My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  After a while, when it becomes clear to me that any information Campbell feels like providing me with won’t be doled out until after dessert, I give in. I lie on my back with my arm draped over the sleeping dog. I watch the sail, loose now, flap like the great white wing of a pelican. Campbell comes up from belowdecks, where he’s been hunting down a corkscrew, and holds out two glasses of red wine. He sits down on the other side of Judge and scratches behind the German shepherd’s ears. “You ever think about being an animal?”

  “Figuratively? Or literally?”

  “Rhetorically,” he says. “If you hadn’t drawn that human card.”

  I think about this for a while. “Is this a trick question? Like, if I say killer whale you’re going to tell me that means I’m a ruthless, cold-blooded, bottom-feeder fish?”

  “They’re mammals,” Campbell says. “And no. It’s just a simple, making-polite-conversation inquiry.”

  I turn my head. “What would you be?”

  “I asked you first.”

  Well, a bird is out of the question; I’m too scared of heights. I don’t think I have the right attitude to be a cat. And I am too much of a loner to function in a pack, like a wolf or a dog. I think of saying something like tarsier just to show off, but then he’ll ask what the hell that is and I can’t remember if it is a rodent or a lizard. “A goose,” I decide.

  Campbell bursts out laughing. “As in Mother? Or Silly?”

  It is because they mate for life, but I would rather fall overboard than tell him this. “What about you?”

  But he doesn’t answer me directly. “When I asked Anna the same question, she told me she’d be a phoenix.”

  The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my mind. “They don’t really exist.”

  Campbell strokes the dog’s head. “She said that depends on whether or not there’s someone who can see them.” Then he looks up at me. “How do you see her, Julia?”

  The wine I have been drinking suddenly tastes bitter. Was all this—the charm, the picnic, the sunset sail—engineered to tip my hand in his favor at tomorrow’s trial? Whatever I recommend as guardian ad litem will weigh heavily in Judge DeSalvo’s decision, and Campbell knows it.

  Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

  “I’m not going to tell you what my decision is,” I say stiffly. “You can wait to hear it when you call me as a witness.” I grab for the anchor and try to reel it in. “I’d like to go back now, please.”

  Campbell yanks the line out of my hand. “You already told me that you don’t think it’s in Anna’s best interests to be a kidney donor for her sister.”

  “I also told you she’s incapable of making that decision by herself.”

  “Her father moved her out of the house. He can be her moral compass.”

  “And how long is that going to last? What about the next time?” I am furious at myself for falling for this. For agreeing to go out to dinner, for letting myself believe that Campbell might want to be with me, rather than use me. Everything—from his compliments on my looks to the wine sitting on the deck between us—has been coldly calculated to help him win his case.

  “Sara Fitzgerald offered us a deal,” Campbell says. “She said if Anna donates the kidney, she will never ask her to do anything for her sister again. Anna turned it down.”

  “You know, I could have the judge throw you in jail for this. It’s completely unethical to try to seduce me into changing my mind.”

  “Seduce you? All I did was lay the cards on the table for you. I made your job easier.”

  “Oh, right. Forgive me,” I say sarcastically. “This isn’t about you. This isn’t about me writing my report with a definite slant toward your client’s petition. If you were an animal, Campbell, you know what you’d be? A toad. No, actually, you’d be a parasite on the belly of a toad. Something that takes what it needs without giving a single thing back.”

  A vein throbs blue in his temple. “Are you finished?”

  “Actually, I’m not. Is anything that comes out of your mouth ever honest?”

  “I did not lie to you.”

  “No? What’s the dog for, Campbell?”

  “Jesus Christ, will you shut up already?” Campbell says, and he pulls me into his arms and kisses me.

  His mouth moves like a silent story; he tastes like salt and wine. There is no moment of relearning, of adjusting the patterns of the past fifteen years; our bodies remember where to go. He licks my name along the course of my throat. He presses himself so close to me that any hurt left on the surface between us spreads thin, becomes a binding instead of a boundary.

  When we break away to breathe again, Campbell stares at me. “I’m still right,” I whisper.

  It is the most natural thing in the world when Campbell pulls my old sweatshirt up over my head, works at the clasp of my bra. When he kneels before me with his head over my heart, when I feel the water rocking the hull of the boat, I think that maybe this is the place for us. Maybe there are entire worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide.

  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 façade; 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 h