Plain Truth

by Jodie Picoult

  But as the bishop invited everyone to silently recite the Lord’s Prayer, Katie suddenly pulled away from her mother and sprinted to the buggy, climbing inside and out of sight.

  I started after her. No matter what Katie had said up to this point, something about this funeral had apparently struck a chord. I had taken a step in her direction when Leda grasped my hand and stopped me with a brief shake of her head. To my surprise, I remained standing beside her. I found myself mouthing the words of the prayer; words I had not said in years; words I had forgotten I even knew. Then before Leda could stop me again, I hurried to the buggy and climbed in. Katie was huddled in a lump on the seat, head buried beneath her hands. Hesitantly, I stroked her back. “I can imagine how hard this is for you.”

  Slowly, Katie sat up, her spine poker-straight. Her eyes were dry; her lips curved the slightest bit. “He’s not mine, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She repeated, “He’s not mine.”

  “All right,” I conceded. “He’s not yours.” I felt Aaron and Sarah climb into the buggy, turn the horse toward home. And with every rhythmic step I asked myself how Katie, who professed ignorance, had known that the infant was a boy.

  Sarah had prepared a meal for the relatives who’d come to the funeral. She set platters of food and baskets of bread on a trestle table that had been moved onto the porch. Unfamiliar women hurried in and out of the kitchen, smiling shyly at me whenever they passed.

  Katie was nowhere to be found, and even more strange, no one seemed to find this disturbing. I settled myself on a bench with a plate of food, eating without really tasting anything. I was thinking of Coop, and how long it would be before he got here. First the milk coming in, and now the burial of a tiny body-how much longer could Katie deny the birth of a baby before breaking down?

  The bench creaked as a large, elderly woman sat down beside me. Her face was lined like the inner rings of a great sequoia, her hands heavy and swollen at the knuckles. She wore the same black horn-rimmed glasses I remembered my grandfather wearing in the 1950s. “So,” she said. “You’re the nice lawyer girl.”

  I could count on one hand the number of times in my career I’d heard the words nice and lawyer in the same sentence, much less the reference to my thirty-nine-year-old self as a girl. I smiled. “That would be me.”

  She reached across her plate and patted my hand. “You know, you’re very special to us. Standing up for our Katie this way.”

  “Well, thank you. But it’s my job.”

  “No, no.” The woman shook her head. “It’s your heart.”

  Well, I didn’t know what to say to that. What mattered here was getting Katie acquitted, which had virtually nothing to do with my own opinion of her. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, standing, planning on a quick escape. But no sooner had I turned than I ran into Aaron.

  “If you would come with us,” he said, gesturing to the bishop beside him. “We can talk about that matter from earlier today.”

  We walked to a quiet spot in the shade of the barn. “Aaron tells me you have a problem with your legal case,” Ephram began.

  “I wouldn’t call it a problem with the case. It’s more like a difficulty in logistics. You see, part of my job requires me to be plugged into technology. I need the tools of my trade to prepare the motions I’ll be sending to the judge, as well as depositions that will come later on. If I hand the judge a handwritten legal text, he’ll laugh me out of court-right after he puts Katie into jail, saying that the bail conditions aren’t working out.”

  “You are talking about using a computer?”

  “Yes, specifically. Mine will run on batteries, but they’re dead.”

  “You can’t get more of these batteries?”

  “Not at the local Turkey Hill,” I said. “They’re expensive. I could recharge them, but that requires an outlet.”

  “I will not have an outlet on my property,” Aaron interrupted.

  “Well, I can’t go into town and charge the battery for eight hours and leave Katie alone here, either.”

  The bishop stroked his long, gray beard. “Aaron, you remember when Polly and Joseph Zook’s son had the asthma? You remember how much more important it was for the child to have oxygen than to adhere to the strict letter of the Ordnung? I think this is the same thing.”

  “This is not the same at all,” Aaron countered. “This isn’t life or death.”

  “Ask your daughter about that,” I shot back.

  The bishop held up his hands. At that moment, he looked exactly like every judge I’d ever stood up to in a courtroom. “The computer is not yours, Aaron, and I do not doubt your personal commitment to our ways. But like I told the Zooks, the ends justifies the means, in this case. For as long as the lawyer needs it, I will allow an inverter on this farm, to be used only by Miss Hathaway for the electric.”

  “An inverter?”

  He turned to me. “Inverters convert twelve-volt current into onehundred ten volt. Our businessmen use them to power cash registers. We can’t use electric straight from a generator, but an inverter, it runs off a battery, which is okay by the Ordnung. Most families can’t have inverters, because there’s too much temptation. You see, the electric goes from diesel to generator to twelve-volt battery to inverter to any appliance-such as your computer.”

  Aaron looked appalled. “Computers are forbidden by the Ordnung. And inverters-they’re on probation,” he said. “You could plug a lightbulb into one!”

  Ephram smiled. “You could . . . but Aaron, you wouldn’t. I will have someone bring Miss Hathaway an inverter today.”

  Clearly miffed, Aaron looked away from the bishop. I was completely confounded by the bargain that had been struck, but grateful all the same. “This will certainly make a difference.”

  The bishop’s warm hands enveloped mine, and for a moment, I felt my whole self settle. “You have made adjustments for us, Miss Hathaway,” Ephram said. “Did you think we would not make the same compromises for you?”

  I don’t know why the thought of bringing electricity onto the Fishers’ land made me feel a little queasy, as if I were Eve holding out that apple with a come-hither grin. It wasn’t as if I was going to find Katie off in the barn playing Nintendo, for God’s sake. The inverter would probably collect dust between the times I booted up my Thinkpad to do work. Still, I found myself wandering aimlessly away from the barn and the house after the bishop’s decision.

  I heard Katie’s voice before I even realized I’d walked to the pond. She sat among a high brace of cattails, almost hidden, her bare feet submerged in the water. “I’m watching,” she said, her eyes fixed on a spot in the middle of the pond where there was absolutely nothing to see. She smiled and clapped, the single audience member for a show of her own making.

  Okay, so maybe she was crazy.

  “Katie,” I said quietly, startling her. She jumped to her feet, splashing me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s hot. I could use a little spray.” I sat down on the bank. “Who were you talking to?”

  Her cheeks flamed. “No one. Just myself.”

  “Your sister again?”

  Katie sighed, then nodded. “She skates.”

  “She skates,” I repeated, deadpan.

  “Ja, about six inches above where the water is now.”

  “I see. Isn’t she having a little trouble without any ice?”

  “No. She doesn’t know it’s summer; she’s just doing what she was doing before she died.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She doesn’t seem to hear me, either.”

  I looked at Katie for a long moment. Her kapp was slightly askew, a couple of loose tendrils curled about her ears. Her knees were drawn up, arms crossed loosely over them. She was not agitated or confused. She was just staring at the pond, at this alleged vision.

  I picked a cattail and twisted the stem. “What I don’t understand is how you believe something you can’t even see, but adamantly refuse to believe something that other peo
ple-doctors, and coroners, and my God, even your parents-all know for a fact happened.”

  Katie lifted her face. “But I do see Hannah, clear as day, wearing her shawl and her green dress and the skates that got passed down to her from me. And I never saw that baby, until it was already in the barn, wrapped up and dead.” Her brow furrowed. “Which would you believe?”

  Before I could answer, Ephram appeared with the deacon. “Miss Hathaway,” the bishop said, “Lucas and I must speak to our young sister here, for a moment.”

  Even with the distance between us, I could feel Katie trembling, and the sharp scent of fear rising from her skin. She was shivering in a way that she hadn’t even when a charge of murder was being hung around her neck. Her hand scrabbled over the matted reeds to find mine and slip beneath it. “I would like my lawyer to be present, then,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper.

  The bishop looked surprised. “Well, Katie, what for?”

  She could not even raise her eyes to the older man. “Please,” she murmured, then swallowed hard.

  The deacon and the bishop looked at each other, and Ephram nodded. The trembling, submissive creature beside me was nothing like the girl who’d looked me in the eye and told me there was no baby. She was nothing like the girl who’d spoken to me minutes before about what was visible to one person not being crystal clear to another. But she did bear a striking resemblance to the child I’d seen in court the moment I first arrived, the child who had been ready to let the legal system steamroll her rather than mount a defense.

  “It’s like this,” Ephram said uncomfortably. “We know how hard things are, right now, and only bound to be getting more tangled. But there was a baby, Katie, and you being not married . . . well, you need to come to church, and make your things right.”

  It was slight, but Katie inclined her head.

  With a nod to me, the two men struck off across the field again. It took a full thirty seconds for Katie to get control of herself, and when she did, her face was as pale as a new moon. “What was that about?” I asked.

  “They want me to confess to my sin.”

  “What sin?”

  “Having a baby out of wedlock.” She started walking, and I hurried to keep up with her.

  “What will you do?”

  “Confess,” Katie said quietly. “What else can I do?”

  Surprised, I turned and blocked her path. “You could start by telling them what you told me. That you didn’t have a baby.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I couldn’t tell them that; I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Katie shook her head, her cheeks bright. She ran into the waving sea of corn.

  “Why not?” I yelled after her, my frustration rooting me to the ground.

  The men who brought the inverter set it up for me in the barn. Attached to the generator beside the calving pen, it gave me a lovely view of the police tape still securing the crime scene, just in case I needed any inspiration to fight Katie’s charges. Shortly after four o’clock I carried my files and my laptop out to the barn and began to act like a lawyer.

  Levi, Samuel, and Aaron were milking the cows at their stanchions. Levi seemed resigned to the Amish equivalent of scut work-shoveling manure, scooping out grain-while the two older men wiped down the udders of the cows with what seemed to be the pages of a telephone book, and then hooked them up in pairs to a suction pump powered by the same generator that was indirectly running my computer. From time to time, Aaron would carry the container into the milk room and pour it into the bulk tank with an audible splash.

  I watched them for a while, taken by their graceful routine and the kindness of their hands as they stroked the side of a cow’s belly or scratched behind her ears. Smiling, I gingerly plugged in my laptop, made a quick and fervent prayer that this wouldn’t surge and destroy my hard drive, and booted it up.

  The screen rolled open in a wash of color, spotted with icons and toolbars. My screen saver came next, a computer graphic of sharks at the bottom of the ocean. I reached for one of the manila files I’d received from the prosecutor and spread it open on the hay. Leafing through its contents, I tried to formulate in my mind a motion for services other than counsel.

  When I glanced up, Levi was gaping at the laptop from across the barn, his shovel propped forgotten at his side until Samuel walked over and cuffed him. But then Samuel looked himself, eyes widening at the burst of color and the realism of the sharks. His hand twitched, as if he was trying hard not to reach out and touch what he saw.

  Aaron Fisher never even turned his head.

  A cow bawled at the far end of the stanchions. The sweet hay and even sweeter feed tickled the inside of my nose. The tug-suck, tug-suck of the milking pump became a backbeat. Closing out this world, I focused and began to type.

  SEVEN

  The broad beam of light swept over her legs, then arched up the wall and the ceiling before repeating the circuit all over again. Katie came up on her elbows, heart pounding. Ellie was still asleep; that was a good thing. She crawled out of bed and knelt at the window. At first she could see nothing; then Samuel removed his hat and the moon caught the crown of his bright hair. Taking a deep breath, Katie slipped into her clothes and hurried out to meet him.

  He was waiting with the flashlight, which he turned off the minute he saw her framed in the doorway. Once Katie walked outside, he caught her in his arms and pressed his lips against hers, hard. It made Katie freeze-he’d never moved this fast before-and she wedged her hands up between them to set her distance. “Samuel!” she said, and immediately he stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” Samuel murmured. “I am. It’s just that I feel like you’re slipping away.”

  Katie lifted her eyes. She knew Samuel’s face as well as her own; they’d grown up as family, as friends. He’d chased her into a tree once when she was eleven. He’d kissed her for the first time when she was sixteen, behind Joseph Yoder’s calf shed. On the small of her back, she felt Samuel’s hands move restlessly.

  Sometimes when she pictured her life, it was like the telephone poles that marched along the length of Route 340-year after year after year, stretching out all the way to the horizon. And when she saw herself like that, it was always with Samuel standing beside her. He was everything that was right for her; everything that was expected of her. He was her safety net. The thing was, most Plain folks never lifted their faces from the straight and narrow ground, to know that high above was the most wondrous tightrope you could ever have the chance to walk.

  Samuel tipped his forehead against Katie’s. She could feel his breath, his words, falling onto her, and she opened her lips to receive them. “That baby wasn’t yours,” he said urgently.

  “No,” she whispered.

  He tilted his face so that their mouths came together, wide and sweet as the sea. Their kiss tasted of salt, and Katie knew there were tears on both of their cheeks, but she did not recall which of them had passed the sorrow to the other. She opened herself to Samuel as she had never done before, understanding that this was a debt he had come to collect.

  Then Samuel drew away from her and kissed her eyelids. He held her face between his hands and murmured, “I’ve sinned.”

  She raised her palms to cover his. “You haven’t,” she insisted.

  “Yes. Let me finish.” Samuel swallowed. “That baby. That baby, it wasn’t ours.” He gathered Katie closer, burying his face in her hair. “It wasn’t ours, Katie. But I have been wishing it was.”

  “Have you ever touched one?”

  Adam looked up from the desk, smiling at the sight of Katie bent over one of his logbooks. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, sort of. You can’t grab them, you just sort of feel them come over you.”

  “Like a wind?”

  Adam set down his pen. “More like a shiver.”

  Katie nodded, and very seriously turned back to her reading. This was the second time she’d visited Jacob this week-an unprecedented occurrence,
appar ently-and she’d scheduled the visit on a day when she knew that Jacob was working at the college until the afternoon. When Adam sat down beside her, Katie smiled. “Tell me what it was like.”

  “I was at an old hotel in Nantucket. I woke up in the middle of the night and found a woman looking out the window. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, and the air was filled with this perfume-a scent I’d never smelled before, or since. I sat up and asked who she was, but she didn’t answer. And then I realized that I could see the windowsill and the wooden mullions right through her body. She completely ignored me, then walked right past the window, through me. It felt . . . chilly. Made the hair rise on the back of my neck.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “Not really. She didn’t seem to know I was there. The next morning, I asked the proprietor, who told me that the hotel had been the home of a sea captain that drowned. It was supposedly haunted by his widow, who was still waiting for her husband to come home.”

  “That’s so sad,” Katie said.

  “Most ghost stories are.”

  For a moment, Adam thought she was going to cry. He reached out and touched Katie’s head. “Her hair, it was like yours. Thick and straight and longer than I’d ever seen.” As she blushed, he sat back and crossed his arms over his bent knees. “Can I ask you a question now?”

  “All right.”

  “It’s not that I’m not incredibly flattered you’re so fascinated by my re search . . . but you’re the last person I would have expected to find it interesting.”

  “Because I’m Plain, you mean?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Katie touched her fingers to the words that Adam had typed out. “I know these ghosts,” she said. “I know what it’s like to move around in the world, but not really be a part of it. And I know what it’s like to have people stare right through you, and not believe what they are seeing.” Setting aside the book of research, Katie looked at Adam. “If I exist, why can’t they?”