The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  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 naïveté, 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