My Sister's Keeper (9 page)

I imagine my mom in a black-veiled Jackie O hat, sobbing. My dad holding on
to her. Kate and Jesse staring at the shine of the coffin and trying to
plea-bargain with God for all the times they did something mean to me. It is
possible that some of the guys from my hockey team would come, clutching lilies
and their composure. “That Anna,” they'd say, and they wouldn't cry
but they'd want to.

There would be an obituary on page twenty-four of the paper, and maybe Kyle
McFee would see it and come to the funeral, his beautiful face twisted up with
the what-ifs of the girlfriend he never got to have. I think there
would be flowers, sweet peas and snapdragons and blue balls of hydrangea. I
hope someone would sing “Amazing Grace,” not just the famous first
verse but all of them. And afterward, when the leaves turned and the snow came,
every now and then I would rise in everyone's minds like a tide.

At Kate's funeral, everyone will come. There will be nurses from the
hospital who've gotten to be our friends, and other cancer patients still
counting their lucky stars, and townspeople who helped raise money for her
treatments. They will have to turn mourners away at the cemetery gates. There
will be so many lush funeral baskets that some will be donated to charity. The
newspaper will run a story of her short and tragic life. Mark my words, it will
be on the front page.

Judge DeSalvo's wearing flip-flops, the kind soccer players wear when they
take off their cleats. I don't know why, but this makes me feel a little
better. I mean, it's bad enough I'm here in this courthouse, being led toward
his private room in the back; there's something nice about knowing that I'm not
the only one who doesn't quite fit the part.

He takes a can from a dwarf fridge and asks me what I'd like to drink.
“Coke would be great,” I say.

The judge opens the can. “Did you know that if you leave a baby tooth
in a glass of Coke, in a few weeks it'll completely disappear? Carbonic acid.”
He smiles at me. “My brother is a dentist in Warwick. Does that trick
every year for the kindergartners.”

I take a sip of the Coke, and imagine my insides dissolving. Judge DeSalvo
doesn't sit down behind his desk, but instead takes a chair right next to me.
“Here's the problem, Anna,” he says. “Your mom is telling me you
want to do one thing. And your lawyer is telling me you want to do another.
Now, under normal circumstances, I'd expect your mother to know you better than
some guy you met two days ago. But you never would have met this guy if you
hadn't sought him out for his services. And that makes me think that I need to
hear what you think about all this.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he says.

“Does there have to be a trial?”

“Well… your parents can just agree to medical emancipation, and that
would be that,” the judge says.

Like that would ever happen.

“On the other hand, once someone files a petition—like you have—then
the respondent—your parents—have to go to court. If your parents really believe
you're not ready to make these kinds of decisions by yourself, they have to
present their reasons to me, or else risk having me find in your favor by
default.”

I nod. I have told myself that no matter what, I'm going to keep cool. If I
fall apart at the seams, there's no way this judge will think I'm capable of
deciding anything. I have all these brilliant intentions, but I get
sidetracked by the sight of the judge, lifting his can of apple juice.

Not too long ago, when Kate was in the hospital to get her kidneys checked
out, a new nurse handed her a cup and asked for a urine sample. “It better
be ready when I come back for it,” she said. Kate—who isn't a fan of
snotty demands—decided the nurse needed to be taken down a peg. She sent me out
on a mission to the vending machines, to get the very juice that the judge is
drinking now. She poured this into the specimen cup, and when the nurse came
back, held it up to the light. “Huh,” Kate said. “Looks a little
cloudy. Better filter it through again.” And then she lifted it to her
lips and drank it down.

The nurse turned white and flew out of the room. Kate and I, we laughed
until our stomachs cramped. For the rest of that day, all we had to do was
catch each other's eye and we'd dissolve.

Like a tooth, and then there's nothing left.

“Anna?” Judge DeSalvo prompts, and then he sets that stupid can of
Mott's down on the table between us and I burst into tears.

“I can't give a kidney to my sister. I just can't.”

Without a word, Judge DeSalvo hands me a box of Kleenex. I wad some into a
ball, wipe at my eyes and my nose. For a while, he's quiet, letting me catch my
breath. When I look up I find him waiting. “Anna, no hospital in this
country will take an organ from an unwilling donor.”

“Who do you think signs off on it?” I ask. “Not the little
kid getting wheeled into the OR—her parents.”

“You're not a little kid; you could certainly make your objections
known,” he says.

“Oh, right,” I say, tearing up again. “When you complain
because someone's sticking a needle into you for the tenth time, it's
considered standard operating procedure. All the adults look around with fake
smiles and tell each other that no one voluntarily asks for more
needles.” I blow my nose into a Kleenex. “The kidney—that's just
today. Tomorrow it'll be something else. It's always something else.”

“Your mother told me you want to drop the lawsuit,” he says.
“Did she lie to me?”

“No.” I swallow hard.

“Then… why did you lie to her?”

There are a thousand answers for that; I choose the easy one. “Because
I love her,” I say, and the tears come all over again. “I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry.”

He stares at me hard. “You know what, Anna? I'm going to appoint
someone who's going to help your lawyer tell me what's best for you. How does
that sound?”

My hair's fallen all over the place; I tuck it behind my ear. My face is so
red it feels swollen. “Okay,” I answer.

“Okay.” He presses an intercom button, and asks to have everyone
else sent back.

My mother comes into the room first and starts to make her way over to me,
until Campbell and his dog cut her off. He raises his brows and gives me a
thumbs-up sign, but it's a question. “I'm not sure what's going on,”
Judge DeSalvo says, “so I'm appointing a guardian ad litem to spend two
weeks with her. Needless to say, I expect full cooperation on both of your
parts. I want the guardian ad litem's report back, and then we'll have a
hearing. If there's anything more I need to know at that time, bring it with
you.”

“Two weeks…” my mother says. I know what she's thinking.
“Your Honor, with all due respect, two weeks is a very long time, given
the severity of my other daughter's illness.”

She looks like someone I do not recognize. I have seen her before be a
tiger, fighting a medical system that isn't moving fast enough for her. I have
seen her be a rock, giving the rest of us something to cling to. I have seen
her be a boxer, coming up swinging before the next punch can be thrown by Fate.
But I have never seen her be a lawyer before.

Judge DeSalvo nods. "All right. We'll have a hearing next Monday, then.
In the meantime I want Kate's medical records brought to—

“Your Honor,” Campbell Alexander interrupts. “As you're well
aware, due to the strange circumstances of this case, my client is living with
opposing counsel. That's a flagrant breach of justice.”

My mother sucks in her breath. “You are not suggesting my child be
taken away from me.”

Taken away? Where would I go?

“I can't be sure that opposing counsel won't try to use her living
arrangements to her best advantage, Your Honor, and possibly pressure my
client.” Campbell stares right at the judge, unblinking.

“Mr. Alexander, there is no way I am pulling this child out of her
home,” Judge DeSalvo says, but then he turns to my mother. “However,
Mrs. Fitzgerald, you cannot talk about this case with your daughter unless her
attorney is present. If you can't agree to that, or if I hear of any breach in
that domestic Chinese wall, I may have to take more drastic action.”

“Understood, Your Honor,” my mother says.

“Well.” Judge DeSalvo stands up. “I'll see you all next
week.” He walks out of the room, his flip-flops making small sucking slaps
on the tile floor.

The minute he is gone, I turn to my mother. / can explain, I want
to say, but it never makes its way out loud. Suddenly a wet nose pokes into my
hand. Judge. It makes my heart, that runaway train, slow down.

“I need to speak to my client,” Campbell says.

“Right now she's my daughter,” my mother says, and she takes my
hand and yanks me out of my chair. At the threshold of the door, I manage to
look back. Campbell's fuming. I could have told him it would wind up like this.
Daughter trumps everything, no matter what the game.

World War III begins immediately, not with an assassinated archduke or a
crazy dictator but with a missed left turn. “Brian,” my mother says,
craning her neck. “That was North Park Street.”

My father blinks out of his fog. “You could have told me before
I passed it.”

“I did.”

Before I can even weigh the costs and benefits of entering someone else's
battle again, I say, “/ didn't hear you.”

My mother's head whips around. “Anna, right now, you are the last
person whose input I need or want.”

“I just—”

She holds up her hand like the privacy partition in a cab. She shakes her
head.

On the backseat, I slide sideways and curl my feet up, facing to the rear,
so that all I see is black.

“Brian,” my mother says. “You missed it again.”

When we walk in, my mother steams past Kate, who opened the door for us, and
past Jesse, who is watching what looks like the scrambled Playboy channel on
TV. In the kitchen, she opens cabinets and bangs them shut. She takes food from
the refrigerator and smacks it onto the table.

“Hey,” my father says to Kate. “How're you feeling?”

She ignores him, pushing into the kitchen. “What happened?”

“What happened. Well.” My mother pins me with a gaze.
“Why don't you ask your sister what happened?”

Kate turns to me, all eyes.

“Amazing how quiet you are now, when a judge isn't listening,” my
mother says.

Jesse turns off the television. “She made you talk to a judge? Damn,
Anna.”

My mother closes her eyes. “Jesse, you know, now would be a good time
for you to leave.”

“You don't have to ask me twice,” he says, his voice full of
broken glass. We hear the front door open and shut, a whole story.

“Sara.” My father steps into the room. “We all need to cool
off a little.”

“I have one child who's just signed her sister's death sentence, and
I'm supposed to cool off?”

The kitchen gets so silent we can hear the refrigerator whispering. My
mother's words hang like too-ripe fruit, and when they fall on the floor and
burst, she shudders into motion. “Kate,” she says, hurrying toward my
sister, her arms already outstretched. “Kate, I shouldn't have said that.
It's not what I meant.”

In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought
to and not meaning what we do. Kate covers her mouth with her hand. She backs
out of the kitchen door, bumping into my father, who fumbles but cannot catch
her as she scrambles upstairs. I hear the door to our room slam shut. My
mother, of course, goes after her.

So I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.

Is there any place on earth that smells better than a Laundromat? It's like
a rainy Sunday when you don't have to get out from under your covers, or like
lying back on the grass your father's just mowed—comfort food for your nose.
When I was little my mom would take hot clothes out of the dryer and dump them
on top of me where I was sitting on the couch. I used to pretend they were a
single skin, that I was curled tight beneath them like one large heart.

The other thing I like is that Laundromats draw lonely people like metal to
magnets. There's a guy passed out on a bank of chairs in the back, with army
boots and a T-shirt that says Nostradamus Was an Optimist. A woman at
the folding table sifts through a heap of men's button-down shirts, sniffing
back tears. Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't
be the one who's worst off.

I sit down across from a bank of washers and try to match up the clothes
with the people waiting. The pink panties and lace nightgown belong to the girl
who is reading a romance novel. The woolly red socks and checkered shirt are
the skanky sleeping student. The soccer jerseys and kiddie overalls come from the
toddler who keeps handing filmy white dryer sheets to her mom, oblivious on a
cell phone. What kind of person can afford a cell phone, but not her own washer
and dryer?

I play a game with myself, sometimes, and try to imagine what it would be
like to be the person whose clothes are spinning in front of me. If I were
washing those carpenter jeans, maybe I'd be a roofer in Phoenix, my arms strong
and my back tan. If I had those flowered sheets, I might be on break from
Harvard, studying criminal profiling. If I owned that satin cape, I might have
season tickets to the ballet. And then I try to picture myself doing any of
these things and I can't. All I can ever see is me, being a donor for Kate,
each time stretching to the next.

Kate and I are Siamese twins; you just can't see the spot where we're
connected. Which makes separation that much more difficult.

When I look up the girl who works the Laundromat is standing over me, with
her lip ring and blue streaked dreadlocks. “You need change?” she
asks.

To tell you the truth, I'm afraid to hear my own answer.

JESSE

I AM THE KID WHO PLAYED with matches. I used to steal them from the shelf
above the refrigerator, take them into my parents' bathroom. Jean Nate Bath
Splash ignites, did you know that? Spill it, strike, and you can set fire to
the floor. It burns blue, and when the alcohol is gone, it stops.