My Sister's Keeper

by Jodie Picoult

  "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-lt 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."

  "If you testify for Anna, the judge is going to say that at least one of her parents is capable of supporting this petition, and he's going to rule in her favor."

  "I know that," I say. "Why else would I do it?"

  We stare at each other, speechless, unwilling to admit what lies at the end of each of these roads.

  "Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?"

  "I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back."

  But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.

  To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.

  SARA

  BRIAN AND I ARE SITTING ON THE COUCH, sharing sections of the newspaper, when Anna walks into the living room. "If I mow the lawn, like, until I get married," she asks, "can I have $614.96 right now?"

  "Why?" we say simultaneously.

  She rubs her sneaker into the carpet. "I need a little cash."

  Brian folds the national news section. "I didn't think Gap jeans had gotten quite that expensive."

  "I knew you'd be like this," she says, ready to huff away.

  "Hang on." I sit up, rest my elbows on my knees. "What is it you want to buy?"

  "What difference does it make?"

  "Anna," Brian responds, "we're not forking over six hundred bucks without knowing what it's for."

  She weighs this for a minute. "It's something on eBay."

  My ten-year-old surfs eBay?

  "Okay," she sighs. "It's goaltender leg pads."

  I look at Brian, but he doesn't seem to understand, either. "For hockey?" he says.

  "Well, duh."

  "Anna, you don't play hockey," I point out, and when she blushes, I realize this may not be the case at all.

  Brian presses her into an explanation. "A couple of months ago, the chain fell off my bike right in front of the hockey rink. A bunch of guys were practicing, but their goalie had mono, and the coach said he'd pay me five bucks to stand in net and block shots. I borrowed the sick kid's equipment, and the thing is… I wasn't that bad at it. I liked it. So I kept coming back." Anna smiles shyly. "The coach asked me to join the team for real, before the tournament. I'm the first girl on it, ever. But I have to have my own equipment."

  "Which costs $614?"

  "And ninety-six cents. That's just the leg pads, though. I still need a chest protector and catcher and a glove and a mask." She stares at us expectantly.

  "We have to talk about it," I tell her.

  Anna mutters something that sounds like Figures, and walks out of the room.

  "Did you know she was playing hockey?" Brian asks me, and I shake my head. I wonder what else my daughter has been hiding from us.

  We are about to leave the house to watch Anna playing hockey for the first time when Kate announces she isn't going. "Please Mom," she begs. "Not when I look like this."

  She has an angry red rash all over her cheeks, palms, soles, and chest, and a moon face, courtesy of the steroids she takes to treat it. Her skin is rough and thickened.

  These are the calling cards of graft-versus-host disease, which Kate developed after her bone marrow transplant. For the past four years, it's come and gone, flaring up when we least expect it. Bone marrow is an organ, and like a heart or a liver, a body can reject it. But sometimes, instead, the transplanted marrow begins to reject the body it's been put in.

  The good news is that if that happens, all the cancer cells are under siege, too—something Dr. Chance calls graft-versus-leukemia disease. The bad news is the symptomology: the chronic diarrhea, the jaundice, the loss of range of motion in her joints. The scarring and sclerosis wherever there's connective tissue. I am so accustomed to this that it doesn't phase me, but when the graft-versus-host disease flares up this badly, I let Kate stay home from school. She is thirteen, and appearance is paramount. I respect her vanity, because there is so little of it.

  But I cannot leave her alone in the house, and we have promised Anna we'll come watch her play. "This is really important to your sister."

  In response, Kate flops onto the couch and pulls a throw pillow over her face.

  Without saying another word I walk to the hall closet and pull a variety of items from drawers. I hand the gloves
to Kate, then jam the hat on her head and wind the scarf around her nose and mouth so that only her eyes are visible. "It'll be cold in the rink," I say, in a voice that leaves no room for anything but acceptance.

  I barely recognize Anna, stuffed and trussed and tied into equipment that, eventually, we wound up borrowing from the coach's nephew. You cannot tell, for example, that she is the only girl on the ice. You cannot tell that she is two years younger than every other player out there.

  I wonder if Anna can hear the cheering through her helmet, or if she's so focused on what's coming toward her that she blocks it all out, concentrating instead on the scrape of the puck and the smack of the sticks.

  Jesse and Brian sit on the edge of their seats; even Kate—so reluctant to come—is getting into the game. The opposing goalie, compared to Anna, moves in slow motion. The action switches like a current, the play moving from the far goal toward Anna's. The center passes to the right wing, who skates for broke, his blades slicing through the roar of the cheering crowd. Anna steps forward, sure of where the puck is going a moment before it arrives, her knees bent in, her elbows pointed out.

  "Unbelievable," Brian says to me after the second period. "She's got natural talent as a goalie."

  That much, I could have told him. Anna saves, every time.

  That night Kate wakes up with blood streaming out of her nose, her rectum, and the sockets of her eyes. I have never seen so much blood, and even as I try to stanch the flow I wonder how much of it she can stand to lose. By the time we reach the hospital, she is disoriented and agitated, finally slipping into unconsciousness. The staff pump her full of plasma, blood, and platelets to replace the lost blood, which seems to leak out of her just as quickly. They give her IV fluids to prevent hypovolemic shock, and intubate her. They take CT scans of her brain and her lungs to see how far the bleeding has spread.

  In spite of all the times we have run to the ER in the middle of the night, all the times Kate's relapsed with sudden symptoms, Brian and I know it has never been quite this bad. A nosebleed is one thing; system failure is another. Twice now, she's had cardiac arrhythmias. The hemorrhaging keeps her brain, heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys from receiving the flow they need to work.