The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I knew if I wanted rugrats, I’d be able to have them one day. If you wanted kids, though, it wouldn’t be easy, even if it was possible. It wasn’t fair, but then again, what was when it came to you?

  You couldn’t skate. You couldn’t bike. You couldn’t ski. And even when you did play a game that was physical—like hide-and-seek—Mom used to insist that you get an extra count of twenty. I pretended to be bent out of shape by this so you wouldn’t feel like you were getting special treatment, but deep down I knew it was the right thing to do—you couldn’t get around as fast as I could, with your braces or crutches or wheelchair, and it took you longer to wiggle into a hiding spot. Amelia, wait up! you always said when we were walking somewhere, and I would, because I knew there were a million other ways I would leave you behind.

  I would grow up, while you’d stay the size of a toddler.

  I would go to college, move away from home, and not have to worry about things like whether I could reach the gas pump or the buttons on the ATM.

  I’d maybe find a guy who didn’t think I was a total loser and get married and have kids and be able to carry them around without worrying that I’d get microfractures in my spine.

  I read the finer print of the magazine article.

  Alma Dukins, 34, gave birth on March 5, 2008, to a healthy baby girl. Dukins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta Type III, is 3'2'' tall and weighed 39 pounds before her pregnancy. She gained 19 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter, Lulu, was delivered by C-section at 32 weeks, when Alma’s small body could not accommodate the enlarging uterus. She weighed four pounds, six ounces, and was 161/2 inches long at birth.

  You were at the stage when you played with dolls. Mom said I used to do that, too, although I only remember dismembering mine and cutting off all their hair. Sometimes I would catch Mom watching you wrap your fake baby’s arm in a cast, and it was like a storm cloud passed over her face—she was probably thinking that chances were you’d never have a real baby, mixed with feeling relief that you wouldn’t have to know what it was like to watch your own kid break a million bones, like she did.

  But in spite of what my mother thought, here was proof that someone with OI could have a family. This Alma woman was Type III, like you. She didn’t walk like you could—she was wheelchair-bound. And yet she’d managed to find a husband, goofy smile and all, and have a baby of her own.

  “You ought to show Willow,” Emma said. “Just take it. Who’s going to know?”

  So I checked to see if the librarian was still on her computer, ordering clothes from Gap.com (we’d done our share of spying on her), and then I faked a coughing fit. I doubled over and tucked the magazine inside my jacket. I smiled weakly as the librarian glanced at me to make sure I wasn’t hacking out a lung on the floor or anything.

  Emma expected me to keep the magazine for you, to show you or even Mom that one day you could grow up and get married and have a kid. But I had stolen it for a completely different reason. See, this year, you were starting kindergarten. And one day you’d be a seventh grader, like me. And you might be sitting in this library and come across this stupid magazine and see what I had seen when I looked at it: the space between Alma and her husband, that baby, too huge in her arms.

  To me, this didn’t look like a happy family. It was a circus freak show, minus the big top. Why else would it be in a magazine? Normal families didn’t make the news.

  In English class I asked to go to the bathroom. There, I tore the page out of the magazine and ripped the picture into the tiniest pieces I could. I flushed them down the toilet, the best I could do to protect you.

  Marin

  People think of the law as a virtual hallowed hall of justice, but the truth is that my job more closely resembles a bad sitcom. I once represented a woman who was carrying a frozen turkey out of her local Stop-n-Save grocery store the day before Thanksgiving, when the turkey slipped through the plastic bag and fractured her foot. She sued the Stop-n-Save, but we also included the company that made the plastic bags, and she walked away—without crutches, mind you—several hundred thousand dollars richer.

  Then there was the case that involved a woman driving home at two a.m. on a back road at eighty miles per hour, who collided with a lost tractor trailer that had backed up across the road to turn around. She was killed instantly, and her husband wanted to sue the tractor-trailer company because they didn’t have lights along the side of the truck so that his wife could have seen it. We brought a wrongful death suit against the driver of the truck, citing loss of consortium—asking for millions to make up for the fact that the husband had lost his beloved wife’s company. Unfortunately, during the case, the defendant’s attorney uncovered the fact that my client’s wife had been on her way home from a rendezvous with her lover.

  You win some, you lose some.

  Looking at Charlotte O’Keefe, who was sitting in my office with her cell phone clutched in her hands, I was pretty sure which way this case was going to go. “Where’s Willow?” I asked.

  “Physical therapy,” Charlotte said. “She’s there till eleven.”

  “And the breaks? They’re healing well?”

  “Fingers crossed,” Charlotte replied.

  “You’re expecting a call?”

  She looked down, as if she was surprised to find herself holding her phone. “Oh, no. I mean, I hope not. I just have to be available if Willow gets hurt.”

  We smiled politely at each other. “Should we . . . wait a little longer for your husband?”

  “Well,” she said, coloring. “He’s not going to be joining us.”

  To be honest, when Charlotte had called me to set up a meeting and talk about representation, I’d been surprised. Sean O’Keefe had made his feelings pretty damn clear when he’d stormed out of Bob’s office. Her phone call indicated that he’d calmed down enough to pursue litigation, but now—looking at Charlotte—I was starting to get a sinking feeling. “But he does want to file a lawsuit, right?”

  She shifted on her chair. “I don’t understand why I can’t do this on my own.”

  “Besides the obvious answer—that your husband’s bound to find out sooner or later—there’s a legal reason. You and your husband are both responsible for the care and raising of Willow. Let’s say you hire a lawyer by yourself and settle with the doctor, and then you get hit by a car and die. Your husband can go back and sue the doctor on his own, because he wasn’t a party to your settlement and didn’t release the doctor from future liability. Because of this, any defendant is going to insist that any settlement that’s reached or judgment in a trial include both of the parents. Which means that, even if Sergeant O’Keefe doesn’t want to be part of this lawsuit, he’s going to be impleaded—that is, brought into the lawsuit—so that it won’t be litigated again in the future.”

  Charlotte frowned. “I understand.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “No,” she said. “No, it’s not. But . . . we don’t have money to hire a lawyer. We’re barely scraping by as it is, with everything Willow needs. That’s why . . . that’s why I’m here today to talk about the lawsuit.”

  Every plaintiff mill firm—Bob Ramirez included—began a case with a cost-benefit analysis. It’s what had taken us so long to contact the O’Keefes between meetings: I would review a claim with experts, I would do due diligence to ascertain other suits like this and what the payouts had been. Once I knew that the estimated settlement would at least cover the costs of our time and the experts’ fees, I’d call the prospective clients and tell them they had a valid complaint. “You don’t have to worry about attorney’s fees,” I now said smoothly. “That would become part of the settlement. However, realistically, you do need to know that most wrongful birth suits settle out of court for less money than a jury would award, because malpractice insurance companies don’t want the press. Of the cases that do go to court, seventy-five percent find in favor of the defendant. Your particular case, which hinges on a misrea