Handle With Care

by Jodi Picoult

  I

  t's funny, isn't it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you. Like arresting someone - people who aren't in law enforcement think it's appalling to know that, even with probable cause, mistakes are made. If that's the case, you unarrest the person and tell him you were just doing what you had to. Better that than take the risk of letting a criminal walk free, I've always said, and to hell with civil libertarians who wouldn't know a perp if he spit in their faces. This was what I believed, heart and soul, until I was carted down to the Lake Buena Vista PD on suspicion of child abuse. One look at your X-rays, at the dozens of healing fractures, at the curvature of your lower right arm where it should have been straight - and the doctors went ballistic and called DCF. Dr Rosenblad had given us a note years ago that should have served as a Get Out of Jail Free card, because lots of parents with OI kids are accused of child abuse when the case history isn't known - and Charlotte's always carried it around in the minivan, just in case. But today, with everything we had to remember to pack for the trip, the letter was forgotten, and what we got instead was a trip to the police station for interrogation.

  'This is bullshit,' I yelled. 'My daughter fell down in public. There were at least ten witnesses. Why aren't you dragging them in? Don't you guys have real cases to keep you busy around here?'

  I'd been alternating between playing good cop and bad cop, but as it turned out, neither worked when you were up against another officer from an unfamiliar jurisdiction. It was nearly midnight on Saturday - which meant that it could be Monday before this was sorted out with Dr Rosenblad. I hadn't seen Charlotte since they'd brought us to the station to be questioned - in cases like this, we'd separate the parents so that they had less of a chance to fabricate a story. The problem was, even the truth sounded crazy. A kid slips on a napkin and winds up with compound fractures in both femurs? You don't need nineteen years on the job, like I have, to be suspicious of that one.

  I imagined Charlotte was falling apart at the seams - being away from you while you were hurting would rip her to pieces, and then knowing that Amelia was God knows where was even more devastating. I kept thinking of how Amelia used to hate to sleep with the lights off, how I'd have to creep into her room in the middle of the night and turn them off when she'd fallen asleep. Are you scared? I'd asked her once, and she'd said she wasn't. I just don't want to miss anything. We lived in Bankton, New Hampshire - a small town where you could actually drive down the street and have people honk when they recognized your car; a place where if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store, the checkout girl would just let you take your food and come back to pay later. That's not to say that we didn't have our share of the seedy underbelly of life - cops get to see behind the white picket fences and polished doors, where there are all kinds of hidden nightmares: esteemed local bigwigs who beat their wives, honors students with drug addictions, schoolteachers with kiddie porn on their computers. But part of my goal, as a police officer, was to leave all that crap at the station and make sure you and Amelia grew up blissfully naive. And what happens instead? You watch the Florida police come into the emergency room to take your parents away. Amelia gets carted off to a foster-care facility. How much would this lousy attempt at a vacation scar you both?

  The detective had left me alone after two rounds of interrogation. This was his way, I knew, of hanging me out to dry - assuming that the information he was gathering between our little sessions would be enough to scare me into confessing that I'd broken your legs.

  I wondered if Charlotte was in this building somewhere, in another interrogation room, or a lockup. If they wanted to keep us here overnight, they had to arrest us - and they had grounds for that. A new injury had occurred here in Florida - that, coupled with the old injuries on the X-ray, was probable cause, until someone could corroborate our explanations. But the hell with it - I was tired of waiting. You and your sister needed me.

  I stood up and banged on the glass mirror that I knew the detective was watching me through.

  He came back into the room. Skinny, redheaded, pimples - he couldn't have been thirty yet. I weighed 225 - all muscle - and stood six-three; for the past three years I'd won our department's unofficial weight-lifting challenge during annual fitness testing. I could have snapped him in half if I wanted to. Which made me remember why he was questioning me in the first place.

  'Mr O'Keefe,' the detective said. 'Let's go through this again.'

  'I want to see my wife.'

  'That's not possible right now.'

  'Will you at least tell me if she's okay?'

  My voice cracked on that last word, and it was enough to soften the detective. 'She's fine,' he said. 'She's with another detective right now.'

  'I want to make a phone call.'

  'You're not under arrest,' the detective said.

  I laughed. 'Yeah, right.'

  He gestured toward the phone in the middle of the desk. 'Dial nine for an outside line,' he said, and he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, as if to make it clear that he wasn't giving me any privacy.

  'You know the number for the hospital where my daughter's being kept?'

  'You can't call her.'

  'Why not? I'm not under arrest,' I repeated.

  'It's late. No good parent would want to wake his kid up. But then you're not a good parent, are you, Sean?'

  'No good parent would leave his kid alone at a hospital when she's scared and hurt,' I countered.

  'Let's get through what we need to here, and then maybe you'll be able to catch your daughter before she goes to bed.'

  'I'm not saying another word until I talk to her,' I bargained. 'Give me that number, and I'll tell you what really happened today.'

  He stared at me for a minute - I knew that technique, too. When you have been doing this as long as I have, you can ferret out truth by reading someone's eyes. I wonder what he saw in mine. Disappointment, maybe. Here I was, a police officer, and I hadn't even been able to keep you safe.

  The detective picked up the phone and dialed. He asked for your room and talked quietly to a nurse who answered. Then he handed the receiver to me. 'You have one minute,' he said.

  You were groggy, shaken awake by that nurse. Your voice sounded small enough for me to carry around in my back pocket. 'Willow,' I said. 'It's Daddy.'

  'Where are you? Where's Mommy?'

  'We're coming back for you, honey. We're going to see you tomorrow, first thing.' I didn't know that this was true, but I wasn't going to let you think we'd abandoned you. 'One to ten?' I asked.

  It was a game we played whenever there was a break - I offered you a pain scale, you showed me how brave you were. 'Zero,' you whispered, and it felt like a punch.

  Here's something you should know about me: I don't cry. I haven't cried since my father passed away, when I was ten. I've come close, let me tell you. Like when you were born, and almost died right afterward. Or when I saw the look on your face when, as a two-year-old, you had to learn how to walk again after being casted for five months with a hip fracture. Or today, when I saw Amelia being pulled away. It's not that I don't feel like breaking down - it's that someone's got to be the strong one, so that you all don't have to be.

  So I pulled it together and cleared my throat. 'Tell me something I don't know, baby.'

  It was another game between us: I'd come home, and you'd recite something you'd learned that day - honestly, I'd never seen a kid absorb information like you. Your body might betray you at every turn, but your brain picked up the slack.

  'A nurse told me that a giraffe's heart weighs twenty-five pounds,' you said.

  'That's huge,' I replied. How heavy was my own? 'Now, Wills, I want you to lie down and get a good night's rest, so that you're wide awake when I come get you in the morning.'

  'You promise?'

  I swallowed. 'You bet, baby. Sleep tight, okay?' I handed the phone back to the detective.

  'How touching,' he said
flatly, hanging it up. 'All right, I'm listening.'

  I rested my elbows on the table between us. 'We had just gotten into the park, and there was an ice-cream place close to the entry. Willow was hungry, so we decided we'd stop off there. My wife went to get napkins, Amelia sat down at a table, and Willow and I were waiting in line. Her sister saw something through the window, and Willow ran to go look at it, and she fell down and broke her femurs. She's got a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, which means her bones are extremely brittle. One in ten thousand kids are born with it. What the fuck else do you want to know?'

  'That's exactly the statement you gave an hour ago.' The detective threw down his pen. 'I thought you were going to tell me what happened.'

  'I did. I just didn't tell you what you wanted to hear.'

  The detective stood up. 'Sean O'Keefe,' he said. 'You're under arrest.'

  By seven on Sunday morning, I was pacing in the waiting room of the police station, a free man, waiting for Charlotte to be released. The desk sergeant who let me out of the lockup shuffled beside me, uncomfortable. 'I'm sure you understand,' he said. 'Given the circumstances, we were only doing our job.'

  My jaw tightened. 'Where's my older daughter?'

  'DCF is on their way here with her.'

  I had been told - professional courtesy - that Louie, the dispatcher at the Bankton PD who confirmed my claim to be an officer with the department, also told them you had a disease that caused your bones to break easily, but that DCF wouldn't release Willow until they had confirmation from a medical professional. So I'd prayed half the night - although I have to admit I give less credit for our release to Jesus than I do to your mother. Charlotte watched enough Law & Order to know that once her rights had been read to her she was allowed a phone call - and to my surprise, she didn't use it to contact you. Instead, she called Piper Reece, her best friend.

  I like Piper, honestly, I do. God knows I love her for whatever connections she used to cold-call Mark Rosenblad at three a.m. on a weekend and get him to phone the hospital where you were being treated. I even owe Piper for my marriage - she and Rob are the ones who introduced me to Charlotte. But all this being said, sometimes Piper is . . . just a little too much. She's smart and opinionated and frustratingly right most of the time. Most of the fights I've had with your mother have had their roots in something Piper got her thinking about. The thing is, where Piper can carry off that brashness and confidence, on Charlotte, it seems a little off - like a kid playing dress-up in her mom's closet. Your mother is quieter, more of a mystery; her strengths sneak up on you instead of smacking you front and center. If Piper's the one you notice when you walk into a room, with her boy-cut blond hair and forever legs and her wide smile, Charlotte's the one you find yourself thinking about long after you've left. But then again, that in-your-face fierceness that makes Piper so exhausting sometimes is also what got me out of the lockup in Lake Buena Vista. I suppose this means, in the grand cosmic tally, I have something else to thank her for.

  Suddenly a door opened, and I could see Charlotte - dazed, pale, her brown curls tumbling out of her ponytail elastic. She was blistering the officer escorting her: 'If Amelia isn't back here before I count to ten, I swear I'll--'

  God, I love your mother. She and I think exactly alike, when it counts.

  Then she noticed me and broke off. 'Sean!' she cried, and ran into my arms.

  I wish you could know what it feels like to find the missing piece of you, the thing that makes you stronger. Charlotte's that, for me. She's tiny, only five-two, but underneath her serpentine curves - the ones she's always stressing out about because she's not a size four like Piper - are muscles that would surprise you, developed from years of hauling flour when she was a pastry chef and - later - you and your equipment.

  'You all right, baby?' I murmured against her hair. She smelled like apples and suntan lotion. She'd made us all put it on before we even left the Orlando airport. To be safe, she'd said.

  She didn't answer, just nodded against my chest.

  There was a cry from the doorway, and we both looked up in time to see Amelia barreling toward us. 'I forgot,' she sobbed. 'Mom, I forgot to take the doctor's note. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

  'It's not anyone's fault.' I knelt down and brushed her tears away with my thumbs. 'Let's get out of here.'

  The desk sergeant had offered to drive us to the hospital in a cruiser, but I asked him to call us a cab instead; I wanted them to stew in their own poor judgment instead of trying to make it up to us. As the taxi pulled up in front of the police department entrance, we three moved as a unit out the front door. I let Charlotte and Amelia slide into the cab before getting in myself. 'To the hospital,' I told the driver, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the padded seat.

  'Thank God,' your mother said. 'Thank God that's over.'

  I didn't even open my eyes. 'It's not over,' I said. 'Someone is going to pay.'

  Charlotte

  S

  uffice it to say that the trip home wasn't a pleasant one. You had been put into a spica cast - surely one of the biggest torture devices ever created by doctors. It was a half shell of plaster that covered you from knee to ribs. You were in a semireclined position, because that's what your bones needed to knit together. The cast kept your legs splayed wide so that the femurs would set correctly. Here's what we were told: 1. You would wear this cast for four months.

  2. Then it would be sliced in half, and you would spend weeks sitting in it like an oyster on the half shell, trying to rebuild your stomach muscles so that you could sit upright again.

  3. The small square cutout of the plaster at your belly would allow your stomach to expand while you ate.

  4. The open gash between your legs was left so you could go to the bathroom.

  Here's what we were not told:

  1. You wouldn't be able to sit completely upright, or lie completely down.

  2. You couldn't fly back to New Hampshire in a normal plane seat.

  3. You couldn't even lie down in the back of a normal car.

  4. You wouldn't be able to sit comfortably for long periods in your wheelchair.

  5. Your clothes wouldn't fit over the cast.

  Because of all these things, we did not leave Florida immediately. We rented a Suburban, with three full bench seats, and settled Amelia in the back. You had the whole middle bench, and we padded this with blankets we'd bought at Wal-Mart. There we'd also bought men's Tshirts and boxer shorts - the elastic waists could stretch over the cast and be belted with a hair scrunchie if you pulled the extra fabric to the side, and if you didn't look too closely, they almost passed for shorts. They were not fashionable, but they covered up your crotch, which was left wide open by the position of the cast.

  Then we started the long drive home.

  You slept; the painkillers they'd given you at the hospital were still swimming through your blood. Amelia alternated between doing word search puzzles and asking if we were almost home yet. We ate at drive-through restaurants, because you couldn't sit up at a table.

  Seven hours into our journey, Amelia shifted in the backseat. 'You know how Mrs Grey always makes us write about the cool stuff we did over vacation? I'm going to talk about you guys trying to figure out how to get Willow onto the toilet to pee.'

  'Don't you dare,' I said.

  'Well, if I don't, my essay's going to be really short.'

  'We could make the rest of the trip fun,' I suggested at one point. 'Stop off in Memphis at Graceland . . . or Washington, D.C. . . .'

  'Or we could just drive straight through and be done with it,' Sean said.

  I glanced at him. In the dark, a green band of light from the dashboard reflected like a mask around his eyes.

  'Could we go to the White House?' Amelia asked, perking up.

  I imagined the hothouse of humidity that Washington would be; I pictured us lugging you around on our hips as we climbed the steps to the Air and Space Museum. Out the window,
the black road was a ribbon that kept unraveling in front of us; we couldn't manage to catch up to its end. 'Your father's right,' I said.

  When we finally got home, word had already spread about what happened. There was a note from Piper on the kitchen counter, with a list of all the people who'd brought casseroles she'd stashed in the fridge and a rating system: five stars (eat this one first), three stars (better than Chef Boyardee), one star (botulism alert). I learned a long time ago with you that folks who are trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

  People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know. They look at your casts - camouflage or hot pink or neon orange. They watch me unload the car and set up your walker, with its tennis-ball feet, so that we can creep across the sidewalk, while behind us, their children swing from monkey bars and play dodgeball and do all the other ordinary things that would cause you to break. They smile at me, because they want to be polite or politically correct, but the whole time they are thinking, Thank God. Thank God it was her, instead of me.

  Your father says that I'm not being fair when I say things like this. That some people, when they ask, really do want to lend a hand. I tell him that if they really wanted to lend a hand, they wouldn't bring macaroni casseroles - instead they'd offer to take Amelia apple picking or ice skating so that she can get out of the house when you can't, or they'd rake the gutters of the house, which are always clogging up after a storm. And if they truly wanted to be saviors, they'd call the insurance company and spend four hours on the phone arguing over bills, so I wouldn't have to.

  Sean doesn't realize that most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don't blame them. It's superstition: if you give assistance to the family in need . . . if you throw salt over your shoulder . . . if you don't step on the cracks, then maybe you'll be immune. Maybe you'll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you.

  Don't get me wrong; I am not complaining. Other people look at me and think: That poor woman; she has a child with a disability. But all I see when I look at you is the girl who had memorized all the words to Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there's a thunderstorm - not because you're afraid but because I am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn't you.