My Sister's Keeper (6 page)

“She paged Dad away from work.”

In our family, it is a cardinal sin to page my father away. Since his job is
emergencies, what crisis could we possibly have that compares? “Last time
she paged Dad,” Jesse informs me, “Kate was getting diagnosed.”

“Great.” I cross my arms. “That makes me feel infinitely
better.”

Jesse just smiles. He blows a smoke ring. “Sis,” he says,
“welcome to the Dark Side.”

They come in like a hurricane. Kate barely manages to look at me before my
father sends her upstairs to our room. My mother whacks her purse down, then
her car keys, and then advances on me. “All right,” she says, her
voice so tight it might snap. “What's going on?”

I clear my throat. “I got a lawyer.”

“Evidently.” My mother grabs the portable phone and hands it to
me. “Now get rid of him.”

It takes enormous effort, but I manage to shake my head and the phone into
the cushions of the couch.

“Anna, so help me—”

“Sara.” My father's voice is an ax. It comes between us, and sends
us both spinning. “I think we need to give Anna a chance to explain- We agreed
to give her a chance to explain, right?”

I duck my head. “I don't want to do it anymore.”

That ignites my mother. "Well, you know Anna, neither do In fact,
neither does Kate. But it's not something we have a choice about-'

The thing is, I do have a choice. Which is exactly why I have the one to do
this.

My mother stands over me. "You went to a lawyer and made him think this
is all about you—and it's not. It's about us. All of us—

My father's hands curl around her shoulders and squeeze-crouches down in
front of me, I smell smoke. He's come from someone else's fire right into the
middle of this one, and for this and nothing else. I'm embarrassed. "Anna,
honey, we know you think you were something you needed to do—'

“/ don't think that,” my mother interrupts.

My father closes his eyes. “Sara. Dammit, shut up.” Then he looks
at me again. “Can we talk, just us three, without a lawyer having to talk
for us?”

What he says makes my eyes fill up. But I knew this was coming—I lift my
chin and let the tears go at the same time. "Daddy, I can't—“

“For God's sake, Anna,” my mother says. “Do you even realize
what the consequences would be?”

My throat closes like the shutter of a camera, so that any air must move
through a tunnel as thin as a pin. I'm invisible I think, and realize
too late I have spoken out loud.

My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face
hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me
long after it's faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

Once, when Kate was eight and I was five, we had a fight and decided we no
longer wanted to share a room. Given the size of our house, though, and the
fact that Jesse lived in the other spare bedroom, we didn't have anywhere else
to go. So Kate, being older and wiser, decided to split our space in half.
“Which side do you want?” she asked diplomatically. “I'll even
let you pick.”

Well, I wanted the part with my bed in it. Besides, if you divided the room
in two, the half with my bed would also, by default, have the box that held all
our Barbie dolls and the shelves where we kept our arts and crafts supplies.
Kate went to reach for a marker there, but I stopped her. “That's on my
side,” I pointed out.

“Then give me one,” she demanded, so I handed her the red. She
climbed up onto the desk, reaching as high as she could toward the ceiling.
“Once we do this,” she said, “you stay on your side, and I stay
on my side, right?” I nodded, just as committed to keeping up this bargain
as she was. After all, I had all the good toys. Kate would be begging me for a
visit long before I'd be begging her.

“Swear it?” she asked, and we made a pinky promise.

She drew a jagged line from the ceiling, over the desk, across the tan
carpet, and back up over the nightstand up the opposite wall. Then she handed
me the marker. “Don't forget,” she said. “Only cheats go back on
a promise.”

I sat on the floor on my side of the room, removing every single Barbie we
owned, dressing and undressing them, making a big fuss out of the fact that I
had them and Kate didn't. She perched on her bed with her knees drawn up,
watching me. She didn't react at all. Until, that is, my mother called us down
for lunch.

Then Kate smiled at me, and walked out the door of the bedroom—which was on
her side.

I went up to the line she had drawn on the carpet, kicking at it with my
toes. I didn't want to be a cheat. But I didn't want to spend the rest of my
life in my room, either.

I do not know how long it took my mother to wonder why I wasn't coming to
the kitchen for lunch, but when you are five, even a second can last forever.
She stood in the doorway, staring at the line of marker on the walls and
carpet, and closed her eyes for patience. She walked into our room and picked
me up, which was when I started fighting her. “Don't,” I cried.
“I won't ever get back in!”

A minute later she left, and returned with pot holders, dishtowels, and
throw pillows. She placed these at odd distances, all along Kate's side of the
room. “Come on,” she urged, but I did not move. So she came and sat
down beside me on my bed. “It may be Kate's pond,” she said,
“but these are my lily pads.” Standing, she jumped onto a
dish-towel, and from there, onto a pillow. She glanced over her shoulder, until
I climbed onto the dishtowel. From the dishtowel, to the pillow, to a pot
holder Jesse had made in first grade, all the way across Kate's side of the
room. Following my mother's footsteps was the surest way out.

I am taking a shower when Kate jimmies the lock and comes into the bathroom.
“I want to talk to you,” she says.

I poke my head out from the side of the plastic curtain. “When I'm
finished,” I say, trying to buy time for the conversation I don't really
want to have.

“No, now.” She sits down on the lid of the toilet and sighs.
“Anna… what you're doing—”

“It's already done,” I say.

“You can undo it, you know, if you want.”

I am grateful for all the steam between us, because I couldn't bear the
thought of her being able to see my face right now. “I know,” I
whisper.

For a long time, Kate is silent. Her mind is running in circles, like a
gerbil on a wheel, the same way mine is. Chase every rung of possibility, and
you still get absolutely nowhere.

After a while, I peek my head out again. Kate wipes her eyes and looks up at
me. “You do realize,” she says, “that you're the only friend
I've got?”

“That's not true,” I immediately reply, but we both know I'm
lying.

Kate has spent too much time out of organized school to find a group she
fits into. Most of the friends she has made during her long stretch of
remission have disappeared—a mutual thing. It turned out to be too hard for an
average kid to know how to act around someone on the verge of dying; and it was
equally as difficult for Kate to get honestly excited about things like
homecoming and SATs, when there was no guarantee she'd be around to experience
them. She's got a few acquaintances, sure, but mostly when they come over they
look like they're serving out a sentence, and sit on the edge of Kate's bed
counting down the minutes until they can leave and thank God this didn't happen
to them.

A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.

“I'm not your friend,” I say, yanking the curtain back into place.
“I'm your sister.” And doing a damn lousy job at that, I
think. I push my face into the shower spray, so that she cannot tell I'm
crying, too.

Suddenly, the curtain whips aside, leaving me totally bare. “That's
what I wanted to talk about,” Kate says. “If you don't want to be my
sister anymore, that's one thing. But I don't think I could stand to lose you
as a friend.”

She pulls the curtain back into place, and the steam rises around me. A
moment later I hear the door open and close, and the knife-slice of cold air
that comes on its heels.

I can't stand the thought of losing her, either.

That night, once Kate falls asleep, I crawl out of my bed and stand beside
hers. When I hold my palm up under her nose to see if she's breathing, a
mouthful of air presses against my hand. I could push down, now, over that nose
and mouth, hold her when she fights. How would that really be any different
than what I am already doing?

The sound of footsteps in the hallway has me diving underneath the cave of
my covers. I turn onto my side, away from the door, just in case my eyelids are
still flickering by the time my parents enter the room. “I can't believe
this,” my mother whispers. “I just can't believe she's done
this.”

My father is so quiet that I wonder if maybe I have been mistaken, if maybe
he isn't here at all.

“This is Jesse, all over again,” my mother adds. “She's doing
it for the attention.” I can feel her looking down at me, like I'm some
kind of creature she's never seen before. “Maybe we need to take her
some-where, alone. Go to a movie, or shopping, so she doesn't feel left out.
Make her see that she doesn't have to do something crazy to get us to notice
her. What do you think?”

My father takes his time answering. “Well,” he says quietly,
“maybe this isn't crazy.”

You know how silence can push in at your eardrums in the dark, make you
deaf? That's what happens, so that I almost miss my mother's answer. “For
God's sake, Brian… whose side are you on?”

And my father: “Who said there were sides?”

But even I could answer that for him. There are always sides. There is
always a winner, and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who
must give.

A few seconds later, the door closes, and the hall light that has been
dancing on the ceiling disappears. Blinking, I roll onto my back—and find my
mother still standing beside my bed. “I thought you were gone,” I
whisper.

She sits down on the foot of my bed and I inch away. But she puts her hand
on my calf before I move too far. “What else do you think, Anna?”

My stomach squeezes tight. “I think… I think you must hate me.”

Even in the dark, I can see the shine of her eyes. “Oh, Anna,” my
mother sighs, “how can you not know how much I love you?”

She holds out her arms and I crawl into them, as if I'm small again and I
fit there. I press my face hard into her shoulder. What I want, more than
anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who
believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without
looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.

My mother holds me tighter. “We'll talk to the judge and explain it. We
can fix this,” she says. “We can fix everything.” And because
those words are really all I've ever wanted to hear, I nod.

SARA

THERE IS AN UNEXPECTED COMFORT to being at the oncology wing of the
hospital, a sense that I am a member of the club. From the kindhearted parking
attendant who asks us if it's our first time, to the legions of children with
pink emesis basins tucked beneath their arms like teddy bears—these people have
all been here before us, and there's safety in numbers.

We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison
Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor? “He's
late,” I say to Brian, as I check my watch for the twentieth time. A
spider plant languishes, brown, on a windowsill. I hope he is better with
people.

To amuse Kate, who is starting to lose it, I inflate a rubber glove and knot
it into a coxcomb balloon. On the glove dispenser near the sink is a prominent
sign, warning parents not to do this very thing. We bat it back and forth,
playing volleyball, until Dr. Chance himself comes in without a single apology
for his delay.

“Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald.” He is tall and rail-thin, with snapping
blue eyes magnified by thick glasses, and a tightly set mouth. He catches
Kate's makeshift balloon in one hand and frowns at it. “Well, I can see
there's already a problem.”

Brian and I exchange a glance. Is this coldhearted man the one who will lead
us through this war, our general, our white knight? Before we can even
backpedal with explanations, Dr. Chance takes a Sharpie marker and draws a face
on the latex, complete with a set of wire-rimmed glasses to match his own.
“There,” he says, and with a smile that changes him, he hands it back
to Kate.

I only see my sister Suzanne once or twice a year. She lives less than an
hour and several thousand philosophical convictions away.

As far as I can tell, Suzanne gets paid a lot of money to boss people
around. Which means, theoretically, that she did her career training with me.
Our father died while mowing the lawn on his forty-ninth birthday; our mother
never quite sewed herself together in the aftermath. Suzanne, ten years my
senior, took up the slack. She made sure I did my homework and filled out law
school applications and dreamed big. She was smart and beautiful and always
knew what to say at any given moment. She could take any catastrophe and find
the logical antidote to cure it, which is what made her such a success at her
job. She was just as comfortable in a boardroom as she was jogging along the
Charles. She made it all look easy. Who wouldn't want a role model
like that?

My first strike was marrying a guy without a college degree. My second and
third were getting pregnant. I suppose that when I didn't go on to become the
next Gloria Allred, she was justified in counting me a failure. And I suppose
that until now, I was justified in thinking that I wasn't one.

Don't get me wrong, she loves her niece and nephew. She sends them carvings
from Africa, shells from Bali, chocolates from Switzerland. Jesse wants a glass
office like hers when he grows up. “We can't all be Aunt Zanne,” I
tell him, when what I mean is that I can't be her.