by Jodi Picoult
I knew if I wanted rugrats, I’d be able to have them one day. If you wanted kids, though, it wouldn’t be easy, even if it was possible. It wasn’t fair, but then again, what was when it came to you?
You couldn’t skate. You couldn’t bike. You couldn’t ski. And even when you did play a game that was physical—like hide-and-seek—Mom used to insist that you get an extra count of twenty. I pretended to be bent out of shape by this so you wouldn’t feel like you were getting special treatment, but deep down I knew it was the right thing to do—you couldn’t get around as fast as I could, with your braces or crutches or wheelchair, and it took you longer to wiggle into a hiding spot. Amelia, wait up! you always said when we were walking somewhere, and I would, because I knew there were a million other ways I would leave you behind.
I would grow up, while you’d stay the size of a toddler.
I would go to college, move away from home, and not have to worry about things like whether I could reach the gas pump or the buttons on the ATM.
I’d maybe find a guy who didn’t think I was a total loser and get married and have kids and be able to carry them around without worrying that I’d get microfractures in my spine.
I read the finer print of the magazine article.
Alma Dukins, 34, gave birth on March 5, 2008, to a healthy baby girl. Dukins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta Type III, is 3'2'' tall and weighed 39 pounds before her pregnancy. She gained 19 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter, Lulu, was delivered by C-section at 32 weeks, when Alma’s small body could not accommodate the enlarging uterus. She weighed four pounds, six ounces, and was 161/2 inches long at birth.
You were at the stage when you played with dolls. Mom said I used to do that, too, although I only remember dismembering mine and cutting off all their hair. Sometimes I would catch Mom watching you wrap your fake baby’s arm in a cast, and it was like a storm cloud passed over her face—she was probably thinking that chances were you’d never have a real baby, mixed with feeling relief that you wouldn’t have to know what it was like to watch your own kid break a million bones, like she did.
But in spite of what my mother thought, here was proof that someone with OI could have a family. This Alma woman was Type III, like you. She didn’t walk like you could—she was wheelchair-bound. And yet she’d managed to find a husband, goofy smile and all, and have a baby of her own.
“You ought to show Willow,” Emma said. “Just take it. Who’s going to know?”
So I checked to see if the librarian was still on her computer, ordering clothes from Gap.com (we’d done our share of spying on her), and then I faked a coughing fit. I doubled over and tucked the magazine inside my jacket. I smiled weakly as the librarian glanced at me to make sure I wasn’t hacking out a lung on the floor or anything.
Emma expected me to keep the magazine for you, to show you or even Mom that one day you could grow up and get married and have a kid. But I had stolen it for a completely different reason. See, this year, you were starting kindergarten. And one day you’d be a seventh grader, like me. And you might be sitting in this library and come across this stupid magazine and see what I had seen when I looked at it: the space between Alma and her husband, that baby, too huge in her arms.
To me, this didn’t look like a happy family. It was a circus freak show, minus the big top. Why else would it be in a magazine? Normal families didn’t make the news.
In English class I asked to go to the bathroom. There, I tore the page out of the magazine and ripped the picture into the tiniest pieces I could. I flushed them down the toilet, the best I could do to protect you.
Marin
People think of the law as a virtual hallowed hall of justice, but the truth is that my job more closely resembles a bad sitcom. I once represented a woman who was carrying a frozen turkey out of her local Stop-n-Save grocery store the day before Thanksgiving, when the turkey slipped through the plastic bag and fractured her foot. She sued the Stop-n-Save, but we also included the company that made the plastic bags, and she walked away—without crutches, mind you—several hundred thousand dollars richer.
Then there was the case that involved a woman driving home at two a.m. on a back road at eighty miles per hour, who collided with a lost tractor trailer that had backed up across the road to turn around. She was killed instantly, and her husband wanted to sue the tractor-trailer company because they didn’t have lights along the side of the truck so that his wife could have seen it. We brought a wrongful death suit against the driver of the truck, citing loss of consortium—asking for millions to make up for the fact that the husband had lost his beloved wife’s company. Unfortunately, during the case, the defendant’s attorney uncovered the fact that my client’s wife had been on her way home from a rendezvous with her lover.
You win some, you lose some.
Looking at Charlotte O’Keefe, who was sitting in my office with her cell phone clutched in her hands, I was pretty sure which way this case was going to go. “Where’s Willow?” I asked.
“Physical therapy,” Charlotte said. “She’s there till eleven.”
“And the breaks? They’re healing well?”
“Fingers crossed,” Charlotte replied.
“You’re expecting a call?”
She looked down, as if she was surprised to find herself holding her phone. “Oh, no. I mean, I hope not. I just have to be available if Willow gets hurt.”
We smiled politely at each other. “Should we . . . wait a little longer for your husband?”
“Well,” she said, coloring. “He’s not going to be joining us.”
To be honest, when Charlotte had called me to set up a meeting and talk about representation, I’d been surprised. Sean O’Keefe had made his feelings pretty damn clear when he’d stormed out of Bob’s office. Her phone call indicated that he’d calmed down enough to pursue litigation, but now—looking at Charlotte—I was starting to get a sinking feeling. “But he does want to file a lawsuit, right?”
She shifted on her chair. “I don’t understand why I can’t do this on my own.”
“Besides the obvious answer—that your husband’s bound to find out sooner or later—there’s a legal reason. You and your husband are both responsible for the care and raising of Willow. Let’s say you hire a lawyer by yourself and settle with the doctor, and then you get hit by a car and die. Your husband can go back and sue the doctor on his own, because he wasn’t a party to your settlement and didn’t release the doctor from future liability. Because of this, any defendant is going to insist that any settlement that’s reached or judgment in a trial include both of the parents. Which means that, even if Sergeant O’Keefe doesn’t want to be part of this lawsuit, he’s going to be impleaded—that is, brought into the lawsuit—so that it won’t be litigated again in the future.”
Charlotte frowned. “I understand.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
“No,” she said. “No, it’s not. But . . . we don’t have money to hire a lawyer. We’re barely scraping by as it is, with everything Willow needs. That’s why . . . that’s why I’m here today to talk about the lawsuit.”
Every plaintiff mill firm—Bob Ramirez included—began a case with a cost-benefit analysis. It’s what had taken us so long to contact the O’Keefes between meetings: I would review a claim with experts, I would do due diligence to ascertain other suits like this and what the payouts had been. Once I knew that the estimated settlement would at least cover the costs of our time and the experts’ fees, I’d call the prospective clients and tell them they had a valid complaint. “You don’t have to worry about attorney’s fees,” I now said smoothly. “That would become part of the settlement. However, realistically, you do need to know that most wrongful birth suits settle out of court for less money than a jury would award, because malpractice insurance companies don’t want the press. Of the cases that do go to court, seventy-five percent find in favor of the defendant. Your particular case, which hinges on a misrea
d sonogram, might not sway the jury—sonograms don’t make the most convincing evidence at a trial. And there will be considerable public scrutiny. There always is, when someone brings a wrongful birth suit.”
She looked up at me. “You mean people will think I’m in it for the money.”
“Well,” I said simply. “Aren’t you?”
Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. “I’m in it for Willow. I’m the one who brought her into this world, so it’s up to me to make sure that she suffers as little as possible. That doesn’t make me a monster.” She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. “Or does it?”
I gritted my teeth and passed her a box of Kleenex. Well, wasn’t that the $64,000 question?
It was probable that, by the time this lawsuit got to court, you would be old enough to fully understand the ramifications of what your mother was doing—just like I had, one day, when I was told about my adoption. I knew what it was like to feel as if your own mom didn’t want you. In fact, I’d spent my whole childhood inventing excuses for her. Daydream 1: She was desperately in love with a boy who’d gotten her pregnant, and her family couldn’t bear the stain of shame, so they sent her to Switzerland and told everyone she was at boarding school when, instead, she was having me. Daydream 2: She was headed off to the Peace Corps to save the world when she found herself pregnant—and realized she had to put the needs of others above her own desire for a baby. Daydream 3: She was an actress, America’s sweetheart, who would lose her family-values midwest audience if they learned that she was a single mom. Daydream 4: She and my father were poor, struggling dairy farmers who wanted their baby to have a better life than they could offer.
I figured there was one seminal moment when a woman realized what it meant to be a mother. For my birth mom, maybe it was when she passed me to a nurse and said good-bye. For the mother who’d raised me, it was when she sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that I had been adopted. For your mother, it was making the decision to file this lawsuit in spite of the public and private backlash. Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.
“I wanted another baby so much,” Charlotte said quietly. “I wanted to experience that, with Sean. I wanted us to take her to the park and push her on the swings. I wanted to bake cookies with her and go to her school plays. I wanted to teach her how to ride a horse and water-ski. I wanted her to take care of me when I got old,” she said, looking up at me. “Not the other way around.”
I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to believe that a person who had brought a baby into this world would quit so easily when the going got tough. “I think most parents know there’s going to be some bad to go with the good,” I said evenly.
“I wasn’t naïve—I already had a daughter. I knew I’d take care of Willow when she was hurt. I knew I’d have to get up in the middle of the night when she had nightmares. But I didn’t know she was going to be hurt for weeks at a time, for years at a time. I didn’t know I’d be up with her every night. I didn’t know that she would never get better.”
I looked down, pretending to straighten some papers. What if the reason my mother had given me away was that I didn’t measure up to what she had hoped for? “What about Willow?” I said, bluntly playing devil’s advocate. “She’s a smart kid. How do you think she’ll handle her mother saying she should never have been born?”
Charlotte flinched. “She knows that’s not the truth,” she said. “I could never imagine my life without her in it.”
A red flag went up in my mind. “Stop right there. Don’t say that. You can’t even hint at it. If you file this lawsuit, Mrs. O’Keefe, you have to be able to swear—under oath—that if you’d known about your daughter’s illness earlier, if you’d been given the choice, you would have terminated the pregnancy.” I waited until her gaze met mine. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Her eyes slid away, focusing on something outside my window. “Can you miss a person you’ve never known?”
There was a knock at the door, and the receptionist popped her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, Marin,” Briony said, “but your eleven o’clock is here.”
“Eleven?” Charlotte said, jumping to her feet. “I’m late. Willow’s going to panic.” She grabbed her purse, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried out of my office.
“I’ll be in touch,” I called after her.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, when I began to think about what Charlotte O’Keefe had said to me, that I realized she’d answered my question about abortion with another question.
Sean
At ten o’clock on Saturday night, it became clear to me that I was going to hell.
Saturday nights were the ones that made you remember every sleepy picture-postcard New England town had a split personality, that the healthy, smiling guys you saw featured in Yankee magazine might pass out drunk at the local bar. On Saturday nights, lonely kids tried to hang themselves from the closet racks in their dorm rooms and high school girls got raped by college boys.
Saturday nights were also when you’d catch someone bobbing and weaving so bad in a car that it was only a matter of time before the drunk rammed into someone else. Tonight I was pulled over behind a bank parking lot when a white Camry crawled by, practically on the dotted yellow line. I flicked on my blues and followed the driver, waiting for the car to pull onto the shoulder.
I stepped out and approached the driver’s window. “Good evening,” I said, “do you know why—” But before I could finish asking the driver to tell me why he thought I’d pulled him over, the window rolled down and I found myself staring at our priest.
“Oh, Sean, it’s you,” Father Grady said. He had a shock of white hair that Amelia called his Einstein-do, and he was wearing his clerical collar. His eyes were glassy and bright.
I hesitated. “Father, I’m going to have to see your license and registration . . .”
“Not a problem,” the priest said, digging in his glove compartment. “You’re just doing your job.” I watched him fumble, dropping his license three times before he managed to hand it to me. I glanced inside the car but didn’t see any bottles or cans.
“Father, you were all over the road there.”
“Was I?”
I could smell alcohol on his breath. “You have any drinks tonight, Father?”
“Can’t say that I have . . .”
Priests couldn’t lie, could they? “You mind stepping out of the car for me?”
“Sure, Sean.” He stumbled out of the door and leaned against the hood of his Camry, his hands in his pockets. “Haven’t seen your family at Mass lately . . .”
“Father, do you wear contact lenses?”
“No . . .”
This was the beginning of the test for horizontal gaze nystagmus, an involuntary jerking of the eyeball that could suggest drunkenness. “I’m just going to ask you to follow this light,” I said, taking a penlight out of my pocket and holding it several inches away from his face, a bit above eye level. “Follow it only with your eyes—keep your head still,” I added. “Understand?”
Father Grady nodded. I checked his equal pupil size and tracking as he followed the beam, marking down a lack of smooth pursuit, and an end-point nystagmus as I moved the beam toward his left ear.
“Thanks, Father. Now, can you stand on your right foot for me, like this?” I demonstrated, and he lifted his left foot. He wobbled but stayed upright. “Now the left,” I said, and this time, he pitched forward.
“Okay, Father, one last thing—can you walk for me, heel to toe?” I showed him how and then watched him trip over his own feet.
Bankton was so tiny we didn’t ride with partners. I could have probably let Father Grady go; no one would have been the wiser, and maybe he’d even put a good word in to heaven for me. But letting him go also meant I would be lying to myself—and surely that was just as grievous a sin. Who might be driving on the roads that led to his house .
. . a teenager, coming home from a date? A dad flying back from a business trip out of town? A mom with a sick kid, headed to the hospital? It wasn’t Father Grady I was trying to rescue, it was the people he might hurt in his condition.
“I hate to do this, Father, but I’m going to have to arrest you for driving under the influence.” I Mirandized him and gently led the priest into the back of the cruiser.
“What about my car?”
“It’ll be towed. You can get it tomorrow,” I said.
“But tomorrow’s Sunday!”
We were only about a half mile from the station, which was a blessing, because I didn’t think I could stand to make small talk with my priest after I’d arrested him. At the station, I went through the rigmarole of implied consent and told Father Grady I wanted him to take a Breathalyzer test. “You have the right to have a similar test or tests done by a person of your choosing,” I said. “You’ll be given the opportunity to request this additional test, if you want. If you do not permit a test at the direction of the law enforcement officer, you may lose your license for a period of one hundred and eighty days, not concurrent with any loss of license if found guilty of the charge of DUI.”
“No, Seanie, I trust you,” Father Grady said.
It didn’t surprise me when he blew a .15.
Since my shift was ending, I offered to take him back home. The road snaked in front of me as I passed the church and drove up a hill to the little white house that served as the rectory. I parked in the driveway and helped him walk a relatively straight line to the door. “I was at a wake tonight,” he said, turning his key in the lock.
“Father,” I sighed. “You don’t have to explain.”
“It was a boy—only twenty-six. Motorcycle accident last Tuesday, you probably know all about it. I knew I’d be driving home. But there was the mother, sobbing her heart out, and the brothers, completely shattered—and I wanted to leave them with a tribute, instead of with all that loss.”
