My Sister's Keeper (35 page)

Kate looked at me and popped in a new CD. We both knew where this was
headed. “You can't exactly pick up a kidney at Kmart.”

“I know. It turns out that you only need to match a couple of HLA
proteins to be a kidney donor—not all six. I called Dr. Chance to ask if I
might be a match for you, and he said in normal cases, I probably would.”

Kate hears the right word. “Normal cases?”

“Which you're not. Dr. Chance thinks you'd reject an organ from the
general donor pool, just because your body has already been through so
much.” My mother looked down at the carpet. “He won't recommend the
procedure unless the kidney comes from Anna.”

My father shook his head. “That's invasive surgery,” he said
quietly. “For both of them.”

I started thinking about this. Would I have to be in the hospital? Would it
hurt? Could people live with just one kidney?

What if I wound up with kidney failure when I was, like, seventy? Where
would I get my spare?

Before I could ask any of this, Kate spoke. “I'm not doing it again,
all right? I'm sick of it. The hospitals and the chemo and the radiation and
the whole freaking thing. Just leave me alone, will you?”

My mother's face went white. “Fine, Kate. Go ahead and commit
suicide!”

She put her headphones on again, turned the music up so loud that I could
hear it. “It's not suicide,” she said, “if you're already
dying.”

“Did you ever tell anyone that you didn't want to be a donor?”
Campbell asks me, as his dog starts doing helicopters in the front of the
courtroom.

“Mr. Alexander,” Judge DeSalvo says, “I'm going to call a
bailiff to remove your… pet.”

It's true, the dog is totally out of control. He's barking and leaping up
with his front paws on Campbell and running in those tight circles. Campbell
ignores both Judges. "Anna, did you decide to file this lawsuit all by
yourself?'

I know why he's asking; he wants everyone to know I'm capable of making
choices that are hard. And I even have my lie, quivering like the

snake it is, caught between my teeth. But what I mean to say isn't quite
what slips out. “I was kind of convinced by someone.”

This is, of course, news to my parents, whose eyes hammer onto me. It's news
to Julia, who actually makes a small sound. And it's news to Campbell, who runs
a hand down his face in defeat. This is exactly why it's better to stay silent;
there is less of a chance of screwing up your life and everyone else's.

“Anna,” Campbell says, “who convinced you?”

I am small in this seat, in this state, on this lonely planet. I fold my
hands together, holding between them the only emotion I've managed to keep from
slipping away: regret. “Kate.”

The entire courtroom goes silent. Before I can say anything else, the
lightning bolt I have been expecting strikes. I cringe, but it turns out that
the crash I've heard isn't the earth opening up to swallow me whole. It is Campbell,
who's fallen to the floor, while his dog stands nearby with a very human look
on his face that says / told you so.

BRIAN

IF YOU TRAVEL IN SPACE for three years and come back, four hundred years
will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd
sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes
sense. I thought I had been listening to Jesse, but it turns out I haven't been
listening to him at all. I have listened carefully to Anna, and yet it
seems there is a piece missing. I try to work through the few things she has
said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow
found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.

Then it hits me-l am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of
Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the
Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern
Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in
the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.

Or this is what I'm thinking, anyway, when my daughter's lawyer falls to the
floor in the throes of an epileptic seizure.

Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal
seizure, is the biggie. I jump over the gate of the gallery and have to fight
the dog out of the way; he's come to stand over Campbell Alexander's twitching
body like a sentry. The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is
forced out by the contraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the
ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and his muscles fire randomly,
repeatedly. I turn him on his side, in case he vomits, and start looking for
something to stick between his jaws so that he won't bite off his own tongue,
when the most amazing thing happens-that dog knocks over Alexander's briefcase
and pulls out something that looks like a rubber bone but is actually a bite
block, and drops it into my hand. Distantly I am aware of the judge sealing off
the courtroom. I yell to Vern to call for an ambulance.

Julia is at my side immediately. “Is he all right?”

“He's gonna be fine. It's a seizure.”

She looks like she's on the verge of tears. “Can't you do
something?”

“Wait,” I say.

She reaches for Campbell, but I draw her hand away. “I don't understand
why it happened.”

I don't know if Campbell does, himself. I do know that there are some
things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.

Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so
when you get right down to it, the Greek conceptions of star signs as related
to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today's day and age. It's called the
Line of Procession: back then the sun didn't set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A
September 24 birthday didn't mean you were a Libra, but a Virgo. And there was
a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, which rose
between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days.

The reason it's all off kilter? The earth's axis wobbles. Life isn't nearly
as stable as we want it to be.

Campbell Alexander vomits on the courtroom rug, then coughs his way to
consciousness in the judge's chambers. 'Take it easy,“ I say, helping him
sit. ”You had a bad one."

He holds his head. “What happened?”

Amnesia, on both sides of the event, is pretty common. “Blacked out.
Looked like a grand mal to me.”

He glances down at the IV line Caesar and I have placed. “I don't need
that.”

“Like hell you don't,” I say. “If you don't take antiseizure
meds, you'll be back on that floor in no time.”

Relenting, he leans back against the couch and stares at the ceiling.
“How bad was it?”

“Pretty bad,” I admit.

He pats Judge on the head-the dog's been inseparable. “Good boy. Sorry
I didn't listen.” Then he looks down at his pants—wet and reeking, another
common effect of a grand mal. “Shit.”

“Close enough.” I hand him a spare pair from one of my uniforms,
something I had the department bring along. “You need help?”

He shakes me off and tries, one-handedly, to take off his trousers. Without
a word I reach over and undo the fly, help him change. I do this without
thinking, the way I'd lift up the shirt of a woman who needed CPR; but all the
same, I know it's killing him.

“Thanks,” he says, taking great care to zip his own fly. We sit
for a second. “Does the judge know?” When I don't answer, Campbell
buries his face in his hands. “Christ. Right in front of everyone?”

“How long have you hidden it?”

“Since it started. I was eighteen. I got into a car crash, and they
started up after that.”

“Head trauma?”

He nods. 'That's what they said."

I clasp my hands together between my knees. “Anna was pretty freaked
out.”

Campbell rubs his forehead. “She was… testifying.”

“Yeah,” I say. 'Yeah."

He looks up at me. “I have to get back in there.”

“Not yet.” At the sound of Julia's voice, we both turn. She stands
in the doorway, staring at Campbell as if she has never seen him before, and I
suppose in all fairness she hasn't, not like this.

“I'll, uh, go see if the boys have filed their report yet,” I
murmur, and I leave them.

Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like
bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find
you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a
single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri,
which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close
proximity.

There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the
second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered
observatory telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and
the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at
the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young
girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.

Make of it what you will.

CAMPBELL

THE ONLY THING COMPARABLE to the aftermath of a grand mal seizure is waking
up on the pavement with a hangover from the mother of all frat parties and
immediately being run over by a truck. On second thought, maybe a grand mal is
worse. I am covered in my own filth, hooked up to medicine and falling apart at
the seams, when Julia walks toward me. “It's a seizure dog,” I say.

“No kidding.” Julia holds out her hand for Judge to sniff. She
points to the couch beside me. “Can I sit down?”

“It's not catching, if that's what you mean.”

“It wasn't.” Julia comes close enough that I can feel the heat
from her shoulder, inches away from mine. “Why didn't you tell me,
Campbell?”

“Christ, Julia, I didn't even tell my parents.” I try to look over
her shoulder into the hallway. “Where's Anna?”

“How long has this been going on?”

I try to get up, and manage to lift myself a half inch before my strength
gives out. “ I have to get back in there.”

“Campbell.”

I sigh. “A while.”

“A while, as in a week?”

Shaking my head, I say, “A while, as in two days before we graduated
from Wheeler.” I look up at her. “The day I took you home, all I
wanted was to be with you. When my parents told me I had to got o that stupid
dinner at the country club, I followed them in my own car, so I could make a
quick escape—I was planning on driving back to your house, that night. But on
the way to dinner, I got into a car accident. I came through with a few
bruises, and that night, I had the first seizure. Thirty CT scans later, the
doctors still couldn't really tell me why, but they made it pretty clear I'd
have to live with it forever.” I take a deep breath. “Which is what
made me realize that no one else should have to.”

“What?”

“What do you want me to say, Julia? I wasn't good enough for you. You
deserved better than some freak who might fall down frothing at the mouth any
old minute.”

Julia goes perfectly still. “You might have let me make up my own
mind.”

“What difference would it have made? Like you really would have gotten
great satisfaction guarding me like Judge does when it happens; wiping up after
me, living at the end of my life.” I shake my head. “You were so
incredibly independent. A free spirit. I didn't want to be the one who took
that away from you.”

“Well, if I'd had the choice, maybe I wouldn't have spent the past
fifteen years thinking there was something the matter with me.”

“You?” I start to laugh. “Look at you. You're a knockout.
You're smarter than I am. You're on a career track and you're family-centered
and you probably even can balance your checkbook.”

“And I'm lonely, Campbell,” Julia adds. “Why do you think I
had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the
covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip
code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone
because they're perfect,” she says. “You love them in spite of the
fact that they're not.”

I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five
years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather
green.

“And another thing—this time, you don't get to leave me. I'm
going to leave you.”

If possible, that only makes me feel worse. I try to pretend it doesn't
hurt, but I don't have the energy. “So go.”

Julia settles next to me. “I will,” she says. “In another
fifty or sixty years.”

ANNA

I KNOCK ON THE DOOR of the men's room, and then walk inside. On one wall is
a really long, gross urinal. On the other, washing his hands in a sink, is
Campbell. He's wearing a pair of my dad's uniform pants. He looks different
now, as if all the straight lines that had been used to draw his face have been
smudged. “Julia said you wanted me to come in here,” I say.

“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you alone, and all the conference rooms are
upstairs. Your dad doesn't think I ought to tackle that just yet.” He
wipes his hands on a towel. “I'm sorry about what happened.”

Well, I don't even know if there's a decent answer to that. I chew on my
lower lip. “Is that why I couldn't pat the dog?”

“Yeah.”

“How does Judge know what to do?”

Campbell shrugs. “It's supposed to have something to do with scent or
electrical impulses that an animal can sense before a human can. But I think
it's because we know each other so well.” He pats Judge on the neck.
“He gets me somewhere safe before it happens. I usually have about twenty
minutes' lead time.”

“Huh.” I am suddenly shy. I've been with Kate when she's really,
really sick, but this is different. I hadn't been expecting this from Campbell.
“Is this why you took my case?”