My Sister's Keeper (38 page)

We bag her and put in an IV. Paulie screams into the loading zone for
ambulances and throws open the back doors. On the trailer, Anna is immobile.
Red grabs my arm, hard. “Don't think about it,” he says, and he takes
the head of Anna's stretcher and rushes her into the ER.

They will not let me into the trauma room. A flock of firefighters dribble
in for support. One of them goes up to get Sara, who arrives frantic.
“Where is she? What happened?”

“A car accident,” I manage. “I didn't know who it was until I
got there.” My eyes fill up. Do I tell her that she is not breathing
independently? Do I tell her that the EKG flatlined? Do I tell her that I have
spent the past few minutes questioning every single thing I did on that call,
from the way I crawled over the truck to the moment I pulled her from the
wreckage, certain that my emotion compromised what should have been done, what
could have been done?

At that moment I hear Campbell Alexander, and the sound of something being
thrown against a wall. “Goddammit,” he says. “Just tell me
whether or not she was brought here!”

He bursts out of the doorway of another trauma room, his arm in a cast, his
clothes bloodied. The dog, limping, is at his side. Immediately, Campbell's
eyes home in on mine. “Where's Anna?” he asks.

I don't answer, because what the hell can I say. And that's all it takes for
him to understand. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispers. “Oh God, no.”

The doctor comes out of Anna's room. He knows me; I am here four nights a
week. “Brian,” he says soberly, “she's not responding to noxious
stimuli.”

The sound that comes out of me is primal, inhuman, all-knowing. “What does
that mean?” Sara's words peck at me. “What is he saying, Brian?”

“Anna's head hit the window with great force, Mrs. Fitzgerald. It
caused a fatal head injury. A respirator is keeping her breathing right now,
but she's not showing any indications of neurological activity… she's brain
dead. I'm sorry,” the doctor says. “I really am.” He hesitates,
looks from me to Sara. “I know it's not something you even want to think
about right now, but there's a very small window… is organ donation something
you'd like to consider?”

There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and
when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins.
The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years
to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for
anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later
that it has a white dwarf as a companion-that first one shines so bright, by
the time you notice the second one, it's really too late.

Campbell is the one who actually answers the doctor. “I have power of
attorney for Anna,” he explains, “not her parents.” He looks
from me, to Sara. “And there is a girl upstairs who needs that
kidney.”

SARA

IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE there are orphans and widows, but there is no word
for the parent who loses a child.

They bring her back down to us after the donated organs are removed. I am
the last to go in. In the hallway, already, are Jesse and Zanne and Campbell
and some of the nurses we've grown close to, and even Julia Romano—the people
who needed to say goodbye.

Brian and I walk inside, where Anna lies tiny and still on the hospital bed.
A tube feeds down her throat, a machine breathes for her. It is up to us to
turn it off. I sit down on the edge of the bed and pick up Anna's hand, still
warm to the touch, still soft inside mine. It turns out that after all these
years I have spent anticipating a moment like this, I am completely at a loss.
Like coloring the sky in with a crayon; there is no language for grief this
big. “I can't do this,” I whisper.

Brian comes up behind me. “Sweetheart, she's not here. It's the machine
keeping her body alive. What makes Anna Anna is already gone.”

I turn, bury my face against his chest. “But she wasn't supposed
to,” I sob.

We hold each other, then, and when I feel brave enough I look back down at
the husk that once held my youngest. He is right, after all. This is nothing
but a shell. There is no energy to the lines

of her face; there is a slack absence to her muscles. Under this skin they
have stripped her of organs that will go to Kate and to other, nameless,
second-chance people.

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. I put my hand on Anna's chest as
Brian, trembling, flips off the respirator. I rub her skin in small circles, as
if this might make it easier. When the monitors flatline, I wait to see some
change in her. And then I feel it, as her heart stops beating beneath my
palm—that tiny loss of rhythm, that hollow calm, that utter loss.

When along the pavement,

Palpitating flames of life,

People flicker round me,

I forget my bereavement,

The gap in the great constellation,

The place where a star used to be.

—D. H. LAWRENCE, “Submergence”

KATE

 2010

THERE SHOULD BE A STATUTE of limitation on grief. A rule book that says
it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty -two
days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her
call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to
clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a
school portrait as you pass—if only because it cuts you fresh again to
see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once
measured her birthdays.

For a long time, afterward, my father claimed to see Anna in the night
sky. Sometimes it was the wink of her eye, sometimes the shape of her profile.
He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved they were traced in
constellations, to live forever. My mother believed, for a long time, that Anna
would come back to her. She began to look for signs—plants that
bloomed too early, eggs with double yolks, salt spilled in the shape of
letters.

And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault.
If Anna had never filed that lawsuit, if she hadn't been at the courthouse
signing papers with her attorney, she never would have been at that particular
intersection at that particular moment. She would be here, and I would be the
one coming back to haunt her.

For a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then,
inexplicably, I began the long steep climb upward. It has been eight years
since my last relapse, something not even Dr. Chance can understand. He thinks
it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy—some
contributing delayed effect—but I know better. It is that someone had
to go, and Anna took my place.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid
being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a
household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my
room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to
listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked
round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come home to a house that
felt too big for us.

Then one morning, my mother realized that we had eaten everything in the
house, down to the last shrunken raisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went
to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat down to watch TV
and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh.

Immediately, I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over
my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse, sitting beside me on the couch, who said,
“She would have thought it was funny, too.”

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that
someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is
a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you
look down and see how much pain has eroded.

I wonder how much she keeps tabs on us. If she knows that for a long
time, we were close to Campbell and Julia, even went to their wedding. If she
understands that the reason we don't see them anymore is because it just plain
hurt too much, because even when we didn't talk about Anna, she lingered in the
spaces between the words, like the smell of something burning.

I wonder if she was at Jesse's graduation from the police academy, if
she knows that he won a citation from the mayor last year for his role in a
drug bust. I wonder if she knew that Daddy fell deep into a bottle after she
left, and had to claw his way out. I wonder if she knows that, now, I
teach children how to dance. That every time I see two little girls at the
barre, sinking into plies, I think of us.

She still takes me by surprise. Like nearly a year after her death, when
my mother came home with a roll of film she'd just developed of my high school
graduation. We sat down at the kitchen table together, shoulder to shoulder,
trying not to mention as we looked at all our double-wide grins that there was
someone missing from the photo.

And then, as if we'd conjured her, the last picture was of Anna. It had
been that long since we'd used the camera, plain and simple. She was on a beach
towel, holding out one hand toward the photographer, trying to get whoever it
was to stop taking her picture.

My mother and I sat at the kitchen table staring at Anna until the sun
set, until we had memorized everything from the color of her pony tail holder
to the pattern of fringe on her bikini. Until we couldn't be sure we were
seeing her clearly anymore.

My mother let me have that picture of Anna. But I didn't frame it; I put
it into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer
of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose
her.

There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first
thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where
the freckles were on her right shoulder. Maybe one of these days, I will not be
able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

When I start to feel this way I go into the bathroom and I lift up my
shirt and touch the white lines of my scar. I remember how, at first, I thought
the stitches seemed to spell out her name. I think about her kidney working
inside me and her blood running through my veins. I take her with me, wherever
I go.