My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  “Hello, Campbell.”

  I am going crazy; I am definitely going crazy. Because not five feet away from me is Julia Romano, whom I have not seen in fifteen years. Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear. “Julia,” I manage.

  She closes the door, and at the sound, Judge jumps to his feet. “I’m the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna Fitzgerald’s case,” she says.

  “Providence is a pretty tight place . . . I kept expecting . . . Well, I thought for sure we’d run into each other before now.”

  “It’s not all that hard to avoid someone, when you want to,” she answers. “You of all people should know.” Then, all of a sudden, the anger seems to steam out of her. “I’m sorry. That was totally uncalled for.”

  “It’s been a long time,” I reply, when what I really want to do is ask her what she’s been doing for the past fifteen years. If she still drinks tea with milk and lemon. If she’s happy. “Your hair isn’t pink anymore,” I say, because I am an idiot.

  “No, it’s not,” she replies. “Is that a problem?”

  I shrug. “It’s just. Well . . .” Where are words, when you need them? “I liked the pink,” I confess.

  “It tends to take away from my authority in a courtroom,” Julia admits.

  This makes me smile. “Since when do you care what people think of you?”

  She doesn’t respond, but something changes. The temperature of the room, or maybe the wall that comes up in her eyes. “Maybe instead of dragging up the past, we should talk about Anna,” she suggests diplomatically.

  I nod. But it feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit to or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn’t looking. How am I supposed to think about Anna Fitzgerald when I’m wondering whether Julia has ever woken up in someone’s arms and for just a moment, before the sleep cleared from her mind, thought maybe it was me?

  Sensing tension, Judge gets up and stands beside me. Julia seems to notice for the first time that we are not alone in the room. “Your partner?”

  “Only an associate,” I say. “But he made Law Review.” Her fingers scratch Judge behind the ear—goddamn lucky bastard—and grimacing, I ask her to stop. “He’s a service dog. He isn’t supposed to be petted.”

  Julia looks up, surprised. But before she can ask, I turn the conversation. “So. Anna.” Judge pushes his nose into my palm.

  She folds her arms. “I went to see her.”

  “And?”

  “Thirteen-year-olds are heavily influenced by their parents. And Anna’s mother seems convinced that this trial isn’t going to happen. I have a feeling she might be trying to convince Anna of that, too.”

  “I can take care of that,” I say.

  She looks up, suspicious. “How?”

  “I’ll get Sara Fitzgerald removed from the house.”

  Her jaw drops. “You’re kidding, right?”

  By now, Judge has started pulling my clothes in earnest. When I don’t respond, he barks twice. “Well, I certainly don’t think my client ought to be the one to move out. She hasn’t violated the judge’s orders. I’ll get a temporary restraining order keeping Sara Fitzgerald from having any contact with her.”

  “Campbell, that’s her mother!”

  “This week, she’s opposing counsel, and if she’s prejudicing my client in any way she needs to be ordered not to do so.”

  “Your client has a name, and an age, and a world that’s falling apart—the last thing she needs is more instability in her life. Have you even bothered to get to know her?”

  “Of course I have,” I lie, as Judge begins to whine at my feet.

  Julia glances down at him. “Is something wrong with your dog?”

  “He’s fine. Look. My job is to protect Anna’s legal rights and win the case, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “Of course you are. Not necessarily because it’s in Anna’s best interests . . . but because it’s in yours. How ironic is it that a kid who wants to stop being used for another person’s benefit winds up picking your name out of the Yellow Pages?”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I say, my jaw tightening.

  “Well, whose fault is that?”

  So much for not bringing up the past. A shudder runs the length of me, and I grab Judge by the collar. “Excuse me,” I say, and I walk out the office door, leaving Julia for the second time in my life.

  When you get right down to it, The Wheeler School was a factory, pumping out debutantes and future investment bankers. We all looked alike and talked alike. To us, summer was a verb.

  There were students, of course, who broke that mold. Like the scholarship kids, who wore their collars up and learned to row, never realizing that all along we were well aware they weren’t one of us. There were the stars, like Tommy Boudreaux, who was drafted by the Detroit Redwings in his junior year. Or the head cases, who tried to slit their wrists or mix booze and Valium and then left campus just as silently as they had once wandered around it.

  I was a sixth-former the year that Julia Romano came to Wheeler. She wore army boots and a Cheap Trick T-shirt under her school blazer; she was able to memorize entire sonnets without breaking a sweat. During free periods, while the rest of us were copping smokes behind the headmaster’s back, she climbed the stairs to the ceiling of the gymnasium and sat with her back against a heating duct, reading books by Henry Miller and Nietzsche. Unlike the other girls in school, with their smooth waterfalls of yellow hair caught up in a headband like ribbon candy, hers was an absolute tornado of black curls, and she never wore makeup—just those sharp features, take it or leave it. She had the thinnest hoop I’d ever seen, a silver filament, through her left eyebrow. She smelled like fresh dough rising.

  There were rumors about her: that she’d been booted out of a girl’s reform school; that she was some whiz kid with a perfect PSAT score; that she was two years younger than everyone else in our grade; that she had a tattoo. Nobody quite knew what to make of her. They called her Freak, because she wasn’t one of us.

  One day Julia Romano arrived at school with short pink hair. We all assumed she’d be suspended, but it turned out that in the litany of rules about what one had to wear at Wheeler, coiffure was conspicuously absent. It made me wonder why there wasn’t a single guy in the school with dreadlocks, and I realized it wasn’t because we couldn’t stand out; it’s because we didn’t want to.

  At lunch that day she passed the table where I was sitting with a bunch of guys on the sailing team and some of their girlfriends.

  “Hey,” one girl said, “did it hurt?”

  Julia slowed down. “Did what hurt?”

  “Falling into the cotton candy machine?”

  She didn’t even blink. “Sorry, I can’t afford to get my hair done at Wash, Cut and Blow Jobs ‘R’ Us.” Then she walked off to the corner of the cafeteria where she always ate by herself, playing solitaire with a deck of cards that had pictures of patron saints on the backs.

  “Shit,” one of my friends said, “that’s one girl I wouldn’t mess with.”

  I laughed, because everyone else did. But I also watched her sit down, push the tray of food away from her, and begin to lay out her cards. I wondered what it would be like to not give a damn about what people thought of you.

  One afternoon, I went AWOL from the sailing team where I was captain, and followed her. I made sure to stay far enough behind that she wouldn’t realize I was there. She headed down Blackstone Boulevard, turned into Swan Point Cemetery, and climbed to the highest point. She opened her knapsack, took out her textbooks and binder, and spread herself in front of a grave. “You might as well come out,” she said then, and I nearly swallowed my tongue, expecting a ghost, until I realized she was talking to me. “If you pay an extra quarter, you can eve