by Jodi Picoult
“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. I 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, “I 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.”
M
y 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 Naté 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.
Once, Anna walked in on me when I was in the bathroom. “Hey,” I said. “Check this out.” I dribbled some Jean Naté on the floor, her initials. Then I torched them. I figured she’d run screaming like a tattletale, but instead she sat right down on the edge of the bathtub. She reached for the bottle of Jean Naté, made some loopy design on the tiles, and told me to do it again.
Anna is the only proof I have that I was born into this family, instead of dropped off on the doorstep by some Bonnie and Clyde couple that ran off into the night. On the surface, we’re polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we’re the same: people think they know what they’re getting, and they’re always wrong.
• • •
Fuck them all. I ought to have that tattooed on my forehead, for all the times I’ve thought it. Usually I am in transit, speeding in my Jeep until my lungs give out. Today, I’m driving ninety-five down 95. I weave in and out of traffic, sewing up a scar. People yell at me behind their closed windows. I give them the finger.
It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I’m an organ donor, but the truth is I’d consider being an organ martyr. I’m sure I’m worth a lot more dead than alive—the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.
To my dismay, though, I get all the way to the exit without a scratch. I peel off the ramp and tool along Allens Avenue. There’s an underpass there where I know I’ll find Duracell Dan. He’s a homeless dude, Vietnam vet, who spends most of his time collecting batteries that people toss into the trash. What the hell he does with them, I don’t know. He opens them up, I know that much. He says the CIA hides messages for all its operatives in Energizer double-As, that the FBI sticks to Evereadys.
Dan and I have a deal: I bring him a McDonald’s Value Meal a few times a week, and in return, he watches over my stuff. I find him huddled over the astrology book that he considers his manifesto. “Dan,” I say, getting out of the car and handing him his Big Mac. “What’s up?”
He squints at me. “The moon’s in freaking Aquarius.” He stuffs a fry into his mouth. “I never should have gotten out of bed.”
If Dan has a bed, it’s news to me. “Sorry about that,” I say. “Got my stuff?”
He jerks his head to the barrels behind the concrete pylon where he keeps my things. The perchloric acid filched from the chemistry lab at the high school is intact; in another barrel is the sawdust. I hike the stuffed pillowcase under my arm and haul it to the car. I find him waiting at the door. “Thanks.”
He leans against the car, won’t let me get inside. “They gave me a message for you.”
Even though everything that comes out of Dan’s mouth is total bullshit, my stomach rolls over. “Who did?”
He looks down the road, then back at me. “You know.” Leaning closer, he whispers, “Think twice.”
“That was the message?”
Dan nods. “Yeah. It was that, or Drink twice. I can’t be sure.”
“That advice I might actually listen to.” I shove him a little, so that I can get into the car. He is lighter than you’d think, like whatever was inside him was used up long ago. With that reasoning, it’s a wonder I don’t float off into the sky. “Later,” I tell him, and then I drive toward the warehouse I’ve been watching.
I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone. This one’s in the Olneyville area. At one time, it was used as a storage facility for an export business. Now, it’s pretty much just home to an extended family of rats. I park far enough away that no one would think twice about my car. I stuff the pillowcase of sawdust under my jacket and take off.
It turns out that I learned something from my dear old dad after all: firemen are experts at getting into places they shouldn’t be. It doesn’t take much to pick the lock, and then it’s just a matter of figuring out where I want to start. I cut a hole in the bottom of the pillowcase and let the sawdust draw three fat initials, JBF. Then I take the acid and dribble it over the letters.
This is the first time I’ve done it in the middle of the day.
I take a pack of Merits out of my pocket and tamp them down, then stick one into my mouth. My Zippo’s almost
out of lighter fluid; I need to remember to get some. When I’m finished, I get to my feet, take one last drag, and toss the cigarette into the sawdust. I know this one’s going to move fast, so I’m already running when the wall of fire rises behind me. Like all the others, they will look for clues. But this cigarette and my initials will have long been gone. The whole floor underneath them will melt. The walls will buckle and give.
The first engine reaches the scene just as I get back to my car and pull the binoculars out of my trunk. By then, the fire’s done what it wants to—escape. Glass has blown out of windows; smoke rises black, an eclipse.
The first time I saw my mother cry I was five. She was standing at the kitchen window, pretending that she wasn’t. The sun was just coming up, a swollen knot. “What are you doing?” I asked. It was not until years later that I realized I had heard her answer all wrong. That when she said mourning, she had not been talking about the time of day.
The sky, now, is thick and dark with smoke. Sparks shower as the roof falls in. A second crew of firefighters arrives, the ones who have been called in from their dinner tables and showers and living rooms. With the binoculars, I can make out his name, winking on the back of his turnout coat like it’s spelled in diamonds. Fitzgerald. My father lays hands on a charged line, and I get into my car and drive away.
• • •
At home, my mother is having a nervous breakdown. She flies out the door as soon as I pull into my parking spot. “Thank God,” she says. “I need your help.”
She doesn’t even look back to see if I’m following her inside, and that is how I know it’s Kate. The door to my sisters’ room has been kicked in, the wooden frame around it splintered. My sister lies still on her bed. Then all of a sudden she bursts to life, jerking up like a tire jack and puking blood. A stain spreads over her shirt and onto her flowered comforter, red poppies where there weren’t any before.
My mother gets down beside her, holding back her hair and pressing a towel up to her mouth when Kate vomits again, another gush of blood. “Jesse,” she says matter-of-factly, “your father’s out on a call, and I can’t reach him. I need you to drive us to the hospital, so that I can sit in the back with Kate.”