My Sister's Keeper Read online

  We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our family.

  "Give me a number." He means on the pain scale. "Five?"

  "Three."

  Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. "It may be a five in an hour," he cautions. "It may be a nine."

  My mother's face has gone the color of an eggplant. "But Kate's feeling great right now!" she cheerleads.

  "I know. But the lucid moments, they're going to get briefer and further apart," Dr. Chance explains. "This isn't the APL. This is renal failure."

  "But after a transplant--" my mother says.

  All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You'd be able to hear a hummingbird's wings, that's how quiet it gets. I want to slink out of the room like mist; I don't want this to be my fault.

  Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. "As I understand it, Sara, the availability of an organ is under debate."

  "But--"

  "Mom," Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. "How long are we talking about?"

  "A week, maybe."

  "Wow," she says softly. "Wow." She touches the edge of the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at its edge. "Will it hurt?"

  "No," Dr. Chance promises. "I will make sure of that."

  Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. "Thanks. For the truth, I mean."

  When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. "Don't thank me." He gets up so heavily that I think he must be made of stone, and leaves the room without speaking another word.

  My mother, she folds into herself, that's the only way to explain it. Like paper, when you put it deep into the fireplace, and instead of burning, it simply seems to vanish.

  Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed. So I get up and walk toward my mother. I put a hand on her shoulder. "Mom," I say. "Stop."

  She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. "No, Anna. You stop."

  It takes me a little while, but I break away. "Anna," I murmur.

  My mother turns. "What?"

  "A four-letter word for vessel," I say, and I walk out of Kate's room.

  *

  Later that afternoon, I'm turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad's office at the fire station, with Julia sitting across from me. On the desk are a half-dozen pictures of my family. There's one with Kate as a baby, wearing a knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just as wide as the bluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store--ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees--people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.

  Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.

  I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and younger than I can ever remember them being. "Do you have a boyfriend?" I ask Julia.

  "No!" she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of shrugs. "Do you?"

  "There's this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I'm not sure." I pick up a pen and start to unscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of these built inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.

  "What happened?"

  "I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and we stood up he was--" I turn bright red. "Well, you know." I wave in the general vicinity of my lap.

  "Ah," Julia says.

  "He asked me whether I'd ever taken wood shop at school--I mean, God, wood shop?--and I go to tell him no and bam, I'm staring right there." I put the decapitated pen down on my dad's blotter. "When I see him now around town it's all I can think about." I stare up at her, a thought coming at me. "Am I a pervert?"

  "No, you're thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn't help it happening any more than you can help thinking about it when you see him. My brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guy could get excited: during the day, and during the night."

  "Your brother used to talk to you about stuff like that?"

  She laughs. "I guess so. Why, wouldn't Jesse?"

  I snort. "If I asked Jesse a question about sex, he'd laugh so hard he'd bust a rib, and then he'd give me a stash of Playboys and tell me to do research."

  "How about your parents?"

  I shake my head. My dad is out of the question--because he's my dad. My mom's too distracted. And Kate is in the same clueless boat I'm in. "Did you and your sister ever fight over the same guy?"

  "Actually, we don't go for the same type."

  "What's your type?"

  She thinks about it. "I don't know. Tall. Dark-haired. Breathing."

  "Do you think Campbell's cute?"

  Julia nearly falls out of her chair. "What?"

  "Well, I mean, for an older guy."

  "I could see where some women . . . might find him attractive," she says.

  "He looks like a character on one of the soaps that Kate likes." I run my thumbnail into the groove of wood on the desk. "It's weird. That I get to grow up and kiss someone and get married."

  And Kate doesn't.

  Julia leans forward. "What's going to happen if your sister dies, Anna?"

  One of the pictures on the desk is of me and Kate. We are little--maybe five and two. It is before her first relapse, but after her hair grew back. We're standing on the edge of a beach, wearing matching bathing suits, playing patty-cake. You could fold this picture in half and think it was a mirror image--Kate small for her age and me tall; Kate's hair a different color but with the same natural part and flip at the bottom; Kate's hands pressed up against mine. Until now, I don't think I've really realized how much alike we are.

  *

  The phone rings just before ten o'clock that night, and to my surprise it's my name that's paged throughout the firehouse. I pick up the extension in the kitchen area, which has been cleaned and mopped for the night. "Hello?"

  "Anna," my mother says.

  Immediately, I assume she's calling about Kate. There isn't much else for her to say to me, given the way we left things earlier at the hospital. "Is everything okay?"

  "Kate's asleep."

  "That's good," I reply, and then wonder if it really is.

  "I called for two reasons. The first is to say that I'm sorry about this morning."

  I feel very small. "Me too," I admit. In that minute, I remember how she used to tuck me in at night. She'd go to Kate's bed first, and lean down, and announce that she was kissing Anna. And then she'd come to my bed and say she'd come to hug Kate. Every time, it cracked us up. She'd turn off the light, and for long moments after she left, the room still smelled of the lotion she used on her skin to keep it as soft as the inside of a flannel pillowcase.

  "The second reason I called," my mother says, "was just to say good night."

  "That's all?"

  In her voice, I can hear a smile. "Isn't that enough?"

  "Sure," I tell her, although it isn't.

  *

  Because I can't fall asleep, I slip out of my bed at the fire station, past my father, who's snoring. I steal the Guinness Book of World Records from the men's room and lie down on the roof of the station to read by moonlight. An eighteen-month-old baby named Alejandro fell 65 feet 7 inches from the window of his parents' apartment in Murcia, Spain, and became the infant to survive the longest fall. Roy Sullivan, of Virginia, survived seven lightning strikes, only to commit suicide after being spurned by a lover. A cat was found in rubble eighty days after a Taiwanese earthquake that killed 2,000, and made a full recovery. I find myself reading and rereading the section called "Survivors and Lifesavers," adding listings in my head. Longest surviving APL patient, it would read. Most ecstatic sister.

  My father finds me when I have put the book a