My Sister's Keeper

by Jodi Picoult

  As you can see, I clearly knew my stuff. But when it was nearly my turn, just as Stephen Scarpinio was holding up a papier-mache model of a lemur, I knew that I was going to be sick. I went up to Mrs. Cuthbert, and told her if I stayed to do this assignment, no one was going to be happy.

  "Anna," she said, "if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will."

  So when Stephen finished, I got up. I took a deep breath. "Kangaroos," I said, "are marsupials that live only in Australia."

  Then I projectile vomited over four kids who had the bad luck to be sitting in the front row.

  For the whole rest of the year, I was called KangaRalph. Every now and then some kid would go on a plane on vacation, and I'd go to my cubby to find a barf bag pinned to the front of my fleece pullover, a makeshift marsupial pouch. I was the school's greatest embarrassment until Darren Hong went to capture the flag in gym and accidentally pulled down Oriana Bertheim's skirt.

  I'm telling you this to explain my general aversion to public speaking.

  But now, on the witness stand, there's even more to be worried about. It's not that I'm nervous, like Campbell thinks. I am not afraid of clamming up, either. I'm afraid of saying too much.

  I look out at the courtroom and see my mother, sitting at her lawyer table, and at my father, who smiles at me just the tiniest bit. And suddenly I can't believe I ever thought I might be able to go through with this. I get to the edge of my seat, ready to apologize for wasting everyone's time and bolt--only to realize that Campbell looks positively awful. He's sweating, and his pupils are so big they look like quarters set deep in his face. "Anna," Campbell asks, "do you want a glass of water?"

  I look at him and think, Do you?

  What I want is to go home. I want to run away to a place where no one knows my name and pretend to be a millionaire's adopted daughter, the heir to a toothpaste manufacturing kingdom, a Japanese pop star.

  Campbell turns to the judge. "May I confer for a moment with my client?"

  "Be my guest," Judge DeSalvo says.

  So Campbell walks up to the witness stand and leans so close that only I can hear him. "When I was a kid I had a friend named Joseph Balz," he whispers. "Imagine if Dr. Neaux had married him."

  He backs away while I am still smiling, and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can last for another two or three minutes up here.

  Campbell's dog is going crazy--he's the one who needs water or something, from the looks of it. And I'm not the only one to notice. "Mr. Alexander," Judge DeSalvo says, "please control your animal."

  "No, Judge."

  "Excuse me?!"

  Campbell goes tomato red. "I was speaking to the dog, Your Honor, like you asked." Then he turns to me. "Anna, why did you want to file this petition?"

  A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead. "She asked," I say, the first two words that will become an avalanche.

  "Who asked what?"

  "My mom," I say, staring at Campbell's shoes. "For a kidney." I look down at my skirt, pick at a thread. Just maybe I will unravel the whole thing.

  *

  About two months ago, Kate was diagnosed with kidney failure. She got tired easily, and lost weight, and retained water, and threw up a lot. The blame was pinned to a bunch of different things: genetic abnormalities, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor--growth hormone shots Kate had once taken to boost marrow production, stress from other treatments. She was put on dialysis to get rid of the toxins zipping around her bloodstream. And then, the dialysis stopped working.

  One night, my mother came into our room when Kate and I were just hanging out. She had my father with her, which meant we were in for a more heavy discussion than who-left-the-sink-running-by-accident. "I've been doing some reading on the internet," my mother said. "Transplants of typical organs aren't nearly as difficult to recover from as bone marrow transplants."

  Kate looked at me and popped in a new CD. We both knew where this was headed. "You can't exactly pick up a kidney at Kmart."

  "I know. It turns out that you only need to match a couple of HLA proteins to be a kidney donor--not all six. I called Dr. Chance to ask if I might be a match for you, and he said in normal cases, I probably would."

  Kate hears the right word. "Normal cases?"

  "Which you're not. Dr. Chance thinks you'd reject an organ from the general donor pool, just because your body has already been through so much." My mother looked down at the carpet. "He won't recommend the procedure unless the kidney comes from Anna."

  My father shook his head. "That's invasive surgery," he said quietly. "For both of them."

  I started thinking about this. Would I have to be in the hospital? Would it hurt? Could people live with just one kidney?

  What if I wound up with kidney failure when I was, like, seventy? Where would I get my spare?

  Before I could ask any of this, Kate spoke. "I'm not doing it again, all right? I'm sick of it. The hospitals and the chemo and the radiation and the whole freaking thing. Just leave me alone, will you?"

  My mother's face went white. "Fine, Kate. Go ahead and commit suicide!"

  She put her headphones on again, turned the music up so loud that I could hear it. "It's not suicide," she said, "if you're already dying."

  *

  "Did you ever tell anyone that you didn't want to be a donor?" Campbell asks me, as his dog starts doing helicopters in the front of the courtroom.

  "Mr. Alexander," Judge DeSalvo says, "I'm going to call a bailiff to remove your . . . pet."

  It's true, the dog is totally out of control. He's barking and leaping up with his front paws on Campbell and running in those tight circles. Campbell ignores both Judges. "Anna, did you decide to file this lawsuit all by yourself?"

  I know why he's asking; he wants everyone to know I'm capable of making choices that are hard. And I even have my lie, quivering like the snake it is, caught between my teeth. But what I mean to say isn't quite what slips out. "I was kind of convinced by someone."

  This is, of course, news to my parents, whose eyes hammer onto me. It's news to Julia, who actually makes a small sound. And it's news to Campbell, who runs a hand down his face in defeat. This is exactly why it's better to stay silent; there is less of a chance of screwing up your life and everyone else's.

  "Anna," Campbell says, "who convinced you?"

  I am small in this seat, in this state, on this lonely planet. I fold my hands together, holding between them the only emotion I've managed to keep from slipping away: regret. "Kate."

  The entire courtroom goes silent. Before I can say anything else, the lightning bolt I have been expecting strikes. I cringe, but it turns out that the crash I've heard isn't the earth opening up to swallow me whole. It is Campbell, who's fallen to the floor, while his dog stands nearby with a very human look on his face that says I told you so.

  BRIAN

  IF YOU TRAVEL IN SPACE for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense. I thought I had been listening to Jesse, but it turns out I haven't been listening to him at all. I have listened carefully to Anna, and yet it seems there is a piece missing. I try to work through the few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.

  Then it hits me--I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.

  Or this is what I'm thinking, anyway, when my daughter's lawyer falls to the fl
oor in the throes of an epileptic seizure.

  *

  Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal seizure, is the biggie. I jump over the gate of the gallery and have to fight the dog out of the way; he's come to stand over Campbell Alexander's twitching body like a sentry. The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is forced out by the contraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and his muscles fire randomly, repeatedly. I turn him on his side, in case he vomits, and start looking for something to stick between his jaws so that he won't bite off his own tongue, when the most amazing thing happens--that dog knocks over Alexander's briefcase and pulls out something that looks like a rubber bone but is actually a bite block, and drops it into my hand. Distantly I am aware of the judge sealing off the courtroom. I yell to Vern to call for an ambulance.

  Julia is at my side immediately. "Is he all right?"

  "He's gonna be fine. It's a seizure."

  She looks like she's on the verge of tears. "Can't you do something?"

  "Wait," I say.

  She reaches for Campbell, but I draw her hand away. "I don't understand why it happened."

  I don't know if Campbell does, himself. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.

  *

  Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so when you get right down to it, the Greek conceptions of star signs as related to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today's day and age. It's called the Line of Procession: back then the sun didn't set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A September 24 birthday didn't mean you were a Libra, but a Virgo. And there was a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, which rose between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days.

  The reason it's all off kilter? The earth's axis wobbles. Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be.

  *

  Campbell Alexander vomits on the courtroom rug, then coughs his way to consciousness in the judge's chambers. "Take it easy," I say, helping him sit. "You had a bad one."

  He holds his head. "What happened?"

  Amnesia, on both sides of the event, is pretty common. "Blacked out. Looked like a grand mal to me."

  He glances down at the IV line Caesar and I have placed. "I don't need that."

  "Like hell you don't," I say. "If you don't take antiseizure meds, you'll be back on that floor in no time."

  Relenting, he leans back against the couch and stares at the ceiling. "How bad was it?"

  "Pretty bad," I admit.

  He pats Judge on the head--the dog's been inseparable. "Good boy. Sorry I didn't listen." Then he looks down at his pants--wet and reeking, another common effect of a grand mal. "Shit."

  "Close enough." I hand him a spare pair from one of my uniforms, something I had the department bring along. "You need help?"

  He shakes me off and tries, one-handedly, to take off his trousers. Without a word I reach over and undo the fly, help him change. I do this without thinking, the way I'd lift up the shirt of a woman who needed CPR; but all the same, I know it's killing him.

  "Thanks," he says, taking great care to zip his own fly. We sit for a second. "Does the judge know?" When I don't answer, Campbell buries his face in his hands. "Christ. Right in front of everyone?"

  "How long have you hidden it?"

  "Since it started. I was eighteen. I got into a car crash, and they started up after that."

  "Head trauma?"

  He nods. "That's what they said."

  I clasp my hands together between my knees. "Anna was pretty freaked out."

  Campbell rubs his forehead. "She was . . . testifying."

  "Yeah," I say. "Yeah."

  He looks up at me. "I have to get back in there."

  "Not yet." At the sound of Julia's voice, we both turn. She stands in the doorway, staring at Campbell as if she has never seen him before, and I suppose in all fairness she hasn't, not like this.

  "I'll, uh, go see if the boys have filed their report yet," I murmur, and I leave them.

  *

  Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster--a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity.

  There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.

  Make of it what you will.

  CAMPBELL

  THE ONLY THING COMPARABLE to the aftermath of a grand mal seizure is waking up on the pavement with a hangover from the mother of all frat parties and immediately being run over by a truck. On second thought, maybe a grand mal is worse. I am covered in my own filth, hooked up to medicine and falling apart at the seams, when Julia walks toward me. "It's a seizure dog," I say.

  "No kidding." Julia holds out her hand for Judge to sniff. She points to the couch beside me. "Can I sit down?"

  "It's not catching, if that's what you mean."

  "It wasn't." Julia comes close enough that I can feel the heat from her shoulder, inches away from mine. "Why didn't you tell me, Campbell?"

  "Christ, Julia, I didn't even tell my parents." I try to look over her shoulder into the hallway. "Where's Anna?"

  "How long has this been going on?"

  I try to get up, and manage to lift myself a half inch before my strength gives out. "I have to get back in there."

  "Campbell."

  I sigh. "A while."

  "A while, as in a week?"

  Shaking my head, I say, "A while, as in two days before we graduated from Wheeler." I look up at her. "The day I took you home, all I wanted was to be with you. When my parents told me I had to go to that stupid dinner at the country club, I followed them in my own car, so I could make a quick escape--I was planning on driving back to your house, that night. But on the way to dinner, I got into a car accident. I came through with a few bruises, and that night, I had the first seizure. Thirty CT scans later, the doctors still couldn't really tell me why, but they made it pretty clear I'd have to live with it forever." I take a deep breath. "Which is what made me realize that no one else should have to."

  "What?"

  "What do you want me to say, Julia? I wasn't good enough for you. You deserved better than some freak who might fall down frothing at the mouth any old minute."

  Julia goes perfectly still. "You might have let me make up my own mind."

  "What difference would it have made? Like you really would have gotten great satisfaction guarding me like Judge does when it happens; wiping up after me, living at the end of my life." I shake my head. "You were so incredibly independent. A free spirit. I didn't want to be the one who took that away from you."

  "Well, if I'd had the choice, maybe I wouldn't have spent the past fifteen years thinking there was something the matter with me."

  "You?" I start to laugh. "Look at you. You're a knockout. You're smarter than I am. You're on a career track and you're family-centered and you probably even can balance your checkbook."

  "And I'm lonely, Campbell," Julia adds. "Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect," she says. "You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

  I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty
-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

  "And another thing--this time, you don't get to leave me. I'm going to leave you."

  If possible, that only makes me feel worse. I try to pretend it doesn't hurt, but I don't have the energy. "So go."

  Julia settles next to me. "I will," she says. "In another fifty or sixty years."

  ANNA

  I KNOCK ON THE DOOR of the men's room, and then walk inside. On one wall is a really long, gross urinal. On the other, washing his hands in a sink, is Campbell. He's wearing a pair of my dad's uniform pants. He looks different now, as if all the straight lines that had been used to draw his face have been smudged. "Julia said you wanted me to come in here," I say.

  "Yeah, I wanted to talk to you alone, and all the conference rooms are upstairs. Your dad doesn't think I ought to tackle that just yet." He wipes his hands on a towel. "I'm sorry about what happened."

  Well, I don't even know if there's a decent answer to that. I chew on my lower lip. "Is that why I couldn't pat the dog?"

  "Yeah."

  "How does Judge know what to do?"

  Campbell shrugs. "It's supposed to have something to do with scent or electrical impulses that an animal can sense before a human can. But I think it's because we know each other so well." He pats Judge on the neck. "He gets me somewhere safe before it happens. I usually have about twenty minutes' lead time."

  "Huh." I am suddenly shy. I've been with Kate when she's really, really sick, but this is different. I hadn't been expecting this from Campbell. "Is this why you took my case?"

  "So that I could have a seizure in public? Believe me, no."

  "Not that." I look away from him. "Because you know what it's like to not have any control over your body."

  "Maybe," Campbell says thoughtfully. "But my doorknobs did sorely need polishing."

  If he's trying to make me feel better, he's failing miserably. "I told you having me testify wasn't the greatest idea."

  He puts his hands on my shoulders. "Anna, come on. If I can go back in there after that performance, you sure as hell can climb into the hot seat for a few more questions."

  How am I supposed to fight that logic? So I follow Campbell back into the courtroom, where nothing is the way it was just an hour ago. With everyone watching him like he's a ticking bomb, Campbell walks up to the bench and turns to the court in general. "I'm very sorry about that, Judge," he says. "Anything for a ten-minute break, right?"