Handle With Care (34 page)

“But—” He glanced at my attire. “You’re the baker?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the baker.” Not the gold digger, not the bitch, not even the mother. Something separate and apart, an identity as bright and clear as stainless steel. I held out my hand. “Charlotte O’Keefe.”

He planted his feet squarely on the doormat. “I’d like to buy your pastries.”

“Oh, you didn’t need to come up here for that,” I said. “You can just leave a couple of dollars in the honesty box.”

“No, you don’t understand. I want to buy all of them.” He handed me a card, the kind with raised lettering. “My name’s Henry DeVille. I run
a chain of Gas-n-Get convenience stores in New Hampshire, and I’d like to feature your baked goods.” He flushed. “Mostly because I can’t stop eating them.”

“Really?” I said, a slow smile breaking over my face.

“I was visiting my sister one day last month—she lives two roads up from here, but I had gotten lost, and I was starving. And since then I’ve made eight two-hour treks just to get whatever it is you’re selling on a particular day. I may not be the best judge of business, but I’m pretty much a Ph.D. when it comes to good desserts.”

It had taken me a week to agree. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to drive all over New Hampshire delivering muffins in the morning; I didn’t know how much I could promise to produce. For every caveat I raised, Henry had a solution, and within a week I had run a draft contract past Marin that was sweet enough to get me to agree. To celebrate, I baked Henry an almond-blueberry coffeecake. He sat at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, eating cake with a newly minted businesswoman. “I’ve tried to pinpoint it,” he mused, watching me sign the contract. “There’s a certain something in your cooking that’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted. It’s addictive, really.”

I smiled at him as best I could and pushed the paper across the table before he could change his mind. Because Henry DeVille was correct—there was an ingredient in my baking more concentrated than any extract, more pungent than any spice; an ingredient that everyone would recognize and no one was able to name: it was regret, and it rose when one least expected.

The next morning, as part of the Be Fit! campaign that headed this year’s festival, you and I headed down to the exercise course, where participants could wheel or walk a quarter or a half mile. When you finished, clutching a certificate close to your chest, we had a quick breakfast before the day’s small group sessions. Amelia was sleeping in, but I was planning to attend a workshop on body image for young girls with OI.

As soon as you were welcomed back to the Kids’ Zone—the nurse who gave you a high five, I noticed, had gotten you to lift your right arm higher than any physical therapist in the past four months—I headed to the ladies’ room to wash my hands before the session began. Like every
thing else at the hotel, the restrooms were OI-friendly: the outer door was propped open for easy access; a low table held extra soap and towels.

As I ran the faucet, another woman entered, carrying a glass of milk—it was being served as part of the overall theme of keeping healthy; the problem with OI is a deficiency in collagen, not calcium. “I love this,” she said, grinning. “It’s got to be the only conference that serves milk between the sessions instead of coffee and juice.”

“It was probably cheaper than shots of pamidronate,” I said, and she laughed.

“I don’t think we’ve met yet. I’m Kelly Clough, mother of David, Type V.”

“Willow, Type III. I’m Charlotte O’Keefe.”

“Is Willow having fun?”

“Willow’s in heaven,” I said. “She can barely wait to go to the zoo tonight.” The Henry Doorly Zoo was opening their facility after hours for the convention participants tonight; during breakfast, you had made a list of what animals you wanted to see.

“For David it’s all about swimming.” She glanced at me in the mirror. “There’s something about you that’s really familiar.”

“Well, I’ve never been to a convention before,” I said.

“No, your name…”

There was a flush, and a moment later, a woman our age came out of a room stall. She positioned her walker in front of the handicap-accessible sink and turned on the water. “Do you read Tiny Tim’s blog?” she asked.

“Sure,” Kelly said. “Who doesn’t?”

Well. Me, for one.

“She’s the one who’s suing for wrongful birth.” The woman turned, wiping her hands on a towel before facing me. “I think it’s disgusting, frankly. And I think it’s even more disgusting that you’re here. You can’t play both sides. You can’t sue because a life with OI isn’t worth living and then come here and talk about how excited your daughter is to be with other kids like her and how great it is that she can go to the zoo.”

Kelly had taken a step backward. “That’s you?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I can’t believe any parent would think that way,” Kelly said. “We all
have to scrape the bottoms of our bank accounts to make things work. But I never, ever would wish I hadn’t had my son.”

I felt myself shaking uncontrollably. I wanted to be a mother, like Kelly, who took her son’s disability in stride. I wanted you to grow up like this other woman, forthright and confident. I just also wanted the resources for you to be able to do it.

“Do you know what I’ve spent the past six months doing?” the woman with OI said. “Training for the Paralympics. I’m on the swim team. If your daughter came home with a gold medal one day, would that convince you her life wasn’t a waste?”

“You don’t understand—”

“Actually,” Kelly said, “you don’t.”

She turned on her heel, walking out of the restroom with the other woman trailing behind. I turned the water on full blast and splashed some onto my face, which felt as if it had gone up in flames. Then, with my heart still hammering, I stepped into the hallway.

The nine o’clock sessions were filling. My cover had been blown; I could feel the needles of a hundred eyes on me, and every whisper held my name. I kept my gaze trained on the patterned carpet as I pushed past a knot of wrestling boys and a toddler being carried by a girl with OI not much bigger than himself. A hundred steps to the elevators…fifty…twenty.

The elevator doors opened, and I slipped inside and punched a button. Just as the doors were closing, a crutch jammed between them. The man who had signed us in yesterday was standing on the threshold, but instead of smiling at me in welcome, like he had twelve hours earlier, his eyes were dark as pitch. “Just so you know—it’s not my disability that makes my life a constant struggle,” he said. “It’s people like you.” Then, with a rasping of metal, he stepped back and let the elevator doors close.

I made it to the room and slid the key card inside, only to remember that Amelia was probably still sleeping. But—thank God—she was gone, downstairs eating breakfast or AWOL, and right now I didn’t care which. I lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over my head. Then, finally, I let myself burst into tears.

This was worse than being judged by a jury of my peers. This was being judged by a jury of your peers.

I was, pure and simple, a failure. My husband had left me; my moth
ering skills had been warped to include the American legal system. I cried until my eyes had swollen and my cheeks hurt. I cried until there was nothing left inside me. Then I sat up and walked to the small desk near the window.

It held a phone, a blotter, and a binder listing the services offered by the hotel. Inside this were two postcards and two blank fax cover sheets. I took them out and reached for the pen beside the telephone.

Sean, I wrote. I miss you.

Until he moved out, Sean and I had never spent any time apart from each other, unless you counted the week before our wedding. Although he’d moved into the house where Amelia and I lived, I had wanted to create at least the semblance of excitement, so he’d bunked on the couch of another police officer in the days leading up to the ceremony. He’d hated it. I’d find him driving by in his cruiser while I was at work at the restaurant, and we’d sneak into the cold room in the kitchen and kiss intensely. Or he’d stop by to tuck Amelia in at night and then pretend to fall asleep on the couch watching TV. I’m onto you, I told him. And this isn’t going to work. At the ceremony, Sean surprised me with vows he’d written himself: I’ll give you my heart and my soul, he said. I’ll protect you and serve you. I’ll give you a home, and I won’t let you kick me out of it ever again. Everyone laughed, including me—imagine, mousy little Charlotte being the kind of sultry seductress who’d have that much control over a man! But Sean made me feel like I could fell a giant with a single word or a gentle touch. It was powerful, and it was a me I had never imagined.

Somewhere, in the deep creases of my mind—the folds where hope gets caught—I believed that whatever was wrong between Sean and me was reparable. It had to be, because when you love someone—when you create a child with him—you don’t just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can’t be destroyed, just channeled into something else. And maybe right now I’d turned the full spotlight of my attention on you. But that was normal; the levels of love within a family shifted and flowed all the time. Next week, it could be Amelia; next month, Sean. Once this lawsuit was over, he’d move back home. We’d go back to the way we used to be.

We had to, because I couldn’t really swallow the alternative: that I would be forced to choose between your future and my own.

The second letter I had to write was harder. Dear Willow, I wrote.

I don’t know when you’ll be reading this, or what will have happened by then. But I have to write it, because I owe you an explanation more than anyone else. You are the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me, and the most painful. Not because of your illness, but because I can’t fix it, and I hate seeing those moments when you realize that you might not be able to do what other kids do.

I love you, and I always will. Maybe more than I should. That’s the only reason I can give for all this. I thought that if I loved you hard enough, I could move mountains for you; I could make you fly. It didn’t matter to me how that happened—just as long as it did. I wasn’t thinking of who I might hurt, only who I could rescue.

The first time you broke in my arms, I couldn’t stop crying. I think I’ve spent all these years trying to make up for that moment. That’s why I can’t stop now, even though there are times I want to. I can’t stop, but there isn’t a moment I don’t worry about what you’ll remember in the long run. Will it be the arguments I had with your father? The way your sister turned into someone we didn’t recognize? Or will you remember the way you and I once spent an hour watching a snail cross our porch? Or how I cut your lunch-box sandwiches into your initials? Will you remember how, when I wrapped you in a towel after your bath, I held you a moment longer than it took to dry you?

I have always had a dream of you living on your own. I see you as a doctor, and I wonder if that’s because I’ve seen you with so many. I imagine a man who will love you like crazy, maybe even a baby. I bet you’ll fight for her as fiercely as I tried to fight for you.

What I could never puzzle out, however, was how you’d get from where you are to where you might one day be—until I was given the materials to make a bridge. Too late I learned that that bridge was made of thorns, that it might not be strong enough to hold us all.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance. I am not sure how I came to measure your life by the mo ments when it’s fallen apart—surgeries, breaks, emergencies—instead of the moments in between. Maybe that makes me a pessimist, maybe it makes me a realist. Or maybe it just makes me a mother.

You will hear people saying things about me. Some are lies, some are truth. There’s only one fact that matters: I don’t want you to ever suffer another break.

Especially one between you and me, because that might never set properly.

Sean

I was hemorrhaging money.

Not only was my paycheck being stretched to cover the mortgage and the car payment and the credit card finance charges but now any cash I might have been able to sock away was being poured, forty-nine dollars per night, into the Sleep Inn motel, where I’d been living since the day Charlotte came to ream me out at the highway construction detail.

This is why, when Charlotte told me she was leaving one Friday to take the girls to an OI convention for the weekend, I checked out of the Sleep Inn and let myself into my own house.

It’s a weird thing, coming back home as a stranger. You know how, when you go into someone else’s house, it smells—sometimes like fresh laundry, sometimes like pine needles, but distinct from any other? You don’t notice it where you live until you haven’t been there for a while. The first night, I’d walked around soaking in the familiar: the newel post on the banister that still popped off because I’d never gotten around to fixing it; the herd of stuffed animals on your bed; the baseball I’d caught while on a trip to Fenway with a bunch of other cops back in ’90, a Tom Brunansky homer to center field in a game that put the Sox in first place over Toronto for the season.

I went into my bedroom, too, and sat down on Charlotte’s side of the bed. That night, I slept on her pillow.

The next morning, as I packed up my toiletries, I wondered if Charlotte would go to wash her face and be able to smell the scent of me on the towels. If she’d notice that I’d finished off the loaf of bread and the roast beef. If she’d care.

It was my day off, and I knew what I had to do.

The church was quiet at this time on a Saturday morning. I sat down in a pew, looking up at a stained-glass window that reached long, blue fingers down the aisle.

Forgive me, Charlotte, for I have sinned.

Father Grady, who was close to the altar, noticed me. “Sean,” he said. “Is Willow all right?”

He probably thought the only time I’d willingly set foot in a church was if I had to pray hard for my daughter’s failing health. “She’s doing okay, Father. I actually was hoping I could talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure.” He sank down into the pew in front of me, turning sideways.