How great a matter a little fire kindleth!
-THE NEW TESTAMENT, James 3:5
WE SLEEP IN THE TINY CABIN, moored to its slip. Tight quarters, but that hardly seems to matter: all night long, she fits herself around me. She snores, just a little. Her front tooth is crooked. Her eyelashes are as long as the nail of my thumb.
These are the minutiae that prove, more than anything else, the difference between us now that fifteen years have passed. When you're seventeen, you don't think about whose apartment you want to sleep in. When you're seventeen, you don't even see the pearl-pink of her bra, the lace that arrows between her legs. When you're seventeen it's all about the now, not the after.
What I had loved about Julia—there, I've said it now—was that she didn't need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilted army-surplus jacket and combat boots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit.
No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.
After Julia, there weren't all that many women. None whose names I took the time to remember, anyway. It was far too complicated to maintain the facade; instead, I chose the coward's rocky route of one-night stands. Out of necessity—medical and emotional—I have gotten rather skilled at being an escape artist.
But there are a half-dozen times this past night when I had the opportunity to leave. While Julia was sleeping, I even considered how to do it: a note pinned to the pillow, a message scrawled on the deck with her cherry lipstick. And yet the urge to do this was nowhere near as strong as the need to wait just one more minute, one more hour.
From the spot where he's curled up on the galley table tight as a cinnamon bun, Judge raises his head. He whines a little, and I completely understand. Detangling myself from Julia's rich forest of hair, I slip out of the bed. She inches into the warm spot I've left behind.
I swear, it makes me hard again.
But instead of doing what comes naturally—that is, calling in sick with some latent strain of smallpox and making the clerk of the court reschedule the hearing so that I can spend the day getting laid—I pull on my pants and go above-deck. I want to make sure I'm at the courthouse before Anna, and need to shower and change. I leave Julia the keys to my car—it's a short walk to my place. It's only when Judge and I are on our way home that I realize unlike every other bloodshot morning that I have left a woman, I haven't fashioned some charming symbol of my exit for Julia, something to lessen the blow of abandonment upon waking.
I wonder if this was an oversight. Or if I have been waiting all this time for her to come back, so that I can grow up.
When Judge and I arrive at the Garrahy building for the hearing, we have to fight our way through the reporters who have lined up for the Main Event. They thrust microphones in my face, and inadvertently step on Judge's paws. Anna will take one look at walking this gauntlet, and bolt.
Inside the front door, I flag down Vern. "Get us some security out here, will you?" I tell him. "They're going to eat the witnesses alive." Then I see Sara Fitzgerald, already waiting. She is wearing a suit that most likely hasn't seen the outside of the plastic dry cleaner's bag for a decade, and her hair is pulled back severely into a barrette. She doesn't carry a briefcase, but a knapsack instead. "Good morning," I say evenly.
The door blows open and Brian enters, looking from Sara to me.
"Where's Anna?"
Sara takes a step forward. "Didn't she come here with you?"
"She was already gone when I got back from a call at five A.M. She left a note and said she'd meet me here." He glances at the door, at the jackals on the other side. "I bet she took off."
Again, there is the sound of a seal being breached, and then Julia surfs into the courthouse on a crest of shouts and questions. She smoothes back her hair, gets her bearings, then looks at me and loses them again.
"I'll find her," I say. Sara bristles. "No, I will." Julia looks at each of us. "Find who?"
"Anna is temporarily absent," I explain. "Absent?" Julia says. "As in disappeared?"
"Not at all." This isn't a lie, either. For Anna to have disappeared, she would have had to appear in the first place.
I realize that I even know where I am headed—at the same moment that Sara understands it, too. In that moment she lets me take the lead. Julia grabs my arm as I am walking toward the door. She shoves my car keys into my hand. "Now you do understand why this isn't going to work?"
I turn to her. "Julia, listen. I want to talk about what's going on between us, too. But this isn't the right time."
"I was talking about Anna. Campbell, she's waffling. She couldn't even show up for her own court date. What does that say to you?"
"That everyone gets scared," I answer finally, fair warning for all of us.
The shades to the hospital room are drawn, but that doesn't keep me from seeing the angel pallor of Kate Fitzgerald's face, the web of blue veins mapping out the last-chance path of medication running under her skin. Curled up on the foot of the bed is Anna.
At my command, Judge waits by the door. I crouch down. "Anna, it's time to go."
When the door to the hospital room opens, I'm expecting either Sara Fitzgerald or a doctor with a crash cart. Instead, to my shock, Jesse stands on the threshold. "Hey," he says, as if we are old friends.
How did you get here? I almost ask, but realize I don't want to hear the answer. "We're on our way to the courthouse. Need a lift?" I ask dryly.
"No thanks. I thought since everyone was going to be there, I'd stay here." His eyes do not waver from Kate. "She looks like shit."
"What do you expect," Anna answers, awake now. "She's dying."
Again, I find myself staring at my client. I should know better than most that motivations are never what they seem to be, but I still cannot figure her out. "We need to go."
In the car, Anna rides shotgun while Judge takes a seat in the back. She starts telling me about some crazy precedent she found on the internet, where a guy in Montana in 1876 was legally prohibited from using the water from a river that originated on his brother's land, even though it meant all his crops would dry up. "What are you doing?" she asks, when I deliberately miss the turn to the courthouse.
Instead I pull over next to a park. A girl with a great ass jogs by, holding on to the leash of one of those froufrou dogs that looks more like a cat. "We're gonna be late," Anna says after a moment. "We already are. Look, Anna. What's going on here?" She gives me one of those patented teenage looks, as if to say that there's no way she and I descended from the same evolutionary chain. "We're going to court."
"That's not what I'm asking. I want to know why we're going to court."
"Well, Campbell, I guess you cut the first day of law school, but that's pretty much what happens when someone files a lawsuit."
I level my gaze on her, refusing to be bested. "Anna, why are we going to court?"
She doesn't blink. "Why do you have a service dog?" I rap my fingers on the steering wheel and look out over the park. A mother pushes a stroller now, across the same spot where the jogger was, oblivious to the kid who's trying his best to crawl out. A titter of birds explodes from a tree. "I don't talk about this with anyone," I say.
"I'm not just anyone."
I take a deep breath. "A long time ago I got sick and wound up with an ear infection. But for whatever reason, the medicine didn't work and I got nerve damage. I'm totally deaf in my left ear. Which isn't such a big deal, in the long run, but there are certain lifestyle issues I couldn't handle. Like hearing a car approach, you know, but not being able to tell what direction it's coming from. Or having someone behind me at the grocery store who wants to pass by me in the aisle, but I don't hear her ask. I got trained with Judge so that in those circumstances, he could be my ears." I hesitate. "I don't like people feeling sorry for me. Hence, the big secret."
Anna stares at me carefully. "I came to your office because just for once, I wanted it to be about me instead of Kate."
But this selfish confession saws out of her sideways; it just doesn't fit. This lawsuit has never been about Anna wanting her sister to die, but simply that she wants a chance to live. "You're lying." Anna crosses her arms. "Well, you lied first. You hear perfectly fine."
"And you're a brat." I start to laugh. "You remind me of me."
"Is that supposed to be a good thing?" Anna says, but she's smiling. The park is starting to get more crowded. An entire school group walks the path, toddlers tethered together like sled-dog huskies, pulling two teachers in their wake. Someone zooms past on a racing bike, wearing the colors of the U.S. Postal Service. "C'mon. I'll treat you to breakfast."
"But we're late."
I shrug. "Who's counting?"
Judge DeSalvo is not a happy man; Anna's little field trip this morning has cost us an hour and a half. He glares at me when Judge and I hurry into his chambers for the pretrial conference. "Your Honor, I apologize. We had a veterinary emergency."
I feel, rather than see, Sara's mouth drop open. "That's not what opposing counsel indicated," the judge says.
I look DeSalvo right in the eye. "Well, it's what happened. Anna was kind enough to help me by keeping the dog calm while the sliver of glass was removed from his paw."
The judge is dubious. But there are laws against handicapped discrimination, and I'm playing them to the hilt; the last thing I want is for him to blame Anna for this delay. "Is there any way of resolving this petition without a hearing?" he asks.
"I'm afraid not." Anna may not be willing to share her secrets, which I can only respect, but she knows that she wants to go through with this.
The judge accepts my answer. "Mrs. Fitzgerald, I take it you're still representing yourself?"
"Yes, Your Honor," she says.
"All right then." Judge DeSalvo glances at each of us. "This is family court, Counselors. In family court, and especially in hearings like these, I tend to personally relax the rules of evidence because I don't want a contentious hearing. I'm able to filter out what is admissible and what is not, and if there's something truly objectionable, I'll listen to the objection, but I would prefer that we get through this hearing quickly, without worrying about form." He looks directly at me. "I want this to be as painless as possible for everyone involved."
We move into the courtroom—one that's smaller than the criminal courts, but intimidating all the same. I swing into the lobby to pick Anna up along the way. As we cross through the doorway, she stops dead. She glances at the vast paneled walls, the rows of chairs, the imposing bench. "Campbell," she whispers, "I won't have to stand up there and talk, right?"
The fact is, the judge will most likely want to hear what she has to say. Even if Julia comes out in support of her petition, even if Brian says he will help Anna, Judge DeSalvo may want her to take the stand. But telling her this right now is only going to get her all worked up—and that's not any way to start a hearing.
I think about the conversation in the car, when Anna called me a liar. There are two reasons to not tell the truth—because lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt. It's for both of these reasons that I give Anna this answer. "Well," I say, "I doubt it."
"Judge," I begin, "I know it's not traditional practice, but there's something I'd like to say before we start calling witnesses."
Judge DeSalvo sighs. "Isn't this sort of standing on ceremony exactly what I asked you not to do?"
"Your Honor, I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was important."
"Make it quick," the judge says.
I stand up and approach the bench. "Your Honor, all of Anna Fitzgerald's life she has been medically treated for her sister's good, not her own. No one doubts Sara Fitzgerald's love for all her children, or the decisions she's made that have prolonged Kate's life. But today we have to doubt the decisions she's made for this child."
I turn, and see Julia watching me carefully. And suddenly I remember that old ethics assignment, and know what I have to say. "You might remember the recent case of the firefighters in Worcester, Massachusetts, who were killed in a blaze started by a homeless woman. She knew the fire had started and she left the building, but she never called 911 because she thought she might get into trouble. Six men died that night, and yet the State couldn't hold this woman responsible, because in America—even if the consequences are tragic—you are not responsible for someone else's safety. You aren't obligated to help anyone in distress. Not if you're the one who started the fire, not if you're a passerby to a car wreck, not if you're a perfectly matched donor."
I look at Julia again. "We're here today because there's a. difference in our system of justice between what's legal and what's moral. Sometimes it's easy to tell them apart. But every now and then, especially when they rub up against each other, right sometimes looks wrong, and wrong sometimes looks right." I walk back to my seat, and stand in front of it. "We're here today," I finish, "so that this Court can help us all see a little more clearly."
My first witness is opposing counsel. I watch Sara walk to the stand unsteadily, a sailor getting her sea legs again. She manages to get herself into the seat and be sworn in without ever breaking her gaze away from Anna.
"Judge, I'd like permission to treat Mrs. Fitzgerald as a hostile witness."
The judge frowns. "Mr. Alexander, I truly would hope that both you and Mrs. Fitzgerald can stand to be civilized, here."
"Understood, Your Honor." I walk toward Sara. "Can you state your name?"
She lifts her chin a fraction. "Sara Crofton Fitzgerald."
"You are the mother of the minor child Anna Fitzgerald?"
"Yes. And also of Kate and Jesse."
"Isn't it true that your daughter Kate was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia at age two?"
"That's right."
"At that time did you and your husband decide to conceive a child who would be genetically programmed to be an organ donor for Kate, so that she could be cured?"
Sara's face hardens. "Not the words I would choose, but that was the story behind Anna's conception, yes. We were planning to use Anna's umbilical cord blood for a transplant."
"Why didn't you try to find an unrelated donor?"
"It's much more dangerous. The risk of mortality would have been far higher with someone who wasn't related to Kate."
"So how old was Anna when she first donated an organ or tissue to her sister?"
"Kate had the transplant a month after Anna was born."
I shake my head. "I didn't ask when Kate received it; I asked when Anna donated it. The cord blood was taken from Anna moments after birth, isn't that right?"
"Yes," Sara says, "but Anna wasn't even aware of it."
"How old was Anna the next time she donated some body part to Kate?"
Sara winces, just as I have expected. "She was five when she gave donor lymphocytes."
"What does that involve?"
"Drawing blood from the crooks of her arms."
"Did Anna agree to let you put a needle in her arm?"
"She was five years old," Sara answers.
"Did you ask her if you could put a needle in her arm?"
"I asked her to help her sister."
"Isn't it true that someone had to physically hold Anna down to get the needle in her arm?"
Sara looks at Anna, closes her eyes. "Yes."
"Do you call that voluntary participation, Mrs. Fitzgerald?" From the corner of my eye I can see Judge DeSalvo's brows draw together. "The first time you took lymphocytes from Anna, were there any side effects?"
"She had some bruising. Some tenderness."
"How long was it before you took blood again?"
"A month."
"Did she have to be held down that time, too?"
"Yes, but—"
"What were her side effects then?"
"The same." Sara shakes her head. "You don't understand. It wasn't like I didn't see what was happening to Anna, every time she underwent a procedure. It doesn't matter which of your children you see in that situation—every single time, it breaks you apart."
"And yet, Mrs. Fitzgerald, you managed to get past that sentiment," I say, "because you took blood from Anna a third time."
"It took that long to get all the lymphocytes," Sara says. "It's not an exact procedure."
"How old was Anna the next time she had to undergo medical treatment for her sister's well-being?"
"When Kate was nine she got a raging infection and—"
"Again, that's not what I asked. I want to know what happened to Anna when she was six."
"She donated granulocytes to fight Kate's infection. It's a process a lot like a lymphocyte donation."
"Another needle stick?"
"That's right."
"Did you ask her if she was willing to donate the granulocytes?"
Sara doesn't answer. "Mrs. Fitzgerald," the judge prompts.
She turns toward her daughter, pleading. "Anna, you know we never did any of these things to hurt you. It hurt all of us. If you got the bruises on the outside, then we got them on the inside."
"Mrs. Fitzgerald," I step between her and Anna. "Did you ask her?"
"Please don't do this," Sara says. "We all know the history. I'll stipulate to whatever it is you're trying to do in the process of crucifying me. I'd rather just get this part over with."
"Because it's hard to hear it hashed out again, isn't it?" I know I'm walking a fine line, but behind me there is Anna, and I want her to know that someone here is willing to go the distance for her. "Added up like this, it doesn't seem quite so innocuous, does it?"
"Mr. Alexander, what is the point of this?" Judge DeSalvo says. "I am well aware of the number of procedures Anna's undergone."
"Because we have Kate's medical history, Your Honor, not Anna's."
Judge DeSalvo looks between us. "Be brief, Counselor."
I turn to Sara. "Bone marrow," she says woodenly, before I can ask the question. "She was put under general anesthesia because she was so young, and needles were put into the crests of her hips to draw out the marrow."
"Was it one needle stick, like the other procedures?"
"No," Sara says quietly. "It was about fifteen."
"Into the bone?"
"Yes."
"What were the side effects for Anna this time around?"
"She had some pain, and was given some analgesics."
"So this time, Anna had to be hospitalized overnight… and she needed medication herself?"
Sara takes a minute to compose herself. "I was told that donating marrow isn't considered a particularly invasive procedure for a donor. Maybe I was just waiting to hear those words; maybe I needed to hear them at that time. And maybe I was not thinking as much of Anna as I should have been, because I was so focused on Kate. But I know beyond a doubt that—like everyone else in our family—Anna wanted nothing more than for her sister to be cured."
"Well, sure," I reply, "so that you'd stop sticking needles in her."
"Enough, Mr. Alexander," Judge DeSalvo interjects.
"Wait," Sara interrupts. "I have something to say." She turns tom e. "You think you can lay it all out in words, black-and-white, as if it's that easy. But you only represent one of my daughters, Mr.
Alexander, and only in this courtroom. I represent both of them equally, everywhere, every place. I love both of them equally, everywhere, every place."
"But you admitted that you've always considered Kate's health, not Anna's, in making these choices," I point out. "So how can you claim to love both of them equally? How can you say that you haven't been favoring one child in your decisions?"
"Aren't you asking me to do that very thing?" Sara asks. "Only this time, to favor the other child?"
WHEN YOU ARE. A KID you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you're born with, and eventually lose. Everyone under the age of seven is fluent in Ifspeak; go hang around with someone under three feet tall and you'll see. What if a giant funnelweb spider crawled out of that hole over your head and bit you on the neck? What if the only antidote for venom was locked up in a vault on the top of a mountain? What if you lived through the bite, but could only move your eyelids and blink out an alphabet? It doesn't really matter how far you go; the point is that it's a world of possibility. Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
During the first recess, Campbell takes me to a conference room for privacy and buys me a Coke that isn't cold. "So," he says. "What do you think so far?"
Being in the courtroom is weird. It's like I've turned into a ghost—I can watch what's going on, but even if I felt like speaking no one would be able to hear me. Add to that the very bizarre way I have to listen to everyone talk about my life as if they can't see me sitting right there, and you've landed in my surreal little corner of earth.
Campbell pops open his 7 UP and sits down across from me. He pours a little into a paper cup for Judge, and then takes a good long drink. "Comments?" he says. "Questions? Unadulterated praise for my skillful litigation?"
I shrug. "It's not like I expected."
"What do you mean?"
"I guess I figured when it started, I'd know for sure that I was doing the right thing. But when my mom was up there, and you were asking her all those questions…" I glance up at him. "That part about it not being simple. She's right."
What if I was the one who was sick? What if Kate had been asked to do what I've done? What if one of these days, some marrow or blood or whatever actually worked, and that was the end? What if I could look back on all this one day and feel good about what I did, instead of feeling guilty? What if the judge doesn't think I'm right?
What if he does?
I can't answer a single one of these, which is how I know that whether I'm ready or not, I'm growing up.
"Anna." Campbell gets up and comes around to my side of the table. "Now is not the time to start changing your mind."
"I'm not changing my mind." I roll the can between my palms. "I think I'm just saying that even if we win, we don't."
When I was twelve I started baby-sitting for twins who live down the street. They're only six, and they don't like the dark, so I usually wind up sitting between them on a stool that's shaped like the stubby foot of an elephant, toenails and all. It never fails to amaze me how quickly a kid can shut off an energy switch—they'll be climbing the curtains and bam, five minutes later, they're conked out. Was I ever like that? I can't remember, and it makes me feel ancient.
Every now and then one of the twins will fall asleep before the other one. "Anna," his brother will say, "how many years till I can drive?"
"Ten," I tell him.
"How many years till you can drive?"
"Three."
Then the talk will split off like the spokes of a spiderweb—what kind of car will I buy; what will I be when I grow up; does it suck to get homework every night in middle school. It's totally a ploy to stay up a little bit later. Sometimes I fall for it, mostly I just make him go to sleep. See, I get a round hollow spot in my belly knowing I could tell him what's coming, but also knowing it would come out sounding like a warning.
The second witness Campbell calls is Dr. Bergen, the head of the medical ethics committee at Providence Hospital. He has salt-and-pepper hair and a face dented in like a potato. He is smaller than you'd expect, too, given the fact that it takes him just short of a millennium to recite his credentials.
"Dr. Bergen," Campbell starts, "what's an ethics committee?"
"A diverse group of doctors, RNs, clergy, ethicists, and scientists, who are assigned to review individual cases to protect patients' rights. In Western Bioethics, there are six principles we try to follow." He ticks them off on his fingers. "Autonomy, or the idea that any patient over age eighteen has the right to refuse treatment; veracity, which is basically informed consent; fidelity—that is, a health-care provider fulfilling his duties; beneficence, or doing what's in the best interests of the patient; nonmaleficence—when you can no longer do good, you shouldn't do harm… like performing major surgery on a terminal patient who's 102 years old; and finally, justice—that no patient should be discriminated against in receiving treatment."
"What does an ethics committee do?"
"Generally, we're called to convene when there's a discrepancy about patient care. For example, if a physician feels it's in the patient's best interests to go on with extraordinary measures, and the family doesn't—or vice versa."
"So you don't see every case that passes through a hospital?"
"No. Only when there are complaints, or if the attending physician asks for a consultation. We review the situation and make recommendations."
"Not decisions?"
"No," Dr. Bergen says.
"What if the patient complaining is a minor?" Campbell asks.
"Consent isn't necessary until age thirteen. We rely on parents to make informed choices for their children until that point."
"What if they can't?"
He blinks. "You mean if they're not physically present?"
"No. I mean if there's another agenda they're adhering to, that in some way keeps them from making choices in the best interests of that child?"
My mother stands up. "Objection," she says. "He's speculating."
"Sustained," Judge DeSalvo replies.
Without missing a beat, Campbell turns back to his witness. "Do parents control their children's health-care decisions until age eighteen?"
Well, I could answer that. Parents control everything, unless you're like Jesse and you do enough to upset them that they'd rather ignore you than pretend you actually exist.
"Legally," Dr. Bergen says. "However, once a child reaches adolescence, although they can't give formal consent, they have to agree to any hospital procedure—even if their parents have already signed off on it."
This rule, if you ask me, is like the law against jaywalking. Everyone knows you're not supposed to do it, but that doesn't actually stop you.
Dr. Bergen is still talking. "In the rare instance where a parent and an adolescent patient disagree, the ethics committee weighs several factors: whether the procedure is in the adolescent's best interests, the risk/benefit scenario, the age and maturity of the adolescent, and the argument he or she presents."
"Has the ethics committee at Providence Hospital ever met regarding the care of Kate Fitzgerald?" Campbell asks.
"On two occasions," Dr. Bergen says. "The first involved allowing her to enter a trial for peripheral blood stem cell transplant in 2002, when her bone marrow transplant and several other options had failed. The second, more recently, involved whether or not it would be in her best interests to receive a donor kidney."
"What was the outcome, Dr. Bergen?"
"We recommended that Kate Fitzgerald receive a peripheral blood stem cell transplant. As for the kidney, our group was split on that decision."
"Can you explain?"
"Several of us felt that, at this point, the patient's health care had deteriorated to a point where major invasive transplant surgery was going to do more harm than good. Others believed that without a transplant, she would still die, and therefore the benefits outweighed the risk."
"If your team was split, then who gets to decide what will ultimately happen?"
"In Kate's case, because she is still a minor, her parents."
"During either of the times that your committee met regarding Kate's medical treatment, did you discuss the risks and benefits to the donor?"
"That wasn't the issue at stake—"
"What about the consent of the donor, Anna Fitzgerald?"
Dr. Bergen looks right at me, sympathetic, which it turns out is worse even than him thinking I'm a horrible person for filing this petition in the first place. He shakes his head. "It goes without saying that no hospital in the country is going to take a kidney out of a child who doesn't want to donate it."
"So, theoretically, if Anna was fighting this decision, the case would most likely land on your desk?"
"Well—"
"Has Anna's case landed on your desk, Doctor?"
"No."
Campbell advances toward him. "Can you tell us why?"
"Because she isn't a patient."
"Really?" He pulls a stack of papers out from his briefcase, and hands them to the judge, and then to Dr. Bergen. "These are Anna Fitzgerald's hospital records at Providence Hospital for the past thirteen years. Why would there be records for her, if she wasn't a patient?"
Dr. Bergen flips through them. "She's had several invasive procedures," he admits.
Go, Campbell, I think. I am not one to believe in knights who ride in to rescue damsels in distress, but I bet it feels a little like this. "Doesn't it strike you as odd that in thirteen years, given the thickness of this file and the fact it exists in the first place, the medical ethics committee never once convened to discuss what was being done to Anna?"
"We were under the impression that donation was her wish."
"Are you telling me that if Anna had previously said she didn't want to give up lymphocytes or granulocytes or cord blood or even a bee sting kit in her backpack—the ethics committee would have acted differently?"
"I know where you're going with this, Mr. Alexander," the psychiatrist says coldly. "The problem is that this kind of medical situation hasn't existed before. There is no precedent. We're trying to feel our way as best we can.”
“Isn't your job as an ethics committee to look at situations that haven't existed before?"
"Well. Yes."
"Dr. Bergen, in your expert opinion, is it ethically right for Anna Fitzgerald to have been asked to donate parts of her own body repeatedly for thirteen years?"
"Objection!" my mother calls out. The judge strokes his chin. "I want to hear this." Dr. Bergen glances at me again. "Quite frankly, even before I knew that Anna didn't want to be a participant, I voted against her donating a kidney to her sister. I don't believe Kate would live through the transplant, and therefore Anna would undergo a serious operation for no reason at all. Up until this point, however, I think that the risk of the procedures was small, compared to the benefit the family as a whole received, and I support the choices the Fitzgeralds made for Anna."
Campbell pretends to consider this. "Dr. Bergen, what kind of car do you drive?"
"A Porsche."
"Bet you like it."
"I do," he says guardedly.
"What if I told you that you have to give up your Porsche before you leave this courtroom, because that action will save Judge DeSalvo's life?"
"That's ridiculous. You—"
Campbell leans in. "What if you had no choice? What if, today, psychiatrists simply have to do whatever lawyers decide is in the best interests of others?"
He rolls his eyes. "In spite of the high drama you're alluding to, Mr. Alexander, there are basic donor rights, safeguards put into place in medicine, so that the greater good doesn't steamroll the pioneers who help create it. The United States has a long and nasty history of the abuse of informed consent, which is what led to laws relating to Human Subjects Research. It keeps people from being used as experimental lab rats."
"Then tell us," Campbell says, "how the hell did Anna Fitzgerald slip through the cracks?"
When I was only seven months old, there was a block party in our neighborhood. It's just as bad as you're thinking: Jell-O molds and towers of cheese cubes and dancing in the street to music piped out of someone's living room stereo. I, of course, have no personal recollection of any of this—I was plopped down in one of those walkers they made for babies before babies started overturning them and cracking their heads open.
At any rate, I was in my walker, tooling around between the tables and watching the other kids, so the story goes, when I sort of lost my footing. Our block is canted at an angle, and suddenly the wheels were moving faster than I could make them stop. I whizzed past adults, under the barricade the cops had put up at the end of the road to shut it off to traffic, and I was heading right for a main drag full of cars.
But Kate came out of nowhere and ran after me. She somehow managed to grab me by the back of my shirt moments before I got hit by a passing Toyota.
Every now and then, someone on the block brings this up. Me, I remember it as the time she saved me, instead of the other way around.
My mother gets her first chance to play lawyer. "Dr. Bergen," she says, "how long have you known of my family?"
"I've been at Providence Hospital for ten years now."
"In those ten years, when some aspect of Kate's treatment was presented to you, what did you do?"
"Come up with a plan of action that was recommended," he says. "Or an alternate, if possible."
"When you did, at any point in your report did you mention that Anna shouldn't be a part of it?"
"No."
"Did you ever say this would hurt Anna considerably?"
"No."
"Or put her in grave medical danger herself?"
"No."
Maybe it's not Campbell, after all, who will turn out to be my white knight. Maybe it's my mother.
"Dr. Bergen," she asks, "do you have kids?"
The doctor looks up. "I have a son. He's thirteen."
"Have you ever looked at these cases that come to the medical ethics committee and put yourself in a patient's shoes? Or better yet, a parent's shoes?"
"I have," he admits.
"If you were me," my mother says, "and the medical ethics committee handed you back a piece of paper with a suggested course of action that would save your son's life, would you question them further… or would you just jump at the chance?"
He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to.
Judge DeSalvo calls a second recess after that. Campbell says something about getting up and stretching my legs. So I start to follow him out, walking right past my mother. As I pass by, I feel her hand on my waist, tugging down my T-shirt, which is riding up in the back. She hates the spaghetti-strap girls, the ones who come to school in halters and low-riders, like they're trying out as dancers in a Britney Spears video instead of going to math class. I can almost hear her voice: Please tell me that shrank in the wash.
She seems to realize mid-tug that maybe she shouldn't have done this. I stop, and Campbell stops, too, and her face goes bright red. "Sorry," she says.
I put my hand over hers and tuck my shirt into the back of my jeans where it should be. I look at Campbell. "Meet you outside?"
He's giving me a look that has Bad Idea written all over it, but he nods and heads down the aisle. Then my mother and I are nearly alone in the courtroom. I lean forward and kiss her on the cheek. "You did really great up there," I tell her, because I don't know how to say what I really want to: that the people you love can surprise you every day. That maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.
KATE MEETS TAYLOR AMBROSE when they are sitting side by side, hooked up to FVs. "What are you here for?" she asks, and I immediately look up from my book, because in all the years that Kate has been receiving outpatient treatment I cannot remember her initiating a conversation.
The boy she is talking to is not much older than she is, maybe sixteen to her fourteen. He has brown eyes that dance, and is wearing a Bruins cap over his bald head. "The free cocktails," he answers, and the dimples in his cheeks deepen.
Kate grins. "Happy hour," she says, and she looks up at the bag of platelets being infused into her.
"I'm Taylor." He holds out his hand. "AML."
"Kate. APL."
He whistles, and raises his brows. "Ooh," he says. "A rarity."
Kate tosses her cropped hair. "Aren't we all?"
I watch this, amazed. Who is this flirt, and what has she done with my little girl?
"Platelets," he says, scrutinizing the label on her IV bag. "You're in remission?"
"Today, anyway." Kate glances at his pole, the telltale black bag that covers the Cytoxan. "Chemo?"
"Yeah. Today, anyway. So, Kate," Taylor says. He has that rangy puppy look of a sixteen-year-old, one with knobby knees and thick fingers and cheekbones he hasn't yet grown into. When he crosses his arms, the muscles swell. I realize he's doing this on purpose, and I duck my head to hide a smile. "What do you do when you're not at Providence Hospital?"
She thinks, and then a slow smile lights her up from the inside out. "Wait for something that makes me come back."
This makes Taylor laugh out loud. "Maybe sometime we can wait together," he says, and he passes her a wrapper from a gauze pad. "Can I have your phone number?"
Kate scribbles it down as Taylor's IV begins to beep. The nurse comes in and unhooks his line. "You're outta here, Taylor," she says. "Where's your ride?"
"Waiting downstairs. I'm all set." He gets out of the padded chair slowly, almost weakly, the first reminder that this is not some casual conversation. He slips the piece of paper with our phone number into his pocket. "Well, I'll call you, Kate."
When he leaves Kate lets all her breath out in a dramatic finish. She rolls her head after him. "Oh my God," she gasps. "He is gorgeous."
The nurse, checking her flow, grins. "Tell me about it, honey. If only I were thirty years younger."
Kate turns to me, blooming. "You think he'll call?"
"Maybe," I say.
"Where do you think we'll go out?"
I think of Brian, who has always said that Kate can date… when she's forty. "Let's take one step at a time," I suggest. But inside, I am singing.
The arsenic, which ultimately put Kate into remission, worked its magic by wearing her down. Taylor Ambrose, a drug of an entirely different sort, works his magic by building her up. It becomes a habit: when the phone rings at seven P.M., Kate flies from the dinner table and hides in a closet with the portable receiver. The rest of us clear the dinner plates and spend time in the living room and get ready for bed, hearing little more than giggles and whispers, and then Kate emerges from her cocoon, flushed and glowing, first love beating like a hummingbird at the pulse in her throat. Every time it happens, I can't stop staring. It is not that Kate is so beautiful, although she is; it's that I never really let myself believe that I would see her all grown up.
I follow her into the bathroom one night, after one of her marathon phone sessions. Kate stares at herself in the mirror, pursing her lips and raising her brows in a come-hither pose. Her hand comes up to her cropped hair—after the chemo, it never grew back in waves, just thick straight tufts that she usually cultivates with mousse to look like bedhead. She holds her palm out, as if she still expects to see hair shedding.
"What do you think he sees when he looks at me?" Kate asks. I come to stand behind her. She is not the child that mirrors me—that would be Jesse—and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It's not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.
"I think he sees a girl who knows what he's been through," I tell her honestly.
"I got on the internet and read up on AML," she says. "His leukemia's got a pretty high cure rate." She turns to me. "When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself… is that what love's like?"
It is hard, all of a sudden, to pull an answer through the tunnel of my throat. "Exactly."
Kate runs the tap and washes her face with a foam of soap. I hand her a towel, and as she rises from the cloud of it, she says, "Something bad's going to happen."
On alert, I search her out for clues. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing. But that's the way it works. If there's something as good as Taylor in my life, I'm going to pay for it."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," I say out of habit, yet there is a truth to this. Anyone who believes that people have ultimate control of what life hands to them needs only to spend a day in the shoes of a child with leukemia. Or her mother. "Maybe you're finally getting a break," I say.
Three days later, during a routine CBC, the hematologist tells us that Kate is once again throwing promyelocytes, the first slide down a steep slope of relapse.
I have never eavesdropped, at least not intentionally, until the night that Kate comes back from her first date with Taylor, to see a movie. She tiptoes into her room and sits down on Anna's bed. "You awake?" she asks.
Anna rolls over, groans. "I am now." Sleep slips away from her, like a shawl falling to the floor. "How was it?"
"Wow," Kate says, and she laughs. "Wow."
"How wow? Like, tonsil hockey wow?"
"You are so disgusting," Kate whispers, although there's a smile behind it. "But he is a really good kisser." She dangles this like a fisherman.
"Get out!" Anna's voice shines. "So what was it like?"
"Flying," Kate answers. "I bet it feels just the same way."
"I don't get what that has in common with someone slobbering all over you."
"God, Anna, it's not like he spits on you."
"What does Taylor taste like?"
"Popcorn." She laughs. "And guy."
"How did you know what to do?"
"I didn't. It just kind of happened. Like the way you play hockey."
This, finally, makes sense to Anna. "Well," she says, "I do feel pretty good when I'm doing that."
"You have no idea," Kate sighs. There is some movement; I imagine her stripping off her clothes. I wonder if Taylor is imagining the same, somewhere.
Pillow is punched, cover yanked back, sheets rustle as Kate gets into bed and rolls onto her side. "Anna?"
"Hmm?"
"He has scars on his palms, from graft-versus-host," Kate murmurs. "I could feel them when we were holding hands."
"Was it gross?"
"No," she says. "It was like we matched."
At first, I can't get Kate to agree to undergo the peripheral blood stem cell transplant. She refuses because she doesn't want to be hospitalized for chemo, doesn't want to have to sit in reverse isolation for the next six weeks when she could be going out with Taylor Ambrose. "It's your life," I point out to her, and she looks at me as if I'm crazy.
"Exactly," she says.
In the end, we compromise. The oncology team agrees to let Kate begin her chemo as an outpatient, in preparation for a transplant from Anna. At home, she agrees to wear a mask. At the first indication of her counts dropping, she'll be hospitalized. They aren't happy; they worry it will affect the procedure, but like me they also understand that Kate has reached the age where she can bargain with her will.
As it turns out, this separation anxiety is all for naught, since Taylor shows up for Kate's first outpatient chemo appointment. "What are you doing here?"
"I can't seem to stay away," he jokes. "Hey, Mrs. Fitzgerald." He sits down beside Kate in the empty adjoining chair. "God, it feels good to be in one of these without an IV hookup."
"Rub it in," Kate mutters.
Taylor puts his hand on her arm. "How far into it are you?"
"Just started."
He gets up and sits on the wide arm of Kate's chair, picks the emesis basin up from Kate's lap. "A hundred bucks says you can't make it till three without tossing your cookies."
Kate glances at the clock. It is 2:50. "You're on."
"What did you have for lunch?" He grins, wicked. "Or should I guess based on the colors?"
"You're disgusting," Kate says, but her smile is as wide as the sea. Taylor puts his hand on her shoulder. She leans into the contact.
The first time Brian touched me, he saved my life. There had been cataclysmic downpours in Providence, a nor'easter that swelled the tides and put the parking lot at the courthouse entirely underwater. I was clerking then, when we were evacuated. Brian's department was in charge; I walked onto the stone steps of the building to see cars floating by, and abandoned purses, and even a terrified paddling dog. While I had been filing briefs, the world I knew had been submerged. "Need a hand?" Brian asked, dressed in his full turnout gear, and he held out his arms. As he swam me to higher ground, rain struck my face and pelted my back. I wondered how—in a deluge—I could feel like I was being burned alive.
"What's the longest you've ever gone before throwing up?" Kate asks Taylor.
"Two days."
"Get out."
The nurse glances up from her paperwork. "True," she confirms. "I saw it with my own eyes."
Taylor grins at her. "I told you, I'm a master at this." He looks at the clock: 2:57.
"Don't you have anywhere else you'd rather be?" Kate says.
"Trying to weasel out of the bet?"
"Trying to spare you. Although—" Before she can finish, she goes green. Both the nurse and I rise from ours seats, but Taylor reaches Kate first. He holds the vomit basin beneath her chin and when she starts retching, he rubs his hand in slow circles on her upper back.
"It's okay," he soothes, close to her temple.
The nurse and I exchange glances. "Looks like she's in good hands," the nurse says, and she leaves to take care of another patient.
When Kate is finished, Taylor puts the basin aside and wipes her mouth with a tissue. She looks up at him, glow-eyed and flushed, her nose still running. "Sorry," she mutters.
"For what?" Taylor says. "Tomorrow, it could be me."
I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.
"I'm some fun date," Kate murmurs.
Taylor smiles at her. "Fries," he says. "For lunch."
Kate smacks his shoulder. "You are disgusting."
He raises one brow. "You lost the bet, you know."
"I seem to have left my trust fund at home."
Taylor pretends to study her. "OK, I know what you can give me instead."
"Sexual favors?" Kate says, forgetting I am here.
"Gee, I don't know," Taylor laughs. "Should we ask your mom?"
She goes plum-red. "Oops."
"Keep this up," I warn, "and your next date will be during a bone marrow aspiration."
"You know the hospital has this dance, right?" Suddenly, Taylor is jittery; his knee bobs up and down. "It's for kids who are sick. There are doctors and nurses there, in case, and it's held in one of the conference rooms at the hospital, but for the most part it's just like a regular prom. You know, lame band, ugly tuxes, punch spiked with platelets." He swallows. "I'm just kidding about that last part. Well, I went last year, stag, and it was pretty dumb, but I figure since you're a patient and I'm a patient maybe this year we could, like, go together."
Kate, with an aplomb I never would have guessed she possesses, considers the offer. "When is it?"
"Saturday."
"As it turns out, I don't have plans to kick the bucket that day." She beams at him. "I'd love to."
"Cool," Taylor says, smiling. "Very cool." He reaches for a fresh basin, careful of Kate's IV line, which snakes down between them. I wonder if her heart is pumping faster, if it will affect the medication. If she'll be sicker, sooner rather than later.
Taylor settles Kate into the crook of his arm. Together, they wait for what comes next.
"It's too low," I say, as Kate holds a pale yellow dress up below her neck. From the spot on the boutique floor where she is sitting, Anna offers up her opinion, too: "You'd look like a banana."
We have been shopping for a prom dress for hours. Kate has only two days to prepare for this dance, and it has become an obsession: what she will wear, how she will do her makeup, if the band is going to play anything remotely decent. Her hair, of course, is not an issue; after chemo she lost it all. She hates wigs—they feel like bugs on her scalp, she says—but she's too self-conscious to go commando. Today, she has wrapped a batik scarf around her head, like a proud, pale African queen.
The reality of this outing hasn't matched Kate's dreams. Dresses that normal girls wear to proms bare the midriff or shoulders, where Kate's skin is riddled and thickened with scarring. They cling in all the wrong places. They are cut to showcase a healthy, hale body, not to hide the lack of it.
The saleswoman who hovers like a hummingbird takes the dress from Kate. "It's actually quite modest," she pushes. "It really does cover up a fair amount of cleavage."
"Will it cover this?" Kate snaps, popping open the buttons of her peasant blouse to reveal her recently replaced Hickman catheter, which sprouts from the center of her chest.
The saleswoman gasps before she can remember to stop herself. "Oh," she says faintly.
"Kate!" I scold.
She shakes her head. "Let's just get out of here."
As soon as we are on the street in front of the boutique I lace into her. "Just because you're angry, you don't have to take it out on the rest of the world."
"Well, she's a bitch," Kate retorts. "Did you see her looking at my scarf?"
"Maybe she just liked the pattern," I say dryly.
"Yeah, and maybe I'm going to wake up tomorrow and not be sick." Her words fall like boulders between us, cracking the sidewalk. "I'm not going to find a stupid dress. I don't know why I even told Taylor I'd go in the first place."
"Don't you think every other girl who's going to that dance is in the same boat? Trying to find gowns that cover up tubes and bruises and wires and colostomy bags and God knows what?"
"I don't care about anyone else," Kate says. "I wanted to look good. Really good, you know, for one night."
"Taylor already thinks you're beautiful."
"Well I don't!" Kate cries. "I don't, Mom, and maybe I want to just once."
It is a warm day, one where the ground beneath our feet seems to be breathing. The sun beats down on my head, on the back of my neck. What do I say to that? I have never been Kate. I have prayed and begged and wanted to be the one who's sick in lieu of her, some devil's Faustian bargain, but that is not the way it's happened.
"We'll sew something," I suggest. "You can design it."
"You don't know how to sew," Kate sighs.
"I'll learn."
"In a day?" She shakes her head. "You can't fix it every time, Mom. How come I know that, and you don't?"
She leaves me on the sidewalk and storms off. Anna runs after her, loops her arm through Kate's elbow, and drags her into a storefront a few feet away from the boutique, while I hurry to catch up.
It is a salon, filled with gum-cracking hairstylists. Kate is struggling to get away from Anna, but Anna, she can be strong when she wants to be. "Hey," Anna says, getting the attention of the receptionist. "Do you work here?"
"When I'm forced to."
"You guys do prom hairstyles?"
"Sure," the stylist says. "Like an updo?"
"Yeah. For my sister." Anna looks at Kate, who has stopped fighting. A smile glows slowly across her face, like a firefly caught in a jelly jar.
"That's right. For me," Kate says mischievously, and she unwinds the scarf from her bald head.
Everyone in the salon stops speaking. Kate stands regally straight. "We were thinking of French braids," Anna continues.
"A perm," Kate adds.
Anna giggles. "Maybe a nice chignon."
The stylist swallows, caught between shock and sympathy and political correctness. "Well, um, we might be able to do something for you." She clears her throat. "There's always, you know, extensions."
"Extensions," Anna repeats, and Kate bursts out laughing.
The stylist begins to look behind the girls, toward the ceiling. "Is this like a Candid Camera thing?"
At that, my daughters collapse into each other's arms, hysterical. They laugh until they cannot catch their breath. They laugh until they cry.
As a chaperone at the Providence Hospital Prom, I am in charge of the punch. Like every other food item provided for the celebrants, it's neutropenic. The nurses—fairy godmothers for the night—have converted a conference room into a fantasy dance hall, complete with streamers and a disco ball and mood lighting.
Kate is a vine twined around Taylor. They sway to completely different music than the song that is playing. Kate wears her obligatory blue mask. Taylor has given her a corsage made of silk flowers, because real ones can carry diseases that immunocompromised patients can't fight off. In the end, I did not wind up sewing a dress; I found one online at Bluefly.com: a gold sheath, cut in a V for Kate's catheter. But over this is a long-sleeved, sheer shirt, one that wraps at the waist and glimmers when she turns this way and that so when you notice the strange triple tubing coming out by her breastbone, you wonder if it was only a trick of the light.
We took a thousand photos before leaving the house. When Kate and Taylor had escaped and were waiting for me in the car, I went to put the camera away and found Brian in the kitchen with his back to me. "Hey," I said. "You going to wave us off? Throw rice?"
It was only when he turned around that I realized he'd come in here to cry. "I didn't expect to see this," he said. "I didn't think I'd get to have this memory."
I fitted myself against him, working our bodies so tight it felt as if we'd been carved from the same smooth stone. "Wait up for us," I whispered, and then I left.
Now, I hand a cup of punch to a boy whose hair is just starting to fall out in small tufts. It sheds on the black lapel of his tuxedo. "Thanks," he says, and I see he has the most beautiful eyes, dark and still as a panther's. I glance away and realize that Kate and Taylor are gone.
What if she's sick? What if he's sick? I have promised myself I wouldn't be overprotective, but there are too many children here for the staff to really keep track of. I ask another parent to take over my punch station and then I search out the ladies' room. I check the supply closet. I walk through empty hallways and dark corridors and even the chapel.
Finally I hear Kate's voice through a cracked doorway. She and Taylor stand under a spotlight moon, holding hands. The courtyard they've found is a favorite for the residents during the daytime; many doctors who wouldn't otherwise see the light of the sun take their lunches out here.
I am about to ask if they're all right when Kate speaks. "Are you afraid of dying?"
Taylor shakes his head. "Not really. Sometimes, though, I think about my funeral. If people will say good things, you know, about me. If anyone will cry." He hesitates. "If anyone will even come."
"I will," Kate promises.
Taylor dips his head toward Kate's, and she sways closer, and I realize that this is why I followed them. I knew this was what I would find, and like Brian, I wanted one more picture of my daughter, one that I might worry between my fingers like a piece of sea glass. Taylor lifts up the edges of her blue hygienic mask and I know I should stop him, I know I have to, but I don't. This much I want her to have.
When they kiss, it is beautiful: those alabaster heads bent together, smooth as statues—an optical illusion, a mirror image that's folding into itself.
When Kate goes into the hospital for her stem cell transplant, she's an emotional wreck. She is far less concerned with the runny fluid being infused into her catheter than she is with the fact that Taylor hasn't called her in three days, and has in fact not returned her calls either. "Did you have a fight?" I ask, and she shakes her head. "Did he say he was going somewhere? Maybe it was an emergency," I say. "Maybe this has nothing to do with you at all."
"Maybe it does," Kate argues.
"Then the best revenge is getting healthy enough to give him a piece of your mind," I point out. "I'll be right back."
In the hallway, I approach Steph, a nurse who has just come on duty and who's known Kate for years. The truth is, I am just as surprised about Taylor's lack of communication as Kate is. He knew she was coming in here.
"Taylor Ambrose," I ask Steph. "Has he been in today?"
She looks at me and blinks.
"Big kid, sweet. Hung up on my daughter," I joke.
"Oh, Sara… I thought for sure someone would have told you," Steph says. "He died this morning."
I don't tell Kate, not for a month. Not until the day Dr. Chance says Kate is well enough to leave the hospital, until Kate has already convinced herself she was better off without him. I cannot begin to tell you the words I use; none of them are big enough to bear the weight behind them. I mention how I went to Taylor's house and spoke to his mother; how she broke down in my arms and said she'd wanted to call me, but there was a part of her that was so jealous it swallowed all her speech. She told me that Taylor, who'd come home from the prom walking on air, had walked into her bedroom in the middle of the night, with a 105 degree fever. How maybe it was viral and maybe it was fungal but he'd gone into respiratory distress and then cardiac arrest and after thirty minutes of trying the doctors had to let him go.
I don't tell Kate something else Jenna Ambrose said—that afterward, she went inside and stared at her son, who wasn't her son anymore. That she sat for five whole hours, sure he was going to wake up. That even now she hears noise overhead and thinks Taylor is moving around his room, and that the half-second she is gifted before she remembers the truth is the only reason she gets up each morning.
"Kate," I say, "I'm so sorry."
Kate's face crumples. "But I loved him," she replies, as if this should be enough.
"I know."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I couldn't. Not when I thought it might make you stop fighting back, yourself."
She closes her eyes and turns onto her side on the pillow, crying so hard that the monitors she's still hooked to begin to beep and bring in the nursing staff.
I reach for her. "Kate, honey, I did what was best for you."
She refuses to look in my direction. "Don't talk to me," she murmurs. "You're good at that."
Kate stops speaking to me for seven days and eleven hours. We come home from the hospital; we go about our business of reverse isolation; we pick through the motions because we have done it before. At night I lie in bed next to Brian and wonder why he can sleep. I stare at the ceiling and think that I have lost my daughter before she's even gone.
Then one day I walk by her bedroom and find her sitting on the floor with photographs all around. There are, as I expect, the ones of her and Taylor that we took before the prom—Kate dressed to the nines with that telltale surgical mask covering her mouth. Taylor has drawn a lipstick smile on it, for the sake of the photos, or so he said.
It had made Kate laugh. It seems impossible that this boy, who was so solid a presence when the flash went off mere weeks ago, simply is not here anymore; a pang goes through me, and immediately on its heels a single word: practice.
But there are other photos, too, from when Kate was younger. One of Kate and Anna on the beach, crouched over a hermit crab. One of Kate dressed up like Mr. Peanut for Halloween. One of Kate with cream cheese all over her face, holding up two halves of a bagel like eyeglasses.
In another pile are her baby pictures—all taken when she was three, or younger. Gap-toothed and grinning, backlit by a sloe-eyed sun, unaware of what was to come. "I don't remember being her," Kate says quietly, and these first words make a bridge of glass, one that shifts beneath my feet as I step into the room.
I put my hand beside hers, at the edge of one photo. Bent at a corner, it shows Kate as a toddler being tossed into the air by Brian, her hair flying behind her, her arms and legs starfish-splayed, certain beyond a doubt that when she fell to earth again, there would be a safe landing, sure that she deserved nothing less.
"She was beautiful," Kate adds, and with her pinky she strokes the glossy vivid cheek of the girl none of us ever got to know.
THE SUMMER I WAS FOURTEEN my parents sent me to boot camp on a farm. It was one of those action-adventures for troubled kids, you know, get up at four A.M. to do the milking and how much trouble can you really get into? (The answer, if you're interested: score pot off the ranch hands. Get stoned. Tip cows.) Anyway, one day I was assigned to Moses Patrol, or that's what we called the poor son of a bitch who pulled herding duty with the lambs. I had to follow about a hundred sheep around a pasture that didn't have one goddamned tree to provide even a sliver of shade.
To say a sheep is the dumbest fucking animal on earth is probably an understatement. They get caught in fences. They get lost in four-foot-square pens. They forget where to find their food, although it's been in the same place for a thousand days straight. And they're not the little puffy darlings you picture when you go to sleep, either. They stink. They bleat. They're annoying as hell.
Anyway, the day I was stuck with the sheep, I had filched a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I was folding down the pages that came closest to good porn, when I heard someone scream. I was perfectly sure, mind you, that it wasn't an animal, because I'd never heard anything like this in my life. I ran toward the sound, sure I was going to find someone thrown from a horse with their leg twisted like a pretzel or some yoho who'd emptied his revolver by accident into his own guts. But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of ewes in attendance, was a sheep giving birth.
I wasn't a vet or anything, but I knew enough to realize that when any living creature makes a racket like that, things aren't going according to plan. Sure enough, this poor sheep had two little hooves dangling out of her privates. She lay on her side, panting. She rolled one flat black eye toward me, then just gave up.
Well, nothing was dying on my patrol, if only because I knew that the Nazis who ran the camp would make me bury the damn animal. So I shoved the other sheep out of the way. I got down on my knees and grabbed the knotty slick hooves and yanked while the ewe screamed like any mother whose child is ripped away from her.
The lamb came out, its limbs folded like the parts of a Swiss Army knife. Over its head was a silver sac that felt like the inside of your cheek when you run your tongue around it. It wasn't breathing.
I sure as shit wasn't going to put my mouth over a sheep and do artificial respiration, but I used my fingernails to rip apart the skin sac, to yank it down from the neck of the lamb. And it turned out, that was all it needed. A minute later it unbent its clothespin legs and started whickering for its mother.
There were, I think, twenty lambs born during that summer session. Every time I passed the pen I could pick mine out from a crowd. He looked like all the others, except that he moved with a little more spring; he always seemed to have the sun shining off the oil in its wool. And if you happened to get him calm enough to look you in the eye, the pupils had gone milky white, a sure sign that he'd walked on the other side long enough to remember what he was missing.
I tell you this now because when Kate finally stirs in that hospital bed, and opens her eyes, I know she's got one foot on the other side already, too.
"Oh my God," Kate says weakly, when she sees me. "I wound up in Hell after all."
I lean forward in my chair and cross my arms. "Now, sis, you know I'm not that easy to kill." Getting up, I kiss her on the forehead, letting my lips stay an extra second. How is it that mothers can read fever that way? I can only read imminent loss. "How you doing?"
She smiles at me, but it's like a cartoon drawing when I've seen the real thing hanging in the Louvre. "Peachy," she says. "To what do I owe the honor of your presence?"
Because you won't be here much longer, I think, but I do not tell her this. "I was in the neighborhood. Plus there's a really hot nurse who works this shift."
This makes Kate laugh out loud. "God, Jess. I'm gonna miss you."
She says it so easily that I think it surprises both of us. I sit down on the edge of the bed and trace the little puckers in the thermal blanket. "You know—" I begin a pep talk, but she puts her hand on my arm.
"Don't." Then her eyes come alive, for just a moment. "Maybe I'll get reincarnated."
"Like as Marie Antoinette?"
"No, it's got to be something in the future. You think that's crazy?"
"No," I admit. "I think we probably all just keep running in circles."
"So what will you come back as, then?"
"Carrion." She winces, and something beeps, and I panic. "You want me to get someone?"
"No, you're fine," Kate answers, and I'm sure she doesn't mean it this way, but it pretty much makes me feel like I've swallowed lightning.
I suddenly remember an old game I used to play when I was nine or ten, and was allowed to ride my bike until it got dark. I used to make little bets with myself as I watched the sun getting lower and lower on the horizon: if I hold my breath to twenty seconds, the night won't come. If I don't blink. If I stand so still a fly lands on my cheek. Now, I find myself doing the same thing, bargaining to keep Kate, even though that isn't the way it works.
"Are you afraid?" I blurt out. "Of dying?"
Kate turns to me, a smile sliding over her mouth. "I'll let you know." Then she closes her eyes. "I'm just gonna rest a second," she manages, and she is asleep again.
It's not fair, but Kate knows that. It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get. I stand up, with that lightning bolt branding the lining of my throat, which makes it impossible to swallow, so everything gets backed up like a dammed river. I hurry out of Kate's room and far enough down the hall where I won't disturb her, and then I lift my fist and punch a hole in the thick white wall and still this isn't enough.
HERE IS THE RECIPE TO BLOW SOMETHING UP: a Pyrex bowl; potassium chloride—found at health food stores, as a salt substitute. A hydrometer. Bleach. Take the bleach and pour it into the Pyrex, put it onto a stove burner. Meanwhile, weigh out your potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check it with the hydrometer and boil until you get a reading of 1.3. Cool to room temperature, and filter out the crystals that form. This is what you will save.
It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.
I'm in what has to be the ugliest courtroom on the East Coast, sitting in chairs until it's my turn, when suddenly my beeper goes off. I look at the number, groan, and try to figure out what to do. I'm a witness later, but the department needs me right now.
It takes a few talking heads but I get permission from the judge to remove myself from the premises. I leave through the front door, and immediately I'm assailed with questions and cameras and lights. It is everything I can do not to punch these vultures, who want to rip apart the bleached bones of my family.
When I couldn't find Anna the morning of the hearing, I headed home. I looked in all her usual haunts-the kitchen, the bedroom, the hammock out back-but she wasn't there. As a last resort I climbed the garage stairs to the apartment Jesse uses.
He wasn't home either, although by now this is hardly a surprise. There was a time when Jesse disappointed me regularly; eventually, I told myself not to expect anything from him, and as a result, it has gotten easier for me to take what comes. I knocked on the door and yelled for Anna, for Jesse, but no one answered. Although there was a key to this apartment on my own set, I stopped short of letting myself inside. Turning on the stairs, I knocked over the red recycling bin I personally empty every Tuesday, since God forbid Jesse can remember to drag it out to the curb himself. A tenpin of beer bottles, lucent green, tumbled out. An empty jug of laundry detergent, an olive jar, a gallon container from orange juice.
I put everything back in, except for the orange juice container, which I've told Jesse isn't recyclable and which he puts in the bin nonetheless every damn week.
The difference between these fires and the other ones was that now the stakes have been ratcheted up a notch. Instead of an abandoned warehouse or a shack at the side of the water, it is an elementary school. This being summer, no one was on the premises when the fire was started. But there's no question in my mind it was due to unnatural causes.
When I get there, the engines are just loading up after salvage and overhaul. Paulie comes over to me right away. "How's Kate?"
"She's okay," I tell him, and I nod toward the mess. "What'd you find?"
"He pretty much managed to gut the whole north side of the facility," Paulie says. "You doing a walk through?"
'Yeah."
The fire began in the teacher's lounge; the char patterns point like an arrow to the origin. A collection of synthetic stuffing that hasn't burned clean through is still visible; whoever set this was smart enough to light his fire in the middle of a pile of couch cushions and stacks of paper. I can still smell the accelerant; this time it was as simple as gasoline. Bits of glass from the exploded Molotov cocktail litter the ashes.
I wander to the far side of the building, peer through a broken window. The guys must have vented the fire here. "You think we'll catch this little fuck, Cap?" asks Caesar, coming into the room. Still in his turnout gear, with a smudge across his left cheek, he looks down at the debris in the fire line. Then he bends down, and with his heavy glove, picks up a cigarette butt. "Unbelievable. The secretary's desk melted down to a puddle, but a goddamn tobacco stick survives."
I take it out of his hands and turn it over in my palm. "That's because it wasn't here when the fire started. Someone had a nice smoke while he watched this, and then he walked away." I tip it onto the side, to where the yellow meets the filter, and read the brand.
Paulie sticks his head in the shattered window, looking for Caesar. "We're heading back. Get on the truck." Then he turns to me. "Hey, just so you know, we didn't break this one."
"I wasn't gonna make you pay for it, Paulie."
"No, I mean, we vented the roof. This was already broken when we got here." He and Caesar leave, and a few moments later I hear the heavy drag of the engine pulling away.
It could have been a stray baseball, or a Frisbee. But even in the summertime, janitors monitor public property. A broken window is too much of a hazard to be left alone; it would have been taped up or boarded.
Unless the same guy who started the fire knew where to bring in oxygen, so that the flames would race through the wind tunnel created by that vacuum.
I look down at the cigarette in my hand, and crush it.
You need 56 grams of these reserved crystals. Mix with distilled water. Heat to a boil and cool again, saving the crystals, pure potassium chlorate. Grind these to the consistency of face powder, and heat gently to dry. Melt five parts Vaseline with five parts wax. Dissolve in gasoline and pour this liquid onto 90 parts potassium chlorate crystals in a plastic bowl. Knead. Allow the gasoline to evaporate.
Mold into a cube and dip in wax to make it waterproof. This explosive requires a blasting cap of at least a grade A3.
When Jesse opens the door to his apartment, I am waiting on the couch. "What are you doing here?" he asks.
"What are you doing here?"
"I live here," Jesse says. "Remember?"
"Do you? Or are you using this as a place to hide?"
He takes out a cigarette from a pack in his front pocket and lights up. Merits. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Why aren't you in court?"
"How come there's muriatic acid under your sink?" I ask. "Considering that we don't have a pool?"
"Hello? Is this, like, the Inquisition?" He scowls. "I used it when I was working with those tile layers last summer; you can clean up grout with it. To tell you the truth I didn't even know I still had it."
"Then you probably wouldn't know, Jess, that when you put it into a bottle with a piece of aluminum foil with a rag stuffed into the top, it blows up pretty damn well."
He goes very still. "Are you accusing me of something? Because if you are, just say it, you bastard."
I get up from the couch. "Okay. I want to know if you scored the bottles before you made the cocktails, so that they'd break easier. I want to know if you realized how close that homeless guy was to dying when you set the warehouse on fire for kicks." Reaching behind me, I lift the empty Clorox container from his recycle bin. "I want to know why the hell this is in your trash, when you don't do your own laundry and God knows you don't clean, yet there's an elementary school six miles from here that's been gutted with an explosive made of bleach and brake fluid?" I have him by the shoulders now, and although Jesse could break away if he really tried, he lets me shake him until his head snaps back. "Jesus Christ, Jesse!"
He stares at me, his face blank. "Are you about done?"
I let him go and he backs away, teeth bared. "Then tell me I'm wrong," I challenge.
"I'll tell you more than that," he yells. "I mean, I totally understand that you've spent your life believing that everything that's wrong in the universe all traces back to me, but news flash, Dad, this time you're totally off base."
Slowly, I take something out of my pocket and press it into Jesse's hand. The Merit cigarette butt settles in the hollow of his palm. 'Then you shouldn't have left your calling card."
There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.
Jesse's hand comes up, trembling, and the cigarette rolls to the floor at our feet. He covers his face, presses his thumbs to the corners of his eyes. "I couldn't save her." The words are ripped from his center. He hunches his shoulders, sliding backward into the body of a boy. "Who… who did you tell?"
He is asking, I realize, whether the police will be coming after him. Whether I have spoken to Sara about this.
He is asking to be punished.
So I do what I know will destroy him: I pull Jesse into my arms as he sobs. His back is broader than mine. He stands a half-head taller than me. I don't remember seeing him go from that five-year-old, who wasn't a genetic match, to the man he is now, and I guess this is the problem. How does someone go from thinking that if he cannot rescue, he must destroy? And do you blame him, or do you blame the folks who should have told him otherwise?
I will make sure that my son's pyromania ends here and now, but I won't tell the cops or the fire chief about this. Maybe that's nepotism, maybe it's stupidity. Maybe it's because Jesse isn't all that different from me, choosing fire as his medium, needing to know that he could command at least one uncontrollable thing.
Jesse's breathing evens against me, like it used to when he was so small, when I used to carry him upstairs after he'd fallen asleep in my lap. He used to hit me over and over with questions: What's a two-inch hose for, a one-inch? How come you wash the engines? Does the can man ever get to drive? I realize that I cannot remember exactly when he stopped asking. But I do remember feeling as if something had gone missing, as if the loss of a kid's hero worship can ache like a phantom limb.
DOCTORS HAVE THIS THING about being subpoenaed: they let you know, with every syllable of every word, that no moment of this testimony will make up for the fact that while they were sitting on the witness stand under duress, patients were waiting, people were dying. Frankly, it pisses me off. And before I know it, I can't help myself, I am asking for a bathroom break, leaning down to retie my shoe, gathering my thoughts and stuffing sentences with pregnant pauses—whatever it takes to keep them cooling their heels just a few seconds more.
Dr. Chance is no exception to the rule. From the onset he's anxious to leave. He checks his watch so often you'd think he was about to miss a train. The difference this time around is that Sara Fitzgerald is just as anxious to get him out of the courtroom. Because the patient who is waiting, the person who is dying, is Kate.
But beside me, Anna's body throws heat. I get up, continue my questioning. Slowly. "Dr. Chance, were any of the treatments that involved donations from Anna's body sure things'?"
"Nothing in cancer is a sure thing, Mr. Alexander."
"Was that explained to the Fitzgeralds?"
"We carefully explain the risks of every procedure, because once you begin treatments, you compromise other bodily systems. What we wind up doing for one treatment successfully may come back to haunt you the next time around." He smiles at Sara. "That said, Kate's an incredible young woman. She wasn't expected to live past age five, and here she is at sixteen."
"Thanks to her sister," I point out.
Dr. Chance nods. "Not many patients have both the strength of body and the good fortune to have a perfectly matched donor available to them."
I stand up, my hands in my pockets. "Can you tell the Court how the Fitzgeralds came to consult Providence Hospital's preimplantation genetic diagnosis team to conceive Anna?"
"After their son was tested and found to be an unsuitable donor for Kate, I told the Fitzgeralds about another family I'd worked with. They'd tested all the patient's siblings, and none qualified, but then the mother got pregnant during the course of treatment and that child happened to be a perfect match."
"Did you tell the Fitzgeralds to conceive a genetically programmed child to serve as a donor for Kate?"
"Absolutely not," Chance says, affronted. "I just explained that even if none of the existing children was a match, that didn't mean that a future child might not be."
"Did you explain to the Fitzgeralds that this child, as a perfectly genetically programmed match, would have to be available for all these treatments for Kate throughout her life?"
"We were talking about a single cord blood treatment at the time," Dr. Chance says. "Subsequent donations came about because Kate didn't respond to the first one. And because they offered more promising results."
"So if tomorrow scientists were to come up with a procedure that would cure Kate's cancer if Anna only cut off her head and gave it to her sister, would you recommend that?"
"Obviously not. I would never recommend a treatment that risked another child's life."
"Isn't that what you've done for the past thirteen years?"
His face tightens. "None of the treatments have caused significant long-term harm to Anna."
I take a piece of paper out of my briefcase and hand it to the judge, and then to Dr. Chance. "Can you read the part that's marked?"
He puts on a pair of glasses and clears his throat. "I understand that anesthesia involves potential risks. These risks may include, but are not limited to: adverse drug reactions, sore throat, injury to teeth and dental work, damage to vocal cords, respiratory problems, minor pain and discomfort, loss of sensation, headaches, infection, allergic reaction, awareness during general anesthesia, jaundice, bleeding, nerve injury, blood clot, heart attack, brain damage, and even loss of bodily function or of life."
"Are you familiar with this form, Doctor?"
"Yes. It's a standard consent form for a surgical procedure."
"Can you tell us who the patient receiving it was?"
"Anna Fitzgerald."
"And who signed the consent form?"
"Sara Fitzgerald."
I rock back on my heels. "Dr. Chance, anesthesia carries a risk of life impairment or death. Those are pretty strong long-term effects."
"That's exactly why we have a consent form. It's to protect us from people like you," he says. "But realistically, the risk is extremely small. And the procedure of donating marrow is fairly simple."
"Why was Anna being anesthetized for such a simple procedure?"
"It's less traumatic for a child, and they're less likely to squirm around."
"And after the procedure, did Anna experience any pain?"
"Maybe a little," Dr. Chance says.
"You don't remember?"
"It's been a long time. I'm sure even Anna's forgotten about it by now."
"You think?" I turn to Anna. "Should we ask her?"
Judge DeSalvo crosses his arms.
"Speaking of risk," I continue smoothly. "Can you tell us about the research that's been done on the long-term effects of the growth factor shots she's taken twice now, prior to harvest for transplant?"
"Theoretically, there shouldn't be any long-term sequelae."
"Theoretically," I repeat. "Why theoretically?"
"Because the research has been done on lab animals," Dr. Chance admits. "Effects on humans are still being tracked."
"How comforting."
He shrugs. "Physicians don't tend to prescribe drugs that have the potential to wreak havoc."
"Have you ever heard of thalidomide, Doctor?" I ask.
"Of course. In fact, recently, it's been resurrected for cancer research."
"And it was a milestone drug once before," I point out. "With catastrophic effects. Speaking of which . . . this kidney donation—are there risks associated with the procedure?"
"No more than for most surgeries," Dr. Chance says.
"Could Anna die from complications of this surgery?"
"It's highly unlikely, Mr. Alexander."
"Well, then, let's assume Anna comes through the procedure with flying colors. How will having a single kidney affect her for the rest of her life?"
"It won't, really," the doctor says. "That's the beauty of it."
I hand him a flyer that has come from the nephrology department of his own hospital. "Can you read the highlighted section?"
He slips on his glasses again. "Increased chance of hypertension. Possible complications during pregnancy." Dr. Chance glances up. "Donors are advised to refrain from contact sports to eliminate the risk of harming their remaining kidney."
I clasp my hands behind my back. "Did you know that Anna plays hockey in her free time?"
He turns toward her. "No. I didn't."
"She's a goalie. Has been for years now." I let this sink in. "But since this donation is hypothetical, let's concentrate on the ones that have already happened. The growth factor shots, the DLI, the stem cells, the lymphocyte donations, the bone marrow—all of these myriad treatments Anna endured—in your expert opinion, Doctor, are you saying that Anna has not undergone any significant medical harm from these procedures?"
"Significant?" He hesitates. "No, she has not."
"Has she received any significant benefit from them?" Dr. Chance looks at me for a long moment. "Sure," he says. "She's saving her sister."
Anna and I are eating lunch upstairs at the courthouse when Julia walks in. "Is this a private party?"
Anna waves her inside, and Julia sits down without so much as a glance toward me. "How are you doing?" she asks.
"Okay," Anna replies. "I just want it to be over."
Julia opens up a packet of salad dressing and pours it over the lunch she's brought. "It will be, before you know it."
She looks at me when she says this, briefly.
That's all it takes for me to remember the smell of her skin, and the spot below her breast where she has a beauty mark in the shape of a crescent moon.
Suddenly Anna gets up. "I'm going to take Judge for a walk." she announces.
"Like hell you are. There are reporters out there, still."
"I'll walk him in the hallway, then."
"You can't. He has to be walked by me; it's part of his training."
"Then I'm going to pee," Anna says. "That's something I'm still allowed to do by myself, right?"
She walks out of the conference room, leaving Julia and me and everything that shouldn't have happened but did.
"She left us alone on purpose," I realize.
Julia nods. "She's a smart kid. She can read people very well." Then she sets down her plastic fork. "Your car is full of dog hair."
"I know. I keep asking Judge to pull it back in a ponytail but he never listens."
"Why didn't you just get me up?"
I grin. "Because we were anchored in a no-wake zone."
Julia, however, doesn't even crack a smile. "Was last night a joke to you, Campbell?"
That old adage pops into my head: If you want to see God laugh, make apian. And because I am a coward, I grab the dog by his collar. "I need to walk him before we're called back into court."
Julia's voice follows me to the door. "You didn't answer me."
"You don't want me to," I say. I don't turn around. That way I don't have to see her face.
When Judge DeSalvo adjourns us for the day at three because of a weekly chiropractic appointment, I walk Anna out to the lobby to find her father—but Brian's gone. Sara looks around, surprised. "Maybe he got a fire call," she says. "Anna, I'll—"
But I put my hand on Anna's shoulder. "I'll take you to the fire station."
In the car, she is quiet. I pull into the station parking lot and leave the engine running. "Listen," I tell her, "you may not have realized it, but we had a great first day."
"Whatever."
She gets out of my car without another word and Judge hops up into the vacated front seat. Anna walks toward the station, but then veers left. I start to pull back out, and then against my better judgment turn off the engine. Leaving Judge in the car, I follow her around the back of the building.
She stands like a statue, her face turned up to the sky. What am I supposed to do, say? I have never been a parent; I can barely take care of myself.
As it turns out, Anna starts speaking first. "Did you ever do something you knew was wrong, even though it felt right?"
I think of Julia. "Yeah."
"Sometimes I hate myself," Anna murmurs.
"Sometimes," I tell her, "I hate myself, too."
This surprises her. She looks at me, and then at the sky again. "They're up there. The stars. Even when you can't see them."
I put my hands into my pockets. "I used to wish on a star every night."
"For what?"
"Rare baseball cards for my collection. A golden retriever. Young, hot female teachers."
"My dad told me that a bunch of astronomers found a new place where stars are being born. Only it's taken us 2,500 years to see them." She turns to me. "Do you get along with your parents?"
I think about lying to her, but then I shake my head. "I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I'm not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway."
The sun washes over her milky skin, lights the line of her throat. "I get it," Anna says. "You were invisible, too."