My Sister's Keeper: List 4

Well, I don’t need to tell you that eleven-year-old budding derelicts and house rules are like oil and water.

The smoke is already billowing, angry black clouds.

"But Kate's feeling great right now!" she cheerleads.
"I know. But the lucid moments, they're going to get briefer and further apart," Dr. Chance explains.

"I can put you in touch with a shelter. And if you like, I can speak to your insurance company to expedite things."

We hiked back four miles to the shanty we'd passed, a gas station.

Madame Agnes was the kind of blind that scares children, with cataract eyes that looked like an empty blue sky.

She put her knobby hands on Sara's face to read her bones, and said that she saw three babies and a long life, but that it wouldn't be good enough. What's that supposed to mean? Sara asked, incensed, and Madame Agnes explained that fortunes were like clay, and could be reshaped at any time.

The good news is that if that happens, all the cancer cells are under siege, too—something Dr. Chance calls graft-versus-leukemia disease. The bad news is the symptomology: the chronic diarrhea, the jaundice, the loss of range of motion in her joints.

The scarring and sclerosis wherever there's connective tissue.

I barely recognize Anna, stuffed and trussed and tied into equipment that, eventually, we wound up borrowing from the coach's nephew.

I have never seen so much blood, and even as I try to stanch the flow I wonder how much of it she can stand to lose.

Belligerent, Anna walks into Kate's room, climbs onto a chair. Kate's chest rises and falls, the work of the respirator. All the fight goes out of Anna as she reaches out to touch her sister's cheek.

"Are you indicating that if my client willingly donates a kidney, then she will be absolved of all other medical procedures that may be necessary in the future to prolong Kate's life?"

“See, you're looking at the wrong stuff, Julia. You ought to be attracted to someone for what they've got inside them, not for the package it's presented in. Campbell Alexander may be gorgeous, but he's like marzipan frosting on a sardine."

We sleep in the tiny cabin, moored to its slip.

She snores, just a little. Her front tooth is crooked. Her eyelashes are as long as the nail of my thumb.
These are the minutiae that prove, more than anything else, the difference between us now that fifteen years have passed.

From the spot where he’s curled up on the galley table tight as a cinnamon bun, Judge raises his head.

When Judge and I arrive at the Garrahy building for the hearing, we have to fight our way through the reporters who have lined up for the Main Event. They thrust microphones in my face, and inadvertently step on Judge’s paws. Anna will take one look at walking this gauntlet, and bolt.

The shades to the hospital room are drawn, but that doesn’t keep me from seeing the angel pallor of Kate Fitzgerald’s face, the web of blue veins mapping out the last-chance path of medication running under her skin.

Anna was kind enough to help me by keeping the dog calm while the sliver of glass was removed from his paw.

“This is family court, Counselors. In family court, and especially in hearings like these, I tend to personally relax the rules of evidence because I don’t want a contentious hearing. I’m able to filter out what is admissible and what is not, and if there’s something truly objectionable, I’ll listen to the objection, but I would prefer that we get through this hearing quickly, without worrying about form.”

I’ll stipulate to whatever it is you’re trying to do in the process of crucifying me.

“Added up like this, it doesn’t seem quite so innocuous, does it?”

"Questions? Unadulterated praise for my skillful litigation?"

"...In Western Bioethics, there are six principles we try to follow." He ticks them off on his fingers. "Autonomy, or the idea that any patient over age eighteen has the right to refuse treatment..."

"Autonomy, or the idea that any patient over age eighteen has the right to refuse treatment; veracity, which is basically informed consent; fidelity—that is, a health-care provider fulfilling his duties; beneficence, or doing what's in the best interests of the patient; nonmaleficence—when you can no longer do good, you shouldn't do harm..."

He has that rangy puppy look of a sixteen-year-old, one with knobby knees and thick fingers and cheekbones he hasn't yet grown into.

As he swam me to higher ground, rain struck my face and pelted my back. I wondered how—in a deluge—I could feel like I was being burned alive.

Kate, with an aplomb I never would have guessed she possesses, considers the offer.

I have prayed and begged and wanted to be the one who's sick in lieu of her, some devil's Faustian bargain, but that is not the way it's happened.

"We were thinking of French braids," Anna continues.
"A perm," Kate adds.
Anna giggles. "Maybe a nice chignon."

When they kiss, it is beautiful: those alabaster heads bent together, smooth as statues—an optical illusion, a mirror image that's folding into itself.

But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of ewes in attendance, was a sheep giving birth.

“So what will you come back as, then?”
“Carrion.”

The difference between these fires and the other ones was that now the stakes have been ratcheted up a notch. Instead of an abandoned warehouse or a shack at the side of the water, it is an elementary school.

I will make sure that my son's pyromania ends here and now, but I won't tell the cops or the fire chief about this. Maybe that's nepotism, maybe it's stupidity.

Doctors have this thing about being subpoenaed: they let you know, with every syllable of every word, that no moment of this testimony will make up for the fact that while they were sitting on the witness stand under duress, patients were waiting, people were dying.

“Did you tell the Fitzgeralds to conceive a genetically programmed child to serve as a donor for Kate?”
“Absolutely not,” Chance says, affronted.

“But since this donation is hypothetical, let’s concentrate on the ones that have already happened. The growth factor shots, the DLI, the stem cells, the lymphocyte donations, the bone marrow—all of these myriad treatments Anna endured—in your expert opinion, Doctor, are you saying that Anna has not undergone any significant medical harm from these procedures?”

That old adage pops into my head: If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.