My Sister's Keeper Read online

  As you can see, I clearly knew my stuff. But when it was nearly my turn, just as Stephen Scarpinio was holding up a papier-mache model of a lemur, I knew that I was going to be sick. I went up to Mrs. Cuthbert, and told her if I stayed to do this assignment, no one was going to be happy.

  "Anna," she said, "if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will."

  So when Stephen finished, I got up. I took a deep breath. "Kangaroos," I said, "are marsupials that live only in Australia."

  Then I projectile vomited over four kids who had the bad luck to be sitting in the front row.

  For the whole rest of the year, I was called KangaRalph. Every now and then some kid would go on a plane on vacation, and I'd go to my cubby to find a barf bag pinned to the front of my fleece pullover, a makeshift marsupial pouch. I was the school's greatest embarrassment until Darren Hong went to capture the flag in gym and accidentally pulled down Oriana Bertheim's skirt.

  I'm telling you this to explain my general aversion to public speaking.

  But now, on the witness stand, there's even more to be worried about. It's not that I'm nervous, like Campbell thinks. I am not afraid of clamming up, either. I'm afraid of saying too much.

  I look out at the courtroom and see my mother, sitting at her lawyer table, and at my father, who smiles at me just the tiniest bit. And suddenly I can't believe I ever thought I might be able to go through with this. I get to the edge of my seat, ready to apologize for wasting everyone's time and bolt--only to realize that Campbell looks positively awful. He's sweating, and his pupils are so big they look like quarters set deep in his face. "Anna," Campbell asks, "do you want a glass of water?"

  I look at him and think, Do you?

  What I want is to go home. I want to run away to a place where no one knows my name and pretend to be a millionaire's adopted daughter, the heir to a toothpaste manufacturing kingdom, a Japanese pop star.

  Campbell turns to the judge. "May I confer for a moment with my client?"

  "Be my guest," Judge DeSalvo says.

  So Campbell walks up to the witness stand and leans so close that only I can hear him. "When I was a kid I had a friend named Joseph Balz," he whispers. "Imagine if Dr. Neaux had married him."

  He backs away while I am still smiling, and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can last for another two or three minutes up here.

  Campbell's dog is going crazy--he's the one who needs water or something, from the looks of it. And I'm not the only one to notice. "Mr. Alexander," Judge DeSalvo says, "please control your animal."

  "No, Judge."

  "Excuse me?!"

  Campbell goes tomato red. "I was speaking to the dog, Your Honor, like you asked." Then he turns to me. "Anna, why did you want to file this petition?"

  A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead. "She asked," I say, the first two words that will become an avalanche.

  "Who asked what?"

  "My mom," I say, staring at Campbell's shoes. "For a kidney." I look down at my skirt, pick at a thread. Just maybe I will unravel the whole thing.

  *

  About two months ago, Kate was diagnosed with kidney failure. She got tired easily, and lost weight, and retained water, and threw up a lot. The blame was pinned to a bunch of different things: genetic abnormalities, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor--growth hormone shots Kate had once taken to boost marrow production, stress from other treatments. She was put on dialysis to get rid of the toxins zipping around her bloodstream. And then, the dialysis stopped working.

  One night, my mother came into our room when Kate and I were just hanging out. She had my father with her, which meant we were in for a more heavy discussion than who-left-the-sink-running-by-accident. "I've been doing some reading on the internet," my mother said. "Transplants of typical organs aren't nearly as difficult to recover from as bone marrow transplants."

  Kate looked at me and popped in a new CD. We both knew where this was headed. "You can't exactly pick up a kidney at Kmart."

  "I know. It turns out that you only need to match a couple of HLA proteins to be a kidney donor--not all six. I called Dr. Chance to ask if I might be a match for you, and he said in normal cases, I probably would."

  Kate hears the right word. "Normal cases?"

  "Which you're not. Dr. Chance thinks you'd reject an organ from the general donor pool, just because your body has already been through so much." My mother looked down at the carpet. "He won't recommend the procedure unless the kidney comes from Anna."

  My father shook his head. "That's invasive surgery," he said quietly. "For both of them."

  I started thinking about this. Would I have to be in the hospital? Would it hurt? Could people live with just one kidney?

  What if I wound up with kidney failure when I was, like, seventy? Where would I get my spare?

  Before I could ask any of this, Kate spoke. "I'm not doing it again, all right? I'm sick of it. The hospitals and the chemo and the radiation and the whole freaking thing. Just leave me alone, will you?"

  My mother's face went white. "Fine, Kate. Go ahead and commit suicide!"

  She put her headphones on again, turned the music up so loud that I could hear it. "It's not suicide," she said, "if you're already dying."

  *

  "Did you ever tell anyone that you didn't want to be a donor?" Campbell asks me, as his dog starts doing helicopters in the front of the courtroom.

  "Mr. Alexander," Judge DeSalvo says, "I'm going to call a bailiff to remove your . . . pet."

  It's true, the dog is totally out of control. He's barking and leaping up with his front paws on Campbell and running in those tight circles. Campbell ignores both Judges. "Anna, did you decide to file this lawsuit all by yourself?"

  I know why he's asking; he wants everyone to know I'm capable of making choices that are hard. And I even have my lie, quivering like the snake it is, caught between my teeth. But what I mean to say isn't quite what slips out. "I was kind of convinced by someone."

  This is, of course, news to my parents, whose eyes hammer onto me. It's news to Julia, who actually makes a small sound. And it's news to Campbell, who runs a hand down his face in defeat. This is exactly why it's better to stay silent; there is less of a chance of screwing up your life and everyone else's.

  "Anna," Campbell says, "who convinced you?"

  I am small in this seat, in this state, on this lonely planet. I fold my hands together, holding between them the only emotion I've managed to keep from slipping away: regret. "Kate."

  The entire courtroom goes silent. Before I can say anything else, the lightning bolt I have been expecting strikes. I cringe, but it turns out that the crash I've heard isn't the earth opening up to swallow me whole. It is Campbell, who's fallen to the floor, while his dog stands nearby with a very human look on his face that says I told you so.

  BRIAN

  IF YOU TRAVEL IN SPACE for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense. I thought I had been listening to Jesse, but it turns out I haven't been listening to him at all. I have listened carefully to Anna, and yet it seems there is a piece missing. I try to work through the few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.

  Then it hits me--I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.

  Or this is what I'm thinking, anyway, when my daughter's lawyer falls to the fl