My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  It is, I realize, a good term for a spouse. What else does a husband or a wife do, but attest to each other’s errors in judgment?

  I get up slowly from my seat. “Hello, Brian,” I say, and my voice is not nearly as steady as I would have hoped.

  “Sara,” he answers.

  Following that exchange, I have no idea what to say.

  A memory washes over me. We had wanted to get away, but couldn’t decide where to go. So we got into the car and drove, and every half hour we’d let one of the kids pick an exit, or tell us to turn right or left. We wound up in Seal Cove, Maine, and then stopped, because Jesse’s next direction would have landed us in the Atlantic. We rented a cabin with no heat, no electricity—and our three kids afraid of the dark.

  I do not realize I have been speaking out loud until Brian answers. “I know,” he says. “We put so many candles on that floor I thought for sure we’d burn the place down. It rained for five days.”

  “And on the sixth day, when the weather cleared, the greenheads were so bad we couldn’t even stand to be outside.”

  “And then Jesse got poison ivy and his eyes swelled shut . . . ”

  “Excuse me,” Campbell Alexander interrupts.

  “Sustained,” Judge DeSalvo says. “Where is this going, Counselor?”

  We hadn’t been going anywhere, and the place we wound up was awful, and still I wouldn’t have traded that week for the world. When you don’t know where you’re headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore. “When Kate wasn’t sick,” Brian says slowly, carefully, “we’ve had some great times.”

  “Don’t you think Anna would miss those, if Kate were gone?”

  Campbell is out of his seat, just as I’d expect. “Objection!”

  The judge holds up his hand, and nods to Brian for his answer.

  “We all will,” he says.

  And in that moment, the strangest thing happens. Brian and I, facing each other and poles apart, flip like magnets sometimes can; and instead of pushing each other away we suddenly seem to be on the same side. We are young and pulse-to-pulse for the first time; we are old and wondering how we have walked this enormous distance in so short a period of time. We are watching fireworks on television on a dozen New Year’s Eves, three sleeping children wedged between us in our bed, pressed so tight that I can feel Brian’s pride even though we two are not touching.

  Suddenly it does not matter that he has moved out with Anna, that he has questioned some of the decisions about Kate. He did what he thought was right, just the same as me, and I can’t fault him for it. Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we’ve accomplished.

  If we lose Kate today, we will have had her for sixteen years, and no one can take that away. And ages from now, when it is hard to bring back the picture of her face when she laughed or the feel of her hand inside mine or the perfect pitch of her voice, I will have Brian to say, Don’t you remember? It was like this.

  The judge’s voice breaks into my reverie. “Mrs. Fitzgerald, are you finished?”

  There has never been a need for me to cross-examine Brian; I have always known his answers. What I’ve forgotten are the questions.

  “Almost.” I turn to my husband. “Brian?” I ask. “When are you coming home?”

  • • •

  In the bowels of the court building are a sturdy row of vending machines, none of which have anything you’d want to eat. After Judge DeSalvo calls a recess, I wander down there, and stare at the Starbursts and the Pringles and the Cheetos trapped in their corkscrew cells.

  “The Oreos are your best shot,” Brian says from behind me. I turn around in time to see him feed the machine seventy-five cents. “Simple. Classic.” He pushes two buttons and the cookies begin their suicide plunge to the bottom of the machine.

  He leads me to the table, scarred and stained by people who have carved their eternal initials and graffitied their inner thoughts across the top. “I didn’t know what to say to you on the stand,” I admit, and then hesitate. “Brian? Do you think we’ve been good parents?” I am thinking of Jesse, who I gave up on so long ago. Of Kate, who I could not fix. Of Anna.

  “I don’t know,” Brian says. “Does anyone?”

  He hands me the package of Oreos. When I open my mouth to tell him I’m not hungry, Brian pushes a cookie inside. It is rich and rough against my tongue; suddenly I am famished. Brian brushes the crumbs from my lips as if I am made of fine china. I let him. I think maybe I have never tasted anything this sweet.

  • • •

  Brian and Anna move back home that night. We both tuck her in; we both kiss her. Brian goes to take a shower. In a little while, I will go to the hospital, but right now I sit down across from Anna, on Kate’s bed. “Are you going to lecture me?” she asks.

  “Not the way you think.” I finger the edge of one of Kate’s pillows. “You’re not a bad person because you want to be yourself.”

  “I never—”

  I hold up a hand. “What I mean is that those thoughts, they’re human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone’s imagined you would doesn’t mean that you’ve failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.” I take a deep breath, and shake my head. “Am I making any sense?”

  “Not really.”

  That makes me smile. “I guess I’m saying that you remind me of someone.”

  Anna comes up on an elbow. “Who?”

  “Me,” I say.

  • • •

  When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you’ve worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn’t there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn’t new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.

  Brian lies beside me on the bed. He doesn’t say anything, just puts his hand on the valley made by the curve of my neck. Then he kisses me, long and bittersweet. This I expect, but not the next—he bites down on my lip so hard that I taste blood. “Ow,” I say, trying to laugh a little, make light of this. But he doesn’t laugh, or apologize. He leans forward, licks it off.

  It makes me jump inside. This is Brian, and this is not Brian, and both of these things are remarkable. I run my own tongue over the blood, copper and slick. I open like an orchid, make my body a cradle, and feel his breath travel down my throat, over my breasts. He rests his head for a moment on my belly, and just as much as that bite was unexpected, there is now a pang of the familiar—this is what he would do each night, a ritual, when I was pregnant.

  Then he moves again. He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat. We are a study of contrasts—hard to soft, fair to dark, frantic to smooth—and yet there is something about the fit of us that makes me realize neither of us would be quite right without the other. We are a Möbius strip, two continuous bodies, an impossible tangle.

  “We’re going to lose her,” I whisper, and even I don’t know if I’m talking about Kate or about Anna.

  Brian kisses me. “Stop,” he says.

  After that we don’t talk anymore. That’s safest.

  WEDNESDAY

  Yet from those flames,

  No light, but rather darkness visible.

  —JOHN MI