My Sister's Keeper: List 5

If Brian does what I need him to—namely, tell Judge DeSalvo that he knows Anna has rights, too, and that he’s prepared to support her—then whatever Julia says in her report will be a moot point.

Brian has become an emotional avalanche, headed right for the glass house I have been meticulously crafting.

“After having moved out with Anna, after having spoken to her at great lengths about why she’s initiated this lawsuit—do you agree with your wife’s request to have Anna continue to be a donor for Kate?”
The answer we have rehearsed is no; this is the crux of my case.

What else does a husband or a wife do, but attest to each other's errors in judgment?

And ages from now, when it is hard to bring back the picture of her face when she laughed or the feel of her hand inside mine or the perfect pitch of her voice, I will have Brian to say, Don't you remember? It was like this.
The judge's voice breaks into my reverie.

I slam down the empty glass carafe so hard it breaks in the sink.

He comes slinking around a corner with his ears flattened, no doubt running away from the sound of his owner’s raised voice. “Hey,” I say, soothing, but Judge wants none of it. He latches on to the bottom of my suit jacket—Campbell’s paying the dry cleaning bill, I swear it—and starts to drag me toward the fray.

“Mrs. Fitzgerald may not be thirteen, but she lives each day waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of Kate’s health, don’t you think?”
Grudgingly, the psychiatrist nods.

I am watching Campbell’s hands. They move around a lot while he is talking; he almost seems to use them to punctuate whatever he’s saying. But they're trembling a little, too, and I attribute this to the fact that he doesn't know what I'm going to say.

On the day that I mustered the courage to get out of bed of my own volition, I went to Wheeler and trolled around the boathouse, carefully staying hidden until I found a boy on the sailing team—a summer session student—who was taking out one of the school's skiffs.

I'm telling you this to explain my general aversion to public speaking.

Or this is what I'm thinking, anyway, when my daughter's lawyer falls to the floor in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal seizure, is the biggie. I jump over the gate of the gallery and have to fight the dog out of the way; he's come to stand over Campbell Alexander's twitching body like a sentry.

The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is forced out by the contraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and his muscles fire randomly, repeatedly.

"I don't understand why it happened."
I don't know if Campbell does, himself. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.

She reads back the transcript, and Campbell nods, but he acts like he's hearing my words, regurgitated, for the very first time.

But there is something mesmerizing about this weather. I used to sit in the front seat of my father’s Jag, watching the raindrops run their kamikaze suicide missions from one edge of the windshield to the wiper blade.

He liked to leave the wipers on intermittent, so that the world went runny on my side of the glass for whole blocks of time.

I follow her eyes from the gray carpet to the black couch, to the mirrored wall and the lacquered bookshelves. It is full of sharp edges and expensive art. It has the most advanced electronic gadgets and bells and whistles. It is a dream residence, but it is nobody’s home.

It's raining.
Not an auspicious beginning, I think.

I take a deep breath, stare down at the gibberish in front of me, and grab the whole sheaf of index cards.

The way the law works, if a petitioner takes action—even if that's your own child—you must have a reaction. And so I was forced to explain, eloquently, why I believe that I know better than Anna what is best for her. When you get down to it, though, explaining what you believe isn't all that easy.

It gets quiet for a moment, so all I can hear is the squelch of the windshield wipers.

"Brian," he says soberly, "she's not responding to noxious stimuli."

The sound that comes out of me is primal, inhuman, all-knowing.

When along the pavement,
Palpitating flames of life,
People flicker round me,
I forget my bereavement,
The gap in the great constellation,
The place where a star used to be.
—D. H. Lawrence,
 “Submergence”

When along the pavement,
Palpitating flames of life,
People flicker round me,
I forget my bereavement,
The gap in the great constellation,
The place where a star used to be.
—D. H. Lawrence,
 “Submergence”

The transplant nearly failed, and then, inexplicably, I began the long steep climb upward.

I sat down to watch TV and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh.
Immediately, I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse, sitting beside me on the couch, who said, “She would have thought it was funny, too.”

And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

I wonder if she was at Jesse’s graduation from the police academy, if she knows that he won a citation from the mayor last year for his role in a drug bust.