by Jodi Picoult
After a while, when it becomes clear to me that any information Campbell feels like providing me with won’t be doled out until after dessert, I give in. I lie on my back with my arm draped over the sleeping dog. I watch the sail, loose now, flap like the great white wing of a pelican. Campbell comes up from belowdecks, where he’s been hunting down a corkscrew, and holds out two glasses of red wine. He sits down on the other side of Judge and scratches behind the German shepherd’s ears. “You ever think about being an animal?”
“Figuratively? Or literally?”
“Rhetorically,” he says. “If you hadn’t drawn that human card.”
I think about this for a while. “Is this a trick question? Like, if I say killer whale you’re going to tell me that means I’m a ruthless, cold-blooded, bottom-feeder fish?”
“They’re mammals,” Campbell says. “And no. It’s just a simple, making-polite-conversation inquiry.”
I turn my head. “What would you be?”
“I asked you first.”
Well, a bird is out of the question; I’m too scared of heights. I don’t think I have the right attitude to be a cat. And I am too much of a loner to function in a pack, like a wolf or a dog. I think of saying something like tarsier just to show off, but then he’ll ask what the hell that is and I can’t remember if it is a rodent or a lizard. “A goose,” I decide.
Campbell bursts out laughing. “As in Mother? Or Silly?”
It is because they mate for life, but I would rather fall overboard than tell him this. “What about you?”
But he doesn’t answer me directly. “When I asked Anna the same question, she told me she’d be a phoenix.”
The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my mind. “They don’t really exist.”
Campbell strokes the dog’s head. “She said that depends on whether or not there’s someone who can see them.” Then he looks up at me. “How do you see her, Julia?”
The wine I have been drinking suddenly tastes bitter. Was all this—the charm, the picnic, the sunset sail—engineered to tip my hand in his favor at tomorrow’s trial? Whatever I recommend as guardian ad litem will weigh heavily in Judge DeSalvo’s decision, and Campbell knows it.
Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.
“I’m not going to tell you what my decision is,” I say stiffly. “You can wait to hear it when you call me as a witness.” I grab for the anchor and try to reel it in. “I’d like to go back now, please.”
Campbell yanks the line out of my hand. “You already told me that you don’t think it’s in Anna’s best interests to be a kidney donor for her sister.”
“I also told you she’s incapable of making that decision by herself.”
“Her father moved her out of the house. He can be her moral compass.”
“And how long is that going to last? What about the next time?” I am furious at myself for falling for this. For agreeing to go out to dinner, for letting myself believe that Campbell might want to be with me, rather than use me. Everything—from his compliments on my looks to the wine sitting on the deck between us—has been coldly calculated to help him win his case.
“Sara Fitzgerald offered us a deal,” Campbell says. “She said if Anna donates the kidney, she will never ask her to do anything for her sister again. Anna turned it down.”
“You know, I could have the judge throw you in jail for this. It’s completely unethical to try to seduce me into changing my mind.”
“Seduce you? All I did was lay the cards on the table for you. I made your job easier.”
“Oh, right. Forgive me,” I say sarcastically. “This isn’t about you. This isn’t about me writing my report with a definite slant toward your client’s petition. If you were an animal, Campbell, you know what you’d be? A toad. No, actually, you’d be a parasite on the belly of a toad. Something that takes what it needs without giving a single thing back.”
A vein throbs blue in his temple. “Are you finished?”
“Actually, I’m not. Is anything that comes out of your mouth ever honest?”
“I did not lie to you.”
“No? What’s the dog for, Campbell?”
“Jesus Christ, will you shut up already?” Campbell says, and he pulls me into his arms and kisses me.
His mouth moves like a silent story; he tastes like salt and wine. There is no moment of relearning, of adjusting the patterns of the past fifteen years; our bodies remember where to go. He licks my name along the course of my throat. He presses himself so close to me that any hurt left on the surface between us spreads thin, becomes a binding instead of a boundary.
When we break away to breathe again, Campbell stares at me. “I’m still right,” I whisper.
It is the most natural thing in the world when Campbell pulls my old sweatshirt up over my head, works at the clasp of my bra. When he kneels before me with his head over my heart, when I feel the water rocking the hull of the boat, I think that maybe this is the place for us. Maybe there are entire worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide.
MONDAY
How great a matter a little fire kindleth!
—THE NEW TESTAMENT, James 3:5
CAMPBELL
WE SLEEP IN THE TINY CABIN, moored to its slip. Tight quarters, but that hardly seems to matter: all night long, she fits herself around me. She snores, just a little. Her front tooth is crooked. Her eyelashes are as long as the nail of my thumb.
These are the minutiae that prove, more than anything else, the difference between us now that fifteen years have passed. When you’re seventeen, you don’t think about whose apartment you want to sleep in. When you’re seventeen, you don’t even see the pearl-pink of her bra, the lace that arrows between her legs. When you’re seventeen it’s all about the now, not the after.
What I had loved about Julia—there, I’ve said it now—was that she didn’t need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilted army-surplus jacket and combat boots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit.
No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.
After Julia, there weren’t all that many women. None whose names I took the time to remember, anyway. It was far too complicated to maintain the façade; instead, I chose the coward’s rocky route of one-night stands. Out of necessity—medical and emotional—I have gotten rather skilled at being an escape artist.
But there are a half-dozen times this past night when I had the opportunity to leave. While Julia was sleeping, I even considered how to do it: a note pinned to the pillow, a message scrawled on the deck with her cherry lipstick. And yet the urge to do this was nowhere near as strong as the need to wait just one more minute, one more hour.
From the spot where he’s curled up on the galley table tight as a cinnamon bun, Judge raises his head. He whines a little, and I completely understand. Detangling myself from Julia’s rich forest of hair, I slip out of the bed. She inches into the warm spot I’ve left behind.
I swear, it makes me hard again.
But instead of doing what comes naturally—that is, calling in sick with some latent strain of smallpox and making the clerk of the court reschedule the hearing so that I can spend the day getting laid—I pull on my pants and go above-deck. I want to make sure I’m at the courthouse before Anna, and need to shower and change. I leave Julia the keys to my car—it’s a short walk to my place. It’s only when Judge and I are on our way home that I realize unlike every other bloodshot morning that I have left a woman, I haven’t fashioned some charming symbol of my exit for Julia, something to lessen the blow of abandonment upon waking.
I wonder if this was an oversight. Or if I h
ave been waiting all this time for her to come back, so that I can grow up.
• • •
When Judge and I arrive at the Garrahy building for the hearing, we have to fight our way through the reporters who have lined up for the Main Event. They thrust microphones in my face, and inadvertently step on Judge’s paws. Anna will take one look at walking this gauntlet, and bolt.
Inside the front door, I flag down Vern. “Get us some security out here, will you?” I tell him. “They’re going to eat the witnesses alive.”
Then I see Sara Fitzgerald, already waiting. She is wearing a suit that most likely hasn’t seen the outside of the plastic dry cleaner’s bag for a decade, and her hair is pulled back severely into a barrette. She doesn’t carry a briefcase, but a knapsack instead. “Good morning,” I say evenly.
The door blows open and Brian enters, looking from Sara to me. “Where’s Anna?”
Sara takes a step forward. “Didn’t she come here with you?”
“She was already gone when I got back from a call at five A.M. She left a note and said she’d meet me here.” He glances at the door, at the jackals on the other side. “I bet she took off.”
Again, there is the sound of a seal being breached, and then Julia surfs into the courthouse on a crest of shouts and questions. She smooths back her hair, gets her bearings, then looks at me and loses them again.
“I’ll find her,” I say.
Sara bristles. “No, I will.”
Julia looks at each of us. “Find who?”
“Anna is temporarily absent,” I explain.
“Absent?” Julia says. “As in disappeared?”
“Not at all.” This isn’t a lie, either. For Anna to have disappeared, she would have had to appear in the first place.
I realize that I even know where I am headed—at the same moment that Sara understands it, too. In that moment she lets me take the lead. Julia grabs my arm as I am walking toward the door. She shoves my car keys into my hand. “Now you do understand why this isn’t going to work?”
I turn to her. “Julia, listen. I want to talk about what’s going on between us, too. But this isn’t the right time.”
“I was talking about Anna. Campbell, she’s waffling. She couldn’t even show up for her own court date. What does that say to you?”
“That everyone gets scared,” I answer finally, fair warning for all of us.
• • •
The shades to the hospital room are drawn, but that doesn’t keep me from seeing the angel pallor of Kate Fitzgerald’s face, the web of blue veins mapping out the last-chance path of medication running under her skin. Curled up on the foot of the bed is Anna.
At my command, Judge waits by the door. I crouch down. “Anna, it’s time to go.”
When the door to the hospital room opens, I’m expecting either Sara Fitzgerald or a doctor with a crash cart. Instead, to my shock, Jesse stands on the threshold. “Hey,” he says, as if we are old friends.
How did you get here? I almost ask, but realize I don’t want to hear the answer. “We’re on our way to the courthouse. Need a lift?” I ask dryly.
“No thanks. I thought since everyone was going to be there, I’d stay here.” His eyes do not waver from Kate. “She looks like shit.”
“What do you expect,” Anna answers, awake now. “She’s dying.”
Again, I find myself staring at my client. I should know better than most that motivations are never what they seem to be, but I still cannot figure her out. “We need to go.”
In the car, Anna rides shotgun while Judge takes a seat in the back. She starts telling me about some crazy precedent she found on the internet, where a guy in Montana in 1876 was legally prohibited from using the water from a river that originated on his brother’s land, even though it meant all his crops would dry up. “What are you doing?” she asks, when I deliberately miss the turn to the courthouse.
Instead I pull over next to a park. A girl with a great ass jogs by, holding on to the leash of one of those froufrou dogs that looks more like a cat. “We’re gonna be late,” Anna says after a moment.
“We already are. Look, Anna. What’s going on here?”
She gives me one of those patented teenage looks, as if to say that there’s no way she and I descended from the same evolutionary chain. “We’re going to court.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I want to know why we’re going to court.”
“Well, Campbell, I guess you cut the first day of law school, but that’s pretty much what happens when someone files a lawsuit.”
I level my gaze on her, refusing to be bested. “Anna, why are we going to court?”
She doesn’t blink. “Why do you have a service dog?”
I rap my fingers on the steering wheel and look out over the park. A mother pushes a stroller now, across the same spot where the jogger was, oblivious to the kid who’s trying his best to crawl out. A titter of birds explodes from a tree. “I don’t talk about this with anyone,” I say.
“I’m not just anyone.”
I take a deep breath. “A long time ago I got sick and wound up with an ear infection. But for whatever reason, the medicine didn’t work and I got nerve damage. I’m totally deaf in my left ear. Which isn’t such a big deal, in the long run, but there are certain lifestyle issues I couldn’t handle. Like hearing a car approach, you know, but not being able to tell what direction it’s coming from. Or having someone behind me at the grocery store who wants to pass by me in the aisle, but I don’t hear her ask. I got trained with Judge so that in those circumstances, he could be my ears.” I hesitate. “I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. Hence, the big secret.”
Anna stares at me carefully. “I came to your office because just for once, I wanted it to be about me instead of Kate.”
But this selfish confession saws out of her sideways; it just doesn’t fit. This lawsuit has never been about Anna wanting her sister to die, but simply that she wants a chance to live. “You’re lying.”
Anna crosses her arms. “Well, you lied first. You hear perfectly fine.”
“And you’re a brat.” I start to laugh. “You remind me of me.”
“Is that supposed to be a good thing?” Anna says, but she’s smiling.
The park is starting to get more crowded. An entire school group walks the path, toddlers tethered together like sled-dog huskies, pulling two teachers in their wake. Someone zooms past on a racing bike, wearing the colors of the U.S. Postal Service. “C’mon. I’ll treat you to breakfast.”
“But we’re late.”
I shrug. “Who’s counting?”
• • •
Judge DeSalvo is not a happy man; Anna’s little field trip this morning has cost us an hour and a half. He glares at me when Judge and I hurry into his chambers for the pretrial conference. “Your Honor, I apologize. We had a veterinary emergency.”
I feel, rather than see, Sara’s mouth drop open. “That’s not what opposing counsel indicated,” the judge says.
I look DeSalvo right in the eye. “Well, it’s what happened. Anna was kind enough to help me by keeping the dog calm while the sliver of glass was removed from his paw.”
The judge is dubious. But there are laws against handicapped discrimination, and I’m playing them to the hilt; the last thing I want is for him to blame Anna for this delay. “Is there any way of resolving this petition without a hearing?” he asks.
“I’m afraid not.” Anna may not be willing to share her secrets, which I can only respect, but she knows that she wants to go through with this.
The judge accepts my answer. “Mrs. Fitzgerald, I take it you’re still representing yourself?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” she says.
“All right then.” Judge DeSalvo glances at each of us. “This is family court, Counselors. In family court, and especially in hearings like these, I tend to personally relax the rules of evidence because I don’t want a contentious hearing. I’m able to filter out what is a
dmissible and what is not, and if there’s something truly objectionable, I’ll listen to the objection, but I would prefer that we get through this hearing quickly, without worrying about form.” He looks directly at me. “I want this to be as painless as possible for everyone involved.”
We move into the courtroom—one that’s smaller than the criminal courts, but intimidating all the same. I swing into the lobby to pick Anna up along the way. As we cross through the doorway, she stops dead. She glances at the vast paneled walls, the rows of chairs, the imposing bench. “Campbell,” she whispers, “I won’t have to stand up there and talk, right?”
The fact is, the judge will most likely want to hear what she has to say. Even if Julia comes out in support of her petition, even if Brian says he will help Anna, Judge DeSalvo may want her to take the stand. But telling her this right now is only going to get her all worked up—and that’s not any way to start a hearing.
I think about the conversation in the car, when Anna called me a liar. There are two reasons to not tell the truth—because lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt. It’s for both of these reasons that I give Anna this answer. “Well,” I say, “I doubt it.”
• • •
“Judge,” I begin, “I know it’s not traditional practice, but there’s something I’d like to say before we start calling witnesses.”
Judge DeSalvo sighs. “Isn’t this sort of standing on ceremony exactly what I asked you not to do?”
“Your Honor, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”
“Make it quick,” the judge says.
I stand up and approach the bench. “Your Honor, all of Anna Fitzgerald’s life she has been medically treated for her sister’s good, not her own. No one doubts Sara Fitzgerald’s love for all her children, or the decisions she’s made that have prolonged Kate’s life. But today we have to doubt the decisions she’s made for this child.”
I turn, and see Julia watching me carefully. And suddenly I remember that old ethics assignment, and know what I have to say. “You might remember the recent case of the firefighters in Worcester, Massachusetts, who were killed in a blaze started by a homeless woman. She knew the fire had started and she left the building, but she never called 911 because she thought she might get into trouble. Six men died that night, and yet the State couldn’t hold this woman responsible, because in America—even if the consequences are tragic—you are not responsible for someone else’s safety. You aren’t obligated to help anyone in distress. Not if you’re the one who started the fire, not if you’re a passerby to a car wreck, not if you’re a perfectly matched donor.”
