by Jodi Picoult
Charlotte
Suffice 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 T-shirts 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.
• • •
The next morning I spent five hours on the phone with the insurance company. Ambulance trips were not covered by our policy; however, the hospital in Florida would not discharge anyone in a spica cast unless he or she was traveling by ambulance. It was a catch-22, but I was the only one who could see it, and it led to a conversation that felt like theater of the absurd. “Let me get this straight,” I said to the fourth supervisor I’d spoken with that day. “You’re telling me I didn’t have to take the ambulance; therefore you won’t cover the cost.”
“That’s correct, ma’am.”
On the couch, you were propped up on pillows, drawing stripes on your cast with markers. “Can you tell me what the alternative was?” I asked.
“Apparently you could have kept the patient in the hospital.”
“You do understand this cast is going to stay on for months. Are you suggesting I keep my daughter hospitalized for that long?”
“No, ma’am. Just until transportation could be arranged.”
“But the only transportation the hospital would allow us to leave in was an ambulance!” I said. By now your leg looked like a candy cane. “Would your policy have covered the additional stay?”
“No, ma’am. The maximum number of nights allowed for injuries like these is—”
“Yeah, we’ve been through that.” I sighed.
“It seems to me,” the supervisor said tartly, “that given the option of paying for additional nights in the hospital or an unauthorized ambulance trip, you don’t have much to complain about.”
I felt my cheeks flame. “Well, it seems to me that you are an enormous ass!” I yelled, and I slammed down the phone. I turned around and saw you, marker trailing out of your hand, precariously close to the fabric of the couch cushions. You were twisted like a pretzel, your lower half in the cast still facing forward, your head leaning back over your shoulder so that you could see out the window.
“Swear jar,” you murmured. You had a canning jar that you’d covered with iridescent gift wrap, and every time Sean swore in front of you, you netted a quarter. Just this month alone, you were up to for
ty-two dollars—you’d kept count the whole way home from Florida. I took a quarter out of my pocket and put it into the jar on the table nearby, but you weren’t looking; your attention was still focused outside, on a frozen pond at the edge of the lawn, where Amelia was skating.
Your sister had been ice skating since, well, since she was your age. She and Piper’s daughter, Emma, took lessons together twice a week, and there was nothing you wanted more than to copy your sister. Skating, however, happened to be a sport you’d never, ever be allowed to try. Once, you’d broken your arm when you were pretending to skate on one foot across the kitchen linoleum in your socks.
“Between my foul language and your dad’s, you’re going to have enough cold, hard cash to buy a plane ticket out of here pretty soon,” I joked, trying to distract you. “Where to? Vegas?”
You turned away from the window and looked at me. “That would be dumb,” you said. “I can’t play Blackjack till I’m twenty-one.”
Sean had taught you how. Also Hearts, Texas Hold ’Em, and Five-Card Stud. I’d been horrified, until I realized that playing Go Fish for hours at a time might officially qualify as torture. “So the Caribbean, then?”
As if you would ever travel unimpeded, as if you would ever take a vacation without thinking about this last one. “I was thinking of buying some books. Like Dr. Seuss stuff.”
You read at a sixth-grade level, even though your peers were still sounding out the alphabet. It was one of the few perks of OI: when you had to be immobile, you’d pore over books, or get on the Internet. In fact, when Amelia wanted to rile you, she called you Wikipedia. “Dr. Seuss?” I said. “Really?”
“They’re not for me. I thought we could ship them to that hospital in Florida. The only thing they had to read was Where’s Spot? and that gets really old after the fifth or sixth time.”
That left me speechless. All I wanted to do was forget about that stupid hospital, to curse the insurance nightmare it had led to and the fact that you would be stuck in the four-month hell of a spica cast—and there you were, already past the pity party. Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn’t mean you ever took the opportunity to do so. In fact, sometimes I was sure that the reason people stared at you with your crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with your disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that you had abilities they only dreamed of.
The phone rang again—for the briefest of seconds I fantasized that it was the CEO of the health insurance company, calling to personally apologize. But it was Piper, checking in. “Is this a good time?”
“Not really,” I said. “Why don’t you call back in a few months?”
“Is she in a lot of pain? Did you call Rosenblad?” Piper asked. “Where’s Sean?”
“Yes, no, and I hope earning enough to cover the credit card bills for the vacation we didn’t get to have.”
“Well, listen, I’ll pick up Amelia for skating tomorrow, when I take Emma. One less thing for you to worry about.”
Worry about it? I hadn’t even known Amelia had practice. It wasn’t just on the bottom of the totem pole; it wasn’t even on the totem pole.
“What else do you need?” Piper asked. “Groceries? Gas? Johnny Depp?”
“I was going to say Xanax . . . but now I might take door number three.”
“It figures. You’re married to a guy who looks like Brad Pitt—with a better body—and you go for the long-haired artsy type.”
“Grass is always greener, I guess.” Absently I watched you reach for the old laptop computer beside you and try to balance it on your lap. It kept toppling over, because of the angle of your cast, so I grabbed a throw pillow and set it on your lap as a table. “Unfortunately, right now, my side of the fence is looking pretty grim,” I told her.
“Oops, I’ve got to go. Apparently, my patient’s crowning.”
“If I had a dollar for every time I heard that one—”
Piper laughed. “Charlotte,” she said. “Try taking down the fence.”
I hung up. You were typing feverishly with two fingers. “What are you doing?”
“Setting up a Gmail account for Amelia’s goldfish,” you said.
“I highly doubt he needs one . . .”
“That’s why he asked me to do this, instead of you . . .”
Take down the fence. “Willow,” I announced, “shut down the laptop. You and I are going skating.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“But you said—”
“Willow, do you want to argue, or do you want to skate?” You beamed, a smile the likes of which I had not seen on you since before we left for Florida. I pulled on a sweater and my boots, then brought my winter coat in from the mudroom to cover your upper half. I wound blankets around your legs and hoisted you onto my hip. Without the cast, you were elfin, slight. With it, you weighed fifty-three pounds.
The one thing a spica cast was good for—practically made for—was balancing you on my hip. You leaned away from me a little bit, but I could still wrap one arm around you and maneuver us through the foyer and down the front steps.
When Amelia saw us coming, tortoise-slow, navigating hummocks of snow and patches of black ice, she stopped spinning. “I’m going skating,” you sang, and Amelia’s eyes flew to mine.
“You heard her.”
“You’re taking her skating. Aren’t you the one who wanted Dad to fill in the skating pond? You called it cruel and unusual punishment for Willow.”
“I’m taking down the fence,” I said.
“What fence?”
I wrapped the blankets underneath your bottom and gently set you down on the ice. “Amelia,” I said, “this is the part where I need your help. I want you to watch her—don’t take your eyes off her—while I go grab my skates.”
I sprinted back to the house, stopping only at the threshold to make sure that Amelia was still staring at you, just like I’d left her. My skates were buried in a boot bin in the mudroom—I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d used them. The laces knotted them together like lovers; I slung them over my shoulder and then hoisted the computer desk chair with its rolling casters into my arms. Outside, I tipped it over, so that the seat was balanced on my head. I thought of African women in their bright skirts, with baskets of fruit and bags of rice set squarely on their heads as they walked home to feed their families.
When I got to the little pond, I set the chair on the ice. I adjusted the back and the arms so that they sloped and flared to accommodate your cast. Then I lifted you up and set you into the snug mesh seat.
I sat down to lace up my skates. “Hold on, Wiki,” Amelia said, and you grabbed the arms of the chair. She stood behind you and started to move across the ice. The blankets around your legs ballooned, and I called out to your sister to be careful. But Amelia already was. She was leaning over the back of the chair so that one arm held you close in the seat while she skated faster and faster. Then she quickly reversed direction, so that she was facing you, pulling the arms of the chair as she skated backward.
You tilted your head back and closed your eyes as Amelia spun you in a circle. Amelia’s dark curls streamed out from beneath her striped wool cap; your laugh fluted across the ice like a bright banner. “Mom,” you called out. “Look at us!”
I stood up, my ankles wobbling. “Wait for me,” I said, growing steadier with every step.
Sean
On my first day back at work, I came into the locker room to find a Wanted poster hanging near my dry-cleaned uniform. Written across the photo of my face, in bright red marker, was the word APPREHENDED. “Very funny,” I muttered, and I ripped down the flyer.
“Sean O’Keefe!” said one of the guys, pretending to hold a microphone in his hand as he held it up to another cop. “You’ve just won the Super Bowl. What are you going to do next?”
Two fists, pumped in the air. “I’m going to Disney World!”
The rest of the guys cracked up. “
Hey, your travel agent called,” one said. “She’s booked your tickets to Gitmo for your next vacation.”
My captain hushed them all up and came to stand in front of me. “Seriously, Sean, you know we’re just pulling your chain. How’s Willow?”
“She’s okay.”
“Well, if there’s anything we can do . . . ,” the captain said, and he let the rest of his sentence fade like smoke.
I scowled, pretending that this didn’t bother me, that I was in on the joke instead of being the laughingstock. “Don’t you guys have something constructive to do? What do you think this is, the Lake Buena Vista PD?”
At that, everyone howled with laughter and dribbled out of the locker room, leaving me alone to dress. I smacked my fist into the metal frame of my locker, and it jumped open. A piece of paper fluttered out—my face again, with Mickey Mouse ears superimposed on my head. And on the bottom: “It’s a Small World After All.”
Instead of getting dressed, I navigated the hallways of the department to the dispatch office and yanked a telephone book from a stack kept on a shelf. I looked for the ad until I found the name I was looking for, the one I’d seen on countless late-night television commercials: “Robert Ramirez, Plaintiff’s Attorney: Because you deserve the best.”
I do, I thought. And so does my family.
So I dialed the number. “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to make an appointment.”
• • •
I was the designated night watchman. After you girls were fast asleep and Charlotte was showered and climbing into bed, it was my job to turn off the lights, lock the doors, do one last pass through the house. With you in your cast, your makeshift bed was the living room couch. I almost turned off the kitchen night-light before I remembered, and then I came closer and pulled the blanket up to your chin and kissed your forehead.
Upstairs, I checked on Amelia and then went into our room. Charlotte was standing in the bathroom with a towel wrapped around herself, brushing her teeth. Her hair was still wet. I stepped up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, twirled a curl around one of my fingers. “I love the way your hair does that,” I said, watching it spring back into the same spiral it had been a minute before. “It’s got a memory of its own.”
