Handle With Care (54 page)

I had held my hands over the bowl of my belly. “I don’t want her to suffer.”

Piper sighed. “I don’t want you to suffer.”

I thought of the conversation Sean and I had had after we left the geneticist’s office the day before, after being told you had—at worst—lethal OI and—at best—severe OI. I had found him in the garage, sanding the rails of the cradle he’d been making in anticipation of your arrival. It’s like butter, he said, holding out the narrow piece of wood. Feel it. But to me, it looked like a bone, and I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. “Sean doesn’t want to do it,” I said.

“Sean isn’t pregnant.”

I asked you how an abortion was performed, and I asked you to be honest. I had pictured being on the plane, having flight attendants ask
me when I was due, whether it was a boy or a girl, those same flight attendants not making eye contact on the flight home. “What would you do?” I asked her.

She hesitated. “I’d ask myself what scares me the most.”

That’s when I looked up at her, the one question on my lips that I had not been brave enough to ask Sean, or Dr. Del Sol, or even myself. “What if I can’t love her?” I whispered.

Piper smiled at me, then. “Oh, Charlotte,” she said. “You already do.”

Marin

The defense called Dr. Gianna Del Sol to the stand, to establish that there was nothing she would have done differently if she’d been the primary physician to treat Charlotte instead of the referral. But when they called Dr. R. Romulus Wyndham, an OB and bioethicist with a list of credentials that took a half hour to run through, I started to worry. Not only was Wyndham smart but he was movie-star pretty, and he had the jury eating out of his hand. “Some tests that flag abnormality early are false positives,” he said. “In 2005, for example, a team from Reprogenetics kept growing fifty-five embryos that were diagnosed as abnormal during preimplantation genetic diagnosis. After a few days, they were shocked to find out that forty-eight percent of them—nearly half—were normal. Which means there’s evidence that embryos with genetically flawed cells might heal themselves.”

“Why might that be medically important to a physician like Piper Reece?” Booker asked.

“Because it’s proof that termination decisions made too early might not be prudent.”

As Booker took his seat, I rose in one smooth motion. “Dr. Wyndham, that study you just cited—how many of those embryos had osteogenesis imperfecta?”

“I…I don’t know that any of them did.”

“What was the nature of the abnormality, then?”

“I can’t say, precisely—”

“Were they major abnormalities?”

“Again, I’m not—”

“Isn’t it true, Dr. Wyndham, the study could have been showing
embryos with very minor abnormalities that corrected themselves?”

“I suppose so.”

“There’s also a difference between waiting to see what happens to a days-old embryo and a weeks-old fetus, isn’t there, in terms of the point when you can safely and legally terminate a pregnancy?”

“Objection,” Guy Booker said. “If I can’t run a pro-life rally in court, she can’t run a pro-choice rally.”

“Sustained,” the judge said.

“Isn’t it true that if doctors followed your wait-and-see approach and withheld information about fetal conditions, it might make it harder to terminate a pregnancy—logistically, physically, and emotionally?”

“Objection!” Guy Booker called out again.

I walked toward the bench. “Please, Your Honor, this isn’t about abortion rights. It’s about the standard of care that my client should have received.”

The judge pursed his lips. “All right, Ms. Gates. But make your point fast.”

Wyndham shrugged. “Any obstetrician knows how hard it is to counsel patients with fetal abnormalities to terminate pregnancies when, in one’s medical opinion, the baby won’t survive. But it’s part of the job.”

“It might be part of Piper Reece’s job,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean she did it.”

We had a two-hour recess for lunch, because Judge Gellar had to go to the DMV to apply for a motorcycle license. Apparently, according to the clerk of the court, he planned to take a Harley cross-country next summer during his month off the bench. I wondered if that was what had made him dye his hair: black went better with leather.

Charlotte left the minute court was recessed, so that she could visit you at the hospital. I hadn’t seen Sean or Amelia since this morning, so I stepped out onto the janitor’s loading dock, a door most reporters didn’t know existed.

It was one of those late September days that felt like the long fingers of winter tugging the hem of New Hampshire—cold, bitter, with a biting wind. And yet, there still seemed to be a big crowd gathered
on the front steps, which I could only just make out from where I was standing. A custodian pushed out the door and stood beside me to light up a cigarette. “What’s going on up there?”

“Freaking circus,” he said. “That case about the kid with the funky bones.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard it’s a nightmare,” I muttered, and hugging my arms to stay warm, I picked my way to the edge of the group in front of the courthouse.

At the top of the stairs was a man I recognized from the news: Lou St. Pierre, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Association of People with Disabilities. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, he had a degree from Yale Law, was a Rhodes scholar, and had won a gold medal in the breast stroke at the Paralympics. Now, he traveled both in his customized wheelchair and in a plane that he piloted himself to fly kids around the country for medical treatment. His service dog sat by the side of St. Pierre’s wheelchair, unflinching, while twenty reporters jammed microphones close to its nose. “You know why this lawsuit is so captivating? It’s like a train wreck. You can’t tear your eyes away, even though you’d rather not admit these kind of torts exist,” he said. “Plain and simple: this topic is loaded. This is exactly the kind of lawsuit that makes your skin crawl, because we’d all like to believe that we might love any child that comes into our family—instead of admitting that, in reality, we might not be that accepting. Prenatal testing reduces a fetus to one trait: its disability. It’s unfortunate that prenatal testing automatically makes the assumption that a parent might not want a child who’s disabled, and that it implies it’s unacceptable to live life with some sort of physical impairment. I know plenty of parents in the deaf community who would love a child just like them, for example. One person’s disability is another person’s culture.”

As if on cue, his service dog barked.

“Abortion’s already a hot-button issue: Is it okay to destroy a potential life? Termination takes that one step further: Is it okay to destroy this potential life?”

“Mr. St. Pierre,” a reporter called out. “What about the statistics that say raising a disabled child is stressful to a marriage?”

“Well, I agree. But there are also statistics that say it’s equally stressful to raise a child who’s a prodigy or an athletic superstar, and you don’t see any doctors advising parents to terminate those pregnancies.”

I wondered who’d called in the cavalry—Guy Booker, no doubt. Since this case was technically a malpractice suit, he wouldn’t invite another attorney from outside his practice to cochair Piper’s defense, but he made sure to stage this impromptu news conference all the same to stack his odds of winning.

“Lou,” another reporter asked. “Are you going to testify?”

“That’s what I’m doing right now in front of all you good people,” St. Pierre preached. “And I’m going to keep on talking in the hopes that I can convince anyone who’s listening never to bring another lawsuit like this to the great state of New Hampshire.”

Excellent. I’d lost my case because of a guy who wasn’t even a valid witness for the defense. I trudged back toward the loading dock door. “Who’s talking?” the custodian said, grinding his cigarette butt underneath his boot. “That dwarf?”

“He’s a Little Person,” I corrected.

The custodian stared at me blankly. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

The door banged shut behind him. I was freezing, but I waited before following him inside: I didn’t feel like making small talk with him the whole way up the staircase. He was, in truth, the perfect example of the greased slope Charlotte and I were dancing down. If it was acceptable to want to terminate a fetus that had Down or OI, what about when medical advances made it possible to see your child’s potential beauty, or her level of compassion? What about parents who wanted only a boy and learned they had conceived a girl? Who would be allowed to set the bars for access, and for rejection?

As much as it pained me to admit it, Lou St. Pierre was right. People were always saying they’d love any baby that came along, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Sometimes, it really did come down to the particular child in question. There had to be a reason why blond-haired, blue-eyed babies got plucked out of adoption agencies like ripe peaches but children of color and children with disabilities might linger in foster homes for years. What people said they would do and what people actually did were two very different things.

Juliet Cooper had stated it clearly: there really were some babies who were better off not being born.

Like you.

And me.

Amelia

Whatever goodwill I thought might rain down on me from basking in my father’s attention after he discovered my little secret quickly disappeared when I started to realize that I had created a new hell of my own making. I was not allowed to go to school, which would have been awesome beyond belief if not for the fact that, instead, I had to sit in a courthouse lobby reading the same newspaper over and over. I had envisioned my parents realizing how badly they’d messed up and falling all over each other to take care of me, the way they did for you when you had a break. But instead, they’d just yelled so loud in the hospital cafeteria that all the residents watched us like we were a reality TV show.

I wasn’t even allowed to visit you during the long lunch recess, when Mom went to the hospital. I guess I had become, officially, A Bad Influence.

So I have to admit I was a little surprised when my mother showed up with a chocolate milk shake for me before court reconvened. I was sitting in this totally airless conference room, where my father had left me while he went over his testimony with some stupid lawyer. How my mother even found me in this building was a mystery, but when she stepped through the door, I was actually happy to see her.

“How’s Willow?” I asked, because (a) I knew she expected it, and (b) I really did want to know.

“She’s doing okay. The doctor says we might be able to take her home tomorrow.”

“You kind of lucked out on the free babysitting,” I said.

My mother’s eyes flashed, hurt. “You don’t really believe I think that way, do you?”

I shrugged.

“I brought you this,” she said, and she passed over the milk shake.

I used to have a thing for chocolate Fribbles at Friendly’s. I’d beg my mom to get one, even though they were three times more expensive than kiddie cones. Sometimes, she said yes, and we’d split one and rhapsodize about chocolate ice cream, something you and Dad never really understood, having the rare misfortune to be born loving vanilla as you both were.

“You want to share?” I asked quietly.

She shook her head. “That one’s just for you. Provided it doesn’t come back up again.”

I flicked my eyes toward her and then back down at the lid of the shake, but I didn’t say anything.

“I think I understand,” my mother said. “I know what it’s like to start something and have it suddenly grow out of control. And you want to get rid of it, because it’s hurting you and everyone else around you, but every time you try to do that, it consumes you again.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. That was exactly what I felt like, every day of my life.

“You asked me not too long ago what the world would be like without Willow in it,” my mother said. “So here’s what I think: if Willow had never been born, I’d still look for her in the aisles of the grocery store, or at the bank, or in the bowling alley. I’d stare at every individual face in a crowd, trying to find hers. There’s this weird part about having kids—you know when your family is finished, and when it’s not. If Willow hadn’t been born, that’s how the world would be for me—unfinished.”

I slurped on the straw, on purpose, and tried not to blink, because then maybe the tears would reabsorb through osmosis.

“The thing is, Amelia,” my mother continued, “if you weren’t here…I’d feel the same exact way.”

I was afraid to look at her. I was afraid I had heard her wrong. Was this her way of saying that she didn’t just love me, which was a given for a mother, but she liked me? I imagined her making me open the lid of the shake to be sure I’d drunk it all. I would grumble, but deep down, I’d like that she was insisting. It meant she cared; it meant she wasn’t going to let me go that easily.

“I did a little research today, at the hospital,” my mother said. “There’s a place just outside of Boston that takes care of kids with
eating disorders. They have an inpatient program, and when you’re ready, you get to move to a residential program with other girls who are going through the same issues.”

My head snapped up. “Inpatient? Like, as in, live there?”

“Just until they can help you get this under control—”

“You’re sending me away?” I said, panicking. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. My mother knew what it felt like; so why didn’t she understand that cutting me off was just like saying I’d never be good enough for this family? “How come Willow can break a thousand bones and she’s still perfect and gets to live at home, and I make one little mistake and get shipped off?”

“Your father and I aren’t shipping you off,” my mother said. “We’re doing this to help you—”

“He knows about it?” I felt my nose running. I had hoped that my father could be my last appeal; now, I found out he was a conspirator. The whole world hated me.

Suddenly Marin Gates stuck her head into the room. “We’re ready to rock and roll,” she said.