My Sister's Keeper Read online

  She thinks, and then a slow smile lights her up from the inside out. "Wait for something that makes me come back."

  This makes Taylor laugh out loud. "Maybe sometime we can wait together," he says, and he passes her a wrapper from a gauze pad. "Can I have your phone number?"

  Kate scribbles it down as Taylor's IV begins to beep. The nurse comes in and unhooks his line. "You're outta here, Taylor," she says. "Where's your ride?"

  "Waiting downstairs. I'm all set." He gets out of the padded chair slowly, almost weakly, the first reminder that this is not some casual conversation. He slips the piece of paper with our phone number into his pocket. "Well, I'll call you, Kate."

  When he leaves Kate lets all her breath out in a dramatic finish. She rolls her head after him. "Oh my God," she gasps. "He is gorgeous."

  The nurse, checking her flow, grins. "Tell me about it, honey. If only I were thirty years younger."

  Kate turns to me, blooming. "You think he'll call?"

  "Maybe," I say.

  "Where do you think we'll go out?"

  I think of Brian, who has always said that Kate can date . . . when she's forty. "Let's take one step at a time," I suggest. But inside, I am singing.

  *

  The arsenic, which ultimately put Kate into remission, worked its magic by wearing her down. Taylor Ambrose, a drug of an entirely different sort, works his magic by building her up. It becomes a habit: when the phone rings at seven P.M., Kate flies from the dinner table and hides in a closet with the portable receiver. The rest of us clear the dinner plates and spend time in the living room and get ready for bed, hearing little more than giggles and whispers, and then Kate emerges from her cocoon, flushed and glowing, first love beating like a hummingbird at the pulse in her throat. Every time it happens, I can't stop staring. It is not that Kate is so beautiful, although she is; it's that I never really let myself believe that I would see her all grown up.

  I follow her into the bathroom one night, after one of her marathon phone sessions. Kate stares at herself in the mirror, pursing her lips and raising her brows in a come-hither pose. Her hand comes up to her cropped hair--after the chemo, it never grew back in waves, just thick straight tufts that she usually cultivates with mousse to look like bedhead. She holds her palm out, as if she still expects to see hair shedding.

  "What do you think he sees when he looks at me?" Kate asks.

  I come to stand behind her. She is not the child that mirrors me--that would be Jesse--and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It's not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.

  "I think he sees a girl who knows what he's been through," I tell her honestly.

  "I got on the internet and read up on AML," she says. "His leukemia's got a pretty high cure rate." She turns to me. "When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself . . . is that what love's like?"

  It is hard, all of a sudden, to pull an answer through the tunnel of my throat. "Exactly."

  Kate runs the tap and washes her face with a foam of soap. I hand her a towel, and as she rises from the cloud of it, she says, "Something bad's going to happen."

  On alert, I search her out for clues. "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing. But that's the way it works. If there's something as good as Taylor in my life, I'm going to pay for it."

  "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," I say out of habit, yet there is a truth to this. Anyone who believes that people have ultimate control of what life hands to them needs only to spend a day in the shoes of a child with leukemia. Or her mother. "Maybe you're finally getting a break," I say.

  Three days later, during a routine CBC, the hematologist tells us that Kate is once again throwing promyelocytes, the first slide down a steep slope of relapse.

  *

  I have never eavesdropped, at least not intentionally, until the night that Kate comes back from her first date with Taylor, to see a movie. She tiptoes into her room and sits down on Anna's bed. "You awake?" she asks.

  Anna rolls over, groans. "I am now." Sleep slips away from her, like a shawl falling to the floor. "How was it?"

  "Wow," Kate says, and she laughs. "Wow."

  "How wow? Like, tonsil hockey wow?"

  "You are so disgusting," Kate whispers, although there's a smile behind it. "But he is a really good kisser." She dangles this like a fisherman.

  "Get out!" Anna's voice shines. "So what was it like?"

  "Flying," Kate answers. "I bet it feels just the same way."

  "I don't get what that has in common with someone slobbering all over you."

  "God, Anna, it's not like he spits on you."

  "What does Taylor taste like?"

  "Popcorn." She laughs. "And guy."

  "How did you know what to do?"

  "I didn't. It just kind of happened. Like the way you play hockey."

  This, finally, makes sense to Anna. "Well," she says, "I do feel pretty good when I'm doing that."

  "You have no idea," Kate sighs. There is some movement; I imagine her stripping off her clothes. I wonder if Taylor is imagining the same, somewhere.

  Pillow is punched, cover yanked back, sheets rustle as Kate gets into bed and rolls onto her side. "Anna?"

  "Hmm?"

  "He has scars on his palms, from graft-versus-host," Kate murmurs. "I could feel them when we were holding hands."

  "Was it gross?"

  "No," she says. "It was like we matched."

  *

  At first, I can't get Kate to agree to undergo the peripheral blood stem cell transplant. She refuses because she doesn't want to be hospitalized for chemo, doesn't want to have to sit in reverse isolation for the next six weeks when she could be going out with Taylor Ambrose. "It's your life," I point out to her, and she looks at me as if I'm crazy.

  "Exactly," she says.

  In the end, we compromise. The oncology team agrees to let Kate begin her chemo as an outpatient, in preparation for a transplant from Anna. At home, she agrees to wear a mask. At the first indication of her counts dropping, she'll be hospitalized. They aren't happy; they worry it will affect the procedure, but like me they also understand that Kate has reached the age where she can bargain with her will.

  As it turns out, this separation anxiety is all for naught, since Taylor shows up for Kate's first outpatient chemo appointment. "What are you doing here?"

  "I can't seem to stay away," he jokes. "Hey, Mrs. Fitzgerald." He sits down beside Kate in the empty adjoining chair. "God, it feels good to be in one of these without an IV hookup."

  "Rub it in," Kate mutters.

  Taylor puts his hand on her arm. "How far into it are you?"

  "Just started."

  He gets up and sits on the wide arm of Kate's chair, picks the emesis basin up from Kate's lap. "A hundred bucks says you can't make it till three without tossing your cookies."

  Kate glances at the clock. It is 2:50. "You're on."

  "What did you have for lunch?" He grins, wicked. "Or should I guess based on the colors?"

  "You're disgusting," Kate says, but her smile is as wide as the sea. Taylor puts his hand on her shoulder. She leans into the contact.

  The first time Brian touched me, he saved my life. There had been cataclysmic downpours in Providence, a nor'easter that swelled the tides and put the parking lot at the courthouse entirely underwater. I was clerking then, when we were evacuated. Brian's department was in charge; I walked onto the stone steps of the building to see cars floating by, and abandoned purses, and even a terrified paddling dog. While I had been filing briefs, the world I knew had been submerged. "Need a hand?" Brian asked, dressed in his full turnout gear, and he held out his arms. As he swam me to higher ground, rain struck my face and pelted my back. I wondered how--in a deluge--I could feel like I was being burned alive.

  "What's the longest you've ever gone before throwing up?" Kate asks Taylor.

  "Two days."