My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  “She’s gone, man. Eloped, last night.”

  Eloped? People still do that? “With whom?” I ask, though it’s none of my business.

  “Some performance artist who sculpts dog crap into busts of world leaders. It’s supposed to be a statement.”

  I feel a momentary pang for poor Ophelia. Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow—beautiful while it’s there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

  The waiter reaches into his back pocket and hands me a plastic card. “Here’s the Braille menu.”

  “I want a double espresso and two croissants, and I’m not blind.”

  “Then what’s Fido for?”

  “I have SARS,” I say. “He’s tallying the people I infect.”

  The waiter can’t seem to figure out if I am joking. He backs away, unsure, to get my coffee.

  Unlike my normal table, this one has a view of the street. I watch an elderly lady narrowly avoid the swipe of a taxi; a boy dances past with a radio three times the size of his head balanced on his shoulder. Twins in parochial school uniforms giggle behind the pages of a teen magazine. And a woman with a running river of black hair spills coffee on her skirt, dropping the paper cup on the pavement.

  Inside me, everything stops. I wait for her to lift her face—to see if this could possibly be who I think it is—but she turns away from me, blotting the fabric with a napkin. A bus cuts the world in half, and my cell phone begins to ring.

  I glance down at the incoming number: no surprise there. Turning off the power button without bothering to take my mother’s call, I glance back at the woman outside the window, but by then the bus is gone and so is she.

  • • •

  I open the door of the office, already barking orders for Kerri. “Call Osterlitz and ask him whether he’s available to testify during the Weiland trial; get a list of other complainants who’ve gone up against New England Power in the past five years; make me a copy of the Melbourne deposition; and phone Jerry at the court and ask who the judge is going to be for the Fitzgerald kid’s hearing.”

  She glances up at me as the phone begins to ring. “Speaking of.” She jerks her head in the direction of the door to my inner sanctum. Anna Fitzgerald stands on the threshold with a spray can of industrial cleaner and a chamois cloth, polishing the doorknob.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “What you told me to.” She looks down at the dog. “Hey, Judge.”

  “Line two for you,” Kerri interrupts. I give her a measured look—why she even let this kid in here is beyond me—and try to get into my office, but whatever Anna has put on the hardware makes it too greasy to turn. I struggle for a moment, until she grips the knob with the cloth and opens the door for me.

  Judge circles the floor, finding the most comfortable spot. I punch the blinking light on the call row. “Campbell Alexander.”

  “Mr. Alexander, this is Sara Fitzgerald. Anna Fitzgerald’s mother.” I let this information settle. I stare at her daughter, polishing a mere five feet away.

  “Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I answer, and as expected, Anna stops in her tracks.

  “I’m calling because . . . well, you see, this is all a misunderstanding.”

  “Have you filed a response to the petition?”

  “That isn’t going to be necessary. I spoke to Anna last night, and she isn’t going to continue with her case. She wants to do anything she can to help Kate.”

  “Is that so.” My voice falls flat. “Unfortunately, if my client is planning to call off her lawsuit, I’ll need to hear it directly from her.” I raise a brow, catch Anna’s gaze. “You wouldn’t happen to know where she is?”

  “She went out for a run,” Sara Fitzgerald says. “But we’re going to come down to the courthouse this afternoon. We’ll talk to the judge, and get this straightened out.”

  “I suppose I’ll see you then.” I hang up the phone and cross my arms, look at Anna. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  She shrugs. “Not really.”

  “That’s not what your mother seems to think. Then again, she’s also under the impression that you’re out playing Flo Jo.”

  Anna glances out into the reception area, where Kerri, naturally, is hanging on our words like a cat on a rope. She closes the door and walks up to my desk. “I couldn’t tell her I was coming here, not after last night.”

  “What happened last night?” When Anna goes mute, I lose my patience. “Listen. If you’re not going to go through with a lawsuit . . . if this is a colossal waste of my time . . . then I’d appreciate it if you had the honesty to tell me now, rather than later. Because I’m not a family therapist or your best buddy; I’m your attorney. And for me to be your attorney there actually has to be a case. So I will ask you one more time: have you changed your mind about this lawsuit?”

  I expect this tirade to put an end to the litigation, to reduce Anna to a wavering puddle of indecision. But to my surprise, she looks right at me, cool and collected. “Are you still willing to represent me?” she asks.

  Against my better judgment, I say yes.

  “Then no,” she says, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  • • •

  The first time I sailed in a yacht club race with my father I was fourteen, and he was dead set against it. I wasn’t old enough; I wasn’t mature enough; the weather was too iffy. What he really was saying was that having me crew for him was more likely to lose him the cup than to win it. In my father’s eyes, if you weren’t perfect, you simply weren’t.

  His boat was a USA-1 class, a marvel of mahogany and teak, one he’d bought from the keyboard player J. Geils up in Marblehead. In other words: a dream, a status symbol, and a rite of passage, all wrapped up in a gleaming white sail and a honey-colored hull.

  We hit the start dead-on, crossing the line at full sail just as the cannon shot off. I did my best to be a step ahead of where my father needed me to be—guiding the rudder before he even gave the order, jibing and tacking until my muscles burned with effort. And maybe this even would have had a happy ending, but then a storm blew in from the north, bringing sheets of rain and swells that stretched ten feet high, pitching us from height to gulley.

  I watched my father move in his yellow slicker. He didn’t seem to notice it was raining; he certainly didn’t want to crawl into a hole and clutch his sick stomach and die, like I did. “Campbell,” he bellowed, “come about.”

  But to turn into the wind meant to ride another roller coaster up and down. “Campbell,” my father repeated, “now.”

  A trough opened up in front of us; the boat dipped so sharply I lost my footing. My father lunged past me, grabbing for the rudder. For one blessed moment, the sails went still. Then the boom whipped across, and the boat tacked along an opposite course.

  “I need coordinates,” my father ordered.

  Navigating meant going down into the hull where the charts were, and doing the math to figure out what heading we had to be on to reach the next race buoy. But being below, away from the fresh air, only made it worse. I opened a map just in time to throw up all over it.

  My father found me by default, because I hadn’t returned with an answer. He poked his head down and saw me sitting in a puddle of my own vomit. “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered, and left me.

  It took all the strength I had to pull myself up after him. He jerked the wheel and yanked at the rudder. He pretended I was not there. And when he jibed, he did not call it. The sail whizzed across the boat, ripping the seam of the sky. The boom flew, clipped me on the back of the head and knocked me out.

  I came to just as my father was stealing the wind of another boat, mere feet from the finish line. The rain had mellowed to a mist, and as he put our craft between the airstream and our closest competitor, the other boat fell back. We won by seconds.

  I was told to clean up my mess and take the taxi in, while my father sailed the dory to the yacht club to celebrate