Handle with Care

Tempering: to heat slowly and gradually.

Most of the time when we talk about a temper, we mean a quickness to anger. In cooking, though, tempering is about making something stronger by taking your time. You temper eggs by adding a hot liquid in small increments. The idea is to raise their temperature without causing them to curdle. The result is a stirred custard that can be used as a dessert sauce or incorporated into a complex dessert.

Here’s something interesting: the consistency of the finished product has nothing to do with the type of liquid used to heat it. The more eggs you use, the thicker and richer the final product will be.

Or in other words, it’s the substance you’ve got when you start that determines the outcome.

2 cups whole milk

6 egg yolks at room temperature

5 ounces sugar

1½ ounces cornstarch

1 teaspoon vanilla

Bring the milk just to a boil in a nonreactive saucepan. In a stainless steel bowl, whisk the egg yolks, sugar, and cornstarch. Temper the yolk mixture with milk. Put the milk and yolk mixture back on the heat, whisking constantly. When the mixture starts to thicken, whisk faster until it boils, then remove from heat. Add vanilla and pour into a stainless steel bowl. Sprinkle with a bit of sugar, and place plastic wrap directly on top of the crème. Put in fridge and chill before serving. This can be used as a filling for fruit tarts, napoleons, cream puffs, éclairs, et cetera.

Amelia

February 2007

My whole life, I’ve never been on a vacation. I’ve never even left New Hampshire, unless you count the time that I went with you and Mom to Nebraska-and even you have to admit that sitting in a hospital room for three days watching really old Tom and Jerry cartoons while you got tested at Shriners was nothing like going to a beach or to the Grand Canyon. So you can imagine how excited I was when I found out that our family was planning to go to Disney World. We would go during February school vacation. We’d stay at a hotel that had a monorail running right through the middle of it.

Mom began to make a list of the rides we would go on. It’s a Small World, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Peter Pan’s Flight.

“Those are for babies,” I complained.

“Those are the ones that are safe,” she said.

“Space Mountain,” I suggested.

“Pirates of the Caribbean,” she answered.

“Great,” I yelled. “I get to go on the first vacation of my life, and I won’t even have any fun.” Then I stormed off to our room, and even though I wasn’t downstairs anymore, I could pretty much imagine what our parents were saying: There Amelia goes, being difficult again.

It’s funny, when things like this happen (which is, like, always), Mom isn’t the one who tries to iron out the mess. She’s too busy making sure you’re all right, so the task falls to Dad. Ah, see, there’s something else that I’m jealous about: he’s your real dad, but he’s only my stepfather. I don’t know my real dad; he and my mother split up before I was even born, and she swears that his absence is the best gift he could ever have given me. But Sean adopted me, and he acts like he loves me just as much as he loves you-even though there’s this black, jagged splinter in my mind that constantly reminds me this couldn’t possibly be true.

“Meel,” he said when he came into my room (he’s the only one I’d ever let call me that in a million years; it makes me think of the worms that get into flour and ruin it, but not when Dad says it), “I know you’re ready for the big rides. But we’re trying to make sure that Willow has a good time, too.”

Because when Willow’s having a good time, we’re all having a good time. He didn’t have to say it, but I heard it all the same.

“We just want to be a family on vacation,” he said.

I hesitated. “The teacup ride,” I heard myself say.

Dad said he’d go to bat for me, and even though Mom was dead set against it-what if you smacked up against the thick plaster wall of the teacup?-he convinced her that we could whirl around in circles with you wedged between us so that you wouldn’t get hurt. Then he grinned at me, so proud of himself for having negotiated this deal that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I really couldn’t care less about the teacup ride.

The reason it had popped into my head was because, a few years ago, I’d seen a commercial for Disney World on TV. It showed Tinker Bell floating like a mosquito through the Magic Kingdom over the heads of the cheery visitors. There was one family that had two daughters, the same age as you and me, and they were on the Mad Hatter’s teacup ride. I couldn’t take my eyes off them-the older daughter even had brown hair, like I do; and if you squinted, the father looked a lot like Dad. The family seemed so happy it made my stomach hurt to watch it. I knew that the people on the commercial probably weren’t even a real family-that the mom and dad were probably two single actors, that they had most likely met their fake daughters that very morning as they arrived on set to shoot the commercial-but I wanted them to be one. I wanted to believe they were laughing, smiling, even as they were spinning out of control.

Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which one of us they feel sorrier for-you or me-and we all know who they’ll choose. It’s kind of hard to look past your casts; and the fact that you’re the size of a two-year-old, even though you’re five; and the funny twitch of your hips when you’re healthy enough to walk. I’m not saying that you’ve had it easy. It’s just that I have it worse, because every time I think my life sucks, I look at you and hate myself even more for thinking my life sucks in the first place.

Here’s a snapshot of what it’s like to be me:

Amelia, don’t jump on the bed, you’ll hurt Willow.

Amelia, how many times have I told you not to leave your socks on the floor, because Willow could trip over them?

Amelia, turn off the TV (although I’ve only watched a half hour, and you’ve been staring at it like a zombie for five hours straight).

I know how selfish this makes me sound, but then again, knowing something’s true doesn’t keep you from feeling it. And I may only be twelve, but believe me, that’s long enough to know that our family isn’t the same as other families, and never will be. Case in point: What family packs a whole extra suitcase full of Ace bandages and waterproof casts, just in case? What mom spends days researching the hospitals in Orlando?

It was the day we were leaving, and as Dad loaded up the car, you and I sat at the kitchen table, playing Rock Paper Scissors. “Shoot,” I said, and we both threw scissors. I should have known better; you always threw scissors. “Shoot,” I said again, and this time I threw rock. “Rock breaks scissors,” I said, bumping my fist on top of your hand.

“Careful,” Mom said, even though she was facing in the opposite direction.

“I win.”

“You always win.”

I laughed at you. “That’s because you always throw scissors.”

“Leonardo da Vinci invented the scissors,” you said. You were, in general, full of information no one else knew or cared about, because you read all the time, or surfed the Net, or listened to shows on the History Channel that put me to sleep. It freaked people out, to come across a five-year-old who knew that toilets flush in the key of E-flat or that the oldest word in the English language is town, but Mom said that lots of kids with OI were early readers with advanced verbal skills. I figured it was like a muscle: your brain got used more than the rest of your body, which was always breaking down; no wonder you sounded like a little Einstein.

“Do I have everything?” Mom asked, but she was talking to herself. For the bazillionth time she ran through a checklist. “The letter,” she said, and then she turned to me. “Amelia, we need the doctor’s note.”

It was a letter from Dr. Rosenblad, saying the obvious: that you had OI, that you were treated by him at Children’s Hospital-in case of emergency, which was actually pretty amusing since your breaks were one emergency after another. It was in the glove compartment of the van, next to the registration and the owner’s manual from Toyota, plus a torn map of Massachusetts, a Jiffy Lube receipt, and a piece of gum that had lost its wrapper and grown furry. I’d done the inventory once when my mother was paying for gas.

“If it’s in the van, why can’t you just get it when we drive to the airport?”

“Because I’ll forget,” Mom said as Dad walked in.

“We’re locked and loaded,” he said. “What do you say, Willow? Should we go visit Mickey?”

You gave him a huge grin, as if Mickey Mouse was real and not just some teenage girl wearing a big plastic head for her summer job. “Mickey Mouse’s birthday is November eighteenth,” you announced as he helped you crawl down from the chair. “Amelia beat me at Rock Paper Scissors.”

“That’s because you always throw scissors,” Dad said.

Mom frowned over her list one last time. “Sean, did you pack the Motrin?”

“Two bottles.”

“And the camera?”

“Shoot, I took it out and left it on the dresser upstairs-” He turned to me. “Sweetie, can you grab it while I put Willow in the car?”

I nodded and ran upstairs. When I came down, camera in hand, Mom was standing alone in the kitchen turning in a slow circle, as if she didn’t know what to do without Willow by her side. She shut off the lights and locked the front door, and I bounded over to the van. I handed the camera to Dad and buckled myself in beside your car seat, and let myself admit that, as dorky as it was to be twelve years old and excited about Disney World, I was. I was thinking about sunshine and Disney songs and monorails, and not at all about the letter from Dr. Rosenblad.

Which means that everything that happened was my fault.

We didn’t even make it to the stupid teacups. By the time our flight landed and we got to the hotel, it was late afternoon. We drove to the theme park and had just walked onto Main Street, U.S.A.-Cinderella’s Castle in full view-when the perfect storm hit. You said you were hungry, and we turned into an old-time ice-cream parlor. Dad stood in line holding your hand while Mom brought napkins over to the table where I was sitting. “Look,” I said, pointing out Goofy pumping the hand of a screaming toddler. At exactly the same moment that Mom let one napkin flutter to the ground and Dad let go of your hand to take out his wallet, you hurried to the window to see what I wanted to show you, and you slipped on the tiny paper square.

We all watched it in slow motion, the way your legs simply gave out from underneath you, so that you sat down hard on your bottom. You looked up at us, and the whites of your eyes flashed blue, the way they always do when you break.

It was almost like the people at Disney World had been expecting this to happen. No sooner had Mom told the man scooping ice cream that you’d broken your leg than two men from their medical facility came with a stretcher. With Mom giving orders, the way she always does around doctors, they managed to get you onto it. You weren’t crying, but then, you hardly ever did when you broke something. Once, I had fractured my pinkie playing tetherball at school and I couldn’t stop freaking out when it turned bright red and blew up like a balloon, but you didn’t even cry the time you broke your arm right through the skin.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” I whispered, as they lifted up the stretcher so that it suddenly grew wheels.

You were biting your lower lip, and you nodded.

There was an ambulance waiting for us when we got to the Disney World gate. I took one last look at Main Street, U.S.A., at the top of the metal cone that housed Space Mountain, at the kids who were running in instead of going out, and then I crawled into the car that someone had arranged so Dad and I could follow you and Mom to the hospital.

It was weird, going to an emergency room that wasn’t our usual one. Everyone at our local hospital knew you, and the doctors all listened to what Mom told them. Here, though, nobody was paying any attention to her. They said this could be not one but two femur fractures, and that might mean internal bleeding. Mom went into the examination room with you for the X-ray, which left Dad and me sitting on green plastic chairs in a waiting room. “I’m sorry, Meel,” he said, and I just shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be an easy one, and we can go back to the park tomorrow.” There had been a man in a black suit at Disney World who told my father that we would be comped, whatever that meant, if we wanted to return another day.

It was Saturday night, and the people coming into the emergency room were much more interesting than the TV program that was playing. There were two kids who looked like they were old enough to be in college, both bleeding from the same spot on their foreheads and laughing every time they looked at each other. There was an old man wearing sequined pants and holding the right side of his stomach, and a girl who spoke only Spanish and was carrying screaming twin babies.

Suddenly, Mom burst out of the double doors to the right, with a nurse running after her and another woman in a skinny pin-striped skirt and red high heels. “The letter,” she cried. “Sean, what did you do with it?”

“What letter?” Dad asked, but I already knew what she was talking about, and just like that, I thought I might throw up.

“Mrs. O’Keefe,” the woman said, “please. Let’s do this somewhere more private.”

She touched Mom’s arm, and-well, the only way I can really describe it is that Mom just folded in half. We were led to a room with a tattered red couch and a little oval table and fake flowers in a vase. There was a picture on the wall of two pandas, and I stared at it while the woman in the skinny skirt-she said her name was Donna Roman, and she was from the Department of Children and Families-talked to our parents. “Dr. Rice contacted us because he has some concerns about the injuries to Willow,” she said. “Bowing in her arm and X-rays indicate that this wasn’t her first break?”

“Willow’s got osteogenesis imperfecta,” Dad said.

“I already told her,” Mom said. “She didn’t listen.”

“Without a physician’s statement, we have to look into this further. It’s just protocol, to protect children-”

“I’d like to protect my child,” Mom said, her voice sharp as a razor. “I’d like you to let me get back in there so I can do just that.”

“Dr. Rice is an expert-”

“If he was an expert, then he’d know I was telling the truth,” Mom shot back.

“From what I understand, Dr. Rice is trying to reach your daughter’s physician,” Donna Roman said. “But since it’s Saturday night, he’s having trouble making contact. So in the meantime, I’d like to get you to sign releases that will allow us to do a full examination on Willow-a full bone scan and neurological exam-and in the meantime, we can talk a little bit.”

“The last thing Willow needs is more testing-“Mom said.

“Look, Ms. Roman,” Dad interrupted. “I’m a police officer. You can’t really believe I’d lie to you?”

“I’ve already spoken to your wife, Mr. O’Keefe, and I’m going to want to speak to you, too…but first I’d like to talk to Willow’s sister.”

My mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out of it. Mom was staring at me as if she were trying to do ESP, and I looked down at the floor until I saw those red high heels stop in front of me. “You must be Amelia,” she said, and I nodded. “Why don’t we take a walk?”

As we left, a police officer who looked like Dad did when he went to work stepped into the doorway. “Split them up,” Donna Roman said, and he nodded. Then she took me to the candy machine at the far end of the hallway. “What would you like? Me, I’m a chocolate fiend, but maybe you’re more of a potato chip girl?”

She was so much nicer to me when my parents weren’t sitting there-I immediately pointed to a Snickers bar, figuring that I’d better take advantage of this while I could. “I guess this isn’t quite what you’d hoped your vacation would be?” she said, and I shook my head. “Has this happened to Willow before?”

“Yeah. She breaks bones a lot.”

“How?”

For someone who was supposed to be smart, this woman sure didn’t seem it. How do anyone’s bones break? “She falls down, I guess. Or gets hit by something.”

“She gets hit by something?” Donna Roman repeated. “Or do you mean someone?”

There had been one time in nursery school when a kid had run into you on the playground. You were pretty gifted at ducking and weaving, but that day, you hadn’t been fast enough. “Well,” I said, “sometimes that happens, too.”

“Who was with Willow when she got hurt this time, Amelia?”

I thought back to the ice-cream counter, to Dad, holding your hand. “My father.”

Her mouth flattened. She fed coins into another machine, and out popped a bottled water. She twisted the cap. I wanted her to offer it to me, but I was too embarrassed to ask.

“Was he upset?”

I thought of my father’s face as we sped off toward the hospital following the ambulance. Of his fists, balanced on his thighs as we waited for word about Willow’s latest break. “Yeah-really upset.”

“Do you think he did this because he was angry at Willow?”

“Did what?”

Donna Roman knelt down so that she was staring me in the eye. “Amelia,” she said, “you can tell me what really happened. I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”

Suddenly, I realized what she thought I’d meant. “My dad wasn’t mad at Willow,” I said. “He didn’t hit her. It was an accident!”

“Accidents like that don’t have to happen.”

“No-you don’t understand-it’s because of Willow-”

“Nothing kids do justifies abuse,” Donna Roman muttered under her breath, but I could hear her loud and clear. By now she was walking back toward the room where my parents were, and even though I was yelling, trying to get her to hear me, she wasn’t listening. “Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe,” she said, “we’re putting your children into protective custody.”

“Why don’t we just go down to the station to talk?” the officer was saying to Dad.

Mom threw her arms around me. “Protective custody? What does that mean?”

With a firm hand-and the help of the police officer-Donna Roman tried to peel her away from me. “We’re just keeping the children safe until we can get this all cleared up. Willow will be here overnight.” She started to steer me out of the room, but I grabbed at the doorframe.

“Amelia?” my mother said, frantic. “What did you say?”

“I tried to tell her the truth!”

“Where are you taking my daughter?”

“Mom!” I shrieked, and I reached for her.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Donna Roman said, and she pulled at my hands until I had to let go, until I was being dragged out of the hospital kicking and screaming. I did this for five minutes, until I went totally numb. Until I understood why you didn’t cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn’t speak out loud.

I’d seen and heard the words foster home before, in books that I read and television programs I watched. I figured that they were for orphans and inner-city kids, kids whose parents were drug dealers-not girls like me who lived in nice houses and got plenty of Christmas presents and never went to sleep hungry. As it turned out, though, Mrs. Ward, who ran this temporary foster home, could have been an ordinary mom. I guess she had been one, judging from the photos that plastered every surface like wallpaper. She met us at the door wearing a red bathrobe and slippers that looked like pink pigs. “You must be Amelia,” she said, and she opened the door a little wider.

I was expecting a posse of kids, but it turned out that I was the only one staying with Mrs. Ward. She took me into the kitchen, which smelled like dishwashing detergent and boiled noodles. She set a glass of milk and a stack of Oreo cookies in front of me. “You’re probably starving,” she said, and even though I was, I shook my head. I didn’t want to take anything from her; it felt like giving in.

My bedroom had a dresser, a small bed, and a comforter with cherries printed all over it. There was a television and a remote. My parents would never let me have a television in my room; my mother said it was the Root of All Evil. I told Mrs. Ward that, and she laughed. “Maybe so,” she said, “but then again, sometimes The Simpsons are the best medicine.” She opened a drawer and took out a clean towel and a nightgown that was a couple of sizes too big. I wondered where it had come from. I wondered how long the last girl who’d worn it had slept in this bed.

“I’m right down the hall if you need me,” Mrs. Ward said. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

My mother.

My father.

You.

Home.

“How long,” I managed, the first words I had said out loud in this house, “do I have to be here?”

Mrs. Ward smiled sadly. “I can’t say, Amelia.”

“Are my parents…are they in a foster home, too?”

She hesitated. “Something like that.”

“I want to see Willow.”

“First thing tomorrow,” Mrs. Ward said. “We’ll go up to the hospital. How’s that?”

I nodded. I wanted to believe her, so bad. With this promise tucked into my arms like my stuffed moose at home, I could sleep through the night. I could convince myself that everything was bound to get better.

I lay down, and tried to remember the useless bits of information you’d rattle off before we went to sleep, when I was always telling you to just shut up already: Frogs have to close their eyes to swallow. One pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long. Cleveland, spelled backward, is DNA level C.

I was starting to see why you carried those stupid facts like other kids dragged around security blankets-if I repeated them over and over, it almost made me feel better. I just wasn’t sure if that was because it helped to know something, when the rest of my life seemed to be a big question mark, or because it reminded me of you.

I was still hungry, or empty, I couldn’t tell which. After Mrs. Ward had gone to her own bedroom, I tiptoed out of bed. I turned the light on in the hallway and went down to the kitchen. There, I opened up the refrigerator and let the light and cold fall over my bare feet. I stared at lunch meat, sealed into plastic packages; at a jumble of apples and peaches in a bin; at cartons of orange juice and milk lined up like soldiers. When I thought I heard a creak upstairs, I grabbed whatever I could: a loaf of bread, a Tupperware of cooked spaghetti, a handful of those Oreos. I ran back to my room and closed the door, spread my treasure out on the sheets in front of me.

At first, it was just the Oreos. But then my stomach rumbled and I ate all the spaghetti-with my fingers, because I had no fork. I had a piece of bread and another and then another, and before I knew it only the plastic wrapper was left. What is wrong with me? I thought, catching my reflection in the mirror. Who eats a whole loaf of bread? The outside of me was disgusting enough-boring brown hair that frizzed with crummy weather, eyes too far apart, that crooked front tooth, enough fat to muffin-top my jeans-but the inside of me was even worse. I pictured it as a big black hole, like the kind we learned about in science last year, that sucks everything into its center. A vacuum of nothingness, my teacher had called it.

Everything that had ever been good and kind in me, everything people imagined me to be, had been poisoned by the part of me that had wished, in the darkest crack of the night, that I could have a different family. The real me was a disgusting person who imagined a life where you had never been born. The real me had watched you being loaded into an ambulance and had let myself wish, for a half a second, that I could stay behind at Disney World. The real me was a bottomless soul who could eat a whole loaf of bread in ten minutes and still have room for more.

I hated myself.

I could not tell you what made me go into the bathroom that was attached to my room-wallpaper spotted with pink roses, shaped soaps curled in dishes next to the sink-and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe it was because I could feel the toxic stuff seeping into my bloodstream, and I wanted it out. Maybe it was punishment. Maybe it was because I wanted to control one part of me that had been uncontrollable, so the rest of me would fall into line. Rats can’t throw up, you’d told me once; it popped into my head now. With one hand holding up my hair, I vomited into the toilet until I was flushed and sweating and empty and relieved to learn that, yes, I could do this one thing right, even if it made me feel worse than I had before. With my stomach cinching and bile bitter on the back of my tongue, I felt horrible-but this time there was a physical reason I could point to.

Weak and wobbly, I stumbled back to my borrowed bed and reached for the television remote. My eyes felt like sandpaper and my throat ached, but I could not fall asleep. Instead I flipped through the cable channels, through home decorating shows and cartoons and late-night talk shows and Iron Chef cooking contests. It was on Nick at Nite, twenty-two minutes into The Dick Van Dyke Show, that the old Disney World commercial came on-like a joke, a tease, a warning. It felt like a punch in the gut: there was Tinker Bell, there were the happy people; there was the family that could have been us on the teacup ride.

What if my parents never came back?

What if you didn’t get better?

What if I had to stay here forever?

When I started to sob, I stuffed the corner of the pillow deep into my mouth so Mrs. Ward wouldn’t hear. I hit the mute button on the television remote, and I watched the family at Disney World going round in circles.

Sean

It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you. Like arresting someone-people who aren’t in law enforcement think it’s appalling to know that, even with probable cause, mistakes are made. If that’s the case, you unarrest the person and tell him you were just doing what you had to. Better that than take the risk of letting a criminal walk free, I’ve always said, and to hell with civil libertarians who wouldn’t know a perp if he spit in their faces. This was what I believed, heart and soul, until I was carted down to the Lake Buena Vista PD on suspicion of child abuse. One look at your X-rays, at the dozens of healing fractures, at the curvature of your lower right arm where it should have been straight-and the doctors went ballistic and called DCF. Dr. Rosenblad had given us a note years ago that should have served as a Get Out of Jail Free card, because lots of parents with OI kids are accused of child abuse when the case history isn’t known-and Charlotte’s always carried it around in the minivan, just in case. But today, with everything we had to remember to pack for the trip, the letter was forgotten, and what we got instead was a trip to the police station for interrogation.

“This is bullshit,” I yelled. “My daughter fell down in public. There were at least ten witnesses. Why aren’t you dragging them in? Don’t you guys have real cases to keep you busy around here?”

I’d been alternating between playing good cop and bad cop, but as it turned out, neither worked when you were up against another officer from an unfamiliar jurisdiction. It was nearly midnight on Saturday-which meant that it could be Monday before this was sorted out with Dr. Rosenblad. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since they’d brought us to the station to be questioned-in cases like this, we’d separate the parents so that they had less of a chance to fabricate a story. The problem was, even the truth sounded crazy. A kid slips on a napkin and winds up with compound fractures in both femurs? You don’t need nineteen years on the job, like I have, to be suspicious of that one.

I imagined Charlotte was falling apart at the seams-being away from you while you were hurting would rip her to pieces, and then knowing that Amelia was God knows where was even more devastating. I kept thinking of how Amelia used to hate to sleep with the lights off, how I’d have to creep into her room in the middle of the night and turn them off when she’d fallen asleep. Are you scared? I’d asked her once, and she’d said she wasn’t. I just don’t want to miss anything. We lived in Bankton, New Hampshire-a small town where you could actually drive down the street and have people honk when they recognized your car; a place where if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store, the checkout girl would just let you take your food and come back to pay later. That’s not to say that we didn’t have our share of the seedy underbelly of life-cops get to see behind the white picket fences and polished doors, where there are all kinds of hidden nightmares: esteemed local bigwigs who beat their wives, honors students with drug addictions, schoolteachers with kiddie porn on their computers. But part of my goal, as a police officer, was to leave all that crap at the station and make sure you and Amelia grew up blissfully naïve. And what happens instead? You watch the Florida police come into the emergency room to take your parents away. Amelia gets carted off to a foster-care facility. How much would this lousy attempt at a vacation scar you both?

The detective had left me alone after two rounds of interrogation. This was his way, I knew, of hanging me out to dry-assuming that the information he was gathering between our little sessions would be enough to scare me into confessing that I’d broken your legs.

I wondered if Charlotte was in this building somewhere, in another interrogation room, or a lockup. If they wanted to keep us here overnight, they had to arrest us-and they had grounds for that. A new injury had occurred here in Florida-that, coupled with the old injuries on the X-ray, was probable cause, until someone could corroborate our explanations. But the hell with it-I was tired of waiting. You and your sister needed me.

I stood up and banged on the glass mirror that I knew the detective was watching me through.

He came back into the room. Skinny, redheaded, pimples-he couldn’t have been thirty yet. I weighed 225-all muscle-and stood six-three; for the past three years I’d won our department’s unofficial weight-lifting challenge during annual fitness testing. I could have snapped him in half if I wanted to. Which made me remember why he was questioning me in the first place.

“Mr. O’Keefe,” the detective said. “Let’s go through this again.”

“I want to see my wife.”

“That’s not possible right now.”

“Will you at least tell me if she’s okay?”

My voice cracked on that last word, and it was enough to soften the detective. “She’s fine,” he said. “She’s with another detective right now.”

“I want to make a phone call.”

“You’re not under arrest,” the detective said.

I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

He gestured toward the phone in the middle of the desk. “Dial nine for an outside line,” he said, and he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, as if to make it clear that he wasn’t giving me any privacy.

“You know the number for the hospital where my daughter’s being kept?”

“You can’t call her.”

“Why not? I’m not under arrest,” I repeated.

“It’s late. No good parent would want to wake his kid up. But then you’re not a good parent, are you, Sean?”

“No good parent would leave his kid alone at a hospital when she’s scared and hurt,” I countered.

“Let’s get through what we need to here, and then maybe you’ll be able to catch your daughter before she goes to bed.”

“I’m not saying another word until I talk to her,” I bargained. “Give me that number, and I’ll tell you what really happened today.”

He stared at me for a minute-I knew that technique, too. When you have been doing this as long as I have, you can ferret out truth by reading someone’s eyes. I wonder what he saw in mine. Disappointment, maybe. Here I was, a police officer, and I hadn’t even been able to keep you safe.

The detective picked up the phone and dialed. He asked for your room and talked quietly to a nurse who answered. Then he handed the receiver to me. “You have one minute,” he said.

You were groggy, shaken awake by that nurse. Your voice sounded small enough for me to carry around in my back pocket. “Willow,” I said. “It’s Daddy.”

“Where are you? Where’s Mommy?”

“We’re coming back for you, honey. We’re going to see you tomorrow, first thing.” I didn’t know that this was true, but I wasn’t going to let you think we’d abandoned you. “One to ten?” I asked.

It was a game we played whenever there was a break-I offered you a pain scale, you showed me how brave you were. “Zero,” you whispered, and it felt like a punch.

Here’s something you should know about me: I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since my father passed away, when I was ten. I’ve come close, let me tell you. Like when you were born, and almost died right afterward. Or when I saw the look on your face when, as a two-year-old, you had to learn how to walk again after being casted for five months with a hip fracture. Or today, when I saw Amelia being pulled away. It’s not that I don’t feel like breaking down-it’s that someone’s got to be the strong one, so that you all don’t have to be.

So I pulled it together and cleared my throat. “Tell me something I don’t know, baby.”

It was another game between us: I’d come home, and you’d recite something you’d learned that day-honestly, I’d never seen a kid absorb information like you. Your body might betray you at every turn, but your brain picked up the slack.

“A nurse told me that a giraffe’s heart weighs twenty-five pounds,” you said.

“That’s huge,” I replied. How heavy was my own? “Now, Wills, I want you to lie down and get a good night’s rest, so that you’re wide awake when I come get you in the morning.”

“You promise?”

I swallowed. “You bet, baby. Sleep tight, okay?” I handed the phone back to the detective.

“How touching,” he said flatly, hanging it up. “All right, I’m listening.”

I rested my elbows on the table between us. “We had just gotten into the park, and there was an ice-cream place close to the entry. Willow was hungry, so we decided we’d stop off there. My wife went to get napkins, Amelia sat down at a table, and Willow and I were waiting in line. Her sister saw something through the window, and Willow ran to go look at it, and she fell down and broke her femurs. She’s got a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, which means her bones are extremely brittle. One in ten thousand kids are born with it. What the fuck else do you want to know?”

“That’s exactly the statement you gave an hour ago.” The detective threw down his pen. “I thought you were going to tell me what happened.”

“I did. I just didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear.”

The detective stood up. “Sean O’Keefe,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

By seven on Sunday morning, I was pacing in the waiting room of the police station, a free man, waiting for Charlotte to be released. The desk sergeant who let me out of the lockup shuffled beside me, uncomfortable. “I’m sure you understand,” he said. “Given the circumstances, we were only doing our job.”

My jaw tightened. “Where’s my older daughter?”

“DCF is on their way here with her.”

I had been told-professional courtesy-that Louie, the dispatcher at the Bankton PD who confirmed my claim to be an officer with the department, also told them you had a disease that caused your bones to break easily, but that DCF wouldn’t release Willow until they had confirmation from a medical professional. So I’d prayed half the night-although I have to admit I give less credit for our release to Jesus than I do to your mother. Charlotte watched enough Law & Order to know that once her rights had been read to her she was allowed a phone call-and to my surprise, she didn’t use it to contact you. Instead, she called Piper Reece, her best friend.

I like Piper, honestly, I do. God knows I love her for whatever connections she used to cold-call Mark Rosenblad at three a.m. on a weekend and get him to phone the hospital where you were being treated. I even owe Piper for my marriage-she and Rob are the ones who introduced me to Charlotte. But all this being said, sometimes Piper is…just a little too much. She’s smart and opinionated and frustratingly right most of the time. Most of the fights I’ve had with your mother have had their roots in something Piper got her thinking about. The thing is, where Piper can carry off that brashness and confidence, on Charlotte, it seems a little off-like a kid playing dress-up in her mom’s closet. Your mother is quieter, more of a mystery; her strengths sneak up on you instead of smacking you front and center. If Piper’s the one you notice when you walk into a room, with her boy-cut blond hair and forever legs and her wide smile, Charlotte’s the one you find yourself thinking about long after you’ve left. But then again, that in-your-face fierceness that makes Piper so exhausting sometimes is also what got me out of the lockup in Lake Buena Vista. I suppose this means, in the grand cosmic tally, I have something else to thank her for.

Suddenly a door opened, and I could see Charlotte-dazed, pale, her brown curls tumbling out of her ponytail elastic. She was blistering the officer escorting her: “If Amelia isn’t back here before I count to ten, I swear I’ll-”

God, I love your mother. She and I think exactly alike, when it counts.

Then she noticed me and broke off. “Sean!” she cried, and ran into my arms.

I wish you could know what it feels like to find the missing piece of you, the thing that makes you stronger. Charlotte’s that, for me. She’s tiny, only five-two, but underneath her serpentine curves-the ones she’s always stressing out about because she’s not a size four like Piper-are muscles that would surprise you, developed from years of hauling flour when she was a pastry chef and-later-you and your equipment.

“You all right, baby?” I murmured against her hair. She smelled like apples and suntan lotion. She’d made us all put it on before we even left the Orlando airport. To be safe, she’d said.

She didn’t answer, just nodded against my chest.

There was a cry from the doorway, and we both looked up in time to see Amelia barreling toward us. “I forgot,” she sobbed. “Mom, I forgot to take the doctor’s note. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not anyone’s fault.” I knelt down and brushed her tears away with my thumbs. “Let’s get out of here.”

The desk sergeant had offered to drive us to the hospital in a cruiser, but I asked him to call us a cab instead; I wanted them to stew in their own poor judgment instead of trying to make it up to us. As the taxi pulled up in front of the police department entrance, we three moved as a unit out the front door. I let Charlotte and Amelia slide into the cab before getting in myself. “To the hospital,” I told the driver, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the padded seat.

“Thank God,” your mother said. “Thank God that’s over.”

I didn’t even open my eyes. “It’s not over,” I said. “Someone is going to pay.”

Charlotte

Suffice it to say that the trip home wasn’t a pleasant one. You had been put into a spica cast-surely one of the biggest torture devices ever created by doctors. It was a half shell of plaster that covered you from knee to ribs. You were in a semireclined position, because that’s what your bones needed to knit together. The cast kept your legs splayed wide so that the femurs would set correctly. Here’s what we were told:

1. You would wear this cast for four months.

2. Then it would be sliced in half, and you would spend weeks sitting in it like an oyster on the half shell, trying to rebuild your stomach muscles so that you could sit upright again.

3. The small square cutout of the plaster at your belly would allow your stomach to expand while you ate.

4. The open gash between your legs was left so you could go to the bathroom.

Here’s what we were not told:

1. You wouldn’t be able to sit completely upright, or lie completely down.

2. You couldn’t fly back to New Hampshire in a normal plane seat.

3. You couldn’t even lie down in the back of a normal car.

4. You wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably for long periods in your wheelchair.

5. Your clothes wouldn’t fit over the cast.

Because of all these things, we did not leave Florida immediately. We rented a Suburban, with three full bench seats, and settled Amelia in the back. You had the whole middle bench, and we padded this with blankets we’d bought at Wal-Mart. There we’d also bought men’s T-shirts and boxer shorts-the elastic waists could stretch over the cast and be belted with a hair scrunchie if you pulled the extra fabric to the side, and if you didn’t look too closely, they almost passed for shorts. They were not fashionable, but they covered up your crotch, which was left wide open by the position of the cast.

Then we started the long drive home.

You slept; the painkillers they’d given you at the hospital were still swimming through your blood. Amelia alternated between doing word search puzzles and asking if we were almost home yet. We ate at drive-through restaurants, because you couldn’t sit up at a table.

Seven hours into our journey, Amelia shifted in the backseat. “You know how Mrs. Grey always makes us write about the cool stuff we did over vacation? I’m going to talk about you guys trying to figure out how to get Willow onto the toilet to pee.”

“Don’t you dare,” I said.

“Well, if I don’t, my essay’s going to be really short.”

“We could make the rest of the trip fun,” I suggested at one point. “Stop off in Memphis at Graceland…or Washington, D.C…”

“Or we could just drive straight through and be done with it,” Sean said.

I glanced at him. In the dark, a green band of light from the dashboard reflected like a mask around his eyes.

“Could we go to the White House?” Amelia asked, perking up.

I imagined the hothouse of humidity that Washington would be; I pictured us lugging you around on our hips as we climbed the steps to the Air and Space Museum. Out the window, the black road was a ribbon that kept unraveling in front of us; we couldn’t manage to catch up to its end. “Your father’s right,” I said.

When we finally got home, word had already spread about what happened. There was a note from Piper on the kitchen counter, with a list of all the people who’d brought casseroles she’d stashed in the fridge and a rating system: five stars (eat this one first), three stars (better than Chef Boyardee), one star (botulism alert). I learned a long time ago with you that folks who are trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you’ve done your job-no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

People ask all the time how I’m doing, but the truth is, they don’t really want to know. They look at your casts-camouflage or hot pink or neon orange. They watch me unload the car and set up your walker, with its tennis-ball feet, so that we can creep across the sidewalk, while behind us, their children swing from monkey bars and play dodgeball and do all the other ordinary things that would cause you to break. They smile at me, because they want to be polite or politically correct, but the whole time they are thinking, Thank God. Thank God it was her, instead of me.

Your father says that I’m not being fair when I say things like this. That some people, when they ask, really do want to lend a hand. I tell him that if they really wanted to lend a hand, they wouldn’t bring macaroni casseroles-instead they’d offer to take Amelia apple picking or ice skating so that she can get out of the house when you can’t, or they’d rake the gutters of the house, which are always clogging up after a storm. And if they truly wanted to be saviors, they’d call the insurance company and spend four hours on the phone arguing over bills, so I wouldn’t have to.

Sean doesn’t realize that most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don’t blame them. It’s superstition: if you give assistance to the family in need…if you throw salt over your shoulder…if you don’t step on the cracks, then maybe you’ll be immune. Maybe you’ll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not complaining. Other people look at me and think: That poor woman; she has a child with a disability. But all I see when I look at you is the girl who had memorized all the words to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there’s a thunderstorm-not because you’re afraid but because I am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn’t you.

The next morning I spent five hours on the phone with the insurance company. Ambulance trips were not covered by our policy; however, the hospital in Florida would not discharge anyone in a spica cast unless he or she was traveling by ambulance. It was a catch-22, but I was the only one who could see it, and it led to a conversation that felt like theater of the absurd. “Let me get this straight,” I said to the fourth supervisor I’d spoken with that day. “You’re telling me I didn’t have to take the ambulance; therefore you won’t cover the cost.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

On the couch, you were propped up on pillows, drawing stripes on your cast with markers. “Can you tell me what the alternative was?” I asked.

“Apparently you could have kept the patient in the hospital.”

“You do understand this cast is going to stay on for months. Are you suggesting I keep my daughter hospitalized for that long?”

“No, ma’am. Just until transportation could be arranged.”

“But the only transportation the hospital would allow us to leave in was an ambulance!” I said. By now your leg looked like a candy cane. “Would your policy have covered the additional stay?”

“No, ma’am. The maximum number of nights allowed for injuries like these is-”

“Yeah, we’ve been through that.” I sighed.

“It seems to me,” the supervisor said tartly, “that given the option of paying for additional nights in the hospital or an unauthorized ambulance trip, you don’t have much to complain about.”

I felt my cheeks flame. “Well, it seems to me that you are an enormous ass!” I yelled, and I slammed down the phone. I turned around and saw you, marker trailing out of your hand, precariously close to the fabric of the couch cushions. You were twisted like a pretzel, your lower half in the cast still facing forward, your head leaning back over your shoulder so that you could see out the window.

“Swear jar,” you murmured. You had a canning jar that you’d covered with iridescent gift wrap, and every time Sean swore in front of you, you netted a quarter. Just this month alone, you were up to forty-two dollars-you’d kept count the whole way home from Florida. I took a quarter out of my pocket and put it into the jar on the table nearby, but you weren’t looking; your attention was still focused out side, on a frozen pond at the edge of the lawn, where Amelia was skating.

Your sister had been ice skating since, well, since she was your age. She and Piper’s daughter, Emma, took lessons together twice a week, and there was nothing you wanted more than to copy your sister. Skating, however, happened to be a sport you’d never, ever be allowed to try. Once, you’d broken your arm when you were pretending to skate on one foot across the kitchen linoleum in your socks.

“Between my foul language and your dad’s, you’re going to have enough cold, hard cash to buy a plane ticket out of here pretty soon,” I joked, trying to distract you. “Where to? Vegas?”

You turned away from the window and looked at me. “That would be dumb,” you said. “I can’t play Blackjack till I’m twenty-one.”

Sean had taught you how. Also Hearts, Texas Hold ’Em, and Five-Card Stud. I’d been horrified, until I realized that playing Go Fish for hours at a time might officially qualify as torture. “So the Caribbean, then?”

As if you would ever travel unimpeded, as if you would ever take a vacation without thinking about this last one. “I was thinking of buying some books. Like Dr. Seuss stuff.”

You read at a sixth-grade level, even though your peers were still sounding out the alphabet. It was one of the few perks of OI: when you had to be immobile, you’d pore over books, or get on the Internet. In fact, when Amelia wanted to rile you, she called you Wikipedia. “Dr. Seuss?” I said. “Really?”

“They’re not for me. I thought we could ship them to that hospital in Florida. The only thing they had to read was Where’s Spot? and that gets really old after the fifth or sixth time.”

That left me speechless. All I wanted to do was forget about that stupid hospital, to curse the insurance nightmare it had led to and the fact that you would be stuck in the four-month hell of a spica cast-and there you were, already past the pity party. Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn’t mean you ever took the opportunity to do so. In fact, sometimes I was sure that the reason people stared at you with your crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with your disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that you had abilities they only dreamed of.

The phone rang again-for the briefest of seconds I fantasized that it was the CEO of the health insurance company, calling to personally apologize. But it was Piper, checking in. “Is this a good time?”

“Not really,” I said. “Why don’t you call back in a few months?”

“Is she in a lot of pain? Did you call Rosenblad?” Piper asked. “Where’s Sean?”

“Yes, no, and I hope earning enough to cover the credit card bills for the vacation we didn’t get to have.”

“Well, listen, I’ll pick up Amelia for skating tomorrow, when I take Emma. One less thing for you to worry about.”

Worry about it? I hadn’t even known Amelia had practice. It wasn’t just on the bottom of the totem pole; it wasn’t even on the totem pole.

“What else do you need?” Piper asked. “Groceries? Gas? Johnny Depp?”

“I was going to say Xanax…but now I might take door number three.”

“It figures. You’re married to a guy who looks like Brad Pitt-with a better body-and you go for the long-haired artsy type.”

“Grass is always greener, I guess.” Absently I watched you reach for the old laptop computer beside you and try to balance it on your lap. It kept toppling over, because of the angle of your cast, so I grabbed a throw pillow and set it on your lap as a table. “Unfortunately, right now, my side of the fence is looking pretty grim,” I told her.

“Oops, I’ve got to go. Apparently, my patient’s crowning.”

“If I had a dollar for every time I heard that one-”

Piper laughed. “Charlotte,” she said. “Try taking down the fence.”

I hung up. You were typing feverishly with two fingers. “What are you doing?”

“Setting up a Gmail account for Amelia’s goldfish,” you said.

“I highly doubt he needs one…”

“That’s why he asked me to do this, instead of you…”

Take down the fence. “Willow,” I announced, “shut down the laptop. You and I are going skating.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“But you said-”

“Willow, do you want to argue, or do you want to skate?” You beamed, a smile the likes of which I had not seen on you since before we left for Florida. I pulled on a sweater and my boots, then brought my winter coat in from the mudroom to cover your upper half. I wound blankets around your legs and hoisted you onto my hip. Without the cast, you were elfin, slight. With it, you weighed fifty-three pounds.

The one thing a spica cast was good for-practically made for-was balancing you on my hip. You leaned away from me a little bit, but I could still wrap one arm around you and maneuver us through the foyer and down the front steps.

When Amelia saw us coming, tortoise-slow, navigating hummocks of snow and patches of black ice, she stopped spinning. “I’m going skating,” you sang, and Amelia’s eyes flew to mine.

“You heard her.”

“You’re taking her skating. Aren’t you the one who wanted Dad to fill in the skating pond? You called it cruel and unusual punishment for Willow.”

“I’m taking down the fence,” I said.

“What fence?”

I wrapped the blankets underneath your bottom and gently set you down on the ice. “Amelia,” I said, “this is the part where I need your help. I want you to watch her-don’t take your eyes off her-while I go grab my skates.”

I sprinted back to the house, stopping only at the threshold to make sure that Amelia was still staring at you, just like I’d left her. My skates were buried in a boot bin in the mudroom-I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d used them. The laces knotted them together like lovers; I slung them over my shoulder and then hoisted the computer desk chair with its rolling casters into my arms. Outside, I tipped it over, so that the seat was balanced on my head. I thought of African women in their bright skirts, with baskets of fruit and bags of rice set squarely on their heads as they walked home to feed their families.

When I got to the little pond, I set the chair on the ice. I adjusted the back and the arms so that they sloped and flared to accommodate your cast. Then I lifted you up and set you into the snug mesh seat.

I sat down to lace up my skates. “Hold on, Wiki,” Amelia said, and you grabbed the arms of the chair. She stood behind you and started to move across the ice. The blankets around your legs ballooned, and I called out to your sister to be careful. But Amelia already was. She was leaning over the back of the chair so that one arm held you close in the seat while she skated faster and faster. Then she quickly reversed direc tion, so that she was facing you, pulling the arms of the chair as she skated backward.

You tilted your head back and closed your eyes as Amelia spun you in a circle. Amelia’s dark curls streamed out from beneath her striped wool cap; your laugh fluted across the ice like a bright banner. “Mom,” you called out. “Look at us!”

I stood up, my ankles wobbling. “Wait for me,” I said, growing steadier with every step.

Sean

On my first day back at work, I came into the locker room to find a Wanted poster hanging near my dry-cleaned uniform. Written across the photo of my face, in bright red marker, was the word APPREHENDED. “Very funny,” I muttered, and I ripped down the flyer.

“Sean O’Keefe!” said one of the guys, pretending to hold a microphone in his hand as he held it up to another cop. “You’ve just won the Super Bowl. What are you going to do next?”

Two fists, pumped in the air. “I’m going to Disney World!”

The rest of the guys cracked up. “Hey, your travel agent called,” one said. “She’s booked your tickets to Gitmo for your next vacation.”

My captain hushed them all up and came to stand in front of me. “Seriously, Sean, you know we’re just pulling your chain. How’s Willow?”

“She’s okay.”

“Well, if there’s anything we can do…,” the captain said, and he let the rest of his sentence fade like smoke.

I scowled, pretending that this didn’t bother me, that I was in on the joke instead of being the laughingstock. “Don’t you guys have something constructive to do? What do you think this is, the Lake Buena Vista PD?”

At that, everyone howled with laughter and dribbled out of the locker room, leaving me alone to dress. I smacked my fist into the metal frame of my locker, and it jumped open. A piece of paper fluttered out-my face again, with Mickey Mouse ears superimposed on my head. And on the bottom: “It’s a Small World After All.”

Instead of getting dressed, I navigated the hallways of the department to the dispatch office and yanked a telephone book from a stack kept on a shelf. I looked for the ad until I found the name I was looking for, the one I’d seen on countless late-night television commercials: “Robert Ramirez, Plaintiff’s Attorney: Because you deserve the best.”

I do, I thought. And so does my family.

So I dialed the number. “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to make an appointment.”

I was the designated night watchman. After you girls were fast asleep and Charlotte was showered and climbing into bed, it was my job to turn off the lights, lock the doors, do one last pass through the house. With you in your cast, your makeshift bed was the living room couch. I almost turned off the kitchen night-light before I remembered, and then I came closer and pulled the blanket up to your chin and kissed your forehead.

Upstairs, I checked on Amelia and then went into our room. Charlotte was standing in the bathroom with a towel wrapped around herself, brushing her teeth. Her hair was still wet. I stepped up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, twirled a curl around one of my fingers. “I love the way your hair does that,” I said, watching it spring back into the same spiral it had been a minute before. “It’s got a memory of its own.”

“Mind of its own is more like it,” she said, shaking out her hair before she bent down to rinse out her mouth. When she straightened back up again, I kissed her.

“Minty fresh,” I said.

She laughed. “Did I miss something? Are we filming a Crest commercial?”

In the mirror, our eyes met. I’ve always wondered whether she sees what I do when I look at her. Or for that matter, whether she notices the fact that my hair’s gotten thinner on the top. “What do you want?” she asked.

“How do you know I want something?”

“Because I’ve been married to you for seven years?”

I followed her into the bedroom and watched as she dropped the towel and pulled on an oversize T-shirt to sleep in. I know you wouldn’t want to hear this-what kid does?-but that was another thing that I loved about your mother. Even after seven years, she still sort of ducked when she changed in front of me, as if I did not know every inch of her by heart.

“I need you and Willow to come somewhere with me tomorrow,” I said. “A lawyer’s office.”

Charlotte sank onto the mattress. “For what?”

I struggled to put into words the feelings that were my explanation. “The way we were treated. The arrest. I can’t just let them get away with it.”

She stared at me. “I thought you were the one who wanted to just get home and get on with our lives.”

“Yeah, and you know what that meant for me today? The whole department thinks I’m some huge joke. I’m always going to be the cop who managed to get arrested. All I’ve got in my job is my reputation. And they ruined that.” I sat down beside Charlotte, hesitating. I championed the truth every day, but I didn’t always like speaking it, especially when it meant saying something that left me bare. “They took my family away. I was in that cell, thinking about you and Amelia and Willow, and all I wanted to do was hurt someone. All I wanted to do was turn into the person they already thought I was.”

Charlotte lifted her gaze to mine. “Who’s ’they’?”

I threaded my fingers through hers. “Well,” I said, “that’s what I hope the lawyer will tell us.”

The waiting room walls of the law offices of Robert Ramirez were papered with the canceled settlement checks that he’d won for former clients. I paced with my hands clasped behind my back, leaning in to read a few. “Pay to the Order of $350,000.” “$1.2 million.” “$890,000.” Amelia was hovering over the coffee machine, a nifty little thing that let you put in a single cup and push a button to get the flavor you wanted. “Mom,” she asked, “can I have some?”

“No,” Charlotte said. She was sitting next to you on the couch, trying to keep your cast from sliding off the stiff leather.

“But they have tea. And cocoa.”

“No means no, Amelia!”

The secretary stood up behind her desk. “Mr. Ramirez is ready to see you now.”

I pulled you onto my hip, and we all followed the secretary down the hall to a conference room enclosed by walls of frosted glass. The secretary held the door open, but even so, I had to tilt you sideways to get your legs through the clearing. I kept my eyes on Ramirez; I wanted to watch his reaction when he saw you. “Mr. O’Keefe,” he said, and he held out a hand.

I shook it. “This is my wife, Charlotte, and my girls, Amelia and Willow.”

“Ladies,” Ramirez said, and then he turned to his secretary. “Briony, why don’t you get the crayons and a couple of coloring books?”

From behind me, I heard Amelia snort-I knew she was thinking that this guy didn’t have a clue, that coloring books were for little kids, not ones who were already wearing training bras.

“The hundred billionth crayon made by Crayola was Periwinkle Blue,” you said.

Ramirez raised his brows. “Good to know,” he replied, and then he gestured toward a woman standing nearby. “I’d like to introduce you to my associate, Marin Gates.”

She looked the part. With black hair pulled back in a clip and a navy suit, she could have been pretty, but there was something off about her. Her mouth, I decided. She looked like she’d just spit out something that tasted awful.

“I’ve invited Marin to sit in on this meeting,” Ramirez said. “Please, take a seat.”

Before we could, though, the secretary reappeared with the coloring books. She handed them to Charlotte, black-and-white pamphlets that said ROBERT RAMIREZ, ESQUIRE across the top in block letters. “Oh, look,” your mother said, shooting a withering glance in my direction. “Who knew they’d invented personal injury coloring books?”

Ramirez grinned. “The Internet is a wondrous place.”

The seats in the conference room were too narrow to accommodate your spica cast. After three abortive attempts to sit you down, I finally hauled you back onto my hip again and faced the lawyer.

“How can we help you, Mr. O’Keefe?” he asked.

“It’s Sergeant O’Keefe, actually,” I corrected. “I work on the Bankton, New Hampshire, police force; I have for the past nineteen years. My family and I just got back from Disney World, and that’s what brought me here today. I’ve never been treated so poorly in my whole life. I mean, what’s more normal than a trip to Disney World, right? But no, instead, my wife and I wind up arrested, my kids are taken away from me and put into protective custody, my youngest daughter is alone by herself in a hospital scared out of her mind…” I drew in my breath. “Privacy’s a fundamental right, and the privacy of my family was violated beyond belief.”

Marin Gates cleared her throat. “I can see that you’re still very upset, Officer O’Keefe. We’re going to try to help you…but we need you to back up a bit and slow down. Why did you go to Disney World?”

So I told her. I told her about your OI, and the ice cream, and how you fell. I told her about the men in black suits who led us out of the theme park and arranged for the ambulance, as if the sooner they got rid of us the better. I told her about the woman who’d taken Amelia away from us, about the interrogations that went on for hours at the police station, about the way no one there believed me. I told her about the jokes that had been made about me at my own station.

“I want names,” I said. “I want to sue, and I want to do it fast. I want to go after someone at Disney World, someone at the hospital, and someone at DCF. I want people’s jobs, and I want money out of this to make up for the hell we went through.”

By the time I finished, my face felt hot. I couldn’t look at your mother; I didn’t want to see her face after what I’d said.

Ramirez nodded. “The type of case you’re suggesting is very expensive, Sergeant O’Keefe. Any lawyer that takes it on would do a cost-benefit analysis first, and I can tell you right away that, even though you’re seeking a money judgment, you’re not going to get one.”

“But those checks in the waiting room…”

“Were for cases where the plaintiff had a valid complaint. From what you’ve described to us, the people who worked at Disney World and the hospital and DCF were just doing their jobs. Doctors have a legal responsibility to report suspicions of child abuse. Without the letter from your hometown doctor, the police had probable cause to make the arrest in the state of Florida. DCF has an obligation to protect children, particularly when the child in question is too young to give a detailed account of her own health issues. As an officer of the law, I’m sure if you step back and remove the emotion from the facts here, you’ll see that, once the health-care information was received from New Hampshire, your kids were immediately turned over to you; you and your wife were released…sure, it made you feel awful. But embarrassment isn’t a just cause of action.”

“What about emotional damages?” I blustered. “Do you have any idea what that was like for me? For my kids?”

“I’m sure it was nothing compared to the emotional burden of living day in and day out with a child who has these particular health problems,” Ramirez said, and beside me, Charlotte lifted her gaze to his. The lawyer smiled sympathetically at her. “I mean, it must be quite challenging.” He leaned forward, frowning a little. “I don’t know much about-what’s it called? Osteo…”

“Osteogenesis imperfecta,” Charlotte said softly.

“How many breaks has Willow had?”

“Fifty-two,” you said. “And did you know that the only bone that hasn’t been broken by a person in a skiing accident yet is one in the inner ear?”

“I did not,” Ramirez said, taken aback. “She’s something else, huh?”

I shrugged. You were Willow, pure and simple. There was nobody else like you. I knew it the moment I first held you, wrapped in foam so that you wouldn’t get hurt in my arms: your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?

Marin Gates cleared her throat. “How was Willow conceived?”

“Ugh,” Amelia said-until then, I’d forgotten she was with us-“that’s totally gross.” I shook my head at her, a warning.

“We had a hard time,” Charlotte said. “We were about to try in vitro when I found out I was pregnant.”

“Grosser,” Amelia said.

“Amelia!” I passed you over to your mother and pulled your sister up by the hand. “You can wait outside,” I said under my breath.

The secretary looked at us as we entered the waiting room again, but she didn’t say anything. “What are you going to talk about next?” Amelia challenged. “Your personal experience with hemorrhoids?”

“That’s enough,” I said, trying hard not to lose my temper in front of the secretary. “We’ll be out soon.”

While I headed back down the hall, I heard the secretary’s high heels clicking as she walked toward Amelia. “Want a cup of cocoa?” she asked.

When I entered the conference room again, Charlotte was still talking. “…but I was thirty-eight years old,” she said. “You know what they write on your charts, when you’re thirty-eight? ‘Geriatric pregnancy.’ I was worried about having a Down syndrome child-I never had even heard of OI.”

“Did you have amnio?”

“Amnio won’t tell you automatically that a fetus has OI; you’d have to be looking for it because it’s already shown up in your family. But Willow’s case was a spontaneous mutation. It wasn’t inherited.”

“So you didn’t know before Willow was born that she had OI?” Ramirez asked.

“We knew when Charlotte’s second ultrasound showed a bunch of broken bones,” I answered. “Look, are we done here? If you don’t want this case, I’m sure I can find-”

“Do you remember that weird thing at the first ultrasound?” Charlotte said, turning to me.

“What weird thing?” Ramirez asked.

“The tech thought the picture of the brain looked too clear.”

“There’s no such thing as too clear,” I said.

Ramirez and his associate exchanged a glance. “And what did your OB say?”

“Nothing.” Charlotte shrugged. “No one even mentioned OI until we did another ultrasound at twenty-seven weeks, and saw all the fractures.”

Ramirez turned to Marin Gates. “See if it’s ever diagnosed in utero that early,” he ordered, and then he turned back to Charlotte. “Would you be willing to release your medical records to us? We’ll have to do some research on whether or not you have a cause of action-”

“I thought we didn’t have a lawsuit,” I said.

“You might, Officer O’Keefe.” Robert Ramirez looked at you as if he was memorizing your features. “Just not the one you thought.”

Marin

Twelve years ago I was a senior in college, going nowhere fast, when I sat down at the kitchen table and had a talk with my mother (more on that later). “I don’t know what I want to be,” I said.

This was hugely ironic for me, because I didn’t really know what I had been, either. Since I was five, I’ve known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one’s own origins.

“What do you like to do?” my mother had asked, taking a sip of her coffee. She took it black; I took mine light and sweet. It was one of thousands of discrepancies between us that always led to unspoken questions: Had my birth mother taken her coffee light and sweet, too? Did she have my blue eyes, my high cheekbones, my left-handedness?

“I like to read,” I said, and then I rolled my eyes. “This is stupid.”

“And you like to argue.”

I smirked at her.

“Reading. Arguing. Honey,” my mother said, brightening, “you were meant to be a lawyer.”

Fast-forward nine years: I’d been called back to the doctor’s office because of an abnormal Pap smear. While I was waiting for the gynecologist to come in, the life I didn’t have flashed before my eyes: the kids I’d put off having because I was too busy in law school and building my career; the men I hadn’t dated because I wanted to make law review instead; the house in the country I didn’t buy because I worked such long hours I never would have been able to enjoy that expansive teak deck, that mountain view. “Let’s go over your family medical history,” my doctor said, and I gave my standard answer: “I’m adopted; I don’t know my family medical history.”

Even though I turned out to be fine-the abnormal results were a lab error-I think that was the day I decided to search for my birth parents.

I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t I happy with my adoptive parents? Well, the answer was yes-which is why I hadn’t even entertained the thought of searching until I was thirty-one. I’d always been happy and grateful that I got to grow up with my family; I didn’t need or want a new one. And the very last thing I wanted to do was break their hearts by telling them I was mounting a search.

But even though I knew my whole life that my adoptive parents desperately wanted me, somewhere in my mind, I knew that my birth parents didn’t. My mom had given me the party line about them being too young and not ready to have a family-and logically I understood that-but emotionally, I felt like I’d been tossed aside. I guess I wanted to know why. So after a talk with my adoptive parents-one during which my mother cried the whole time she promised to help me-I tentatively waded into the search that I’d been toying with for the past six months.

Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you’d probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn’t sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realized you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author’s feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.

Adoption records weren’t open-not even for someone like me, who knew how to pull strings legally. Which meant that every step was Herculean, and that there were far more failures than successes. I’d spent the first three months of my search paying a private investigator over six hundred dollars to tell me that he had turned up absolutely nothing. That, I figured, I could have done myself for free.

The problem was that my real job kept interfering.

As soon as we finished showing the O’Keefes out of the law office I rounded on my boss. “For the record? This kind of lawsuit is completely unpalatable to me,” I said.

“Will you still say that,” Bob mused, “if we wind up with the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire?”

“You don’t know that-”

He shrugged. “Depends on what her medical records turn up.”

A wrongful birth lawsuit implies that, if the mother had known during her pregnancy that her child was going to be significantly impaired, she would have chosen to abort the fetus. It places the onus of responsibility for the child’s subsequent disability on the ob-gyn. From a plaintiff’s standpoint, it’s a medical malpractice suit. For the defense, it becomes a morality question: who has the right to decide what kind of life is too limited to be worth living?

Many states had banned wrongful birth suits. New Hampshire wasn’t one of them. There had been several settlements for the parents of children who’d been born with spina bifida or cystic fibrosis or, in one case, a boy who was profoundly retarded and wheelchair-bound due to a genetic abnormality-even though the illness had never been diagnosed before, much less noticed in utero. In New Hampshire, parents were responsible for the care of disabled children their whole lives-not just till age eighteen-which was as good a reason as any to seek damages. There was no question Willow O’Keefe was a sad story, with her enormous body cast, but she’d smiled and answered questions when the father left the room and Bob chatted her up. To put it bluntly: she was cute and bright and articulate-and therefore a much tougher hardship case to sell to a jury.

“If Charlotte O’Keefe’s provider didn’t meet the standard of care,” Bob said, “then she should be held liable, so this doesn’t happen again.”

I rolled my eyes. “You can’t play the conscience card when you stand to make a few million, Bob. And it’s a slippery slope-if an OB decides a kid with brittle bones shouldn’t be born, what’s next? A prenatal test for low IQ, so you can scrap the fetus that won’t grow up and get into Harvard?”

He clapped me on the back. “You know, it’s nice to see someone so passionate. Personally, whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I’m always glad bioethics wasn’t an issue during the time polio, TB, and yellow fever were running rampant.” We were walking toward our individual offices, but he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “Are you a neo-Nazi?”

“What?”

“I didn’t think so. But if we were asked to defend a client who was a neo-Nazi in a criminal suit, could you do your job-even if you found his beliefs disgusting?”

“Of course, and that’s a question for a first-year law student,” I said immediately. “But this is totally different.”

Bob shook his head. “That’s the thing, Marin,” he replied. “It really isn’t.”

I waited until he’d closed the door to his office and then let out a groan of frustration. Inside my office, I kicked off my heels and stomped to my desk to sit down. Briony had brought in my mail, neatly bound in an elastic band. I sifted through it, sorting envelopes into case-by-case piles, until I came to one that had an unfamiliar return address.

A month ago, after I’d fired the private investigator, I had sent a letter to the court in Hillsborough County to get my adoption decree. For ten dollars, you could get a copy of the original document. Armed with that, and the fact that I had been born at St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, I planned to do some legwork and ferret out the first name of my birth mother. I was hoping for a court intern who might not know what he or she was doing and would forget to white out my birth name on the document. Instead, I wound up with a clerk named Maisie Donovan, who’d worked at the county court since the dinosaurs died out-and who had sent me the envelope I now held in my shaking hands.

COUNTY COURT OF HILLSBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE IN RE: ADOPTION OF BABY GIRL

FINAL DECREE

AND NOW, July 28, 1973, upon consideration of the within Petition and of the hearing and thereon, and the Court having made an investigation to verify the statements of the Petition and other facts to give the Court full knowledge as to the desirability of the proposed adoption;

The Court, being satisfied, finds that the statements made in the Petition are true, and that the welfare of the person proposed to be adopted will be promoted by this adoption; and directs that BABY GIRL, the person proposed to be adopted, shall have all the rights of a child and heir of Arthur William Gates and Yvonne Sugarman Gates, and shall be subject to all the duties of such child; and shall hereafter assume the name of MARIN ELIZA BETH GATES.

I read it a second time, and a third. I stared at the judge’s signature-Alfred something-or-other. For ten dollars I had been given the earth-shattering information that

1. I am female

2. My name is Marin Elizabeth Gates

Well, what had I expected? A Hallmark card from my birth mother and an invitation to this year’s family reunion? With a sigh, I opened my filing cabinet and dropped the decree into the folder that I’d marked PERSONAL. Then I took out a new manila folder and wrote O’KEEFE across the tab. “Wrongful birth,” I murmured out loud, just to test the words on my tongue; they were (no surprise) bitter as coffee grains. I tried to turn my attention to a lawsuit with the thinly veiled message that there are some children who should never be born, and winged a silent thank-you to my birth mother for not feeling the same way.

Piper

Technically, I was your godmother. Apparently, that meant that I was responsible for your religious education, which was sort of a colossal joke since I never set foot in a church (blame that healthy fear of the roof bursting into flames), while your mother rarely missed a weekend Mass. I liked to think of my role, instead, as the fairy-tale version. That one day, with or without the help of mice wearing tiny overalls, I’d make you feel like a princess.

To that end, I rarely showed up to your house empty-handed. Charlotte said I was spoiling you, but I wasn’t draping you in diamonds or giving you the keys to a Hummer. I brought magic tricks, candy bars, kiddie videotapes that Emma had outgrown. Even when I visited directly from a stint at the hospital, I’d improvise: a rubber glove, knotted into a balloon. A hair net from the OR. “The day you bring her a speculum,” Charlotte used to say, “your welcome is officially rescinded.”

“Hello,” I yelled as I walked through the front door. To be honest, I can’t remember a time I ever knocked. “Five minutes,” I said, as Emma tore up the stairs to find Amelia. “Don’t even take your coat off.” I wandered through the hallway into Charlotte’s living room, where you were propped up in your spica cast, reading.

“Piper!” you said, and your face lit up.

Sometimes, when I looked at you, I didn’t see the compromised twist of your bones or the short stature that came part and parcel with your illness. Instead, I remembered your mother crying when she told me that she had failed to get pregnant yet another month; I remembered her taking the Doptone out of my ears at an office visit so that she could listen to your hummingbird heartbeat, too.

I sat down beside you on the couch and took your gift du jour out of my coat pocket. It was a beach ball-believe me, it wasn’t easy finding one of those in February. “We didn’t get to go to the beach,” you said. “I fell down.”

“Ah, but this isn’t just a beach ball,” I corrected, and I inflated it until it was as firm and round as the belly of a woman in her ninth month. Then I pushed it between your knees, the ball wedged tight against the plaster, and began to strike the top of it with an open palm. “This,” I said, “is a bongo drum.”

You laughed, and began to smack the plastic surface, too. The sound brought Charlotte into the room. “You look like hell,” I said. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Gee, Piper, it’s really great to see you, too…”

“Is Amelia ready?”

“For what?”

“Skating?”

She smacked her forehead. “I totally forgot. Amelia!” she yelled, and then to me: “We just got home from the lawyer’s.”

“And? Is Sean still on a rampage to sue the world?”

Instead of answering, she rapped her hand against the beach ball. She didn’t like it when I ragged on Sean. Your mother was my best friend in the world, but your father could drive me crazy. He got an idea in his head, and that was the end of that-you couldn’t budge him. The world was utterly black-and-white for Sean, and I guess I’ve always been the kind of person who prefers a splash of color.

“Guess what, Piper,” you interrupted. “I went skating, too.”

I glanced at Charlotte, who nodded. She was usually terrified about the pond in the backyard and its constant temptation; I couldn’t wait to hear the details of this story. “I suppose if you forgot about skating, you forgot about the bake sale, too?”

Charlotte winced. “What did you make?”

“I made brownies,” I told her. “In the shape of skates. With frosting for the laces and blades. Get it? Ice skates with frosting?”

“You made brownies?” Charlotte said, and I followed her as she headed toward the kitchen.

“From scratch. The rest of the moms already blacklisted me because I missed the spring show for a medical conference. I’m trying to atone.”

“So you whipped these up when? While you were stitching an epi siotomy? After being on call for thirty-six hours?” Charlotte opened her pantry and rummaged through the shelves, finally grabbing a package of Chips Ahoy! and spilling them onto a serving platter. “Honestly, Piper, do you always have to be so damn perfect?”

With a fork, she was attacking the edges of the cookies. “Whoa. Who peed in your Cheerios?”

“Well, what do you expect? You waltz in here and tell me I look like crap, and then you make me feel completely inadequate-”

“You’re a pastry chef, Charlotte. You could bake circles around-What on earth are you doing?”

“Making them look homemade,” Charlotte said. “Because I’m not a pastry chef, not anymore. Not for a long time.”

When I’d first met Charlotte, she had just been named the finest pastry chef in New Hampshire. I’d actually read about her in a magazine that lauded her ability to take unlikely ingredients and come up with the most remarkable confections. She used to never come empty-handed to my house-she’d bring cupcakes with spun-sugar icing, pies with berries that burst like fireworks, puddings that acted like balms. Her soufflés were as light as summer clouds; her chocolate fondant could wipe your mind clean of whatever obstacles had littered your day. She told me that, when she baked, she could feel herself coming back to center, that everything else fell away, and she remembered who she was supposed to be. I’d been jealous. I had a vocation-and I was a damn good doctor-but Charlotte had a calling. She dreamed of opening a patisserie, of writing her own bestselling cookbook. In fact, I never imagined she would find anything she loved more than baking, until you came along.

I moved the platter away. “Charlotte. Are you okay?”

“Let’s see. I was arrested last weekend; my daughter’s in a body cast; I don’t even have time to take a shower-yup, I’m just fantastic.” She turned to the doorway and the staircase upstairs. “Amelia! Let’s go!”

“Emma’s gone selectively deaf, too,” I said. “I swear she ignores me on purpose. Yesterday, I asked her eight times to clear the kitchen counter-”

“You know what,” Charlotte said wearily. “I really don’t care about the problems you’re having with your daughter.”

No sooner had my jaw dropped-I had always been Charlotte’s confidante, not her punching bag-than she shook her head and apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

Just then the older girls clattered down the stairs and skidded past us in a flurry of whispers and giggles. I put my hand on Charlotte’s arm. “Just so you know,” I said firmly. “You’re the most devoted mother I’ve ever met. You’ve given up your whole life to take care of Willow.”

She ducked her head and nodded before looking up at me. “Do you remember her first ultrasound?”

I thought for a second, and then I grinned. “We saw her sucking her thumb. I didn’t even have to point it out to you and Sean; it was clear as day.”

“Right,” your mother repeated. “Clear as day.”

Charlotte

March 2007

What if it was someone’s fault?

The idea was just the germ of a seed, carried in the hollow beneath my breastbone when we left the law offices. Even when I was lying awake next to Sean, I heard it as a drumbeat in my blood: what if, what if, what if. For five years now I had loved you, hovered over you, held you when you had a break. I had gotten exactly what I so desperately wished for: a beautiful baby. So how could I admit to anyone-much less myself-that you were not only the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me…but also the most exhausting, the most overwhelming?

I would listen to people complain about their kids being impolite or surly or even getting into trouble with the law, and I’d be jealous. When those kids turned eighteen, they’d be on their own, making their own mistakes and being held accountable. But you were not the kind of child I could let fly in the world. After all, what if you fell?

And what would happen to you when I wasn’t around to catch you anymore?

After one week went by and then another, I began to realize that the law offices of Robert Ramirez were just as disgusted by a woman who would harbor these secret thoughts as I was. Instead, I threw myself into making you happy. I played Scrabble until I knew all the two-letter words by heart; I watched programs on Animal Planet until I had memorized the scripts. By now, your father had settled back into his work routine; Amelia had gone back to school.

This morning, you and I were squeezed into the downstairs bathroom. I faced you, my arms under yours, balancing you over the toilet so that you could pee. “The bags,” you said. “They’re getting in the way!”

With one hand, I adjusted the trash bags that were wrapped around your legs while I grunted under the weight of you. It had taken a series of failed attempts to figure out how one went to the bathroom while wearing a spica cast-another little tidbit the doctors don’t share. From parents on online forums I had learned to wedge plastic garbage bags under the lip of the cast where it had been left open, a liner of sorts so that the plaster edge would stay dry and clean. Needless to say, a trip to the bathroom for you took about thirty minutes, and after a few accidents, you’d gotten very good at predicting when you had to go, instead of waiting till the last minute.

“Forty thousand people get hurt by toilets every year,” you said.

I gritted my teeth. “For God’s sake, Willow, just concentrate before you make it forty thousand and one.”

“Okay, I’m done.”

With another balancing act, I passed you the roll of toilet tissue and let you reach between your legs. “Good work,” I said, leaning down to flush and then gingerly backing out of the narrow bathroom door. But my sneaker caught on the edge of the rug, and I felt myself going down. I twisted so that I’d land first, so that my body would cushion your blow.

I’m not sure which of us started to laugh first, and when the doorbell and phone rang simultaneously, we started to laugh even harder. Maybe I would change my message. Sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m holding my daughter, in her fifty-pound cast, over the toilet bowl.

I levered myself on my elbows, pulling you upright with me. The doorbell rang again, impatient. “Coming,” I called out.

“Mommy!” you screeched. “My pants!”

You were still half naked after our bathroom run, and getting you into your flannel pajama bottoms would be another ten-minute endeavor. Instead, I grabbed one of the trash bags still tucked into your cast and wrapped it around you like a black plastic skirt.

On the front porch stood Mrs. Dumbroski, one of the neighbors who lived down the road. She had twin grandsons your age, who had visited last year, stolen her glasses when she fell asleep, and set a pile of raked leaves on fire that would have spread to her garage if the mailman hadn’t come by at just the right moment. “Hello, dear,” Mrs. Dumbroski said. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

“Oh no,” I answered. “We were just…” I looked at you, wearing the trash bag, and we both started to laugh again.

“I was looking for my dish,” Mrs. Dumbroski said.

“Your dish?”

“The one I baked the lasagna in. I do hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy it.”

It must have been one of the meals that had been waiting for us on our return home from the hell that was Disney World. To be honest, we’d eaten only a few; the rest were getting freezer burn even as I stood there. There was only so much mac and cheese and lasagna and baked ziti that a human could stomach.

It seemed to me that if you made a meal for someone who was sick, it was pretty cheeky to ask whether or not she’d finished it so you could have your Pyrex back.

“How about I try to find the dish, Mrs. Dumbroski, and have Sean drop it off at your house later?”

Her lips pursed. “Well,” she said, “then I suppose I’ll have to wait to make my tuna casserole.”

For just a moment I entertained the thought of stuffing you into Mrs. Dumbroski’s chicken-wing arms and watching her totter under the weight of you while I went to the freezer, found her stupid lasagna, and threw it onto the ground at her feet-but instead I just smiled. “Thanks for being so accommodating. I’ve got to get Willow down for a nap now,” I said, and I closed the door.

“I don’t take naps,” you said.

“I know. I just said that to make her leave, so I wouldn’t kill her.” I twirled you into the living room and positioned a legion of pillows behind your back and under your knees, so that you could sit comfortably. Then I reached for your pajama bottoms and leaned over to tap the blinking button on the answering machine. “Left leg first,” I said, sliding the wide waistband over your cast.

You have one new message.

I slipped your right leg into the pants and shimmied them over the plaster at your hips.

Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe…this is Marin Gates from the Law Offices of Robert Ramirez. We’ve got something we’d like to discuss with you.

“Mom,” you whined as my hands stilled at your waist.

I gathered the extra fabric into a knot. “Yes,” I said, my heart racing. “Almost done.”

This time, Amelia was in school, but we still had to bring Willow to the lawyer’s office. And this time, they were ready: beside the coffee machine were juice packs; next to the glossy architectural magazines was a small stack of picture books. When the secretary brought us back to meet the lawyers, we were not led to the conference room. Instead she opened the door to an office that was a hundred different shades of white: from the pickled wood floor to the creamy wall paneling to the pair of pale leather sofas. You craned your neck, taking this all in. Was it supposed to look like heaven? And if so, what did that make Robert Ramirez?

“I thought the couch might be more comfortable for Willow,” he said smoothly. “And I also thought she might like to watch a movie instead of listening to the grown-ups talk about all this boring stuff.” He held up the DVD of Ratatouille-your favorite, although he couldn’t have known that. After we’d watched it for the first time, we’d cooked the real deal for dinner.

Marin Gates brought over a portable DVD player and a very swanky pair of Bose headphones. She plugged it in, settled you on the couch, turned on the DVD, and popped the straw into a juice pack.

“Sergeant O’Keefe, Mrs. O’Keefe,” Ramirez said. “We thought it would be better to discuss this without Willow in the room, but we also realized that might be a physical impossibility given her condition. Marin’s the one who came up with the idea of the DVD. She’s also been doing a great deal of work these past two weeks. We reviewed your medical records, and we gave them to someone else to review. Does the name Marcus Cavendish ring a bell?”

Sean and I looked at each other and shook our heads.

“Dr. Cavendish is Scottish. He’s one of the foremost experts on osteogenesis imperfecta in the world. And according to him, it appears that you have a good cause of action of medical malpractice against your obstetrician. You remembered your eighteen-week ultrasound being too clear, Mrs. O’Keefe…That’s significant evidence that your obstetrician missed. She should have been able to recognize your baby’s condition then, long before broken bones were visible at the later ultrasound. And she should have presented that information to you at a time in your pregnancy…that might have allowed you to change the outcome.”

My head was spinning, and Sean looked utterly confused. “Wait a second,” he said. “What kind of lawsuit is this?”

Ramirez glanced at you. “It’s called wrongful birth,” he said.

“And what the hell does that mean?”

The lawyer glanced at Marin Gates, who cleared her throat. “A wrongful birth lawsuit entitles the parents to sue for damages incurred from the birth and care of a severely disabled child,” she said. “The implication is that if your provider had told you earlier on that your baby was going to be impaired, you would have had choices and options as to whether or not to continue with the pregnancy.”

I remembered snapping at Piper weeks ago: Do you always have to be so damn perfect?

What if the one time she hadn’t been perfect was when it came to you?

I was as rooted to my seat as you were; I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Sean spoke for me: “You’re saying my daughter never should have been born?” he accused. “That she was a mistake? I’m not listening to this bullshit.”

I glanced at you: you had taken off your headphones and were hanging on every word.

As your father stood up, so did Robert Ramirez. “Sergeant O’Keefe, I know how horrible it sounds. But the term wrongful birth is just a legal one. We don’t wish your child wasn’t born-she’s absolutely beautiful. We just think that, when a doctor doesn’t meet the standard of care a patient deserves, someone ought to be held responsible.” He took a step forward. “It’s medical malpractice. Think of all the time and money that’s gone into taking care of Willow-and will go into taking care of her in the future. Why should you pay for someone else’s mistake?”

Sean towered over the lawyer, and for a second, I thought he might swat Ramirez out of his way. But instead he jabbed one finger into the lawyer’s chest. “I love my daughter,” Sean said, his voice thick. “I love her.”

He pulled you into his arms, yanking the headphone jack out so that the DVD player overturned, knocking over the juice box onto the leather couch. “Oh,” I cried, digging in my purse for a tissue to blot the stain. That gorgeous, creamy leather; it would be ruined.

“It’s all right, Mrs. O’Keefe,” Marin murmured, kneeling beside me. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Daddy, the movie’s not done,” you said.

“Yes it is.” Sean pulled the headphones off you and threw them down. “Charlotte,” he said, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

He was already striding down the hall, volcanic, as I mopped up the juice. I realized that both lawyers were staring at me, and I rocked back on my heels.

“Charlotte!” Sean’s voice rang from the waiting room.

“Um…thank you. I’m really sorry that we bothered you.” I stood up, crossing my arms, as if I were cold, or had to hold myself together. “I just…there’s one thing…” I looked up at the lawyers and took a deep breath. “What happens if we win?”