The Sabbathday River (51 page)

Read The Sabbathday River Online

Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
2.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The flash, mercury-fast, of hope: Polly hers, always. Naomi, shocked, pushed it away.
“Not true. Don't think that!”
“And even if I did,” she wailed, “I can't live here anymore. They hate me here. Even if I won, where would I go?”
Naomi shook her head, but not because she disagreed. The problem of what would happen to Heather after was far afield. From where they all sat, there was not yet a glimmer of an after. And so she sat, watching Heather through the mesh, her head bent forward with its rough, hacked hair, her shoulders in a perpetual, arrhythmic shudder. The institutional uniform, a kind of army-navy house dress, puckered across her lap where she was thinning and thinning, withering back to the bone. And still Naomi could not quite—not quite, not completely—be moved, for which she did not forgive herself. She thought, without feeling herself reach back over the hours past, to the morning, the chilly park bench, and Judith, how she had wept with her morning coffee cold in her hands. How long ago that had been, she thought, and how much had happened since: the women of Dartmouth, Ann Chase and Randa
Burns, Nelson Erroll and the stunning hilarity of that green address book with its single name. She thought how she had sat there so long ago, watching Judith weep, just as she was sitting here now, watching Heather, and how she did not understand why this was always her place, this comforting hand and tempered tone reaching out into the unknowable void of another human being.
Polly's fingers were sharp on her skin. Naomi, unthinkingly, plucked them away, and the little girl suddenly gave out a bleak cry of fear. Then, with her other hand, her other little-girl fist, she reached forward to the mesh, to her mother, and said, her voice piercing and clear, the word: Mama.
Heather, as if the air were choked from her throat, looked up and was silent.
“Mama,” Polly said. But she was not smiling, and she did not sound happy. She pointed through the mesh, which was wide. She leaned forward, releasing Naomi's shirt. “Mama.”
Heather's hand touched her own neck, between the clavicles. She was looking intently at her daughter. “Polly, sweetheart.” She leaned forward until her face and chest were up against the wire. Naomi leaned forward, too, and put the baby up close. Polly put her hand through the wires and reached the place her mother was touching, pushing Heather's hand away. She stared at this triangle of white skin, and then, quite suddenly, started to wail.
“Polly,” Naomi said. She started to pull her back, onto her own lap, but Polly cried louder. Heather closed her eyes.
“I'm sorry,” said Naomi. “I don't understand.”
“It's my necklace.” Heather's voice was flat. “They took it away.”
“What necklace?” said Naomi.
“The one Ashley gave me. I always wore it, and they made me take it off. Those people.”
Meaning Charter, who had taken it away, and Judith, who had put it in a plastic bag for strangers to finger and examine. Now Naomi understood.
“She loved to play with it,” Heather explained. “She held on to it. Oh, sweetie.”
But Polly wouldn't look at her. She looked at her mother's neck, livid and dismayed.
“I can't,” Heather said. She touched her own throat. “I wish I could.”
She smiled through her streaky face. “I don't think she recognizes me without it, you know.”
“Oh, I'm sure she does,” said Naomi, her voice unnaturally hearty.
Heather got to her feet. She picked up the three white roses and crushed the paper cones together. “You take them home,” she said, pushing them through the mesh. The lavender flyer was left, facedown, on the table. “And take her away, Naomi. Please.” Heather smiled weakly. “I know she's in good hands. But you were wrong about what you said, about how I was a good mother. I'm not a good mother at all, you know.”
That isn't true, Naomi started to say, but she saw from Heather's face that she did not wish to be told otherwise. She watched Heather turn her back to them and knock for the guard. Polly turned away and gripped Naomi around the neck, her fist tight at Naomi's collar, as the door opened and her mother slipped away. For a minute Naomi stared after her, enervated, depressed, and relieved. Then she gathered up the white roses and her bags and her little girl, and went home.
Horses and Zebras
THE PEYTON COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER HAD A shiny scalp, ringed by a fringe of white hair, and eyes visibly blue even across the ten feet between him and Naomi. His name was Petersen and his accent vaguely Southern, though he had a way of swallowing his own words that made it hard to tell for certain. When he was called the following morning, he walked easily to the front of the room, gave his name and title, and tried to make his tall, densely built body comfortable in the comfortless witness seat. He seemed very much at ease with Charter, which only made sense: their reputations, it occurred to Naomi, were symbiotic, and if one were to fail or err in some way, the other must suffer, too.
Charter began with the Sabbathday River baby. He still had Randa Burns's lingering evocation of a confused and tragic Heather to contend with, and his object was to replace this with the brutal imagery of two dead babies. It didn't take long. He passed photographs to the jury and waited helpfully until they were incapacitated by shock, one man green and three of the women weeping. No one was looking at Heather now.
Dead babies, after all, were incontrovertibly dead babies, and no one knew that better than Naomi. For the first time since the trial began, she did not have the option of resentment. She braced herself against what was to come.
The Sabbathday River baby, Petersen testified, was a full-term infant girl, weighing—at the time of examination—six pounds and eight ounces, with no evident deformities or defects. It was impossible to say how old the baby had been at the time of her death, but she had certainly breathed on her own. Her stomach was empty—no one had fed her—but there was the beginning of repair of the umbilical stump, which had evidently been cut with a sharp instrument. In her sternum, a single small puncture or stab wound was evident, round in shape and two inches deep. The wound appeared bleached, Petersen said, with no blood and no surrounding redness. Naomi remembered, as he spoke, the moment she had turned the baby over in the river, and the first jag of her thoughts on seeing it: the bloodless laceration in the medieval painting, Christ's immaculate suffering on the cross. Cause of death was this puncture wound directly into the baby's heart.
“How did you go about determining the shape of the weapon?” Charter said.
Petersen looked over at the jury and began his lesson. “You can never take the shape of the wound at face value,” he said. “There are some layers of tissues beneath the skin that would pull the wound apart, and others that would push it together or distort it in some way. What we do,” he informed them, “is take the edges of the wound and tape them together. Scotch tape works fine.” He smiled, pleased to enlighten them with this fascinating tidbit. “And when you've done that, you can see the shape of the wound—whether, for example, it's a puncture or a slice, and whether it's a double-edged wound or a single-edged wound. This baby's wound was a round puncture, consistent with a very narrow spike.”
“What kind of instruments would you associate with that shape, Dr. Petersen?” Charter smiled obsequiously.
“Oh.” Petersen thought, lifting his eyes to the ceiling. “I suppose an awl, or an ice pick. Possibly a nail.”
Charter went to the evidence table. The thin knitting needle glittered blue beneath its plastic cover. He lifted it, held it up to show the jury, and handed it to the medical examiner. “And this?”
He frowned at it, though he must have seen it already, Naomi thought. “Yes. This would fit.”
“In your opinion, this knitting needle could have caused the fatal wound in the baby's chest?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right.” Charter nodded. “Were you able to determine a time of death for this baby?”
The baby had been found on September 22, Petersen said. At that time, it had been dead between two and three days. Given that it was several hours old at the time of its death—the early reactive changes of the umbilical stump attested to that—this implied a birthdate of September 19 or 20. More exact dates were not possible.
“Fine,” Charter said. “Now let's talk a little bit about the other baby.”
More pictures. These were worse, Naomi thought, shuddering. Even more than the first, this was the image she still had to tear through in the mornings when she woke, this chalky mask of white from under the muddy water. Once, she dreamed that she had pulled it not from the pond but from a stone, hauling her weight against it as if the baby were Excalibur, the sword, resisting and then surrendering to her hand—her hand from that unremembered world above.
One of the jurors, a man, signaled the bailiff. A break was called, but only long enough for them to visit the bathroom. Heather, too, was taken away for a few minutes, led out in a soft stumble of movement. She looked pliable as paper, her line of sight imprecise. When she returned, murmuring swelled as she passed, was turned, and sat. Only Naomi, close enough to see, caught the small but constant tremble off the surface of her white skin. Hollowed out, a carapace where a person had been. Charter kept his seat, as did Petersen. Judith, who seemed happy for the extra time, wrote quickly on her pad.
When the jurors returned, Charter moved quickly to take advantage of their vulnerability. The baby found in Heather's pond was a full-term baby girl, weighing—at examination—seven pounds one ounce (though its long sojourn underwater, Petersen said, rendered this suspect as an accurate birth weight), with no apparent defects or deformities. Pockets of air were visible by X-ray both in the baby's lungs and in her intestines.
“And what is the significance of that, Dr. Petersen?”
“It implies that the baby breathed air. It implies that this was a live birth.”
“The baby wasn't born dead, in other words?”
“Exactly. Though I do have to say that the conditions are far from ideal for a definitive forensic finding. That is my conclusion.”
“Based on your years of experience, your conclusion is that the pond baby was born healthy and breathed?”
“Yes.”
“And in what manner, based on your experience, was the umbilical cord severed?”
“It was not severed. It was, in fact, still attached to the remains of the placenta.”
“So. The baby was born healthy. It breathed air. So far,” he editorialized, “we have a live birth and a viable child. Now what, in your opinion, and based on your years of experience, caused this baby's death?”
Petersen frowned. “Once again, these forensic conditions are not ideal. But to the best of my ability to tell, I conclude that the baby died of asphyxia due to manual strangulation and obstruction of the external airway.” He gave the jury an indulgent nod. “It was either strangled by choking around its neck or suffocated by covering its nose and mouth.”
Charter let this sink in, then he let it lie for a moment. He studiously shuffled his papers. Judith, for her part, tapped her pen impatiently.
“How long had this baby been in the water, Dr. Petersen?”
The tall man shook his head. “It's just not possible to say. I've estimated a period of between four and five weeks. The water was cold, which retarded decomposition, but there were certainly bacteria present within the body. Between four and five weeks is the best I can do.”
“I see.” Charter nodded calmly. “Now, on what date did you take possession of the remains of the pond baby?”
Petersen looked down at the notes he held in his lap. “October 20.”
“What would the calendar date between four and five weeks before October 20 have been, Doctor?”
“September 19 or 20,” he said firmly. “Roughly my estimated birth date for the Sabbathday River baby.”
“So it's entirely possible that these two little girls were born at the same time?”
Petersen nodded. The harsh fluorescent light glinted off his pink scalp. “Very much so.”
“And died at roughly the same time?”
“In my opinion,” he said, “yes.”
“Dr. Petersen, I thank you.” And indeed Charter bent forward in a half bow. He took his seat. Judith leaped up, so anxious she skipped the usual tug at the back of her jacket. She walked straight across the room and stood before him, drumming her yellow pad against her thigh. It was covered with scrawls, Naomi saw.
“Hello, Dr. Petersen,” Judith said. “I'm Judith Friedman.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
“Dr. Petersen,” she said, amiably enough, “are you asking us to believe that one young woman had a baby, cut its umbilical cord, and stabbed it to death with a knitting needle, then gave birth to a second baby, which she suffocated and threw into a pond with its umbilical cord unsevered and its placenta intact?”
“I am asking no such thing,” Petersen shook his head. “I am merely reporting my findings, based on my experience.”
Judith smiled. “Yes. Your years of experience, as I think you put it.” She cocked her head. “Dr. Petersen, do you consider yourself a competent and professional medical examiner?”
He looked blankly at her for a moment, and then his face hardened. “I do,” he said tightly. “I would be very offended if someone suggested otherwise.”
“I can understand that,” said Judith. But then she did it again. “Would you say that your methods are conscientious and thorough?”
“Without doubt,” he said, now visibly angry. “If someone has said otherwise, I would like to know it.”
She ignored this. “Dr. Petersen, when the body of the Sabbathday River baby was delivered to you, and you removed it to your office here in Peytonville, I take it you performed a physical examination as well as laboratory tests. Would that be correct?”
“Certainly.” But he volunteered nothing else. He was going to make her work for it.
“What are some of the laboratory tests you performed, Dr. Petersen?” Judith said, bearing down.
“In addition to a thorough autopsy, I ordered basic tissue and blood typing.”
She looked at him. Then let the moment stretch.
“And?”
Judith said finally.
“And
what?”
“And what other tests?”
“What other tests did you have in mind? The cause of death was quite obvious, I assure you.”
Judith nodded. “And the cause of death, you stated earlier, was the single stab wound to the heart.”
“Certainly,” said Petersen smugly.
“And you felt comfortable with your assumption that the infant's cause of death was, in fact, the stab wound.”
“I just said that,” he said impatiently. “Look, there's a famous thing they tell you in medical school. When you hear hoofbeats in Central Park, think horses, not zebras. Here we had a newborn infant with a stab wound. This isn't a difficult equation.”
“So you thought horses. You didn't think of doing, for example, a toxicology screening.”
He looked at her as if she was crazy. “No. And I didn't think of testing to see whether the cause of death was cancer, either. Should I have done that?”
“You didn't feel it was important.”
“Not unless there's evidence our newborn infant was a heroin addict, no.” He gave a little laugh, and looked at the jury, but they weren't laughing.
Judith nodded. She went back to her table and found a pink form which she read provocatively before looking up. “Dr. Petersen, do you recall allowing the defense's own pathologist to examine Infant A in your office?”
“That's standard,” Petersen commented.
“And do you recall releasing samples of the Sabbathday River infant's blood and tissue so that the defense in this case could order its own lab work?”
“That's also standard,” he said tightly. “Certainly I recall.”
“Do you recall signing this release form for the samples?” Judith asked, walking toward Petersen to hand him the pink sheet.

Other books

The Bicycle Thief by Franklin W. Dixon
Moonflower Madness by Margaret Pemberton
Dandelion Clocks by Rebecca Westcott
Catching Caitlin by Amy Isan
2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino
The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell
Stealing the Dragon by Tim Maleeny