The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  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.”

  “How did this contribute to your understanding of Katie?”

  “Well,” Coop said, “in Katie’s mind, difference is equated with shame, rejection, and failure. For Katie, the fear of being shunned is even more deeply rooted. She saw it happen to her brother, in a very extreme case, and absolutely did not want that to happen to herself. She wanted to get married, to have children . . . but she’d always assumed it would happen the way it happened to everyone else in her world. Discovering she was pregnant with an English man’s child, and unwed—both glaringly against the Amish norm—well, it led right to being shunned, which was something her mind wasn’t equipped to handle.”

  I was hearing him speak of Katie, but thinking of myself. My hand crept inside the jacket of my suit, resting over my abdomen. “What do you mean by that?”

  “She had been brought up to believe that there was only one way to get from point A to point B,” he said. “That if her life didn’t march down that path or turn out as perfectly as she had expected, it was unacceptable.”

  Coop’s words wrapped so tightly around me that breathing became an effort. “It wasn’t her fault,” I managed.

  “No,” Coop said softly. “I’ve been trying to get her to see that for a while, now.”

  The room narrowed, people falling away and sounds receding. “It’s hard to change the way you’ve always thought about things.”

  “Yes, and that’s why she didn’t. Couldn’t. That pregnancy,” Coop murmured, “it turned her world upside down.”

  I swallowed. “What did she do?”

  “She pretended it didn’t matter, when it was the most important thing in the world. When it had the power to change her life.”

  “Maybe . . . she was just afraid of taking that first step.”

  A profound silence had blanketed the courtroom. I watched Coop’s lips part, I waited for him to absolve me.

  “Objection!” George said. “Is