My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  This makes Kate laugh out loud. “God, Jess. I’m gonna miss you.”

  She says it so easily that I think it surprises both of us. I sit down on the edge of the bed and trace the little puckers in the thermal blanket. “You know—” I begin a pep talk, but she puts her hand on my arm.

  “Don’t.” Then her eyes come alive, for just a moment. “Maybe I’ll get reincarnated.”

  “Like as Marie Antoinette?”

  “No, it’s got to be something in the future. You think that’s crazy?”

  “No,” I admit. “I think we probably all just keep running in circles.”

  “So what will you come back as, then?”

  “Carrion.” She winces, and something beeps, and I panic. “You want me to get someone?”

  “No, you’re fine,” Kate answers, and I’m sure she doesn’t mean it this way, but it pretty much makes me feel like I’ve swallowed lightning.

  I suddenly remember an old game I used to play when I was nine or ten, and was allowed to ride my bike until it got dark. I used to make little bets with myself as I watched the sun getting lower and lower on the horizon: if I hold my breath to twenty seconds, the night won’t come. If I don’t blink. If I stand so still a fly lands on my cheek. Now, I find myself doing the same thing, bargaining to keep Kate, even though that isn’t the way it works.

  “Are you afraid?” I blurt out. “Of dying?”

  Kate turns to me, a smile sliding over her mouth. “I’ll let you know.” Then she closes her eyes. “I’m just gonna rest a second,” she manages, and she is asleep again.

  It’s not fair, but Kate knows that. It doesn’t take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get. I stand up, with that lightning bolt branding the lining of my throat, which makes it impossible to swallow, so everything gets backed up like a dammed river. I hurry out of Kate’s room and far enough down the hall where I won’t disturb her, and then I lift my fist and punch a hole in the thick white wall and still this isn’t enough.

  BRIAN

  HERE IS THE RECIPE TO BLOW SOMETHING UP: a Pyrex bowl; potassium chloride—found at health food stores, as a salt substitute. A hydrometer. Bleach. Take the bleach and pour it into the Pyrex, put it onto a stove burner. Meanwhile, weigh out your potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check it with the hydrometer and boil until you get a reading of 1.3. Cool to room temperature, and filter out the crystals that form. This is what you will save.

  • • •

  It’s hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there’s something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there’s a whole story in who’s left behind.

  I’m in what has to be the ugliest courtroom on the East Coast, sitting in chairs until it’s my turn, when suddenly my beeper goes off. I look at the number, groan, and try to figure out what to do. I’m a witness later, but the department needs me right now.

  It takes a few talking heads but I get permission from the judge to remove myself from the premises. I leave through the front door, and immediately I’m assailed with questions and cameras and lights. It is everything I can do not to punch these vultures, who want to rip apart the bleached bones of my family.

  • • •

  When I couldn’t find Anna the morning of the hearing, I headed home. I looked in all her usual haunts—the kitchen, the bedroom, the hammock out back—but she wasn’t there. As a last resort I climbed the garage stairs to the apartment Jesse uses.

  He wasn’t home either, although by now this is hardly a surprise. There was a time when Jesse disappointed me regularly; eventually, I told myself not to expect anything from him, and as a result, it has gotten easier for me to take what comes. I knocked on the door and yelled for Anna, for Jesse, but no one answered. Although there was a key to this apartment on my own set, I stopped short of letting myself inside. Turning on the stairs, I knocked over the red recycling bin I personally empty every Tuesday, since God forbid Jesse can remember to drag it out to the curb himself. A tenpin of beer bottles, lucent green, tumbled out. An empty jug of laundry detergent, an olive jar, a gallon container from orange juice.

  I put everything back in, except for the orange juice container, which I’ve told Jesse isn’t recyclable and which he puts in the bin nonetheless every damn week.

  • • •

  The difference between these fires and the other ones was that now the stakes have been ratcheted up a notch. Instead of an abandoned warehouse or a shack at the side of the water, it is an elementary school. This being summer, no one was on the premises when the fire was started. But there’s no question in my mind it was due to unnatural causes.

  When I get there, the engines are just loading up after salvage and overhaul. Paulie comes over to me right away. “How’s Kate?”

  “She’s okay,” I tell him, and I nod toward the mess. “What’d you find?”

  “He pretty much managed to gut the whole north side of the facility,” Paulie says. “You doing a walk through?”

  “Yeah.”

  The fire began in the teacher’s lounge; the char patterns point like an arrow to the origin. A collection of synthetic stuffing that hasn’t burned clean through is still visible; whoever set this was smart enough to light his fire in the middle of a pile of couch cushions and stacks of paper. I can still smell the accelerant; this time it was as simple as gasoline. Bits of glass from the exploded Molotov cocktail litter the ashes.

  I wander to the far side of the building, peer through a broken window. The guys must have vented the fire here. “You think we’ll catch this little fuck, Cap?” asks Caesar, coming into the room. Still in his turnout gear, with a smudge across his left cheek, he looks down at the debris in the fire line. Then he bends down, and with his heavy glove, picks up a cigarette butt. “Unbelievable. The secretary’s desk melted down to a puddle, but a goddamn tobacco stick survives.”

  I take it out of his hands and turn it over in my palm. “That’s because it wasn’t here when the fire started. Someone had a nice smoke while he watched this, and then he walked away.” I tip it onto the side, to where the yellow meets the filter, and read the brand.

  Paulie sticks his head in the shattered window, looking for Caesar. “We’re heading back. Get on the truck.” Then he turns to me. “Hey, just so you know, we didn’t break this one.”

  “I wasn’t gonna make you pay for it, Paulie.”

  “No, I mean, we vented the roof. This was already broken when we got here.” He and Caesar leave, and a few moments later I hear the heavy drag of the engine pulling away.

  It could have been a stray baseball, or a Frisbee. But even in the summertime, janitors monitor public property. A broken window is too much of a hazard to be left alone; it would have been taped up or boarded.

  Unless the same guy who started the fire knew where to bring in oxygen, so that the flames would race through the wind tunnel created by that vacuum.

  I look down at the cigarette in my hand, and crush it.

  • • •

  You need 56 grams of these reserved crystals. Mix with distilled water. Heat to a boil and cool again, saving the crystals, pure potassium chlorate. Grind these to the consistency of face powder, and heat gently to dry. Melt five parts Vaseline with five parts wax. Dissolve in gasoline and pour this liquid onto 90 parts potassium chlorate crystals in a plastic bowl. Knead. Allow the gasoline to evaporate.

  Mold into a cube and dip in wax to make it waterproof. This explosive requires a blasting cap of at least a grade A3.

  • • •

  When Jesse opens the door to his apartment, I am waiting on the couch. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here,” Jesse says. “Remember?”

  “Do you? Or are you using this as a place to hide?”

  He takes out a cigarette from a pack in his front pocket and lights up. Merits. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talk