My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  Kate’s lips are slick as cherries. I pick her up in my arms. She’s nothing but bones, poking sharp through the skin of her T-shirt.

  “When Anna ran off, Kate wouldn’t let me into her room,” my mother says, hurrying beside me. “I gave her a little while to calm down. And then I heard her coughing. I had to get in there.”

  So you kicked it down, I think, and it doesn’t surprise me. We reach the car, and she opens the door so that I can slide Kate inside. I pull out of the driveway and speed even faster than normal through town, onto the highway, toward the hospital.

  Today, when my parents were at court with Anna, Kate and I watched TV. She wanted to put on her soap and I told her fuck off and put on the scrambled Playboy channel instead. Now, as I run through red lights, I’m wishing that I’d let her watch that retarded soap. I’m trying not to look at her little white coin of a face in the rearview mirror. You’d think, with all the time I’ve had to get used to it, that moments like this wouldn’t come as such a shock. The question we cannot ask pushes through my veins with each beat: Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?

  The minute we hit the ER driveway, my mother’s out of the car, hurrying me to get Kate. We are quite a picture walking through the automatic doors, me with Kate bleeding in my arms, and my mother grabbing the first nurse who walks by. “She needs platelets,” my mother orders.

  They take her away from me, and for a few moments, even after the ER team and my mother have disappeared with Kate behind closed curtains, I stand with my arms buoyed, trying to get used to the fact that there’s no longer anything in them.

  • • •

  Dr. Chance, the oncologist I know, and Dr. Nguyen, some expert I don’t, tell us what we’ve already figured out: these are the death throes of end-stage kidney disease. My mother stands next to the bed, her hand tight around Kate’s IV pole. “Can you still do a transplant?” she asks, as if Anna never started her lawsuit, as if it means absolutely nothing.

  “Kate’s in a pretty grave clinical state,” Dr. Chance tells her. “I told you before I didn’t know if she was strong enough to survive that level of surgery; the odds are even slighter now.”

  “But if there was a donor,” she says, “would you do it?”

  “Wait.” You’d think my throat had just been paved with straw. “Would mine work?”

  Dr. Chance shakes his head. “A kidney donor doesn’t have to be a perfect match, in an ordinary case. But your sister isn’t an ordinary case.”

  When the doctors leave, I can feel my mother staring at me. “Jesse,” she says.

  “It wasn’t like I was volunteering. I just wanted to, you know, know.” But inside, I’m burning just as hot as I was when that fire caught at the warehouse. What made me believe I might be worth something, even now? What made me think I could save my sister, when I can’t even save myself?

  Kate’s eyes open, so that she’s staring right at me. She licks her lips—they’re still caked with blood—and it makes her look like a vampire. The undead. If only.

  I lean closer, because she doesn’t have enough in her right now to make the words creep across the air between us. Tell, she mouths, so that my mother won’t look up.

  I answer, just as silent. Tell? I want to make sure I’ve got it right.

  Tell Anna.

  But the door to the room bursts open and my father fills the room with smoke. His hair and clothes and skin reek of it, so much so that I look up, expecting the sprinklers to go off. “What happened?” he asks, going right to the bed.

  I slip out of the room, because nobody needs me there anymore. In the elevator, in front of the NO SMOKING sign, I light a cigarette.

  Tell Anna what?

  SARA

  1990–1991

  BY PURE CHANCE, or maybe karmic distribution, all three clients at the hair salon are pregnant. We sit under the dryers, hands folded over our bellies like a row of Buddhas. “My top choices are Freedom, Low, and Jack,” says the girl next to me, who is getting her hair dyed pink.

  “What if it’s not a boy?” asks the woman sitting on my other side.

  “Oh, those are meant to be for either.”

  I hide a smile. “I vote for Jack.”

  The girl squints, looking out the window at the rotten weather. “Sleet is nice,” she says absently, and then tries it on for size. “Sleet, pick up your toys. Sleet, honey, come on, or we’re gonna be late for the Uncle Tupelo concert.” She digs a piece of paper and a pencil stub out of her maternity overalls and scribbles down the name.

  The woman on my left grins at me. “Is this your first?”

  “My third.”

  “Mine too. I have two boys. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

  “I have a boy and a girl,” I tell her. “Five and three.”

  “Do you know what you’re having this time?”

  I know everything about this baby, from her sex to the very placement of her chromosomes, including the ones that make her a perfect match for Kate. I know exactly what I am having: a miracle. “It’s a girl,” I answer.

  “Ooh, I’m so jealous! My husband and I, we didn’t find out at the ultrasound. I thought if I heard it was another boy, I might never finish out the last five months.” She shuts off her hair dryer and pushes it back. “You have any names picked?”

  It strikes me that I don’t. Although I am nine months pregnant, although I have had plenty of time to dream, I have not really considered the specifics of this child. I have thought of this daughter only in terms of what she will be able to do for the daughter I already have. I haven’t admitted this even to Brian, who lies at night with his head on my considerable belly, waiting for the twitches that herald—he thinks—the first female placekicker for the Patriots. Then again, my dreams for her are no less exalted; I plan for her to save her sister’s life.

  “We’re waiting,” I tell the woman.

  Sometimes I think it is all we ever do.

  • • •

  There was a moment, after Kate’s three months of chemotherapy last year, that I was stupid enough to believe we had beaten the odds. Dr. Chance said that she seemed to be in remission, and that we would just keep an eye on what came next. And for a little while, my life even got back to normal: chauffeuring Jesse to soccer practice and helping out in Kate’s preschool class and even taking a hot bath to relax.

  And yet, there was a part of me that knew the other shoe was bound to drop. This part scoured Kate’s pillow every morning, even after her hair started to grow back with its frizzy, burned ends, just in case it started falling out again. This part went to the geneticist recommended by Dr. Chance. Engineered an embryo given the thumbs-up by scientists to be a perfect match for Kate. Took the hormones for IVF and conceived that embryo, just in case.

  It was during a routine bone marrow aspiration that we learned Kate was in molecular relapse. On the outside, she looked like any other three-year-old girl. On the inside, the cancer had surged through her system again, steamrolling the progress that had been made with chemo.

  Now, in the backseat with Jesse, Kate’s kicking her feet and playing with a toy phone. Jesse sits next to her, staring out the window. “Mom? Do buses ever fall on people?”

  “Like out of trees?”

  “No. Like . . . just over.” He makes a flipping motion with his hand.

  “Only if the weather’s really bad, or if the driver’s going too fast.”

  He nods, accepting my explanation for his safety in this universe. Then: “Mom? Do you have a favorite number?”

  “Thirty-one,” I tell him. This is my due date. “How about you?”

  “Nine. Because it can be a number, or how old you are, or a six standing on its head.” He pauses only long enough to take a breath. “Mom? Do we have special scissors to cut meat?”

  “We do.” I take a right and drive past a cemetery, headstones canted forward and back like a set of yellowed teeth.

  “Mom?” Jesse asks, “is that where Kate will go?”