The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

“Sure.”

  “Why don’t you talk about your family? How could you move out here and not have to make a phone call to them saying where you’d be?”

  I watched the cows milling in the field, lowering their heads to the fresh grass. “My mother’s dead, and I haven’t spoken to my father in a few years.” Not since I became a defense attorney, and he accused me of selling out my morals for money. “I never got married, and my boyfriend and I just ended our relationship.”

  “How come?”

  “We sort of outgrew each other,” I said, testing the answer on my lips. “Not surprising, after eight years.”

  “How can you be boyfriend and girlfriend for eight years and not get married?”

  How to describe the intricacies of 1990s dating to an Amish girl? “Well, we started out thinking we were right for each other. It took us that long to find out we weren’t.”

  “Eight years,” she scoffed. “You could have had a whole bunch of kids by now.”

  At the thought of all that time wasted, I felt my throat close with tears. Katie dipped her toe in the small puddle of mud forming beneath the nozzle of the hose, clearly embarrassed at having upset me. “You must miss him.”

  “Not Stephen, so much,” I said softly. “Just that bunch of kids.”

  I waited for Katie to make the connection, to say something about her own circumstances in relation to mine—but once again she surprised me. “You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There’s the telephone, and the fax—and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You’ve got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide in their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.”

  Just as I started to protest, Katie handed me the hose and hopped over the fence. Reaching for the nozzle again, she turned the water on and waved it over the cows, who bellowed and tried to dodge the spray. Then, with a grin, she turned the hose on me.

  “Why, you little—!” Soaked from my hair to my ankles, I climbed the fence and started to run after her. The cows got between us, milling in circles. Katie shrieked as I finally grabbed the hose and saturated her. “Take that,” I laughed, then slipped on the wet grass and landed on my bottom in a slick of mud.

  “Excuse me? I’m looking for Ellie Hathaway.”

  At the sound of the deep voice, both Katie and I turned, the nozzle in my hand spraying the shoes of the speaker before he managed to jump out of the way. I stood up, wiping mud off my hands, and grinned sheepishly at the man on the other side of the heifer pen, a man staring at my boots and apron and the muck all over me. “Coop,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later when I came downstairs fresh from a shower, I found Coop sitting on the porch with Katie and Sarah. A platter of cookies was on the wicker table, and Coop held a sweating glass of ice water in his hand. He stood up as soon as he saw me.

  “Still a gentleman,” I said, smiling.

  He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, and to my surprise a hundred memories rushed at me—the way his hair had always smelled of wood smoke and apples, the curve of his jaw, the imprint of his fingers splayed over my back. Dizzy, I stepped back and did my best not to look uncomfortable.

  “These ladies have been kind enough to keep me company,” he said, and Katie and Sarah bent their heads together, whispering like schoolgirls.

  Sarah came to her feet. “We’ll leave you to your caller,” she said, nodding at Coop as she walked back into the house. Katie headed toward the garden, and I sat down. After twenty years, Coop had grown into his looks. His features—just a little too sharp in college—had roughened with time, chiseling his skin with a scar here and a laugh line there. His black hair, which once hung to his shoulders, was neatly trimmed and feathered with gray. His eyes were still that clear pale green that I had only seen twice in my life: on Coop, and once from the window of a plane when I was traveling to the Caribbean with Stephen.

  “You’ve aged well,” I said.

  He laughed. “You make it sound like I’m a bottle of wine.” Leaning back in his chair, he grinned at me. “You look pretty good, yourself. Especially compared to about fifteen minutes ago. I’d heard defense litigation was a dirty business, but I never took it literally.”

  “Well, it’s sort of like method acting. The Amish aren’t a particularly trusting lot, when it comes to outsiders. When I look like them, work with them, they open up.”

  “Must be hard, being stuck here away from home.”

  “Is that John Joseph Cooper the psychiatrist asking?”

  He started to say something, then shook his head. “Nah. Just Coop, the friend.”

  I shrugged, deliberately looking away from his careful gaze. “There are things I miss—my coffee maker, for one. Downshifting in my car. The X-Files, and ER.”

  “Not Stephen?”

  I had forgotten that the last time I saw Coop, we’d been with our significant others. We met in the lobby during the intermission of a performance by the Philadelphia Symphony. Although we’d been in touch occasionally for business reasons, I had never before met his wife, who was fine-boned and blond, and fit against his side as neatly as a matched jigsaw puzzle piece. Even after all those years, just the sight of her was a sucker punch.

  “Stephen isn’t in the picture,” I admitted.

  Coop regarded me for a moment before saying, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I was a grown-up; I could get through this. Taking a deep breath, I summoned a smile and clapped my hands on my knees. “Well. You didn’t come all the way out here to talk to me—”

  “But I would have, Ellie,” Coop said, his voice soft. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

  It would have been easy to pretend that I had not heard him; to simply launch into a discussion about Katie. But you can’t speak to someone partly responsible for making you who you are without unearthing a little bit of that history. Maybe Coop had forgiven me, but I hadn’t.

  Coop cleared his throat. “Let me tell you what I found out about Katie.” He dug in a briefcase and pulled out a pad of yellow legal paper covered with his chicken-scratch handwriting. “There are two camps of psychiatric explanations for neonaticide. The minority attitude is that women who kill their newborns have gone into a dissociative state that lasts throughout the pregnancy.”

  “Dissociative state?”

  “A very concentrated focus state, where a person blocks out all but the one thing they’re doing. In this case, these women fracture off a bit of their consciousness, so that they’re living in a fantasy world where they’re not pregnant. When the birth finally occurs, the women are totally unprepared. They’ve dissociated from the reality of the event, experiencing memory lapses. Some women even become temporarily psychotic, once the shock of the birth slams through that shell of denial. In either case, the excuse is that they’re not mentally present at the moment of the crime, so they can’t be held legally accountable for their actions.”

  “Sounds very Sybil to me.”

  Coop grinned and handed me a list of names. “These are some psychiatrists who’ve testified the past few years with the soft approach. They’re clinical psychiatrists, you’ll see—not forensic ones. That’s because the majority of forensic psychiatrists who deal with neonaticides say the women are not in a dissociative state—just detached from the pregnancy. They feel dissociation might occur at the moment of birth. Plus, even I’d tell you that some dissociation is entirely normal, given the pain of childbirth. It’s like when you cut yourself chopping vegetables, and you kind of stand there for a second and say, ‘Wow, that’s a deep one.’ But you don’t go chopping off your hand after that to eliminate the problem.”

  I nodded. “Then why do they kill the babies?”

  “Because they have no emotional connection to them—it’s like passing a gallstone. At the