Handle With Care (57 page)

The judge said a few words to the jury, and then everyone began to file out of the courtroom. Rob walked up to the bar that separated the gallery from the front of the court and put his hands on my shoulders. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. I tried to offer him a smile.

“Thank you,” I said to Guy Booker.

He stuffed a pad into his briefcase. “Don’t thank me yet,” he said.

Charlotte

“You’re making me dizzy,” Sean said as I entered the conference room. Amelia was pacing back and forth, her hands speared through her electric hair. As soon as she saw me, she turned.

“So here’s the thing,” she said, talking fast. “I know you’re thinking about killing me, but that wouldn’t be the brightest move in a courthouse. I mean, there are cops all over the place, not to mention the fact that Dad’s here and he’d be obligated to arrest you—”

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said.

She stopped moving. “No?”

How had I never noticed before how beautiful Amelia had become? Her eyes, under the fringe of that ridiculous hair, were huge and almond-shaped. Her cheeks were naturally pink. Her mouth was a tiny bow, a purse string holding her opinions tight. I realized that she did not look like me, or like Sean. Mostly, she resembled you.

“What you did…what you said,” I began. “I know why.”

“Because I don’t want to go to Boston!” Amelia blurted. “That stupid treatment facility. You’re just going to leave me behind there.”

I glanced at Sean, and then back at her. “Maybe we shouldn’t have made that decision without you.”

Amelia narrowed her eyes, as if she didn’t quite trust what she was hearing.

“You may be angry at us, but that’s not really why you told Guy Booker you’d testify,” I continued. “I think you did it because you were trying to protect your sister.”

“Well,” Amelia said. “Yeah.”

“How could I be angry at you, then, for doing the same thing I’m trying to do?”

Amelia threw herself into my arms with the force of a hurricane. “If we win,” she said, muffled against my chest, “can I buy a Jet Ski?”

“No,” Sean and I said simultaneously. He stood up, his hands in his pockets. “If you win,” he said, “I was thinking I might move back home for good.”

“What if I lose?”

“Well,” Sean said, “I was still thinking I’d move back home for good.”

I looked at him over the crown of Amelia’s head. “You drive a hard bargain,” I said, and I smiled.

On the way to Disney World, during an airport layover, we had eaten in a Mexican restaurant. You had a quesadilla; Amelia had a burrito. I had fish tacos, and Sean had a chimichanga. The mild sauce was too hot for us. Sean convinced me to get a margarita (“It’s not like you’re the one who’ll be flying the plane”). We talked about fried ice cream, which was on the dessert menu and didn’t seem possible: wouldn’t the ice cream melt when it was put into the deep fryer? We talked about which rides we would go on first in the Magic Kingdom.

Back then, possibility stretched out in front of us like a red carpet. Back then, we were all focused on what could happen, instead of what had gone wrong. On our way out of the restaurant, the hostess—a girl with pockmarks on her cheeks and a nose stud—gave us each a helium balloon. “What’s the point of this?” Sean said. “You can’t take them on the plane.”

“Not everything has to have a point,” I replied, looping my arm through his. “Live a little.”

Amelia nipped a hole in the neck of her balloon with her teeth and suctioned her lips over it. She took a deep breath, and then looked at us with a dazzling smile. “Hello, parents,” she said, but her voice was high and reedy, that of a Munchkin, not Amelia’s at all.

“God only knows what’s in there—”

“Duh, Mom,” Amelia trilled. “Helium.”

“Me, too,” you said, and Amelia took your balloon and showed you how to breathe it in.

“I really don’t think they should be sucking in helium—”

“Live a little,” Sean said, grinning, and he nipped a corner of his balloon and sucked in.

They all started talking at me, their voices a comedy, a bird chorus, a rainbow. “Do it, Mom,” you said. “Do it!”

So I followed suit. The helium burned a little as I swallowed it, one great gulp. I could feel my vocal cords buzzing. “Maybe this isn’t so bad after all,” I peeped.

We sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” We recited the Lord’s Prayer. And when a man in a business suit stopped Sean to ask if he knew the way to Baggage Claim, Sean took a long drag of his balloon and said, “Follow the yellow brick road.”

I cannot remember laughing as much as I did that day, or feeling so liberated. Maybe it was the helium, which made me lighter, made me feel like I could close my eyes and fly to Orlando with or without the plane. Or maybe it was the fact that, no matter what we said to one another, we were not ourselves.

Four hours later, the jury had still not returned a verdict. Sean had driven to the hospital to check on you and had just called to say he was on his way back, had there been any news? Amelia was writing haikus on the white board in the conference room:

Help, I’m clearly trapped

Behind this very white board.

Please do not erase.

The rule for today

Is that there are no more rules.

Guess you’re out of luck.

I headed to the bathroom for the third time since court had adjourned. I didn’t have to go, but I ran the water in the sink and splashed some on my face. I kept telling myself this was not such a big deal, but that was a lie. You did not drag your family to the verge of dissolution for nothing; to have gone through this with nothing to show would have been disastrous. If I had entered into this lawsuit to assuage my con
science, how could I reconcile an outcome where I left feeling even more guilty?

I patted my face dry and dabbed at my sweater, where it had gotten wet. I tossed the toweling into the trash just as there was a flush in one of the stalls. The door opened as I stepped away from the sink, and I inadvertently smacked it back against the person who was trying to exit. “Sorry,” I said, and then I realized that the woman standing in front of me was Piper.

“You know, Charlotte,” she said softly, “so am I.”

I looked at her, silent. Of all the things to notice, I realized that she didn’t smell the way she used to. She’d changed her perfume or her shampoo.

“So you admit it,” I said. “That you made a mistake.”

Piper shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Not professionally, anyway. But on a personal level, well…I’m sorry that this is how things have turned out between us. And I’m sorry that you didn’t get the healthy baby you wanted.”

“Do you realize,” I replied, “in all the years after Willow was born, you never said that to me?”

“You should have told me you were waiting to hear it,” Piper said.

“I shouldn’t have had to.”

I tried not to remember how Piper and I had huddled together in the bleachers at the skating rink, reading the classified ads and trying to match up personal ads with each other. How we would take walks, pushing you in a stroller, punctuating the cold air with so many starbursts of conversation that three miles passed in no time at all. I tried not to remember that I had thought of her as the sister I’d never had, that I’d hoped you and Amelia would grow up just as close.

I tried not to remember, but I would.

Suddenly the door of the bathroom opened. “There you are,” Marin sighed. “The jury’s back.”

She hurried out the door, and Piper quickly rinsed her hands under the faucet. I could feel her a half step behind me as we walked toward the courtroom again, but her legs were longer, and eventually she caught up.

As we stepped in, side by side, a dozen camera flashes went off, and I could not see where I was headed. Marin pulled me forward by the wrist. I thought, although I could have imagined it, that I heard Piper whisper good-bye.

The judge entered, and we all sat down. “Madame Foreman,” he said, turning to the jury, “have you reached a verdict?”

The woman was small and birdlike, with glasses that made her eyes seem overly magnified. “Yes, Your Honor. In the case of O’Keefe versus Reece, we find for the plaintiff.”

Marin had told me 75 percent of all wrongful birth cases were found in favor of the defendant. I turned to her, and she grabbed my arm. “That’s you, Charlotte.”

“And,” the foreman said, “we award damages in the amount of eight million dollars.”

I remember falling back into my chair, and the gallery erupting. My fingers felt numb, and I had to work to breathe. I remember Sean and Amelia, climbing over the bar to hold me tight. I heard the uproar from a group of parents of special-needs kids who’d taken up residence in the back of the court during the trial, and the names they’d called me. I heard Marin telling a reporter that this was the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire history, and that justice had been done today. I looked through the crowd, trying to find Piper, but she was already gone.

Today, when I went to take you home from the hospital, I would tell you that this was finally over. I would tell you that you’d have everything you needed, for the rest of your life—and after mine ended. I’d tell you that I had won, that the verdict had been read out loud…although I didn’t really believe it.

After all, if I had won this lawsuit, why was my smile as hollow as a drum, and my chest too tight?

If I had won this lawsuit, why did it feel like I’d lost?

Weeping:
the release of extra moisture.

In baking, just as in life, there are tears when something’s gone wrong. Meringues are only whipped egg whites and sugar; they are meant to be eaten right away. If you hesitate, water will seep between the filling and the meringue, and weeping—little beads that form on the snowy, white peaks—will occur. There are all sorts of theories on how to prevent this—from using only fresh egg whites to using superfine sugar, from adding cornstarch to precooking the meringue. Ask me, and I’ll tell you the only foolproof method:

Do not bake while your heart is breaking.

LEMON MERINGUE PIE

1 pie shell, blind-baked

FILLING

1½ cups granulated sugar

6 tablespoons cornstarch

Pinch of salt

1 1/3 cups cold water

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

5 egg yolks

½ cup fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon grated lemon zest

Prepare the pie shell. Meanwhile, combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt, and water in a nonreactive saucepan. Mix until there are no lumps, and whisk as the mixture gradually comes to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the butter.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Add a small amount of the hot liquid mixture and whisk until smooth. Add the egg mixture to the saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat, continuing to whisk as
it thickens, approximately 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice and zest.

MERINGUE

6 large egg whites at room temperature

Pinch of cream of tartar

Pinch of salt

¾ cup sugar

On low speed, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt until combined. Increase the speed and whip until they form stiff peaks. Beat in the sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Add the filling to the pie shell and top it with the meringue. Make sure you spread the meringue all the way to touch the edges of the crust. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Let the pie cool for about 2 hours, then refrigerate to prevent weeping.

Or just think happy thoughts.

Willow

March 2009

In school we have Hundred Day. It falls in late November, and we have to bring in a hundred of something, anything. When Amelia was in first grade, she brought in a hundred chocolate chips, but by the time she made it off the bus, she was down to fifty-three. Me, I brought a list of seventy-five bones I’ve broken and the names of twenty-five more that I haven’t.

A million is ten thousand hundreds. I can’t even think of ten thousand. Maybe there are that many trees in a forest or water molecules in a lake. Eight million is even more than that, and it is the number of dollars written on the big blue check that has been on our refrigerator for almost six months now.

My parents talk about that check a lot. They say that pretty soon the van will officially wheeze itself to death and we’ll have to use the money to buy a new one, but then they find a way to keep the old one running. They talk about how the registration deadline for camps for kids like me is coming up, and how they’ll have to send in a deposit. I have the brochures next to my bed. In them, there are kids in every color who have OI, like me. They all look happy.

Maybe that’s what happens to kids who go away somewhere. Amelia did, and when she came home, she had brown hair again and her own easel. She paints all the time—portraits of me while I’m sleeping, still lifes of coffee mugs and pears, landscapes in colors they’d never really be. I have to look really hard at her arms to see the silver scars, and even when she catches me looking, she hardly ever bothers to pull down her sleeves.

It was Saturday. My father was parked in front of the television, watch
ing the Bruins. Amelia was outside somewhere, sketching. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, playing solitaire with the index cards of her recipes. She had over a hundred (if only she was in the first grade!), and she’d decided to put them together in a cookbook. It was a compromise, because she didn’t have to bake all the time anymore like she used to for Mr. DeVille. He still stocked her pies and tarts and macaroons when she went off on a tear in the kitchen, but now her big plan was to publish the book, and give all the money she made to the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation.

We didn’t need money, because ours was all tacked to the refrigerator.

“Hey,” my mother said, as I climbed onto a chair. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” The mail, fanned out on the table like a bright scarf, caught my eye.

“There’s something in there for you,” my mother said.

It was a card—and inside was a picture of Marin with a boy who was probably around Amelia’s age. He had buck teeth and skin the color of chocolate. His name was Anton, and she had adopted him two months ago.