Handle With Care (26 page)

The green box that held the local paper was empty; Sean must have taken it on the way out to wherever he’d gone. Frustrated, I turned and noticed the wheelbarrow full of baked goods that we had set out yesterday at the end of the driveway.

The wheelbarrow was empty, except for the shoe box Amelia had fashioned into an honor-system cash register, and the cardboard sign you’d painted with glitter to read SYLLABUB.

I grabbed the shoe box and ran back to the house, into your bedroom. “Girls,” I said, “look!”

You both rolled over, still cocooned in sleep. “God,” Amelia groaned, glancing at the clock.

I sat down on your bed and opened the shoe box. “Where did you get all the money?” you asked, and that was enough to make Amelia sit up in bed.

“What money?” she asked.

“From the stuff we baked,” I said.

“Give me that.” Amelia grabbed the box and started organizing the money into piles. There were bills and coins, in all denominations. “There’s like a hundred dollars here!”

You crawled out of your bed and onto Amelia’s. “We’re rich,” you said, and you took a fistful of dollars and tossed them overhead.

“What are we going to do with it?” Amelia asked.

“I think we should buy a monkey,” you said.

“Monkeys cost way more than a hundred dollars,” Amelia scoffed. “I think we should get a TV for our bedroom.”

And I thought we should pay down the debt on our MasterCard, but I doubted you girls would agree.

“We already have a TV downstairs,” you said.

“Well, we don’t need a stupid monkey!”

“Girls,” I interrupted. “There’s only one way to get what we all want. We bake enough to make more money.” I looked at each of you in turn. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

You and Amelia rushed to the adjacent bathroom, and then I heard running water and the methodic scrub of your toothbrushes. I pulled up the sheets on your bed and tucked in the blankets. On Amelia’s bed, I did the same thing, but this time when I smoothed the quilt under the mattress, my fingers swept free dozens of candy wrappers, the plastic bag from a loaf of bread, crumbling packets of graham crackers. Teenagers, I thought, sweeping them all into the trash can.

In the bathroom, I could hear you two arguing about who had left the cap off the toothpaste. I reached into the shoe box and tossed another handful of cash into the air, listening instead to the hail of silver coins, the song of possibility.

Sean

I probably shouldn’t have taken the newspaper. That’s what I thought to myself as I sat in a booth at a diner two towns over from Bankton, nursing my glass of orange juice and waiting for the short-order cook to fry up my eggs. After all, it was the first thing Charlotte did every morning: sip a cup of coffee as she perused the headlines. Sometimes she’d even read the letters to the editor out loud, especially the ones that sounded as if they’d been written by nutcases one step away from a Ruby Ridge standoff. When I sneaked out at six a.m., pausing before I grabbed the paper, I realized that this was going to piss her off. And, okay, maybe that was enough incentive for me to drive off with it. But now that I’d unfolded it and scanned the front page, I categorically knew I should have left it where it was, in its box.

Because right there, above the fold, was a story about me and my family.

LOCAL COP FILES WRONGFUL BIRTH SUIT

Willow O’Keefe is—in many ways—a normal five-year-old girl. She goes to full-day kindergarten at Bankton Elementary School, where she studies reading and math and music. She plays with her peers during recess. She buys lunch in the school cafeteria. But in one respect, Willow is not like other five-year-olds. Sometimes Willow uses a wheelchair,
sometimes a walker, and sometimes, leg braces. That’s because, during the course of her short life, she’s suffered over sixty-two broken bones, due to a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that Willow’s had since birth and that—her parents allege—should have been diagnosed by the obstetrician early enough to allow for an abortion. Although the O’Keefes love their daughter dearly, her medical bills have spiraled past routine insurance coverage, and now her parents—Lieutenant Sean O’Keefe of the Bankton Police Department and Charlotte O’Keefe—are among a growing number of patients suing their obstetrician-gynecologists for not providing them with information about fetal abnormalities that, they say, would have led them to terminate the pregnancies.

More than half of the states in America recognize wrongful birth lawsuits, and many of these cases settle out of court for less money than a jury might award because medical malpractice insurance companies don’t want a child like Willow presented to a jury. But lawsuits like this often open a can of worms in terms of ethical complications: what do such lawsuits suggest about the value society places on disabled people? Who can judge parents, who see their disabled children suffering daily? Who—if anyone—has the right to choose what sorts of disabilities should determine abortion? And what is the effect on a child like Willow, who is old enough to hear her parents’ testimony?

Lou St. Pierre, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Association of People with Disabilities, says he understands why parents like the O’Keefes choose to file a lawsuit. “It can help with the incredible financial burden that a severely disabled child puts on a family,” says St. Pierre, who was born with spina bifida and is wheelchair-bound. “But the caveat is the message that’s being sent to that child: that disabled people can’t live rich, full lives; that if you aren’t perfect, you shouldn’t be here.”

Most recently, in 2006, a $3.2 million settlement in a 2004 wrongful birth case was overturned by the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

There was even a picture of the four of us—one that had been taken for a Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Cop circular put out by the Bankton PD two years ago. Amelia didn’t have her braces yet.

Your arm was in a cast.

I threw the paper across the booth so that it landed in the far seat. Fucking journalists. What did they do, wait at the courthouse to see what was coming up on the docket? Anyone who read this article—and who wouldn’t? It was the local paper—would think I was in this for the cash.

I wasn’t, and just to prove it, I took out my wallet and left twenty bucks on the table for a two-dollar meal I hadn’t even been served.

Fifteen minutes later, after a quick stop at the precinct to look up Marin Gates’s address, I showed up at her house. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. There were gnome garden statues, and the mailbox was a pig whose snout opened. The clapboards were painted purple. It looked like the kind of place Hansel and Gretel would live, not a no-nonsense attorney.

When I rang the bell, Marin answered the door. She was wearing a Beatles Revolver T-shirt and sweatpants that said UNH down the leg. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“You should have called.” She looked around, trying to find Charlotte.

“I’m here alone,” I said.

Marin folded her arms across her chest. “I’m unlisted. How did you find out where I live?”

I shrugged. “I’m a cop.”

“That’s an invasion of privacy—”

“Good. You can sue me when you finish suing Piper Reece.” I held up the morning paper. “Did you read this crap?”

“Yes. There’s very little we can do about the press, except keep saying ‘No comment.’”

“I’m out,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“I quit. I want out of this lawsuit.” Simply saying those words made me feel like I’d passed the weight of the world to some other sucker. “I’ll sign anything you want me to, I just want to make it official.”

Marin hesitated. “Come inside so we can talk,” she said.

If I’d been surprised by the outside of her house, I was stunned by the interior. There was one entire wall covered with Hummel figurines on shelves, and the other walls were spotted with needlepoint. Doilies bloomed like algae on the surface of the sofa. “Nice place,” I lied.

She just stared at me, impassive. “I rent it fully furnished,” she explained. “The woman who owns the house lives in Fort Lauderdale.”

On the dining room table was a stack of files, and a legal pad. All around the floor were crumpled pieces of paper; whatever it was she was writing wasn’t coming smoothly.

“Look, Lieutenant O’Keefe, I know you and I haven’t gotten off to the best start, and I know the deposition was…challenging for you. But we’ll take another stab at that, and things are going to be different once we’re in court. I really do feel confident that the damages the jury will be willing to award—”

“I don’t want your blood money,” I said. “She can have it all.”

“I think I see the problem here,” Marin answered. “But this isn’t about you and your wife. This is about Willow. And if you really want to give her the kind of life she deserves, you need to win a lawsuit like this. If you pull out now, it just gives the defense one more hook to hang their hat on—”

Too late, she realized that this might actually be something I’d want.

“My daughter,” I said tightly, “reads at a sixth-grade level. She’s going to see that newspaper article, and a dozen others like it, I’m guessing. She’s going to hear her mother tell the whole wide world she wasn’t wanted. You tell me, Ms. Gates. Is it better that I sit in that courtroom actively undermining your chance of winning your case or that I step aside so there’s somewhere for Willow to turn when she needs to know that someone loves her, no matter what she’s like?”

“Are you so sure you’ll be doing the right thing for your daughter?”

“Are you?” I asked. “I’m not leaving here until you give me paperwork to sign.”

“You can’t expect me to draft something on a Sunday morning when I’m not at the office—”

“Twenty minutes. I’ll meet you there.” I had just opened the door to walk outside when I was stopped by Marin’s voice.

“Your wife,” she asked. “What does she think about you doing this?”

I turned slowly. “She doesn’t think about me,” I said.

I didn’t see Charlotte that night, or the next morning. I assumed it would take that long for Marin to tell my wife that I’d dropped out of the lawsuit. However, even a guy who’s strong in his convictions understands self-preservation; there was no way I was headed home to talk to your mother until I had a few fortifying drinks under my belt—and, being a cop, had left enough time to let the alcohol pass safely through my system before I drove.

Maybe then I’d be lucky enough to find her asleep.

“Tommy,” I said, motioning to the bartender, and I pushed my empty beer glass toward him. I had come to O’Boys with some of the patrol officers after our shift, but they’d all left to go home to their wives and kids for supper by now. It was too late for a predinner drink and too early for the nighttime party crowd; other than Tommy and me, the only person in the bar was an old man who started drinking at three and stopped when his daughter came to pick him up at last call.

The bell over the door jingled, and a woman walked in. She peeled off a tight leopard-print coat only to reveal an even tighter hot pink dress. It was outfits like this that always fucked up rape cases for the prosecution.

“Cold out there,” she said, sliding onto a stool beside me. I stared resolutely down at my empty beer glass. Try wearing some clothes, I thought.

Tommy passed me a fresh beer and turned to the woman. “What can I get you?”

“A dirty martini,” she said, and then she turned to me and smiled. “You ever have one of those?”

I took a sip of beer. “I don’t like olives.”

“I like to suck the pimientos out,” she admitted. She unclipped her hair—blond, curly—so that it fell like a river to the middle of her back. “Beer tastes like Kitty Litter, if you ask me.”

I laughed at that. “When was the last time you tasted Kitty Litter?”

She arched her brows. “Haven’t you ever just looked at something and known how it’s going to taste?”

She did say something, didn’t she? Not someone?

I’ve never cheated on Charlotte. I’ve never even thought about cheating on Charlotte. God knows, I come across enough young women in my career to have the opportunity, if I wanted to take advantage. To be honest, Charlotte was all I’d ever wanted—even after eight years. But the woman I’d married—the one who had promised to buy vanilla ice cream for me in her wedding vows, even though it was a poor substitute for chocolate—was not the same one I saw these days in our house. That woman was single-minded and distant, so focused on what she might get that she couldn’t even see what she had.

“My name’s Sean,” I said, facing the woman.

“Taffy Lloyd,” she said, and she took a sip of her martini. “Like the candy. The Taffy part, not the Lloyd.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t I know you?”

“I’m pretty sure I’d remember meeting you before—”

“No, I know it. I never forget a face—” She broke off, snapping her fingers. “You were in the newspaper,” she said. “You’ve got a little girl who’s really sick, right? How’s she doing?”

I lifted my beer, wondering if she could hear my heart pounding as loud as I could. She recognized me from that article? If this woman did, how many others would? “She’s doing all right,” I said tersely, finishing my beer in another long swallow. “In fact, I’ve got to get home to her.” The hell with driving; I’d walk.

I started to get up from my stool but was stopped by her voice. “I heard you’re not suing anymore.”

Slowly, I turned. “That wasn’t in the newspaper.”

Suddenly, she didn’t look ditzy at all. Her eyes were a piercing blue, and they were fixed on mine. “Why did you want out?”

Was she a reporter? Was this a trap? I felt my guard rising, too late. “I’m just trying to do what’s best for Willow,” I muttered, shrugging into my jacket, cursing when my sleeve got tangled.

Taffy Lloyd set a business card down on the bar in front of me. “What’s best for Willow,” she said, “is for this lawsuit not to happen.” With a nod, she swung her leopard coat over her shoulder and walked out the door, leaving behind most of her martini.

I picked up the card and traced my finger over the raised black lettering: