth—“this is Mommy. Your mommy.”

  “It’s okay,” Heather said sadly. “She doesn’t have to. She looks very well.”

  “She is well.” Naomi tried to sound reassuring. But then she felt bad, as if she were claiming that Polly was well with her, better than she would be if she had remained with Heather. “I mean,” Naomi said, “she’s growing, and she’s been very healthy. A little ear infection, I think I told you. But that cleared up right away, and otherwise there haven’t been any problems. I’m taking her to the sports center once a week, for swimming lessons. I go in the water, too, so it’s perfectly safe, and Polly really likes it.”

  “The sports center?” Heather said, and Naomi was instantly horrified. That she had said this so unthinkingly was extraordinary.

  “I’m sorry, I should have asked your permission.” />
  “Is he there? At the sports center?”

  Naomi stared at her, astonished. Abruptly she felt like throttling Heather.

  “I haven’t seen him. No.”

  Though she had seen Sue, whose parent-toddler swim class with her older son ended just before Polly and Naomi’s began. Sue was wont to look viciously at them as they waited at poolside, but the two women had not spoken, and Naomi honestly had no idea what she would say if they ever did.

  “You should see her,” she told Heather, trying for equilibrium. “She just loves the water. She can put her face in and kick. She’s a natural swimmer.”

  “Good,” Heather said. She was looking down at the flowers again. She picked up one of the three and opened up the little white envelope. Then she shook her head. “‘We just wanted you to know that we are thinking of you and wishing you well.’ The Ann Arbor Women’s Collective.” She peered at Naomi. “What is that?”

  “Well,” said Naomi, “I guess it’s a women’s group. Maybe a commune, or an informal group. Or a political group. They must have heard about what’s happened to you, and they wanted to express their support.”

  She shook her head. “But it has nothing to do with them.”

  “They disagree, obviously,” Naomi said, seriously and deliberately, as if she were explaining something to a little child. “They apparently feel that this trial is important to women, and they are responding as women. And look at this!” She sounded, to her own ears, inappropriately bright. She extracted the lavender sheet from her back pocket and passed it to Heather. Heather read, frowning, “Women at Dartmouth.”

  “Yes. They were outside the courthouse, protesting.”

  For a long moment Heather only stared.

  “I just want to go home,” she said suddenly. “I want Polly, and I want to go home.”

  Polly, unaffected by her name, was heavy, stiff, and motionless.

  “I’m sure that will happen,” Naomi said, wondering if she was right to say so. “I think it’s going well.”

  “I hate it!” Heather spoke sharply. “Oh, I hate this so much. I hate going in there. I hate to see him and hear him say those things about me. I love him so much!”

  Naomi wasn’t going to touch this. She frowned.

  “How could he say he wanted to break up with me when Polly was born? How could he say I had another lover? I didn’t! How could he say he didn’t know he was Polly’s father? I told him he was. How could he believe I was seeing another man. What other man? There was nobody else, he knows that!”

  “I know,” she tried to sound soothing. “I think the jury knows that, Heather.”

  “And that horrible Ann Chase, coming out after me in the woods, and calling the police as if I were doing something dirty when I was only feeding the baby. How could she hate me so much?”

  Naomi, to her own surprise, felt relief that at least Heather had come to life. She nodded and clucked. “Ann’s a sick person, that’s all. She has nothing better to do than worry about you.”

  “But it’s all so crazy,” Heather moaned. “I know it is. I know I haven’t done these things. But they all believe.”

  “No, that isn’t true,” Naomi said hastily. “I don’t think many people really believe it. Only Charter. And maybe not even him. But he’s dug himself in because of his own ignorance, and the only way he can get himself out is by making it seem as if he was right all along. He’s using you to do that. It stinks, but it doesn’t mean people really believe him, Heather.”

  “Ashley believes it,” she said, her voice newly hushed. This, it came to Naomi, was the crux of her distress. “He thinks I had another man, and I had two babies and I killed them. But there was no other man.”

  Naomi couldn’t bear this any longer. “Listen, Ashley is a complete bastard, Heather. I know you don’t want to hear that.”

  “He’s not!” And she was crying, freely. She didn’t bother to try to stop, or even to wipe away the tears as they came. “He’s not. He loved me.”

  “Fine.” She didn’t want to talk about this. She gathered Polly a little closer. The little girl watched her mother weep, mesmerized and mute.

  “I hate this,” Heather sobbed. “I hate the way they talk about me, like I’m not there. When the midwife was talking about me, about how I had Polly, and the centimeters, and how I pushed her out, I hated that. And how I asked about having sex. It’s so private. I never said they could talk about these things.”

  Naomi, who knew Charter had yet to call his physician and his psychiatrist, said nothing.

  “I feel like I’m naked. Like my clothes have all come off and they’re standing there to measure me and take pictures. All those people, they know those things about me.”

  “And Ashley,” Naomi said harshly. “He didn’t exactly respect your privacy.”

  This, to Naomi’s abrupt shame, made Heather weep harder. “I can’t do this,” she sobbed. “I don’t see how they can expect me to do this. I don’t see why I have to be there.”

  “Because it’s your right. It’s your right to confront your accuser.”

  “My right,” Heather said roughly. “Like my right to have a lawyer!”

  “Yes.” Naomi nodded, somewhat relieved at this apparent segue from pain to rage. “So we’ll do this part right, at any rate.”

  She shook her head. “It won’t matter. I won’t get out of here. I’ll never get out of here.”

  “That isn’t true.” Naomi tried to sound comforting. “Listen, Heather, I think Judith is winning. I mean, I can’t vouch for it, but she’s doing very well, and if you add that to the charges being so crazy, I think you really have a chance. And when you get up there and tell your own story, they’ll see.”

  “I won’t!” Heather shouted. “I mean, I can’t. I can’t talk about that.”

  “But you’ll have to, Heather,” she said, confident but not autocratic. Judith’s only request had been that Naomi make Heather understand this. “People—I mean people on juries—say they don’t hold it against a defendant who doesn’t testify, but of course they do. They think, What is she hiding? She’d testify if she had nothing to hide. So you have to say what happened.”

  “I did nothing wrong,” Heather shouted, her voice ragged.

  “Of course you didn’t. That’s the point. But look,” Naomi said, backing off, “just think about it, all right? Just give it some thought. And don’t lose heart, okay?” She tried for a broad smile. “Like your friends in Ann Arbor and San Francisco keep telling you.”

  “I’m never going to get out of here!” she sobbed. Her tears ran down her face and her nose and clear into her mouth. “I’m never going to have Polly back.”

  The flash, mercury-fast, of hope: Polly hers, always. Naomi, shocked, pushed it away.

  “Not true. Don’t think that!”

  “And even if I did,” she wailed, “I can’t live here anymore. They hate me here. Even if I won, where would I go?”

  Naomi shook her head, but not because she disagreed. The problem of what would happen to Heather after was far afield. From where they all sat, there was not yet a glimmer of an after. And so she sat, watching Heather through the mesh, her head bent forward with its rough, hacked hair, her shoulders in a perpetual, arrhythmic shudder. The institutional uniform, a kind of army-navy house dress, puckered across her lap where she was thinning and thinning, withering back to the bone. And still Naomi could not quite—not quite, not completely—be moved, for which she did not forgive herself. She thought, without feeling herself reach back over the hours past, to the morning, the chilly park bench, and Judith, how she had wept with her morning coffee cold in her hands. How long ago that had been, she thought, and how much had happened since: the women of Dartmouth, Ann Chase and Randa Burns, Nelson Erroll and the stunning hilarity of that green address book with its single name. She thought how she had sat there so long ago, watching Judith weep, just as she was sitting here now, watching Heather, and how she did not understand why this was
always her place, this comforting hand and tempered tone reaching out into the unknowable void of another human being.

  Polly’s fingers were sharp on her skin. Naomi, unthinkingly, plucked them away, and the little girl suddenly gave out a bleak cry of fear. Then, with her other hand, her other little-girl fist, she reached forward to the mesh, to her mother, and said, her voice piercing and clear, the word: Mama.

  Heather, as if the air were choked from her throat, looked up and was silent.

  “Mama,” Polly said. But she was not smiling, and she did not sound happy. She pointed through the mesh, which was wide. She leaned forward, releasing Naomi’s shirt. “Mama.”

  Heather’s hand touched her own neck, between the clavicles. She was looking intently at her daughter. “Polly, sweetheart.” She leaned forward until her face and chest were up against the wire. Naomi leaned forward, too, and put the baby up close. Polly put her hand through the wires and reached the place her mother was touching, pushing Heather’s hand away. She stared at this triangle of white skin, and then, quite suddenly, started to wail.

  “Polly,” Naomi said. She started to pull her back, onto her own lap, but Polly cried louder. Heather closed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” said Naomi. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s my necklace.” Heather’s voice was flat. “They took it away.”

  “What necklace?” said Naomi.

  “The one Ashley gave me. I always wore it, and they made me take it off. Those people.”

  Meaning Charter, who had taken it away, and Judith, who had put it in a plastic bag for strangers to finger and examine. Now Naomi understood.

  “She loved to play with it,” Heather explained. “She held on to it. Oh, sweetie.”

  But Polly wouldn’t look at her. She looked at her mother’s neck, livid and dismayed.

  “I can’t,” Heather said. She touched her own throat. “I wish I could.” She smiled through her streaky face. “I don’t think she recognizes me without it, you know.”