Handle With Care

by Jodi Picoult

  I smacked my hand on the steering wheel, inadvertently honking the horn. The noise brought Charlotte to the window. Her face was tiny and white, an oval whose features were blurred at this distance.

  I had asked Charlotte to marry me with petit fours. I went to a bakery and had them write a letter in icing on top of each one: MARRY ME, and then I mixed them up and served them on a plate. It's a puzzle, I told her. You have to put them in order.

  ARMY REM, she wrote.

  Charlotte was still at the window, watching me with her arms crossed. I could barely see in her the girl I'd told to try again. I could no longer picture the look on her face when, the second time, she got it right.

  Amelia

  W

  hen Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer's office we'd gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you'd been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.

  I didn't do it for the reason you'd think - to drown out the noise you were making. I knew that's what my parents thought: that I was totally unsympathetic. I wasn't about to try to explain it to them, either, but the truth was, I needed that music. I needed to distract myself from the fact that, when you were crying, there was nothing I could do to stop it, because that just made me hate myself even more.

  Everyone - even you, in the bottom half of your spica cast, with your arm strapped up against your chest - was already sitting at the dinner table when I got there. Mom had cut your meat loaf into tiny squares, like postage stamps. It made me think of when you were little, sitting in your high chair. I used to try to play with you - rolling a ball or pulling you in a wagon - and every time I was told the same thing: Be careful.

  Once, you were sitting on the bed and I was bouncing on it, and you fell off. One minute we were astronauts exploring the planet Zurgon, and the next, your left shin was bent at a ninety-degree angle and you were doing that freaky zoning-out thing you did when you had a bad break. Mom and Dad went out of their way to say this wasn't my fault, but who did they think they were kidding? I was the one who'd been jumping, even if it had been your idea in the first place. If I'd never been there, you wouldn't have gotten hurt.

  I slid into my chair. We didn't have assigned seats, like some families did, but we all took the same ones for every meal. I was still wearing my headphones, with my music turned up loud - emo stuff, songs that made me feel like there were people with even crappier lives than mine. 'Amelia,' my father said. 'Not at the table.'

  Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. I blinked at my father, cranked the volume, and said - too loudly, 'Pass the potatoes.'

  I sounded like the biggest brat on earth, and maybe I wanted to be: like Pinocchio, if I acted like a self-centered teenager, eventually I'd become one, and everyone would notice me and cater to me instead of hand-feeding you your meat loaf and watching you to make sure you weren't slipping in your chair. Actually, I'd just settle for having someone notice I was even a member of this family.

  'Wills,' my mother said, 'you have to eat something.'

  'It tastes like feet,' you answered.

  'Amelia, I'm not going to ask you again,' Dad said.

  'Five more bites . . .'

  'Amelia!'

  They didn't look at each other; as far as I knew they hadn't spoken since this afternoon. I wondered if they realized that they could be on opposite sides of the globe right now, and still be having this dinner conversation, and it wouldn't make a difference.

  You squirmed away from the fork Mom was waving in front of your face. 'Stop treating me like a baby,' you said. 'Just because I broke my shoulder doesn't mean you have to treat me like I'm two years old!' To illustrate this, you reached for your glass with your free arm, but you knocked it over. Milk landed in part on the tablecloth and mostly smack in the middle of Dad's plate. 'Goddammit!' he yelled, and he reached toward me and ripped the headphones out of my ears. 'You're part of this family, and you'll act that way at the dinner table.'

  I stared at him. 'You first,' I said.

  His face turned a steamy red. 'Amelia, go to your room.'

  'Fine!' I shoved my chair back with a screech and ran upstairs. With tears leaking out of my eyes and my nose running, I locked myself in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror was someone I didn't know: her mouth twisted, her eyes dark and hollow.

  These days, it seemed as if everything pissed me off. I got pissed off when I woke up in the morning and you were staring at me like I was some zoo animal; I got pissed off when I went to school and my locker was near the French classroom when Madame Riordan had made it her personal mission to make my life horrible; I got pissed off when I saw a gaggle of cheerleaders, with their perfect legs and their perfect lives, who worried about things like who would ask them to the next dance and whether red nail polish looked trampy, instead of whether their moms would remember to pick them up from school or be otherwise occupied at the emergency room. The only times I wasn't pissed off, I was hungry - like right now. Or at least I thought it was hunger. Both felt like I was being consumed from the inside out; I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

  The last time my parents had been fighting - which was, like, yesterday - you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth . . . testimony . . . deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don't you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn't really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.

  They're mad at me, you said.

  No. They're mad at each other.

  Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn't figure this out?

  You looked at me. Figure what out?

  I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I'd read out loud.

  Normally you didn't like that - reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn't this the way it all started?

  I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink's car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars' worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man's car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.

  You liked that last one best, and I'd gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?

  That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. 'Do you and Daddy hate each other?' you asked.

  'No, Wills,' she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. 'Everything's absolutely fine.'

&n
bsp; I stood up, my hands on my hips. 'When are you going to tell her?' I demanded.

  My mother's gaze could have cut me in half, I swear. 'Amelia,' she said in a tone that brooked no argument, 'there is nothing to tell.'

  Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I realized what a total liar my mother was. I wondered if that was what I was destined for, if you could inherit that tendency the same way she had passed me the ability to double-joint my elbows, to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.

  I leaned over the toilet bowl, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited, so that this time when I told myself I was empty and aching, I would finally be telling the truth.

  Blind Baking: the process of baking a pie crust without the filling.

  Sometimes, when you're dealing with a fragile dough, it will collapse in spite of your best intentions. For this reason, some pie crusts and tart shells must be baked before the filling is added. The best method is to line the tart pan or pie plate with the rolled-out dough and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. When you are ready to bake, prick the crust in several spots with a fork, line the pie plate or tart shell with foil or parchment paper, and fill it with rice or dried beans. Bake as directed, then carefully remove the foil and the beans - the shell will have retained its form because of them. I like seeing how a substance that weighs heavily can, in the end, be lifted; I like the feel of the beans, like trouble that slips through your fingers. Most of all, I like the proof in the pastry: it is the things we have to bear that shape us.

  * * *

  SWEET PASTRY DOUGH

  11/3 cups all-purpose flour

  Pinch of salt

  1 tablespoon sugar

  1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces 1 large egg yolk

  1 tablespoon ice water

  In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and butter. Pulse until coarse. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and ice water. With the processor running, add the yolk mixture to the flour and butter until a ball forms. Remove the dough, wrap it in plastic, flatten to a disk, and chill for 1 hour.

  Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface and place it in a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill before baking.

  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Remove the tart pan from the fridge, prick the crust all over with a fork, line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans. Bake for 17 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and continue baking for another 6 minutes. Cool completely before filling.

  * * *

  APRICOT TART

  Sweet Pastry Dough tart shell - blind baked

  2-3 apricots

  2 egg yolks

  1 cup heavy cream

  3/4 cup sugar

  11/2 tablespoons flour 1/4 cup chopped hazelnuts

  Peel the apricots, slice, and arrange in the bottom of a blind-baked tart shell.

  Combine the egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flour. Pour over the apricots and sprinkle with the hazelnuts. Bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35 minutes.

  When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It's the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue.

  Marin

  June 2007

  F

  acebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it - me included - spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people's walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact. Perhaps it was bad form to check one's Facebook in the middle of the workday, but once, I'd walked in on Bob Ramirez tooling around with his MySpace page and I realized that there was very little he could say to me without being a hypocrite.

  These days I used Facebook to join groups - Birth Mothers and Adoptees Searching, Adoption Search Registry. Some members actually found the people they were looking for. Even if that hadn't happened to me, there was a nice comfort to logging on and reading the posts that proved I wasn't the only one frustrated by this whole process.

  I logged in and checked my mini-feed. I'd been poked by a girl from high school who'd asked me to be her friend a week ago but whom I hadn't seen in fifteen years. I had been dared to take a quiz on Flixster by my cousin in Santa Barbara. I'd been voted by my other friends as the person you'd most prefer to be stuck in handcuffs with. I glanced at the information just above this, my profile.

  NAME: Marin Gates

  NETWORKS: Portsmouth, NH/UNH Alumni/NH Bar Association

  SEX: Female

  INTERESTED IN: Men

  RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single

  Single?

  I reloaded the page. For the past four months on my Facebook page that line had read: In a relationship with Joe McIntyre. I clicked on the home page and scrolled through the news feed. There it was: a picture of his face and a status update: Joe McIntyre and Marin Gates have ended their relationship.

  My jaw dropped open; I felt like I'd been sucker-punched.

  I grabbed my coat and stormed into the reception area. 'Wait!' Briony said. 'Where are you going? You've got a conference call at--'

  'Reschedule it,' I snapped. 'My boyfriend just dumped me via Facebook.'

  It was not like Joe McIntyre was the One. I'd met him at a Bruins game with clients; he passed me in the aisle and spilled his beer down the front of my shirt. Not an auspicious beginning, but he had indigo eyes and a smile that contributed to global warming, and before I knew it, I'd not only promised that he could pay my dry-cleaning bill but also given him my phone number. On our first date, we found out that we worked less than a block away from each other - he was an environmental lawyer - and that we'd both graduated from UNH. On our second date, we went back to my place and didn't get out of bed for two straight days.

  Joe was six years younger than me, which meant that at twenty-eight he was still playing the field and that at thirty-four I had traded in my wristwatch for a biological clock. I expected this fling to be a little fun: someone to go to a movie with on a Saturday night and get flowers from on Valentine's Day. I wasn't banking on forever; I fully figured that I would tell him sometime in the next few months that we were looking for different things in our lives right now.

  But I sure as hell wouldn't have broken the news to him on Facebook.

  I strode around the corner and walked into the reception area of the law firm where he worked. It was much less grandiose than Bob's, but then again, we were a plaintiff's attorney, we weren't trying to save the world. The receptionist smiled. 'Can I help you?'

  'Joe's expecting me,' I said, and I headed down the hall.

  When I opened the door to his office, he was dictating into a digital recorder. 'Furthermore, we believe it's in the best interests of Cochran and Sons to - Marin? What are you doing here?'

  'You broke up with me on Facebook?'

  'I was going to send a text, but I thought that would be worse,' Joe said, jumping up to close the door as a colleague wandered by. 'C'mon, Marin. You know I'm not good at the touchyfeely stuff.' Then he grinned. 'Well, the metaphorical touchyfeely stuff . . .'

  'You are such an insensitive troll,' I said.

  'This was a lot more civilized, if you ask me. What was the alternative? Some big argument where you tell me to fuck off and die?'

  'Yes!' I said, and then I took a deep breath. 'Is there someone else?'

  'There's something else,' Joe said soberly. 'For God's sake, Marin. You've blown me off the past three times I've tried to get together. What did you expect me to do? Just sit around waiting for you to have time for me?'

  'That's not fair,' I said. 'I was reading marriage license applications--'

  'Exactly,' Joe replied. 'You don't want to go out with me. You want to go out with your birth mother. Look, at first, I thought it was kind of hot - you know, you were so passionate when you talked about finding her. Except it turns out you're not passionate about anything but that, Marin.' He slid his hands into his pockets. 'You're so busy livin
g in the past, you've got nothing to give right now.'

  I could feel my neck heating up beneath the collar of my suit. 'Do you remember those two amazing days - and nights - at my house?' I said, leaning toward him until we were a breath away. I watched his pupils dilate.

  'Oh yeah,' he murmured.

  'I faked it. Every time,' I said, and I walked out of Joe's office with my head high.

  My birthday is January 3, 1973. I've known this, obviously, my whole life. The adoption decree I'd gotten from Hillsborough County was dated in late July, because of the six-month waiting period to finalize an adoption and the time it takes to schedule the hearing. There's a lot of debate about that six-month period, in the adoptive community. Some people feel it should be longer, to give the birth mom time to change her mind; some people feel it should be shorter, to give the adoptive parents peace of mind that their newborn won't be taken away. Where you fall on the spectrum, of course, depends on whether you have a baby to give away or one to receive.

  I was a few days late. My father used to say that he was counting on me being his little tax deduction, but then I foiled that by arriving in the new year. On the slip of paper that came home from the hospital with me, saved in my baby book, was a bassinet card with my name torn off - but I could still make out a loop in the middle of the last name that hadn't been ripped away: a cursive y or g or j or q. I knew this about my former self, and I knew that my birth parents had lived in Hillsborough County, and that my mother had been seventeen. In the seventies, there was still a good chance that a seventeen-year-old would marry the father of her baby, and that had led me to the records room.

  Using a due date calculator on a pregnancy website, I figured out that I must have been conceived sometime around April tenth in order to be due on New Year's Eve. (April tenth. A high school spring formal dance, I imagined. A midnight car ride to the shore. The waves on the sand, the sun breaking like a yolk over the ocean at dawn, he and she, sleeping in each other's arms.) At any rate, if she found out she was pregnant a month later, that meant getting married in the early summer of 1972.