My Sister's Keeper: List 3

The fire was all but out; the boys were inside doing salvage and overhaul.

The fire was all but out; the boys were inside doing salvage and overhaul.

Three hours later, I was the only person still there, unless you counted Seven, which was what the bartender had rechristened himself last August after deciding to jettison whatever sort of label the name Neil suggested.

We sat back to back, and tried to think each other's thoughts—pretending clairvoyance, when it only made sense that his whole mind would be full of me and mine would be full of him.

Her arm goes up, a weak arabesque. “You know what ballerinas have?"

That sounds so patently familiar that I grin.

Kate opens her presents—necklaces made of glittery beads, craft kits, Barbie paraphernalia.

Brian and I slide into our respective chairs in Dr. Chance's office.

"It's a stop-gap measure—Kate will, in all probability, have a full-fledged relapse—but it buys time to build up her defenses before we have to rush into a more aggressive treatment."

Her feet are on a brocade chair; her body is sprawled on the white carpet.

I look around at the opulence of the room, at our decadent sprawl of wine bottles and chocolate strawberries.

Thanks to a little bout of insomnia and way too many doses of Tony Robbins, I decided one day to force myself into imagining what it would be like after Kate died.

There may be a special corner of Hell for attorneys who are shamelessly self-aggrandizing, but you can bet we all are ready for our close-ups.

She tucks an errant coil of hair behind one ear.

“I did, and we were—Sara was coercing her, and Anna wanted that to stop. I explained the alternatives.”

“We all have full-time jobs, Mr. Alexander. We’re psychiatrists and nurses and doctors and scientists and chaplains. We don’t go looking for problems.”

“Oh, stuff it, Campbell. You’re so glib you probably oil your lips every morning.”

“And putting Anna’s health at risk for a procedure that’s not necessary for her seems a little cavalier.”

That way, when I pulled into the house two driveways down, the sprawling Georgian with its rows of beech trees and its slope to the Bay, it wasn’t quite as imposing. At the very least, it was smaller than the first place.

For example, if you walk into my office and say, “I killed the Lindbergh baby,” I might ask you where the body is. “Under my bedroom floor,” you tell me, “three feet down below the foundation of the house.” If I am to do my job correctly, I can’t tell a soul where that baby is. I could be disbarred, in fact, if I do.

“Bruce,” I say to the prosecutor, “my client will waive information. And if you get rid of some of these traffic misdemeanors, I swear he’ll never come within fifty feet of the judge or his car again.”

“I’m probably going to get eviscerated for suggesting it, but I’ll tell him that the cops don’t mind if we give the kid a break.”

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it’s the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do.

“Today wasn’t a very good harbinger of what’s to come,” I tell her.

I pull the car back onto the road, and glance at her sidelong, but Anna sits with her hands wedged between her thighs, her face set mutinously ahead.

The triage nurse waves us inside, shepherds the other kids to the bank of plastic chairs where they can wait.

We use EMLA cream, a topical anesthetic. The cream is supposed to keep her from feeling the prick of the needle, but she still yells.

I have told myself that I will not lose my temper, and already thirty seconds into this phone call with the insurance company, I have ceded the battle.

"Don't walk Jesse into school. Apparently, that's anathema for sixth-graders."

When I first became a parent I used to lie in bed at night and imagine the most horrible succession of maladies: the bite of a jellyfish, the taste of a poisonous berry, the smile of a dangerous stranger, the dive into a shallow pool.

It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants—the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice, the ones who can teach you how to flush a central venous catheter, or suggest which patient floor kitchens might still have Popsicles left to be stolen, or tell you which dry cleaners know how to remove the stains of blood and chemotherapies from clothing.

One night during Kate's induction, when I have been awake for so long that my body has forgotten how to segue into sleep, I turn on the TV while she sleeps.

I can't even really remember what it was like to hear a story about a mother with breast cancer or a baby born with congenital heart problems or any other medical burden, and to feel myself crack down the middle: half sympathetic, half grateful that my own family was safe.

Anna is on the pediatric floor, one that doesn't have the hermetically sealed rooms necessary for protective isolation.

I accost the first nurse I can find.

I walk in to find Brian's big hands fumbling a Lilliputian clasp on the back of a necklace, as he hangs a locket around Anna's neck.

Almost immediately after we are seated, the sommelier comes to ask if we want wine.

Besides, the three funds we have are all earmarked for the kids' education. We are not the sort of family that has enough spare change to play the stock market.

This is to confirm your recent redemption from fund #323456, Brian D. Fitzgerald Custodian for Katherine S. Fitzgerald, in the amount of $8,369.56. This disbursement effectively closes the account.

In the basement, I pull out a pair of ancient electric grooming clippers we found when we bought the house, and plug them in. Then I cut a swath right down the middle of my scalp.