My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.

  More amazing is how even though that’s become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.

  • • •

  On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us doing our best to pretend that two days from now, my trial won’t begin. You’d think this is hard, but actually, it’s much easier than the alternative. My family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission: if we don’t talk about it, then—presto!—there’s no more lawsuit, no more kidney failure, no worries at all.

  I’m watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunning-hams, they’re not so different from us. All they ever seem to worry about is whether Richie’s band will be hired at Al’s place, or if Fonzie will win the kissing contest, when even I know that in the ’50s Joanie should have been having air raid drills at school and Marion was probably popping Valium and Howard would have been freaking out about commie attacks. Maybe if you spend your life pretending you’re on a movie set, you don’t ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren’t really yours.

  Kate is trying to do a crossword puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for vessel?” she asks.

  Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for borrowing two of her CDs without asking (for God’s sake, she was practically comatose; it isn’t like she would have been able to give her permission); she feels up to trying this crossword.

  “Vat,” I suggest. “Urn.”

  “Four letters.”

  “Ship,” my mother offers. “Maybe they’re thinking of that kind.”

  “Blood,” Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.

  “That’s five letters,” Kate replies, in a tone that’s much more pleasant than the one she used with me, I might add.

  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