Handle With Care (12 page)

Charlotte drew away from me. “Where’s the we, Sean? You go off to work. You go out with the guys for poker night. You make it sound like you’re with Willow twenty-four/seven, but you have no idea what that’s like.”

“Then we’ll get a visiting nurse. An aide…”

“And we’ll pay her with what?” Charlotte snapped. “Come to think of it, how are we going to afford a new car big enough to carry Willow’s chair and walker and crutches, since ours is going on two hundred thousand miles? How are we going to pay off her surgeries, the parts insurance won’t cover? How are we going to make sure her house has a handicapped ramp and a kitchen sink low enough for a wheelchair?”

“Are you saying I can’t provide for my own kid?” I said, my voice escalating.

Suddenly, all the bluster went out of Charlotte. “Oh, Sean. You’re the best father. But…you’re not a mother.”

There was a shriek, and—instinct kicking in—both Charlotte and I sprinted across the parking lot, expecting to find Willow twisted on the pavement with a bone breaking through her skin. Instead, Amelia was holding the crying baby at arm’s length, a stain streaking the front of her shirt. “It barfed on me!” she wailed.

The baby’s mother came hurrying out of the church. “I’m so sorry,” she said, to us, to Amelia, as Willow sat on the ground, laughing at her sister’s bad luck. “I think he might be coming down with something…”

Charlotte stepped forward and took the baby from Amelia. “Maybe a virus,” she said. “Don’t worry. These things happen.”

She stood back as the woman gave a wad of Baby Wipes to Amelia to clean herself off. “This conversation is over,” I murmured to Charlotte. “Period.”

Charlotte bounced the baby in her arms. “Sure, Sean,” she said, too easily. “Whatever you say.”

By six o’clock that night, Charlotte had caught whatever the baby had, and was sick as a dog. Vomiting like crazy, she’d sequestered herself in the bathroom. I was supposed to work the night shift, but it was blatantly clear that wasn’t going to happen. “Amelia needs help with her science
homework,” Charlotte murmured, patting her face with a damp towel. “And the girls need dinner…”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “What else do you need?”

“To die?” Charlotte moaned, and she shoved me out of the way to kneel in front of the toilet again.

I backed out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Downstairs, you were sitting on the living room couch eating a banana. “You’re gonna spoil your appetite,” I said.

“I’m not eating it, Daddy. I’m fixing it.”

“Fixing it,” I repeated. On the table in front of you was a knife, which you weren’t supposed to have—I made a mental note to yell at Amelia for getting you one. There was a slice down the center of the banana.

You popped open the lid of a mending kit we’d taken from the hotel room in Florida, pulled out a prethreaded needle, and started to sew up the wound in the banana skin.

“Willow,” I said. “What are you doing?”

You blinked up at me. “Surgery.”

I watched you for a few stitches, to make sure you didn’t poke yourself with the needle, and then shrugged. Far be it from me to stand in the way of science.

In the kitchen, Amelia was sprawled across the table with markers, glue, and a piece of poster board. “You want to tell me why Willow’s out there with a paring knife?” I said.

“Because she asked for one.”

“If she asked for a chain saw, would you have gotten it out of the garage?”

“Well, that would kind of be overkill for cutting up a banana, don’t you think?” Looking down at her project, Amelia sighed. “This totally sucks. I have to make a board game about the digestive system, and everyone’s going to make fun of me because we all know where the digestive system ends.”

“Funny you should use that word,” I said.

“G-R-O-double-S, Dad.”

I started pulling pots and pans out from beneath the counter and set out a frying pan. “What do you say to pancakes for dinner?” Not that they had a choice; it was the only thing I knew how to cook, except for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“Mom made pancakes for breakfast,” Amelia complained.

“Did you know that dissolvable stitches are made out of animal guts?” you called out.

“No, and now I kind of wish I didn’t…”

Amelia rubbed a glue stick over her poster board. “Is Mom better yet?”

“No, baby.”

“But she promised me she’d help draw the esophagus.”

“I can help,” I said.

“You can’t draw, Dad. When we play Pictionary you always make a house, even when that has nothing to do with the answer.”

“Well, how hard can an esophagus be? It’s a tube, right?” I rummaged for a box of Bisquick.

There was a thump; the knife had rolled under the couch. You were twisting uncomfortably. “Hang on, Wills, I can get that for you,” I called.

“I don’t need it anymore,” you said, but you hadn’t stopped squirming.

Amelia sighed. “Willow, stop being such a baby before you pee in your pants.”

I looked from your sister to you. “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“She’s making that face she makes when she’s trying to hold it in—”

“Amelia, enough.” I walked into the living room and crouched down beside you. “Honey, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

You flattened your lips together. “I want Mom to take me.”

“Mom’s not here,” Amelia snapped.

I hoisted you off the couch to carry you into the downstairs bathroom. I’d just wrangled your awkwardly cast legs into the doorframe when you said, “You forgot the garbage bags.”

Charlotte had told me how she’d line them inside your cast before you went to the bathroom. In all the time you’d been in your spica, I hadn’t been pressed into duty for this—you were wildly self-conscious about having me pull down your pants. I reached around the doorframe to the dryer, where Charlotte had stashed a box of kitchen trash bags. “Okay,” I said. “I’m a novice, so you have to tell me what to do.”

“You have to swear you won’t peek,” you said.

“Cross my heart.”

You untied the knot that was holding up the gigantic boxer shorts we’d pulled over your spica, and I lifted you up so that they would pool at your hips. As I pulled them off, you squealed. “Look up here!”

“Right.” I resolutely fixed my eyes on yours, trying to maneuver the shorts off you without seeing what I was doing. Then I held up the garbage bag, which would have to be tucked in along the crotch line. “You want to do this part?” I asked, blushing.

I held you under the armpits while you struggled to line the cast with the plastic. “Ready,” you said, and I positioned you over the toilet.

“No, back more,” you said, and I adjusted you and waited.

And waited.

“Willow,” I said, “go ahead and pee.”

“I can’t. You’re listening.”

“I’m not listening—”

“Yes you are.”

“Your mother listens…”

“That’s different,” you said, and you burst into tears.

Once the floodgates opened, they opened universally. I glanced down at the bowl of the toilet, only to hear you cry louder. “You said you wouldn’t peek!”

I snapped my eyes north, juggled you into my left arm, and reached for the toilet paper with the right.

“Dad!” Amelia yelled. “I think something’s burning…”

“Oh shit,” I muttered, giving only a passing thought to the swear jar. I stuffed a wad of paper into your hand. “Hurry up, Willow,” I said, and then I flushed the toilet.

“I h-have to w-wash my hands,” you hiccuped.

“Later,” I bit out, and I carried you back to the couch, tossing your shorts into your lap before racing to the kitchen.

Amelia stood in front of the stove, where the pancakes were charring. “I turned off the burner,” she said, coughing through the smoke.

“Thanks.” She nodded and reached around me onto the counter for…Were those what I thought they were? Sure enough, Amelia sat down and picked up the hot glue gun. She’d affixed about thirty of my good clay poker chips around the edge of her poster board.

“Amelia!” I yelled. “Those are my poker chips!”

“You have a whole bunch. I just needed a few…”

“Did I tell you you could use them?”

“You didn’t tell me I couldn’t,” Amelia said.

“Daddy,” you called out from the living room, “my hands!”

“Okay,” I said under my breath. “Okay.” I counted to ten, and then car
ried the pan to the trash to scrape out its contents. The metal lip grazed my wrist and I dropped the pan. “Sonofabitch,” I cried, and I switched on the cold-water faucet, thrusting my arm beneath it.

“I want to wash my hands,” you wailed.

Amelia folded her arms. “You owe Willow a quarter,” she said.

By nine o’clock, you girls were asleep and the pots had been washed and the dishwasher was humming in the kitchen. I went around the house, turning out the lights, then crept into the dark bedroom. Charlotte was lying down with one arm thrown over her head. “You don’t have to tiptoe,” she said. “I’m awake.”

I sank down beside her. “You feeling any better?”

“I’m down a dress size. How are the girls?”

“Fine. Although I’m sorry to say Willow’s patient didn’t survive.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.” I rolled onto my back. “We had peanut butter and jelly for dinner.”

She patted my arm absently. “You know what I love about you?”

“Hmm?”

“You make me look so good by comparison…”

I propped my arms behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. “You don’t bake anymore.”

“Yeah, but I don’t burn the pancakes,” Charlotte said, smiling a little. “Amelia ratted you out when she came in to say good night.”

“I’m serious. Remember how you used to make crème brûlée and petit fours and chocolate éclairs?”

“I guess other things became more important,” Charlotte answered.

“You used to say you’d have your own bakery one day. You wanted to call it Syllable—”

“Syllabub,” she corrected.

I may not have remembered the name right, but I knew what it meant, because I’d asked you: syllabub was the oldest English dessert, made when dairymaids would shoot warm milk straight from the cow into a pail that held cider or sherry. It was like eggnog, you told me, and you promised me you’d make me some to try, and the night you did you dipped a finger in the sweet cream and traced a trail down my chest that you kissed clean.

“That’s what happens to dreams,” Charlotte said. “Life gets in the way.”

I sat up, picking at a stitch on the quilt. “I wanted a house, a backyard, a bunch of kids. A vacation every now and then. A good job. I wanted to coach softball and take my girls skiing and not know every fucking doctor in the Portsmouth Regional Hospital emergency room by name.” I turned to her. “I may not be with her all the time, but when she breaks, Charlotte, I feel it. I swear I do. I’d do anything for her.”

She faced me. “Would you?”

I could feel its weight on the mattress: the lawsuit, the elephant in the room. “It feels…ugly. It feels like we’re saying we didn’t love her, because she’s…the way she is.”

“It’s because we want her, because we love her, that I’d ever think about this in the first place,” Charlotte said. “I’m not stupid, Sean. I know people are going to talk, and say I’m after a big settlement. I know they’re going to think I’m the worst mother in the world, the most selfish, you fill in the blank. But I don’t care what they say about me—I care about Willow. I want to know that she’ll be able to go to college and live on her own and do everything she dreams of. Even if that means that the whole world thinks I’m horrible. Does it really matter what everyone else says if I know why I’m doing it?” She faced me. “I’m going to lose my best friend because of this,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”

In her previous life as a pastry chef, I’d always been amazed to watch tiny Charlotte hauling fifty-pound bags of flour around. There was strength in her that went far beyond my own size and force. I saw the world in black and white; it was why I was a career cop. But what if this lawsuit and its uncomfortable name was only a means to an end? Could something that looked so wrong on the outside turn out to be undeniably right?

My hand crept across the quilt to cover hers. “You won’t,” I said.

Charlotte

Late May 2007

Your first seven breaks happened before you entered this world. The next four happened minutes after you were born, as a nurse lifted you out of me. Another nine, when you were being resuscitated in the hospital, after you coded. The tenth: when you were lying across my lap and suddenly I heard a pop. Eleven was when you rolled over and your arm hit the edge of the crib. Twelve and thirteen were femur fractures; fourteen a tibia; fifteen a compression fracture of the spine. Sixteen was jumping down from a stoop; seventeen was a kid crashing into you on a playground; eighteen was when you slipped on a DVD jacket lying on the carpet. We still don’t know what caused number nineteen. Twenty was when Amelia was jumping on a bed where you were sitting; twenty-one was a soccer ball that hit your left leg too hard; twenty-two was when I discovered waterproof casting materials and bought enough to supply an entire hospital, now stocked in my garage. Twenty-three happened in your sleep; twenty-four and twenty-five were a fall forward in the snow that snapped both forearms at once. Twenty-six and twenty-seven were nasty fractures, fibula and tibia tenting through the skin at a nursery school Halloween party, where, ironically, you were wearing a mummy’s costume whose bandages I used to splint the breaks. Twenty-eight happened during a sneeze; twenty-nine and thirty were ribs you broke on the edge of the kitchen table. Thirty-one was a hip fracture that required a metal plate and six screws. I stopped keeping track after that, until the ones from Disney World, which we had not numbered but instead named Mickey, Donald, and Goofy.

Four months after you were put in the spica cast, it was bivalved. This meant that it was cut in half and secured with low-budget clips that broke within hours, so I replaced them with bright strips of Velcro. Gradually, we’d remove the top, so that you could practice sitting up like a clam on the half shell, and you could strengthen the stomach and calf muscles that had deteriorated. According to Dr. Rosenblad, you’d have a couple of weeks in the bottom of the shell; then you’d graduate to just sleeping in it. Eight weeks later you’d stand with a walker; four weeks after that, you’d be moving to the bathroom on your own.