My Sister's Keeper (2 page)

My father says that a fire will burn itself out, unless you open a window
and give it fuel. I suppose that's what I'm doing, when you get right down to
it; but then again, my dad also says that when flames are licking at your heels
you've got to break a wall or two if you want to escape. So when Kate falls
asleep from her meds I take the leather binder I keep between my mattress and
box spring and go into the bathroom for privacy. I know Kate's been snooping—I
rigged up a red thread between the zipper's teeth to let me know who was prying
into my stuff without my permission, but even though the thread's been torn
there's nothing missing inside. I turn on the water in the bathtub so it sounds
like I'm in there for a reason, and sit down on the floor to count.

If you add in the twenty dollars from the pawnshop, I have $136.87. It's not
going to be enough, but there's got to be a way around that. Jesse didn't have
$2,900 when he bought his beat-up Jeep, and the bank gave him some kind of
loan. Of course, my parents had to sign the papers, too, and I doubt they're
going to be willing to do that for me, given the circumstances. I count the
money a second time, just in case the bills have miraculously reproduced, but
math is math and the total stays the same. And then I read the newspaper
clippings. Campbell Alexander. It's a stupid name, in my opinion. It sounds
like a bar drink that costs too much, or a brokerage firm. But you can't deny
the man's track record.

To reach my brother's room, you actually have to leave the house, which is
exactly the way he likes it. When Jesse turned sixteen he moved into the attic
over the garage—a perfect arrangement, since he didn't want my parents to see
what he was doing and my parents didn't really want to see. Blocking the stairs
to his place are four snow tires, a small wall of cartons, and an oak desk
tipped onto its side. Sometimes I think Jesse sets up these obstacles himself,
just to make getting to him more of a challenge.

I crawl over the mess and up the stairs, which vibrate with the bass from
Jesse's stereo. It takes nearly five whole minutes before he hears me knocking.
“What?” he snaps, opening the door a crack. “Can I come
in?”

He thinks twice, then steps back to let me enter. The room is a sea of dirty
clothes and magazines and leftover Chinese take-out cartons; it smells like the
sweaty tongue of a hockey skate. The only neat spot is the shelf where Jesse
keeps his special collection—a Jaguar's silver mascot, a Mercedes symbol, a
Mustang's horse—hood ornaments that he told me he just found lying around,
although I'm not dumb enough to believe him.

Don't get me wrong—it isn't that my parents don't care about Jesse or
whatever trouble he's gotten himself mixed up in. It's just that they don't
really have time to care about it, because it's a problem somewhere lower on
the totem pole.

Jesse ignores me, going back to whatever he was doing on the far side of the
mess. My attention is caught by a Crock-Pot—one that disappeared out of the
kitchen a few months ago—which now sits on top of Jesse's TV with a copper tube
threaded out of its lid and down through a plastic milk jug filled with ice,
emptying into a glass Mason jar. Jesse may be a borderline delinquent, but he's
brilliant. Just as I'm about to touch the contraption, Jesse turns around.
“Hey!” He fairly flies over the couch to knock my hand away.
“You'll screw up the condensing coil.”

“Is this what I think it is?”

A nasty grin itches over his face. “Depends on what you think it
is.” He jimmies out the Mason jar, so that liquid drips onto the carpet.
“Have a taste.”

For a still made out of spit and glue, it produces pretty potent moonshine
whiskey. An inferno races so fast through my belly and legs I fall back onto
the couch. “Disgusting,” I gasp.

Jesse laughs and takes a swig, too, although for him it goes down easier.
“So what do you want from me?”

“How do you know I want something?”

“Because no one comes up here on a social call,” he says, sitting
on the arm of the couch. “And if it was something about Kate, you would've
already told me.”

“It is about Kate. Sort of.” I press the newspaper
clippings into my brother's hand; they'll do a better job explaining than I
ever could. He scans them, then looks me right in the eye. His are the palest
shade of silver, so surprising that sometimes when he stares at you, you can
completely forget what you were planning to say.

“Don't mess with the system, Anna,” he says bitterly. “We've
all got our scripts down pat. Kate plays the Martyr. I'm the Lost Cause. And
you, you're the Peacekeeper.”

He thinks he knows me, but that goes both ways—and when it comes to
friction, Jesse is an addict. I look right at him. “Says who?”

Jesse agrees to wait for me in the parking lot. It's one of the few times I
can recall him doing anything I tell him to do. I walk around to the front of
the building, which has two gargoyles guarding its entrance.

Campbell Alexander, Esquire's office is on the third floor. The walls are paneled
with wood the color of a chestnut mare's coat, and when I step onto the thick
Oriental rug on the floor, my sneakers sink an inch. The secretary is wearing
black pumps so shiny I can see my own face in them. I glance down at my cutoffs
and the Keds that I tattooed last week with Magic Markers when I was bored.

The secretary has perfect skin and perfect eyebrows and honeybee lips, and
she's using them to scream bloody murder at whoever's on the other end of the
phone. “You cannot expect me to tell a judge that. Just because you
don't want to hear Kleman rant and rave doesn't mean that / have to… no,
actually, that raise was for the exceptional job I do and the crap I put up
with on a daily basis, and as a matter of fact, while we're on—” She holds
the phone away from her ear; I can make out the buzz of disconnection.
“Bastard,” she mutters, and then seems to realize I'm standing three
feet away. “Can I help you?”

She looks me over from head to toe, rating me on a general scale of first
impressions, and finding me severely lacking. I lift my chin and pretend to be
far more cool than I actually am. “I have an appointment with Mr.
Alexander. At four o'clock.”

“Your voice,” she says. “On the phone, you didn't sound quite
so…”

Young?

She smiles uncomfortably. “We don't try juvenile cases, as a rule. If
you'd like I can offer you the names of some practicing attorneys who—”

I take a deep breath. “Actually,” I interrupt, “you're wrong.
Smith v. Whately, Edmunds v. Womens and Infants Hospital, and Jerome v. the Diocese
of Providence all involved litigants under the age of eighteen. All three
resulted in verdicts for Mr. Alexander's clients. And those were just in the
past year.”

The secretary blinks at me. Then a slow smile toasts her face, as if she's
decided she just might like me after all. “Come to think of it, why don't
you just wait in his office?” she suggests, and she stands up to show me
the way.

Even if I spend every minute of the rest of my life reading, I do not
believe that I will ever manage to consume the sheer number of words routed
high and low on the walls of Campbell Alexander, Esquire's office. I do the
math—if there are 400 words or so on every page, and each of those legal books
are 400 pages, and there are twenty on a shelf and six shelves per
bookcase—why, you're pushing nineteen million words, and that's only partway
across the room.

I'm alone in the office long enough to note that his desk is so neat, you
could play Chinese football on the blotter; that there is not a single photo of
a wife or a kid or even himself; and that in spite of the fact that the room is
spotless, there's a mug full of water sitting on the floor.

I find myself making up explanations: it's a swimming pool for an army of
ants. It's some kind of primitive humidifier. It's a mirage.

I've nearly convinced myself about that last one, and am leaning over to
touch it to see if it's real, when the door bursts open. I practically fall out
of my chair and that puts me eye to eye with an incoming German shepherd, which
spears me with a look and then marches over to the mug and starts to drink.

Campbell Alexander comes in, too. He's got black hair and he's at least as
tall as my dad—six feet—with a right-angle jaw and eyes that look frozen over.
He shrugs out of a suit jacket and hangs it neatly on the back of the door,
then yanks a file out of a cabinet before moving to his desk. He never makes
eye contact with me, but he starts talking all the same. “I don't want any
Girl Scout cookies,” Campbell Alexander says. “Although you do get
Brownie points for tenacity. Ha.” He smiles at his own joke.

“I'm not selling anything.”

He glances at me curiously, then pushes a button on his phone.
“Kerri,” he says when the secretary answers. “What is this doing
in my office?”

“I'm here to retain you,” I say.

The lawyer releases the intercom button. “I don't think so.”

“You don't even know if I have a case.”

I take a step forward; so does the dog. For the first time I realize it's
wearing one of those vests with a red cross on it, like a St. Bernard that
might carry rum up a snowy mountain. I automatically reach out to pet him.
“Don't,” Alexander says. “Judge is a service dog.”

My hand goes back to my side. “But you aren't blind.”

“Thank you for pointing that out to me.”

“So what's the matter with you?”

The minute I say it, I want to take it back. Haven't I watched Kate field
this question from hundreds of rude people?

“I have an iron lung,” Campbell Alexander says curtly, “and
the dog keeps me from getting too close to magnets. Now, if you'd do me the
exalted honor of leaving, my secretary can find you the name of someone
who—”

But I can't go yet. “Did you really sue God?” I take out all the
newspaper clippings, smooth them on the bare desk.

A muscle tics in his cheek, and then he picks up the article lying on top.
“I sued the Diocese of Providence, on behalf of a kid in one of their
orphanages who needed an experimental treatment involving fetal tissue, which
they felt violated Vatican II. However, it makes a much better headline to say
that a nine-year-old is suing God for being stuck with the short end of the
straw in life.” I just stare at him. “Dylan Jerome,” the lawyer
admits, “wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.”

A rainbow might as well have cracked down the middle of that big mahogany
desk. “Mr. Alexander,” I say, “my sister has leukemia.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. But even if I were willing to litigate against
God again, which I'm not, you can't bring a lawsuit on someone else's
behalf.”

There is way too much to explain—my own blood seeping into my sister's
veins; the nurses holding me down to stick me for white cells Kate might
borrow; the doctor saying they didn't get enough the first time around. The
bruises and the deep bone ache after I gave up my marrow; the shots that sparked
more stem cells in me, so that there'd be extra for my sister. The fact that
I'm not sick, but I might as well be. The fact that the only reason I was born
was as a harvest crop for Kate. The fact that even now, a major decision about
me is being made, and no one's bothered to ask the one person who most deserves
it to speak her opinion.

There's way too much to explain, and so I do the best I can. “It's not
God. Just my parents,” I say. “I want to sue them for the rights to
my own body.”

CAMPBELL

WHEN YOU ONLY HAVE A HAMMER, everything looks like a nail.

This is something my father, the first Campbell Alexander, used to say; it
is also in my opinion the cornerstone of the American civil justice system.
Simply put, people who have been backed into a corner will do anything to fight
their way to the center again. For some, this means throwing punches. For
others, it means instigating a lawsuit. And for that, I'm especially grateful.

On the periphery of my desk Kerri has arranged my messages the way I
prefer—urgent ones written on green Post-its, less pressing matters on yellow
ones, lined up in neat columns like a double game of solitaire. One phone
number catches my eye, and I frown, moving the green Post-it to the yellow side
instead. Your mother called four times!!! Kerri has written. On second
thought, I rip the Post-it in half and send it sailing into the trash.

The girl sitting across from me waits for an answer, one I'm deliberately
withholding. She says she wants to sue her parents, like every other teenager
on the planet. But she wants to sue for the rights to her own body. It
is exactly the kind of case I avoid like the Black Plague—one which requires
far too much effort and client baby-sitting. With a sigh, I get up. “What
did you say your name was?”

“I didn't.” She sits a little straighter. “It's Anna
Fitzgerald.”

I open the door and bellow for my secretary. “Kerri! Can you get the
Planned Parenthood number for Ms. Fitzgerald?”

“What?” When I turn around, the kid is standing.
“Planned Parenthood?”

“Look, Anna, here's a little advice. Instigating a lawsuit because your
parents won't let you get birth control pills or go to an abortion clinic is
like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. You can save your allowance money
and go to Planned Parenthood; they're far better equipped to deal with your
problem.”

For the first time since I've entered my office, I really, truly look at
her. Anger glows around this kid like electricity. “My sister is dying,
and my mother wants me to donate one of my kidneys to her,” she says
hotly. “Somehow I don't think a handful of free condoms is going to take
care of that.”

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life
stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one
gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that
you're making a mistake? Kerri approaches, holding out a strip of paper with
the number I've asked for, but I close the door without taking it and walk back
to my desk. “No one can make you donate an organ if you don't want
to.”