My Sister's Keeper Read online

  Jesse looks up. "Excellent. I'm starving."

  "Not you," I say. "We're going to court."

  *

  On the day I graduated from Wheeler, the locusts came. They arrived like a thick summer storm, tangling in the branches of trees and thudding hard on the ground. The meteorologists had a field day, trying to explain the phenomenon. They mentioned biblical plagues and El Nino and our prolonged drought. They recommended umbrellas, broad-brimmed hats, staying indoors.

  The graduation ceremony, however, was held outside under a large white canvas tent. As the salutatorian spoke, his message was punctuated by the suicide leap of bugs. Locusts rolled off the sloped roof, falling into the laps of spectators.

  I hadn't wanted to come, but my parents forced me to go. Julia found me while I was putting on my cap. She wrapped her arms around my waist. She tried to kiss me. "Hey," she said. "Which side of the earth did you drop off?"

  I remember thinking that in our white gowns, we looked like ghosts. I pushed her away from me. "Don't. Okay? Just don't."

  In every graduation photo my parents took, I was smiling as if this new world were a place I actually wanted to live in, while all around me insects fell, big as fists.

  *

  What is ethical to a lawyer differs from what's ethical to the rest of the world. In fact, we have a written code--the Rules of Professional Responsibility--which we have to read, be tested on, and follow in order to maintain a practice. But these very standards require us to do things that most people consider immoral. For example, if you walk into my office and say, "I killed the Lindbergh baby," I might ask you where the body is. "Under my bedroom floor," you tell me, "three feet down below the foundation of the house." If I am to do my job correctly, I can't tell a soul where that baby is. I could be disbarred, in fact, if I do.

  All this means is that I'm actually educated to think that morals and ethics do not necessarily go hand in hand.

  "Bruce," I say to the prosecutor, "my client will waive information. And if you get rid of some of these traffic misdemeanors, I swear he'll never come within fifty feet of the judge or his car again."

  I wonder how much the general population of this country knows that the legal system has far more to do with playing a good hand of poker than it does with justice.

  Bruce is an all right guy. Plus, I happen to know he's just been assigned to a double murder; he doesn't want to waste his time with Jesse Fitzgerald's conviction.

  "You know, we're talking about Judge Newbell's Humvee, Campbell," he says.

  "Yes. I am aware of that," I answer gravely, when what I'm thinking is that anyone vain enough to drive a Humvee is practically asking to have it ripped off.

  "Let me talk to the judge," Bruce sighs. "I'm probably going to get eviscerated for suggesting it, but I'll tell him that the cops don't mind if we give the kid a break."

  Twenty minutes later, we have signed all the forms, and Jesse stands beside me in the front of the court. Twenty-five minutes later he is on probation, officially, and we walk out onto the courthouse steps.

  It is one of those summer days that feel like a memory welling up in your throat. On days like this, I would have been sailing with my father.

  Jesse tips his head back. "We used to fish for tadpoles," he says out of nowhere. "Catch them up in a bucket, and then watch their tails turn into legs. Not a single one, I swear it, ever made it to frog." He turns to me and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. "Want one?"

  I haven't smoked since I was in law school. But I find myself taking a cigarette and lighting up. Judge watches life happen, lolling his tongue. Beside me, Jesse strikes a match. "Thanks," he says. "For what you're doing for Anna."

  A car passes by, its radio playing one of those songs that stations never play in winter. A blue stream of smoke flares out from Jesse's mouth. I wonder if he's ever been sailing. If there's a memory he's held on to all these years--sitting on the front lawn and feeling the grass cool down after sunset, holding a sparkler on the Fourth of July until it burned his fingers. We all have something.

  *

  She left the note underneath the windshield wiper of my Jeep seventeen days after graduation. Before I even opened it I wondered how she got to Newport, how she made her way back. I carried it out to the Bay to read on the rocks; and after I was done I held it up and sniffed at it, in case it smelled like her.

  I was not technically allowed to drive, but that hardly mattered. We met, as per that note, at the cemetery.

  Julia sat in front of the headstone, her arms clasped around her knees. She looked up when she saw me. "I wanted you to be different."

  "Julia, it's not you."

  "No?" She got to her feet. "I don't have a trust fund, Campbell. My father doesn't own a yacht. If you were crossing your fingers, expecting me to turn into Cinderella one of these days, you got it all wrong."

  "I don't care about any of that."

  "Bullshit you don't." Her eyes narrowed. "What did you think, that it would be fun to go slumming? Did you do it to piss off your parents? And now you can scrape me off your shoe like I'm something you stepped in by accident?" She struck out at me, clipping me across the chest. "I don't need you. I never needed you."

  "Well, I fucking needed you!" I shouted back at her. When she turned I grabbed her shoulders and I kissed her. I took the things I couldn't bring myself to say, and poured them into her.

  There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

  I pushed Julia away from me. Walked down that cemetery hill. Didn't look back.

  *

  Anna sits in the passenger seat, which doesn't go over well with Judge. He hangs his sorry face into the front, right between us, panting up a storm. "Today wasn't a very good harbinger of what's to come," I tell her.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "If you want the right to make major decisions, Anna, then you need to start making them now. Not relying on the rest of the world to clean up the messes."

  She scowls at me. "This is all because I called you to help my brother? I thought you were my friend."

  "I already told you once I'm not your friend; I'm your attorney. There's a seminal difference."

  "Fine." She fumbles with the lock. "I'll go back to the police and tell them to rearrest Jesse." She nearly succeeds in pushing the passenger door open, although we are traveling on a highway.

  I grab the handle and slam it shut. "Are you crazy?"

  "I don't know," she answers. "I'd ask you what you think, but it's probably not in the job description."

  With a yank of the wheel, I pull the car to the shoulder of the road. "You know what I think? The reason no one ever asks you for your opinion about anything important is because you change your mind so often they don't know what to believe. Take me, for example. I don't even know if we're still petitioning a judge for medical emancipation."

  "Why wouldn't we be?"

  "Ask your mother. Ask Julia. Every time I turn around someone informs me that you don't want to go through with this." I look down at the armrest, where her hand sits--purple sparkle polish, nails bitten to the quick. "If you want to be treated like an adult by the court, you need to start acting like one. The only way I can fight for you, Anna, is if you can prove to everyone that you can fight for yourself when I walk away."

  I pull the car back onto the road, and glance at her sidelong, but Anna sits with her hands wedged between her thighs, her face set mutinously ahead. "We're almost at your house," I say dryly. "Then you can get out and give the door a good slam in my face."

  "We're not going to my house. I need to go to the fire station. My dad and I are staying there for a while."

  "Is it my imagination, or did I not spend a couple of hours at the family court yesterday arguing this very point? And I thought you told Julia that you didn'