by Jodi Picoult
“Mind of its own is more like it,” she said, shaking out her hair before she bent down to rinse out her mouth. When she straightened back up again, I kissed her.
“Minty fresh,” I said.
She laughed. “Did I miss something? Are we filming a Crest commercial?”
In the mirror, our eyes met. I’ve always wondered whether she sees what I do when I look at her. Or for that matter, whether she notices the fact that my hair’s gotten thinner on the top. “What do you want?” she asked.
“How do you know I want something?”
“Because I’ve been married to you for seven years?”
I followed her into the bedroom and watched as she dropped the towel and pulled on an oversize T-shirt to sleep in. I know you wouldn’t want to hear this—what kid does?—but that was another thing that I loved about your mother. Even after seven years, she still sort of ducked when she changed in front of me, as if I did not know every inch of her by heart.
“I need you and Willow to come somewhere with me tomorrow,” I said. “A lawyer’s office.”
Charlotte sank onto the mattress. “For what?”
I struggled to put into words the feelings that were my explanation. “The way we were treated. The arrest. I can’t just let them get away with it.”
She stared at me. “I thought you were the one who wanted to just get home and get on with our lives.”
“Yeah, and you know what that meant for me today? The whole department thinks I’m some huge joke. I’m always going to be the cop who managed to get arrested. All I’ve got in my job is my reputation. And they ruined that.” I sat down beside Charlotte, hesitating. I championed the truth every day, but I didn’t always like speaking it, especially when it meant saying something that left me bare. “They took my family away. I was in that cell, thinking about you and Amelia and Willow, and all I wanted to do was hurt someone. All I wanted to do was turn into the person they already thought I was.”
Charlotte lifted her gaze to mine. “Who’s ’they’?”
I threaded my fingers through hers. “Well,” I said, “that’s what I hope the lawyer will tell us.”
• • •
The waiting room walls of the law offices of Robert Ramirez were papered with the canceled settlement checks that he’d won for former clients. I paced with my hands clasped behind my back, leaning in to read a few. “Pay to the Order of $350,000.” “$1.2 million.” “$890,000.” Amelia was hovering over the coffee machine, a nifty little thing that let you put in a single cup and push a button to get the flavor you wanted. “Mom,” she asked, “can I have some?”
“No,” Charlotte said. She was sitting next to you on the couch, trying to keep your cast from sliding off the stiff leather.
“But they have tea. And cocoa.”
“No means no, Amelia!”
The secretary stood up behind her desk. “Mr. Ramirez is ready to see you now.”
I pulled you onto my hip, and we all followed the secretary down the hall to a conference room enclosed by walls of frosted glass. The secretary held the door open, but even so, I had to tilt you sideways to get your legs through the clearing. I kept my eyes on Ramirez; I wanted to watch his reaction when he saw you. “Mr. O’Keefe,” he said, and he held out a hand.
I shook it. “This is my wife, Charlotte, and my girls, Amelia and Willow.”
“Ladies,” Ramirez said, and then he turned to his secretary. “Briony, why don’t you get the crayons and a couple of coloring books?”
From behind me, I heard Amelia snort—I knew she was thinking that this guy didn’t have a clue, that coloring books were for little kids, not ones who were already wearing training bras.
“The hundred billionth crayon made by Crayola was Periwinkle Blue,” you said.
Ramirez raised his brows. “Good to know,” he replied, and then he gestured toward a woman standing nearby. “I’d like to introduce you to my associate, Marin Gates.”
She looked the part. With black hair pulled back in a clip and a navy suit, she could have been pretty, but there was something off about her. Her mouth, I decided. She looked like she’d just spit out something that tasted awful.
“I’ve invited Marin to sit in on this meeting,” Ramirez said. “Please, take a seat.”
Before we could, though, the secretary reappeared with the coloring books. She handed them to Charlotte, black-and-white pamphlets that said ROBERT RAMIREZ, ESQUIRE across the top in block letters. “Oh, look,” your mother said, shooting a withering glance in my direction. “Who knew they’d invented personal injury coloring books?”
Ramirez grinned. “The Internet is a wondrous place.”
The seats in the conference room were too narrow to accommodate your spica cast. After three abortive attempts to sit you down, I finally hauled you back onto my hip again and faced the lawyer.
“How can we help you, Mr. O’Keefe?” he asked.
“It’s Sergeant O’Keefe, actually,” I corrected. “I work on the Bankton, New Hampshire, police force; I have for the past nineteen years. My family and I just got back from Disney World, and that’s what brought me here today. I’ve never been treated so poorly in my whole life. I mean, what’s more normal than a trip to Disney World, right? But no, instead, my wife and I wind up arrested, my kids are taken away from me and put into protective custody, my youngest daughter is alone by herself in a hospital, scared out of her mind . . .” I drew in my breath. “Privacy’s a fundamental right, and the privacy of my family was violated beyond belief.”
Marin Gates cleared her throat. “I can see that you’re still very upset, Officer O’Keefe. We’re going to try to help you . . . but we need you to back up a bit and slow down. Why did you go to Disney World?”
So I told her. I told her about your OI, and the ice cream, and how you fell. I told her about the men in black suits who led us out of the theme park and arranged for the ambulance, as if the sooner they got rid of us the better. I told her about the woman who’d taken Amelia away from us, about the interrogations that went on for hours at the police station, about the way no one there believed me. I told her about the jokes that had been made about me at my own station.
“I want names,” I said. “I want to sue, and I want to do it fast. I want to go after someone at Disney World, someone at the hospital, and someone at DCF. I want people’s jobs, and I want money out of this to make up for the hell we went through.”
By the time I finished, my face felt hot. I couldn’t look at your mother; I didn’t want to see her face after what I’d said.
Ramirez nodded. “The type of case you’re suggesting is very expensive, Sergeant O’Keefe. Any lawyer that takes it on would do a cost-benefit analysis first, and I can tell you right away that, even though you’re seeking a money judgment, you’re not going to get one.”
“But those checks in the waiting room . . .”
“Were for cases where the plaintiff had a valid complaint. From what you’ve described to us, the people who worked at Disney World and the hospital and DCF were just doing their jobs. Doctors have a legal responsibility to report suspicions of child abuse. Without the letter from your hometown doctor, the police had probable cause to make the arrest in the state of Florida. DCF has an obligation to protect children, particularly when the child in question is too young to give a detailed account of her own health issues. As an officer of the law, I’m sure if you step back and remove the emotion from the facts here, you’ll see that, once the health-care information was received from New Hampshire, your kids were immediately turned over to you; you and your wife were released . . . sure, it made you feel awful. But embarrassment isn’t a just cause of action.”
“What about emotional damages?” I blustered. “Do you have any idea what that was like for me? For my kids?”
“I’m sure it was nothing compared to the emotional burden of living day in and day out with a child who has these particular health problems,” Ramirez said, and beside me, Char
lotte lifted her gaze to his. The lawyer smiled sympathetically at her. “I mean, it must be quite challenging.” He leaned forward, frowning a little. “I don’t know much about—what’s it called? Osteo . . .”
“Osteogenesis imperfecta,” Charlotte said softly.
“How many breaks has Willow had?”
“Fifty-two,” you said. “And did you know that the only bone that hasn’t been broken by a person in a skiing accident yet is one in the inner ear?”
“I did not,” Ramirez said, taken aback. “She’s something else, huh?”
I shrugged. You were Willow, pure and simple. There was nobody else like you. I knew it the moment I first held you, wrapped in foam so that you wouldn’t get hurt in my arms: your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?
Marin Gates cleared her throat. “How was Willow conceived?”
“Ugh,” Amelia said—until then, I’d forgotten she was with us—“that’s totally gross.” I shook my head at her, a warning.
“We had a hard time,” Charlotte said. “We were about to try in vitro when I found out I was pregnant.”
“Grosser,” Amelia said.
“Amelia!” I passed you over to your mother and pulled your sister up by the hand. “You can wait outside,” I said under my breath.
The secretary looked at us as we entered the waiting room again, but she didn’t say anything. “What are you going to talk about next?” Amelia challenged. “Your personal experience with hemorrhoids?”
“That’s enough,” I said, trying hard not to lose my temper in front of the secretary. “We’ll be out soon.”
While I headed back down the hall, I heard the secretary’s high heels clicking as she walked toward Amelia. “Want a cup of cocoa?” she asked.
When I entered the conference room again, Charlotte was still talking. “. . . but I was thirty-eight years old,” she said. “You know what they write on your charts, when you’re thirty-eight? ‘Geriatric pregnancy.’ I was worried about having a Down syndrome child—I never had even heard of OI.”
“Did you have amnio?”
“Amnio won’t tell you automatically that a fetus has OI; you’d have to be looking for it because it’s already shown up in your family. But Willow’s case was a spontaneous mutation. It wasn’t inherited.”
“So you didn’t know before Willow was born that she had OI?” Ramirez asked.
“We knew when Charlotte’s second ultrasound showed a bunch of broken bones,” I answered. “Look, are we done here? If you don’t want this case, I’m sure I can find—”
“Do you remember that weird thing at the first ultrasound?” Charlotte said, turning to me.
“What weird thing?” Ramirez asked.
“The tech thought the picture of the brain looked too clear.”
“There’s no such thing as too clear,” I said.
Ramirez and his associate exchanged a glance. “And what did your OB say?”
“Nothing.” Charlotte shrugged. “No one even mentioned OI until we did another ultrasound at twenty-seven weeks, and saw all the fractures.”
Ramirez turned to Marin Gates. “See if it’s ever diagnosed in utero that early,” he ordered, and then he turned back to Charlotte. “Would you be willing to release your medical records to us? We’ll have to do some research on whether or not you have a cause of action—”
“I thought we didn’t have a lawsuit,” I said.
“You might, Officer O’Keefe.” Robert Ramirez looked at you as if he was memorizing your features. “Just not the one you thought.”
Marin
Twelve years ago I was a senior in college, going nowhere fast, when I sat down at the kitchen table and had a talk with my mother (more on that later). “I don’t know what I want to be,” I said.
This was hugely ironic for me, because I didn’t really know what I had been, either. Since I was five, I’ve known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one’s own origins.
“What do you like to do?” my mother had asked, taking a sip of her coffee. She took it black; I took mine light and sweet. It was one of thousands of discrepancies between us that always led to unspoken questions: Had my birth mother taken her coffee light and sweet, too? Did she have my blue eyes, my high cheekbones, my left-handedness?
“I like to read,” I said, and then I rolled my eyes. “This is stupid.”
“And you like to argue.”
I smirked at her.
“Reading. Arguing. Honey,” my mother said, brightening, “you were meant to be a lawyer.”
Fast-forward nine years: I’d been called back to the doctor’s office because of an abnormal Pap smear. While I was waiting for the gynecologist to come in, the life I didn’t have flashed before my eyes: the kids I’d put off having because I was too busy in law school and building my career; the men I hadn’t dated because I wanted to make law review instead; the house in the country I didn’t buy because I worked such long hours I never would have been able to enjoy that expansive teak deck, that mountain view. “Let’s go over your family medical history,” my doctor said, and I gave my standard answer: “I’m adopted; I don’t know my family medical history.”
Even though I turned out to be fine—the abnormal results were a lab error—I think that was the day I decided to search for my birth parents.
I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t I happy with my adoptive parents? Well, the answer was yes—which is why I hadn’t even entertained the thought of searching until I was thirty-one. I’d always been happy and grateful that I got to grow up with my family; I didn’t need or want a new one. And the very last thing I wanted to do was break their hearts by telling them I was mounting a search.
But even though I knew my whole life that my adoptive parents desperately wanted me, somewhere in my mind, I knew that my birth parents didn’t. My mom had given me the party line about them being too young and not ready to have a family—and logically I understood that—but emotionally, I felt like I’d been tossed aside. I guess I wanted to know why. So after a talk with my adoptive parents—one during which my mother cried the whole time she promised to help me—I tentatively waded into the search that I’d been toying with for the past six months.
Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you’d probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn’t sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realized you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author’s feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.
Adoption records weren’t open—not even for someone like me, who knew how to pull strings legally. Which meant that every step was Herculean, and that there were far more failures than successes. I’d spent the first three months of my search paying a private investigator over six hundred dollars to tell me that he had turned up absolutely nothing. That, I figured, I could have done myself for free.
The problem was that my real job kept interfering.
As soon as we finished showing the O’Keefes out of the law office, I rounded on my boss. “For the record? This kind of lawsuit is completely unpalatable to me,” I said.
“Will you still say that,” Bob mused, “if we wind up with the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire?”
“You don’t know that—”
He shrugged. “Depends on what her medical records turn up.”
A wrongful birth lawsuit implies that, if the mother had known during her pregnancy that her child was going to be significantly impaired, she would have chosen to abort the fetus. It places the onus of responsib
ility for the child’s subsequent disability on the ob-gyn. From a plaintiff’s standpoint, it’s a medical malpractice suit. For the defense, it becomes a morality question: who has the right to decide what kind of life is too limited to be worth living?
Many states had banned wrongful birth suits. New Hampshire wasn’t one of them. There had been several settlements for the parents of children who’d been born with spina bifida or cystic fibrosis or, in one case, a boy who was profoundly retarded and wheelchair-bound due to a genetic abnormality—even though the illness had never been diagnosed before, much less noticed in utero. In New Hampshire, parents were responsible for the care of disabled children their whole lives—not just till age eighteen—which was as good a reason as any to seek damages. There was no question Willow O’Keefe was a sad story, with her enormous body cast, but she’d smiled and answered questions when the father left the room and Bob chatted her up. To put it bluntly: she was cute and bright and articulate—and therefore a much tougher hardship case to sell to a jury.
“If Charlotte O’Keefe’s provider didn’t meet the standard of care,” Bob said, “then she should be held liable, so this doesn’t happen again.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can’t play the conscience card when you stand to make a few million, Bob. And it’s a slippery slope—if an OB decides a kid with brittle bones shouldn’t be born, what’s next? A prenatal test for low IQ, so you can scrap the fetus that won’t grow up and get into Harvard?”
He clapped me on the back. “You know, it’s nice to see someone so passionate. Personally, whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I’m always glad bioethics wasn’t an issue during the time polio, TB, and yellow fever were running rampant.” We were walking toward our individual offices, but he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “Are you a neo-Nazi?”