Plain Truth

by Jodie Picoult

  “Did your relationship progress?”

  “We became friends very quickly. She was interested in my work, not in the National Enquirer hack way, but truly respectful of what I was trying to do. I found it very easy to talk to her, because she was so open and honest. To me, it was like she wasn’t of this world-and in many ways I guess that was true.” He shifted in his seat. “I was attracted to her. I knew better-God, I was ten years older than her, experienced, and clearly not Amish. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her.”

  “Did you become lovers?”

  He watched Katie’s cheeks bloom with color. “Yes.”

  “Had Katie ever slept with anyone before?”

  “No.” Adam cleared his throat. “She was a virgin.”

  “Did you love her, Mr. Sinclair?”

  “I still do,” he said quietly.

  “Then why weren’t you here for her when she became pregnant?”

  Adam shook his head. “I didn’t know about it. I’d postponed my research trip twice, to stay close to her. But that night after . . . after the conception, I left for Scotland.”

  “Have you come back to the States between then and now?”

  “No. If I had, I would have gone to see Katie. But I’ve been in remote villages, unreachable areas. Saturday was the first time I’ve been on American soil in a year.”

  “If you had known about the baby, Mr. Sinclair, what would you have done?”

  “I would have married Katie in a heartbeat.”

  “But you’d have to be Amish. Could you convert?”

  “It’s been done, I know, but I probably couldn’t. My faith isn’t strong enough.”

  “So marriage wouldn’t really have been an option. What else would you have done?” Ellie asked.

  “Anything. I would have left her among family and friends, but hoped that I could still have some future with her.”

  “What kind of future?”

  “Whatever she was willing or able to give me,” Adam said.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ellie continued, “but a shared future between an Amish woman and a worldly man seems awfully unlikely.”

  “A saguaro can fall for a snowman,” Adam mused softly, “but where would they set up house?” He sighed. “I didn’t want to be a star-crossed lover. I would have been perfectly happy to find some corner of the universe where Katie and I could just be Katie and I. But if I loved her, I couldn’t ask her to turn her back on everything and everyone else. That’s why I took the coward’s way out last year. I left, hoping that by the time I returned, things would have magically changed.”

  “Had they?”

  Adam grimaced. “Yes, but not for the better.”

  “When you came back on Saturday, what did you learn?”

  He swallowed. “Katie had given birth to my child. And the child had died.”

  “That must have been very upsetting to hear.”

  “It was,” Adam said. “It still is.”

  “What was your first reaction?”

  “I wanted to go to Katie. I was certain she must have been as devastated as I was, if not more. I thought we could help each other.”

  “At the time, did you know that Katie had been accused of murdering the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “You heard that your baby was dead, and that Katie was the one suspected of killing him-yet you wanted to go to her to give and receive comfort?”

  “Ms. Hathaway,” Adam said, “Katie didn’t kill our baby.”

  “How could you know for certain?”

  Adam looked into his lap. “Because I wrote a dissertation on it. Love’s the strongest kind of energy. Katie and I loved each other. We couldn’t love each other in my world, and we couldn’t love each other in her world. But all that love, all that energy, it had to go somewhere. It went into that baby.” His voice broke. “Even if we couldn’t have each other, we would have both had him.”

  “If you loved her so much,” George said midway through his cross-examination, “why didn’t you drop her a line every now and then?”

  “I did. I wrote once a week,” Adam answered. From beneath his lashes, he watched Ellie Hathaway. She had warned him not to talk about the letters that had never found their way to Katie, because then it would come out that Jacob had not wanted his sister to have a future with Adam-a strike against the star-crossed lover defense.

  “So during all this pen-pal time, she never told you she was pregnant?”

  “As far I understand, she never told anyone.”

  George raised a brow. “Couldn’t the reason she kept her pregnancy from you be because she didn’t care as much about your relationship as you apparently did?”

  “No, that wasn’t-”

  “Or perhaps she had gotten her wild ride and now intended to go back to her Amish boyfriend with no one the wiser.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Maybe she didn’t tell you because she planned to get rid of the baby.”

  “She wouldn’t have done that,” Adam said with conviction.

  “Pardon me if I’ve misunderstood, but were you standing in the barn the night she gave birth?”

  “You know I wasn’t.”

  “Then you can’t say for certain what did or did not happen.”

  “By the same logic, neither can you,” Adam pointed out. “But there’s one thing I do know that you don’t. I know how Katie thinks and feels. I know she wouldn’t murder our child. It doesn’t matter whether I was there to witness the birth or not.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re a . . . what did you call it? Ah, a ghost hunter. You don’t have to see things to believe them.”

  Adam’s gaze locked onto the prosecutor’s. “Maybe you’ve got that backward,” he said. “Maybe it’s just that I believe things you can’t see.”

  Ellie gently closed the door of the conference room. “Look,” she began with trepidation. “I know what you’re going to say. I had no right to spring him on you. As soon as I knew where Adam was, I should have told you. But Katie, the jury needed to know about the father of your baby in order to understand that the death was a tragedy. They needed to see how much it hurt you to watch Adam walk into the room. They needed to build up sympathy for you so that they’ll want to acquit you, for whatever reason they can find.” She folded her arms. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  When Katie turned away, Ellie tried to make light of the situation. “I said I was sorry. I thought if you confessed, you were forgiven and welcomed back to the fold.”

  Katie looked up at her. “This was mine,” she said quietly. “This memory was the only thing I had left. And you gave it away.”

  “I did it to save you.”

  “Who said I wanted to be saved?”

  Without another word, Ellie walked to the door again. “I brought you something,” she said, and turned the knob.

  Adam stood there hesitantly, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Ellie nodded at him, then walked out, closing the door behind her.

  Katie rose, blinking back tears. All he had to do was open his arms, and she would fall into them. All he had to do was open his arms, and they’d be back where they were before.

  He took a step forward, and Katie flew to him. They whispered their questions into each other’s skin, leaving marks as sure as scars. Katie wriggled closer, surprised to see she didn’t quite fit, as if some small object was caught between their bodies. She glanced down to see what had pressed up between them, and found nothing except the invisible, hard fact of their baby.

  Adam felt it too, she could tell by the way he shifted and held her at arm’s length. “I tried to write you. Your brother didn’t give you my letters.”

  “I would have told you,” she answered. “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “We would have loved him,” Adam said fiercely, the tone as much a statement as it was a question.

  “We would have.”

  His hand stroked over h
er hair, catching at the edge of her kapp. “What happened?” he whispered.

  Katie stilled. “I don’t know. I fell asleep, and woke up, and the baby was gone.”

  “I understand that’s what you told your lawyer. And the police. But this is me, Katie. This is our son.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t remember.”

  “You were there! You have to remember!”

  “But I don’t!” Katie cried.

  “You have to,” Adam said thickly, “because I wasn’t there. And I need to know.”

  Katie pressed her lips together and gave a tight little shake of her head. She sank down into a chair and curled forward, her arms crossed over her stomach.

  Adam reached for her hand and kissed the knuckles. “We’ll figure this out,” he said. “After the trial, somehow, it’s all going to work out.”

  She let his voice wash over her with the same spiritual cleansing that she’d felt at Grossgemee, communion services. How she wanted to believe him! Lifting her face to Adam’s, she started to nod.

  But something flickered in his eyes, the smallest dance of doubt, so brief that had Adam not turned away quickly, Katie might have put it from her mind. He had said he loved her. He had told a jury. He might not admit it in court, but here in private, he would allow himself to wonder if the reason Katie could not remember what had happened to their baby was because she’d done something unspeakable.

  He kissed her gently, and she wondered how you could come so close to a person that there was not a breath of space between you, and still feel like a canyon had ripped the earth raw between your feet. “We’ll have other babies,” he said, the one thing Katie could not stand to hear.

  She touched his cheeks and his jaw and the soft curve of his ears. “I’m sorry,” she said, unsure for what she was apologizing.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Adam murmured.

  “Adam-”

  Touching his finger to her lips, he shook his head. “Don’t say it. Not just yet.”

  Her chest tightened, so that she could barely breathe. “I wanted to tell you he looked like you,” she said, the words tumbling bright as a gift. “I wanted to tell you he was beautiful.”

  Adam stepped out of the bathroom stall and began to wash his hands. His head was still full of thoughts of Katie, of the trial, of their baby. He was only marginally aware when another man stepped up to wash at the sink beside him.

  Their eyes met in the mirror. Adam regarded the man’s broad-brimmed black hat, the simple trousers, the suspenders, the pale green shirt. Adam had never met him before, but he knew. He knew the same way that the blond giant who seemed unable to tear his eyes away from Adam knew.

  This was the one she was with before me, Adam thought.

  He had not been in the courtroom; Adam would have remembered him. Perhaps he was opposed to it for religious reasons. Perhaps he was sequestered, and would be on the witness stand later.

  Perhaps, like the prosecutor had suggested, he had stepped in after Adam left to take care of Katie.

  “Excuse me,” the blond man said in heavily accented English. He reached across Adam toward the soap dispenser.

  Adam dried his hands on a paper towel. He nodded once-territorially, evenly-at the other man, and tossed the crumpled paper into the trash.

  As Adam swung open the bathroom door to reveal the busy hallway, he looked back one last time. The Amish man was reaching for his own paper towel now, was standing in the very spot that Adam had been just a moment before.

  Samuel’s fingers fumbled on the doorknob as he entered the tiny conference room where Ellie had said he’d find Katie. She was there, yes, her head bent over the ugly plastic table like a dandelion wilting on its stem. He sat down across from her and set his elbows on the table. “You okay?”

  “Ja.” Katie sighed, rubbed her eyes. “I’m okay.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  Katie smiled faintly. “You’re on the stand soon?”

  “Ellie says so.” He hesitated. “Ellie says she knows what she’s doing.” Samuel got to his feet, feeling oversized and uncomfortable inside such cramped quarters. “Ellie says I have to bring you back, now, too.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Ellie,” Katie said sarcastically.

  Samuel’s brows drew together. “Katie,” he said, that was all, and suddenly she felt small and mean.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she admitted. “These days, I don’t know myself.”

  “Well, I do,” Samuel said, so perfectly serious that it made her grin.

  “Thank goodness for that.” Katie did not like being in this courthouse, being so far away from her parents’ farm, but knowing that Samuel was feeling just as out of place as she was somehow made it a little better.

  He held out his hand and smiled. “Come on now.”

  Katie slipped her fingers into his. Samuel pulled her out of the chair and led her out of the conference room. They walked hand-in-hand down the hallway, through the double doors of the courtroom, toward the defense table; neither one of them ever thinking it would be all right, now, to let go.

  SIXTEEN

  Ellie

  The night before testimony began for Katie’s defense, I had a dream about putting Coop on the stand. I stood in front of him in a courtroom that was empty save for the two of us, the lemon-polished gallery stretching behind me like a dark desert. I opened up my mouth to ask him about Katie’s treatment, and instead, a different question flew out of my mouth like a bird that had been trapped inside: Will we be happy ten years from now? Mortified, I pressed my lips together and waited for the witness to answer the question, but Coop just stared into his lap. “I need a response, Dr. Cooper,” I pressed; and I approached the witness stand to find Katie’s dead infant stretched across his lap.

  Questioning Coop as a witness rated high on my scale of discomfort-somewhere, say, between suffering a bikini wax and braving bamboo slivers under the nails. There was something about having a man locked in a box in front of me, at my mercy to answer any inquiry I threw at him-and yet to know that the questions I’d be asking were not the ones I truly needed answered. Plus, there was a new subtext between us, all the things that had not yet been said in the wake of this knowledge of pregnancy. It surrounded us like a sea, pale and distorting; so that when I saw Coop or listened to him speak, I could not trust my perception to be accurate.

  He came up to me minutes before he was scheduled to take the stand. Hands in his pockets, painfully professional, he lifted his chin. “I want Katie out of the courtroom while I testify.”

  Katie was not sitting beside me; I’d sent Samuel to retrieve her. “Why?”

  “Because my first responsibility is to Katie as a patient, and after that last stunt you pulled with Adam, I think she’s too fragile to hear me talk about what happened.”

  I straightened the papers in front of me. “That’s too bad, because I need the jury to see her getting upset.”

  His shock was a palpable thing. Well, good. Maybe this was the way to show him that I wasn’t the woman he expected me to be. Turning a cool gaze on him, I added, “The whole point is to gain sympathy for her.”

  I expected him to argue with me, but Coop only stood there, staring at me for a moment, until I began to shift beneath his regard. “You’re not that tough, Ellie,” he said finally. “You can stop pretending.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I cried, frustrated. “It’s not what I need now.”

  “It’s exactly what you need, El.” Coop reached out and straightened my lapel, gently smoothing it down, a gesture that suddenly made me want to cry.

  I took a deep breath. “Katie’s staying, that’s that. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a few minutes by myself.”

  “Those few minutes,” he said softly. “They’re adding up.”

  “For God’s sake, I’m in the middle of
a trial! What do you expect?”

  Coop let his hand trail off my shoulder, over my arm. “That one day you’ll look around,” he said, “and you’ll find out you’ve been alone for years.”

  “Why were you called in to see Katie?”

  Coop looked wonderful on the stand. Not that I was in the habit of judging my witnesses on the way they filled out a suit, but he was relaxed and calm and kept smiling at Katie, something the jury could not help but notice. “To treat her,” he said. “Not to evaluate her.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Most of the professional psychiatrists who testify in court have been appointed to assess Katie’s mind for the value of the trial. I’m not a forensic psychiatrist; I’m just a regular shrink. I was simply asked to help her.”

  “If you’re not a forensic psychiatrist, then why are you here today?”

  “Because I’ve developed a relationship with Katie over the course of her treatment. As opposed to an expert who’s only interviewed her once, I believe I know the workings of her mind more thoroughly. She’s signed an agreement to allow me to testify, which I consider a strong mark of her trust in me.”

  “What did your treatment of Katie involve?” I asked.

  “Clinical interviews that grew more in-depth over a four-month period. I began by asking about her parents, her childhood, her expectations of pregnancy, history of depression or psychological trauma-your basic psychiatric interview, in effect.”

  “What did you learn?”

  He grinned. “Katie’s no run-of-the-mill teenager. Before I could really understand her, I needed to bone up on what it means to be Amish. As I’m sure everyone knows, the culture in which a child is raised dramatically impacts their actions as an adult.”

  “We’ve heard a little about Amish culture. What, in particular, interested you as Katie’s psychiatrist?”

  “Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it’s no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there’s no room for deviation from the norm. It’s important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don’t fit in, the consequences are psychologically tragic-you stand alone when all you’ve ever known is being part of the group.”