Handle With Care (51 page)

BLUEBERRY PEACH BUCKLE

TOPPING

1/3 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

½ cup light brown sugar

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and grated

BATTER

1½ cups flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

¾ cup unsalted butter, room temperature

¾ cup dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 large eggs

2–3 cups wild blueberries (can substitute frozen if fresh are not available)

2 ripe peaches, peeled, pitted, and sliced
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Butter and flour an 8 by 8-inch pan; preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

First, make the topping: in a small bowl, combine the butter, brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and ginger until it resembles coarse meal, and set aside.

Then, make the batter by sifting together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set this mixture aside, too.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, using the paddle attachment, combine the butter and brown sugar until creamy and soft (3–4 minutes). Add the vanilla. Beat the eggs into the flour mixture one at a time until just combined. Fold in the berries and peaches. Spread the batter in the prepared pan and crumble the topping mixture on top. Bake for 45 minutes or until a tester comes out clean and the top of the buckle is golden.

Charlotte

I think you can love a person too much.

You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what’s wrong—a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don’t even realize what you look like, how far you’ve deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.

It is not an excuse, but it is the only answer I can give for why I would find myself here, by your bed; you with your wrist bandaged and broken from where the doctors had to press down to stop the bleeding; you with your broken ribs from the CPR they began when your heart stopped.

I had been used to hearing that you’d broken a bone, or needed surgery, or would be casted. But there were words that had come out of the doctors’ mouths today that I never would have expected: blood loss, self-harm, suicide.

How could a six-year-old girl want to kill herself? Was this the only way I’d sit up and take notice? Because yes, you had my attention.

Not to mention my paralyzing regret.

All of this time, Willow, I’d just wanted you to see how important you were to me, how I would do anything within my power to give you the best life possible…and you didn’t want that life at all.

“I don’t believe it,” I whispered fiercely, even though you were still sleeping, drugged to rest through the night. “I don’t believe you wanted to die.”

I ran my hand down your arm, until my fingers just brushed the
gauze that had been wrapped around the deep cut on your wrist. “I love you,” I said, my voice hollow with tears. “I love you so much that I don’t know who I’d be without you. And even if it takes my whole life to do it, I’ll make you see why yours made a difference.”

I would win this lawsuit, and with the money, I’d take you to see the Paralympics. I’d buy you a sports wheelchair, a service dog. I’d fly you halfway around the world to introduce you to people who, like you, beat the odds to become someone bigger than anyone ever expected. I would prove to you that being different isn’t a death sentence but a call to arms. Yes, you would continue to break: not bones but barriers.

Your fingers twitched against mine, and your eyes slowly blinked open. “Hi, Mommy,” you murmured.

“Oh, Willow,” I said, crying hard by now. “You scared us to death.”

“I’m sorry.”

I lifted your good hand and pressed a kiss into the palm for you to carry like a sweet, until it melted. “No,” I whispered. “I am.”

Sean stirred from the chair where he was sleeping, in the corner of your room. “Hey,” he said, his whole face lighting up when he saw you were awake. He sat down on the side of the bed. “How’s my girl?” He brushed your hair away from your face.

“Mom?” you asked.

“What, baby?”

You smiled then, the first real smile I’d seen on your face in ages. “You’re both here,” you said, as if that was what you’d wanted all along.

Leaving Sean with you, I went downstairs to the lobby and called Marin back; she had left multiple messages on my voice mail. “It’s about time,” she snapped. “Here’s a news flash, Charlotte. You aren’t allowed to leave a trial in the middle, especially without telling your lawyer where the hell you’re going. Do you have any idea how foolish it looks when the judge asks me where my client is, and I can’t answer?”

“I had to go to the hospital.”

“For Willow? What did she break this time?” Marin asked.

“She cut herself. She lost a lot of blood, and some of the intervention the doctors had to do broke some bones, but she’s going to be all right.
She’s here for observation overnight.” I drew in my breath. “Marin, I can’t come to court tomorrow. I have to stay with her.”

“One day,” Marin said. “I can get a continuance for one day. And…Charlotte? I’m glad Willow’s okay.”

My breath tumbled out in a gasp. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Marin was quiet for a moment. “You’d better not let Guy Booker hear you say that,” she said, and then she hung up.

I didn’t want to go back home, because there, I’d have to see the blood. I imagined it was everywhere—on the shower curtain, the tiled floor, the drain of the bathtub. I pictured myself using a bleach solution and a damp cloth and having to wring it into the sink dozens of times, my hands burning and my eyes scalded. I imagined the water running pink, and even after a solid thirty minutes of cleaning I would still smell the fear of losing you.

Amelia was downstairs in the cafeteria, where I’d left her with a cup of hot chocolate and a cardboard boat of French fries. “Hey,” I said.

She came halfway out of her chair. “Is Willow—”

“She’s just waking up.”

Amelia looked like she was going to faint, and I couldn’t blame her—she was the one who’d walked in on you, who had called the ambulance. “Did she say anything?”

“Not a lot.” I reached out and covered her hand with mine. “You saved Willow’s life today. There is nothing I can say that would possibly make you understand how much I want to thank you.”

“I wasn’t going to just let her bleed to death,” she said, but she was trembling.

“Do you want to see her?”

“I…I don’t know if I can yet. I keep picturing her in that bathroom…” She curled into herself, the way teenage girls do, like fiddlehead ferns. “Mom? What would have happened if Willow had died?”

“Don’t even think about that, Amelia.”

“I didn’t mean now…not today. I meant, like, years ago. When she was first born.” She looked up at me, and I realized she wasn’t trying to upset me, she was asking honestly what her life would have been like if it hadn’t taken a backseat to a sibling who had a serious disability.

“I can’t tell you, Amelia,” I said honestly. “I’m just really, really glad she didn’t. Not then, and thanks to you, not today. I need both of you too badly.”

As I stood up, waiting for Amelia to dump out the rest of her fries, I wondered whether the psychiatrist we would take you to would tell me that I had irrevocably damaged you. I wondered if the reason you’d slit your wrist was that, in spite of all the vocabulary you knew, you didn’t have the words to tell me to just stop already. I wondered how you even knew that slitting your wrist was one way to check out of this world.

As if she could read my mind, Amelia spoke. “Mom? I don’t think Willow was trying to kill herself.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because she knows,” Amelia said, falling into step beside me. “She’s the only thing that’s holding our family together.”

Amelia

I wasn’t left alone with you until three hours after you woke up, when Mom and Dad went out into the hall to talk to one of your doctors. You looked at me, because you knew that we wouldn’t have very long before everyone else descended again. “Don’t worry,” you said. “I won’t tell anyone it was yours.”

My knees nearly gave way underneath me; I had to hold on to that weird plastic crib rail on the side of the hospital bed. “What were you thinking?” I said.

“I just wanted to see what it was like,” you said. “When I saw you—”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“Well, I did. And you looked…I don’t know…so happy.”

Once in a science class my teacher had told a story about a woman who went into the hospital because she couldn’t eat anything, not one bite, and the doctors operated only to find a hair ball the whole size and shape of her stomach inside her. Later on, her husband mentioned that, yes, he’d seen her chewing on her hair every now and then, but he never imagined it had gotten so out of control. That’s what I felt like now: sick to my stomach, full of a habit that had grown so solid I couldn’t even swallow anymore.

“It’s a stupid way to be happy. It’s what I did because I couldn’t be happy the normal way.” I shook my head. “I look at you, Wiki, with so much shit raining down on you, and you never let it get you down. But me, I can’t even be satisfied with all the good stuff in my life. I’m pathetic.”

“I don’t think you’re pathetic.”

“Oh yeah?” I laughed, but without any humor; it sounded flat as cardboard. “Then what am I?”

“My big sister,” you said simply.

I could hear the door open a crack, Dad’s voice thanking the doctor. Quickly I swiped a tear from my eye. “Don’t try to be like me, Willow,” I said. “Especially since I was only trying to be like you.”

Then my father was in the room, and my mother. They glanced from your face to mine and back again. “What are you two talking about?” Dad asked.

We did not look at each other. “Nothing,” we said, for once in unison.

Piper

“I don’t have to go to court tomorrow,” I said, still reeling, as I put the phone down and turned to face Rob.

His fork stayed suspended in midair over his plate. “You mean she’s finally come to her senses and dropped this lawsuit?”

“No,” I said, sitting down beside Emma, who was pushing her Chinese food around on her plate. I wondered how much to say with her present, then decided, if she was old enough to deal with this trial, she was old enough to hear the truth. “It’s Willow. She cut herself with a razor blade, apparently, pretty badly.”

Rob’s silverware clattered to the table. “Jesus,” he said softly. “She was trying to kill herself?”

Until he said that, it honestly hadn’t crossed my mind. You were only six and a half, for God’s sake. Girls your age were supposed to be dreaming of ponies and Zac Efron, not trying to commit suicide. But then again, all sorts of things happened that weren’t theoretically supposed to: Bumblebees flew; salmon swam upstream. Babies were born without the bone structure to bear their weight. Best friends were pitted against each other.

“You don’t really think—Oh, Rob. Oh, God.”

“Is she going to be okay?” Emma asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I hope so.”

“Well, if this isn’t a giant cosmic hint for Charlotte to set some priorities,” Rob said, “then I don’t know what is. I don’t even remember Willow ever complaining.”

“A lot can change in a year,” I pointed out.

“Especially when your mother is too busy wringing blood out of a stone to pay attention to her kids—”

“Enough,” I murmured.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to defend that woman.”

“That woman used to be my friend.”

“Used to be, Piper,” Rob repeated.

Emma threw her napkin on the table, a red flag. “I think I know why she did it,” she whispered.

We both turned to her at once.

Emma was nearly white, her eyes bright with tears. “I know friends are supposed to save each other, but we’re not really friends anymore—”

“You and Willow?”

She shook her head. “Me and Amelia. I saw her once, in the girls’ bathroom. She was cutting her arm with a pop top from a soda can. She didn’t see me, and I turned around and ran. I was going to tell someone—you, or the guidance counselor—but then I sort of wished she would die. I thought maybe her mother deserved it, you know, for suing us. But I didn’t think—I never wanted Willow—” She broke down, crying. “Everyone does it—cuts. I figured it was just something she was going through, like the way she used to make herself throw up.”

“She what?”

“She didn’t think I knew, but I did. I could hear her, when I slept over at her house. She thought I was asleep, but she’d go into the bathroom and make herself sick—”

“But she stopped?”

Emma looked up at me. “I can’t remember,” she said, in a very tiny voice. “I thought so, but maybe I just stopped hanging around with her to see.”

“Her teeth,” Rob added. “When I took off her braces, the enamel was worn down. It’s the kind of thing we attribute to either soda…or eating disorders.”

When I was still practicing, I’d had a patient with bulimia who’d been pregnant. As soon as I managed to convince her to stop making herself vomit for the sake of her fetus, she started cutting. I’d consulted a psychiatrist and found out that the two often went hand in hand. Unlike anorexia, which was about being perfect all the time, bulimia was rooted in self-hatred. Cutting was a way of not committing suicide, ironically; it was a coping mechanism for someone who couldn’t control herself any other way, and like bingeing and purging, it became a dirty little secret that added to the cycle of anger at herself for not being who she really wished she could be.

I could only begin to imagine what it was like to live in a house where the subliminal message was that daughters who did not measure up should not exist.

It could have been a coincidence; Emma might have happened upon the one and only time Amelia tried to hurt herself; Rob’s armchair diagnosis might have been far off the mark. But all the same, if the warning signs were present and you noticed them, weren’t you obligated to offer the information?