Plain Truth (50 page)

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 this a direct examination, or
As the World Turns?”

Shaken out of my reverie, I felt myself blush. “Sustained,” Judge Ledbetter said. “Ms. Hathaway, could you flip the channel back to
The People's Court?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Sorry.” I cleared my throat and deliberately turned away from Coop. “When Katie found out that she was pregnant, what did she do?”

“Nothing. She shoved the idea out of her mind. She denied it. She procrastinated. You know how it is when you're a kid, and you close your eyes and think you're invisible? Well, the same principle was at work. If she didn't say out loud, ‘I'm pregnant'—she wasn't. Ultimately, if she admitted to herself that she was pregnant, she would have to admit it to her church, too—confess publicly to her sins and be shunned for a brief time, after which she'd be forgiven.”

“Ignoring her pregnancy—that sounds like a deliberate decision.”

“It's not, because she really didn't have a choice. In her mind it was the only sure way to keep from being excluded from her community.”

“She couldn't hide it when she went into labor. What happened then?”

“Quite obviously,” Coop said, “that denial mechanism broke down, and her mind scrambled for some other way to keep herself from admitting to the pregnancy. When I first met Katie, she told me that she felt sick at dinner, went to bed early, and remembered nothing until she woke up. Of course, the facts indicate that sometime during those hours, she had a baby.”

“That was the new coping mechanism—a memory loss?”

“A memory gap, due to dissociation.”

“How do you know Katie wasn't dissociating from the minute she found out she was pregnant?”

“Because then she'd probably have multiple personality disorder. Anyone who fragments off her consciousness for that many months would develop another identity. However, it is possible to split off one's consciousness to survive brief periods of trauma, and for Katie, that's entirely consistent.” He hesitated. “It's less important to understand which defense mechanism she used, and whether it was conscious or unconscious. For Katie, it's more crucial to understand why she felt a need to protect herself from the knowledge of pregnancy and birth, period.”

I nodded. “Did she eventually recall what happened during and after the birth?”

“To a point,” Coop said. “She remembers being afraid to get blood on the sheets of her bed. She remembers going to the barn to give birth, and being incredibly afraid. She remembers cutting the cord and tying it off. She knows that she picked up the infant and cuddled him. Quieted him.” He held up his pinkie. “She remembers giving him her finger to suckle. She closed her eyes, because she was so tired, and when she woke up the infant was gone.”

“Based on your knowledge of Katie, what do you think happened to that infant?”

“Objection,” George said. “This calls for speculation.”

“Your Honor, every witness the prosecutor put on speculated about this issue,” I pointed out. “As Katie's psychiatrist, Dr. Cooper is far more qualified than anyone else to comment on this.”

“Overruled, Mr. Callahan. Dr. Cooper, you may answer the question.”

“I believe that the baby died in her arms, for whatever medical reasons premature infants die. Then she hid the body—not well, because she was acting like a robot at the time.”

“What makes you believe this?”

“Again, it goes back to being Amish. To bring an illegitimate baby into the Amish community is upsetting, but not ultimately tragic. Katie would have been shunned for a brief time, and then accepted back into the fold, because children are treasured by the Amish. Eventually, after the stress of birth, Katie would have had to face the fact that she'd borne an illegitimate child, but I believe she'd have been able to handle it once the baby was alive and there and real to her—she loved children, she loved the baby's father, and she could have rationalized shunning on the grounds that something beautiful had come from her mistake.”

Coop shrugged. “However, the baby died in her arms while she was passed out from exhaustion. She woke up, covered with blood from delivery and holding the dead newborn. In her mind, she blamed herself for the baby's death: he had died because he wasn't conceived in wedlock, within the Amish church.”

“Let me get this straight, Doctor. You don't believe Katie killed her baby?”

“No, I don't. Killing her own infant would have made it virtually impossible for Katie, in the long run, to be accepted back into the community. Although I'm no expert on pacifist societies, I think deliberately confessing to murder would most likely fall under that category. Since inclusion in the community was the foremost thought in her mind for the entire pregnancy, it was certainly with her at the moment of birth, as well. If she'd woken up to a live baby, I think she would have confessed to her sin in church, raised the baby with her parents, and gone on with her life. But as it was, that didn't happen. I think that she woke up, saw the dead infant, and panicked— she was going to be shunned for an illegitimate birth, and she didn't even have a child to sweeten that reproof. So her mind reflexively kicked into coping gear, and tried to remove the evidence that there had been either a birth or a death—in essence, so that there would be no reason to exclude her from her community.”

“Did she know she was hiding the body at the time she was doing it?”

“I assume Katie hid the baby's body while she was still in a dissociative state, because to this day she doesn't remember doing it. She can't let herself remember, because it's the only way she can live with her grief and her shame.”

That was the point at which Coop and I had planned to cut off the direct examination. But suddenly, on a hunch, I crossed my arms. “Did she ever tell you what happened to the baby?”

“No,” Coop said guardedly.

“So this whole scenario—the baby's death and Katie's sleepwalking stint to hide the body—that's something you came up with entirely on your own.”

Coop blinked at me, confused, and with good reason. “Well … not entirely. I based my conclusions on my conversations with Katie.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said dismissively. “But since she didn't actually tell you what happened that night, isn't it possible that Katie murdered her baby in cold blood, and stuck it in the tack room afterward?”

I was leading, but I knew that George wouldn't have objected if his life depended on it. Coop sputtered, utterly confused.
“Possible
is a very big word,” he said slowly. “If you're talking about the feasibility of certain—”

“Just answer the question, Dr. Cooper.”

“Yes. It's possible. But not probable.”

“Is it possible that Katie gave birth, held her baby boy, swaddled her baby boy, and cried after discovering it had died in her arms?”

“Yes,” Coop said. “Now,
that's
probable.”

“Is it possible that Katie fell asleep holding her live infant, and that a stranger came into the barn and smothered it, and hid it while she was unconscious?”

“Sure, it's possible. Unlikely, but possible.”

“Can you say for certain that Katie did not kill her baby?”

He hesitated. “No.”

“Can you say for certain that Katie did kill her baby?”

“No.”

“Would it be fair to say that you have doubts about what happened that night?”

“Yes. Don't we all?”

I smiled at him. “Nothing further.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Cooper, but the defendant never actually said that her baby died of natural causes, right?”