by Jodi Picoult
"Yes, that's true."
"Women who commit neonaticide--do they kill willfully?"
"Absolutely."
"Do they deliberate about the act?"
"Sometimes, in the way they'll pick a quiet place, or bring a blanket or bag to dispose of the baby--as the defendant did."
"Do they plan the murder of the infant in advance?"
Riordan frowned. "It's a reflexive act, stimulated by the newborn's arrival."
"Reflexive act," Ellie repeated. "By that you mean an automatic, instinctive, unthinking behavior?"
"Yes."
"Then neonaticide isn't really first-degree murder, is it?"
"Objection!"
"Withdrawn," Ellie said. "Nothing further."
George turned to the judge. "Your Honor," he said, "the prosecution rests."
*
Sarah had held dinner for them, a spread of comfort ood that offered no appeal for Ellie. She picked at her plate and felt the walls closing in on her, wondering why she hadn't taken Coop up on his suggestion to get a bite to eat at a restaurant in Lancaster.
"I brushed Nugget for you," Sarah said, "but there's still tack to be cleaned."
"All right, Mam," Katie answered. "I'll go on out after supper. I'll get the dishes, too; you must be tired after helping out with the milking."
From the opposite end of the table, Aaron belched loudly, smiling a compliment at his wife. "Gut meal," he said. He hooked his thumbs beneath his suspenders and turned to his father. "I'm thinking of heading to Lapp's auction on Monday."
"You need some new horseflesh?" Elam said.
Aaron shrugged. "Never hurts to see what's there."
"I heard tell that Marcus King was getting set to sell that colt bred off his bay last spring."
"Ja? He's a beauty."
Sarah snorted. "What are you gonna do with another horse?"
Ellie looked from one family member to another, as if she were following a tennis match. "Excuse me," she said softly, and one by one they turned to her. "Are you all aware that your daughter is involved in a murder trial?"
"Ellie, don't--" Katie stretched out her hand, but Ellie shook her head.
"Are you all aware that in less than a week's time, your daughter could be found guilty of murder and taken directly from the courthouse to the prison in Muncy? Sitting here talking about horse auctions--doesn't anyone even care how the trial is going?"
"We care," Aaron said stiffly.
"Hell of a way to show it," Ellie muttered, balling up her napkin and tossing it onto the table before escaping upstairs to her room.
When Ellie opened her eyes again, it was fully dark, and Katie was sitting on the edge of the bed. She sat up immediately, pushing her hair back from her face and squinting at the little battery-powered clock on the nightstand. "What time is it?" "Just after ten," Katie whispered. "You fell asleep." "Yeah." Ellie ran her tongue over her fuzzy teeth. "Looks like." She blinked her way back to consciousness, then reached over to turn up the gas lamp. "Where did you go, anyway?"
"I did the dishes and cleaned the tack." Katie busied herself around the room, pulling the shades for the night and sitting down to unwind her neat bun.
Ellie watched Katie run a brush through her long, honey hair, her eyes clear and wide. When Ellie had first arrived and seen that look on all the faces surrounding her, she'd mistaken it for blankness, for stupidity. It had taken months for her to realize that the gaze of the Amish was not vacant, but full--brimming with a quiet peace. Even now, after a difficult beginning to the trial that would have kept most people tossing and turning, Katie was at ease. "I know they care," Ellie heard herself murmur. Katie turned her head. "About the trial, you mean." "Yeah. My family used to yell a lot. Argue and spontaneously combust and then somehow get back together after the dust settled. This quiet--it's still a little strange." "Your family yelled at you a lot, didn't they?" "Sometimes," Ellie admitted. "But at least all the noise let me know they were there." She shook her head, clearing it of the memory. "Anyway, I apologize for blowing up at dinner." She sighed. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
Katie's brush stopped in the middle of a long stroke. "You don't?"
"Well, no. I mean, I'm a little anxious about the trial, but if I were you I'd rather have me nervous than complacent." She looked up at Katie, only to realize the girl's cheeks were burning.
"What are you hiding?" Ellie asked, her stomach sinking.
"Nothing! I'm not hiding a thing!"
Ellie closed her eyes. "I'm too tired for this right now. Could you just save your confession until the morning?"
"Okay," Katie said, too quickly.
"The hell with the morning. Tell me now."
"You've been falling asleep early, like you did tonight. And you exploded at the dinner table." Katie's eyes gleamed as she remembered something else. "And remember this morning, in the bathroom at the court?"
"You're right. I can blame it all on this bug I've caught."
Katie set down the hairbrush and smiled shyly. "You're not sick, Ellie. You're pregnant."
FOURTEEN
Elite
"Clearly, it's wrong," I said to Katie, holding out the stick from the pregnancy test kit.
Katie, squinting at the back of the box, shook her head. "You waited five minutes. You watched the little line appear in the test window."
I tossed the stick, with its little pink plus sign, onto the bed. "I was supposed to pee for thirty seconds straight, and I only counted fifteen. So there you go. Human error."
We both looked at the box, which contained a second stick. At the pharmacy the deal had been two for the price of one. All it would take for proof was one more trip to the bathroom, five more interminable minutes of destiny. But both Katie and I knew what the results would be.
Things like this did not happen to forty-year-old women. Accidents were for teenagers caught up in the moment, rolling around the backseat of their parents' cars. Accidents were for women who considered their bodies still new and surprising, rather than old, familiar friends. Accidents were for those who didn't know better.
But this didn't feel like an accident. It felt hard and hot, a nugget nestled beneath my palm, as if already I could feel the sonic waves of that tiny heart.
Katie looked into her lap. "Congratulations," she whispered.
In the past five years, I had wanted a baby so much I ached. I would wake up sometimes beside Stephen and feel my arms throb, as if I had been holding a newborn weight the whole night. I would see an infant in a stroller and feel my whole body reach; I would mark my monthly period on the calendar with the sense that my life was passing me by. I wanted to grow something under my heart. I wanted to breathe, to eat, to blossom for someone else.
Stephen and I fought about children approximately twice a year, as if reproduction were a volcano that erupted every now and then on the island we'd created for ourselves. Once, I actually wore him down. "All right," he'd said. "If it happens, it happens." I threw away my birth control pills for six consecutive months, but we didn't manage to make a baby. It took me nearly half a year after that to understand why not: You can't create life in a place that's dying by degrees.
After that, I'd stopped asking Stephen. Instead, when I was feeling maternal, I went to the library and did research. I learned how many times the cells of a zygote divided before they were classified as an embryo. I saw on microfiche the pictures of a fetus sucking its thumb, veins running like roads beneath the orange glow of its skin. I learned that a six-week-old fetus was the size of a strawberry. I read about alpha-fetal protein and amniocentesis and rH factors. I became a scholar in an ivory tower, an expert with no hands-on experience.
So you see, I knew everything about this baby inside me-- except why I wasn't overjoyed to discover its existence.
*
I didn't want anyone on the farm to know I was pregnant--at least not until I broke the news to Coop. The next morning, I slept late. I managed to make it out to
a secluded spot behind the vegetable garden before I started dry heaving. When the smell of the horse grain made me dizzy, Katie wordlessly took over for me. I began to see her in a new light, amazed she had hidden her condition from so many people, for so long.
She came to join me outside the barn. "So," she asked briskly, "you feeling poor, still?" She slid down beside me, our backs braced by the red wooden wall.
"Not anymore," I lied. "I think I'll be okay."
"Till tomorrow morning, anyway." Katie dug beneath the waistband of her apron and pulled out two teabags. "You'll be needing these, I figure."
I sniffed at them. "Will they settle my stomach?"
Katie blushed. "You put them here," she said, grazing her breasts with the tips of her fingers. "When they're too sore to bear." Assessing my naivete, she added, "You steep them, first."
"Thank God I know someone who's already been through this--" Katie reared back as if I'd slapped her, and too late I realized what I'd said. "I'm sorry."
"It's okay," she murmured.
"It's not okay. I know this can't be easy for you, especially in the middle of the trial. I could say that you'll have another baby of your own one day, but I remember how I felt every time one of my pregnant, married friends said something like that to me."
"How did you feel?"
"Like I wanted to deck her."
Katie smiled shyly. "Ja, that's about right." She glanced at my stomach, then away. "I'm happy for you, Ellie, I am. But that doesn't make it hurt any less. And I keep telling myself that my Mam lost three babies, four if you count Hannah." She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck."
I had never been more aware than I was at that moment of the fact that Katie had wanted her baby. She may have put off having it, she may have procrastinated owning up to her pregnancy--but once the infant was born, there had never been any question in her mind about loving it. With no little amazement I stared at her, feeling the defense I'd prepared for her trial dovetail into the truth.
I squeezed her hand. "It means a lot to me," I said. "Being able to share this secret with someone."
"Soon you'll be able to tell Coop."
"I guess." I didn't know when or whether he'd be by this weekend. We hadn't made any official plans when he dropped us off at the farmhouse on Friday night. Still annoyed after my refusal to move in with him, he was keeping his distance.
Katie wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. "You think he'll be happy?"
"I know he will."
She looked up at me. "Suppose you'll be getting married, then."
"Well," I said, "I don't know about that."
"I bet he'll want to marry you."
I turned to her. "It's not Coop who's holding back."
I expected her to stare at me blankly, to wonder why on earth I'd shy away from the obvious, easy path. I had a man who loved me, who was the father of this child, who wanted this child. Even I didn't understand my reluctance.
"When I found out I was carrying," Katie said softly, "I thought about telling Adam. He'd gone away, sure, but I figured that I could have dug him up if I put my mind to it. And then I realized that I really didn't want to tell Adam. Not because he would have been upset--ach, no, the very opposite. I didn't want to tell him because then all the choices were gone. I'd know what I had to do, and I would have done it. But I was afraid that one day I'd look down at the baby, and I wouldn't be thinking, I love you ..."
Her voice trailed off, and I turned to catch her gaze, to finish her words. "I'd be thinking, how did I get here?"
Katie stared at the flat expanse of the pond in the distance. "Exactly," she said.
Sarah headed toward the chicken coop. "You don't have to do this," she told me for the third time.
But I was feeling guilty about having slept the morning away. "It's no trouble at all," I said. The Fishers kept twenty-four hens for laying. Tending to the chickens was something Katie and I did in the mornings; the chore involved feeding the birds and gathering the eggs. I had been pecked hard enough to bleed at first, but finally learned how to slide my hand under the warm bottom of a chicken without suffering injury. In fact, I was looking forward to showing Sarah that I already knew a thing or two.
Sarah, on the other hand, wanted to pepper me with questions about Katie's trial. With Aaron far out of earshot, she asked about the prosecutor, the witnesses, the judge. She asked whether Katie would have to speak out in court. Whether we would win.
That last question fell at the door to the coop. "I don't know," I admitted. "I'm doing my best."
Sarah's face stretched into a smile. "Yes," she said softly. "You do that well."
She pushed open the wooden door, sending feathers flying as the birds squawked and scattered. Something about a chicken coop reminded me of a batch of ladies gossiping at a hairdresser's salon, and I smiled as a high-strung hen flapped around my heels. Heading to the roost on the right, I began to search the beds for eggs.
"No," Sarah instructed as I upended a russet-colored hen. "She's still gut." I watched her tuck a molting chicken beneath her arm like a football and press her fingers between the bones that protruded from its bottom. "Ah, here's one that stopped laying," she said, holding it out to me by the feet. "Let me just grab another."
The chicken was twisting like Houdini, intent on escaping. Completely baffled, I fisted my hand more tightly around its nubby legs as Sarah found another bird. She headed for the door of the coop, shooing hens. "What about their eggs?" I asked.
Sarah looked back over her shoulder. "They're not giving 'em anymore. That's why we'll be having them for dinner."
I stopped in my tracks, looked down at the hen, and nearly let her go. "Come along," Sarah said, disappearing behind the coop.
There was a chopping block, an ax, and a steaming pail of hot water waiting. With grace Sarah lifted the ax, swung the bird onto the block and cut off its head. As she released its legs, the decapitated chicken somersaulted and danced a jitterbug in a pool of its own blood. With horror I watched Sarah reach for the chicken I was holding; I felt her pull it from my grip just before I fell to my knees and threw up.
After a moment Sarah's hand smoothed back my hair. "Ach, Ellie," she said, "I thought you knew."
I shook my head, which made me feel sick again. "I wouldn't have come."
"Katie don't have the stomach for it either," Sarah admitted. "I asked you because it's so much easier than going back in there again after doing the first one." She patted my arm; on the back of her wrist was a smear of blood. I closed my eyes.
I could hear Sarah moving behind me, dipping the limp bodies of the chickens into hot water. "The dumpling stew," I said hesitantly. "The noodle soup ...?"
"Of course," Sarah answered. "Where did you think chickens came from?"
"Frank Perdue."
"He does it the same way, believe me."
I cradled my head in my hands, refusing to think about all the brisket and the hamburger meat we'd eaten, and of the little bull calves I'd seen born in the months I'd been on the farm. People only see what they want to see--look at Sarah turning a blind eye to Katie's pregnancy, or a jury hanging an acquittal on the testimony of a certain sympathetic witness, or even my own reluctance to admit that the connection between Coop and me went beyond the physical fact of creating a baby.
I glanced up to see Sarah stripping the feathers off one of the birds, her mouth set in a tight line. There were tufts of white fluff on her apron and skirt; a trail of red blood soaked into the hard-packed dirt before her. I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. "How do you do it?"
"I do what I have to do," she said matter-of-factly. "You of all people should understand."
I was hiding in the milk room when Coop found me that afternoon. "El, you're not gonna believe this--" His eyes widened as he saw me, and he sprinted to my side, running his hands up and down my arms. "How did this happen?"
He knew; God,
all he'd had to do was look at me, and he knew about the baby. I swallowed and met his gaze. "Pretty much the usual way, I guess."
Coop's hand slid from my shoulder to my waist, and I waited for him to move lower still. But instead, his fingers plucked at my T-shirt, rubbing at the bright red streak that stained it. "When was your last tetanus shot?"
He wasn't talking about the baby. He wasn't talking about the baby.
"Well, of course I am," Coop said, making me realize I'd spoken aloud. "But for God's sake, the stupid trial can wait. We'll get you stitched up first."
I pushed Coop's hands away. "I'm fine. This blood's not mine."
Coop raised a brow. "Have you been committing homicide again?"
"Very funny. I was helping kill chickens."
"I'd save the pagan rituals until after you've presented your defense, but then--"
"Tell me about him, Coop," I said firmly.
"He wants answers. After all, the man jumped on a plane the day after finding out he was a father--but he wants to see Katie and the baby."
My jaw dropped. "You didn't tell him--"
"No, I didn't. I'm a psychiatrist, Ellie. I'm not about to cause someone undue mental anguish unless I'm there, face to face, to help him deal with it."
As Coop turned away, I put my hand on his shoulder. "I would have done the same thing. Except my motive wouldn't have been kindness, but selfishness. I want him to testify, and if that works to get him here, so be it."
"This isn't going to be easy for him," Coop murmured.
"It was no picnic for Katie, either." I straightened. "Has he seen Jacob yet?"
"He just got off the plane. I picked him up in Philly."
"So where is he now?"
"In the car, waiting."
"In the car?" I sputtered. "Here? Are you crazy?"
Coop grinned. "I think I can tell you with some authority that I'm not."
In no mood for his jokes, I was already walking through the barn. "We've got to get him out of here, fast."
Coop fell into step beside me. "You may want to change first," he said. "Just a suggestion--but right now you look like you've stepped out of a Kevin Williamson film, and you know how important first impressions are."
His words barely registered. I was too busy considering how many times that day I would be called upon to tell a man the one thing he least expected to hear.