by Jodi Picoult
'Willow,' I said. 'What are you doing?'
You blinked up at me. 'Surgery.'
I watched you for a few stitches, to make sure you didn't poke yourself with the needle, and then shrugged. Far be it from me to stand in the way of science.
In the kitchen, Amelia was sprawled across the table with markers, glue, and a piece of poster board. 'You want to tell me why Willow's out there with a paring knife?' I said.
'Because she asked for one.'
'If she asked for a chain saw, would you have gotten it out of the garage?'
'Well, that would kind of be overkill for cutting up a banana, don't you think?' Looking down at her project, Amelia sighed. 'This totally sucks. I have to make a board game about the digestive system, and everyone's going to make fun of me because we all know where the digestive system ends.'
'Funny you should use that word,' I said.
'G-R-O-double-S, Dad.'
I started pulling pots and pans out from beneath the counter and set out a frying pan. 'What do you say to pancakes for dinner?' Not that they had a choice; it was the only thing I knew how to cook, except for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
'Mom made pancakes for breakfast,' Amelia complained.
'Did you know that dissolvable stitches are made out of animal guts?' you called out.
'No, and now I kind of wish I didn't . . .'
Amelia rubbed a glue stick over her poster board. 'Is Mom better yet?'
'No, baby.'
'But she promised me she'd help draw the esophagus.'
'I can help,' I said.
'You can't draw, Dad. When we play Pictionary you always make a house, even when that has nothing to do with the answer.'
'Well, how hard can an esophagus be? It's a tube, right?' I rummaged for a box of Bisquick.
There was a thump; the knife had rolled under the couch. You were twisting uncomfortably. 'Hang on, Wills, I can get that for you,' I called.
'I don't need it anymore,' you said, but you hadn't stopped squirming.
Amelia sighed. 'Willow, stop being such a baby before you pee in your pants.'
I looked from your sister to you. 'Do you have to go to the bathroom?'
'She's making that face she makes when she's trying to hold it in--'
'Amelia, enough.' I walked into the living room and crouched down beside you. 'Honey, you don't have to be embarrassed.'
You flattened your lips together. 'I want Mom to take me.'
'Mom's not here,' Amelia snapped.
I hoisted you off the couch to carry you into the downstairs bathroom. I'd just wrangled your awkwardly cast legs into the doorframe when you said, 'You forgot the garbage bags.'
Charlotte had told me how she'd line them inside your cast before you went to the bathroom. In all the time you'd been in your spica, I hadn't been pressed into duty for this - you were wildly self-conscious about having me pull down your pants. I reached around the doorframe to the dryer, where Charlotte had stashed a box of kitchen trash bags. 'Okay,' I said. 'I'm a novice, so you have to tell me what to do.'
'You have to swear you won't peek,' you said.
'Cross my heart.'
You untied the knot that was holding up the gigantic boxer shorts we'd pulled over your spica, and I lifted you up so that they would pool at your hips. As I pulled them off, you squealed. 'Look up here!'
'Right.' I resolutely fixed my eyes on yours, trying to maneuver the shorts off you without seeing what I was doing. Then I held up the garbage bag, which would have to be tucked in along the crotch line. 'You want to do this part?' I asked, blushing.
I held you under the armpits while you struggled to line the cast with the plastic. 'Ready,' you said, and I positioned you over the toilet.
'No, back more,' you said, and I adjusted you and waited.
And waited.
'Willow,' I said, 'go ahead and pee.'
'I can't. You're listening.'
'I'm not listening--'
'Yes you are.'
'Your mother listens . . .'
'That's different,' you said, and you burst into tears.
Once the floodgates opened, they opened universally. I glanced down at the bowl of the toilet, only to hear you cry louder. 'You said you wouldn't peek!'
I snapped my eyes north, juggled you into my left arm, and reached for the toilet paper with the right.
'Dad!' Amelia yelled. 'I think something's burning . . .'
'Oh shit,' I muttered, giving only a passing thought to the swear jar. I stuffed a wad of paper into your hand. 'Hurry up, Willow,' I said, and then I flushed the toilet.
'I h-have to w-wash my hands,' you hiccuped.
'Later,' I bit out, and I carried you back to the couch, tossing your shorts into your lap before racing to the kitchen.
Amelia stood in front of the stove, where the pancakes were charring. 'I turned off the burner,' she said, coughing through the smoke.
'Thanks.' She nodded and reached around me onto the counter for . . . Were those what I thought they were? Sure enough, Amelia sat down and picked up the hot glue gun. She'd affixed about thirty of my good clay poker chips around the edge of her poster board.
'Amelia!' I yelled. 'Those are my poker chips!'
'You have a whole bunch. I just needed a few . . .'
'Did I tell you you could use them?'
'You didn't tell me I couldn't,' Amelia said.
'Daddy,' you called out from the living room, 'my hands!'
'Okay,' I said under my breath. 'Okay.' I counted to ten, and then carried the pan to the trash to scrape out its contents. The metal lip grazed my wrist and I dropped the pan. 'Sonofabitch,' I cried, and I switched on the cold-water faucet, thrusting my arm beneath it.
'I want to wash my hands,' you wailed.
Amelia folded her arms. 'You owe Willow a quarter,' she said.
By nine o'clock, you girls were asleep and the pots had been washed and the dishwasher was humming in the kitchen. I went around the house, turning out the lights, then crept into the dark bedroom. Charlotte was lying down with one arm thrown over her head. 'You don't have to tiptoe,' she said. 'I'm awake.'
I sank down beside her. 'You feeling any better?'
'I'm down a dress size. How are the girls?'
'Fine. Although I'm sorry to say Willow's patient didn't survive.'
'Huh?'
'Nothing.' I rolled onto my back. 'We had peanut butter and jelly for dinner.'
She patted my arm absently. 'You know what I love about you?'
'Hmm?'
'You make me look so good by comparison . . .'
I propped my arms behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. 'You don't bake anymore.'
'Yeah, but I don't burn the pancakes,' Charlotte said, smiling a little. 'Amelia ratted you out when she came in to say good night.'
'I'm serious. Remember how you used to make creme brulee and petit fours and chocolate eclairs?'
'I guess other things became more important,' Charlotte answered.
'You used to say you'd have your own bakery one day. You wanted to call it Syllable--'
'Syllabub,' she corrected.
I may not have remembered the name right, but I knew what it meant, because I'd asked you: syllabub was the oldest English dessert, made when dairymaids would shoot warm milk straight from the cow into a pail that held cider or sherry. It was like eggnog, you told me, and you promised me you'd make me some to try, and the night you did you dipped a finger in the sweet cream and traced a trail down my chest that you kissed clean.
'That's what happens to dreams,' Charlotte said. 'Life gets in the way.'
I sat up, picking at a stitch on the quilt. 'I wanted a house, a backyard, a bunch of kids. A vacation every now and then. A good job. I wanted to coach softball and take my girls skiing and not know every fucking doctor in the Portsmouth Regional Hospital emergency room by name.' I turned to her. 'I may not be with her all the time, but when she breaks, Charlotte, I feel it. I swe
ar I do. I'd do anything for her.'
She faced me. 'Would you?'
I could feel its weight on the mattress: the lawsuit, the elephant in the room. 'It feels . . . ugly. It feels like we're saying we didn't love her, because she's . . . the way she is.'
'It's because we want her, because we love her, that I'd ever think about this in the first place,' Charlotte said. 'I'm not stupid, Sean. I know people are going to talk, and say I'm after a big settlement. I know they're going to think I'm the worst mother in the world, the most selfish, you fill in the blank. But I don't care what they say about me - I care about Willow. I want to know that she'll be able to go to college and live on her own and do everything she dreams of. Even if that means that the whole world thinks I'm horrible. Does it really matter what everyone else says if I know why I'm doing it?' She faced me. 'I'm going to lose my best friend because of this,' she said. 'I don't want to lose you, too.'
In her previous life as a pastry chef, I'd always been amazed to watch tiny Charlotte hauling fifty-pound bags of flour around. There was strength in her that went far beyond my own size and force. I saw the world in black and white; it was why I was a career cop. But what if this lawsuit and its uncomfortable name was only a means to an end? Could something that looked so wrong on the outside turn out to be undeniably right?
My hand crept across the quilt to cover hers. 'You won't,' I said.
Charlotte
Late May 2007
Y
our first seven breaks happened before you entered this world. The next four happened minutes after you were born, as a nurse lifted you out of me. Another nine, when you were being resuscitated in the hospital, after you coded. The tenth: when you were lying across my lap and suddenly I heard a pop. Eleven was when you rolled over and your arm hit the edge of the crib. Twelve and thirteen were femur fractures; fourteen a tibia; fifteen a compression fracture of the spine. Sixteen was jumping down from a stoop; seventeen was a kid crashing into you on a playground; eighteen was when you slipped on a DVD jacket lying on the carpet. We still don't know what caused number nineteen. Twenty was when Amelia was jumping on a bed where you were sitting; twenty-one was a soccer ball that hit your left leg too hard; twenty-two was when I discovered waterproof casting materials and bought enough to supply an entire hospital, now stocked in my garage. Twenty-three happened in your sleep; twenty-four and twenty-five were a fall forward in the snow that snapped both forearms at once. Twenty-six and twenty-seven were nasty fractures, fibula and tibia tenting through the skin at a nursery school Halloween party, where, ironically, you were wearing a mummy's costume whose bandages I used to splint the breaks. Twenty-eight happened during a sneeze; twenty-nine and thirty were ribs you broke on the edge of the kitchen table. Thirty-one was a hip fracture that required a metal plate and six screws. I stopped keeping track after that, until the ones from Disney World, which we had not numbered but instead named Mickey, Donald, and Goofy.
Four months after you were put in the spica cast, it was bivalved. This meant that it was cut in half and secured with low-budget clips that broke within hours, so I replaced them with bright strips of Velcro. Gradually, we'd remove the top, so that you could practice sitting up like a clam on the half shell, and you could strengthen the stomach and calf muscles that had deteriorated. According to Dr Rosenblad, you'd have a couple of weeks in the bottom of the shell; then you'd graduate to just sleeping in it. Eight weeks later you'd stand with a walker; four weeks after that, you'd be moving to the bathroom on your own.
The best part, though, was that you could go back to preschool. It was a private school, held for two hours each morning in the basement of a church. You were a year older than other kids in the class, but you'd missed so much school because of breaks that we'd decided to repeat the year - you could read at a sixth-grade level, but you needed to be around other kids your age for socialization. You didn't have many friends - children were either frightened by your wheelchair and walker or, oddly, jealous of the casts that you'd come to school wearing. Now, driving to the church, I glanced into the rearview mirror. 'So what are you going to do first?'
'The rice table.' Miss Katie, whom you ranked somewhere just shy of Jesus on the adoration scale, had set up an enormous sandbox full of colored rice grains, which kids could pour into different size containers. You loved the noise it made; you told me it sounded like rain. 'And the parachute.'
This was a game where one child ran under a brightly colored round of silk while the rest held on to its edges. 'You're going to have to wait a while for that, Wills,' I said, and I pulled into the parking lot. 'One day at a time.'
I unloaded your wheelchair from the back of the van and settled you into it, then pushed you up the ramp that the school had added this past summer, after you'd enrolled. Inside, other students were hanging their coats in their cubbies; moms were rolling up dried finger paintings that were hanging on a clothes rack. 'You're back!' one woman said, smiling down at you. Then she looked up at me. 'Kelsey had her birthday party last weekend - she saved a goody bag for Willow. We would have invited her, but, well, it was at the Gymnastics Hut, and I figured she might feel left out.'
As opposed to not being invited? I thought. But instead, I smiled. 'That was very thoughtful.'
A little boy touched the edges of your spica cast. 'Wow,' he breathed. 'How do you pee in that thing?'
'I don't,' you said, without cracking a smile. 'I haven't gone in four months, Derek, so you'd better watch out 'cause I could blow like a volcano any minute.'
'Willow,' I murmured, 'no need to be snarky.'
'He started it . . .'
Miss Katie came into the hallway as she heard the commotion of our arrival. She did the slightest double take when she saw you in the bivalved cast but quickly recovered. 'Willow!' she said, getting down on her knees to your level. 'It is so nice to see you!' She summoned her assistant, Miss Sylvia. 'Sylvia, can you keep an eye on Willow while her mom and I have a talk?'
I followed her down the hallway past the bathrooms with their impossibly squat toilets to the area that doubled as music room and gymnasium. 'Charlotte,' Kate said, 'I must have misunderstood. When you called to tell me Willow was coming, I thought she was out of that body cast!'
'Well, she will be. It's a gradual thing.' I smiled at her. 'She's really excited to be back here.'
'I think you're rushing things--'
'It's fine, really. She needs the activity. Even if she breaks again, a break after a few weeks of really great play is better for her body than just sitting around at home. And you don't have to worry about the other kids hurting her, beyond the usual. We wrestle with her. We tickle her.'
'Yes, but you do all that at home,' the teacher pointed out. 'In a school environment . . . Well, it's riskier.'
I stepped back, reading her loud and clear: we're liable when she's on our grounds. In spite of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I routinely read on online OI forums of private schools who kindly suggested that a healing child be kept at home, ostensibly for the child's best interests but more likely because of their own rising insurance premiums. It created a catch-22: legally, you had clear grounds to sue for discrimination, but once you did, you could bet that, even if you won your case, your child would be treated differently when she returned.
'Riskier for whom?' I said, my face growing hot. 'I paid tuition to have my daughter here. Kate, you know damn well you can't tell me she's not welcome.'
'I'm happy to refund you tuition for the months she's missed. And I would never tell you that Willow's not welcome - we love her, and we've missed her. We just want to make sure she's safe.' She shook her head. 'Look at it from our point of view. Next year, when Willow's in kindergarten, she'll have a full-time aide. We don't have that resource here.'
'Then I'll be her aide. I'll stay with her. Just let her' - my voice snapped like a twig - 'let her feel like she's normal.'
Kate looked up at me. 'Do you think being the only child with a parent in the
classroom is going to make her feel that way?'
Speechless - fuming - I strode down the hall to where Miss Sylvia was still waiting with you, watching you show off the cast's Velcro straps. 'We have to go,' I said, blinking back tears.
'But I want to play at the rice table . . .'
'You know what?' Kate said. 'Miss Sylvia will get you your own bag to take home! Thanks for coming to say hello to all your friends, Willow.'
Confused, you turned to me. 'Mommy? Why can't I stay?'
'We'll talk about it later.'
Miss Sylvia returned with a Ziploc full of purple rice grains. 'Here you go, pumpkin.'
'Tell me this,' I said, eyeing each of the teachers in turn. 'What good is a life if she doesn't get to live it?'
I pushed you out of the school, still so angry that it took me a moment to realize you were deathly silent. When we reached the van, you had tears in your eyes. 'It's okay, Mom,' you said, with a resignation in your voice that no five-year-old ought to have. 'I didn't want to stay anyway.'
That was a lie; I knew how much you had been looking forward to seeing your friends.
'You know how, when there's a rock in the water, the water just moves around the sides of it as if it's not there?' you said. 'That's kind of how the other kids acted when you were talking to Miss Katie.'
How could those teachers - or those other kids - not see how easily you bruised? I kissed you on the forehead. 'You and I,' I promised, 'are going to have so much fun this afternoon, you aren't going to know what hit you.' I leaned down to hoist you out of your wheelchair, but one of the Velcro straps on the cast popped open. 'Shoot,' I muttered, and as I jostled you to one hip to fix it, you dropped your Ziploc bag.
'My rice!' you said, and you instinctively twisted in my arms to reach it, which is exactly the moment I heard the snap: like a branch breaking, like the first bite of an autumn apple.
'Willow?' I said, but I already knew: the whites of your eyes had flashed, blue as lightning, and you were slipping away from me into the sleepy trance that would overcome you when it was a particularly bad fracture.
By the time I settled you in the back of the van, your eyes were nearly closed. 'Baby, tell me where it hurts,' I begged, but you didn't answer. Starting at the wrist, I gently felt up your arm, trying to find the tender spot. I had just hit a divot beneath your shoulder when you whimpered. But you had broken bones in the arm before, and this one wasn't stuck through the skin or twisted at a ninety-degree angle or any of the other hallmarks I associated with the kind of severe break that made you slip into a stupor. Had the bone pierced an organ?
