My Sister's Keeper Read online

  I am about to ask if they're all right when Kate speaks. "Are you afraid of dying?"

  Taylor shakes his head. "Not really. Sometimes, though, I think about my funeral. If people will say good things, you know, about me. If anyone will cry." He hesitates. "If anyone will even come."

  "I will," Kate promises.

  Taylor dips his head toward Kate's, and she sways closer, and I realize that this is why I followed them. I knew this was what I would find, and like Brian, I wanted one more picture of my daughter, one that I might worry between my fingers like a piece of sea glass. Taylor lifts up the edges of her blue hygienic mask and I know I should stop him, I know I have to, but I don't. This much I want her to have.

  When they kiss, it is beautiful: those alabaster heads bent together, smooth as statues--an optical illusion, a mirror image that's folding into itself.

  *

  When Kate goes into the hospital for her stem cell transplant, she's an emotional wreck. She is far less concerned with the runny fluid being infused into her catheter than she is with the fact that Taylor hasn't called her in three days, and has in fact not returned her calls either. "Did you have a fight?" I ask, and she shakes her head. "Did he say he was going somewhere? Maybe it was an emergency," I say. "Maybe this has nothing to do with you at all."

  "Maybe it does," Kate argues.

  "Then the best revenge is getting healthy enough to give him a piece of your mind," I point out. "I'll be right back."

  In the hallway, I approach Steph, a nurse who has just come on duty and who's known Kate for years. The truth is, I am just as surprised about Taylor's lack of communication as Kate is. He knew she was coming in here.

  "Taylor Ambrose," I ask Steph. "Has he been in today?"

  She looks at me and blinks.

  "Big kid, sweet. Hung up on my daughter," I joke.

  "Oh, Sara . . . I thought for sure someone would have told you," Steph says. "He died this morning."

  *

  I don't tell Kate, not for a month. Not until the day Dr. Chance says Kate is well enough to leave the hospital, until Kate has already convinced herself she was better off without him. I cannot begin to tell you the words I use; none of them are big enough to bear the weight behind them. I mention how I went to Taylor's house and spoke to his mother; how she broke down in my arms and said she'd wanted to call me, but there was a part of her that was so jealous it swallowed all her speech. She told me that Taylor, who'd come home from the prom walking on air, had walked into her bedroom in the middle of the night, with a 105 degree fever. How maybe it was viral and maybe it was fungal but he'd gone into respiratory distress and then cardiac arrest and after thirty minutes of trying the doctors had to let him go.

  I don't tell Kate something else Jenna Ambrose said--that afterward, she went inside and stared at her son, who wasn't her son anymore. That she sat for five whole hours, sure he was going to wake up. That even now she hears noise overhead and thinks Taylor is moving around his room, and that the half-second she is gifted before she remembers the truth is the only reason she gets up each morning.

  "Kate," I say, "I'm so sorry."

  Kate's face crumples. "But I loved him," she replies, as if this should be enough.

  "I know."

  "And you didn't tell me."

  "I couldn't. Not when I thought it might make you stop fighting back, yourself."

  She closes her eyes and turns onto her side on the pillow, crying so hard that the monitors she's still hooked to begin to beep and bring in the nursing staff.

  I reach for her. "Kate, honey, I did what was best for you."

  She refuses to look in my direction. "Don't talk to me," she murmurs. "You're good at that."

  *

  Kate stops speaking to me for seven days and eleven hours. We come home from the hospital; we go about our business of reverse isolation; we pick through the motions because we have done it before. At night I lie in bed next to Brian and wonder why he can sleep. I stare at the ceiling and think that I have lost my daughter before she's even gone.

  Then one day I walk by her bedroom and find her sitting on the floor with photographs all around. There are, as I expect, the ones of her and Taylor that we took before the prom--Kate dressed to the nines with that telltale surgical mask covering her mouth. Taylor has drawn a lipstick smile on it, for the sake of the photos, or so he said.

  It had made Kate laugh. It seems impossible that this boy, who was so solid a presence when the flash went off mere weeks ago, simply is not here anymore; a pang goes through me, and immediately on its heels a single word: practice.

  But there are other photos, too, from when Kate was younger. One of Kate and Anna on the beach, crouched over a hermit crab. One of Kate dressed up like Mr. Peanut for Halloween. One of Kate with cream cheese all over her face, holding up two halves of a bagel like eyeglasses.

  In another pile are her baby pictures--all taken when she was three, or younger. Gap-toothed and grinning, backlit by a sloe-eyed sun, unaware of what was to come. "I don't remember being her," Kate says quietly, and these first words make a bridge of glass, one that shifts beneath my feet as I step into the room.

  I put my hand beside hers, at the edge of one photo. Bent at a corner, it shows Kate as a toddler being tossed into the air by Brian, her hair flying behind her, her arms and legs starfish-splayed, certain beyond a doubt that when she fell to earth again, there would be a safe landing, sure that she deserved nothing less.

  "She was beautiful," Kate adds, and with her pinky she strokes the glossy vivid cheek of the girl none of us ever got to know.

  JESSE

  THE SUMMER I WAS FOURTEEN my parents sent me to boot camp on a farm. It was one of those action-adventures for troubled kids, you know, get up at four A.M. to do the milking and how much trouble can you really get into? (The answer, if you're interested: score pot off the ranch hands. Get stoned. Tip cows.) Anyway, one day I was assigned to Moses Patrol, or that's what we called the poor son of a bitch who pulled herding duty with the lambs. I had to follow about a hundred sheep around a pasture that didn't have one goddamned tree to provide even a sliver of shade.

  To say a sheep is the dumbest fucking animal on earth is probably an understatement. They get caught in fences. They get lost in four-foot-square pens. They forget where to find their food, although it's been in the same place for a thousand days straight. And they're not the little puffy darlings you picture when you go to sleep, either. They stink. They bleat. They're annoying as hell.

  Anyway, the day I was stuck with the sheep, I had filched a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I was folding down the pages that came closest to good porn, when I heard someone scream. I was perfectly sure, mind you, that it wasn't an animal, because I'd never heard anything like this in my life. I ran toward the sound, sure I was going to find someone thrown from a horse with their leg twisted like a pretzel or some yoho who'd emptied his revolver by accident into his own guts. But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of ewes in attendance, was a sheep giving birth.

  I wasn't a vet or anything, but I knew enough to realize that when any living creature makes a racket like that, things aren't going according to plan. Sure enough, this poor sheep had two little hooves dangling out of her privates. She lay on her side, panting. She rolled one flat black eye toward me, then just gave up.

  Well, nothing was dying on my patrol, if only because I knew that the Nazis who ran the camp would make me bury the damn animal. So I shoved the other sheep out of the way. I got down on my knees and grabbed the knotty slick hooves and yanked while the ewe screamed like any mother whose child is ripped away from her.

  The lamb came out, its limbs folded like the parts of a Swiss Army knife. Over its head was a silver sac that felt like the inside of your cheek when you run your tongue around it. It wasn't breathing.

  I sure as shit wasn't going to put my mouth over a sheep and do artificial respiration, but I used my fingernails to rip apart the skin sac, to yank it down