by Jodi Picoult
Anna shrugs. "Kind of. The way parents ask questions that they already have answered in their heads. You weren't the reason that the whole second grade stayed in for recess, were you? Or, You want some broccoli, right?"
"Did you ever tell your parents that you weren't comfortable with the choice they'd made for you?"
Anna pushes away from the elephants and begins to trudge up the hill. "I might have complained a couple of times. But they're Kate's parents, too."
Small tumblers in this puzzle begin to hitch for me. Traditionally, parents make decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down. And somewhere, underneath all the rubble, are casualties like Anna.
The question is, did she instigate this lawsuit because she truly feels that she can make better choices about her own medical care than her parents can, or because she wants her parents to hear her for once when she cries?
We wind up in front of the polar bears, Trixie and Norton. For the first time since we've gotten here, Anna's face lights up. She watches Kobe, Trixie's cub--the newest addition to the zoo. He swats at his mother as she lies on the rocks, trying to get her to play. "The last time there was a polar bear baby," Anna says, "they gave it to another zoo."
She is right; memories of the articles in the ProJo swim into my mind. It was a big public relations move for Rhode Island.
"Do you think he wonders what he did to get himself sent away?"
We are trained, as guardians ad litem, to see the signs of depression. We know how to read body language, and flat affect, and mood swings. Anna's hands are clenched around the metal railing. Her eyes go dull as old gold.
Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she's going to lose herself.
"Julia," she asks, "would it be okay if we went home?"
*
The closer we get to her house, Anna distances herself from me. A pretty nifty trick, given that the physical space between us remains unaltered. She shrinks against the window of my car, staring at the streets that bleed by. "What happens next?"
"I'm going to talk to everyone else. Your mom and dad, your brother and sister. Your lawyer."
Now a dilapidated Jeep is parked in the driveway, and the front door of the house is open. I turn off the ignition, but Anna makes no move to release her seat belt. "Will you walk me in?"
"Why?"
"Because my mother's going to kill me."
This Anna--genuinely skittish--bears little resemblance to the one I've spent the past hour with. I wonder how a girl might be both brave enough to instigate a lawsuit, and afraid to face her own mother. "How come?"
"I sort of left today without telling her where I was going."
"You do that a lot?"
Anna shakes her head. "Usually I do whatever I'm told."
Well, I am going to have to speak to Sara Fitzgerald sooner or later. I get out of the car, and wait for Anna to do the same. We walk up the front path, past the groomed flower beds, and through the front door.
She is not the foe I've built her up to be. For one thing, Anna's mother is shorter than I am, and slighter. She has dark hair and haunted eyes and is pacing. The moment it creaks open, she runs to Anna. "For God's sake," she cries, shaking her daughter by the shoulders, "where have you been? Do you have any idea--"
"Excuse me, Mrs. Fitzgerald. I'd like to introduce myself." I step forward, extending my hand. "I'm Julia Romano, the guardian ad litem appointed by the court."
She slides her arm around Anna, a stiff show of tenderness. "Thank you for bringing Anna home. I'm sure you have lots to discuss with her, but right now--"
"Actually, I was hoping I could speak to you. I've been asked by the court to present my findings in less than a week, so if you've got a few minutes--"
"I don't," Sara says abruptly. "Now isn't really a good time. My other daughter has just been readmitted to the hospital." She looks at Anna, still standing in the doorway of the kitchen: I hope you're happy.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"I am too." Sara clears her throat. "I appreciate you coming by to talk to Anna. And I know you're just doing your job. But this is all going to work itself out, really. It's a misunderstanding. I'm sure Judge DeSalvo will be telling you that in a day or so."
She takes a step backward, challenging me--and Anna--to say otherwise. I glance at Anna, who catches my eye and shakes her head almost imperceptibly, a plea to just let this go for now.
Who is she protecting--her mother, or herself?
A red flag unravels across my mind: Anna is thirteen. Anna lives with her mother. Anna's mother is opposing counsel. How can Anna possibly live in the same home and not be swayed by Sara Fitzgerald?
"Anna, I'll call you tomorrow." Then without saying good-bye to Sara Fitzgerald, I leave her house, headed for the one place on earth I never wanted to go.
*
The law offices of Campbell Alexander look exactly the way I've pictured them: at the top of a building cast in black glass, at the end of a hallway lined with a Persian runner, through two heavy mahogany doors that keep out the riffraff. Sitting at the massive receptionist's desk is a girl with porcelain features and a telephone earpiece hidden under the mane of her hair. I ignore her and walk toward the only closed door. "Hey!" she yells. "You can't go in there!"
"He'll be expecting me," I say.
Campbell doesn't look up from whatever he's writing with great fury. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to the elbow. He needs a haircut. "Kerri," he says, "see if you can find some Jenny Jones transcript about identical twins who don't know that they--"
"Hello, Campbell."
First, he stops writing. Then he lifts his head. "Julia." He gets to his feet, a schoolboy caught in an indecent act.
I step inside and close the door behind me. "I'm the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna Fitzgerald's case."
A dog that I haven't noticed till now takes its place by Campbell's side. "I'd heard that you went to law school."
Harvard. On full scholarship.
"Providence is a pretty tight place . . . I kept expecting . . ." His voice trails off, and he shakes his head. "Well, I thought for sure we'd run into each other before now."
He smiles at me, and I suddenly am seventeen again--the year I realized love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable. "It's not all that hard to avoid someone, when you want to," I answer coolly. "You of all people should know."
CAMPBELL
I'M REMARKABLY CALM, really, until the principal of Ponaganset High School starts to give me a telephone lecture on political correctness. "For God's sake," he sputters. "What kind of message does it send when a group of Native American students names their intramural basketball league 'The Whiteys'?"
"I imagine it sends the same message that you did when you picked the Chieftains as your school mascot."
"We've been the Ponaganset Chieftains since 1970," the principal argues.
"Yes, and they've been members of the Narragansett tribe since they were born."
"It's derogatory. And politically incorrect."
"Unfortunately," I point out, "you can't sue a person for political incorrectness, or clearly you would have been handed a summons years ago. However, on the flip side, the Constitution does protect various individual rights to Americans, including Native Americans--one for assembly, and one for free speech, which suggest that the Whiteys would be granted permission to convene even if your ridiculous threat of a lawsuit managed to make its way to court. For that matter, you may want to consider a class action against humanity in general, since surely you'd also like to stifle the inherent racism implicit in the White House, the White Mountains, and the White Pages." There is dead silence on the other end of the phone. "Shall I assume, then, that I can tell my client you don't plan to litigate after all?"
A
fter he hangs up on me, I push the intercom button. "Kerri, call Ernie Fishkiller, and tell him he's got nothing to worry about."
As I settle down to the mountain of work on my desk, Judge lets out a sigh. He's asleep, curled like a braided rug to the left of my desk. His paw twitches.
That's the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own tail. That's what I want to be next.
I had laughed. You would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.
I need you, she replied.
Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip.
I press my thumbs into the balls of my eyes. Clearly I am not getting enough sleep; first there was that moment at the coffee shop, now this. I scowl at Judge, as if it is his fault, and then focus my attention on some notes I've made on a legal pad. New client--a drug dealer caught by the prosecution on videotape. There's no way out of a conviction on this one, unless the guy has an identical twin his mother kept secret.
Which, come to think of it . . .
The door opens, and without glancing up I fire a directive at Kerri. "See if you can find some Jenny Jones transcript about identical twins who don't know that they--"
"Hello, Campbell."
I am going crazy; I am definitely going crazy. Because not five feet away from me is Julia Romano, whom I have not seen in fifteen years. Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear. "Julia," I manage.
She closes the door, and at the sound, Judge jumps to his feet. "I'm the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna Fitzgerald's case," she says.
"Providence is a pretty tight place . . . I kept expecting . . . Well, I thought for sure we'd run into each other before now."
"It's not all that hard to avoid someone, when you want to," she answers. "You of all people should know." Then, all of a sudden, the anger seems to steam out of her. "I'm sorry. That was totally uncalled for."
"It's been a long time," I reply, when what I really want to do is ask her what she's been doing for the past fifteen years. If she still drinks tea with milk and lemon. If she's happy. "Your hair isn't pink anymore," I say, because I am an idiot.
"No, it's not," she replies. "Is that a problem?"
I shrug. "It's just. Well . . ." Where are words, when you need them? "I liked the pink," I confess.
"It tends to take away from my authority in a courtroom," Julia admits.
This makes me smile. "Since when do you care what people think of you?"
She doesn't respond, but something changes. The temperature of the room, or maybe the wall that comes up in her eyes. "Maybe instead of dragging up the past, we should talk about Anna," she suggests diplomatically.
I nod. But it feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit to or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn't looking. How am I supposed to think about Anna Fitzgerald when I'm wondering whether Julia has ever woken up in someone's arms and for just a moment, before the sleep cleared from her mind, thought maybe it was me?
Sensing tension, Judge gets up and stands beside me. Julia seems to notice for the first time that we are not alone in the room. "Your partner?"
"Only an associate," I say. "But he made Law Review." Her fingers scratch Judge behind the ear--goddamn lucky bastard--and grimacing, I ask her to stop. "He's a service dog. He isn't supposed to be petted."
Julia looks up, surprised. But before she can ask, I turn the conversation. "So. Anna." Judge pushes his nose into my palm.
She folds her arms. "I went to see her."
"And?"
"Thirteen-year-olds are heavily influenced by their parents. And Anna's mother seems convinced that this trial isn't going to happen. I have a feeling she might be trying to convince Anna of that, too."
"I can take care of that," I say.
She looks up, suspicious. "How?"
"I'll get Sara Fitzgerald removed from the house."
Her jaw drops. "You're kidding, right?"
By now, Judge has started pulling my clothes in earnest. When I don't respond, he barks twice. "Well, I certainly don't think my client ought to be the one to move out. She hasn't violated the judge's orders. I'll get a temporary restraining order keeping Sara Fitzgerald from having any contact with her."
"Campbell, that's her mother!"
"This week, she's opposing counsel, and if she's prejudicing my client in any way she needs to be ordered not to do so."
"Your client has a name, and an age, and a world that's falling apart--the last thing she needs is more instability in her life. Have you even bothered to get to know her?"
"Of course I have," I lie, as Judge begins to whine at my feet.
Julia glances down at him. "Is something wrong with your dog?"
"He's fine. Look. My job is to protect Anna's legal rights and win the case, and that's exactly what I'm going to do."
"Of course you are. Not necessarily because it's in Anna's best interests . . . but because it's in yours. How ironic is it that a kid who wants to stop being used for another person's benefit winds up picking your name out of the Yellow Pages?"
"You don't know anything about me," I say, my jaw tightening.
"Well, whose fault is that?"
So much for not bringing up the past. A shudder runs the length of me, and I grab Judge by the collar. "Excuse me," I say, and I walk out the office door, leaving Julia for the second time in my life.
When you get right down to it, The Wheeler School was a factory, pumping out debutantes and future investment bankers. We all looked alike and talked alike. To us, summer was a verb.
There were students, of course, who broke that mold. Like the scholarship kids, who wore their collars up and learned to row, never realizing that all along we were well aware they weren't one of us. There were the stars, like Tommy Boudreaux, who was drafted by the Detroit Redwings in his junior year. Or the head cases, who tried to slit their wrists or mix booze and Valium and then left campus just as silently as they had once wandered around it.
I was a sixth-former the year that Julia Romano came to Wheeler. She wore army boots and a Cheap Trick T-shirt under her school blazer; she was able to memorize entire sonnets without breaking a sweat. During free periods, while the rest of us were copping smokes behind the headmaster's back, she climbed the stairs to the ceiling of the gymnasium and sat with her back against a heating duct, reading books by Henry Miller and Nietzsche. Unlike the other girls in school, with their smooth waterfalls of yellow hair caught up in a headband like ribbon candy, hers was an absolute tornado of black curls, and she never wore makeup--just those sharp features, take it or leave it. She had the thinnest hoop I'd ever seen, a silver filament, through her left eyebrow. She smelled like fresh dough rising.
There were rumors about her: that she'd been booted out of a girl's reform school; that she was some whiz kid with a perfect PSAT score; that she was two years younger than everyone else in our grade; that she had a tattoo. Nobody quite knew what to make of her. They called her Freak, because she wasn't one of us.
One day Julia Romano arrived at school with short pink hair. We all assumed she'd be suspended, but it turned out that in the litany of rules about what one had to wear at Wheeler, coiffure was conspicuously absent. It made me wonder why there wasn't a single guy in the school with dreadlocks, and I realized it wasn't because we couldn't stand out; it's because we didn't want to.
At lunch that day she passed the table where I was sitting with a bunch of guys on the sailing team and some of their girlfriends.
"Hey," one girl said, "did it hurt?"
Julia slowed down. "Did what hurt?"
"Falling into the cotton candy machine?"
She didn't even blink. "Sorry, I can't afford to get my hair done at Wash, Cut and Blow Jobs 'R' Us." Then she walked off to the corner of the cafeteria where she
always ate by herself, playing solitaire with a deck of cards that had pictures of patron saints on the backs.
"Shit," one of my friends said, "that's one girl I wouldn't mess with."
I laughed, because everyone else did. But I also watched her sit down, push the tray of food away from her, and begin to lay out her cards. I wondered what it would be like to not give a damn about what people thought of you.
One afternoon, I went AWOL from the sailing team where I was captain, and followed her. I made sure to stay far enough behind that she wouldn't realize I was there. She headed down Blackstone Boulevard, turned into Swan Point Cemetery, and climbed to the highest point. She opened her knapsack, took out her textbooks and binder, and spread herself in front of a grave. "You might as well come out," she said then, and I nearly swallowed my tongue, expecting a ghost, until I realized she was talking to me. "If you pay an extra quarter, you can even stare up close."
I stepped out from behind a big oak, my hands dug into my pockets. Now that I was there, I had no idea why I'd come. I nodded toward the grave. "That a relative?"
She looked over her shoulder. "Yeah. My grandma had the seat right next to him on the Mayflower." She stared at me, all right angles and edges. "Don't you have some cricket match to go to?"
"Polo," I said, breaking a smile. "I'm just waiting for my horse to get here."
She didn't get the joke . . . or maybe she didn't find it funny. "What do you want?"
I couldn't admit that I was following her. "Help," I said. "Homework."
In truth I had not looked over our English assignment. I grabbed a paper on top of her binder and read aloud: You come across a horrible four-car accident. There are people moaning in pain, and bodies strewn all over the place. Do you have an obligation to stop?
"Why should I help?" she said.
"Well, legally, you shouldn't. If you pull someone out and hurt them more, you could get sued."
"I meant why should I help you."
The paper floated to the ground. "You don't think very much of me, do you?"
"I don't think about any of you, period. You're a bunch of superficial idiots who wouldn't be caught dead with someone who's different from you."
"Isn't that what you're doing, too?"
She stared at me for a long second. Then she started stuffing her backpack. "You've got a trust fund, right? If you need help, go pay a tutor."