"Kate," I say, "I'm so sorry."
Kate's face crumples. "But I loved him," she replies, as if this should be enough.
"I know."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I couldn't. Not when I thought it might make you stop fighting back, yourself."
She closes her eyes and turns onto her side on the pillow, crying so hard that the monitors she's still hooked to begin to beep and bring in the nursing staff.
I reach for her. "Kate, honey, I did what was best for you."
She refuses to look in my direction. "Don't talk to me," she murmurs. "You're good at that."
Kate stops speaking to me for seven days and eleven hours. We come home from the hospital; we go about our business of reverse isolation; we pick through the motions because we have done it before. At night I lie in bed next to Brian and wonder why he can sleep. I stare at the ceiling and think that I have lost my daughter before she's even gone.
Then one day I walk by her bedroom and find her sitting on the floor with photographs all around. There are, as I expect, the ones of her and Taylor that we took before the prom—Kate dressed to the nines with that telltale surgical mask covering her mouth. Taylor has drawn a lipstick smile on it, for the sake of the photos, or so he said.
It had made Kate laugh. It seems impossible that this boy, who was so solid a presence when the flash went off mere weeks ago, simply is not here anymore; a pang goes through me, and immediately on its heels a single word: practice.
But there are other photos, too, from when Kate was younger. One of Kate and Anna on the beach, crouched over a hermit crab. One of Kate dressed up like Mr. Peanut for Halloween. One of Kate with cream cheese all over her face, holding up two halves of a bagel like eyeglasses.
In another pile are her baby pictures—all taken when she was three, or younger. Gap-toothed and grinning, backlit by a sloe-eyed sun, unaware of what was to come. "I don't remember being her," Kate says quietly, and these first words make a bridge of glass, one that shifts beneath my feet as I step into the room.
I put my hand beside hers, at the edge of one photo. Bent at a corner, it shows Kate as a toddler being tossed into the air by Brian, her hair flying behind her, her arms and legs starfish-splayed, certain beyond a doubt that when she fell to earth again, there would be a safe landing, sure that she deserved nothing less.
"She was beautiful," Kate adds, and with her pinky she strokes the glossy vivid cheek of the girl none of us ever got to know.
JESSE
THE SUMMER I WAS FOURTEEN my parents sent me to boot camp on a farm. It was one of those action-adventures for troubled kids, you know, get up at four A.M. to do the milking and how much trouble can you really get into? (The answer, if you're interested: score pot off the ranch hands. Get stoned. Tip cows.) Anyway, one day I was assigned to Moses Patrol, or that's what we called the poor son of a bitch who pulled herding duty with the lambs. I had to follow about a hundred sheep around a pasture that didn't have one goddamned tree to provide even a sliver of shade.
To say a sheep is the dumbest fucking animal on earth is probably an understatement. They get caught in fences. They get lost in four-foot-square pens. They forget where to find their food, although it's been in the same place for a thousand days straight. And they're not the little puffy darlings you picture when you go to sleep, either. They stink. They bleat. They're annoying as hell.
Anyway, the day I was stuck with the sheep, I had filched a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I was folding down the pages that came closest to good porn, when I heard someone scream. I was perfectly sure, mind you, that it wasn't an animal, because I'd never heard anything like this in my life. I ran toward the sound, sure I was going to find someone thrown from a horse with their leg twisted like a pretzel or some yoho who'd emptied his revolver by accident into his own guts. But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of ewes in attendance, was a sheep giving birth.
I wasn't a vet or anything, but I knew enough to realize that when any living creature makes a racket like that, things aren't going according to plan. Sure enough, this poor sheep had two little hooves dangling out of her privates. She lay on her side, panting. She rolled one flat black eye toward me, then just gave up.
Well, nothing was dying on my patrol, if only because I knew that the Nazis who ran the camp would make me bury the damn animal. So I shoved the other sheep out of the way. I got down on my knees and grabbed the knotty slick hooves and yanked while the ewe screamed like any mother whose child is ripped away from her.
The lamb came out, its limbs folded like the parts of a Swiss Army knife. Over its head was a silver sac that felt like the inside of your cheek when you run your tongue around it. It wasn't breathing.
I sure as shit wasn't going to put my mouth over a sheep and do artificial respiration, but I used my fingernails to rip apart the skin sac, to yank it down from the neck of the lamb. And it turned out, that was all it needed. A minute later it unbent its clothespin legs and started whickering for its mother.
There were, I think, twenty lambs born during that summer session. Every time I passed the pen I could pick mine out from a crowd. He looked like all the others, except that he moved with a little more spring; he always seemed to have the sun shining off the oil in its wool. And if you happened to get him calm enough to look you in the eye, the pupils had gone milky white, a sure sign that he'd walked on the other side long enough to remember what he was missing.
I tell you this now because when Kate finally stirs in that hospital bed, and opens her eyes, I know she's got one foot on the other side already, too.
"Oh my God," Kate says weakly, when she sees me. "I wound up in Hell after all."
I lean forward in my chair and cross my arms. "Now, sis, you know I'm not that easy to kill." Getting up, I kiss her on the forehead, letting my lips stay an extra second. How is it that mothers can read fever that way? I can only read imminent loss. "How you doing?"
She smiles at me, but it's like a cartoon drawing when I've seen the real thing hanging in the Louvre. "Peachy," she says. "To what do I owe the honor of your presence?"
Because you won't be here much longer, I think, but I do not tell her this. "I was in the neighborhood. Plus there's a really hot nurse who works this shift."
This makes Kate laugh out loud. "God, Jess. I'm gonna miss you."
She says it so easily that I think it surprises both of us. I sit down on the edge of the bed and trace the little puckers in the thermal blanket. "You know—" I begin a pep talk, but she puts her hand on my arm.
"Don't." Then her eyes come alive, for just a moment. "Maybe I'll get reincarnated."
"Like as Marie Antoinette?"
"No, it's got to be something in the future. You think that's crazy?"
"No," I admit. "I think we probably all just keep running in circles."
"So what will you come back as, then?"
"Carrion." She winces, and something beeps, and I panic. "You want me to get someone?"
"No, you're fine," Kate answers, and I'm sure she doesn't mean it this way, but it pretty much makes me feel like I've swallowed lightning.
I suddenly remember an old game I used to play when I was nine or ten, and was allowed to ride my bike until it got dark. I used to make little bets with myself as I watched the sun getting lower and lower on the horizon: if I hold my breath to twenty seconds, the night won't come. If I don't blink. If I stand so still a fly lands on my cheek. Now, I find myself doing the same thing, bargaining to keep Kate, even though that isn't the way it works.
"Are you afraid?" I blurt out. "Of dying?"
Kate turns to me, a smile sliding over her mouth. "I'll let you know." Then she closes her eyes. "I'm just gonna rest a second," she manages, and she is asleep again.
It's not fair, but Kate knows that. It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get. I stand up, with that lightning bolt branding the lining of my throat, which makes it impossible to
swallow, so everything gets backed up like a dammed river. I hurry out of Kate's room and far enough down the hall where I won't disturb her, and then I lift my fist and punch a hole in the thick white wall and still this isn't enough.
BRIAN
HERE IS THE RECIPE TO BLOW SOMETHING UP: a Pyrex bowl; potassium chloride—found at health food stores, as a salt substitute. A hydrometer. Bleach. Take the bleach and pour it into the Pyrex, put it onto a stove burner. Meanwhile, weigh out your potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check it with the hydrometer and boil until you get a reading of 1.3. Cool to room temperature, and filter out the crystals that form. This is what you will save.
It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.
I'm in what has to be the ugliest courtroom on the East Coast, sitting in chairs until it's my turn, when suddenly my beeper goes off. I look at the number, groan, and try to figure out what to do. I'm a witness later, but the department needs me right now.
It takes a few talking heads but I get permission from the judge to remove myself from the premises. I leave through the front door, and immediately I'm assailed with questions and cameras and lights. It is everything I can do not to punch these vultures, who want to rip apart the bleached bones of my family.
When I couldn't find Anna the morning of the hearing, I headed home. I looked in all her usual haunts-the kitchen, the bedroom, the hammock out back-but she wasn't there. As a last resort I climbed the garage stairs to the apartment Jesse uses.
He wasn't home either, although by now this is hardly a surprise. There was a time when Jesse disappointed me regularly; eventually, I told myself not to expect anything from him, and as a result, it has gotten easier for me to take what comes. I knocked on the door and yelled for Anna, for Jesse, but no one answered. Although there was a key to this apartment on my own set, I stopped short of letting myself inside. Turning on the stairs, I knocked over the red recycling bin I personally empty every Tuesday, since God forbid Jesse can remember to drag it out to the curb himself. A tenpin of beer bottles, lucent green, tumbled out. An empty jug of laundry detergent, an olive jar, a gallon container from orange juice.
I put everything back in, except for the orange juice container, which I've told Jesse isn't recyclable and which he puts in the bin nonetheless every damn week.
The difference between these fires and the other ones was that now the stakes have been ratcheted up a notch. Instead of an abandoned warehouse or a shack at the side of the water, it is an elementary school. This being summer, no one was on the premises when the fire was started. But there's no question in my mind it was due to unnatural causes.
When I get there, the engines are just loading up after salvage and overhaul. Paulie comes over to me right away. "How's Kate?"
"She's okay," I tell him, and I nod toward the mess. "What'd you find?"
"He pretty much managed to gut the whole north side of the facility," Paulie says. "You doing a walk through?"
'Yeah."
The fire began in the teacher's lounge; the char patterns point like an arrow to the origin. A collection of synthetic stuffing that hasn't burned clean through is still visible; whoever set this was smart enough to light his fire in the middle of a pile of couch cushions and stacks of paper. I can still smell the accelerant; this time it was as simple as gasoline. Bits of glass from the exploded Molotov cocktail litter the ashes.
I wander to the far side of the building, peer through a broken window. The guys must have vented the fire here. "You think we'll catch this little fuck, Cap?" asks Caesar, coming into the room. Still in his turnout gear, with a smudge across his left cheek, he looks down at the debris in the fire line. Then he bends down, and with his heavy glove, picks up a cigarette butt. "Unbelievable. The secretary's desk melted down to a puddle, but a goddamn tobacco stick survives."
I take it out of his hands and turn it over in my palm. "That's because it wasn't here when the fire started. Someone had a nice smoke while he watched this, and then he walked away." I tip it onto the side, to where the yellow meets the filter, and read the brand.
Paulie sticks his head in the shattered window, looking for Caesar. "We're heading back. Get on the truck." Then he turns to me. "Hey, just so you know, we didn't break this one."
"I wasn't gonna make you pay for it, Paulie."
"No, I mean, we vented the roof. This was already broken when we got here." He and Caesar leave, and a few moments later I hear the heavy drag of the engine pulling away.
It could have been a stray baseball, or a Frisbee. But even in the summertime, janitors monitor public property. A broken window is too much of a hazard to be left alone; it would have been taped up or boarded.
Unless the same guy who started the fire knew where to bring in oxygen, so that the flames would race through the wind tunnel created by that vacuum.
I look down at the cigarette in my hand, and crush it.
You need 56 grams of these reserved crystals. Mix with distilled water. Heat to a boil and cool again, saving the crystals, pure potassium chlorate. Grind these to the consistency of face powder, and heat gently to dry. Melt five parts Vaseline with five parts wax. Dissolve in gasoline and pour this liquid onto 90 parts potassium chlorate crystals in a plastic bowl. Knead. Allow the gasoline to evaporate.
Mold into a cube and dip in wax to make it waterproof. This explosive requires a blasting cap of at least a grade A3.
When Jesse opens the door to his apartment, I am waiting on the couch. "What are you doing here?" he asks.
"What are you doing here?"
"I live here," Jesse says. "Remember?"
"Do you? Or are you using this as a place to hide?"
He takes out a cigarette from a pack in his front pocket and lights up. Merits. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Why aren't you in court?"
"How come there's muriatic acid under your sink?" I ask. "Considering that we don't have a pool?"
"Hello? Is this, like, the Inquisition?" He scowls. "I used it when I was working with those tile layers last summer; you can clean up grout with it. To tell you the truth I didn't even know I still had it."
"Then you probably wouldn't know, Jess, that when you put it into a bottle with a piece of aluminum foil with a rag stuffed into the top, it blows up pretty damn well."
He goes very still. "Are you accusing me of something? Because if you are, just say it, you bastard."
I get up from the couch. "Okay. I want to know if you scored the bottles before you made the cocktails, so that they'd break easier. I want to know if you realized how close that homeless guy was to dying when you set the warehouse on fire for kicks." Reaching behind me, I lift the empty Clorox container from his recycle bin. "I want to know why the hell this is in your trash, when you don't do your own laundry and God knows you don't clean, yet there's an elementary school six miles from here that's been gutted with an explosive made of bleach and brake fluid?" I have him by the shoulders now, and although Jesse could break away if he really tried, he lets me shake him until his head snaps back. "Jesus Christ, Jesse!"
He stares at me, his face blank. "Are you about done?"
I let him go and he backs away, teeth bared. "Then tell me I'm wrong," I challenge.
"I'll tell you more than that," he yells. "I mean, I totally understand that you've spent your life believing that everything that's wrong in the universe all traces back to me, but news flash, Dad, this time you're totally off base."
Slowly, I take something out of my pocket and press it into Jesse's hand. The Merit cigarette butt settles in the hollow of his palm. 'Then you shouldn't have left your calling card."
There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.
He is asking, I realize, whether the police will be coming after him. Whether I have spoken to Sara about this.
He is asking to be punished.
So I do what I know will destroy him: I pull Jesse into my arms as he sobs. His back is broader than mine. He stands a half-head taller than me. I don't remember seeing him go from that five-year-old, who wasn't a genetic match, to the man he is now, and I guess this is the problem. How does someone go from thinking that if he cannot rescue, he must destroy? And do you blame him, or do you blame the folks who should have told him otherwise?
I will make sure that my son's pyromania ends here and now, but I won't tell the cops or the fire chief about this. Maybe that's nepotism, maybe it's stupidity. Maybe it's because Jesse isn't all that different from me, choosing fire as his medium, needing to know that he could command at least one uncontrollable thing.
Jesse's breathing evens against me, like it used to when he was so small, when I used to carry him upstairs after he'd fallen asleep in my lap. He used to hit me over and over with questions: What's a two-inch hose for, a one-inch? How come you wash the engines? Does the can man ever get to drive? I realize that I cannot remember exactly when he stopped asking. But I do remember feeling as if something had gone missing, as if the loss of a kid's hero worship can ache like a phantom limb.
CAMPBELL
DOCTORS HAVE THIS THING about being subpoenaed: they let you know, with every syllable of every word, that no moment of this testimony will make up for the fact that while they were sitting on the witness stand under duress, patients were waiting, people were dying. Frankly, it pisses me off. And before I know it, I can't help myself, I am asking for a bathroom break, leaning down to retie my shoe, gathering my thoughts and stuffing sentences with pregnant pauses—whatever it takes to keep them cooling their heels just a few seconds more.
My Sister's Keeper Page 29
