Handle With Care (21 page)

There was a sudden rush of cold air. “What the hell are you doing?” Rob asked, bleary, standing in the doorway.

“Stripping the wallpaper.”

“In the middle of the night? Piper,” he sighed.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He turned off the taps. “You have to try.” Rob led me by the hand back to bed, where I lay down and drew the covers over me. I curled onto my side, and he fitted his arm around my waist.

“I could redo the bathroom,” I whispered when his even breathing told me he was asleep again.

Charlotte and I had spent one day last summer reading every kitchen and bath makeover magazine in the Barnes & Noble racks. Maybe you should go minimalist, Charlotte had suggested, and then, turning the page, French provincial?

Get an air tub, she’d suggested. A TOTO toilet. A heated towel rack.

I’d laughed. A second mortgage?

When I met with Guy Booker at the law firm, would he take inventory of this house? Of our mutual funds and retirement accounts and Emma’s college savings and all the other assets that could be taken away in a settlement?

Tomorrow, I decided, I would get one of those steamers. And whatever other tools I needed to strip wallpaper. I would fix it all myself.

“I think I dropped the ball,” I admitted as I sat across from Guy Booker at a gleaming, imposing conference table.

My lawyer reminded me of Cary Grant—white hair with a raven’s wing of color at the temples, tailored suit, even that little divot in his chin. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” he said.

He had told me that we had twenty days to file an answer to the complaint I’d been served—a formal pleading for the court. “You say that osteogenesis imperfecta can be diagnosed by a woman’s twentieth week of pregnancy?” he asked.

“Yes—the lethal kind, anyway, by ultrasound.”

“Yet the patient’s daughter survived.”

“Right,” I said. Thank God.

I liked that he was referring to Charlotte as “the patient.” It made it feel more clinical. It was one step farther away.

“So she’s got the severe type—Type III.”

“Yes.”

He flipped through the file again. “The femur was in the sixth percentile?”

“Right. That’s documented.”

“But it’s not a definitive marker for OI.”

“It can mean all sorts of things. Down syndrome, skeletal dysplasia…or a short parent, or the fact that we took a bad measurement. A lot of fetuses with standard deviations like Willow’s at eighteen weeks go on to be perfectly healthy. It’s not until a later ultrasound, when that number falls off the charts, that we know we’re dealing with some abnormality.”

“So your advice would have been to wait and see, regardless?”

I stared at him. Put that way, it didn’t seem like I’d made a mistake. “But the skull,” I said. “My technician pointed it out—”

“Did she say to you that she thought there might be a medical issue?”

“No, but—”

“She said it was a very clear picture of the brain.” He looked up at me. “Yes, your ultrasound technician called attention to something unusual—but not necessarily symptomatic. It might have been a technical issue with the machine, or the position of the transducer, or just a damn good scan.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said, feeling tears claw at the back of my throat. “It was OI, and I missed it.”

“You’re talking about a procedure that isn’t a conclusive test for the presence of OI. Or in other words, had the patient been seeing another physician instead of you, the same thing would have happened. That’s not malpractice, Piper. That’s sour grapes, on the part of the parents.” Guy frowned. “Do you know of any physician who would have diagnosed OI based on the eighteen-week ultrasound of a demineralized calvarium, a shortened femur, and no obvious skeletal fractures?”

I glanced down at the table. I could nearly see my own reflection. “No,” I admitted. “But they would have sent Charlotte for further testing—a more advanced ultrasound, and a CVS.”

“You’d already suggested further testing once to the patient,” Guy
pointed out. “When her quad screen came back with a greater chance of having a Down syndrome baby.”

I met his gaze.

“You advised amniocentesis then, didn’t you? And what was her response?”

For the first time since I’d been handed that little blue folder, I felt the knot in my chest release. “She was going to have Willow no matter what.”

“Well, Dr. Reece,” the lawyer said. “That sure as hell doesn’t sound to me like wrongful birth.”

Charlotte

I started lying all the time.

At first it was just tiny white lies: responses to questions like “Ma’am, are you okay?” when the dental receptionist called my name three times and I didn’t hear her; or when a telemarketer phoned and I said that I was too busy to do a survey, when in fact I’d been sitting at the kitchen table staring into space. Then I began to lie in earnest. I’d cook a roast for dinner, completely forget it was in the oven, and tell Sean as he sawed through the blackened char that it clearly was the shoddy cut of meat the market had started stocking. I’d smile at neighbors and tell them, when they asked, that we were all doing well. And when your kindergarten teacher called me up and asked me to come to school because there had been an incident, I acted as if I had no idea what might have upset you in the first place.

When I arrived, you were sitting in the empty classroom in a tiny chair beside Ms. Watkins’s desk. The transition to public school had been less divine than I’d expected it to be. Yes, you had a full-time aide paid for by the state of New Hampshire, but I had to argue every last right for you—from the ability to go to the bathroom by yourself to the chance to interact in gym class when the play wasn’t too strenuous and you weren’t in danger of suffering a break. The good news was that this took my mind off the lawsuit. The bad news was that I wasn’t allowed to stay and make sure you were doing all right. You were in a classroom with new kids who didn’t know you—and who didn’t know about OI. When I asked you after your first day what you did in school, you told me how you and Martha played with Cuisenaire rods, how you were on the same team for Capture the Flag. I’d been thrilled to hear about this
new friend and asked if you wanted to invite her over to the house. “I don’t think she can, Mom,” you told me. “She has to cook dinner for her family.”

As far as I knew, the only friend you’d made in this class was your aide.

Your eyes flickered toward me when I shook the teacher’s hand, but you didn’t speak. “Hi, Willow,” I said, sitting down beside you. “I hear you had a little trouble today.”

“Do you want to tell your mom what happened, or should I?” Ms. Watkins asked.

You folded your arms and shook your head.

“Willow was invited to participate in some imaginary play with two children this morning.”

My face lit up. “But—that’s terrific! Willow loves to pretend.” I turned to you. “Were you being animals? Or doctors? Space explorers?”

“They were playing house,” Ms. Watkins explained. “Cassidy was role-playing the mom; Daniel was the dad—”

“And they wanted me to be the baby,” you exploded. “I’m not a baby.”

“Willow’s very sensitive about her size,” I explained. “We like to say she’s just space-efficient.”

“Mom, they kept saying that because I was littlest I had to be the baby, but I didn’t want to be the baby. I wanted to be the dad.”

This, I could tell, was news to Ms. Watkins, too. “The dad?” I said. “How come you didn’t want to be the mom?”

“Because moms go into the bathroom and cry and turn on the water so no one can hear them.”

Ms. Watkins looked at me. “Mrs. O’Keefe,” she said, “why don’t you and I talk for a moment outside?”

For five whole minutes we drove in silence. “It is not okay for you to trip Cassidy when she walks by you for snack.” Although I did have to give you some credit for ingenuity—there wasn’t much you could do to hurt someone without also hurting yourself, and this was a pretty clever, if diabolical, tactic. “The last thing you want, Willow, is for Ms. Watkins to think you’re a troublemaker after one week of school.”

I did not tell you that, when we had gone into the hall and Ms. Wat
kins asked if there was something going on at home that might lead to you acting out in school, I had flat-out lied. “No,” I said, after pretending to think a minute. “I can’t imagine where she got that from. But then again, Willow’s always had a remarkable imagination.”

“Well?” I prompted, still waiting for some recognition from you that you’d crossed a line you shouldn’t have. “Do you have something you want to say?”

I glanced in the rearview mirror for your response. You nodded, your eyes full of tears. “Please don’t get rid of me, Mommy.”

If I hadn’t been paused at a stoplight, I probably would have crashed into the car in front of me. Your narrow shoulders were shaking; your nose was running. “I’ll be better,” you said. “I’ll be perfect.”

“Oh, Willow, honey. You are perfect.” I felt trapped by my seat belt, by the ten seconds it took for the light to change. As soon as it did, I pulled into the first side street I could. I turned off the ignition and slipped into the backseat to take you out of your car seat. It had been adapted, like your infant car bed—this was upright but foam lined the straps, because otherwise even braking could cause a fracture. I gently untangled you and rocked you in my arms.

I had not talked to you about the lawsuit. I told myself that I was trying to keep you blissfully ignorant for as long as possible—much the same reason I hadn’t told Ms. Watkins about it. But the longer I put off this conversation, the greater the likelihood you’d find out about it from a classmate, and I couldn’t let that happen.

Had I really been trying to protect you? Or had I just been protecting myself? Would this be the moment I’d point to, months from now, as the beginning of the unraveling between us: yes, we were sitting on Appleton Lane, under a sugar maple, the moment that my daughter started to hate me.

“Willow,” I said, my throat suddenly so dry that I could not swallow. “If anyone’s been bad, it’s me. Do you remember when we went to visit that lawyer after your breaks at Disney World?”

“The man or the lady?”

“The lady. She’s going to help us.”

You blinked. “Help us do what?”

I hesitated. How was I supposed to explain the legal system to a five-year-old? “You know how there are rules?” I said. “At home, and at school? What happens if someone breaks those rules?”

“They get a time-out.”

“Well, there are rules for grown-ups, too,” I said. “Like, you can’t hurt someone. And you can’t take something that’s not yours. And if you break the rules, you get punished. Lawyers can help you if someone breaks a rule and hurts you in the process. They make sure that the person who did something wrong takes responsibility.”

“Like when Amelia stole my glitter nail polish and you made her buy me another one with her babysitting money?”

“Exactly like that,” I said.

Your eyes welled up again. “I broke the rules in school and the lawyer’s going to make me move out of the house,” you said.

“No one is moving,” I said firmly. “Especially not you. You didn’t break the rules. Someone else did.”

“Is it Daddy?” you asked. “Is that why he doesn’t want you to get a lawyer?”

I stared at you. “You heard us talking about that?”

“I heard you yelling about it.”

“It wasn’t Daddy. And it wasn’t Amelia.” I took a deep breath. “It was Piper.”

“Piper stole something from our house?”

“This is where it gets complicated,” I said. “She didn’t steal a thing, like a television or a bracelet. She just didn’t tell me something that she should have. Something very important.”

You looked down at your lap. “It was something about me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s nothing that would ever change the way I feel about you. There’s only one Willow O’Keefe on this planet, and I was lucky enough to get her.” I kissed the top of your head, because I wasn’t brave enough to look you in the eye. “It’s a funny thing, though,” I said, my voice knotting around a rope of tears. “In order for this lawyer to help us, I have to play a game. I have to say things I don’t really mean. Things that might hurt if you heard them and didn’t know I was really just acting.”

Now I watched your face carefully to see if you were following me. “Like when someone gets shot on TV but not in real life?” you said.

“Right,” I said. They’re fake bullets, so why do I still feel like I’m bleeding out? “You’re going to hear things, and maybe read things, and you’ll think to yourself, My mom would never say that. And you’d be right. Because when I’m in court, talking to that lawyer, I’m pretending to be
someone else, even though I look the same and my voice sounds the same. I might fool everyone else in the world, but I don’t want to fool you.”

You blinked up at me. “Can we practice?”

“What?”

“So I can tell. If you’re acting or not.”

I drew in my breath. “Okay,” I said. “You were absolutely right to trip Cassidy today.”

You stared at me fiercely. “You’re lying. I wish you weren’t, but you’re lying.”

“Good girl. Ms. Watkins needs to pluck her unibrow.”

A smile fluted across your face. “That’s a trick question, but you’re still lying, because even if she really does look like there’s a caterpillar between her eyes, that’s something Amelia would say out loud but not you.”

I burst out laughing. “Honestly, Willow.”

“True!”

“But I didn’t say anything yet!”

“You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you,” you said with a shrug. “All you have to do is say my name and I know.”

“How?”

When I looked down at you, I was struck by how much of myself I could see in the shape of your eyes, in the light of your smile. “Say Cassidy,” you instructed.

“Cassidy.”

“Say…Ursula.”

“Ursula,” I parroted.

“Now…,” and you pointed to your own chest.

“Willow.”

“Can’t you hear it?” you said. “When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth.”