Handle With Care

by Jodi Picoult

  My God, what kind of person was I, wishing a six-year-old would get hurt?

  At the school, Charlotte lugged the equipment out of the van and set it in a corner of the classroom. There was a quick powwow with the teacher and your aide, Charlotte explaining which injuries were bothering you today. Meanwhile, you sat in your chair near the cubbies as children funneled around you to hang up their jackets and take off their boots. Your shoelace had come untied, and although you tried to lean over to fix it, your foreshortened arms couldn't quite span the distance. A little girl bent down to help you. 'I just learned how to tie them,' she said, matter-of-fact, and she looped the laces and knotted them. As she bounced off, you watched her. 'I know how to tie my own shoes,' you said, but your voice had an edge to it.

  When it was time for snack, your aide had to lift you up to wash your hands, because the sink was too tall to accommodate your wheelchair. Five children jockeyed to sit next to you. But you got only about three minutes to eat because you were scheduled for physical therapy. That day alone, I'd learned, we'd be filming you at PT, OT, speech therapy, and visiting a prosthetic specialist. It made me wonder when or if you ever got to just be a kindergartner.

  'How do you think it's going so far?' Charlotte asked as we walked down the hall to the physical therapy room, trailing you and your wheelchair and your aide. 'Do you think it will be enough for a jury?'

  'Don't worry,' I said. 'That's my job.'

  The physical therapy room was adjacent to the gymnasium. Inside, on the gleaming floor, a teacher was setting a line of kickballs down. There was a wall of glass, through which you could watch what was going on in the gym. It seemed cruel to me. Was it supposed to inspire a kid like you to work harder? Or just depress the hell out of you?

  Twice a week, you had PT with Molly in school. Once a week, you were taken to her office. She was a skinny redhead with a surprisingly low voice. 'How's the hip?'

  'It still hurts,' you told her.

  'Like I'd rather die than walk, Molly, hurts? Or just ouch, it hurts?'

  You laughed. 'Ouch.'

  'Good. Then show me your stuff.'

  She lifted you out of your chair and set you upright on the floor. I held my breath - I hadn't seen you moving without a walker - and you began to shuffle your feet in tiny hiccups. Your right foot lifted off the floor, your left one dragged, until you paused at the edge of a red mat. It was only an inch thick, but it took you ten whole seconds to lift your left leg enough to gain the clearance.

  She bounced a large red ball to the middle of the mat. 'You want to start with this today?'

  'Yes,' you said, and your face lit up.

  'Your wish is my command,' Molly said, and she sat you down on the ball. 'Show me how far you can reach with your left hand.'

  You reached across your body, putting an S curve into your spine. Even giving it all your effort, you could barely keep your shoulders from facing squarely forward. This put your eyes in line with the window, where your classmates were engaged in a raucous game of dodgeball. 'I wish I could do that,' you said.

  'Keep stretching, Wonder Woman, and you just might,' Molly replied.

  But this wasn't really true - even if you learned enough flexibility to dodge and weave, your bones wouldn't withstand a firm hit.

  'You're not missing anything,' I said. 'I hated dodgeball. I was always the one picked last.'

  'I'm the one picked never,' you said.

  That, I thought, will be a great sound bite.

  Apparently, I wasn't the only one. Charlotte glanced at the camera and then turned to the physical therapist, who had your belly bent over the ball and was rocking you back and forth. 'Molly? How about using the ring?'

  'I was going to hold off another week or two before I did any weight-bearing exercises--'

  'Maybe we can work on the soft tissue? To improve her range?'

  She settled you on the floor. The soles of your feet touched together, a yoga pose I could manage only on a good day. Reaching onto the wall, Molly untied what looked like a gymnastics ring, which was dangling from the ceiling. She adjusted the height until it hovered just over your head. 'Right arm this time,' she said.

  You shook your head. 'I don't want to.'

  'Just give it a try. If it hurts too much, we'll stop.'

  You inched your arm higher, until your fingertips brushed the rubber ring. 'Can we stop now?'

  'Come on, Willow, I know you're tougher than that,' Molly said. 'Wrap your fingers around and give it a squeeze . . .'

  To do that, you had to lift your arm even higher. Tears glazed your eyes, which made your sclera look electric. The cameraman zoomed in on your face, a close-up.

  'Ow,' you said, starting to cry in earnest as your hand clutched the ring. 'Please, Molly . . . can I stop?'

  Suddenly Charlotte wasn't sitting beside me anymore. She'd run to you, prised your fingers free. Tucking your arm close to your side, she cradled you. 'It's okay, baby,' she crooned. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry Molly made you try.'

  At that, Molly's head snapped around - but she kept her mouth shut when she saw the camera rolling.

  Charlotte's eyes were closed; she might have been crying, too. I felt like I was violating something private. So I reached over and put my hand on the long nose of the camera, gently forced it toward the floor.

  The videographer cut the power.

  Charlotte sat cross-legged with you curled in the bowl of her body. You looked embryonic, spent. I watched her stroke your hair and whisper to you as she stood, lifting you in her arms. Charlotte turned, so that she was facing us and you weren't. 'Did you get that on film?' she asked.

  Once, I watched a news story about two couples whose newborns had been switched by accident at the hospital. They learned only years later, when one baby was found to have some god-awful hereditary disease that the parents didn't have in their genetic makeup. The other family was tracked down and the mothers had to trade their sons. One mother - the one who was getting a healthy child back, as a matter of fact - was absolutely inconsolable. 'He doesn't feel right in my arms,' she kept sobbing. 'He doesn't smell like my boy.'

  I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

  But what if the child never knew the parent quite as well?

  Like me, and my birth mother. Or you. Did you wonder why your mother had hired me? Why you were being followed around by a camera crew? Did you wonder, as we walked back to the classroom, whether your mother had brought you to tears on purpose, so that the jury would squirm?

  Charlotte's words kept ringing in my ears: I'm sorry Molly made you try. But Molly hadn't. Charlotte had insisted on it. Had she been doing it because she truly cared about the range of motion in your right arm after your latest break? Or because she knew it would bring you to tears for the camera?

  I was not a mother; I might never be. But I'd certainly had my share of friends who couldn't stand their own mothers - either they were too absent or too smothering; they complained too much or they noticed too little. Part of growing up was distancing yourself from your mother.

  It was different for me. I'd grown up with a tiny buffer of space between my adoptive mother and myself. Once, in chemistry, I'd learned that objects never really touch - because of ions repelling, there's always an infinitesimal space, so that even when it feels like you're holding hands or rubbing up against something on the atomic level, you're not. That was how I felt these days about my adoptive family: to the naked eye, we looked like a seamless, happy group. But I knew that, no matter how hard I tried, I'd never close that microscopic gap.

  Maybe this was normal. Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways. Some knew what they were doing - like my birth mother, handing me over to another family. And
some, like Charlotte, didn't. Her exploiting you on film for what she believed to be the greater good made me hate her, hate this case. I wanted to finish filming; I wanted to get as far away from her as possible before I did something that was forbidden in my line of work: tell her how I really felt about her and her lawsuit.

  But just as I was trying to figure out a way to wrap this up early, I got what I'd been wishing for - a crisis. Not in the form of you falling down but, instead, equipment failure: while Charlotte was packing up your equipment after school, she saw that your wheelchair tire had gone dead flat.

  'Willow,' she said, exasperated. 'Didn't you notice?'

  'Do you have a spare?' I asked, wondering if there was a closet in the O'Keefe house that had extra parts for wheelchairs and braces, just as there was one full of splints, Ace bandages, slings, and doll plaster. 'No,' Charlotte said. 'But the bike store might.' She pulled out her cell phone and called Amelia. 'I'm going to be a little late . . . No, she didn't break. But her wheelchair did.'

  The bike store didn't have a size 22 wheel in stock, but they thought they might be able to order one in by the end of the week. 'Which means,' Charlotte explained, 'that either I can spend twice as much at a medical supply store in Boston or else Willow's minus her chair for the rest of the week.'

  An hour late, we pulled up to the middle school. Amelia was sitting on top of her backpack, glowering. 'Just so you know,' she said, 'I have three tests tomorrow.'

  'Why didn't you study while you were waiting for us?' you asked.

  'Did I ask you for your opinion?'

  By four o'clock I was exhausted. Charlotte was on the computer, trying to find discount wheelchair manufacturers online. Amelia was writing flash cards with French vocabulary on them. You were upstairs in your room, sitting on the floor with a pink ceramic pig on your lap.

  'Sorry about your chair,' I said.

  You shrugged. 'Stuff like that happens a lot. Last time, the bike store had to get hair out from the front wheels because they stopped turning.'

  'That's pretty disgusting,' I said.

  'Yeah . . . I guess it is.'

  I settled down beside you as the videographer moved inconspicuously to a corner of the room. 'You seem to have a lot of friends at school.'

  'Not really. Most of the kids, they say stupid things like how lucky I am to get to ride in a wheelchair when they have to walk all the way down to the gym or around the playground or whatever.'

  'But you don't think it's lucky.'

  'No, because it's only fun at first. It's not so fun if you do it your whole life.' She looked up at me. 'Those kids today? They're not my friends.'

  'They all wanted to sit next to you at snack--'

  'What they wanted was to be in the movie.' You shook the ceramic pig in your lap. It jingled. 'Did you know real pigs think, like we do? And they can learn tricks like dogs, only faster.'

  'That's impressive. Are you saving up to buy one?'

  'No,' you said. 'I'm giving my allowance money to my mother, so she can buy the tire for my wheelchair and not have to worry about how much it costs.' You pulled the black plug from between the pig's legs, and a trickle of dimes and nickels, with the occasional wadded dollar, tumbled out. 'Last time I counted I had seven dollars and sixteen cents.'

  'Willow,' I said slowly. 'Your mother didn't ask you to pay for that wheel.'

  'No, but if it doesn't cost her any extra, she won't have to get rid of me.'

  I was struck silent. 'Willow,' I said, 'you know your mother loves you.'

  You looked up at me.

  'Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids . . . but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life. Do you understand?'

  'I guess.' You tipped over the piggy bank again. It sounded as if it were full of broken glass.

  'Can I talk to you?' I said as I walked into the study where Charlotte was poring over the results of a search engine.

  She jumped up. 'I'm sorry. I know. You didn't come here to film me surfing the Net for wheelchair tire patch kits.'

  I closed the door behind me. 'Forget about the camera, Charlotte. I was just upstairs with Willow, counting her piggy bank savings. She wants to give it to you. She's trying to buy her way into your good graces.'

  'That's ridiculous,' Charlotte said.

  'Why? What great leap of logic would you make if you were six years old and you knew that your mother had filed a lawsuit because something was wrong when you were born?'

  'Aren't you my lawyer?' Charlotte said. 'Aren't you supposed to be helping me instead of telling me I'm a rotten mother?'

  'I am trying to help you. I don't know how the hell I'm going to cobble together a video for the jury from this footage, to be honest. Because right now, if they saw it, they might feel sorry for Willow - but they'd hate you.'

  Suddenly all of the fight went out of Charlotte. She sank back into the chair she'd been sitting on when I came into the room. 'When you first mentioned wrongful birth, I felt like Sean did. Like it was the most disgusting term I'd ever heard in my life. All these years I've just gone along doing what needed to be done. I knew people watched me with Willow and thought, That poor girl. That poor mother. But you know, I never really pictured it that way. She was my baby and I was going to take care of her, and that was that.' Charlotte looked up at me. 'Then, you and Robert Ramirez started talking, asking me questions. And I thought, Someone gets it. It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?'

  I felt my cheeks burn. I knew exactly what Charlotte was talking about, and I did not like thinking I had anything in common with her. But I remembered the day when I'd been told I was adopted, when I realized there was another mother, another father out there somewhere I had never met. For years, even when it wasn't in the forefront of my mind, it was still present, an itch just beneath the skin.

  Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damages awards. But was the dissolution of this family really my fault? Had Bob and I created a monster?

  'My mother's in a nursing home now,' Charlotte said. 'She can't remember who I am, so I've become the keeper of the memories. I'm the one who tells her about the time she baked brownies for the entire senior class when I ran for student council, and how I won by a landslide. Or how she used to collect sea glass with me during the summer and put it in a jar next to my bed. I wonder what memories Willow will have to tell me, if it comes to that. I wonder if there's a difference between being a dutiful mother and being a good mother.'

  'There is,' I said, and Charlotte looked up at me, expectant.

  Even if I couldn't articulate the difference as an adult, as a child, I had felt it. I thought for a moment. 'A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes,' I said.

  'And a good mother?'

  I lifted my gaze to Charlotte's. 'Is someone whose child wants to follow her.'

  Interfering Agents: A substance added to sugar syrup in order to prevent it from crystallizing.

  We've all had a crystallizing moment, when suddenly everything begins to come together . . . whether we want it to or not. The same thing happens in the production of candy - there's a time when the mixture starts to turn into something it wasn't moments before. A single unincorporated sugar crystal can change the texture from smooth to grainy, and eventually, if you don't prevent it, you get rock candy. But ingredients added to sugar syrup before boiling can keep that moment of crystallization from occurring. Common interfering agents are corn syrup, glucose, and honey; cream of tartar, lemon juice, or vinegar.

  If it's not candy you're trying to prevent from becoming crystal clear - but, instead, your life - well, the best interfering agent is always a lie well told.

  * * *

  CREME CARAMEL

&n
bsp; CARAMEL

  1 cup sugar

  1/3 cup water

  2 tablespoons light corn syrup

  1/4 teaspoon lemon juice

  CUSTARD

  11/2 cups whole milk 11/2 cups light whipping cream 3 large eggs

  2 large egg yolks

  1/3 cup sugar

  11/2 teaspoons vanilla extract Pinch of salt

  You can make one large creme caramel, but I like to make individual ones in ramekins. To make the caramel, mix the sugar, water, corn syrup, and lemon juice in a medium nonreactive saucepan (a light-colored one, so you can see the color of the syrup). Simmer over medium-high heat, wiping the sides of the pan with a wet cloth to make sure there are no sugar crystals lurking that might cause crystallization. Cook for about 8 minutes, until the syrup turns from clear to gold, swirling the pan to make sure browning occurs evenly. Continue to cook for another 4 to 5 minutes, swirling the pan constantly, until large bubbles on the mixture's surface turn honey-colored. Remove the pan immediately from the heat and pour a portion of the caramel into each of eight ungreased 5-or 6-ounce ovenproof ramekins. Allow the caramel to cool and harden, about 15 minutes. (Ramekins can be covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to two days, but return them to room temperature before you move on to the next step.) To make the custard, heat the milk and cream in a medium saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally until a thermometer in the liquid reads 160 degrees F. Remove the mixture from the heat. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs, yolks, and sugar in a large bowl until just combined. Whisk the warm milk mixture, vanilla, and salt into the egg mixture until just mixed but not foamy. Strain the mixture through a mesh sieve into a large measuring cup and set it aside.

  Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. Meanwhile, fold a dish towel to fit the bottom of a large roasting pan. Divide the reserved custard mixture among the ramekins and place the filled ramekins in the pan, making sure they do not touch. Set the pan on the center rack of a preheated 350 degree F oven. Fill the pan with boiling water to reach halfway up the ramekins and cover the entire pan loosely with aluminum foil, so that steam can escape. Bake 35 to 40 minutes, until a paring knife inserted halfway between the center and edge of the custard comes out clean.

  Transfer the custards to a wire rack and cool to room temperature. To unmold, slide a paring knife around the outer edge of each custard, hold a serving plate over the top of the ramekin, invert, and shake gently to release the custard. Serve immediately.