The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “That’s what happens to dreams,” Charlotte said. “Life gets in the way.”

  I sat up, picking at a stitch on the quilt. “I wanted a house, a backyard, a bunch of kids. A vacation every now and then. A good job. I wanted to coach softball and take my girls skiing and not know every fucking doctor in the Portsmouth Regional Hospital emergency room by name.” I turned to her. “I may not be with her all the time, but when she breaks, Charlotte, I feel it. I swear I do. I’d do anything for her.”

  She faced me. “Would you?”

  I could feel its weight on the mattress: the lawsuit, the elephant in the room. “It feels . . . ugly. It feels like we’re saying we didn’t love her, because she’s . . . the way she is.”

  “It’s because we want her, because we love her, that I’d ever think about this in the first place,” Charlotte said. “I’m not stupid, Sean. I know people are going to talk, and say I’m after a big settlement. I know they’re going to think I’m the worst mother in the world, the most selfish, you fill in the blank. But I don’t care what they say about me—I care about Willow. I want to know that she’ll be able to go to college and live on her own and do everything she dreams of. Even if that means that the whole world thinks I’m horrible. Does it really matter what everyone else says if I know why I’m doing it?” She faced me. “I’m going to lose my best friend because of this,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”

  In her previous life as a pastry chef, I’d always been amazed to watch tiny Charlotte hauling fifty-pound bags of flour around. There was strength in her that went far beyond my own size and force. I saw the world in black and white; it was why I was a career cop. But what if this lawsuit and its uncomfortable name was only a means to an end? Could something that looked so wrong on the outside turn out to be undeniably right?

  My hand crept across the quilt to cover hers. “You won’t,” I said.

  Charlotte

  Late May 2007

  Your first seven breaks happened before you entered this world. The next four happened minutes after you were born, as a nurse lifted you out of me. Another nine, when you were being resuscitated in the hospital, after you coded. The tenth: when you were lying across my lap and suddenly I heard a pop. Eleven was when you rolled over and your arm hit the edge of the crib. Twelve and thirteen were femur fractures; fourteen a tibia; fifteen a compression fracture of the spine. Sixteen was jumping down from a stoop; seventeen was a kid crashing into you on a playground; eighteen was when you slipped on a DVD jacket lying on the carpet. We still don’t know what caused number nineteen. Twenty was when Amelia was jumping on a bed where you were sitting; twenty-one was a soccer ball that hit your left leg too hard; twenty-two was when I discovered waterproof casting materials and bought enough to supply an entire hospital, now stocked in my garage. Twenty-three happened in your sleep; twenty-four and twenty-five were a fall forward in the snow that snapped both forearms at once. Twenty-six and twenty-seven were nasty fractures, fibula and tibia tenting through the skin at a nursery school Halloween party, where, ironically, you were wearing a mummy’s costume whose bandages I used to splint the breaks. Twenty-eight happened during a sneeze; twenty-nine and thirty were ribs you broke on the edge of the kitchen table. Thirty-one was a hip fracture that required a metal plate and six screws. I stopped keeping track after that, until the ones from Disney World, which we had not numbered but instead named Mickey, Donald, and Goofy.

  Four months after you were put in the spica cast, it was bivalved. This meant that it was cut in half and secured with low-budget clips that broke within hours, so I replaced them with bright strips of Velcro. Gradually, we’d remove the top, so that you could practice sitting up like a clam on the half shell, and you could strengthen the stomach and calf muscles that had deteriorated. According to Dr. Rosenblad, you’d have a couple of weeks in the bottom of the shell; then you’d graduate to just sleeping in it. Eight weeks later you’d stand with a walker; four weeks after that, you’d be moving to the bathroom on your own.

  The best part, though, was that you could go back to preschool. It was a private school, held for two hours each morning in the basement of a church. You were a year older than other kids in the class, but you’d missed so much school because of breaks that we’d decided to repeat the year—you could read at a sixth-grade level, but you needed to be around other kids your age for socialization. You didn’t have many friends—children were either frightened by your wheelchair and walker or, oddly, jealous of the casts that you’d come to school wearing. Now, driving to the church, I glanced into the rearview mirror. “So what are you going to do first?”

  “The rice table.” Miss Katie, whom you ranked somewhere just shy of Jesus on the adoration scale, had set up an enormous sandbox full of colored rice grains, which kids could pour into different size containers. You loved the noise it made; you told me it sounded like rain. “And the parachute.”

  This was a game where one child ran under a brightly colored round of silk while the rest held on to its edges. “You’re going to have to wait a while for that, Wills,” I said, and I pulled into the parking lot. “One day at a time.”

  I unloaded your wheelchair from the back of the van and settled you into it, then pushed you up the ramp that the school had added this past summer, after you’d enrolled. Inside, other students were hanging their coats in their cubbies; moms were rolling up dried finger paintings that were hanging on a clothes rack. “You’re back!” one woman said, smiling down at you. Then she looked up at me. “Kelsey had her birthday party last weekend—she saved a goody bag for Willow. We would have invited her, but, well, it was at the Gymnastics Hut, and I figured she might feel left out.”

  As opposed to not being invited? I thought. But instead, I smiled. “That was very thoughtful.”

  A little boy touched the edges of your spica cast. “Wow,” he breathed. “How do you pee in that thing?”

  “I don’t,” you said, without cracking a smile. “I haven’t gone in four months, Derek, so you’d better watch out ’cause I could blow like a volcano any minute.”

  “Willow,” I murmured, “no need to be snarky.”

  “He started it . . .”

  Miss Katie came into the hallway as she heard the commotion of our arrival. She did the slightest double take when she saw you in the bivalved cast but quickly recovered. “Willow!” she said, getting down on her knees to your level. “It is so nice to see you!” She summoned her assistant, Miss Sylvia. “Sylvia, can you keep an eye on Willow while her mom and I have a talk?”

  I followed her down the hallway past the bathrooms with their impossibly squat toilets to the area that doubled as music room and gymnasium. “Charlotte,” Kate said, “I must have misunderstood. When you called to tell me Willow was coming, I thought she was out of that body cast!”

  “Well, she will be. It’s a gradual thing.” I smiled at her. “She’s really excited to be back here.”

  “I think you’re rushing things—”

  “It’s fine, really. She needs the activity. Even if she breaks again, a break after a few weeks of really great play is better for her body than just sitting around at home. And you don’t have to worry about the other kids hurting her, beyond the usual. We wrestle with her. We tickle her.”

  “Yes, but you do all that at home,” the teacher pointed out. “In a school environment . . . Well, it’s riskier.”

  I stepped back, reading her loud and clear: we’re liable when she’s on our grounds. In spite of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I routinely read on online OI forums of private schools who kindly suggested that a healing child be kept at home, ostensibly for the child’s best interests but more likely because of their own rising insurance premiums. It created a catch-22: legally, you had clear grounds to sue for discrimination, but once you did, you could bet that, even if you won your case, your child would be treated differently when she returned.

  “Riskier for whom?” I said, my face growing h