The Sabbathday River (24 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“Yes,” he said, evidently confirming his own memories. “‘Sure it bothered me. But I couldn't do anything about it. And it was up to her. If she'd gotten rid of it I would have been happy, but I wasn't going to make a big thing.'”
Heather couldn't speak. Her eyes were wet suddenly, and uselessly she willed herself not to cry.
“I've upset you,” Charter observed. “I am sorry.”
Heather said nothing.
“Not very gentlemanly, was he?”
Fuck you, she thought, surprising herself.
“Still, he was more than willing to go on having sex with you, anyway. A lot of men probably wouldn't even have done that.”
Heather wept. She couldn't help that. But she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of answering him.
“And when the baby was born, was he there? Oh no …” He consulted the same papers, flipped a page ahead. “His own son had been
born a week earlier. It would have been hard for him to get away, I suppose. But surely he contributed to Polly's upkeep? Even if he couldn't spare time away from the wife, he would surely have given you some money to help out. Just,” Charter said, “to demonstrate his responsibility.”
“No money,” Heather managed. “I wouldn't have asked.”
“Just to demonstrate … his paternity, then.”
Through her tears, she seethed. “Ashley knew he was the father.”
“Did he?”
From afar, Polly wailed. Heather leaped to her feet. “Give me my daughter!”
“No,” Charter said simply. “Not right now.”
“Right now!” Heather screamed. “Right now!”
He sat, impassive.
“Polly is crying.” She waited for him to deny this, but he didn't.
“Nonetheless, Lucy can take care of her. I'm sure we won't be much longer.”
This gave her pause. She felt this bright thing—home, her own child in her own arms—danghng before her. Anything was worth that. Even this. She glanced at the clock. It was seven o'clock. Polly's bedtime was seven-thirty. She could still make it back to the safety of her own routine.
“All right.” She breathed deeply.
“Five months after your daughter's birth, you and Mr. Deacon were having sex in his car in the woods near the Sabbathday River. His wife and some of her friends followed you and confronted you. You fled the scene—”
“Fled the scene?”
she asked incredulously. “I left. With Ashley.”
“Yes. Shortly thereafter, he terminated your association and returned to his wife. Sue Deacon has just had a second baby. Maybe you knew.”
Heather nodded, though she hadn't heard. She'd seen Sue once, over the summer, from her car. She'd known Sue was pregnant.
“And you, by coincidence, were also pregnant.”
“No,” Heather said. She shook her head once, twice. Then she said it again. “No.”
“You were pregnant a second time, with Ashley's child.”
“No.”
“Conceived at the end of your affair. Perhaps even at your last sexual contact with him.”
“I said no. How many times?”
“This time, it seems to me, you wouldn't have been so happy about being pregnant. Your boyfriend had gone back to his wife. Your grandmother, I understand, had passed away. You were all alone, and you were pregnant.”
“This is completely untrue.” She gave a choked laugh.
“This time you did not flaunt your pregnancy. You didn't tell anybody about your pregnancy. Not even the father of the child. Conversely, you did not choose to terminate your pregnancy. May I ask why not?”
“Because there wasn't one,” she said tightly. “I wasn't.”
“You did not seek medical help. The midwife who delivered your daughter did not hear from you. Over these past few months you stayed mostly at home, and when you went out you wore large shirts and sweaters, even in the heat.” He paused, and even smiled. “That must have been uncomfortable!”
“I never lost the weight,” she said, her voice ragged. “From Polly. I never got it off. And I … I'm still nursing my daughter. You know, not all the time, but once or twice a day. It keeps you fat. I read that.”
“Really,”
Charter said. “I didn't know that.”
They looked at each other. Heather was starting to get her face under control, though it stung a bit.
“Well, I must say, you don't look fat to me,” he offered.
“I've … I had the stomach flu last week. I didn't eat for a few days. And I threw up,” she added.
“How awful for you,” he said dryly. “And still you didn't call the doctor?”
“Well, no. It was only a stomach flu.”
She looked up at the clock. Polly would not make her bedtime.
“Would you like to see a doctor now?” Charter said. His voice was quiet but his tone intent. Very carefully, Heather shook her head. “But why not? Stomach flus can be very unpleasant.”
“No, thank you. I'm fine.”
“And Polly didn't catch your flu?”
“No.” She smiled brightly. “Lucky.”
“Very.” He frowned down at his hands. “Oh no, Miss Pratt. How long are we going to go on like this? How much time are we going to waste?”
“Listen,” she said, “I want to go to the bathroom.”
He looked at her blankly, as if he didn't understand.
“The bathroom.” She felt as if she were in school. Was she supposed to raise her hand? “Please.”
“Are you ill? More of your stomach flu, perhaps?”
“No. I just … I need to use the bathroom.” She felt her face get hot. “To pee. All right?”
“Soon,” he said. “Let's try to move forward.”
“Forward to
what
? I don't even know what's going on! I told you I didn't have a baby, and I sure don't know anything about that baby Naomi found. It wasn't mine!”
“Well, possibly you have some idea whose it was, then.”
“I have no idea!” she shouted. “I don't know whose. It could be anyone's. It could be …” She knew she shouldn't say this, but couldn't interrupt herself. “It could be Sue Deacon's, for all I know. Did you haul
her
in here?”
He got to his feet slowly and looked down at her. He was not tall, but dense, graceless beneath his good gray jacket and slightly frayed tie. For the first time, something in his look made her feel irreversibly powerless, as if she had already been locked away for life at his specific mercy, and he a merciless man.
“Please tell me,” Charter said, “that you are not accusing Sue Deacon of murdering that child.”
Then, in addition to her fear, she felt ashamed.
“I need a little break, Miss Pratt. I'll be back in a few minutes. Please think carefully about how we are going to proceed.”
And he left her, sweeping the files away from her off the table as he went, closing the door deliberately behind him.
The room had changed in the past hour. It had seemed small when he led her in, a great table with a channel of space around the edges, and no windows, but now it felt downright stunted, as if it had been made for a person of abnormally minuscule dimensions. What could you do in such a little place but imprison people, or frighten them? Her bladder ached. She moved her feet beneath the table and brooded over its surface: beige flecked with other beige. The cinder blocks were painted beige, too. She watched the secondhand sweep around its course a few times. She was trying not to think about any of this.
But the quiet prodded at her, the absence of human voices. She even, for a moment, missed
his
voice—Charter's. There was not silence, precisely, but a hiss of air from the walls, through which no sound percolated.
The clock, she thought, could no longer tell her exactly what time it was, since she found that she could no longer completely trust what it said. Not without evidence—
something,
some glimpse of the world. The world could have disappeared, she thought. It could have just gone away, as he had gone away, shutting the door behind it, leaving her in this beige tomb lit with fluorescent glare and lacking a toilet, and she wouldn't ever see Polly again.
So Heather started to cry, but softly, only for herself. She had yet to make any sense at all about this—not only about this man and this room and the police coming to her house, but about the baby herself. And the baby herself had begun to leave her, mercifully. Whatever parts of Heather she had taken along were justifiable losses, too, so long as the baby went and did not return. And Polly …
Panic surged inside her. She jerked to her feet. She hadn't heard Polly in … Oh, the clock was useless! Polly was gone. They had locked her in the room and gone away with her daughter.
She had to get out
.
“Hey!” Heather shouted, first experimentally, then again, louder. She went around the table to the door. She banged on the door with her fist, then tried the knob. The door was locked. “Hey! I need to go to the bathroom!”
Silence. Dread ran through her, but she backed away from the door, determined not to compound her fear by trying again, and again hearing nothing. She walked back around the table, one arm braced above it for support, and sat in her chair again. Then she put her head down. All this … this thing, this weird episode she was mired in, would pass away if she just kept going forward, and she would remember this night—it was night now, if the clock was even remotely right—as some strange and obnoxious inconvenience, like one of those nights when Polly was little and up at strange hours, reading darkness for day. Like an airplane trip must be, she thought, taking off in the night and arriving in the day, or vice versa. It wasn't terrible, after all, but she wanted it over. When he came back, she would do whatever she could do to make it over. Whatever he wanted her to do. Her palms, cupped, made a bed for her forehead. Both were clammy. The door opened.
Charter came in, followed by the sheriff, Erroll. Erroll was bigger, but he hung back and looked a little unsure. He even stood till after Charter had sat in his seat again. Charter slapped down the file in its place and flipped the top cover open, beginning to read, nonchalantly.
Heather noted, with disbelief, an abandoned crumb in the corner of his mouth. Then Erroll closed the door and took the seat next to him.
Heather said, “Listen, do I need a lawyer or something?”
Nelson looked at Charter. Charter frowned. “I don't know. Do you need a lawyer? Have you done something wrong?”
“No!” said Heather.
“Then why would you need a lawyer? I don't understand.”
She didn't understand either. But she was scared. She wanted Polly, and she wanted to go home. She'd thought when you mentioned a lawyer they were supposed to stop, but he looked as if he had no intention of stopping.
“All the same,” she said bravely, “I think I'd like to talk to one. If you don't mind.”
Heather saw Erroll lean close to Charter and speak in his ear. Charter's face never changed. He expressed himself with one dismissive grunt.
“I don't think you understand, Miss Pratt. It's certainly appropriate to call a lawyer if a person is under arrest. But that's not the case here. You're helping us, and as soon as you are finished helping us, you can go home. Don't you want that?”
“Yes,” said Heather poignantly.
“All right, then.” He was complacent.
“Where is Polly?” Heather said. Her voice came out harsh, but really she was just trying to get the words out.
“Fine,” Charter said. Erroll glanced at him, then at the table.
“Not
how. Where?
”
He looked up. “I said she's fine. Don't worry.” And when he saw, to his apparent amazement, that even this wealth of information did not placate her, he sat back in his chair. “I've arranged for Polly to spend the night at Officer Franks's house. She'll be just fine.”
Heather stared at him. Monologues of outrage raced over her tongue and fled, unspoken, leaving her depleted of language—even, incredibly, of anger. It was only as she had thought. They had taken Polly away, that was clear. It wasn't as if she didn't know what she had to do.
“I had a baby,” Heather said.
Charter pursed his lips. “Really.”
“I had a baby. I'm sorry I didn't say so. But it died.”
“Did it, now?” He reached into his breast pocket and extracted a pen. “You don't mind if I write this down, do you?”
She was breathing deeply. It hadn't been hard, after all. Not as hard as she'd thought. So someone knew—the earth hadn't blown apart.

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