My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  “I know where you’re going with this, Mr. Alexander,” the psychiatrist says coldly. “The problem is that this kind of medical situation hasn’t existed before. There is no precedent. We’re trying to feel our way as best we can.”

  “Isn’t your job as an ethics committee to look at situations that haven’t existed before?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “Dr. Bergen, in your expert opinion, is it ethically right for Anna Fitzgerald to have been asked to donate parts of her own body repeatedly for thirteen years?”

  “Objection!” my mother calls out.

  The judge strokes his chin. “I want to hear this.”

  Dr. Bergen glances at me again. “Quite frankly, even before I knew that Anna didn’t want to be a participant, I voted against her donating a kidney to her sister. I don’t believe Kate would live through the transplant, and therefore Anna would undergo a serious operation for no reason at all. Up until this point, however, I think that the risk of the procedures was small, compared to the benefit the family as a whole received, and I support the choices the Fitzgeralds made for Anna.”

  Campbell pretends to consider this. “Dr. Bergen, what kind of car do you drive?”

  “A Porsche.”

  “Bet you like it.”

  “I do,” he says guardedly.

  “What if I told you that you have to give up your Porsche before you leave this courtroom, because that action will save Judge DeSalvo’s life?”

  “That’s ridiculous. You—”

  Campbell leans in. “What if you had no choice? What if, today, psychiatrists simply have to do whatever lawyers decide is in the best interests of others?”

  He rolls his eyes. “In spite of the high drama you’re alluding to, Mr. Alexander, there are basic donor rights, safeguards put into place in medicine, so that the greater good doesn’t steamroll the pioneers who help create it. The United States has a long and nasty history of the abuse of informed consent, which is what led to laws relating to Human Subjects Research. It keeps people from being used as experimental lab rats.”

  “Then tell us,” Campbell says, “how the hell did Anna Fitzgerald slip through the cracks?”

  • • •

  When I was only seven months old, there was a block party in our neighborhood. It’s just as bad as you’re thinking: Jell-O molds and towers of cheese cubes and dancing in the street to music piped out of someone’s living room stereo. I, of course, have no personal recollection of any of this—I was plopped down in one of those walkers they made for babies before babies started overturning them and cracking their heads open.

  At any rate, I was in my walker, tooling around between the tables and watching the other kids, so the story goes, when I sort of lost my footing. Our block is canted at an angle, and suddenly the wheels were moving faster than I could make them stop. I whizzed past adults, under the barricade the cops had put up at the end of the road to shut it off to traffic, and I was heading right for a main drag full of cars.

  But Kate came out of nowhere and ran after me. She somehow managed to grab me by the back of my shirt moments before I got hit by a passing Toyota.

  Every now and then, someone on the block brings this up. Me, I remember it as the time she saved me, instead of the other way around.

  • • •

  My mother gets her first chance to play lawyer. “Dr. Bergen,” she says, “how long have you known of my family?”

  “I’ve been at Providence Hospital for ten years now.”

  “In those ten years, when some aspect of Kate’s treatment was presented to you, what did you do?”

  “Come up with a plan of action that was recommended,” he says. “Or an alternate, if possible.”

  “When you did, at any point in your report did you mention that Anna shouldn’t be a part of it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever say this would hurt Anna considerably?”

  “No.”

  “Or put her in grave medical danger herself?”

  “No.”

  Maybe it’s not Campbell, after all, who will turn out to be my white knight. Maybe it’s my mother.

  “Dr. Bergen,” she asks, “do you have kids?”

  The doctor looks up. “I have a son. He’s thirteen.”

  “Have you ever looked at these cases that come to the medical ethics committee and put yourself in a patient’s shoes? Or better yet, a parent’s shoes?”

  “I have,” he admits.

  “If you were me,” my mother says, “and the medical ethics committee handed you back a piece of paper with a suggested course of action that would save your son’s life, would you question them further . . . or would you just jump at the chance?”

  He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.

  • • •

  Judge DeSalvo calls a second recess after that. Campbell says something about getting up and stretching my legs. So I start to follow him out, walking right past my mother. As I pass by, I feel her hand on my waist, tugging down my T-shirt, which is riding up in the back. She hates the spaghetti-strap girls, the ones who come to school in halters and low-riders, like they’re trying out as dancers in a Britney Spears video instead of going to math class. I can almost hear her voice: Please tell me that shrank in the wash.

  She seems to realize mid-tug that maybe she shouldn’t have done this. I stop, and Campbell stops, too, and her face goes bright red. “Sorry,” she says.

  I put my hand over hers and tuck my shirt into the back of my jeans where it should be. I look at Campbell. “Meet you outside?”

  He’s giving me a look that has Bad Idea written all over it, but he nods and heads down the aisle. Then my mother and I are nearly alone in the courtroom. I lean forward and kiss her on the cheek. “You did really great up there,” I tell her, because I don’t know how to say what I really want to: that the people you love can surprise you every day. That maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.

  SARA

  2002

  KATE MEETS TAYLOR AMBROSE when they are sitting side by side, hooked up to IVs. “What are you here for?” she asks, and I immediately look up from my book, because in all the years that Kate has been receiving outpatient treatment I cannot remember her initiating a conversation.

  The boy she is talking to is not much older than she is, maybe sixteen to her fourteen. He has brown eyes that dance, and is wearing a Bruins cap over his bald head. “The free cocktails,” he answers, and the dimples in his cheeks deepen.

  Kate grins. “Happy hour,” she says, and she looks up at the bag of platelets being infused into her.

  “I’m Taylor.” He holds out his hand. “AML.”

  “Kate. APL.”

  He whistles, and raises his brows. “Ooh,” he says. “A rarity.”

  Kate tosses her cropped hair. “Aren’t we all?”

  I watch this, amazed. Who is this flirt, and what has she done with my little girl?

  “Platelets,” he says, scrutinizing the label on her IV bag. “You’re in remission?”

  “Today, anyway.” Kate glances at his pole, the telltale black bag that covers the Cytoxan. “Chemo?”

  “Yeah. Today, anyway. So, Kate,” Taylor says. He has that rangy puppy look of a sixteen-year-old, one with knobby knees and thick fingers and cheekbones he hasn’t yet grown into. When he crosses his arms, the muscles swell. I realize he’s doing this on purpose, and I duck my head to hide a smile. “What do you do when you’re not at Providence Hospital?”

  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. �