My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  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 floor in the throes of an epileptic seizure.

  • • •

  Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal seizure, is the biggie. I jump over the gate of the gallery and have to fight the dog out of the way; he’s come to stand over Campbell Alexander’s twitching body like a sentry. The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is forced out by the contraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and his muscles fire randomly, repeatedly. I turn him on his side, in case he vomits, and start looking for something to stick between his jaws so that he won’t bite off his own tongue, when the most amazing thing happens—that dog knocks over Alexander’s briefcase and pulls out something that looks like a rubber bone but is actually a bite block, and drops it into my hand. Distantly I am aware of the judge sealing off the courtroom. I yell to Vern to call for an ambulance.

  Julia is at my side immediately. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s gonna be fine. It’s a seizure.”

  She looks like she’s on the verge of tears. “Can’t you do something?”

  “Wait,” I say.

  She reaches for Campbell, but I draw her hand away. “I don’t understand why it happened.”

  I don’t know if Campbell does, himself. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.

  • • •

  Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so when you get right down to it, the Greek conceptions of star signs as related to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today’s day and age. It’s called the Line of Procession: back then the sun didn’t set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A September 24 birthday didn’t mean you were a Libra, but a Virgo. And there was a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, which rose between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days.

  The reason it’s all off kilter? The earth’s axis wobbles. Life isn’t nearly as stable as we want it to be.

  • • •

  Campbell Alexander vomits on the courtroom rug, then coughs his way to consciousness in the judge’s chambers. “Take it easy,” I say, helping him sit. “You had a bad one.”

  He holds his head. “What happened?”

  Amnesia, on both sides of the event, is pretty common. “Blacked out. Looked like a grand mal to me.”

  He glances down at the IV line Caesar and I have placed. “I don’t need that.”

  “Like hell you don’t,” I say. “If you don’t take antiseizure meds, you’ll be back on that floor in no time.”

  Relenting, he leans back against the couch and stares at the ceiling. “How bad was it?”

  “Pretty bad,” I admit.

  He pats Judge on the head—the dog’s been inseparable. “Good boy. Sorry I didn’t listen.” Then he looks down at his pants—wet and reeking, another common effect of a grand mal. “Shit.”

  “Close enough.” I hand him a spare pair from one of my uniforms, something I had the department bring along. “You need help?”

  He shakes me off and tries, one-handedly, to take off his trousers. Without a word I reach over and undo the fly, help him change. I do this without thinking, the way I’d lift up the shirt of a woman who needed CPR; but all the same, I know it’s killing him.

  “Thanks,” he says, taking great care to zip his own fly. We sit for a second. “Does the judge know?” When I don’t answer, Campbell buries his face in his hands. “Christ. Right in front of everyone?”

  “How long have you hidden it?”

  “Since it started. I was eighteen. I got into a car crash, and they started up after that.”

  “Head trauma?”

  He nods. “That’s what they said.”

  I clasp my hands together between my knees. “Anna was pretty freaked out.”

  Campbell rubs his forehead. “She was . . . testifying.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”

  He looks up at me. “I have to get back in there.”

  “Not yet.” At the sound of Julia’s voice, we both turn. She stands in the doorway, staring at Campbell as if she has never seen him before, and I suppose in all fairness she hasn’t, not like this.

  “I’ll, uh, go see if the boys have filed their report yet,” I murmur, and I leave them.

  • • •

  Things don’t always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you’re looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity.

  There’s an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.

  Make of it what you will.

  CAMPBELL

  THE ONLY THING COMPARABLE to the aftermath of a grand mal seizure is waking up on the pavement with a hangover from the mother of all frat parties and immediately being run over by a truck. On second thought, maybe a grand mal is worse. I am covered in my own filth, hooked up to medicine and falling apart at the seams, when Julia walks toward me. “It’s a seizure dog,” I say.

  “No kidding.” Julia holds out her hand for Judge to sniff. She points to the couch beside me. “Can I sit down?”

  “It’s not catching, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It wasn’t.” Julia comes close enough that I can feel the heat from her shoulder, inches away from