My Sister's Keeper Read online

  MONDAY

  How great a matter a little fire kindleth!

  --THE NEW TESTAMENT, James 3:5

  CAMPBELL

  WE SLEEP IN THE TINY CABIN, moored to its slip. Tight quarters, but that hardly seems to matter: all night long, she fits herself around me. She snores, just a little. Her front tooth is crooked. Her eyelashes are as long as the nail of my thumb.

  These are the minutiae that prove, more than anything else, the difference between us now that fifteen years have passed. When you're seventeen, you don't think about whose apartment you want to sleep in. When you're seventeen, you don't even see the pearl-pink of her bra, the lace that arrows between her legs. When you're seventeen it's all about the now, not the after.

  What I had loved about Julia--there, I've said it now--was that she didn't need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilted army-surplus jacket and combat boots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit.

  No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.

  After Julia, there weren't all that many women. None whose names I took the time to remember, anyway. It was far too complicated to maintain the facade; instead, I chose the coward's rocky route of one-night stands. Out of necessity--medical and emotional--I have gotten rather skilled at being an escape artist.

  But there are a half-dozen times this past night when I had the opportunity to leave. While Julia was sleeping, I even considered how to do it: a note pinned to the pillow, a message scrawled on the deck with her cherry lipstick. And yet the urge to do this was nowhere near as strong as the need to wait just one more minute, one more hour.

  From the spot where he's curled up on the galley table tight as a cinnamon bun, Judge raises his head. He whines a little, and I completely understand. Detangling myself from Julia's rich forest of hair, I slip out of the bed. She inches into the warm spot I've left behind.

  I swear, it makes me hard again.

  But instead of doing what comes naturally--that is, calling in sick with some latent strain of smallpox and making the clerk of the court reschedule the hearing so that I can spend the day getting laid--I pull on my pants and go above-deck. I want to make sure I'm at the courthouse before Anna, and need to shower and change. I leave Julia the keys to my car--it's a short walk to my place. It's only when Judge and I are on our way home that I realize unlike every other bloodshot morning that I have left a woman, I haven't fashioned some charming symbol of my exit for Julia, something to lessen the blow of abandonment upon waking.

  I wonder if this was an oversight. Or if I have been waiting all this time for her to come back, so that I can grow up.

  *

  When Judge and I arrive at the Garrahy building for the hearing, we have to fight our way through the reporters who have lined up for the Main Event. They thrust microphones in my face, and inadvertently step on Judge's paws. Anna will take one look at walking this gauntlet, and bolt.

  Inside the front door, I flag down Vern. "Get us some security out here, will you?" I tell him. "They're going to eat the witnesses alive."

  Then I see Sara Fitzgerald, already waiting. She is wearing a suit that most likely hasn't seen the outside of the plastic dry cleaner's bag for a decade, and her hair is pulled back severely into a barrette. She doesn't carry a briefcase, but a knapsack instead. "Good morning," I say evenly.

  The door blows open and Brian enters, looking from Sara to me. "Where's Anna?"

  Sara takes a step forward. "Didn't she come here with you?"

  "She was already gone when I got back from a call at five A.M. She left a note and said she'd meet me here." He glances at the door, at the jackals on the other side. "I bet she took off."

  Again, there is the sound of a seal being breached, and then Julia surfs into the courthouse on a crest of shouts and questions. She smooths back her hair, gets her bearings, then looks at me and loses them again.

  "I'll find her," I say.

  Sara bristles. "No, I will."

  Julia looks at each of us. "Find who?"

  "Anna is temporarily absent," I explain.

  "Absent?" Julia says. "As in disappeared?"

  "Not at all." This isn't a lie, either. For Anna to have disappeared, she would have had to appear in the first place.

  I realize that I even know where I am headed--at the same moment that Sara understands it, too. In that moment she lets me take the lead. Julia grabs my arm as I am walking toward the door. She shoves my car keys into my hand. "Now you do understand why this isn't going to work?"

  I turn to her. "Julia, listen. I want to talk about what's going on between us, too. But this isn't the right time."

  "I was talking about Anna. Campbell, she's waffling. She couldn't even show up for her own court date. What does that say to you?"

  "That everyone gets scared," I answer finally, fair warning for all of us.

  *

  The shades to the hospital room are drawn, but that doesn't keep me from seeing the angel pallor of Kate Fitzgerald's face, the web of blue veins mapping out the last-chance path of medication running under her skin. Curled up on the foot of the bed is Anna.

  At my command, Judge waits by the door. I crouch down. "Anna, it's time to go."

  When the door to the hospital room opens, I'm expecting either Sara Fitzgerald or a doctor with a crash cart. Instead, to my shock, Jesse stands on the threshold. "Hey," he says, as if we are old friends.

  How did you get here? I almost ask, but realize I don't want to hear the answer. "We're on our way to the courthouse. Need a lift?" I ask dryly.

  "No thanks. I thought since everyone was going to be there, I'd stay here." His eyes do not waver from Kate. "She looks like shit."

  "What do you expect," Anna answers, awake now. "She's dying."

  Again, I find myself staring at my client. I should know better than most that motivations are never what they seem to be, but I still cannot figure her out. "We need to go."

  In the car, Anna rides shotgun while Judge takes a seat in the back. She starts telling me about some crazy precedent she found on the internet, where a guy in Montana in 1876 was legally prohibited from using the water from a river that originated on his brother's land, even though it meant all his crops would dry up. "What are you doing?" she asks, when I deliberately miss the turn to the courthouse.

  Instead I pull over next to a park. A girl with a great ass jogs by, holding on to the leash of one of those froufrou dogs that looks more like a cat. "We're gonna be late," Anna says after a moment.

  "We already are. Look, Anna. What's going on here?"

  She gives me one of those patented teenage looks, as if to say that there's no way she and I descended from the same evolutionary chain. "We're going to court."

  "That's not what I'm asking. I want to know why we're going to court."

  "Well, Campbell, I guess you cut the first day of law school, but that's pretty much what happens when someone files a lawsuit."

  I level my gaze on her, refusing to be bested. "Anna, why are we going to court?"

  She doesn't blink. "Why do you have a service dog?"

  I rap my fingers on the steering wheel and look out over the park. A mother pushes a stroller now, across the same spot where the jogger was, oblivious to the kid who's trying his best to crawl out. A titter of birds explodes from a tree. "I don't talk about this with anyone," I say.

  "I'm not just anyone."

  I take a deep breath. "A long time ago I got sick and wound up with an ear infection. But for whatever reason, the medicine didn't work and I got nerve damage. I'm totally deaf in my left ear. Which isn't such a big deal, in the long run, but there are certain lifestyle issues I couldn't handle. Like hearing a car approach, you know, but not being able to tell what direction it's