Handle With Care (14 page)

The little girl stared back.

You’d learned early on that strangers would stare at a girl in a wheelchair. I’d taught you to smile at them, to say hello, so that they’d realize you were a person and not just some curiosity of nature. Amelia was your fiercest protector—if she saw a kid gawking at you, she’d walk right up and tell him that was what would happen if he didn’t clean his room or eat his vegetables. Once or twice, she’d made a child burst into tears, and I almost didn’t reprimand her because it made you smile and sit up straighter in your wheelchair, instead of trying to be invisible.

But this was different; this was an equal match.

I squeezed your waist. “Willow,” I chided.

The girl’s mother looked up at me. A thousand words passed between us, although neither of us spoke. She nodded at me, and I nodded back.

You and I walked out of the hospital into a late spring day that smelled of cinnamon and asphalt. You squinted, tried to raise your arm to shield your eyes, and remembered that it was bound tight against your body. “That girl, Mommy,” you said. “Why did she look like that?”

“Because she’s sick, and that’s what happens when she takes her medicine.”

You considered this for a moment. “I’m so lucky…my medicine lets me have hair.”

I was careful not to cry around you, but this time I could not help it. Here you were, with three out of four extremities broken. Here you were, with a healing fracture I hadn’t even known occurred. Here you were, period. “Yes, we’re lucky,” I said.

You put your hand against my cheek. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said. And just as I’d done for you in the ER, you patted my back, the very same spot you’d broken in your own body.

Sean

“Stop, goddammit!” I yelled as I sprinted across the empty park, holding the can of spray paint. The kid still had a lead on me, not to mention the benefit of being thirty years younger, but I wasn’t going to let him get away. Not even if it killed me, which, judging from the stitch in my side, it just might.

It had been one of those unseasonably warm spring days that made me remember what it felt like to be a kid, listening to the slap of girls’ flip-flops as they walked past you at the town pool. I admit, during my lunch break, I’d put on some running shorts and taken a quick dip. We wouldn’t be swimming for a while—out of solidarity with you, since you couldn’t go into a pool until you were out of your spica cast. There was nothing you wanted to do more than swim—something you’d never really learned to do because of various breaks. Even after Charlotte had discovered fiberglass casts—which were waterproof and wicked expensive—you somehow managed to miss the swim-lesson season for one reason or another. When Amelia was being a particularly nasty preadolescent, she’d lord over you the fact that she was headed to a pool party or out to the beach. Then you’d spend the whole day sulking or, in one memorable case, getting on the Internet and submitting a bid request for an in-ground pool—something we had neither the land nor the money for. Sometimes I thought you were obsessed with water—frozen in the winter or chlorinated in the summer; all you wanted was exactly what you couldn’t have.

Sort of like the rest of us, I guess.

Now, my hair was still wet; I smelled of chlorine—and I was trying to figure out how I could mask that from you when I got home. The car win
dows were rolled down as I cruised by the local park, where a Little League game had recently broken up. And then I noticed a kid spray-painting graffiti on the dugout in broad daylight.

I don’t know what frustrated me more—the fact that this boy was defacing public property or the fact that he was doing it right under my nose, without even the pretense of hiding. I parked far away and sneaked up behind him. “Hey,” I called. “You want to tell me what you’re doing?”

He turned around, caught in the act. He was tall and whip-thin, with stringy yellow hair and a sad attempt at a mustache crawling over his upper lip. His gaze met mine, clear and defiant, and then he dropped the spray can and started running.

I took off, too. The boy darted away from the park’s borders and crossed beneath an overpass, where his sneaker slipped in a puddle of mud. He stumbled, which gave me just enough time to throw my weight into him and shove him up against the concrete wall, with my arm pushing into his throat. “I asked you a question,” I grunted. “What the fuck were you doing?”

He clawed at my arm, choking, and suddenly I saw myself through his eyes.

I wasn’t one of those cops who liked to use my position to bully people. So what had set me off so quickly? As I fell back, I figured it out: it wasn’t the fact that the boy had been spray-painting the dugout, or that he hadn’t shown remorse when I first arrived on the scene. It was that he’d run. That he could run.

I was angry at him because you, in this situation, couldn’t have escaped.

The kid was bent over, coughing. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he gasped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really sorry.”

He stared at me like an animal that had been cornered. “Get it over with, already. Arrest me.”

I turned away. “Just go. Before I change my mind.”

There was a beat of silence and then, again, the sound of running footsteps.

I leaned against the wall of the overpass and closed my eyes. These days, it felt like anger was a geyser inside of me, destined to explode at regular intervals. Sometimes that meant a kid like this one was on the receiving end. Sometimes it was my own child—I’d find myself yelling at
Amelia for something inconsequential, like leaving her cereal bowl on top of the television, when it was an infraction I was just as likely to commit myself. And sometimes it was Charlotte I complained to—for cooking meat loaf when I’d wanted chicken cutlets, for not keeping the kids quiet when I was sleeping after a late-night shift, for not knowing where I’d left my keys, for making me think there might be someone to be angry with in the first place.

I was no stranger to lawsuits. I’d sued Ford, once, after riding around in a cruiser gave me a herniated disk. And okay, maybe it was their fault and maybe it wasn’t, but they settled and I used the money to buy a van so we could move your wheelchairs and adaptive equipment around—and I’m quite sure that Ford Motor Company never even blinked when they cut the check for twenty thousand dollars in damages. But this was different; this wasn’t a lawsuit that blamed something that had happened to you—it was a lawsuit to blame the fact that you were here. Although I could easily earmark what we could do for you with a big settlement, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that, in order to get it, I’d have to lie.

For Charlotte, this didn’t seem to be a problem. And that got me thinking: What else was she lying about, even now, that I didn’t realize? Was she happy? Did she wish she could have started over, without me, without you? Did she love me?

What kind of father did it make me if I refused to file a lawsuit that might net you enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, instead of scraping money here and there and taking on extra shifts at high school basketball games and proms so that we’d have enough to buy you a memory-foam mattress, an electric wheelchair, an adapted car to drive? Then again, what kind of father did it make me if the only way to net those rewards was to pretend I didn’t want you here?

I leaned my head back against the concrete, my eyes closed. If you had been born without OI, and wound up in a car crash that left you paralyzed, I would have gone to an attorney’s office and had them look up every accident report that involved that make and model car to see if there was something faulty with the vehicle, something that might have led to the crash—so that the people responsible for hurting you would pay. Was a wrongful birth lawsuit really all that different?

It was. It was, because when I even whispered the words to myself
in front of the mirror while I was shaving, it made me feel sick to my stomach.

My cell phone began to ring, reminding me that I’d been away from the cruiser longer than I’d intended. “Hello?”

“Dad, it’s me,” Amelia said. “Mom never picked me up.”

I glanced down at my watch. “School ended two hours ago.”

“I know. She’s not home, and she’s not answering her cell phone.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Ten minutes later, a sullen Amelia swung into the cruiser. “Great. I just love being driven home in a cop car. Imagine the rumor mill.”

“Lucky for you, Drama Queen, that the whole town knows your father’s a policeman.”

“Did you talk to Mom?”

I had tried, but like Amelia said, she wasn’t answering any phone. The reason why became crystal clear when I pulled into our driveway and saw her carefully extricating you from the backseat—not just confined by your spica cast but sporting a new bandage that bound your upper arm to your body.

Charlotte turned as she heard us drive up, and winced. “Amelia,” she said. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I totally forgot—”

“Yeah, so what else is new?” Amelia muttered, and she stalked into the house.

I took you out of your mother’s arms. “What happened, Wills?”

“I broke my scapula,” you said. “It’s really hard to do.”

“The shoulder blade, can you believe it?” Charlotte said. “Clear down the middle.”

“You didn’t answer your phone.”

“My battery died.”

“You could have called from the hospital.”

Charlotte looked up. “You can’t actually be angry with me, Sean. I’ve been a little busy—”

“Don’t you think I deserve to know if my daughter gets hurt?”

“Could you keep your voice down?”

“Why?” I demanded. “Why not let everyone listen? They’re going to hear it all anyway, once you file—”

“I refuse to discuss this in front of Willow—”

“Well, you’d better get over that fast, sweetheart, because she’s going to hear every last ugly word of it.”

Charlotte’s face turned red, and she took you out of my arms and carried you into the house. She settled you on the couch, handed you the television remote, then walked into the kitchen, expecting me to follow. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“With me? You’re the one who left Amelia sitting for two hours after school—”

“It was an accident—”

“Speaking of accidents,” I said.

“It wasn’t a serious break.”

“You know what, Charlotte? It looks pretty fucking serious to me.”

“What would you have done if I called you, anyway? Left work early again? That would be one less day you were getting paid, which means we’d be doubly screwed.”

I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. Here was the underlying message in that goddamn lawsuit, the invisible ink that would show up between the lines of every court document: Sean O’Keefe doesn’t make enough money to take care of his daughter’s special needs…which is why it’s come to this.

“You know what I think?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “That if the shoe was on the other foot—if I’d been with Willow when she got hurt—and I didn’t call you, you’d be furious. And you know what else I think? The reason you didn’t call me has nothing to do with my job or with your cell phone battery. It’s that you’ve already made up your mind. You’re going to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, no matter what I say.” I stormed out of the house to my cruiser, still idling in the driveway, because God forbid I left my shift early.

I smacked my hand on the steering wheel, inadvertently honking the horn. The noise brought Charlotte to the window. Her face was tiny and white, an oval whose features were blurred at this distance.

I had asked Charlotte to marry me with petit fours. I went to a bakery and had them write a letter in icing on top of each one: MARRY ME, and then I mixed them up and served them on a plate. It’s a puzzle, I told her. You have to put them in order.

ARMY REM, she wrote.

Charlotte was still at the window, watching me with her arms crossed. I could barely see in her the girl I’d told to try again. I could no longer picture the look on her face when, the second time, she got it right.

Amelia

When Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer’s office we’d gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you’d been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.

I didn’t do it for the reason you’d think—to drown out the noise you were making. I knew that’s what my parents thought: that I was totally unsympathetic. I wasn’t about to try to explain it to them, either, but the truth was, I needed that music. I needed to distract myself from the fact that, when you were crying, there was nothing I could do to stop it, because that just made me hate myself even more.

Everyone—even you, in the bottom half of your spica cast, with your arm strapped up against your chest—was already sitting at the dinner table when I got there. Mom had cut your meat loaf into tiny squares, like postage stamps. It made me think of when you were little, sitting in your high chair. I used to try to play with you—rolling a ball or pulling you in a wagon—and every time I was told the same thing: Be careful.

Once, you were sitting on the bed and I was bouncing on it, and you fell off. One minute we were astronauts exploring the planet Zurgon, and the next, your left shin was bent at a ninety-degree angle and you were doing that freaky zoning-out thing you did when you had a bad
break. Mom and Dad went out of their way to say this wasn’t my fault, but who did they think they were kidding? I was the one who’d been jumping, even if it had been your idea in the first place. If I’d never been there, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

I slid into my chair. We didn’t have assigned seats, like some families did, but we all took the same ones for every meal. I was still wearing my headphones, with my music turned up loud—emo stuff, songs that made me feel like there were people with even crappier lives than mine. “Amelia,” my father said. “Not at the table.”