by Jodi Picoult
The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.
More amazing is how even though that’s become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.
• • •
On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us doing our best to pretend that two days from now, my trial won’t begin. You’d think this is hard, but actually, it’s much easier than the alternative. My family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission: if we don’t talk about it, then—presto!—there’s no more lawsuit, no more kidney failure, no worries at all.
I’m watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunning-hams, they’re not so different from us. All they ever seem to worry about is whether Richie’s band will be hired at Al’s place, or if Fonzie will win the kissing contest, when even I know that in the ’50s Joanie should have been having air raid drills at school and Marion was probably popping Valium and Howard would have been freaking out about commie attacks. Maybe if you spend your life pretending you’re on a movie set, you don’t ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren’t really yours.
Kate is trying to do a crossword puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for vessel?” she asks.
Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for borrowing two of her CDs without asking (for God’s sake, she was practically comatose; it isn’t like she would have been able to give her permission); she feels up to trying this crossword.
“Vat,” I suggest. “Urn.”
“Four letters.”
“Ship,” my mother offers. “Maybe they’re thinking of that kind.”
“Blood,” Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.
“That’s five letters,” Kate replies, in a tone that’s much more pleasant than the one she used with me, I might add.
We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our family.
“Give me a number.” He means on the pain scale. “Five?”
“Three.”
Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. “It may be a five in an hour,” he cautions. “It may be a nine.”
My mother’s face has gone the color of an eggplant. “But Kate’s feeling great right now!” she cheerleads.
“I know. But the lucid moments, they’re going to get briefer and further apart,” Dr. Chance explains. “This isn’t the APL. This is renal failure.”
“But after a transplant—” my mother says.
All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You’d be able to hear a hummingbird’s wings, that’s how quiet it gets. I want to slink out of the room like mist; I don’t want this to be my fault.
Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. “As I understand it, Sara, the availability of an organ is under debate.”
“But—”
“Mom,” Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. “How long are we talking about?”
“A week, maybe.”
“Wow,” she says softly. “Wow.” She touches the edge of the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at its edge. “Will it hurt?”
“No,” Dr. Chance promises. “I will make sure of that.”
Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. “Thanks. For the truth, I mean.”
When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. “Don’t thank me.” He gets up so heavily that I think he must be made of stone, and leaves the room without speaking another word.
My mother, she folds into herself, that’s the only way to explain it. Like paper, when you put it deep into the fireplace, and instead of burning, it simply seems to vanish.
Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed. So I get up and walk toward my mother. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Mom,” I say. “Stop.”
She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. “No, Anna. You stop.”
It takes me a little while, but I break away. “Anna,” I murmur.
My mother turns. “What?”
“A four-letter word for vessel,” I say, and I walk out of Kate’s room.
• • •
Later that afternoon, I’m turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad’s office at the fire station, with Julia sitting across from me. On the desk are a half-dozen pictures of my family. There’s one with Kate as a baby, wearing a knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just as wide as the bluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling’s knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.
Maybe it’s not so different from real photos, after all.
I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and younger than I can ever remember them being. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask Julia.
“No!” she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of shrugs. “Do you?”
“There’s this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I’m not sure.” I pick up a pen and start to unscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of these built inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.
“What happened?”
“I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and we stood up he was—” I turn bright red. “Well, you know.” I wave in the general vicinity of my lap.
“Ah,” Julia says.
“He asked me whether I’d ever taken wood shop at school—I mean, God, wood shop?—and I go to tell him no and bam, I’m staring right there.” I put the decapitated pen down on my dad’s blotter. “When I see him now around town it’s all I can think about.” I stare up at her, a thought coming at me. “Am I a pervert?”
“No, you’re thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn’t help it happening any more than you can help thinking about it when you see him. My brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guy could get excited: during the day, and during the night.”
“Your brother used to talk to you about stuff like that?”
She laughs. “I guess so. Why, wouldn’t Jesse?”
I snort. “If I asked Jesse a question about sex, he’d laugh so hard he’d bust a rib, and then he’d give me a stash of Playboys and tell me to do research.”
“How about your parents?”
I shake my head. My dad is out of the question—because he’s my dad. My mom’s too distracted. And Kate is in the same clueless boat I’m in. “Did you and your sister ever fight over the same guy?”
“Actually, we don’t go for the same type.”
“What’s your type?”
She thinks about it. “I don’t know. Tall. Dark-haired. Breathing.”
“Do you think Campbell’s cute?”
Julia nearly falls out of her chair. “What?”
“Well, I mean, for an older guy.”
“I could see where some women . . . might find him attractive,” she says.
“He looks like a character on one of the soaps that Kate likes.” I run my thumbnail into the groove of wood on the desk. “It’s weird. That I get to grow up and kiss someone and get married.”
And Kate doesn’t.
Julia leans forward. “What’s going to happen if your sister dies, Anna?”
One of the pictures on the desk is of me and Kate. We are little—maybe five and two. It is before her first relapse, but after her hair grew back. We’re standing on the edge of a beach, wearing matching bathing suits, playing patty-cake. You could fold this picture in half and think it was a mirror image—Kate
small for her age and me tall; Kate’s hair a different color but with the same natural part and flip at the bottom; Kate’s hands pressed up against mine. Until now, I don’t think I’ve really realized how much alike we are.
• • •
The phone rings just before ten o’clock that night, and to my surprise it’s my name that’s paged throughout the firehouse. I pick up the extension in the kitchen area, which has been cleaned and mopped for the night. “Hello?”
“Anna,” my mother says.
Immediately, I assume she’s calling about Kate. There isn’t much else for her to say to me, given the way we left things earlier at the hospital. “Is everything okay?”
“Kate’s asleep.”
“That’s good,” I reply, and then wonder if it really is.
“I called for two reasons. The first is to say that I’m sorry about this morning.”
I feel very small. “Me too,” I admit. In that minute, I remember how she used to tuck me in at night. She’d go to Kate’s bed first, and lean down, and announce that she was kissing Anna. And then she’d come to my bed and say she’d come to hug Kate. Every time, it cracked us up. She’d turn off the light, and for long moments after she left, the room still smelled of the lotion she used on her skin to keep it as soft as the inside of a flannel pillowcase.
“The second reason I called,” my mother says, “was just to say good night.”
“That’s all?”
In her voice, I can hear a smile. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Sure,” I tell her, although it isn’t.
• • •
Because I can’t fall asleep, I slip out of my bed at the fire station, past my father, who’s snoring. I steal the Guinness Book of World Records from the men’s room and lie down on the roof of the station to read by moonlight. An eighteen-month-old baby named Alejandro fell 65 feet 7 inches from the window of his parents’ apartment in Murcia, Spain, and became the infant to survive the longest fall. Roy Sullivan, of Virginia, survived seven lightning strikes, only to commit suicide after being spurned by a lover. A cat was found in rubble eighty days after a Taiwanese earthquake that killed 2,000, and made a full recovery. I find myself reading and rereading the section called “Survivors and Lifesavers,” adding listings in my head. Longest surviving APL patient, it would read. Most ecstatic sister.
My father finds me when I have put the book aside and started searching for Vega. “Can’t see much tonight, huh?” he asks, taking a seat beside me. It is a night wrapped in clouds; even the moon seems covered with cotton.
“Nope,” I say. “Everything’s fuzzy.”
“You try the telescope?”
I watch him fiddle with the scope for a while, and then decide that it’s just not worth it tonight. I suddenly remember being about seven, riding beside him in the car, and asking him how grown-ups found their way to places. After all, I had never seen him pull out a map.
“I guess we just get used to taking the same turns,” he said, but I wasn’t satisfied.
“Then what about the first time you go somewhere?”
“Well,” he said, “we get directions.”
But what I want to know is who got them the very first time? What if no one’s ever been where you’re going? “Dad?” I ask, “is it true that you can use stars like a map?”
“Yeah, if you understand celestial navigation.”
“Is it hard?” I’m thinking maybe I should learn. A backup plan, for all those times I feel like I’m just wandering in circles.
“It’s pretty jazzy math—you have to measure the altitude of a star, figure out its position using a nautical almanac, figure out what you think the altitude should be and what direction the star should be in based on where you think you are, and compare the altitude you measured with the one you calculated. Then you plot this on a chart, as a line of position. You get several lines of position to cross, and that’s where you go.” My father takes one look at my face and smiles. “Exactly,” he laughs. “Never leave home without your GPS.”
But I bet I could figure it out; it isn’t really all that confusing. You head toward the place where all those different positions cross, and you hope for the best.
• • •
If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: in the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.
Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder. But mostly it didn’t, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn’t tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they’d never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.
The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn’t fall. She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she had left.
BRIAN
JUST BEFORE SEVEN A.M. on Sunday, an octopus walks into the station. Well, it is actually a woman dressed like an octopus, but when you see something like that, distinctions hardly matter. She has tears running down her face and holds a Pekingese dog in her multiple arms. “You have to help me,” she says, and that’s when I remember: this is Mrs. Zegna, whose house was gutted by a kitchen fire a few days ago.
She plucks at her tentacles. “This is the only clothing I have left. A Halloween costume. Ursula. It’s been rotting in a U-Store-It locker in Taunton with my Peter Paul and Mary album collection.”
I gently sit her down in the chair across from my desk. “Mrs. Zegna, I know your house is uninhabitable—”
“Uninhabitable? It’s wrecked!”
“I can put you in touch with a shelter. And if you like, I can speak to your insurance company to expedite things.”
She lifts one arm to wipe her eyes, and eight others, drawn by strings, rise in unison. “I don’t have home insurance. I don’t believe in living my life expecting the worst.”
I stare at her for a moment. I try to remember what it is like to be taken aback by the very possibility of disaster.
• • •
When I get to the hospital, Kate is lying on her back, holding tight to a stuffed bear she’s had since she was seven. She’s hooked up to one of those patient-managed morphine drips, and her thumb pushes down on the button every now and then, although she is fast asleep.
One of the chairs in the room folds out into a cot with a mattress thin as a wafer; this is where Sara is curled. “Hey,” she says, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Where’s Anna?”
“Still sleeping like only a kid can. How was Kate’s night?”
“Not bad. She was in a little pain between two and four.”
I sit down on the edge of her cot. “It meant a lot to Anna, you calling last night.”
When I look into Sara’s eyes, I see Jesse—they have the same coloring, the same features. I wonder if Sara looks at me and thinks of Kate. I wonder if that hurts.
It is hard to believe that once, this woman and I sat in a car and drove the entire length of Route 66, and never ran out of things to say. Our conversations now are an economy of facts, full of blue chip details and insider information.
“Do you remember that fortune-teller?” I ask. When she looks at me blankly, I keep talking. “We were out in the middle of Nevada, and the Chevy ran out of gas . . . and you wouldn’t let me leave you in
the car while I looked for a service station?”
Ten days from now, when you’re still walking in circles, they’re going to find me with vultures eating out my insides, Sara had said, and she’d fallen into step beside me. We hiked back four miles to the shanty we’d passed, a gas station. It was run by an old guy and his sister, who advertised herself as a psychic. Let’s do it, Sara begged, but a reading cost five bucks and I only had ten. Then we’ll get half the gas, and ask the psychic when we can expect to run out the next time, Sara said, and like always, she convinced me.
Madame Agnes was the kind of blind that scares children, with cataract eyes that looked like an empty blue sky. She put her knobby hands on Sara’s face to read her bones, and said that she saw three babies and a long life, but that it wouldn’t be good enough. What’s that supposed to mean? Sara asked, incensed, and Madame Agnes explained that fortunes were like clay, and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else’s, and for some people that just wasn’t good enough.
She put her hands on my face and said only one thing: Save yourself.
She told us we would run out of gas again just over the Colorado border, and we did.
Now, in the hospital room, Sara looks at me blankly. “When did we go to Nevada?” she asks. Then she shakes her head. “We need to talk. If Anna is really going through with this hearing on Monday, then I need to review your testimony.”
“Actually.” I look down at my hands. “I’m going to speak on Anna’s behalf.”
“What?”
With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure Kate is still sleeping, I do my best to explain. “Sara, believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about this one. And if Anna’s through being a donor for Kate, we’ve got to respect that.”