Handle With Care (52 page)

For God’s sake—that was the crux of this whole lawsuit.

“If it were Emma,” Rob said quietly, “wouldn’t you want to know?”

I blinked at him. “You don’t seriously think that Charlotte would listen to me if I told her her daughter was in trouble?”

Rob tilted his head. “Maybe that’s exactly why you have to try.”

As I drove through Bankton, I cataloged everything I knew about Amelia O’Keefe:

She wore size 7 shoes.

She didn’t like black licorice.

She could skate like an angel, and make it look easier than it ever was.

She was tough. Once, during a skating show, she’d done an entire program with a hole in her stockings and a blister rubbing her heel bloody.

She knew all the words to the Wicked sound track.

She bused her own plate, when I had to remind Emma to do it.

She’d fitted seamlessly, easily, thoughtlessly into our own home life, so much so that, when they were smaller, Emma and Amelia had been called the Twins by most of the teachers in the elementary school. They’d borrowed clothes from each other; they’d gotten their hair cut in tandem; they’d had sleepovers in the same narrow twin bed.

Maybe I was guilty of thinking of Amelia as an extension of Emma. Knowing ten concrete things about her did not make me an expert, but it was ten things more than her parents were paying attention to right now.

I did not realize where I was heading until I pulled into the hospital access drive. The guard at the booth waited for me to unroll my window. “I’m a doctor,” I said, not quite a lie, and he waved me ahead to the parking lot.

Technically, I still had operating privileges here. I’d known the OB staff well enough to be invited to their Christmas parties. But right now
the hospital was so unfamiliar that when I walked through the sliding glass doors I nearly buckled at the smells: industrial cleaner and lost hope. I might not feel ready to take on a real patient yet, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to treat a fictional one. So I put on my best harried physician face and walked up to the elderly volunteer in a pink smock. “I’m Dr. Reece; I was called here on a consult…I need the room number for Willow O’Keefe?”

Because it was after visiting hours, and because I wasn’t wearing a lab coat, I was stopped by the nurses at the pedi desk. None of them were familiar, which actually worked in my favor. I knew, of course, the name of Willow’s OI doctor. “Dr. Rosenblad at Children’s asked me to check in on Willow O’Keefe,” I said, in the no-nonsense tone that usually keeps nurses from second-guessing. “Is the chart outside the door?”

“Yes,” one nurse said. “Did you want us to page Dr. Suraya?”

“Dr. Suraya?”

“The treating physician?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. I won’t be more than a few minutes,” and I hurried down the hall as if I had a thousand things to do.

The door to your room was ajar, and the lights were low. You were asleep on the bed, and Charlotte was asleep in a chair beside you. She was holding on to a book: 1,000,001 Things You Never Knew.

Your arm was splinted, in addition to your left leg. Bandages wrapped your ribs tight. I could guess, even without reading your chart, what collateral damage had been done during the act of saving your life.

I leaned down very gently and kissed the crown of your head. Then I tugged the book out of Charlotte’s hands and set it on the nightstand. I already knew she wouldn’t wake up—she slept so heavily. Sean was always saying she snored like a longshoreman, although the few times we had bunked together during family trips, I’d only noticed her making a soft, soughing sound when she slept. I had always wondered if this was because she was more comfortable with Sean to really let go or because he didn’t understand her the way I did.

She mumbled in her sleep, and shifted, and I froze like a deer in headlights. Now that I was here, I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. Did I think that Charlotte wouldn’t be sleeping by your side? That she would welcome me with open arms when I said I was worried about you? Maybe the reason I had driven all the way here was that I needed to see for myself, even for a moment, that you were all right. Maybe when Charlotte woke
up, she would smell my perfume and wonder if she’d dreamed about me. Maybe she would remember that she’d fallen asleep holding the book, and wonder who’d moved it for her.

“You,” I whispered, “are going to be just fine.”

As I slipped away down the hospital corridor, I realized I was talking to all three of us.

Sean

To my surprise, Guy Booker showed up just after nine p.m. to tell me that the judge had agreed to a one-day continuance—so I wouldn’t have to testify starting tomorrow morning.

“That’s good, since she’s still at the hospital,” I told him. “Charlotte’s there with her. I came home with Amelia.”

“How’s Willow doing?”

“She’ll pull through okay. She’s a fighter.”

“Well, I know it was awful to get that call. But you do realize how great this is for our case?” he said. “It’s too late to say the lawsuit’s made her suicidal, but then again, if she’d died today—” He broke off abruptly, but not before I grabbed him by the collar and threw him against the wall.

“Finish your sentence,” I growled.

The blood drained from Booker’s face.

“You were going to say that, if she died, there wouldn’t be any damages, weren’t you, you son of a bitch?”

“If you thought it, then the jury will think it, too,” Booker choked out. “That’s all.”

I let him drop and turned my back. “Get out of my house.”

He was bright enough to slink out the door without another word, but less than a minute later, the doorbell rang again. “I told you to get lost,” I said, but instead of Guy Booker, it was Piper on the front porch.

“I…I’ll just go…”

I shook my head. “You weren’t who I was expecting.”

The memory of the kiss in the courthouse rose between us, pushing us each back a step. “I have to talk to you, Sean,” Piper said.

“I told you, just forget—”

“This isn’t about what happened this afternoon. This is about your daughter,” Piper said. “I think she might be bulimic.”

“No, she has OI.”

“You have another daughter, Sean. I’m talking about Amelia.”

We were having this conversation with the door wide open, both of us shivering. I stepped back to let Piper inside. She stood uncomfortably in the front hall. “There’s nothing wrong with Amelia,” I said.

“Bulimia’s an eating disorder. Which, by definition, is kept under wraps by the person who’s suffering from it. Emma’s heard her throwing up late at night. And Rob noticed during her last orthodontic checkup that the enamel’s been worn off the backs of her teeth—something that can be caused by repeated vomiting. Look, you can hate me for bringing this up, but especially given what we’re in the middle of right now, I would rather save Amelia’s life than know I had the chance to and didn’t.”

I looked up at the stairs. Amelia was in the shower, or at least she was supposed to be. She wouldn’t go into the bathroom you shared; instead she was using the one attached to the master bedroom. Although I’d cleaned up any evidence of what had happened to you, Amelia said it still freaked her out.

As a police officer, I sometimes had to consider the line between privacy and good parenting. I saw enough kids who appeared squeaky clean on the outside and were then busted for possession or theft or vandalism to know that people were never what you expected them to be—especially if they happened to be between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. I didn’t tell Charlotte, but sometimes I went through Amelia’s drawers just to see what she might be hiding. I’d never found anything. Then again, I had been looking for drugs, for alcohol—I had never thought to look for signs of an eating disorder. I wouldn’t even know what to look for. “She’s not skin and bones,” I said. “Maybe Emma got it wrong.”

“Bulimics don’t starve themselves, they binge and then purge. You wouldn’t see a weight loss. And there’s one more thing, Sean. In school, in the girls’ bathroom, Emma saw Amelia cutting herself.”

“Cutting?” I repeated.

“Like with a razor blade,” Piper replied, and suddenly, I understood. “Just go talk to her, Sean.”

“What do I say?” I asked, but she had already slipped out the door.

As Amelia showered, I could hear the water running through the pipes. Pipes—the same pipes we’d had the plumber in to fix four times over the past year, because they kept leaking. He’d said it was acid, which hadn’t made sense at the time.

Vomit was wicked acidic.

I walked upstairs and went into the bedroom you and your sister shared. If Amelia was bulimic, shouldn’t we have noticed food disappearing? I sat down at the desk and rummaged through the drawers but didn’t find anything except for packets of gum and a few old exams. Amelia brought home straight A’s. How could a kid who worked so hard, who did so many things right, have gone so far off track?

The bottom cabinet of Amelia’s desk didn’t close. I unhooked the drawer from its metal runners and pulled out a box of gallon-size Ziploc bags. I turned the box over in my hands as if I were examining a rare artifact. It didn’t really make sense for Amelia to have these up here when they were readily available in the pantry; it made even less sense for her to go to the trouble of hiding them behind the drawer. Then I turned to the bed. I pulled down the sheets but found only the stuffed, molting moose Amelia had slept with since I’d met Charlotte. I knelt beside the bed and ran my hands beneath the mattress.

They came by the fistfuls: torn candy wrappers, bread loaf wrappers, empty packages of cookies and crackers. They fluttered over my feet like plastic butterflies. Closer to the head of the bed were satin bras with the price tags still attached—in sizes far too big for Amelia—makeup with CVS price stickers, pieces of costume jewelry still riveted to their plastic display squares.

I sank to the floor, sitting in the center of all the evidence I hadn’t been willing to see.

Amelia

I was dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, and all I wanted to do was crawl into my pajamas and go to sleep and pretend today had never happened, but sitting on the floor in the middle of my room was my father. “Do you mind? I’m kind of not dressed…”

He turned around, and that’s when I noticed everything piled on the floor in front of him. “What is all this?” he asked me.

“Okay, so I’m a total pig. I’ll clean my room—”

“Did you steal these?” He lifted a handful of cosmetics and jewelry. They were horrible things—makeup I’d rather die than wear, earrings and necklaces for old ladies—but somehow sneaking them into my pockets had made me feel like a superhero.

“No,” I said, looking him in the eye.

“Who’s the bra for?” he asked. “Thirty-six D.”

“A friend,” I answered, and too soon realized I had screwed myself over: my father would know I didn’t have any friends.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, getting to his feet heavily.

“Well, maybe you could tell me, then. Because I don’t really understand why we have to have an inquisition while I’m freezing and soaking wet—”

“Did you make yourself throw up before you took that shower?”

My cheeks burned with the truth. It was the perfect time, because the running water covered the sound of retching. I’d gotten it down to a science. But I tried for a laugh. “Oh, yeah, right. I do that before every shower. Which is clearly why I’m a size eleven when everyone else in my grade is a size zer—”

He took a step forward, and I wrapped the towel more tightly
around myself. “Just stop the lying,” he said. “Just…stop.” My father reached for me and yanked my wrist toward him. I thought he was trying to pull away the towel, but that was nowhere near as humiliating as what he was actually trying to see: my forearms and my thighs, with their gray-scale ladders of scars.

“She saw me doing it,” I said, and I didn’t have to explain that I was talking about you.

“Jesus Christ,” my father thundered. “What were you thinking, Amelia? If you were upset, why didn’t you come to us?”

But I bet he knew the answer to that one.

I burst into tears. “I never meant to hurt her. I just wanted to hurt myself.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because it’s the only thing I can manage to do right.”

He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look into his eyes. “The reason I’m angry isn’t that I hate you,” my father said tightly. “It’s because I goddamn love you.” And then his arms were tight around me, the towel the thinnest barrier between us, and it wasn’t creepy or embarrassing; it was just what it was. “This stops right now, you hear me? There are treatment programs and things like that—and you’re going to get yourself fixed. But until then, I’m going to watch you. I’m going to watch you like a hawk.”

The more he yelled, the more tightly he held on to me. And here’s the weirdest thing of all: now that the worst had happened—now that I’d been found out—it wasn’t disastrous. It felt, well, inevitable. My father was furious, but me, I couldn’t stop smiling. You see me, I thought, my eyes closing. You see me.

Charlotte

That night, I slept in the chair beside your hospital bed, and I dreamed of Piper. We were at Plum Island again and we were boogie-boarding, but the waves had gone red as blood and stained our hair and our skin. I rode in on a wave so majestic and forceful that it made the shore buckle. I looked behind me, but you were being thrashed underneath the cutting edge of the wave, rolling head over heels, your body raked over the sea glass and the porous stones. Charlotte, you cried, help me! I heard you, but I started walking away.

I was awakened by Sean, shaking my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered, looking at you. “She slept through the night?”

I nodded, stretched the muscles of my neck. And then I noticed Amelia standing behind him. “Shouldn’t Amelia be in school?”

“The three of us have to talk,” Sean said, in a tone that brooked no argument. He glanced down at you, asleep. “You think she’ll be okay for a few minutes, while we grab some coffee?”

I left word at the nurses’ desk and followed Sean into the elevator, with Amelia trailing meekly behind. What the hell had happened between them?