Handle With Care (55 page)

“I just need a minute—”

“Well, Judge Gellar needs you now.”

My mother looked at me, her eyes begging me to cut her a break. “You have to sit inside the courtroom now. Your dad’s testifying, and I can’t stay here and watch over you.”

“Go to hell,” I said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Marin, who was watching all this, whistled long and low. “Actually, she can,” she said. “Because you’re a minor, and she’s your mother.”

I wanted to hurt my mother as bad as she’d hurt me, so I turned to the lawyer. “I don’t think you’re allowed to keep that title if you try to get rid of all of your kids.”

I could see my mother flinch. She was bleeding, even if you couldn’t see the cut, and she knew, like me, that she deserved it. As Marin unceremoniously deposited me in the gallery next to a man wearing a red flannel shirt and suspenders who smelled like tuna fish, I made myself a promise: if my mother was going to ruin my life, there was absolutely no reason I couldn’t ruin hers.

Sean

On our wedding day, Charlotte made me forget all the vows I’d written and diligently memorized. There she was, walking down the aisle of the church, and those sentences were like fishing nets; they couldn’t possibly hold all the feelings I wanted to present to her. Now, as I sat across from my wife in a courtroom, I hoped my words would transform one more time. Into feathers, clouds, steam—anything that did not have the power to land a solid blow.

“Lieutenant O’Keefe,” said Guy Booker, “weren’t you originally a plaintiff in this case?”

He’d promised me that he’d make it short and sweet, that I would be off the stand so quickly I barely felt it. I didn’t trust him. It was his job to lie, cheat, and twist the truth into something the jury could believe.

Something I sorely hoped he’d be successful at, this time around.

“I was, at first,” I replied. “My wife had convinced me that this lawsuit was in Willow’s best interests, but I started to realize I didn’t feel that way at all.”

“How so?”

“I think this lawsuit’s broken our family apart. Our dirty laundry is running on the six o’clock news. I’ve started divorce proceedings. And Willow, she knows what’s going on. There was no hiding it, once it became public knowledge.”

“You realize that wrongful birth suggests your daughter should never have been born. Do you wish that, Lieutenant O’Keefe?”

I shook my head. “Willow may not be perfect, but—well—neither am I. Neither are you. She may not be perfect,” I repeated, “but she’s one hundred percent right.”

“Your witness,” Booker said, and as Marin Gates got to her feet, I took a deep breath to galvanize myself, the same way I did before I ran into a building with the SWAT team.

“You say that this lawsuit has broken your family apart,” she said. “But the same could be said of the divorce proceedings you initiated, isn’t that true?”

I looked at Guy Booker. He’d anticipated this question; we’d practiced an answer. I was supposed to say something about how my actions had been a measure to protect the girls—not to drag them through the mud. But instead of saying that, I found myself looking at Charlotte. At that plaintiff’s table, she seemed so tiny. She was staring down at the wood grain, as if she didn’t trust herself to look me in the eye.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “It is.”

Booker stood up, and then figured he couldn’t object to his own witness, I guess, because he sat back down.

I turned to the judge. “Sir? Do you mind if I talk directly to my wife?”

Judge Gellar raised his brows. “It’s the jury that needs to hear you, son.”

“With all due respect, Your Honor…I don’t think that’s true.”

“Judge,” Booker said. “May I approach?”

“No, Mr. Booker, you may not,” the judge said. “This man’s got something to say.”

Marin Gates looked like she’d swallowed a firecracker. She didn’t know whether to ask me anything else or just let me hang myself. And maybe I was doing that; I didn’t really care. “Charlotte,” I said, “I don’t know what’s right anymore, except admitting that I don’t know that. No, we don’t have enough money. And no, we haven’t had it easy. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been worth the trip.”

Charlotte lifted her face. Her eyes were wide and still. “Some guys at the station, they said they knew what they were getting into when they got married. Well, I didn’t. It was an adventure, and I was okay with that. See, you’re it, for me. You let me take you skiing, and you never mentioned you were afraid of heights. You sleep curled up against me, no matter how far I move to my side of the bed. You let me eat the vanilla half of your Dixie Cup, and you take my chocolate. You tell me when my socks don’t match. You buy Lucky Charms, because you know I like the marshmallows. You gave me two beautiful girls.

“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect—I guess that’s where you
and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way. And I think we were both wrong about something. People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”

Silence settled over the courtroom. “We’re going to adjourn for the day,” Judge Gellar announced.

“But I’m not finished—” Marin argued.

“Yes, you are,” the judge said. “For God’s sake, Ms. Gates, that’s why you’re still single. I want this courtroom cleared, except for Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe.”

He banged his gavel, and there was a flurry of activity, and suddenly, I was sitting alone on the witness stand and Charlotte was standing behind the plaintiff’s table. She took a few steps forward, until she was standing level with me, her hands lightly resting on the wooden railing between us. “I don’t want to get a divorce,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

She shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “So what do we do?”

I leaned forward slowly, so that she could see me coming. I leaned forward, and touched my lips to hers, sweet and familiar, home. “Whatever comes next,” I whispered.

Amelia

My parents’ oh-so-touching reconciliation was the talk of the courtroom. You would have thought the news media was True Confessions the way the reporters all lined up talking about this great romantic moment. The jury would fall for it unless they were a bunch of cynics, like me; the way I saw it, Marin could practically go home and break open the champagne.

Which is exactly why I was a girl on a mission.

While they were all swooning and sighing over the melodrama, I was sitting in that gallery, embarrassed as hell, and learning something new about myself: I didn’t have to vomit for poison to come out of me. I could sweat it out, scream it out, and sometimes just whisper. If I was going to the bulimia camp in Boston, then I was going out with a bang.

I knew that the judge had deliberately played matchmaker and kept my mother and father in the courtroom together to work out Act Two of their drama, but that worked perfectly for me. I slipped out the back before Marin Gates could remember to come find me and ducked out of the courthouse without anyone noticing or caring who I was. I ran to the parking lot, to the mint green T-Bird.

When Guy Booker came out and found me leaning against his car, he scowled. “You scratch the paint job and you’ll be doing community service for the next five years,” he said.

“I’ll take my chances.”

“What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Waiting for you.”

He frowned. “How’d you know this was my car?”

“Because it’s so painfully subtle.”

Booker smirked. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Long story.”

“Well, then, skip it. It’s been an even longer day,” he said, unlocking the driver’s side door. He opened it, hesitating. “Go home, Amelia. Your mother doesn’t need to be worrying about where you are right now. She’s got a lot on her plate.”

“Yeah,” I answered, folding my arms. “Which is why I figured you’d be interested in what I heard her say.”

Marin

I had Juliet Cooper’s address from the jury selection process. I knew that she lived in Epping, a tiny town to the west of Bankton. So as soon as court was adjourned for the day, I programmed the street into my GPS and started driving.

An hour later I pulled into a small cul-de-sac, a horseshoe of modified Capes. Number 22 was just to the right of the circle as you came into it. It had gray siding and black shutters, a red lacquered door. There was a van in the driveway. When I rang the doorbell, a dog started barking.

I could have lived here. This might have been my home. In another lifetime, I might have walked right through the door instead of approaching like a stranger; I might have had a room upstairs filled with horseback-riding ribbons and school yearbooks and the other detritus adults leave behind at their childhood residences. I could have told you where the silverware drawer was in the kitchen, where the vacuum cleaner was stashed, how to use the TV remote.

The door opened, and Juliet Cooper was standing in front of me. Dancing at her feet was a terrier. “Mom?” a girl’s voice called. “Is it for me?”

“No,” she said, her eyes never leaving my face.

“I know you don’t want to see me,” I said quickly, “and I promise that I will go away and never speak to you again. But first, you have to tell me why. What is it about me that makes me so…so repulsive?”

As soon as I spoke, I knew this was a mistake. Maisie at the family court would probably have had me arrested if she’d known I was
here; every adoption search website strongly reminded adoptees not to do exactly this: ambush the birth mother, make her accept you on your time frame rather than hers.

“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “After thirty-five years, I think you owe me five minutes.”

Juliet stepped outside, closing the door behind her. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and on the other side of the door I could still hear the dog barking. But she didn’t say a word to me.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior: Charlotte’s insistent belief that you would one day forgive her for the things she said in court, for example. Or my mad chase to Epping. The truth was, I was greedy. I knew that my adoptive parents wanted me more than anything, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to understand why my birth mother hadn’t, and until I did, there would always be a part of me that felt like a failure.

“You look just like him,” she said finally.

I stared at her, although she still would not meet my gaze. Had it been a love affair that ended badly, with Juliet pregnant and my birth father refusing to support her? Had she gone on loving him, knowing their baby was somewhere in the world; had it eaten away at her even as she made a new life for herself with a husband and family?

“I was sixteen,” Juliet murmured. “I was riding my bike home from school, through the woods, a shortcut. He came out of nowhere and knocked me off. He stuffed a sock in my mouth and pulled my dress up, and he raped me. Then he beat me up, so badly that the only way my parents recognized me was by my clothing. He left me bleeding and unconscious, and two hunters found me.” She lifted her face, so that she was looking directly at me, finally. Her eyes were too bright, her voice thin. “I didn’t speak for weeks. And then, just when I thought I could start over again, I found out I was pregnant,” she said. “He was caught, and the police wanted me to testify, but I couldn’t. I didn’t think I could stand to see his face again. And then, when you were born, a nurse held you up, and there he was in you: the black hair and the blue eyes, those fists swinging. I was glad there was a family that wanted you so badly, because I didn’t.”

She took a deep, trembling breath. “I’m sorry if this isn’t the reunion you’d hoped for. But seeing you, it brings it all back, when I’ve
worked so hard to forget it. So please,” Juliet Cooper whispered, “will you leave me alone?”

Be careful what you wish for. I staggered backward, silent. No wonder she had not wanted to look at me; no wonder she had not welcomed the letter I wrote that Maisie had forwarded; no wonder she only wanted me to go away. I’d want the same thing.

We had that much in common.

I started down the stone steps to my car, trying to see through the rush of tears. At the bottom, I hesitated, then turned back. She was still standing there. “Juliet,” I said. “Thank you.”

I think my car knew where I was headed long before I did. But when I pulled into the old white Colonial where I’d grown up, with the thicket of overgrown roses and the weathered gray trellis that never managed to tame them, I felt something burst inside me. This was the place where my photos were in the albums stacked in the front closet. This was the place where I knew how to work the garbage disposal. This was the place where, in an upstairs bedroom, I still kept pajamas and a toothbrush and a few sweaters, just in case.

This was home, and these were my parents.

It was dark out by now, nearly nine p.m. My mother would be wearing a fuzzy robe and slipper socks, and eating her nightly dish of ice cream. My father would be surfing the channels of the television, arguing that Antiques Roadshow was far more of a reality show than The Amazing Race. I let myself in through the side door, which we’d never locked the whole time I was growing up. “Hi,” I called out, so that they wouldn’t be alarmed. “It’s just me.”

My mother stood up when I came into the living room. “Marin!” she said, hugging me. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood.” This was a lie. I’d driven sixty miles to get here.

“But I thought you were wrapping up that big trial,” my father said. “We’ve been watching you on CNN. Nancy Grace, eat your heart out…”

I smiled a little. “I just…I felt like seeing you guys.”

“Are you hungry?” my mother asked. It had taken her thirty seconds; surely that was a record.

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll get you a little ice cream,” my mother said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Everyone can use a little ice cream.”

My father patted the spot on the couch beside him, and I stripped off my coat and sank down into the cushions. They were not the ones I’d grown up with. I had jumped on those so often that they’d been rendered flat as pancakes; several years ago my mother had had the furniture reupholstered. These pillows were softer, more forgiving. “You think you’re going to win?” my father asked.