by Jodi Picoult
It is, I realize, a good term for a spouse. What else does a husband or a wife do, but attest to each other’s errors in judgment?
I get up slowly from my seat. “Hello, Brian,” I say, and my voice is not nearly as steady as I would have hoped.
“Sara,” he answers.
Following that exchange, I have no idea what to say.
A memory washes over me. We had wanted to get away, but couldn’t decide where to go. So we got into the car and drove, and every half hour we’d let one of the kids pick an exit, or tell us to turn right or left. We wound up in Seal Cove, Maine, and then stopped, because Jesse’s next direction would have landed us in the Atlantic. We rented a cabin with no heat, no electricity—and our three kids afraid of the dark.
I do not realize I have been speaking out loud until Brian answers. “I know,” he says. “We put so many candles on that floor I thought for sure we’d burn the place down. It rained for five days.”
“And on the sixth day, when the weather cleared, the greenheads were so bad we couldn’t even stand to be outside.”
“And then Jesse got poison ivy and his eyes swelled shut . . . ”
“Excuse me,” Campbell Alexander interrupts.
“Sustained,” Judge DeSalvo says. “Where is this going, Counselor?”
We hadn’t been going anywhere, and the place we wound up was awful, and still I wouldn’t have traded that week for the world. When you don’t know where you’re headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore. “When Kate wasn’t sick,” Brian says slowly, carefully, “we’ve had some great times.”
“Don’t you think Anna would miss those, if Kate were gone?”
Campbell is out of his seat, just as I’d expect. “Objection!”
The judge holds up his hand, and nods to Brian for his answer.
“We all will,” he says.
And in that moment, the strangest thing happens. Brian and I, facing each other and poles apart, flip like magnets sometimes can; and instead of pushing each other away we suddenly seem to be on the same side. We are young and pulse-to-pulse for the first time; we are old and wondering how we have walked this enormous distance in so short a period of time. We are watching fireworks on television on a dozen New Year’s Eves, three sleeping children wedged between us in our bed, pressed so tight that I can feel Brian’s pride even though we two are not touching.
Suddenly it does not matter that he has moved out with Anna, that he has questioned some of the decisions about Kate. He did what he thought was right, just the same as me, and I can’t fault him for it. Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we’ve accomplished.
If we lose Kate today, we will have had her for sixteen years, and no one can take that away. And ages from now, when it is hard to bring back the picture of her face when she laughed or the feel of her hand inside mine or the perfect pitch of her voice, I will have Brian to say, Don’t you remember? It was like this.
The judge’s voice breaks into my reverie. “Mrs. Fitzgerald, are you finished?”
There has never been a need for me to cross-examine Brian; I have always known his answers. What I’ve forgotten are the questions.
“Almost.” I turn to my husband. “Brian?” I ask. “When are you coming home?”
• • •
In the bowels of the court building are a sturdy row of vending machines, none of which have anything you’d want to eat. After Judge DeSalvo calls a recess, I wander down there, and stare at the Starbursts and the Pringles and the Cheetos trapped in their corkscrew cells.
“The Oreos are your best shot,” Brian says from behind me. I turn around in time to see him feed the machine seventy-five cents. “Simple. Classic.” He pushes two buttons and the cookies begin their suicide plunge to the bottom of the machine.
He leads me to the table, scarred and stained by people who have carved their eternal initials and graffitied their inner thoughts across the top. “I didn’t know what to say to you on the stand,” I admit, and then hesitate. “Brian? Do you think we’ve been good parents?” I am thinking of Jesse, who I gave up on so long ago. Of Kate, who I could not fix. Of Anna.
“I don’t know,” Brian says. “Does anyone?”
He hands me the package of Oreos. When I open my mouth to tell him I’m not hungry, Brian pushes a cookie inside. It is rich and rough against my tongue; suddenly I am famished. Brian brushes the crumbs from my lips as if I am made of fine china. I let him. I think maybe I have never tasted anything this sweet.
• • •
Brian and Anna move back home that night. We both tuck her in; we both kiss her. Brian goes to take a shower. In a little while, I will go to the hospital, but right now I sit down across from Anna, on Kate’s bed. “Are you going to lecture me?” she asks.
“Not the way you think.” I finger the edge of one of Kate’s pillows. “You’re not a bad person because you want to be yourself.”
“I never—”
I hold up a hand. “What I mean is that those thoughts, they’re human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone’s imagined you would doesn’t mean that you’ve failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.” I take a deep breath, and shake my head. “Am I making any sense?”
“Not really.”
That makes me smile. “I guess I’m saying that you remind me of someone.”
Anna comes up on an elbow. “Who?”
“Me,” I say.
• • •
When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you’ve worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn’t there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn’t new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.
Brian lies beside me on the bed. He doesn’t say anything, just puts his hand on the valley made by the curve of my neck. Then he kisses me, long and bittersweet. This I expect, but not the next—he bites down on my lip so hard that I taste blood. “Ow,” I say, trying to laugh a little, make light of this. But he doesn’t laugh, or apologize. He leans forward, licks it off.
It makes me jump inside. This is Brian, and this is not Brian, and both of these things are remarkable. I run my own tongue over the blood, copper and slick. I open like an orchid, make my body a cradle, and feel his breath travel down my throat, over my breasts. He rests his head for a moment on my belly, and just as much as that bite was unexpected, there is now a pang of the familiar—this is what he would do each night, a ritual, when I was pregnant.
Then he moves again. He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat. We are a study of contrasts—hard to soft, fair to dark, frantic to smooth—and yet there is something about the fit of us that makes me realize neither of us would be quite right without the other. We are a Möbius strip, two continuous bodies, an impossible tangle.
“We’re going to lose her,” I whisper, and even I don’t know if I’m talking about Kate or about Anna.
Brian kisses me. “Stop,” he says.
After that we don’t talk anymore. That’s safest.
WEDNESDAY
Yet from those flames,
No light, but rather darkness visible.
—JOHN MI
LTON, Paradise Lost
JULIA
IZZY IS SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM when I come back from my morning run. “You okay?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I unlace my sneakers, wipe the sweat off my forehead. “Why?”
“Because normal people don’t go jogging at 4:30 A.M.”
“Well, I had some energy to burn off.” I go into the kitchen, but the Braun coffeemaker I’ve programmed to have my hazelnut ready at this very moment hasn’t done its job. I check Eva’s plug, and press some of her buttons, but the whole LED display is shot. “Dammit,” I say, yanking the cord out of the wall. “This isn’t old enough to be broken.”
Izzy comes up beside me and fiddles with the system. “Is she under warranty?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is when you pay for something that’s supposed to give you a cup of coffee, you deserve to get your fucking cup of coffee.” I slam down the empty glass carafe so hard it breaks in the sink. Then I slide down against the cabinets and start to cry.
Izzy kneels down next to me. “What did he do?”
“The same exact thing, Iz,” I sob. “I am so damn stupid.”
She puts her arms around me. “Boiling oil?” she suggests. “Botulism? Castration? You pick.”
That makes me smile a little. “You’d do it, too.”
“Only because you’d do it right back for me.”
I lean against my sister’s shoulder. “I thought lightning wasn’t supposed to strike in the same place twice.”
“Sure it does,” Izzy tells me. “But only if you’re too dumb to move.”
• • •
The first person to greet me at court the next morning isn’t a person at all, but Judge the dog. He comes slinking around a corner with his ears flattened, no doubt running away from the sound of his owner’s raised voice. “Hey,” I say, soothing, but Judge wants none of it. He latches on to the bottom of my suit jacket—Campbell’s paying the dry cleaning bill, I swear it—and starts to drag me toward the fray.
I can hear Campbell before I turn the corner. “I wasted time, and manpower, and you know what, that’s not the worst of it. I wasted my own good judgment about a client.”
“Yeah, well, you aren’t the only one who judged wrong,” Anna argues back. “I hired you because I thought you had a spine.” She pushes past me. “Asshole,” she mutters under her breath.
In that moment, I remember the way I felt when I woke up alone on that boat: Disappointed. Drifting. Angry at myself, for getting into this situation.
Why the hell wasn’t I angry at Campbell?
Judge leaps up on Campbell, scraping at his chest with his paws. “Get down!” he orders, and then he turns around and sees me. “You weren’t supposed to hear all that.”
“I’ll bet.”
He sits heavily on a bridge chair in the conference room and passes his hand over his face. “She refuses to take the stand.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Campbell. She can’t confront her mother in her own living room, much less in a cross-exam. What did you expect?”
He looks up at me, piercing. “What are you going to tell DeSalvo?”
“Are you asking because of Anna, or because you’re afraid of losing this trial?”
“Thanks, but I gave my conscience up for Lent.”
“Aren’t you going to ask yourself why a thirteen-year-old girl’s gotten under your skin?”
He grimaces. “Why don’t you just butt out, Julia, and ruin my case like you were planning to do in the first place?”
“This isn’t your case, it’s Anna’s. Although I can certainly see why you’d think otherwise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re cowards. You’re both hell-bent on running away from yourself,” I say. “I know what consequences Anna’s afraid of. What about you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? Where’s the one-liner? Or is it too hard to joke about something that hits so close to the bone? You back away every time someone gets close to you. It’s okay if Anna’s just a client, but the minute she becomes someone you care about, you’re in trouble. Me, well, a quick fuck’s just fine, but making an emotional attachment, that’s out of the question. The only relationship you have is with your dog, and even that’s some enormous State secret.”
“You are way out of line, Julia—”
“No, actually, I’m probably the only person who’s qualified to let you know exactly what a jerk you are. But that’s okay, right? Because if everyone thinks you’re a jerk, no one will bother getting too close.” I stare at him a beat longer. “It’s disappointing to know that someone can see right through you, isn’t it, Campbell.”
He gets up, stone-faced. “I have a case to try.”
“You do that,” I say. “Just make sure you separate justice from the client who needs it. Otherwise, God forbid, you may actually find out that you have a working heart.”
I walk off before I can embarrass myself any further, and hear Campbell’s voice reach out to me. “Julia. It’s not true.”
I close my eyes, and against my better judgment, turn around.
He hesitates. “The dog. I—”
But whatever he is about to admit is interrupted by Vern’s appearance in the doorway. “Judge DeSalvo’s on the warpath,” he interrupts. “You’re late, and the mini-mart was sold out of coffee milk.”
I meet Campbell’s gaze. I wait for him to finish his sentence. “You’re my next witness,” he says evenly, and the moment is gone before I can even remember it existed.
CAMPBELL
IT’S GETTING HARDER AND HARDER to be a bastard.
By the time I get into the courtroom, my hands are trembling. Part of it, of course, is the same old same old. But part of it involves the fact that my client is about as responsive as a boulder beside me; and the woman I’m crazy about is the one I am about to put on the witness stand. I glance once at Julia as the judge enters; she makes a point of looking away.
My pen rolls off the table. “Anna, can you get that for me?”
“I don’t know. I’d be wasting time and manpower, wouldn’t I?” she says, and the goddamn pen stays on the floor.
“Are you ready to call your next witness, Mr. Alexander?” Judge DeSalvo asks, but before I can even say Julia’s name Sara Fitzgerald asks to approach the bench.
I gear up for yet another complication, and sure enough, opposing counsel doesn’t disappoint. “The psychiatrist that I’ve asked to call as a witness has an appointment at the hospital this afternoon. Would it be all right with the Court if we took her testimony out of order?”
“Mr. Alexander?”
I shrug. It’s just a stay of execution for me, when you get right down to it. So I sit down beside Anna and watch a small, dark woman with a bun twisted ten degrees too tight for her face take the stand. “Please state your name and address for the record,” Sara begins.
“Dr. Beata Neaux,” the psychiatrist says. “1250 Orrick Way, Woonsocket.”
Dr. No. I look around the courtroom, but apparently I’m the only James Bond fan. I take out a legal pad and write a note to Anna: If she married Dr. Chance, she’d be Dr. Neaux-Chance.
A smile twitches at the corner of Anna’s mouth. She picks up the pen that dropped and writes back: If she got a divorce and then married Mr. Buster, she’d be Dr. Neaux-Chance-Buster.
We both start to laugh, and Judge DeSalvo clears his throat and looks at us. “Sorry, Your Honor,” I say.
Anna passes me another note: I’m still mad at you.
Sara walks toward her witness. “Can you tell us, Doctor, the nature of your practice?”
“I’m a child psychiatrist.”
“How did you first meet my children?”
Dr. Neaux glances at Anna. “About seven years ago, you brought in your son, Jesse, because of some behavioral problems. Since then I’ve met with all the children, over various occasions, to talk about differe
nt issues that have come up.”
“Doctor, I called you last week and asked you to prepare a report giving your expert opinion about psychological harm Anna might suffer if her sister dies.”
“Yes. In fact, I did a little research. There was a similar case in Maryland in which a girl was asked to be a donor for her twin. The psychiatrist who examined the twins found they had such a strong identification with each other that if the expected successful results were achieved, it would be of immense benefit to the donor.” She looks at Anna. “In my opinion, you’re looking at a very similar set of circumstances here. Anna and Kate are very close, and not just genetically. They live together. They hang out together. They have literally spent their entire lives together. If Anna donates a kidney that saves her sister’s life, it’s a tremendous gift—and not just to Kate. Because Anna herself will continue to be part of the intact family by which she defines herself, rather than a family that’s lost one of its members.”
This is such a load of psychobabble bullshit I can barely see to swim through it, but to my shock, the judge seems to be taking this with great sincerity. Julia, too, has her head tilted and a tiny frown line between her brows. Am I the only person in the room with a functioning brain?
“Moreover,” Dr. Neaux continues, “there are several studies that indicate children who serve as donors have higher self-esteem, and feel more important within the family structure. They consider themselves superheroes, because they can do the one thing no one else can.”
That’s the most off-the-mark description of Anna Fitzgerald I have ever heard.
“Do you think that Anna is capable of making her own medical decisions?” Sara asks.
“Absolutely not.”
Big surprise.
“Whatever decision she makes is going to have overtones for this entire family,” Dr. Neaux says. “She’s going to be thinking of that while making her decision, and therefore, it will never truly be independent. Plus, she’s only thirteen years old. Develop-mentally her brain isn’t wired yet to look that far ahead, so any decision will be made based on her immediate future, rather than the long term.”