My Sister's Keeper

by Jodie Picoult

  I don't answer, because what the hell can I say. And that's all it takes for him to understand. "Oh, Jesus," he whispers. "Oh God, no."

  The doctor comes out of Anna's room. He knows me; I am here four nights a week. "Brian," he says soberly, "she's not responding to noxious stimuli."

  The sound that comes out of me is primal, inhuman, all-knowing. "What does that mean?" Sara's words peck at me. "What is he saying, Brian?"

  "Anna's head hit the window with great force, Mrs. Fitzgerald. It caused a fatal head injury. A respirator is keeping her breathing right now, but she's not showing any indications of neurological activity… she's brain dead. I'm sorry," the doctor says. "I really am." He hesitates, looks from me to Sara. "I know it's not something you even want to think about right now, but there's a very small window… is organ donation something you'd like to consider?"

  There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion-that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's really too late.

  Campbell is the one who actually answers the doctor. "I have power of attorney for Anna," he explains, "not her parents." He looks from me, to Sara. "And there is a girl upstairs who needs that kidney."

  SARA

  IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parent who loses a child.

  They bring her back down to us after the donated organs are removed. I am the last to go in. In the hallway, already, are Jesse and Zanne and Campbell and some of the nurses we've grown close to, and even Julia Romano—the people who needed to say goodbye.

  Brian and I walk inside, where Anna lies tiny and still on the hospital bed. A tube feeds down her throat, a machine breathes for her. It is up to us to turn it off. I sit down on the edge of the bed and pick up Anna's hand, still warm to the touch, still soft inside mine. It turns out that after all these years I have spent anticipating a moment like this, I am completely at a loss. Like coloring the sky in with a crayon; there is no language for grief this big. "I can't do this," I whisper.

  Brian comes up behind me. "Sweetheart, she's not here. It's the machine keeping her body alive. What makes Anna Anna is already gone."

  I turn, bury my face against his chest. "But she wasn't supposed to," I sob.

  We hold each other, then, and when I feel brave enough I look back down at the husk that once held my youngest. He is right, after all. This is nothing but a shell. There is no energy to the lines of her face; there is a slack absence to her muscles. Under this skin they have stripped her of organs that will go to Kate and to other, nameless, second-chance people.

  "Okay." I take a deep breath. I put my hand on Anna's chest as Brian, trembling, flips off the respirator. I rub her skin in small circles, as if this might make it easier. When the monitors flatline, I wait to see some change in her. And then I feel it, as her heart stops beating beneath my palm—that tiny loss of rhythm, that hollow calm, that utter loss.

  When along the pavement,

  Palpitating flames of life,

  People flicker round me,

  I forget my bereavement,

  The gap in the great constellation,

  The place where a star used to be.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE, "Submergence"

  KATE

  2010

  THERE SHOULD BE A STATUTE of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty -two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass—if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

  For a long time, afterward, my father claimed to see Anna in the night sky. Sometimes it was the wink of her eye, sometimes the shape of her profile. He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved they were traced in constellations, to live forever. My mother believed, for a long time, that Anna would come back to her. She began to look for signs—plants that bloomed too early, eggs with double yolks, salt spilled in the shape of letters.

  And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault. If Anna had never filed that lawsuit, if she hadn't been at the courthouse signing papers with her attorney, she never would have been at that particular intersection at that particular moment. She would be here, and I would be the one coming back to haunt her.

  For a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then, inexplicably, I began the long steep climb upward. It has been eight years since my last relapse, something not even Dr. Chance can understand. He thinks it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy—some contributing delayed effect—but I know better. It is that someone had to go, and Anna took my place.

  Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come home to a house that felt too big for us.

  Then one morning, my mother realized that we had eaten everything in the house, down to the last shrunken raisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat down to watch TV and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh.

  Immediately, I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse, sitting beside me on the couch, who said, "She would have thought it was funny, too."

  See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

  I wonder how much she keeps tabs on us. If she knows that for a long time, we were close to Campbell and Julia, even went to their wedding. If she understands that the reason we don't see them anymore is because it just plain hurt too much, because even when we didn't talk about Anna, she lingered in the spaces between the words, like the smell of something burning.

  I wonder if she was at Jesse's graduation from the police academy, if she knows that he won a citation from the mayor last year for his role in a drug bust. I wonder if she knew that Daddy fell deep into a bottle after she left, and had to claw his way out. I wonder if she knows that, now, I teach children how to dance. That every time I see two little girls at the barre, sinking into plies, I think of us.

  She still takes me by surprise. Like nearly a year after her death, when my mother came home with a roll of film she'd just developed of my high school graduation. We sat down at the kitchen table together, shoulder to shoulder, trying not to mention as we looked at all our double-wide grins that there was someone missing from the photo.

  And then, as if we'd conjured her, the last picture was of Anna. It had been that long since we'd used the camera, plain and simple. She was on a beach towel, holding out one hand toward the photographer, trying to get whoever it was to stop taking her picture.

  My mother and I sat at the kitchen table staring at Anna until the sun set, until we had memorized everything from the color of her pony tail holder to the pattern of fringe on her bikini. Until we couldn't be sure we were seeing her clearly anymore.

  My mother let me have that picture of Anna. But I didn't frame it; I
put it into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her.

  There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulder. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

  When I start to feel this way I go into the bathroom and I lift up my shirt and touch the white lines of my scar. I remember how, at first, I thought the stitches seemed to spell out her name. I think about her kidney working inside me and her blood running through my veins. I take her with me, wherever I go.

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