by Jodi Picoult
My mother is a breath away from me, and in her eyes are all the mistakes she’s ever made. My father comes up and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Come sit down,” he whispers into her hair.
“Your Honor,” Campbell says, getting to his feet. “May I?”
He walks toward me, Judge right beside him. I am just as shaky as he is. I think about that dog an hour ago. How did he know for sure what Campbell really needed, and when?
“Anna, do you love your sister?”
“Of course.”
“But you were willing to take an action that might kill her?”
Something flashes inside me. “It was so she wouldn’t have to go through this anymore. I thought it was what she wanted.”
He goes silent; and I realize at that moment: he knows.
Inside me, something breaks. “It was . . . it was what I wanted, too.”
• • •
We were in the kitchen, washing and drying the dishes. “You hate going to the hospital,” Kate said.
“Well, duh.” I put the forks and spoons, clean, back into their drawer.
“I know you’d do anything to not have to go there anymore.”
I glanced at her. “Sure. Because you’d be healthy.”
“Or dead.” Kate plunged her hands into the soapy water, careful not to look at me. “Think about it, Anna. You could go to your hockey camps. You could choose a college in a whole different country. You could do anything you want and never have to worry about me.”
She pulled these examples right out of my head, and I could feel myself blushing, ashamed that they were even up there to be drawn out into the open. If Kate was feeling guilty about being a burden, then I was feeling twice as guilty for knowing she felt that way. For knowing I felt that way.
We didn’t talk after that. I dried whatever she handed me, and we both tried to pretend we didn’t know the truth: that in addition to the piece of me that’s always wanted Kate to live, there’s another, horrible piece of me that sometimes wishes I were free.
• • •
There, they understand: I am a monster. I started this lawsuit for some reasons I’m proud of and many I’m not. And now Campbell will see why I couldn’t be a witness—not because I was scared to talk in front of everyone—but because of all these terrible feelings, some of which are too awful to speak out loud. That I want Kate alive, but also want to be myself, not part of her. That I want the chance to grow up, even if Kate can’t. That Kate’s death would be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me . . . and also the best.
That sometimes, when I think about all this, I hate myself and just want to crawl back to where I was, to the person they want me to be.
Now the whole courtroom is looking at me, and I’m sure that the witness stand or my skin or maybe both is about to implode. Under this magnifying glass, you can see right down to the rotten core at the heart of me. Maybe if they keep staring at me, I will go up in blue, bitter smoke. Maybe I will disappear without a trace.
“Anna,” Campbell says quietly, “what made you think that Kate wanted to die?”
“She said she was ready.”
He walks up until he is standing right in front of me. “Isn’t it possible that’s the same reason she asked you to help her?”
I look up slowly, and unwrap this gift Campbell’s just handed me. What if Kate wanted to die, so that I could live? What if after all these years of saving Kate, she was only trying to do the same for me?
“Did you tell Kate you were going to stop being a donor?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“When?”
“The night before I hired you.”
“Anna, what did Kate say?”
Until now, I hadn’t really thought about it, but Campbell has triggered the memory. My sister had gotten very quiet, so quiet that I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. And then she turned to me with all the world in her eyes, and a smile that crumbled like a fault line.
I glance up at Campbell. “She said thanks.”
SARA
IT IS JUDGE DESALVO’s IDEA to take a field trip of sorts, so that he can talk to Kate. When we all reach the hospital, she is sitting up in bed, absently staring at the TV set that Jesse flicks through with the remote. She is thin, her skin cast yellow, but she’s conscious. “The tin man,” Jesse says, “or the scarecrow?”
“Scarecrow would get the stuffing knocked out of him,” Kate says. “Chynna from the WWF, or the Crocodile Hunter?”
Jesse snorts. “The Croc dude. Everyone knows the WWF is fake.” He glances at her. “Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.?”
“They wouldn’t sign the waiver.”
“We’re talking Celebrity Boxing on Fox, babe,” Jesse says. “What makes you think they bother with a waiver?”
Kate grins. “One of them would sit down in the ring, and the other wouldn’t put his mouthguard in.” This is the moment I walk inside. “Hey, Mom,” she asks, “who’d win on Hypothetical Celebrity Boxing—Marcia or Jan Brady?”
She notices then that I am not alone. As the whole crowd dribbles into the room, her eyes widen, and she pulls the covers up higher. She looks right at Anna, but her sister refuses to meet her eye. “What’s going on?”
The judge steps forward, takes my arm. “I know you want to talk to her, Sara, but I need to talk to her.” He walks forward, extending his hand. “Hi, Kate. I’m Judge DeSalvo. I was wondering if I could maybe speak to you for a few minutes? Alone,” he adds, and one by one, everyone else leaves the room.
I am the last to go. I watch Kate lean back against the pillows, suddenly exhausted again. “I had a feeling you’d come,” she tells the judge.
“Why?”
“Because,” Kate says, “it always comes back to me.”
• • •
About five years ago a new family bought the house across the street and knocked it down, wanting to rebuild something different. A single bulldozer and a half-dozen waste bins were all it took; in less than a morning this structure, which we’d seen every time we walked outside, was reduced to a pile of rubble. You’d think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different.
Nowadays I can hardly remember what that old house looked like. I walk out the front door and never recall the stretch of months that the gaping lot stood out, conspicuous in its absence, like a lost tooth. It took some time, you know, but the new owners? They did rebuild.
• • •
When Judge DeSalvo comes outside, grim and troubled, Campbell, Brian, and I get to our feet. “Tomorrow,” he says. “Closing’s at nine A.M.” With a nod to Vern to follow, he walks down the hallway.
“Come on,” Julia tells Campbell. “You’re at the mercy of my chaperonage.”
“That’s not a real word.” But instead of following her, he walks toward me. “Sara,” he says simply, “I’m sorry.” He gives me one more gift: “You’ll take Anna home?”
The minute they leave, Anna turns to me. “I really need to see Kate.”
I slide an arm around her. “Of course you can.”
We go inside, just our family, and Anna sits down on the edge of Kate’s bed. “Hey,” Kate murmurs, her eyes opening.
Anna shakes her head; it takes a moment for her to find the right words. “I tried,” she says finally, her voice catching like cotton on thorns, as Kate squeezes her hand.
Jesse sits down on the other side. The three of them in one spot; it makes me think of the Christmas card photo we would take each October, balancing them in height order in the wings of a maple tree or on a stone wall, one frozen moment for everyone to remember them by.
“Alf or Mr. Ed,” Jesse says.
The corners of Kate’s mouth turn up. “Horse. Eighth round.”
“You’re on.”
Finally Brian leans down, kisses Kate’s forehead. “Baby, you get a good night’s sleep.” As Anna and Jesse slip into the hall, he kiss
es me good-bye, too. “Call me,” he whispers.
And then, when they are all gone, I sit down beside my daughter. Her arms are so thin I can see the bones shifting as she moves; her eyes seem older than mine.
“I guess you have questions,” Kate says.
“Maybe later,” I answer, surprising myself. I climb up onto the bed and fold her into my embrace.
I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it’s not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all. “Kate,” I confess, “I’m so sorry.”
She pushes back from me, until she can look me in the eye. “Don’t be,” she says fiercely. “Because I’m not.” She tries to smile, tries so damn hard. “It was a good one, Mom, wasn’t it?”
I bite my lip, feel the heaviness of tears. “It was the best,” I answer.
THURSDAY
One fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
CAMPBELL
IT’S RAINING.
When I come out to the living room, Judge has his nose pressed against the plate glass wall that makes up one whole side of the apartment. He whines at the drops that zigzag past him. “You can’t get them,” I say, patting him on the head. “You can’t get to the other side.”
I sit down on the rug beside him, knowing I need to get up and get dressed and go to court; knowing that I ought to be reviewing my closing argument again and not sitting here idle. But there is something mesmerizing about this weather. I used to sit in the front seat of my father’s Jag, watching the raindrops run their kamikaze suicide missions from one edge of the windshield to the wiper blade. He liked to leave the wipers on intermittent, so that the world went runny on my side of the glass for whole blocks of time. It made me crazy. When you drive, my father used to say when I complained, you can do what you want.
“You want the shower first?”
Julia stands in the open doorway of the bedroom, wearing one of my T-shirts. It hits her at mid-thigh. She curls her toes into the carpet.
“You go ahead,” I tell her. “I could always just step out on the balcony instead.”
She notices the weather. “Awful out, isn’t it?”
“Good day to be stuck in court,” I answer, but without any great conviction. I don’t want to face Judge DeSalvo’s decision today, and for once it has nothing to do with fear of losing this case. I’ve done the best I could, given what Anna admitted on the stand. And I hope like hell that I’ve made her feel a little better about what she’s done, too. She doesn’t look like an indecisive kid anymore, that much is true. She doesn’t look selfish. She just looks like the rest of us—trying to figure out exactly who she is, and what to make of it.
The truth is, as Anna once told me, nobody’s going to win. We are going to give our closing arguments and hear the judge’s opinion and even then, it won’t be over.
Instead of heading back to the bathroom, Julia approaches. She sits down cross-legged beside me and touches her fingers to the plate of glass. “Campbell,” she says, “I don’t know how to tell you this.”
Everything inside me goes still. “Fast,” I suggest.
“I hate your apartment.”
I follow her eyes from the gray carpet to the black couch, to the mirrored wall and the lacquered bookshelves. It is full of sharp edges and expensive art. It has the most advanced electronic gadgets and bells and whistles. It is a dream residence, but it is nobody’s home.
“You know,” I say. “I hate it, too.”
JESSE
IT’S RAINING.
I go outside, and start walking. I head down the street and past the elementary school and through two intersections. I am soaked to the bone in about five minutes flat. That’s when I start to run. I run so fast that my lungs start to ache and my legs burn, and finally when I cannot move another step I fling myself down on my back in the middle of the high school soccer field.
Once, I took acid here during a thunderstorm like this one. I lay down and watched the sky fall. I imagined the raindrops melting away my skin. I waited for the one stroke of lightning that would arrow through my heart, and make me feel one hundred percent alive for the first time in my whole sorry existence.
The lightning, it had its chance, and it didn’t come that day. It doesn’t come this morning, either.
So I get up, wipe my hair out of my eyes, and try to come up with a better plan.
ANNA
IT’S RAINING.
The kind of rain that comes down so heavy it sounds like the shower’s running, even when you’ve turned it off. The kind of rain that makes you think of dams and flash floods, arks. The kind of rain that tells you to crawl back into bed, where the sheets haven’t lost your body heat, to pretend that the clock is five minutes earlier than it really is.
Ask any kid who’s made it past fourth grade and they can tell you: water never stops moving. Rain falls, and runs down a mountain into a river. The river finds it way to the ocean. It evaporates, like a soul, into the clouds. And then, like everything else, it starts all over again.
BRIAN
IT’S RAINING.
Like the day Anna was born—New Year’s Eve, and way too warm for that time of year. What should have been snow become a torrential downpour. Ski slopes had to close for Christmas, because all their runs got washed out. Driving to the hospital, with Sara in labor beside me, I could barely see through the windshield.
There were no stars that night, what with all the rain clouds. And maybe because of that, when Anna arrived I said to Sara, “Let’s name her Andromeda. Anna, for short.”
“Andromeda?” she said. “Like the sci-fi book?”
“Like the princess,” I corrected. I caught her eye over the tiny horizon of our daughter’s head. “In the sky,” I explained, “she’s between her mother and her father.”
SARA
IT’S RAINING.
Not an auspicious beginning, I think. I shuffle my index cards on the table, trying to look more skilled than I actually am. Who was I kidding? I am no lawyer, no professional. I have been nothing more than a mother, and I have not even done a very square job of that.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald?” the judge prompts.
I take a deep breath, stare down at the gibberish in front of me, and grab the whole sheaf of index cards. Standing up, I clear my throat, and start to read aloud. “In this country we have a long legal history of allowing parents to make decisions for their children. It’s part of what the courts have always found to be the constitutional right to privacy. And given all the evidence this court has heard—” Suddenly, there is a crash of lightning, and I drop all my notes onto the floor. Kneeling, I scramble to pick them up, but of course now they are out of order. I try to rearrange what I have in front of me, but nothing makes sense.
Oh, hell. It’s not what I need to say, anyway.
“Your Honor,” I ask, “can I start over?” When he nods, I turn my back on him, and walk toward my daughter, who is sitting beside Campbell.
“Anna,” I tell her, “I love you. I loved you before I ever saw you, and I will love you long after I’m not here to say it. And I know that because I’m a parent, I’m supposed to have all the answers, but I don’t. I wonder every single day if I’m doing the right thing. I wonder if I know my children the way I think I do. I wonder if I lose my perspective in being your mother, because I’m so busy being Kate’s.”
I take a few steps forward. “I know I jump at every sliver of possibility that might cure Kate, but it’s all I know how to do. And even if you don’t agree with me, even if Kate doesn’t agree with me, I want to be the one who says I told you so. Ten years from now, I want to see your children on your lap and in your arms, because that’s when you’ll understand. I have a sister, so I know—that relationship, it’s all about fairness: you want your sibling to have e
xactly what you have—the same amount of toys, the same number of meatballs on your spaghetti, the same share of love. But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It’s bigger than words.” I touch my chest. “And it still all manages to fit very neatly inside here.”
I turn to Judge DeSalvo. “I didn’t want to come to court, but I had to. The way the law works, if a petitioner takes action—even if that’s your own child—you must have a reaction. And so I was forced to explain, eloquently, why I believe that I know better than Anna what is best for her. When you get down to it, though, explaining what you believe isn’t all that easy. If you say that you believe something to be true, you might mean one of two things—that you’re still weighing the alternatives, or that you accept it as a fact. I don’t logically see how one single word can have contradictory definitions, but emotionally, I completely understand. Because there are times I think what I am doing is right, and there are other times I second-guess myself every step of the way.
“Even if the court found in my favor today, I couldn’t force Anna to donate a kidney. No one could. But would I beg her? Would I want to, even if I restrained myself? I don’t know, not even after speaking to Kate, and after hearing from Anna. I am not sure what to believe; I never was. I know, indisputably, only two things: that this lawsuit was never really about donating a kidney . . . but about having choices. And that nobody ever really makes decisions entirely by themselves, not even if a judge gives them the right to do so.”
Finally, I face Campbell. “A long time ago I used to be a lawyer. But I’m not one anymore. I am a mother, and what I’ve done for the past eighteen years in that capacity is harder than anything I ever had to do in a courtroom. At the beginning of this hearing, Mr. Alexander, you said that none of us is obligated to go into a fire and save someone else from a burning building. But that all changes if you’re a parent and the person in that burning building is your child. If that’s the case, not only would everyone understand if you ran in to get your child—they’d practically expect it of you.”