Handle With Care (9 page)

But even if I came to terms with that moral conundrum, the additional wrinkle here was that the person on the other end of the lawsuit was not a stranger—she was my best friend.

I thought of the foam pad we had once used to line your car bed and your crib, how sometimes, when I lifted you out of it, I could still see the impression you’d made, like a memory, or a ghost. And then, like magic, it would disappear. The indelible mark I’d left on Piper, the indelible mark she’d left on me—well, maybe they weren’t permanent. For years, I’d believed Piper when she said tests wouldn’t have told us any earlier that you had OI, but she had been talking about blood tests. She’d never even alluded to the fact that other prenatal testing—like ultrasounds—might have picked up your OI. Had she been making excuses for me, or for herself?

It won’t affect her, a voice in my head murmured. That’s what malpractice insurance is for. But it would affect us. In order to make sure you
could rely on me, I would lose the friend I’d relied on since before you were born.

Last year, when Emma and Amelia were in sixth grade, the gym teacher had come up behind Emma and squeezed her shoulders while she waited on the sidelines of a softball game. Innocuous, most likely, but Emma had come home saying that it creeped her out. What do I do? Piper had asked me. Give him the benefit of the doubt, or be a helicopter parent? Before I could even offer her my opinion, she’d made up her mind. It’s my daughter, she said. If I don’t go in and open up my mouth, I may live to regret it.

I loved Piper Reece. But I would always love you more.

With my heart pounding, I took a business card out of my back pocket and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve.

“Marin Gates,” said a voice on the other end.

“Oh,” I stumbled, surprised. I had been anticipating an answering machine this late at night. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there…”

“Who is this?”

“Charlotte O’Keefe. I was in your office a couple of weeks ago with my husband about—”

“Yes, I remember,” Marin said.

I twisted the metal snake of the phone cord around my arm, imagined the words I would funnel into it, send into the world, make real.

“Mrs. O’Keefe?”

“I’m interested in…taking legal action.”

There was a brief silence. “Why don’t we schedule a time for you to come in and meet with me? I can have my secretary call you tomorrow.”

“No,” I said, and then shook my head. “I mean, that’s fine, but I won’t be home tomorrow. I’m in the hospital with Willow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, she’s fine. Well, she’s not fine, but this is routine. We’ll be home Thursday.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“Good,” I said, my breath coming in a rush. “Good.”

“Give my best to your family,” Marin replied.

“I’ve just got one question,” I said, but she had already hung up the phone. I pressed the mouthpiece against my lips, tasted the bitter metal. “Would you do this?” I whispered out loud. “Would you do this, if you were me?”

If you’d like to make a call, said the mechanical voice of an operator, please hang up and try again.

What would Sean say?

Nothing, I realized, because I wouldn’t tell him what I’d done.

I walked back down the hall toward your room. On the bed, you were snoring softly. The video you’d been watching when you fell asleep cast a reflection over your bed in reds and greens and golds, an early rush of autumn. I lay down on the narrow cot that had been converted from one of the guest chairs by a helpful nurse; she’d left me a threadbare blanket and a pillow that crackled like polar ice.

The mural on the far wall was an ancient map, with a pirate ship sailing off its borders. Not long ago, sailors believed that the seas were precipitous, that compasses could point out the spots where, beyond, there’d be dragons. I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

Piper

I met Charlotte eight years ago, in one of the coldest rinks in New Hampshire, when we were dressing our four-year-old daughters as shooting stars for a forty-five-second performance in the club’s winter skating show. I was waiting for Emma to finish lacing up her skates while other mothers effortlessly yanked their daughters’ hair into buns and tied the ribbons of the shimmering costumes around their wrists and ankles. They chatted about the Christmas wrapping paper sale the skating club was doing for fund-raising and complained about their husbands, who hadn’t charged the video camera batteries long enough. In contrast to this offhanded competence, Charlotte sat alone, off to one side, trying to coax a very stubborn Amelia into tying back her long hair. “Amelia,” she said, “your teacher won’t let you onto the ice like that. Everyone has to match.”

She looked familiar, although I didn’t remember meeting her. I thrust a few bobby pins at Charlotte and smiled. “If you need them,” I said, “I also have superglue and marine varnish. This isn’t our first year with the Nazi Skating Club.”

Charlotte burst out laughing and took the pins. “They’re four years old!”

“Apparently, if you don’t start young, they’ll have nothing to talk about in therapy,” I joked. “I’m Piper, by the way. Proudly defiant skating parent.”

She held out a hand. “Charlotte.”

“Mom,” Emma said, “that’s Amelia. I told you about her last week. She just moved here.”

“We came because of work,” Charlotte said.

“For you or your husband?”

“I’m not married,” she said. “I’m the new pastry chef over at Capers.”

“That’s where I know you from. I read about you in that magazine article.”

Charlotte blushed. “Don’t believe everything in print…”

“You ought to be proud! Me, I can’t even bake a Betty Crocker mix without screwing it up. Luckily, that’s not part of my job description.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an obstetrician.”

“Well, that beats what I do, hands down,” Charlotte said. “When I deliver, people gain weight. When you deliver, they lose it.”

Emma poked a finger into a hole in her costume. “Mine’s going to fall off because you don’t know how to sew,” she accused.

“It won’t fall off,” I sighed, then turned to Charlotte. “I was too busy suturing to sew a costume, so I hot-glued the seams.”

“Next time,” Charlotte told Emma, “I’ll sew yours when I do Amelia’s.”

I liked that—the idea that she was already counting on us being friends. We were destined to be partners in crime, subversive parents who didn’t care what the establishment thought. Just then, the teacher stuck her head inside the locker room door. “Amelia? Emma?” she snapped. “We’re all waiting for you out here!”

“Girls, you’d better hurry. You heard what Eva Braun said.”

Emma scowled. “Mommy, her name’s Miss Helen.”

Charlotte laughed. “Break a leg!” she said as they hurried into the rink. “Or does that only work if the stage isn’t made of ice?”

I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination, but I have thought back to that moment, to Charlotte’s good-luck phrase, many times. Do I remember it because of the way you were born? Or were you born because of the way I remember it?

Rob was braced over me, his leg moving between mine as he kissed me. “We can’t,” I whispered. “Emma’s still awake.”

“She won’t come in here…”

“You don’t know that—”

Rob buried his face in my neck. “She knows we have sex. If we didn’t, she wouldn’t be here.”

“Do you like to imagine your parents having sex?”

Grimacing, Rob rolled away from me. “Okay, that effectively killed the mood.”

I laughed. “Give her ten minutes to fall asleep and I’ll get the fire going again.”

He pillowed his head on his arms, staring up at the ceiling. “How many times a week do you think Charlotte and Sean do it?”

“I don’t know!”

Rob glanced at me. “Sure you do. Girls talk about that kind of thing.”

“Okay, first of all, no we don’t. And second of all, even if we did, I don’t sit around wondering how often my best friend has sex with her husband.”

“Yeah, right,” Rob said. “So you’ve never looked at Sean and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him?”

I came up on an elbow. “Have you?”

He grinned. “Sean’s not my type…”

“Very funny.” My gaze slid toward him. “Charlotte? Really?”

“Well…you know…it’s just a curiosity. Even Gordon Ramsay’s got to think about Big Macs once or twice in passing.”

“So I’m the high-maintenance gourmet meal and Charlotte’s fast food?”

“It was a bad metaphor,” Rob admitted.

Sean O’Keefe was tall, strong, physically fierce—orthogonal to Rob’s slight runner’s frame, his careful surgeon’s hands, his addiction to reading. One of the reasons I’d fallen for Rob was that he seemed to be more impressed with my mind than with my legs. If I’d ever considered what it would be like to roll around with someone like Sean, the impulse must have been quickly squashed: after all these years, and all these conversations with Charlotte, I knew him too well to find him attractive.

But Sean’s intensity also carried over into his parenting—he was crazy about his little girls; he was deeply private and protective of Charlotte. Rob was cerebral, not visceral. What would it feel like to have so much raw passion focused on you at once? I tried to picture Sean in bed. Did he wear pajama pants, like Rob? Or go commando?

“Huh,” Rob said. “I didn’t know you could blush way down to your—”

I yanked the sheets up to my chin. “To answer your question,” I said, “I’m not even sure it’s once a week. Between Willow and Sean’s work schedule, they’re probably not even in the same room at night most of the time.”

It was odd, I realized, that Charlotte and I had not discussed sex. Not because I was her friend but because I was her doctor—part of my medical questioning involved whether or not a patient was having any problems during intercourse. Had I asked her that? Or had I skipped over it because it seemed too personal to ask that of a friend instead of a stranger? Back then, sex was a means to an end: a baby. But what about now? Was Charlotte happy? Did she and Sean lie in bed, comparing themselves to me and Rob?

“Well, go figure. You and I are in the same room at night.” Rob leaned over me. “How about we maximize that potential?”

“Emma—”

“Is lost in her dreams by now.” Rob pulled my pajama top over my head and stared at me. “As a matter of fact, so am I…”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him slowly. “Still thinking about Charlotte?”

“Charlotte who?” Rob murmured, and he kissed me back.

Once a month, Charlotte and I went to a movie and then to a seedy bar called Maxie’s Pad—a place whose name absolutely cracked me up, given the gynecological connotation, although I’m quite sure that was lost on Maxie himself, a grizzled old Maine fisherman who, when we first ordered Chardonnay, had told us it wasn’t on tap. Even when the only films playing were really awful slasher flicks or teen comedies, I’d drag Charlotte out for the night. If I didn’t, there were stretches of time when she’d never have left the house.

The best thing about Maxie’s was his grandson, Moose, a linebacker who’d been kicked out of college in the middle of a cheating scandal. He’d started bartending for his grandpa three years ago, when he was back home evaluating his options, and he’d never left. He was six-six, blond, brawny, and had the mental acuity of a spatula.

“Here you go, ma’am,” Moose said, sliding a pale ale toward Charlotte, who barely even flicked a glance at him.

There was something wrong with Charlotte tonight. She’d tried to back out of our standing date, but I wouldn’t allow it, and for the past few hours she’d been distant and distracted. I attributed it to concern over you—with the pamidronate treatment and the femur breaks and the rodding surgery, she had plenty on her mind—and I was determined to divert her attention. “He winked at you,” I announced as soon as Moose turned away to help another customer.

“Oh, get out,” Charlotte said. “I’m too old to be flirted with.”

“Forty-four is the new twenty-two.”

“Yeah, well, talk to me when you’re my age.”

“Charlotte, I’m only two years younger than you!” I laughed and took a sip of my own beer. “God, we’re pathetic. He’s probably thinking, Those poor middle-aged women; the least I can do is make their day by pretending I find them even remotely sexy.”

Charlotte lifted her mug. “Here’s to not being married to a guy too young to rent a car from Hertz.”

I was the one who’d introduced your mother and your father. I think it’s human nature that those of us who are married cannot rest easy until we find mates for our single friends. Charlotte had never been married—Amelia’s father had been a drug addict who’d tried to clean up his act during Charlotte’s pregnancy, failed miserably, and moved to India with a seventeen-year-old pole dancer. So when I was pulled over for speeding by a really good-looking cop who wasn’t wearing a wedding band, I invited him to dinner so that he could meet Charlotte.

“I don’t do blind dates,” your mother told me.

“Then Google him.”

Ten minutes later she called me, frantic, because Sean O’Keefe was also the name of a recently paroled child molester. Ten months later, she married the other Sean O’Keefe.

I watched Moose stack glasses behind the bar, the light playing over his muscles. “So how goes it with Sean?” I asked. “Have you managed to convince him to do it yet?”

Charlotte startled, nearly knocking over her beer. “To do what?”

“The rodding surgery for Willow. Hello?”

“Right,” Charlotte said. “I forgot I’d told you about that.”

“Charlotte, we talk every day.” I looked at her more carefully. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I just need a good night’s sleep,” she replied, but she was looking down into her beer, running one finger along the rim of the glass until it sang to us. “You know, I was reading something at the hospital, some magazine. There was an article in there about a family who sued the hospital after their son was born with cystic fibrosis.”