My Sister's Keeper Read online

  *

  Earlier, after we ate, I helped Sara clean up in the kitchen. "You think something's going on with Anna?" I asked, moving the ketchup back into the fridge.

  "Because she took off her necklace?"

  "No." I shrugged. "Just in general."

  "Compared to Kate's kidneys and Jesse's sociopathy, I'd say she's doing fine."

  "She wanted dinner over before it started."

  Sara turned around at the sink. "What do you think it is?"

  "Uh . . . a guy?"

  Sara glanced at me. "She's not dating anyone."

  Thank God. "Maybe one of her friends said something to upset her." Why was Sara asking me? What the hell did I know about the mood swings of thirteen-year-old girls?

  Sara wiped her hands on a towel and turned on the dishwasher. "Maybe she's just being a teenager."

  I tried to think back to what Kate was like when she was thirteen, but all I could remember was the relapse and the stem cell transplant she had. Kate's ordinary life had a way of fading into the background, overshadowed by the times she was sick.

  "I have to take Kate to dialysis tomorrow," Sara said. "When will you get home?"

  "By eight. But I'm on call, and I wouldn't be surprised if our arsonist struck again."

  "Brian?" she asked. "How did Kate look to you?"

  Better than Anna did, I thought, but this was not what she was asking. She wanted me to measure the yellow cast of Kate's skin against yesterday; she wanted me to read into the way she leaned her elbows on the table, too tired to hold her body upright.

  "Kate looks great," I lied, because this is what we do for each other.

  "Don't forget to say good night to them before you leave," Sara said, and she turned to gather the pills Kate takes at bedtime.

  *

  It's quiet, tonight. Weeks have rhythms all their own, and the craziness of a Friday or Saturday night shift stands in direct contrast to a dull Sunday or Monday. I can already tell: this will be one of those nights where I bunk down and actually get to sleep.

  "Daddy?" The hatch to the roof opens, and Anna crawls out. "Red told me you were up here."

  Immediately, I freeze. It is ten o'clock at night. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. I just . . . wanted to visit."

  When the kids were small, Sara would stop by with them all the time. They'd play in the bays around the sleeping giant engines; they'd fall asleep upstairs in my bunk. Sometimes, in the warmest part of the summer, Sara would bring along an old blanket and we would spread it here on the roof, lie down with the kids between us, and watch the night rise.

  "Mom know where you are?"

  "She dropped me off." Anna tiptoes across the roof. She's never been all that great with heights, and there is only a three-inch lip around the concrete. Squinting, she bends to the telescope. "What can you see?"

  "Vega," I tell her. I take a good look at Anna, something I haven't done in some time. She's not stick-straight anymore; she's got the beginnings of curves. Even her motions--tucking her hair behind her ear, peering into the telescope--have a sort of grace I associate with full-grown women. "Got something you want to talk about?"

  Her teeth snag on her bottom lip, and she looks down at her sneakers. "Maybe instead you could talk to me," Anna suggests.

  So I sit her down on my jacket and point to the stars. I tell her that Vega is a part of Lyra, the lyre that belonged to Orpheus. I am not one for stories, but I remember the ones that match up with the constellations. I tell her about this son of the sun god, whose music charmed animals and softened boulders. A man who loved his wife, Eurydice, so much that he wouldn't let Death take her away.

  By the time I finish, we are lying flat on our backs. "Can I stay here with you?" Anna asks.

  I kiss the top of her head. "You bet."

  "Daddy," Anna whispers, when I think for sure she has fallen asleep, "did it work?"

  It takes me a moment to understand she is talking about Orpheus and Eurydice.

  "No," I admit.

  She lets loose a sigh. "Figures," she says.

  TUESDAY

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--

  It gives a lovely light!

  --EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "First Fig," A Few Figs from Thistles

  ANNA

  I USED TO PRETEND that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one. It isn't too much of a stretch, really--there's Kate, the spitting image of my dad; and Jesse, the spitting image of my mom; and then there's me, a collection of recessive genes that came out of left field. In the hospital cafeteria, eating rubberized French fries and red Jell-O, I'd glance around from table to table, thinking my bona fide parents might be just a tray away. They'd sob with sheer joy to find me, and whisk me off to our castle in Monaco or Romania and give me a maid that smelled like fresh sheets, and my own Bernese mountain dog, and a private phone line. The thing is, the first person I'd have called to crow over my new fortune would be Kate.

  Kate's dialysis sessions run three times a week, for two hours at a time. She has a Mahhukar catheter, which looks just like her central line used to look and protrudes from the same spot on her chest. This gets hooked up to a machine that does the work her kidneys aren't doing. Kate's blood (well, it's my blood if you want to get technical about it) leaves her body through one needle, gets cleaned, and then goes into her body again through a second needle. She says it doesn't hurt. Mostly, it's just boring. Kate usually brings a book or her CD player and headphones. Sometimes we play games. "Go out into the hall and tell me about the first gorgeous guy you find," Kate'll instruct, or, "Sneak up on the janitor who surfs the Net and see whose naked pictures he's downloading." When she is tied to the bed, I am her eyes and her ears.

  Today, she is reading Allure magazine. I wonder if she even knows that every V-necked model she comes across she touches at the breastbone, in the same place where she has a catheter and they don't. "Well," my mother announces out of the blue, "this is interesting." She waves a pamphlet she's taken from the bulletin board outside Kate's room: You and Your New Kidney. "Did you know that they don't take out the old kidney? They just transplant the new one into you and hook it up."

  "That creeps me out," Kate says. "Imagine the coroner who cuts you open and sees you've got three instead of two."

  "I think the point of a transplant is so that the coroner won't be cutting you open anytime soon," my mother replies. This fictional kidney she's discussing resides right now in my own body.

  I've read that pamphlet, too.

  Kidney donation is considered relatively safe surgery, but if you ask me, the writer must have been comparing it to something like a heart-lung transplant, or some brain tumor removal. In my opinion, safe surgery is the kind where you go into the doctor's office and you're awake the whole time and the procedure is finished in five minutes--like when you have a wart removed or a cavity drilled. On the other hand, when you donate a kidney, you spend the night before the operation fasting and taking laxatives. You're given anesthesia, the risks of which can include stroke, heart attack, and lung problems. The four-hour surgery isn't a walk in the park, either--you have a 1 in 3,000 chance of dying on the operating table. If you don't, you are hospitalized for four to seven days, although it takes four to six weeks to fully recover. And that doesn't even include the long-term effects: an increased chance of high blood pressure, a risk of complications with pregnancy, a recommendation to refrain from activities where your lone remaining kidney might be damaged.

  Then again, when you get a wart removed or a cavity drilled, the only person who benefits in the long run is yourself.

  There is a knock on the door, and a familiar face peeks in. Vern Stackhouse is a sheriff, and therefore a member of the same public servant community as my father. He used to come over to our house every now and then to say hi or leave off Christmas presents for us; more recently, he's saved Jesse's