The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  She lifted her face, the sun lighting her cheeks and her eyes. “Oh, yes,” she whispered. “More than anything.”

  * * *

  The moment Katie was out of earshot I verbally pounced on Coop. “What do you think?”

  He lay back on the grassy bank. “That I’m not in Kansas anymore. I need a crash course in Amish life before I evaluate her further.”

  “When you find the university offering the night session, will you sign me up?” I sighed. “She said she wants children.”

  “Most women who commit neonaticide do. Just not at this time.” He hesitated. “Then again, it’s also possible that to her, this baby never existed.”

  “So you don’t think she’s lying. You think she really blocked out having that baby.”

  Coop was silent for a moment. “I wish I could tell you for sure. The general public seems to believe that shrinks can tell better than the average Joe whether someone’s lying through her teeth, but you know what, El? It’s a myth. It’s too early, really, to make a judgment. If she is lying, she’s awfully good at it, and I can’t imagine it was part of her upbringing.”

  “Well, did you come up with anything conclusive?”

  He shrugged. “I think it’s safe to say that she’s not psychotic right now.”

  “Ghosts notwithstanding?”

  “There’s a big difference between a figment of one’s imagination and a psychotic delusion. If her sister was appearing and telling her to kill her baby, or saying the Devil was living under the silo, that would be another story.”

  “I don’t care if she’s psychotic now. What about when she delivered the baby?”

  Coop pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s clear she’s blocking out the pregnancy, and the act that led to it, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

  “What about rape?” Ellie asked.

  “That’s tough to call, too. She’s so skittish about sex I can’t figure out if it’s due to religious background or to assault. Even having consensual sex with someone not Amish might be enough to put up a wall in Katie’s mind. You heard how fearful she is of being shunned. If she developed a relationship with an outsider, she might as well kiss her Amish life good-bye.”

  I had been there long enough to know that wasn’t quite right. You were always welcomed back—you just had to admit to your sins. “Actually, she could confess, and go back to the church.”

  “Unfortunately, just because others would forgive her doesn’t mean that she would forget. She’d be carrying that around for the rest of her life.” Coop turned to me. “Given her upbringing, it’s not surprising that her mind is working overtime to block out what’s happened.”

  I flopped onto my back beside him. “She tells me she didn’t kill the baby. She tells me she didn’t have the baby. But there’s proof that she did have the baby—”

  “And if she lied about the one thing,” Coop finished for me, “then she’s probably lied about the other. However, lying presumes conscious knowledge. If she’s dissociating, she can’t be blamed for not knowing the truth.”

  Coming up on my elbow, I smiled sadly. “But can she be blamed for committing murder?”

  “That,” Coop said, “depends on a jury.” He tugged me upright. “I’d like to keep talking to her. Walk her through the night before the birth.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s incredibly nice of you and far beyond the call of duty, but you must have more important things to do.”

  “I said I’d help you, El, and I haven’t exactly done a crackerjack job yet. I’ll drive out in the evenings and talk to her after leaving the office.”

  “And meanwhile, your wife’s sitting home eating dinner alone. Weren’t you the one who told me psychiatrists are the ones who can’t keep their own personal relationships together?”

  Coop nodded. “Yeah. Which is probably why I got divorced about a year ago.”

  I turned toward him, my mouth dry. “You did?” He looked down at his shoes, at the rush of the creek; and I wondered why it was so easy to speak of Katie, and so difficult to speak of ourselves. “Coop, I’m sorry.”

  He reached out to the bark of a tree and plucked off a neon inchworm, which curled tight as a drum in the hollow of his palm. “We all make mistakes,” Coop said softly. He reached for my hand and held it up beside his, just as the worm began to move; traveling, stretching, a small bright bridge between us.

  * * *

  It took me a half hour to convince Sarah that if I left Katie in her custody for the morning, I wouldn’t be breaking any laws, and chances were incredibly slim that any representative of the court would come ambling by to realize I wasn’t around. “Look,” I said finally, “if you want me to gather up a defense strategy for Katie, I need flexibility.”

  “Dr. Cooper drove out here,” Sarah fretted.

  “Dr. Cooper doesn’t have to bring half a million dollars’ worth of laboratory equipment with him,” I explained. In fact, I had worked so hard just to guarantee myself the two hours I needed to meet with Dr. Owen Zeigler that I was faintly disappointed to realize I had no desire to be in the neonatal pathology lab at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. I kept thinking of sick infants, dead infants, infants born at risk to women over forty, and all I wanted to do was hightail it back to the Fishers’ farm.

  Owen, a man with whom I’d worked once in the past, had a Moon Pie face, a bright bald head, and a round middle that balanced on his knees whenever he hiked himself up onto one of the high stools in front of the microscopes. “The placental culture showed mixed flora, including diphtheroids,” he said. “Which basically means there was crap floating around.”

  “Are you saying it might have affected the results?”

  “No. It’s perfectly normal, considering the placenta had been lying around in a barn.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Then tell me something that’s abnormal.”

  “Well, the death of the neonate. Looks like a live birth to me,” he said, and my hopes plummeted. “Based on the hydrostatic test, air made it to the alveoli.”

  “Speak English, Owen.”

  The pathologist sighed. “The baby breathed.”

  “That’s a definite, then?”

  “You can tell if a newborn, even a preemie, has breathed air or just inhaled fluid, when you look at the alveoli in the lungs. They get rounded. It’s more conclusive than the hydrostatic test itself, because lungs may float if artificial respiration was attempted.”

  “Yeah, right,” I muttered. “She gave it mouth to mouth, and then killed it.”

  “You never know,” Owen said.

  “So what made it stop breathing?”

  “The medical examiner is crying suffocation. But that’s not conclusive.”

  I climbed onto a stool beside the pathologist. “Tell me more.”

  “There are petechiae in the lungs, which suggests asphyxia, but they could have formed before or after death. As for the bruising on the neonate’s lips, all that means is that it was pressed up tightly against something. That something could have been the mother’s collarbone, for all we know. In fact, if the newborn was suffocated with something soft, like the shirt it was wrapped in or the mother’s hand, the findings are virtually indistinguishable from SIDS.”

  He reached forward and took from my hand the glass slide I’d been absently playing with. “Bottom line: the baby could very well have died without anyone laying a hand on him. At thirty-two weeks, it’s a viable neonate, but just barely.”

  I frowned. “Would the mother have known if the baby was dying right before her eyes?”

  “Depends. If it was choking on mucus, she could have heard it. If it was suffocating, she’d see it gasping, turning blue.” He turned off his microscope and slipped the slide—marked clearly BABY FISHER—into a small box containing others.

  I tried to imagine Katie paralyzed by fear, by the awareness of this tiny premature infant struggling to