Handle With Care (24 page)
Authors: Jodi Picoult
I had woken up, screaming; it took hours to fall back asleep. That next morning, when Sean woke me up, I said I could not get out of bed. And I meant it: I was certain that the very act of living, for me, would be a threat to your survival. With every step I took you might be jarred; by contrast, with care, I might keep you from breaking apart.
Sean had called Piper, who showed up at the house and talked to me about the logistics of pregnancy the way she’d describe them to a small child: the amniotic sac, the fluid, the cushion between my body and yours. I knew all this, of course, but then again, I thought I’d known other things that had turned out to be wrong: that bones grew stronger, not weaker; that a fetus not having Down syndrome must mean it was otherwise healthy. She told Sean maybe I just needed a day to sleep this off, and she’d check back in with me later. But Sean was still worried, and after calling in sick to work, he phoned our priest.
Father Grady, apparently, made house calls. He sat down on a chair that Sean brought into the bedroom. “I hear you’re a little worried.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said.
“God doesn’t give people burdens they can’t handle,” Father Grady pointed out.
That was all very well and good, but what had my baby done to piss Him off? Why would she have to prove herself by being hurt, before she even got here?
“I’ve always believed that He saves truly special babies for parents He trusts,” Father Grady said.
“My baby might die,” I said flatly.
“Your baby might not stay in this world,” he corrected. “Instead, she’ll get to be with Jesus.”
I felt tears in my eyes. “Well, let Him have someone else’s baby.”
“Charlotte!” Sean said.
Father Grady looked down at me with wide, warm eyes. “Sean thought maybe it would help if I came over to bless the baby. Do you mind?” He lifted his hand, left it hovering over my abdomen.
I nodded; I was not about to turn down a blessing. But as he prayed over the hill of my belly, I silently said my own prayer: Let me keep her, and you can take everything else I have.
He left me with a holy card propped on my nightstand and promised to pray for us. Sean walked him back downstairs, and I stared at that card. Jesus was stretched across the crucifix. He had suffered pain, I realized. He knew what it was like to feel a nail breaking through your skin, shattering the bone.
Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, I found Sean sitting at the kitchen table cradling his head in his hands. He looked so beaten, so helpless. I was so busy worrying about this baby myself, I had not seen what he was going through. Imagine making a career out of protecting people, and then not being able to rescue your own unborn child. “You’re up,” he said the obvious.
“I thought maybe I’d go for a little walk.”
“Good. Fresh air. I’ll come with you.” He stood too quickly, rattling the table.
“You know,” I said, trying to smile, “I need to be by myself.”
“Oh—right. No problem,” he said, but he looked a little wounded. I could not understand the physics of this situation: we were in the thickest, most suffocating mess together; how could we possibly feel so far apart?
Sean assumed I needed to clear my head, think, reflect. But Father Grady’s visit had gotten me wondering about a woman who’d stopped going to our church a year ago. She lived a half mile down the street, and from time to time I saw her putting out her garbage. Her name was Annie, and all I knew about her was that she’d been pregnant, and then one day she wasn’t, and after that, she never came to Mass again. The rumor was that she’d had an abortion.
I had grown up Catholic. I had been taught by nuns. There were girls
who’d gotten pregnant, but they either disappeared from the class rosters or left for a semester abroad, returning quieter and skittish. But in spite of this, I’d voted Democratic ever since I turned eighteen. It might not be my personal choice, but I thought women ought to have one.
These days, though, I was wondering if it wasn’t my personal choice because I was Catholic, or simply because I had never been forced to make it in practice, instead of theory.
Annie’s house was yellow, with fairy-tale trim and gardens that were full of day lilies in the summertime. I walked up to the front door and knocked, wondering what I would say to her if she answered. Hi, I’m Charlotte. Why did you do it?
It was a relief when no one answered; this was feeling more and more like a stupid idea. I’d started back down the driveway when suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Oh, hi. I thought I heard someone on the porch.” Annie was wearing jeans, a sleeveless red shirt, and gardening gloves. Her hair was caught up in a knot on the back of her head, and she was smiling. “You live up the road, don’t you?”
I looked at her. “There’s something wrong with my baby,” I blurted.
She folded her arms across her chest, and the smile vanished from her face. “I’m sorry,” she said woodenly.
“The doctors told me that if she lives—if—she’s going to be so sick. So, so sick. And I’m not supposed to think about it, but I don’t understand why it’s a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.” I wiped my face with my sleeve. “I can’t tell my husband. I can’t tell him I’ve even thought about this.”
She scuffed at the ground with her sneaker. “My baby would have been two years, six months, and four days old today,” she said. “There was something wrong with her, something genetic. If she lived, she would have been profoundly retarded. Like a six-month-old, forever.” She took a deep breath. “It was my mother who talked me into it. She said, Annie, you can barely take care of yourself. How are you going to take care of a baby like that? She said, You’re young. You’ll have another one. So I gave in, and my doctor induced me at twenty-two weeks.” Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. “Here’s what no one tells you,” she said. “When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” She looked up at me. “You can’t win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don’t have the baby,
and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn’t do the wrong thing. But I don’t feel like I did the right thing, either.”
There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.
“They gave me a choice,” Annie said, “and even now, I wish they hadn’t.”
Amelia
That night, I let you brush my hair and stick scrunchies all over it. Usually, you just made massive knots and annoyed me, but you loved doing it—your arms were too short for you to manage even a ponytail yourself, so when other girls your age were playing around with their hair and putting in ribbons and braids, you were stuck at the mercy of Mom, whose braiding experience was limited to challah. Don’t go thinking I’d suddenly developed a conscience or anything—I just felt bad for you. Mom and Dad had been yelling about you as if you weren’t there ever since they’d come home. I mean, for God’s sake, your vocabulary was better than mine half the time—they couldn’t possibly think this had all gone over your head.
“Amelia?” you asked, finishing off a braid that hung right over my nose. “I like your hair this color.”
I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a cool punk chick, in spite of my best intentions. I looked more like Grover the Muppet.
“Amelia? Are Mom and Dad going to get a divorce?”
I met your gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know, Wills.”
I was already anticipating the next question: “Amelia?” you asked. “Is it my fault?”
“No,” I said fiercely. “Honest.” I pulled the barrettes and scrunchies out of my hair and started unraveling the knots. “Okay, enough. I’m not beauty queen material. Go to bed.”
Everyone had forgotten to tuck you in tonight—not that I was expecting any better, with the pathetic level of parenting skills I was witnessing these days. You crawled into your bed from the open end—it still had bars on either side of the mattress, which you hated, because you said
they were for babies even if they did keep you safe. I leaned down and tucked you in. Awkwardly, I even kissed your forehead. “’Night,” I said, and I jumped under my own covers and turned off the light.
Sometimes, in the dark, the house felt like it had a heartbeat. I could hear it pulsing, waa waa waa, in my ears. It was even louder now. Maybe my new hair was some kind of superconductor. “You know how Mom always says that I can be anything when I grow up?” you whispered. “That’s a lie.”
I came up on one elbow. “Why?”
“I couldn’t be a boy,” you said.
I smirked. “Ask Mom about that sometime.”
“And I couldn’t be Miss America.”
“How come?”
“You can’t wear leg braces in a pageant,” you said.
I thought about those pageants, girls too beautiful to be real, tall and thin and plastic-perfect. And then I thought of you, short and stubby and twisted, like a root growing wrong from the trunk of a tree, with a banner draped across your chest.
MISS UNDERSTOOD.
MISS INFORMED.
MISS TAKE.
That made my stomach hurt. “Go to sleep already,” I said, more harshly than I meant to, and I counted to 1036 before you started snoring.
Downstairs, I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was absolutely no food in this house. I would probably have to eat ramen for breakfast. It was getting to the point, honestly, where if my parents didn’t go to the grocery store, they could be called to task for child abuse.
Been there, done that.
I rummaged through the fruit drawer and unearthed a fossilized lemon and a knob of ginger.
I slammed the refrigerator door shut and heard a moan.
Terrified—did people who broke into houses rape girls with blue hair?—I crept toward the kitchen doorway and looked into the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw it: the quilt draped across the back of the couch, the pillow my father had pulled over his head when he rolled over.
I felt the same pang in my stomach that I had felt when you were talking about beauty queens. Moving back through the kitchen as silent as snow, I trailed my fingers along the countertop until they closed over the hilt of a carving knife. I carried it upstairs with me into the bathroom.
The first cut stung. I watched the blood rise like a tide and spill down into my elbow. Shit, what had I done? I ran the cold water, held my forearm underneath it until the blood slowed.
Then I made another parallel cut.
They weren’t on my wrists, don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly why I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period. I could feel everything building up inside of me like steam heat, and I was just turning a valve. It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She’d prick little holes all over the place. So it can breathe, she said.
I was just breathing.
I closed my eyes, anticipating each thin cut, feeling that wash of relief when it was done. God, it felt so good—that buildup, and the sweet release. I would have to hide these marks, because I would rather die than let anyone know I’d done this. But I was also proud of myself, a little bit. Crazy girls did this—the ones who wrote poetry about their organs being filled with tar and who wore so much black eyeliner they looked Egyptian—not good girls from good families. That meant either I was not a good girl or I did not come from a good family.
Take your pick.
I opened the tank of the toilet and stuck the knife inside. Maybe I would need it again.
I stared at the cuts, which were pulsing now, just like the rest of the house, waa waa waa. They looked like the ties of railroad tracks. Like a tower of stairs you’d find on a stage. I pictured a parade of ugly people like me, we beauty queens who could not walk without braces. I closed my eyes, and I imagined where those steps would lead.
In this abundant earth no doubt
Is little room for things worn out:
Disdain them, break them, throw them by!
And if before the days grew rough
We once were lov’d, us’d—well enough,
I think, we’ve far’d, my heart and I.
-ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, “MY HEART AND I”
Hardball:
one of the stages of sugar syrup in the preparation of candy, which occurs at 250 to 266 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nougat, marshmallows, rock candy, gummies—these are all cooked to the hardball stage, when the sugar concentration is very high and syrup will form thick ropes when dripped from a spoon. (Be careful. Sugar burns long after it comes into contact with your skin; it’s easy to forget that something so sweet can leave a scar.) To test your solution, drop a bit of it into cold water. It’s ready if it forms a hard ball that doesn’t flatten when fished out but whose shape can still be changed with significant pressure.
Which, of course, leads to the more colloquial definition of hardball: ruthless, aggressive, competitive behavior; the kind that’s designed to mold someone else’s thinking to match your own.
DIVINITY
2½ cups sugar
½ cup light corn syrup
½ cup water
Pinch of salt
3 large egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ cup chopped pecans
½ cup dried cherries, blueberries, or cranberries
I’ve always found it interesting that a candy with a name such as Divinity requires so much brutality to create.
In a 2-quart saucepan, mix the sugar, corn syrup, water, and salt. Using a candy thermometer, heat to the hardball stage, stirring only until the sugar is dissolved. Meanwhile, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. When the syrup reaches 260 degrees F, add it gradually to the egg whites while beating at high speed in a mixer. Continue to beat until the
candy takes shape—about 5 minutes. Stir in the vanilla, nuts, and dried fruit. Quickly drop the candy from a teaspoon onto waxed paper, finishing each piece with a swirl, and let it cool to room temperature.
Hardball, beating, beating again. Maybe this candy should have been called Submission.
Charlotte
January 2008
It had started as a stain in the outline of a stingray on the ceiling in the dining room—a watermark, an indication that there was something wrong with the pipes in the upstairs bathroom. But the watermark spread, until it no longer looked like a stingray but a whole tide, and half the ceiling seemed to have been steeped in tea leaves. The plumber fussed around under the sinks and beneath the front panel of the tub for about an hour before he reappeared in the kitchen, where I was boiling down spaghetti sauce. “Acid,” he announced.
“No…just marinara.”
“In the pipes,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve been flushing down there, but it’s eroding them.”
“The only stuff we’ve been flushing is what everyone else flushes. It’s not like the girls are doing chemistry experiments in the shower.”
The plumber shrugged. “I can replace the pipes, but unless you fix the problem, it’s just going to happen again.”
It was costing me $350 just for this visit, by my calculation—we couldn’t afford it, much less a second visit. “Fine.”
It would be another thirty dollars for paint to cover the ceiling, and that was if we did it ourselves. And yet here we were eating pasta for the third time this week, because it was cheaper than meat, because you had needed new shoes, because we were effectively broke.
It was nearly six o’clock—the time Sean usually walked through the door. It had been almost three months since his disastrous deposition, not that you would have known it had ever happened, from our conver
sations. We talked about what the police chief had said to a local newspaper about an act of vandalism at the high school, about whether Sean should take the detectives’ exam. We talked about Amelia, who had yesterday gone on a word strike and insisted on pantomiming. We talked about how you had walked all the way around the block today without me having to run back and get your chair because your legs were giving out.
We did not talk about this lawsuit.
I had grown up in a family where, if you didn’t discuss a crisis, it didn’t exist. My mother had breast cancer for months before I realized it, and by then it was too late. My father lost three jobs during my childhood, but it wasn’t a topic of conversation—one day he’d just put on a suit again and head to a new office, as if there had been no interruption in the routine. The only place we were supposed to turn with our fears and worries was the confessional; the only comfort we needed was from God.
I had sworn that, when I had my own family, all the cards would be on the table. We wouldn’t have hidden agendas and secrets and rose-colored glasses that kept us from seeing all the knots and snarls of an ordinary family’s affairs. I had forgotten one critical element, though: people who didn’t talk about their problems got to pretend they didn’t have any. People who discussed what was wrong, on the other hand, fought and ached and felt miserable.
“Girls,” I shouted. “Dinner!”
I heard the distant thunder of both your feet moving down the hallway upstairs. You were tentative—one foot on a step joined by another—whereas Amelia nearly skidded into the kitchen. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Spaghetti again?”
To be fair, it wasn’t like I’d just opened a box of Prince. I’d made the dough, rolled it, cut it into strands. “No, this time it’s fettuccine,” I said, unfazed. “You can set the table.”
Amelia stuck her head in the fridge. “News flash, we don’t have any juice.”
“We’re drinking water this week. It’s better for us.”
“And conveniently cheaper. Tell you what. Take twenty bucks out of my college fund and splurge on chicken cutlets.”
“Hmm, what is that sound?” I said, looking around with my brow furrowed. “Oh, right. The sound of me not laughing.”
At that, Amelia cracked a smile. “Tomorrow, we’d better get some protein.”
“Remind me to buy a little tofu.”
“Gross.” She set a stack of dishes on the table. “Remind me to kill myself before dinner then.”
You came into the kitchen and scooted into your high chair. We didn’t call it a high chair—you were nearly six, and you were quick to point out that you were a big girl—but you couldn’t reach the table without some sort of booster; you were just too tiny. “To cook a billion pounds of pasta, you’d need enough water to fill up seventy-five thousand swimming pools,” you said.
Amelia slouched into the chair beside you. “To eat a billion pounds of pasta, you only have to be born into the O’Keefe family.”
“Maybe if you all keep complaining, I’ll make something gourmet tomorrow night…like squid. Or haggis. Or calves’ brains. That’s protein, Amelia—”
“A long time ago there was this guy, Sawney Beane, in Scotland, who ate people,” you said. “Like, a thousand of them.”
“Well, luckily, we’re not that desperate.”
“But if we were,” you said, your eyes lighting up, “I’d be boneless.”
“Okay, enough.” I dumped a serving of steaming pasta on your plate. “Bon appétit.”
I glanced up at the clock; it was 6:10. “What about Dad?” Amelia said, reading my thoughts.
“We’ll wait for him. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”
But five minutes later, Sean had not arrived. You were fidgeting in your seat, and Amelia was picking at the congealed mass of pasta on her plate. “The only thing more disgusting than pasta is ice-cold pasta,” she muttered.
“Eat,” I said, and you and your sister dove into your dinners like hawks.
I stared down at my meal, not hungry anymore. After a few minutes, you girls carried your plates to the sink. The plumber came back downstairs to say he was finished and left me a bill on the kitchen counter. The phone rang twice and was picked up by one of you.
At seven thirty, I called Sean’s cell, and it immediately rolled over into the voice mail.
At eight, I scraped the cold contents of my plate into the trash.
At eight thirty, I tucked you into bed.
At eight forty-five, I called the nonemergency line for dispatch. “This is Charlotte O’Keefe,” I said. “Do you know if Sean took on another shift tonight?”
“He left around five forty-five,” the dispatcher said.
“Oh, right, of course,” I replied lightly, as if I’d known that all along, because I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of wife who had no idea where her husband might be.
At 11:06, I was sitting in the dark on a couch in the family room, wondering if it could still arguably be called a family room if one’s family was splintering apart, when the front door of the house opened gingerly. Sean tiptoed into the hallway, and I switched on the lamp beside me. “Wow,” I said. “Traffic must have been a bitch.”
He froze. “You’re up.”
“We waited for you for dinner. Your plate’s still on the table, if you’re in the mood for fossilized fettuccine.”
“I went to O’Boys after my shift with some of the guys. I was going to call…”
I finished his sentence for him. “But you didn’t want to talk to me.”
He came closer, then, so that I could smell his aftershave. Licorice, and the faintest bit of smoke. You could blindfold me and I would be able to pick Sean out from a crowd with my other senses. But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through—the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.
I supposed Sean could say that about me, too.
He sat down on a chair across from me. “What do you want me to tell you, Charlotte? You want me to lie and say I look forward to coming home at night?”
“No.” I swallowed. “I want…I just want things to go back to the way they were.”
“Then stop,” he said quietly. “Just walk away from what you’ve started.”
Choices are funny things—ask a native tribe that’s eaten grubs and roots forever if they’re unhappy, and they’ll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don’t know there’s an alternative, you can’t miss it. Marin Gates had offered
me a brass ring that I never, in my wildest dreams, would have considered—but now that she had, how could I not try to grab it? With every future break, with every dollar we moved further into debt, I would be thinking about how I should have reached out.
Sean shook his head. “That’s what I thought.”
“I’m thinking of Willow’s future…”
“Well, I’m thinking about here and now. She doesn’t give a shit about money. She cares about whether her parents love her. But that’s not the message she’s going to hear when you get up in that damn courtroom.”
“Then you tell me, Sean, what’s the answer? Are we just supposed to sit around and hope Willow stops breaking? Or that you—” I broke off abruptly.
“That I what? Get a better job? Win the fucking lottery? Why don’t you just say it, Charlotte? You think I can’t support all of you.”
“I never said that—”
“You didn’t have to. It came through loud and clear,” he said. “You know, you used to say that you felt like I’d rescued you and Amelia. But I guess in the long run, I let you down.”
“This isn’t about you. It’s about our family.”
“Which you’re ripping apart. My God, Charlotte, what do you think people see when they look at you now?”
“A mother,” I said.
“A martyr,” Sean corrected. “No one’s ever as good as you when it comes to taking care of Willow. You don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”
I felt a tightening at the back of my throat. “Well, excuse me for not being perfect.”
“No,” Sean said. “You just expect that of the rest of us.” With a sigh, he walked to the fireplace hearth, where a pillow and a quilt were neatly stacked. “If you don’t mind, you’re sitting on my bed.”
I managed to hold in my sob until I was upstairs. I lay down on Sean’s side of the mattress, trying to find the spot where he used to sleep. I turned my face in to the pillow, which still smelled of his shampoo. Although I had changed the sheets since he’d moved to the couch, I hadn’t washed his pillowcase, on purpose—and now I wondered why. So I could pretend he was still here? So that I’d have something of him if he never came back?
On our wedding day, Sean told me that he’d step in front of a bullet
to save me. I knew he’d wanted me to confess the same thing, but I couldn’t. Amelia needed me to take care of her. On the other hand, if that bullet had been heading straight for Amelia, I wouldn’t have thought twice before diving forward.
Did that make me a very good mother, or a very bad wife?
But this wasn’t a bullet, and it hadn’t been fired at us. It was an on-coming train, and the cost of saving my daughter was throwing myself onto the tracks. There was only one catch: my best friend was tied to me.
It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else’s. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party—a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.
It had seemed so simple: a lawsuit that acknowledged how hard it was for us, and that would make things so much better. But in my haste to see the silver lining, I missed the storm clouds: the fact that accusing Piper and convincing Sean would sever those relationships. And now, it was too late. Even if I called Marin and told her to stop everything, it wouldn’t make Piper forgive me. It wouldn’t keep Sean from judging me.
You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it’s a catch-22: all of those things you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you’ve lost yourself.
For a moment I imagined tiptoeing down the stairs and kneeling in front of Sean and telling him I was sorry. I imagined asking him to start over. Then I looked up to find that the door had opened a crack, and your little white triangle of a face was poking through. “Mommy,” you said, coming closer with your awkward gait and climbing onto the bed, “did you have a nightmare?”
