Handle With Care (47 page)

Had I ever really told her that?

I threw off the blanket and sat up, rubbing my hands down my face. Wearing just my boxers and a police department tee, I padded upstairs and slipped into our bedroom. I sat down on the bed. “Charlotte,” I whispered, but there was no response.

I touched the bundle of quilts, only to realize it was a pillow trapped under the sheets. “Charlotte?” I said out loud. The bathroom door was wide open; I turned on the light, but she wasn’t inside. Starting to worry—Was she just as upset as I was about the trial? Had she been sleepwalking?—I walked down the hallway, checking your bathroom, the guest room, the narrow staircase that led to the attic.

The last door was your room. I stepped inside and immediately saw
her. Charlotte was curled on your bed, her arm wrapped tight around you. Even in her sleep, she wasn’t willing to let you go.

I touched your hair, and then your mother’s. I brushed Amelia’s cheek. And then I lay down on the throw rug on the floor and pillowed my head on my arm. Go figure: with all of us together again, I fell asleep in a matter of minutes.

Marin

“Do you know what this is about?” I asked, as I hurried along the courthouse hallway beside Guy Booker.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.

We had been called to chambers before the start of the second day of the trial. Being called to chambers, this early on, was not usually a good thing—particularly not if it was something Guy Booker didn’t know about, either. Whatever pressing issue Judge Gellar had to address most likely was not one I wanted to hear.

We were led in to find the judge sitting at his desk, his too-black hair a helmet. It reminded me of those old Superman action figures—you just knew that Superman’s coif never blew around in the wind when he flew, some marvel of physics and styling gel—and it was distracting enough for me not even to notice the second person in the room, who was sitting with her back to us.

“Counselors,” Judge Gellar said. “You both know Juliet Cooper, juror number six.”

The woman turned around. She was the one who—during voir dire—had been the target of Guy’s intrusive questions about abortion. Maybe the defense attorney’s hammering of Charlotte yesterday about the same issue had triggered a complaint. I stood up a little straighter, convinced that the reason the judge had convened us had little to do with me and much to do with Guy Booker’s questionable practice of the law.

“Ms. Cooper will be excused from the jury. Beginning immediately, the alternate juror will be rotated into the pool.”

No lawyer likes to have the jury change in the middle of a trial
but neither do judges. If this woman was being excused, it must have been for a very good reason.

She was looking at Guy Booker, and very deliberately not looking at me. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I didn’t know I had a conflict of interest.”

Conflict of interest? I had assumed it was a health issue, some emergency that required her to fly to the bedside of a dying relative or go immediately for chemo. A conflict of interest meant that she knew something about my client or Guy’s—but surely she would have realized this during jury selection.

Apparently, Guy Booker felt the same way. “Is it possible to hear what the conflict is, exactly?”

“Ms. Cooper is related to one of the parties in this case,” Judge Gellar said, and he met my gaze. “You, Ms. Gates.”

I used to imagine that I saw my birth mother everywhere and just didn’t know it. I’d smile an extra moment longer at the lady who handed me my ticket at the movie theater; I’d make conversation about the weather with my bank teller. I’d hear the cultured voice of a receptionist at a rival firm and imagine that it was her; I’d bump into a lady in a cashmere coat in the lobby downstairs and stare at her face as I apologized. There were any number of people I could cross paths with who might be my mother; I could run into her dozens of times each day without ever knowing.

And now she was sitting across from me, in Judge Gellar’s chambers.

He and Guy Booker had left us alone for a few minutes. And to my surprise, even with almost thirty-six years’ worth of questions, the dam didn’t break down easily. I found myself staring at her hair—which was a frizzy red. All my life, I’d looked different from the other people in my family, and I had always assumed that I was a carbon copy of my birth mother. But I didn’t resemble her, not at all.

She was holding on to her purse with a death grip. “A month ago I got a phone call from the courthouse,” Juliet Cooper said. “Saying that they had some information for me. I thought something like this might happen one day.”

“So,” I said, but my voice was wheezy, dry. “How long have you known?”

“Only since yesterday. The clerk mailed me your card a week ago, but I couldn’t make myself open it. I wasn’t ready.” She looked up at me. Her eyes were brown. Did that mean my father’s had been blue, like mine? “It was what happened in court yesterday—all those questions about the mother wanting to get rid of her baby—that made me finally get up the nerve to do it.”

I felt as if I’d been pumped full of helium: surely, then, this meant that she hadn’t really wanted to give me up, just like Charlotte hadn’t really wanted to give up Willow.

“When I got to the end of the card, I saw your name, and realized I knew it already, from the trial.” She hesitated. “It’s a pretty unique name.”

“Yes.” What had you wanted to call me instead? Suzy, Margaret, Theresa?

“You’re very good,” Juliet Cooper said, shyly. “In court, I mean.”

There was three feet of space between us. Why wasn’t either of us crossing it? I had imagined this moment so many times, and it always ended with my mother holding me tight, as if she needed to make up for ever having let me go.

“Thank you,” I said. Here’s what I hadn’t realized: the mother you haven’t seen for almost thirty-six years isn’t your mother, she’s a stranger. Sharing DNA does not make you fast friends. This wasn’t a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.

Well, maybe she was as uncomfortable as I was; maybe she was afraid to overstep her bounds or assumed I held a grudge against her for giving me up in the first place. It was my job, then, to break the ice, wasn’t it? “I can’t believe that I spent all this time looking for you and you turned up on my jury,” I said, smiling. “It’s a small world.”

“Very,” she agreed, and went dead silent again.

“I knew I liked you during voir dire,” I said, trying to make a joke, but it fell flat. And then I remembered something else Juliet Cooper had said during jury selection: She used to be a stay-at-home mother. She’d only gone back to work when her children went to high school. “You have kids. Other kids.”

She nodded. “Two girls.”

For an only child, that was remarkable: Not only had I found my
birth mother but I had gained siblings. “I have sisters,” I said out loud.

At that, something shuttered in Juliet Cooper’s eyes. “They are not your sisters.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I was going to write you a letter. I was going to send it to the Hillsborough court and ask them to forward it to you,” she said. “Listening to Charlotte O’Keefe brought it all back for me: there are just some babies who are better off not being born.” Juliet stood up abruptly. “I was going to write you a letter,” she repeated, “and ask you not to contact me again.”

And just like that, my birth mother abandoned me for the second time in my life.

When you’re adopted, you may have the happiest life in the world, but there’s always a part of you that wonders if you’d been cuter, quieter, an easy delivery—well, maybe then your birth mom wouldn’t have given you up. It’s silly, of course—the decision to give a child up for adoption is made months in advance—but that doesn’t keep you from thinking it all the same.

I had gotten straight A’s in college. I’d graduated at the top of my law school class. I did this, of course, to make my family proud of me—but I didn’t specify which family I was talking about. My adoptive parents, sure. But also my birth parents. I think there was always a hidden belief that if my birth mother stumbled across me and saw how smart I was, how successful, she couldn’t help but love me.

When in fact, she couldn’t help but leave me.

The door of the conference room opened, and Charlotte slipped inside. “There was a reporter in the ladies’ room. She came after me with a microphone while I was going into a—Marin? Have you been crying?”

I shook my head, although it was clear that I was. “Something in my eye.”

“Both of them?”

I stood up. “Let’s go,” I said brusquely, and I left her to follow in my wake.

Dr. Mark Rosenblad, who treated you at Children’s Hospital in
Boston, was my next witness. I decided to shake myself off autopilot and give the performance of a lifetime for the juror who’d taken Juliet Cooper’s place, who happened to be a fortyish man with thick glasses and an overbite. He smiled at me as I directed all my questions about Rosenblad’s qualifications in his general direction.

With my luck, I’d lose the trial and have this guy ask me out on a date.

“You’re familiar with Willow, Dr. Rosenblad?” I said.

“I’ve treated her since she was six months old. She’s a great kid.”

“What type of OI does she have?”

“Type III—or progressively deforming OI.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the most severe form of OI that isn’t lethal. Children who have Type III will have hundreds of broken bones over the course of a lifetime—not just from contact but sometimes caused by rolling over in their sleep or reaching for something on a shelf. They often develop severe respiratory infections and complications because of the barrel shape of their rib cages. Often Type III kids have hearing loss or loose joints and poor muscle development. They’ll get severe scoliosis that requires spinal rodding or even having the vertebrae fused together—although that’s a tricky decision, because from that moment on, the child won’t grow any taller, and these kids have short stature to begin with. Other complications can include macrocephaly—fluid on the brain—cerebral hemorrhage caused by birth trauma, brittle teeth, and for some Type IIIs, basilar invagination—the second vertebra moves upward and cuts off the opening in the skull where the spinal cord passes through to the brain, causing dizziness, headache, periods of confusion, numbness, or even death.”

“Can you tell us what the next ten years will be like for Willow?” I asked.

“Like many kids her age with Type III OI, she’s been on pamidronate since she was a baby. It’s improved the quality of her life significantly—prior to bisphosphonates, Type III kids would rarely walk and would have been wheelchair-bound. Instead of having several hundred breaks in her life, thanks to the pamidronate, she may have only a hundred—we’re not sure. Some of the research that’s coming back now through teenagers who began getting infusions as babies, like Willow, shows that the bones—when they do break—
aren’t breaking along normal fracture patterns, and that makes them more difficult to treat. The bone’s getting denser because of the infusions, but it’s still imperfect bone. There’s also some evidence of jawbone abnormalities, but it’s unclear whether that’s related to the pamidronate or just part of the dentinogenesis that goes with OI. So some of these complications might occur,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “In addition, she’ll still have breaks, and surgeries to repair them. She was recently rodded in one thigh; I imagine the other will follow suit. Eventually she’ll have spinal surgery. She’s had pneumonia annually. Virtually all Type IIIs develop some sort of chest wall abnormalities, vertical collapse, and kyphoscoliosis, all of which lead to lung disease and cardiopulmonary distress. A number of individuals with Type III die due to respiratory or neurological complications, but with any luck, Willow will be one of our success stories—and will go into adulthood and live a fully functional and important life.”

For a moment, I just stared at Dr. Rosenblad. Having met you, and talked to you, and even seen you struggling to wheel yourself up an incline or reach for something on a counter that was too tall, I found it hard to conceive that all these medical nightmares awaited you. It was, of course, the hook Bob Ramirez and I had planned to hang this lawsuit on from the get-go, but even I had come to take your life for granted.

“If Willow does survive into adulthood, will she be able to take care of herself?”

I couldn’t look at Charlotte while I asked this; I didn’t think I could stand to see her face at the use of if instead of when.

“She’s going to need someone to take care of her, to some extent, no matter how independent she becomes. There are always going to be breaks and hospitalizations and physical therapy. Holding down a job will be difficult.”

“Beyond the physical challenges,” I asked, “will there be emotional challenges as well?”

“Yes,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “Kids with OI often have anxiety issues, because of the worry and avoidance behavior they exhibit to keep from suffering a break. They sometimes develop post-traumatic stress disorder after particularly severe fractures. In addition, Willow’s already started to notice she’s different from other kids and limited because of her OI. As kids with OI grow up, they want to be
independent—but they can’t be as functionally independent as able-bodied teens. The struggle can cause kids with OI to become introverted, depressed, perhaps even suicidal.”

When I turned around, I saw Charlotte. Her face was buried in her hands.

Maybe a mother wasn’t what she seemed to be on the surface. Maybe Charlotte had sued Piper Reece because she loved Willow too much to let her go. Maybe my birth mother let me go because she knew she couldn’t love me.

“In the six years you’ve treated Willow, have you gotten to know Charlotte O’Keefe?”

“Yes,” the doctor replied. “Charlotte’s incredibly attuned to her daughter. She’s almost got a sixth sense when it comes to Willow’s level of discomfort, and for making sure steps are taken before it gets out of hand.” He glanced at the jury. “Remember Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment? That’s Charlotte. Sometimes she’s so stubborn I want to sock her—but that’s because I’m the one she’s standing up to.”