Handle With Care (42 page)

“Um, good luck today,” I said.

“Do you want me to come in and talk to the guidance counselor or the principal? Tell them you might need extra attention today…?”

That was the last thing I needed—to stand out like even more of a sore thumb. “I’m fine,” I said, and I opened the truck door.

The cars peeled off after my dad’s truck, which made it a little easier for me to breathe. At least that’s what I thought, until I heard someone call my name. “Amelia,” a woman said, “how do you feel about this lawsuit?”

Behind her was a man with a TV camera on his shoulder. Some other kids walking into the school threw their arms around me, as if I were their friend. “Dude!” one of them said. “Can you do this on TV?” He held up his middle finger.

Another journalist materialized from behind the bushes on my left. “Does your sister talk to you about how she feels, knowing her mother’s suing for wrongful birth?”

Was this a family decision?

Are you going to testify?

Until I heard that, I’d forgotten: my name was on some stupid list
just in case. My mother and Marin had said that I’d probably never testify, that it was just a precaution, but I didn’t like being on lists. It made me feel like someone was counting on me, and what if I let them down?

Why weren’t they following Emma? She went to this school, too. But I already knew the answer: in their eyes, in everyone’s eyes, Piper was the victim. I was the one related to the vampire who’d decided to suck her best friend dry.

“Amelia?”

Over here, Amelia…

Amelia!

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. I covered my ears with my hands and shoved my way into the school, blindly pushing past kids kneeling at their lockers and teachers navigating with their mugs of coffee and couples making out as if they wouldn’t see each other for years, instead of just the next forty-five minutes of class. I turned in to the first doorway I could find—a teachers’ bathroom—and locked myself inside. I stared at the clean porcelain rim of the toilet.

I knew the word for what I was doing. They showed us movies about it in health class; they called it an eating disorder. But that was completely wrong: when I did it, everything fell into place.

For example, when I did it, hating myself made perfect sense. Who wouldn’t hate someone who ate like Jabba the Hutt and then vomited it all up again? Someone who went to all the trouble to get rid of the food inside her but was still just as chubby as ever? And I understood that whatever I was doing wasn’t nearly as bad as the girl in my school who was anorexic. Her limbs looked like toothpick and sinew; no one in their right mind would ever confuse me with her. I wasn’t doing this because I looked in the mirror and saw a fat girl even though I was skinny—I was fat. I couldn’t even starve myself the right way, apparently.

But I had sworn that I’d stop. I had sworn that I’d stop making myself sick, in return for a family that stayed together.

You promised, I told myself.

Less than twelve hours ago.

But suddenly there I was, sticking my finger down my throat, throwing up, waiting for the relief that always came.

Except this time, it didn’t.

Piper

I learned from Charlotte that baking is all about chemistry. Leavening happens biologically, chemically, or mechanically, and creates steam or gases that make the mixture rise. The key to great baked goods is to pick the right leavening agent for the batter or dough, so that bread has a smooth texture, popovers pop, meringue foams, and soufflés rise.

This, Charlotte said to me one day, while I was helping her bake a birthday cake for Amelia, is why baking works. She wrote on a napkin:

I got a B-in Orgo, I told her.

Cream of tartar plus sodium bicarbonate gives you carbon dioxide gas and potassium sodium tartrate and water, she said.

Show-off, I replied.

I’m only saying it’s not as simple as beating eggs and flour together, Charlotte said. I’m trying to make this a teachable moment here.

Pass me the damn vanilla extract, I said. Do they really teach that in culinary school?

They don’t just hand over scalpels to med students, do they? You have to learn why you’re doing what you’re doing first.

I shrugged. I bet Betty Crocker wouldn’t know a scientific equation if it flew out of her oven.

Charlotte began to mix the batter. She knew it in principle: one ingredient in a bowl is a start. But two ingredients in a bowl, well, that’s a whole story.

Here’s what Charlotte didn’t mention: that sometimes even the most
careful baker can make a mistake. That the balance between the acid and the soda might be off, the ingredients not mixed, the salts trapped behind.

That you’d be left with a bitter taste in your mouth.

On the morning of the trial, I stayed in the shower for a very long time, letting the water strike my back like a punishment. Here it was: the moment I would face Charlotte in court.

I had forgotten the sound of her voice.

Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you’d start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

Once the shock had worn off when I was served, I had gotten furious. Who the hell did Charlotte think she was, ruining my life in order to bolster her own? Anger, though, is too fierce a flame to last for long, and when it burned out, I was left numb and wondering. Would she get what she wanted from this? And what did she want? Revenge? Money? Peace of mind?

Sometimes I woke up with words weighing down my tongue like stones, left over from a recurring nightmare where Charlotte and I met face-to-face. I had a thousand things to say to her, and not one of them ever came out. When I looked at her, to see why she wasn’t speaking, either, I noticed that her mouth had been sewn shut.

I had not gone back to work. The one time I’d tried, I had been shaking so hard when I got to the front door that I never went inside. I knew of other doctors who had been sued for malpractice and went back to their routines, but this lawsuit went beyond the question of whether or not I could have diagnosed osteogenesis imperfecta in utero. It wasn’t skeletal breaks I had not seen in advance but rather the wishes of a best friend whose mind I’d thought I knew inside out. If I had not been able to read Charlotte correctly, how could I trust myself to understand the needs of patients who were virtual strangers?

I had wondered for the first time about the terminology of running your own office as a doctor. It was called a practice. But shouldn’t we have gotten it right by the time we opened one?

We were, of course, taking a huge financial hit. I had promised Rob that I would go back to work by the end of the month, whether or not the trial was over. I had not specified, however, what sort of work I’d go back to. I still could not imagine myself shepherding a routine pregnancy. What about pregnancy was routine?

In the course of preparing with Guy Booker, I had gone back over my notes and my memories a thousand times. I almost believed him when he said that no physician would be blamed for not diagnosing OI at the eighteen-week ultrasound; that even if I had an inkling about it, the recommended course of action would have been to wait several weeks to see if the fetus was Type II or Type III. I had behaved responsibly as a doctor.

I just hadn’t behaved responsibly as a friend.

I should have been looking more closely. I should have pored over Charlotte’s records with the same thoroughness with which I would have pored over my own, had I been the patient. Even if I was in the right in a courtroom, I had failed her as a friend. And in a roundabout way, that was how I’d failed her as a doctor, too—I should have declined when she asked me to treat her in my practice. I should have known that somehow, some way, the relationship we had outside the examination room would color the relationship we had inside it.

The water in the shower was running cold now; I turned it off and wrapped a towel around myself. Guy Booker had given me very specific instructions on what I should wear today: no business suits, nothing black, hair loose around my face. I’d bought a twinset at T.J. Maxx because I never wore them but Guy said that it would be perfect. The idea was to look like an ordinary mom, a person any woman on the jury might identify with.

When I came downstairs, I heard music in the kitchen. Emma had left for the bus stop before I’d even gotten into the shower, and Rob—well, Rob had been at work by seven thirty every morning for the past three weeks. It was less of a burgeoning work ethic, I believed, than a burning desire to be out of the house by the time I awakened, just in case we’d have to have a civil conversation without Emma there to serve as a buffer.

“It’s about time,” Rob said as I walked into the kitchen. He reached over to the radio and turned down the volume, then pointed to a plate on the table that was piled high with bagels. “The store only had one pumpernickel,” he said. “But there’s also jalapeño-cheddar, and cinnamon-raisin—”

“But I heard you leave,” I said.

Rob nodded. “And I came back. Veggie cream cheese, or regular?”

I didn’t answer, just stood very still, watching him.

“I don’t know if I ever got around to telling you,” Rob said, “but the kitchen? It’s so much brighter, now that you painted it. You’d be a hell of an interior designer. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think you’re better suited to be an obstetrician, but still…”

My head was starting to pound. “Look, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but what are you doing here?”

“Toasting a bagel?”

“You know what I mean.”

The toaster popped, Rob ignored it. “There’s a reason we have to say ‘for better or for worse.’ I’ve been a total asshole, Piper. I’m sorry.” He looked down at the space between us. “You didn’t ask for this lawsuit; it was lobbed at you. I have to admit, it made me think about things I thought I’d never have to think about again. But regardless of all that, you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t provide any less than the standard of care for Charlotte and Sean. If anything, you went above and beyond.”

I felt a sob rise in my throat. “Your brother,” I managed.

“I don’t know how different my life would have been if he’d never been born,” Rob said quietly. “But I do know this: I loved him, while he was here.” He glanced up at me. “I can’t take back what I said to you, and I can’t erase my behavior these past few months. But I was hoping, all the same, that you might not mind me coming to court.”

I didn’t know how he’d cleared his schedule, or for how long. But I looked up at Rob and saw behind him the new cabinets I’d installed, the track of blue lighting, the warm copper paint on the walls, and for the first time I did not see a room that needed perfecting; I saw a home. “On one condition,” I hedged.

Rob nodded. “Fair enough.”

“I get the pumpernickel bagel,” I said, and I walked right into his open arms.

Marin

An hour before the trial was supposed to start, I really didn’t know whether or not my client was planning to show up. I’d tried to call her all weekend, and had not been able to reach her landline or her cell. When I reached the courthouse and saw the news crews lining the steps, I tried to phone her again.

You’ve reached the O’Keefes, the message machine sang.

That wasn’t exactly true, if Sean was proceeding with a divorce. But then, if I had learned anything about Charlotte, it was that the sound bite offered to the public might not be what was true behind the scenes, and to be honest, I didn’t particularly care, as long as she didn’t confuse her rhetoric when I had her on the witness stand.

I knew when she arrived. The roar on the steps was audible, and when she finally breached the door of the courthouse, the press poured in after her. I immediately hooked my arm through hers, muttering “No comment” as I dragged Charlotte down a hallway and into a private room, locking the door behind me.

“My God,” she said, still stunned. “There are so many of them.”

“Slow news day in New Hampshire,” I reasoned. “I would have been happy to wait for you out in the parking lot and take you through the back way, but that would actually have meant you’d returned my seven thousand messages this weekend, so that we could arrange a time to meet.”

Charlotte stared blankly out the window at the white vans and their satellite dishes. “I didn’t know you called. I wasn’t home. Willow broke her femur. We spent the weekend at the hospital, having a rod surgically implanted.”

I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment. Charlotte hadn’t been ignoring my calls; she’d been putting out a fire. “Is she all right?”

“She broke it running away from us. Sean told her about the divorce.”

“I don’t think any kid wants to hear something like that.” I hesitated. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but I wanted to have a few minutes to talk to you about what’s going to happen today—”

“Marin,” Charlotte said. “I can’t do this.”

“Come again?”

“I can’t do this.” She looked up at me. “I really don’t think I can go through with it.”

“If this is about the media—”

“It’s about my daughter. It’s about my husband. I don’t care how the rest of the world sees me, Marin. But I do care what they think.”

I considered the countless hours I’d spent preparing for this trial, all the expert witnesses I’d interviewed and all the motions I’d filed. Somehow, in my mind, it was tangled up with the fruitless search for my mother, who had finally responded to Maisie the court clerk’s phone call, asking her to send along my letter. “Now’s a little late to break this news to me, don’t you think?”

Charlotte faced me. “My daughter thinks I don’t want her, because she’s broken.”

“Well, what did you think she’d believe?”

“Me,” Charlotte said softly. “I thought she’d believe me.”