Plain Truth (29 page)

“You see her,” Katie murmured, her heart lifting. She dropped the dowsing rods and threw her arms around Adam. “You can see my sister!” Belatedly suspicious, she drew back to quiz him. “What color are her skates?”

“Black. And they look like hand-me-downs.”

“And her dress?”

“Kind of green. Light, like sherbet.”

Adam led her to the bench at the edge of the pond. “Tell me what happened that night.”

Katie painted with words: Jacob's escape to the barn, the spangles on the figure-skating champion she'd been dreaming about, the scrape of Hannah's blades on the thin patches of ice. “I was supposed to be looking out for her, and instead all I could think of was me,” she said finally, miserably. “It was my fault.”

“You can't think that. It was just something horrible that happened. “ He touched Katie's cheek. “Look at her. She's happy. You can feel it.”

Katie lifted her face to his. “You've already told me that the ones who come back, the ones who become ghosts, have pain left behind. If she's so happy, Adam, why is she still here?”

“What I told you,” Adam gently corrected, “is that the ones who come back have an emotional connection to the world. Sometimes it's pain, sometimes it's anger … but Katie, sometimes it's just love.” His words rose softly between them. “Sometimes they stay because they don't want to leave someone behind.”

She remained perfectly still as Adam bent toward her. She waited for him to kiss her, but he didn't. He stopped just a breath away, fighting for the willpower to keep from touching her
.

Katie knew he would be leaving the next day, knew that he moved in a world that would never be her own. She placed her palms on his cheeks. “Will you haunt me?” she whispered, and met his lips halfway
.

Katie was cleaning the tack used by the mules and by Nugget when a voice startled her.

“They made you pick up my chores,” Jacob said sadly. “I never even thought to ask you about it.”

Her hand at her throat, she whirled around. “Jacob!”

He opened his arms, and she flew into them. “Does Mam know—”

“No,” he said, cutting her off. “And let's keep it that way.” He hugged her tightly and then held her at arm's length. “Katie, what's happened?”

She buried her face against his chest again. He smelled of pine and ink, and was so solid, so strong for her. “I don't know,” she murmured. “I thought I did, but now I can't be sure.”

She felt Jacob distance himself again, and then his eyes dipped down to her apron. “You had … a baby,” he said uneasily, then swallowed. “You were pregnant when you last saw me.”

She nodded and bit her lower lip. “Are you awful mad about it?”

He slid his hand down her arm and squeezed her hand. “I'm not mad,” he said, sitting down on the edge of a wagon. “I'm sorry.”

Katie sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I am too,” she whispered.

Mary Esch came visiting on Sunday, wearing Rollerblades and bearing a Frisbee. Ellie could have run up and hugged the girl. It was just what Katie needed in light of these newfound recollections about the baby—a moment to just be a teenager again, without any responsibilities. While Ellie washed the dishes from lunch, Mary and Katie ran around the front yard, their skirts belling as they leaped into the air to snatch the neon disc.

Hot and winded, the girls collapsed on the grass outside the kitchen window, which Ellie had opened to catch the faint breeze. She could hear snatches of conversation drifting up over the rush of the faucet: “… seen the fly that landed on Bishop Ephram's nose,” “… asked about you,” “… not so lonely, not really.”

Mary closed her eyes and rubbed the cold glass of a root beer bottle against her forehead. “I think it's hotter than any summer I ever remember,” she said.

“No.” Katie smiled. “You just put things out of your mind when they're not right in front of you, is all.”

“Still, it's awful hot.” She put down the bottle and fluted her skirt over her bare toes, unsure of what else to say.

“Mary, has it got so bad that all we can talk about is the weather?” Katie said quietly. “Why don't you ask me what you really want to ask?”

Mary looked into her lap. “Is it awful, being shunned?”

Katie shrugged. “It's not so bad. The mealtimes are tough, but I have Ellie with me, and my Mam tries to make it all work out okay.”

“And your Dat?”

“My Dat isn't so good at trying to make it all work out,” she admitted. “But that's how he is.” She took her friend's hand. “In six weeks, it'll all go back to being the way it was.”

If anything, this made Mary look even more upset. “I don't know about that, Katie.”

“Well, sure you do. I've made my things right. Even if Bishop Ephram asks me to step down at communion time, I won't have to be under the
bann.”

“That's not what I mean,” Mary murmured. “It's the way others might act.”

Katie slowly turned. “If they can't forgive my sin, they shouldn't be my friends.”

“For some people, it's going to be harder to pretend nothing happened.”

“It's the good Christian thing to do,” Katie said.

“Ja
, but it's hard to be Christian when it was your girl,” Mary answered quietly. She fiddled with the strings of her
kapp
. “Katie, I think Samuel might want to see someone else.”

Katie felt the air go out of her, like a pillow punched in the middle. “Who told you that?”

Mary did not answer. But the red burn in her friend's cheeks, the obvious discomfort at bringing up the very private notion of a beau, made Katie reali2e exactly what had happened. “Mary Esch,” she whispered. “You
wouldn't.”

“I didn't want to! I pushed him away after he tried to kiss me!”

Katie got to her feet, so angry she was shaking. “Some friend you are!”

“I am, Katie. I came here so you wouldn't have to hear it from someone else.”

“I wish you hadn't.”

Mary nodded slowly, sadly. She pulled her socks from the bellies of her Rollerblades and buckled the skates onto her feet. Gliding smoothly out of the driveway, she did not look back.

Katie held her elbows tight at her sides. Any movement, she thought, and she might fly apart in a thousand different pieces. She heard the screen door open and slam, but she remained staring over the fields, where Samuel was working with her father.

“I heard,” Ellie said, touching her shoulder from behind. “I'm sorry.”

Katie tried to keep her eyes wide, so wide that the tears in them couldn't quite trickle over the edges. But then she turned and threw herself into Ellie's arms. “It's not supposed to be like this,” she cried. “It wasn't supposed to happen this way.”

“Ssh. I know.”

“You don't know,” Katie sobbed.

Ellie's hand fell, cool, on the back of her neck. “You'd be surprised.”

Katie desperately wanted Dr. Polacci to like her. Ellie had said that the psychiatrist was being paid a great deal of money to come to the farm and meet with her. She knew that Ellie believed whatever Dr. Polacci had to say would be extremely useful when it came time for trial. She also knew that ever since she had told Dr. Cooper about the pregnancy, he and Ellie had been too stiff with each other, and Katie thought it was all somehow tied together.

The psychiatrist had puffy black hair and a face like the moon and a wide ocean of body. Everything about her urged Katie to jump, knowing that no matter how she landed, she'd be safe.

She smiled nervously at Dr. Polacci. They were sitting in the living room, alone. Ellie had fought to be there, but Dr. Polacci suggested that her presence might keep Katie silent. “I'm someone she confides in,” Ellie had argued.

“You're one more person to confess in front of,” the psychiatrist answered.

They talked in front of her like she was stupid, or a pet dog—like she had no opinion whatsoever about what was happening to her. In the end, Ellie had left. Dr. Polacci had made it clear that she was here to help Katie get acquitted. She'd said that Katie should tell her the truth, because she surely didn't want to go to jail. Well, Dr. Polacci was right on that count. So pretty much, Katie had spent the past hour telling her everything that she had told Dr. Cooper. She was careful about her choice of words—she wanted the most precise recollection. She wanted Dr. Polacci to go back to Ellie and say, “Katie's not cra2y; it's all right for the judge to let her go.”

“Katie,” Dr. Polacci asked now, drawing her attention, “what was going through your mind when you went to bed?”

“Just that I felt bad. And I wanted to go to sleep so that I could wake up and be better.”

The psychiatrist marked something down on her notepad. “Then what happened?”

She had been waiting for this, for the moment when the small flashes of light that had been bursting in her mind these past few days would fly from her mouth like a flock of scattering starlings. Katie could almost feel the cut of the pain again, slicing like a scythe from her back to her belly with such a sharp, reaching pull from inside that she found herself knotted in a ball by the time she could breathe again. “I hurt,” she whispered. “I woke up and the cramps were bad.”

Dr. Polacci frowned. “Dr. Cooper told me that you haven't been able to remember labor pains, or the birth of the baby.”

“I haven't,” Katie admitted. “The first thing that came to me was that I was pregnant—I told Dr. Cooper how I remembered trying to bend down and feeling something stuck in the middle there that I had to work my way around. And since then, I keep remembering things.”

“Like what?”

“Like that the light in the barn was already on, when it was way too early for the milking.” She shuddered. “And how I was trying and trying to hold it in, but I couldn't.”

“Did you realize that you were giving birth?”

“I don't know. I was awfully scared, because it hurt so much. I just knew that I had to be quiet, that if I yelled out or cried someone might hear.”

“Did your water break?”

“Not all at once, like my cousin Frieda's did when she had little Joshua, right in the middle of the barn-raising lunch. The ladies sitting on both sides of her on the bench got soaked. This was more like a trickle, every time I sat up.”

“Was there blood?”

“A little, on the insides of my legs. That's why I went outside—I didn't want it to get on the sheets.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wash 'em, but my Mam takes them off the beds. And I didn't want her to know what was happening.”

“Did you know you were going to go to the barn?”

“I didn't plan it, exactly. I never really got to thinking about what would happen … when it was time. I just knew that I had to get out of the house.”

“Did anyone in the household wake up as you left?”

“No. And there was no one outside, or in the barn. I went into the calving pen, because I knew it had the cleanest hay put out for the expecting cows. And then … well, it was like I wasn't there for a little while. Like I was somewhere else, just watching what was happening. And then I looked down, and it was out.”

“By ‘it' you mean the baby.”

Katie looked up, a little dazed to think of the result of that night in those terms. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Approximately two hundred to two hundred and fifty neonati-cides occur each year, Ms. Hathaway. And those are only the ones that are reported.” Teresa Polacci walked beside Ellie along the stream that bordered the farm. “In our culture, that's reprehensible. But in certain cultures, such as the Far East, neonaticide is still acceptable.”

Ellie sighed. “What kind of woman would kill her own newborn?” she asked rhetorically.

“One who's single, unmarried, pregnant for the first time with an unwanted baby conceived out of wedlock. They're usually young, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. They don't abuse drugs or alcohol, or have run-ins with the law. No, they're the girls who walk the neighbor's dog as a favor when they're on vacation; the ones who study hard to get good grades. Often they're overachievers, oriented toward pleasing their parents. They are passive and naïve, afraid of shame and rejection, and occasionally come from religious backgrounds where sex is not discussed.”

“I take it from your comments that you think Katie fits the mold.”

“In terms of the profile, and her religious upbringing, I've rarely seen a closer case,” Dr. Polacci said. “She certainly had more reason than most girls in this day and age to face shame and persecution both within her family and without if she admitted to premarital sex and pregnancy. Hiding it became the path of least resistance.”

Ellie glanced at her. “Hiding it suggests a conscious decision to cover up.”

“Yes. At some point she knew she was pregnant—and she intentionally denied it. Curiously enough, she wasn't the only one. There's a conspiracy of silence—the people around the girl usually don't want her to be pregnant, either, so they ignore the physical changes, or pretend to ignore them, which just plays into the system of denial.”

“So you don't believe that Katie went into a dissociative state.”

“I never said that. I do believe it's psychologically impossible to be in a dissociative state for the entire term of a pregnancy. Katie—like many other women I've interviewed who have committed neonaticide—consciously denied her pregnancy, yet then unconsciously dissociated at the time of the birth.”

“What do you mean?” Ellie asked.

“That's when the moment of truth occurs. These women are extremely stressed. The defense mechanism they've had in place—denial —is shattered by the arrival of the infant. They have to distance themselves from what's occurring, and most of these women—Katie included —will tell you it didn't feel like it was happening to them, or that they saw themselves but couldn't stop it—a true out-of-body experience. Sometimes the appearance of the baby even triggers a temporary psychosis. And the more out of touch with reality the women are at that moment, the more likely they are to harm their newborns.