My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  “You will,” I insist, but he shakes his head.

  My heart beats a little faster. “A punch bowl, that’s what you can buy. A picture frame. You can make a toast.”

  “Sara,” Dr. Chance says, “you need to say good-bye.”

  • • •

  Jesse spends fifteen minutes in Kate’s closed room, and comes out looking for all the world like a bomb about to explode. He runs through the halls of the pediatric ICU ward. “I’ll go,” Brian says. He heads down the corridor in Jesse’s direction.

  Anna sits with her back to the wall. She is angry, too. “I’m not doing this.”

  I crouch down next to her. “There is nothing, believe me, I’d rather make you do less. But if you don’t, Anna, then one day, you’re going to wish you had.”

  Belligerent, Anna walks into Kate’s room, climbs onto a chair. Kate’s chest rises and falls, the work of the respirator. All the fight goes out of Anna as she reaches out to touch her sister’s cheek. “Can she hear me?”

  “Absolutely,” I answer, more for myself than for her.

  “I won’t go to Minnesota,” Anna whispers. “I won’t ever go anywhere.” She leans close. “Wake up, Kate.”

  We both hold our breath, but nothing happens.

  • • •

  I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don’t necessarily want them to be there.

  Brian and Kate and I are a circuit. We sit on each side of the bed and hold each other’s hands, and one of hers. “You were right,” I tell him. “We should have taken her home.”

  Brian shakes his head. “If we hadn’t tried the arsenic, we’d spend the rest of our lives asking why not.” He brushes back the pale hair that surrounds Kate’s face. “She’s such a good girl. She’s always done what you ask her to do.” I nod, unable to speak. “That’s why she’s hanging on, you know. She wants your permission to leave.”

  He bends down to Kate, crying so hard he cannot catch his breath. I put my hand on his head. We are not the first parents to lose a child. But we are the first parents to lose our child. And that makes all the difference.

  • • •

  When Brian falls asleep, draped over the foot of the bed, I take Kate’s scarred hand between both of mine. I trace the ovals of her nails and remember the first time I painted them, when Brian couldn’t believe I’d do that to a one-year-old. Now, twelve years later, I turn over her palm and wish I knew how to read it, or better yet, how to edit that lifeline.

  I pull my chair closer to the hospital bed. “Do you remember the summer we signed you up for camp? And the night before you left, you said you’d changed your mind and wanted to stay home? I told you to get a seat on the left side of the bus, so that when it pulled away, you’d be able to look back and see me there, waiting for you.” I press her hand against my cheek, hard enough to leave a mark. “You get that same seat in Heaven. One where you can watch me, watching you.”

  I bury my face in the blankets and tell this daughter of mine how much I love her. I squeeze her hand one last time.

  Only to feel the slightest pulse, the tiniest grasp, the smallest clutch of Kate’s fingers, as she claws her way back to this world.

  ANNA

  HERE’S MY QUESTION: What age are you when you’re in Heaven? I mean, if it’s Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got blown up by a mine?

  I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you’d like to be seen as by everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if I’m a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven I’d be young and pretty.

  Once at a dinner party I heard my father say that even though he was old old old, in his heart he was twenty-one. So maybe there is a place in your life you wear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.

  The problem, I suppose, is that everyone’s different. What happens in Heaven when all these people are trying to find each other after so many years spent apart? Say that you die and start looking around for your husband, who died five years ago. What if you’re picturing him at seventy, but he hit his groove at sixteen and is wandering around suave as can be?

  Or what if you’re Kate, and you die at sixteen, but in Heaven you choose to look thirty-five, an age you never got to be here on Earth. How would anyone ever be able to find you?

  • • •

  Campbell calls my father at the station when we’re having lunch, and says that opposing counsel wants to talk about the case. Which is a really stupid way to put it, since we all know he’s talking about my mother. He says we have to meet at three o’clock in his office, no matter that it’s Sunday.

  I sit on the floor with Judge’s head in my lap. Campbell is so busy he doesn’t even tell me not to do it. My mother arrives right on the dot and (since Kerri the secretary is off today) walks in by herself. She has made a special effort to pull her hair back into a neat bun. She’s put on some makeup. But unlike Campbell, who wears this room like an overcoat he can shrug on and off, my mom looks completely out of place in a law firm. It is hard to believe that my mother used to do this for a living. I guess she used to be someone else, once. I suppose we all were.

  “Hello,” she says quietly.

  “Ms. Fitzgerald,” Campbell replies. Ice.

  My mother’s eyes move from my father, at the conference table, to me, on the floor. “Hi,” she says again. She steps forward, like she is going to hug me, but she stops.

  “You called this meeting, Counselor,” Campbell prompts.

  My mother sits down. “I know. I was . . . well, I’m hoping that we can clear this up. I want us to make a decision, together.”

  Campbell raps his fingers on the table. “Are you offering us a deal?”

  He makes it sound so businesslike. My mother blinks at him. “Yes, I guess I am.” She turns her chair toward me, as if only the two of us are in the room. “Anna, I know how much you’ve done for Kate. I also know she doesn’t have many chances left . . . but she might have this one.”

  “My client doesn’t need coercing—”

  “It’s okay, Campbell,” I say. “Let her talk.”

  “If the cancer comes back, if this kidney transplant doesn’t work, if things don’t wind up the way we all wish they would for Kate—well, I will never ask you to help your sister again . . . but Anna, will you do this one last thing?”

  By now, she looks very tiny, smaller even than me, as if I am the parent and she is the child. I wonder how this optical illusion took place, when neither of us has moved.

  I glance at my father, but he’s gone boulder-still, and he seems to be doing everything he can to follow the grain of wood in the conference table instead of getting involved.

  “Are you indicating that if my client willingly donates a kidney, then she will be absolved of all other medical procedures that may be necessary in the future to prolong Kate’s life?” Campbell clarifies.

  My mother takes a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “We need, of course, to discuss it.”

  When I was seven, Jesse went out of his way to make sure I wasn’t stupid enough to believe in Santa. It’s Mom and Dad, he explained, and I fought him every step of the way. I decided to test the theory. So that Christmas I wrote to Santa, and asked for a hamster, which is what I wanted most in the world. I mailed the letter myself in the school secretary’s mailbox. And I steadfastly did not tell my parents,