The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  Do you have small children? If so, did you have a positive birthing experience?

  Do you do any volunteer work? (Someone who volunteered at Planned Parenthood would be great for us. Someone who volunteered at the church home for unwed mothers—not so much.)

  Have you or any family member ever filed a lawsuit? Have you or any family member ever been a defendant in a lawsuit?

  Guy had added:

  Do you believe physicians should make medical decisions in the best interests of their patients or leave the decisions up to them?

  Do you have any personal experience with disability or with people who have disabilities?

  However, those were the easy ones. We both knew that this case hinged on jurors who could be open-minded enough to understand a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy; to that end, I wanted to rule out pro-lifers, while Guy’s defense would be greatly enhanced if there were no pro-choice folks on the jury. We had both wanted to submit the question Are you pro-life or pro-choice? but the judge had not allowed it. After three weeks of arguing, Guy and I had finessed the question to this instead: Do you have any real-life experience with abortion, either personal or professional?

  An affirmative answer meant I could try to have the person stricken. A negative answer would allow us to pussyfoot more tenderly around the issue when it came to individual voir dire.

  Which was, finally, where we stood right now. After reviewing the questionnaires, I had separated them into piles of the people I thought I liked for this jury and the people I thought I didn’t. Judge Gellar would put each juror on the stand for questioning, and Guy and I had to either get the witness stricken for cause, accept him or her for the jury, or use one of our three precious peremptory strikes—a Get Off This Jury Now card that allowed us to remove a juror for no reason at all. The catch was knowing when to use these peremptory strikes and when to save them in case a more odious person came along.

  What I wanted for Charlotte’s jury were housewives who gave everything and thought nothing of it. Parents whose lives revolved around their kids. Soccer moms, PTA moms, stay-at-home dads. Victims of domestic violence who tolerated the intolerable. In short, I wanted twelve martyrs.

  So far, Guy and I had interviewed three people: a graduate student at UNH, a used car salesman, and a lunch lady at a high school cafeteria. I had used the first of my peremptory challenges to strike the grad student when I learned that he was the head of the Young Republicans on campus. Now, we were on our fourth potential juror, a woman named Juliet Cooper. She was in her early fifties, a good age for a juror, someone with maturity and not just hotheaded opinions. She had two teenage children and worked as a switchboard operator at a hospital. When she sat down in the witness stand, I tried to make her feel comfortable by offering up a wide smile. “Thanks for being here today, Mrs. Cooper,” I said. “Now, you work outside the home, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “How have you been able to balance that with child rearing?”

  “I didn’t work when they were little. I thought it was important to be at home with them. It’s really only when they reached high school that I got a job again.”

  So far, so good—a woman whose children came first. I scanned her questionnaire again. “You said here that you filed a lawsuit?”

  I had done nothing more than state a fact she herself had written down, but Juliet Cooper looked like I’d just slapped her. “Yes.”

  The difference between witness examinations and jury selection interviews was that, in the former, you only asked questions to which you knew the answers. In the latter, though, you asked completely open-ended questions—because finding out something you didn’t know might help you remove the potential juror. What if, for example, Juliet Cooper had filed her own medical malpractice suit and it had turned out badly for her?

  “Can you elaborate?” I pressed.

  “It never went to trial,” she murmured. “I withdrew the complaint.”

  “Would you have a problem being fair and impartial toward someone who carried through with a lawsuit?”

  “No,” Juliet Cooper said. “I’d just think she was braver than me.”

  Well, that seemed to bode well for Charlotte. I sat down to let Guy begin his questioning. “Mrs. Cooper, you mention a nephew who’s wheelchair-bound?”

  “He served in Iraq and lost both his legs when a car bomb went off. He’s only twenty-three; it’s been devastating to him.” She looked at Charlotte. “I think there are some tragedies that you just can’t get past. Your whole life will never be quite the same, no matter what.”

  I loved this juror. I wanted to clone her.

  I wondered if Guy would strike this juror. But chances were, he was just as touchy about how disabilities would play for him as I was. Whereas I’d thought at first that mothers of disabled children would be locks for Charlotte, I had reconsidered. Wrongful birth—a term with which Guy was going to slather the courtroom—could be horribly offensive to them. It seemed that the better juror, from my point of view, would be either someone who had sympathy but no firsthand experience with disabilities or, like Juliet Cooper, someone who knew so much about disability that she understood how challenging your life had been.

  “Mrs. Cooper,” Guy said, “on the question that asked about religious or personal beliefs about abortion, you wrote something and then crossed it out, and I can’t quite read it.”

  “I know,” she replied. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “It’s a very tough question,” Guy admitted. “Do you understand that the decision to abort a fetus is central to making a judgment in this case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever had an abortion?”

  “Objection!” I cried out. “That’s a HIPAA violation, Your Honor!”

  “Mr. Booker,” the judge said. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  “My job, Judge. The juror’s personal beliefs are critical, given the nature of this case.”

  I knew exactly what Guy was doing—taking the risk of upsetting the juror, which he’d weighed to be less important than the risk of losing the trial because of her. There had been every chance I’d have had to ask an equally contentious question. I was just glad that it had been Guy instead, because it allowed me to play good cop. “What Mrs. Cooper did or didn’t do in her past is not at all integral to this lawsuit,” I declared, turning to the jury pool. “Let me apologize for my colleague’s invasion of your privacy. What Mr. Booker is conveniently forgetting is that the salient issue here isn’t abortion rights in America but a single case of medical malpractice.”

  Guy Booker, as the defendant’s attorney, would be using a combination of smoke and mirrors to suggest that Piper Reece had not made an error in judgment: that OI couldn’t be conclusively diagnosed in utero, that you can’t be blamed for not seeing something you can’t see, that no one has the right to say life’s not worth living if you’re disabled. But no matter how much smoke Guy blew in the jury’s direction, I would redirect them, remind them that this was a medical malpractice suit and someone had to pay for making a mistake.

  I was vaguely aware of the irony that I was championing the juror’s right to medical privacy when—on a personal level—it had made my life a nightmare. If not for the sealing of medical records, I would have known my birth mother’s name months ago; as it was, I was still in the great black void of chance, awaiting news from the Hillsborough Family Court and Maisie.

  “You can stop grandstanding, Ms. Gates,” the judge said. “And as for you, Mr. Booker, if you ask a follow-up question like this again, I’ll hold you in contempt.”

  Guy shrugged. He finished up his questioning, and then we both approached the bench again. “The plaintiff has no objection to Mrs. Cooper sitting on this panel,” I said. Guy agreed, and the judge called up the next potential juror.

  Her name was Mary Paul. She had gray hair pulled into a low ponytail and wore a shapeless blue dress and crepe-sole
d shoes. She looked like someone’s grandmother, and smiled kindly at Charlotte as she took the stand. This, I thought, could be promising.

  “Ms. Paul, you say here that you’re retired?”

  “I don’t know if retired is really the word for it . . .”

  “What kind of work were you doing previously?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was a Sister of Mercy.”

  It was going to be a very long day.

  Sean

  When Charlotte finally came home from jury selection, you were soundly kicking my ass in Scrabble. “How did it go?” I asked, but I could tell before she even said a word; she looked like she’d been run over by a truck.

  “They all kept staring at me,” she said. “Like I was something they’d never seen before.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, really. What did she expect?

  “Where’s Amelia?”

  “Upstairs, becoming one with her iPod.”

  “Mom,” you said, “do you want to play? You can just join in, it doesn’t matter if you missed the beginning.”

  In the eight hours I’d been with you today, I hadn’t managed to bring up the divorce. We’d taken a field trip to the pet store and had gotten to watch a snake eat a dead mouse; we had watched a Disney movie; we had gone food shopping and bought SpaghettiOs—Chef Boyardee, which your mother called Chef MSG. We’d had, in short, the perfect day. I didn’t want to be the one who took the light out of your eyes. Maybe Charlotte had known this, which was why she’d suggested that I be the one to tell you. And maybe for that reason, too, she looked at me now and sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Sean, it’s been three weeks.”

  “It hasn’t been the right time . . .”

  You stuck your hand into the bag of letters. “We’re down to two-letter words,” you said. “Daddy tried to do Oz, but that’s a place and it’s not allowed.”

  “There’s never going to be a right time. Honey,” she said, turning to you, “I’m really wiped out. Can I take a Scrabble rain check?” She walked into the kitchen.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told you, and I followed her. “I know I have no right to ask you this, but—I’d like you to be there when I tell her. I think it’s important.”

  “Sean, I’ve had an awful day—”

  “And I am about to make it more awful. I know.” I looked down at her. “Please.”

  Wordlessly, she walked back into the family room with me and sat down at the table. You turned, delighted. “So you do want to play?”

  “Willow, your mom and I have some news for you.”

  “You’re going to move back home for good? I knew it. At school Sapphire said that once her father moved out he fell in love with a dirty whore and now her parents aren’t together anymore, but I said that you’d never do that.”

  “I told you so,” Charlotte said to me.

  “Wills, your mother and I . . . we’re getting divorced.”

  She looked at each of us. “Because of me?”

  “No,” Charlotte and I said in unison.

  “We both love you, and Amelia,” I said. “But your mom and I can’t be a couple anymore.”

  Charlotte walked toward the window, her back to me.

  “You’re still going to see both of us. And live with both of us. We’re going to do everything we can to make things easy for you, so not much has to change—”

  Your face was pinching up tighter and tighter as I spoke, becoming a flushed and angry pink. “My goldfish,” you said. “He can’t live in two houses.”

  You had a betta that we’d gotten you last Christmas, the cheapest concession to a pet we could provide. To everyone’s shock, it had lived longer than a week. “We’ll get you a second one,” I suggested.

  “But I don’t want two goldfish!”

  “Willow—”

  “I hate you,” you shouted, starting to cry. “I hate both of you!”

  You were out of your chair like a shot, running faster than I thought you could to the front door. “Willow!” Charlotte called out. “Be—”

  Careful.

  I heard the cry before I could reach the doorway. In your hurry to get away from me, from this news, you had not been cautious, and you were lying on the porch where you’d slipped. Your left femur was bent at a ninety-degree angle, breaking through the bloody surface of your thigh; the sclera of your eyes was an unholy blue. “Mommy?” you said, and then your eyes rolled back in your head.

  “Willow!” Charlotte screamed, and she knelt down beside you. “Call an ambulance,” she ordered, and then she bent closer to you and began to whisper.

  For a fraction of a second, as I looked at the two of you, I believed she was the better parent.

  • • •

  Do not, if you can help it, break a bone on a Friday night. Even more important, do not break a femur the weekend of the annual convention of American orthopedic surgeons. Leaving Amelia home alone, Charlotte rode in the ambulance with you, and I followed in my truck. Although most of your serious breaks were handled by the orthopods in Omaha, this one was too severe to simply immobilize until they could assess it; we were headed to the local hospital, only to learn in the emergency room that the orthopedic surgeon called to consult was a resident.

  “A resident?” Charlotte had said. “Look, no offense, but I’m not letting a resident rod my daughter’s femur.”

  “I’ve done this kind of surgery before, Mrs. O’Keefe,” the doctor said.

  “Not on a girl with OI,” Charlotte countered. “And not on Willow.”

  He wanted to put a Fassier-Duval rod—one that would telescope as you grew—into your femur. It was the newest rod available, and it threaded into the epiphysis, whatever that was, which kept it from migrating, like the older rods used to. Most important, you wouldn’t be in a spica cast, which was the postoperative care for femur rodding in the past—instead, you’d be in a functional brace, a long leg splint, for three weeks. Uncomfortable, especially during the summertime, but nowhere near as debilitating.

  I was stroking your forehead while this battle raged. You had regained consciousness, but you didn’t speak, only stared straight ahead. It scared the crap out of me, but Charlotte said this happened a lot when it was a bad break; it had something to do with endorphins released by the body to self-medicate. And yet, you had started to shiver, as if you were in shock. I’d taken off my jacket to cover you when the thin hospital blanket didn’t seem to work.

  Charlotte had badgered and argued; she had dropped names—and finally she got the guy to call his attending at the convention center in San Diego. It was mesmerizing to watch, like an orchestrated battle: the push, the retreat, the turn toward you before the next round. And it was, I realized, something your mother was very, very good at.

  The resident reappeared a few minutes later. “Dr. Yaeger can get on a red-eye and be here for a ten o’clock surgery tomorrow morning,” he said. “That’s the best we can do.”

  “She can’t stay like this overnight,” I said.

  “We can give her morphine to sedate her.”

  They moved you onto a pediatric floor, where the murals of balloons and circus animals stood completely at odds with the shrieks of crying babies and the faces of shell-shocked parents wandering the halls. Charlotte watched over you while the orderlies slipped you from the stretcher to the bed—one sharp, hollow cry as your leg was moved—and gave instructions to the nurse (IV on your right side, because you were a lefty) when your morphine drip was set up.

  It was killing me, to watch you in pain. “You were right,” I said to Charlotte. “You wanted to put a rod in her leg and I said no.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “You were right. She needed time to get up and run around to strengthen her muscles and bones, or this might have happened even sooner.”

  At that, you whimpered, and then you started to scratch. You raked at your arms, at your belly.

  “What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked.


  “The bugs,” you said. “They’re all over me.”

  “Baby, there aren’t any bugs,” I said, watching as she scraped her arms raw.

  “But it itches . . .”

  “How about we play a game?” Charlotte suggested. “Poodle?” She reached up for your wrist and pulled it down to your side. “Do you want to pick the word?”

  She was trying to distract you, and it worked. You nodded.

  “Can you poodle underwater?” Charlotte asked, and you shook your head. “Can you poodle while you’re asleep?”

  “No,” you said.

  She looked at me, nodding. “Um, can you poodle with a friend?” I asked.

  You almost smiled. “Absolutely not,” you said as your eyes started to drift shut.

  “Thank God,” I said. “Maybe she’ll sleep through now.”

  But, as if I’d cursed your chances, you suddenly jumped—an exaggerated full-body tremor that made you come right off the bed, and dislodged your leg. Immediately, you screamed.

  We had just managed to calm you down again when the same thing happened: as soon as you began to fall asleep, you startled as if you were falling off a cliff. Charlotte pushed the nurse’s call button.

  “She’s jumping,” Charlotte explained. “It keeps happening.”

  “Morphine does that to some people,” the nurse said. “The best thing you can do is try to keep her still.”

  “Can’t we take her off it?”

  “If you do, she’s going to be thrashing around a lot more than she already is,” the nurse replied.

  When she left the room, you jerked again, and a low, long moan rose from your throat. “Help me,” Charlotte said, and she crawled onto the hospital bed, pinning down your upper body.

  “You’re crushing me, Mom . . .”

  “I’m just going to help you stay good and still,” Charlotte said calmly.