The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  Charlotte

  Suffice it to say that the trip home wasn’t a pleasant one. You had been put into a spica cast—surely one of the biggest torture devices ever created by doctors. It was a half shell of plaster that covered you from knee to ribs. You were in a semireclined position, because that’s what your bones needed to knit together. The cast kept your legs splayed wide so that the femurs would set correctly. Here’s what we were told:

  1. You would wear this cast for four months.

  2. Then it would be sliced in half, and you would spend weeks sitting in it like an oyster on the half shell, trying to rebuild your stomach muscles so that you could sit upright again.

  3. The small square cutout of the plaster at your belly would allow your stomach to expand while you ate.

  4. The open gash between your legs was left so you could go to the bathroom.

  Here’s what we were not told:

  1. You wouldn’t be able to sit completely upright, or lie completely down.

  2. You couldn’t fly back to New Hampshire in a normal plane seat.

  3. You couldn’t even lie down in the back of a normal car.

  4. You wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably for long periods in your wheelchair.

  5. Your clothes wouldn’t fit over the cast.

  Because of all these things, we did not leave Florida immediately. We rented a Suburban, with three full bench seats, and settled Amelia in the back. You had the whole middle bench, and we padded this with blankets we’d bought at Wal-Mart. There we’d also bought men’s T-shirts and boxer shorts—the elastic waists could stretch over the cast and be belted with a hair scrunchie if you pulled the extra fabric to the side, and if you didn’t look too closely, they almost passed for shorts. They were not fashionable, but they covered up your crotch, which was left wide open by the position of the cast.

  Then we started the long drive home.

  You slept; the painkillers they’d given you at the hospital were still swimming through your blood. Amelia alternated between doing word search puzzles and asking if we were almost home yet. We ate at drive-through restaurants, because you couldn’t sit up at a table.

  Seven hours into our journey, Amelia shifted in the backseat. “You know how Mrs. Grey always makes us write about the cool stuff we did over vacation? I’m going to talk about you guys trying to figure out how to get Willow onto the toilet to pee.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I said.

  “Well, if I don’t, my essay’s going to be really short.”

  “We could make the rest of the trip fun,” I suggested at one point. “Stop off in Memphis at Graceland . . . or Washington, D.C. . . .”

  “Or we could just drive straight through and be done with it,” Sean said.

  I glanced at him. In the dark, a green band of light from the dashboard reflected like a mask around his eyes.

  “Could we go to the White House?” Amelia asked, perking up.

  I imagined the hothouse of humidity that Washington would be; I pictured us lugging you around on our hips as we climbed the steps to the Air and Space Museum. Out the window, the black road was a ribbon that kept unraveling in front of us; we couldn’t manage to catch up to its end. “Your father’s right,” I said.

  • • •

  When we finally got home, word had already spread about what happened. There was a note from Piper on the kitchen counter, with a list of all the people who’d brought casseroles she’d stashed in the fridge and a rating system: five stars (eat this one first), three stars (better than Chef Boyardee), one star (botulism alert). I learned a long time ago with you that folks who are trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you’ve done your job—no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

  People ask all the time how I’m doing, but the truth is, they don’t really want to know. They look at your casts—camouflage or hot pink or neon orange. They watch me unload the car and set up your walker, with its tennis-ball feet, so that we can creep across the sidewalk, while behind us, their children swing from monkey bars and play dodgeball and do all the other ordinary things that would cause you to break. They smile at me, because they want to be polite or politically correct, but the whole time they are thinking, Thank God. Thank God it was her, instead of me.

  Your father says that I’m not being fair when I say things like this. That some people, when they ask, really do want to lend a hand. I tell him that if they really wanted to lend a hand, they wouldn’t bring macaroni casseroles—instead they’d offer to take Amelia apple picking or ice skating so that she can get out of the house when you can’t, or they’d rake the gutters of the house, which are always clogging up after a storm. And if they truly wanted to be saviors, they’d call the insurance company and spend four hours on the phone arguing over bills, so I wouldn’t have to.

  Sean doesn’t realize that most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don’t blame them. It’s superstition: if you give assistance to the family in need . . . if you throw salt over your shoulder . . . if you don’t step on the cracks, then maybe you’ll be immune. Maybe you’ll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you.

  Don’t get me wrong; I am not complaining. Other people look at me and think: That poor woman; she has a child with a disability. But all I see when I look at you is the girl who had memorized all the words to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there’s a thunderstorm—not because you’re afraid but because I am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn’t you.

  • • •

  The next morning I spent five hours on the phone with the insurance company. Ambulance trips were not covered by our policy; however, the hospital in Florida would not discharge anyone in a spica cast unless he or she was traveling by ambulance. It was a catch-22, but I was the only one who could see it, and it led to a conversation that felt like theater of the absurd. “Let me get this straight,” I said to the fourth supervisor I’d spoken with that day. “You’re telling me I didn’t have to take the ambulance; therefore you won’t cover the cost.”

  “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  On the couch, you were propped up on pillows, drawing stripes on your cast with markers. “Can you tell me what the alternative was?” I asked.

  “Apparently you could have kept the patient in the hospital.”

  “You do understand this cast is going to stay on for months. Are you suggesting I keep my daughter hospitalized for that long?”

  “No, ma’am. Just until transportation could be arranged.”

  “But the only transportation the hospital would allow us to leave in was an ambulance!” I said. By now your leg looked like a candy cane. “Would your policy have covered the additional stay?”

  “No, ma’am. The maximum number of nights allowed for injuries like these is—”

  “Yeah, we’ve been through that.” I sighed.

  “It seems to me,” the supervisor said tartly, “that given the option of paying for additional nights in the hospital or an unauthorized ambulance trip, you don’t have much to complain about.”

  I felt my cheeks flame. “Well, it seems to me that you are an enormous ass!” I yelled, and I slammed down the phone. I turned around and saw you, marker trailing out of your hand, precariously close to the fabric of the couch cushions. You were twisted like a pretzel, your lower half in the cast still facing forward, your head leaning back over your shoulder so that you could see out the window.

  “Swear jar,” you murmured. You had a canning jar that you’d covered with iridescent gift wrap, and every time Sean swore in front of you, you netted a quarter. Just this month alone, you were up to for