Handle with Care

Folding: a gentle process in which one mixture is added to another, using a large metal spoon or spatula.

Most of the time when you talk about folding, it involves an edge. You fold laundry, you fold notes in half. With batter, it’s different: you bring two diverse substances together, but that space between them doesn’t completely disappear-a mixture that’s been folded the right way is light, airy, the parts still getting to know each other.

It’s a combination on the cusp, as one mixture yields to the other. Think of a bad hand of poker, of an argument, of any situation where one party simply gives in.

1 pint raspberries, pureed and strained

8 eggs, separated

4 ounces sugar

3 ounces all-purpose flour

8 ounces good-quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped

2 ounces Chambord liqueur

2 tablespoons melted butter

Sugar for dusting ramekins

Heat the raspberry puree to lukewarm in a heavy saucepan. Whisk the egg yolks with 3 ounces of sugar in large mixing bowl; whisk in the flour and raspberry puree, and return the mixture to the saucepan.

Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard is thick. Do not allow it to boil. Remove from heat, and stir in the chocolate until it is completely melted. Mix in the liqueur. Cover the base mixture with plastic to prevent a skin from forming.

Meanwhile, butter six ramekins and dust with sugar. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks with the remaining ounce of sugar. And here is the part where you will see it-the coming together of two very different mixtures-as you fold the egg whites into the chocolate. Neither one will be willing to give up its substance: the darkness of the chocolate will become part of the foam of the egg whites, and vice versa.

Spoon the mixture into the ramekins, just 1/₄ inch shy of the rim. Bake immediately. The soufflés are done when they are well risen, golden brown on top, with edges that appear dry-about 20 minutes. But do not be surprised if, when you remove them from the oven, they sink under the weight of their own promise.

Charlotte

April 2007

You can’t live a life without impact. It was one of the first things doctors told us when they began explaining the catch-22 that was osteogenesis imperfecta: be active, but don’t break, because if you break, you can’t be active. The parents who kept their kids sedentary, or had them walk on their knees so that they would be less likely to fall and suffer a fracture, also ran the risk of never having their children’s muscles and joints develop enough to protect the bones.

Sean was the risk taker when it came to you. Then again, he wasn’t the one who was home most often when you had a break. But he’d spent years convincing me that a few casts was small price to pay for a real life; maybe now I could convince him that two silly words like wrongful birth meant nothing when compared to the future they might secure for you. In spite of Sean’s exit from the lawyer’s office, I kept hoping they might call me again. I fell asleep thinking about what Robert Ramirez had said. I woke up with an unfamiliar taste in my mouth, part sweet and part sour; it took me days to realize this was simply hope.

You were sitting in a hospital bed with a blanket thrown over your spica cast, reading a trivia book while we waited for your pamidronate infusion. At first, you’d come in every two months; now we only had to make biannual treks down to Boston. Pamidronate wasn’t a cure for OI, just a treatment-one that made it possible for Type IIIs like you to walk at all, instead of being wheelchair-bound. Before this, even stepping down could cause microfractures in your feet.

“You wouldn’t believe it, looking at her femur breaks, but her Z score’s much better,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “She’s at minus three.”

When you were born and had a Dexascan reading for bone density, your score was minus six. Ninety-eight percent of the population fell between plus and minus two. Bone constantly makes new bone and absorbs old bone; pamidronate slowed down the rate at which your body would absorb the bone; it allowed you to move enough to build up strength in your bones. Once, Dr. Rosenblad had explained it to me by holding up a kitchen sponge: bone was porous, the pamidronate filled in the holes a little.

You’d had over fifty fractures in five years with the treatment; I couldn’t imagine what life would have been like without it.

“I’ve got a good fact for you today, Willow,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “In a pinch, if you need a substitute for blood plasma, you can use the goop inside coconuts.”

Your eyes widened. “Have you ever done that?”

“I was thinking of trying it today…” He grinned at you. “Just joking. Got any questions for me before we get the show on the road?”

You slipped your hand into mine. “Two sticks, right?”

“That’s the rule,” I said. If a nurse couldn’t get the IV inserted in your vein in two tries, I’d make her get someone else to do it.

It’s funny-when I went out with Sean and another cop and his wife, I was the shy one. I was never the life of the party; I didn’t strike up conversations with people standing in the grocery line behind me. But put me in a hospital setting, and I would fight to the death for you. I would be your voice, until you learned to speak up for yourself. I had not always been like this-who doesn’t want to believe a doctor knows best? But there are practitioners who can go an entire career without ever running across a case of OI. The fact that people told me they knew what they were doing did not mean I would trust them.

Except Piper. I had believed her when she told me that there was no way we could have known any sooner that you would be born this way.

“I think we’re good to go,” Dr. Rosenblad said.

The treatments were four hours each, for three days in a row. After two hours of multiple nurses and residents coming in to get your vitals (honestly, did they think that your weight and height changed in the span of a half hour?), Dr. Rosenblad would be called in, and then you’d give a urine sample. After that came the blood draw-six vials while you clutched my hand so hard you left tiny half-moons with your fingernails on the canvas of my skin. Finally, the nurse would administer the IV-the part you resisted the most. As soon as I heard her footsteps in the hall, I tried to distract you by pointing out facts in your book.

Flamingo tongues were eaten in ancient Rome as a delicacy.

In Kentucky, it’s illegal to carry ice cream in your back pocket.

“Hey, sugar,” the nurse said. She had a cloud of unnaturally yellow hair and wore a stethoscope with a monkey clipped to the side of it. She was carrying a small plastic tray with an IV needle, alcohol wipes, and two strips of white tape.

“Needles suck,” you said.

“Willow! Watch your language!”

“But suck isn’t a swear word. Vacuums suck.”

“Especially if you’re the one doing the housecleaning,” the nurse murmured, swabbing your arm. “Now, Willow, I’m going to count to three before I stick you. Ready? One…two!”

“Three,” you yelped. “You lied!”

“Sometimes it’s easier to not be expecting it,” the nurse said, but she was lifting the needle again. “That wasn’t a good one. Let’s give it another try-”

“No,” I interrupted. “Is there another nurse on the floor who can do this?”

“I’ve been putting in IVs for thirteen years-”

“But not in my daughter.”

Her face frosted over. “I’ll get my supervisor.”

She closed the door behind us. “But that was only the first stick,” you said.

I sank down beside you on the bed. “She was sneaky. I’m not taking any chances.”

Your fingers ruffled the pages of your book, as if you were reading Braille. One factoid jumped out at me: The safest year of life, statistically, is age ten.

You were halfway there.

The nice part about your being kept overnight in the hospital was that I didn’t have to worry whether you’d wind up there, courtesy of a slip in the tub or an arm hooked on the sleeve of your jacket. As soon as they had finished the first infusion and flushed the IV and you were sleeping deeply, I crept out of the darkened room and went to the bank of pay phones near the elevators so that I could call home.

“How is she?” Sean asked as soon as he picked up the phone.

“Bored. Fidgety. The usual. How’s Amelia?”

“She got an A on her math quiz and threw a fit when I told her she had to wash the dishes after dinner.”

I smiled. “The usual,” I repeated.

“Guess what we had for dinner?” Sean said. “Chicken cordon bleu, roasted potatoes, and stir-fried green beans.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “You can’t even boil an egg.”

“I didn’t say I cooked. The take-out counter at the grocery store was just particularly well stocked tonight.”

“Well, Willow and I had a culinary feast of tapioca pudding, chicken noodle soup, and red Jell-O.”

“I want to call her before I go to work tomorrow. What time will she get up?”

“Six, for the nurses’ shift change,” I said.

“I’ll set my alarm,” Sean answered.

“By the way, Dr. Rosenblad asked me about doing the surgery again.”

This was-no pun intended-a bone of contention for Sean and me. Your orthopedic surgeon wanted to rod your femurs after you were out of your spica cast, so that, even if there were future breaks, they wouldn’t displace. Rodding also prevented bowing, since OI bone grows spirally. As Dr. Rosenblad said, it was the best way to manage OI, since you can’t cure OI. But although I was gung ho about doing anything and everything that might save you some pain in the future, Sean looked at the here and now-and the fact that a surgery meant you’d be incapacitated once again. I could practically hear him digging in his heels. “Didn’t you print out some article about how rodding stunts growth in OI kids-”

“You’re thinking of the spinal rods,” I said. “Once they put them in to combat the scoliosis, Willow won’t get any taller. This is different. Dr. Rosenblad even said the rods have gotten so sophisticated, they’ll grow with her-they telescope out.”

“What if she doesn’t have any more femur breaks? Then she’s having the surgery for nothing.”

The chances of you not having another leg break were about as good as those of the sun not rising tomorrow morning. That was the other difference between Sean and me-I was the resident pessimist. “Do you really want to have to deal with another spica cast? If she winds up in one when she’s seven or ten or twelve, who’s going to be able to lift her then?”

Sean sighed. “She’s a kid, Charlotte. Shouldn’t she be able to run around for a while before you take that away again?”

“I’m not taking anything away,” I said, stung. “The fact is, she’s going to fall. The fact is, she’s going to break. Don’t cast me as the villain, Sean, just because I’m trying to help her in the long run.”

There was a hesitation. “I know how hard it is,” he said. “I know how much you do for her.”

It was as close as he could come to alluding to the disastrous visit in the lawyer’s office. “I wasn’t complaining-”

“I never said you were. I’m just saying…we knew it wouldn’t be easy, right?”

Yes, we’d known that. But I guess I also hadn’t realized it would ever be quite this hard. “I have to go,” I said, and when Sean said he loved me, I pretended I had not heard.

I hung up and immediately dialed Piper. “What’s wrong with men?” I asked.

In the background, I could hear the water running, dishes clattering in the sink. “Is that a rhetorical question?” she said.

“Sean doesn’t want Willow to have rodding surgery.”

“Hang on. Aren’t you in Boston for pamidronate?”

“Yes, and Rosenblad brought it up today when we saw him,” I said. “He’s been urging us to do it for a year now, and Sean keeps putting it off, and Willow keeps breaking.”

“Even though she’ll be better off in the long run?”

“Even though.”

“Well,” Piper said, “then I have one word for you: Lysistrata.”

I burst out laughing. “I’ve been sleeping with Willow on the living room couch for the past month. If I told Sean I was going to stop having sex with him, it would be a pretty empty threat.”

“There’s your answer, then,” Piper said. “Bring on the candles, oysters, negligee, the whole nine yards…and when he’s blissed out in a hedonistic coma, ask him again.” I heard a voice in the background. “Rob says that’ll work like a charm.”

“Thank him for the vote of confidence.”

“Hey, by the way, tell Willow that a person’s thumb is as long as his nose.”

“Really?” I wedged my hand up to my face to check. “She’ll love that.”

“Oh, shoot, that’s my call waiting. Why can’t babies get born at nine in the morning?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I said.

“And we come full circle. Talk to you tomorrow, Char.”

After I hung up, I stared at the receiver for a long moment. She’ll be better off in the long run, Piper had said.

Did she believe that, unconditionally? Not just about a rodding surgery but about any action that a good mother would undertake?

I didn’t know if I could even muster the courage to sue for wrongful birth. Saying abstractly that there were some children who shouldn’t be born was hard enough, but this went one step further. This meant saying one particular child-my child-shouldn’t have been born. What kind of mother would face a judge and a jury, and announce that she wished her child had never existed?

Either the kind of mother who didn’t love her daughter at all…or the kind of mother who loved her daughter too much. The kind of mother who would say anything and everything if it meant you’d have a better life.

But even if I came to terms with that moral conundrum, the additional wrinkle here was that the person on the other end of the lawsuit was not a stranger-she was my best friend.

I thought of the foam pad we had once used to line your car bed and your crib, how sometimes, when I lifted you out of it, I could still see the impression you’d made, like a memory, or a ghost. And then, like magic, it would disappear. The indelible mark I’d left on Piper, the indelible mark she’d left on me-well, maybe they weren’t permanent. For years, I’d believed Piper when she said tests wouldn’t have told us any earlier that you had OI, but she had been talking about blood tests. She’d never even alluded to the fact that other prenatal testing-like ultrasounds-might have picked up your OI. Had she been making excuses for me, or for herself?

It won’t affect her, a voice in my head murmured. That’s what malpractice insurance is for. But it would affect us. In order to make sure you could rely on me, I would lose the friend I’d relied on since before you were born.

Last year, when Emma and Amelia were in sixth grade, the gym teacher had come up behind Emma and squeezed her shoulders while she waited on the sidelines of a softball game. Innocuous, most likely, but Emma had come home saying that it creeped her out. What do I do? Piper had asked me. Give him the benefit of the doubt, or be a helicopter parent? Before I could even offer her my opinion, she’d made up her mind. It’s my daughter, she said. If I don’t go in and open up my mouth, I may live to regret it.

I loved Piper Reece. But I would always love you more.

With my heart pounding, I took a business card out of my back pocket and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve.

“Marin Gates,” said a voice on the other end.

“Oh,” I stumbled, surprised. I had been anticipating an answering machine this late at night. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there…”

“Who is this?”

“Charlotte O’Keefe. I was in your office a couple of weeks ago with my husband about-”

“Yes, I remember,” Marin said.

I twisted the metal snake of the phone cord around my arm, imagined the words I would funnel into it, send into the world, make real.

“Mrs. O’Keefe?”

“I’m interested in…taking legal action.”

There was a brief silence. “Why don’t we schedule a time for you to come in and meet with me? I can have my secretary call you tomorrow.”

“No,” I said, and then shook my head. “I mean, that’s fine, but I won’t be home tomorrow. I’m in the hospital with Willow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, she’s fine. Well, she’s not fine, but this is routine. We’ll be home Thursday.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“Good,” I said, my breath coming in a rush. “Good.”

“Give my best to your family,” Marin replied.

“I’ve just got one question,” I said, but she had already hung up the phone. I pressed the mouthpiece against my lips, tasted the bitter metal. “Would you do this?” I whispered out loud. “Would you do this, if you were me?”

If you’d like to make a call, said the mechanical voice of an operator, please hang up and try again.

What would Sean say?

Nothing, I realized, because I wouldn’t tell him what I’d done.

I walked back down the hall toward your room. On the bed, you were snoring softly. The video you’d been watching when you fell asleep cast a reflection over your bed in reds and greens and golds, an early rush of autumn. I lay down on the narrow cot that had been converted from one of the guest chairs by a helpful nurse; she’d left me a threadbare blanket and a pillow that crackled like polar ice.

The mural on the far wall was an ancient map, with a pirate ship sailing off its borders. Not long ago, sailors believed that the seas were precipitous, that compasses could point out the spots where, beyond, there’d be dragons. I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

Piper

I met Charlotte eight years ago, in one of the coldest rinks in New Hampshire, when we were dressing our four-year-old daughters as shooting stars for a forty-five-second performance in the club’s winter skating show. I was waiting for Emma to finish lacing up her skates while other mothers effortlessly yanked their daughters’ hair into buns and tied the ribbons of the shimmering costumes around their wrists and ankles. They chatted about the Christmas wrapping paper sale the skating club was doing for fund-raising and complained about their husbands, who hadn’t charged the video camera batteries long enough. In contrast to this offhanded competence, Charlotte sat alone, off to one side, trying to coax a very stubborn Amelia into tying back her long hair. “Amelia,” she said, “your teacher won’t let you onto the ice like that. Everyone has to match.”

She looked familiar, although I didn’t remember meeting her. I thrust a few bobby pins at Charlotte and smiled. “If you need them,” I said, “I also have superglue and marine varnish. This isn’t our first year with the Nazi Skating Club.”

Charlotte burst out laughing and took the pins. “They’re four years old!”

“Apparently, if you don’t start young, they’ll have nothing to talk about in therapy,” I joked. “I’m Piper, by the way. Proudly defiant skating parent.”

She held out a hand. “Charlotte.”

“Mom,” Emma said, “that’s Amelia. I told you about her last week. She just moved here.”

“We came because of work,” Charlotte said.

“For you or your husband?”

“I’m not married,” she said. “I’m the new pastry chef over at Capers.”

“That’s where I know you from. I read about you in that magazine article.”

Charlotte blushed. “Don’t believe everything in print…”

“You ought to be proud! Me, I can’t even bake a Betty Crocker mix without screwing it up. Luckily, that’s not part of my job description.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an obstetrician.”

“Well, that beats what I do, hands down,” Charlotte said. “When I deliver, people gain weight. When you deliver, they lose it.”

Emma poked a finger into a hole in her costume. “Mine’s going to fall off because you don’t know how to sew,” she accused.

“It won’t fall off,” I sighed, then turned to Charlotte. “I was too busy suturing to sew a costume, so I hot-glued the seams.”

“Next time,” Charlotte told Emma, “I’ll sew yours when I do Amelia’s.”

I liked that-the idea that she was already counting on us being friends. We were destined to be partners in crime, subversive parents who didn’t care what the establishment thought. Just then, the teacher stuck her head inside the locker room door. “Amelia? Emma?” she snapped. “We’re all waiting for you out here!”

“Girls, you’d better hurry. You heard what Eva Braun said.”

Emma scowled. “Mommy, her name’s Miss Helen.”

Charlotte laughed. “Break a leg!” she said as they hurried into the rink. “Or does that only work if the stage isn’t made of ice?”

I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination, but I have thought back to that moment, to Charlotte’s good-luck phrase, many times. Do I remember it because of the way you were born? Or were you born because of the way I remember it?

Rob was braced over me, his leg moving between mine as he kissed me. “We can’t,” I whispered. “Emma’s still awake.”

“She won’t come in here…”

“You don’t know that-”

Rob buried his face in my neck. “She knows we have sex. If we didn’t, she wouldn’t be here.”

“Do you like to imagine your parents having sex?”

Grimacing, Rob rolled away from me. “Okay, that effectively killed the mood.”

I laughed. “Give her ten minutes to fall asleep and I’ll get the fire going again.”

He pillowed his head on his arms, staring up at the ceiling. “How many times a week do you think Charlotte and Sean do it?”

“I don’t know!”

Rob glanced at me. “Sure you do. Girls talk about that kind of thing.”

“Okay, first of all, no we don’t. And second of all, even if we did, I don’t sit around wondering how often my best friend has sex with her husband.”

“Yeah, right,” Rob said. “So you’ve never looked at Sean and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him?”

I came up on an elbow. “Have you?”

He grinned. “Sean’s not my type…”

“Very funny.” My gaze slid toward him. “Charlotte? Really?”

“Well…you know…it’s just a curiosity. Even Gordon Ramsay’s got to think about Big Macs once or twice in passing.”

“So I’m the high-maintenance gourmet meal and Charlotte’s fast food?”

“It was a bad metaphor,” Rob admitted.

Sean O’Keefe was tall, strong, physically fierce-orthogonal to Rob’s slight runner’s frame, his careful surgeon’s hands, his addiction to reading. One of the reasons I’d fallen for Rob was that he seemed to be more impressed with my mind than with my legs. If I’d ever considered what it would be like to roll around with someone like Sean, the impulse must have been quickly squashed: after all these years, and all these conversations with Charlotte, I knew him too well to find him attractive.

But Sean’s intensity also carried over into his parenting-he was crazy about his little girls; he was deeply private and protective of Charlotte. Rob was cerebral, not visceral. What would it feel like to have so much raw passion focused on you at once? I tried to picture Sean in bed. Did he wear pajama pants, like Rob? Or go commando?

“Huh,” Rob said. “I didn’t know you could blush way down to your-”

I yanked the sheets up to my chin. “To answer your question,” I said, “I’m not even sure it’s once a week. Between Willow and Sean’s work schedule, they’re probably not even in the same room at night most of the time.”

It was odd, I realized, that Charlotte and I had not discussed sex. Not because I was her friend but because I was her doctor-part of my medical questioning involved whether or not a patient was having any problems during intercourse. Had I asked her that? Or had I skipped over it because it seemed too personal to ask that of a friend instead of a stranger? Back then, sex was a means to an end: a baby. But what about now? Was Charlotte happy? Did she and Sean lie in bed, comparing themselves to me and Rob?

“Well, go figure. You and I are in the same room at night.” Rob leaned over me. “How about we maximize that potential?”

“Emma-”

“Is lost in her dreams by now.” Rob pulled my pajama top over my head and stared at me. “As a matter of fact, so am I…”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him slowly. “Still thinking about Charlotte?”

“Charlotte who?” Rob murmured, and he kissed me back.

Once a month, Charlotte and I went to a movie and then to a seedy bar called Maxie’s Pad-a place whose name absolutely cracked me up, given the gynecological connotation, although I’m quite sure that was lost on Maxie himself, a grizzled old Maine fisherman who, when we first ordered Chardonnay, had told us it wasn’t on tap. Even when the only films playing were really awful slasher flicks or teen comedies, I’d drag Charlotte out for the night. If I didn’t, there were stretches of time when she’d never have left the house.

The best thing about Maxie’s was his grandson, Moose, a linebacker who’d been kicked out of college in the middle of a cheating scandal. He’d started bartending for his grandpa three years ago, when he was back home evaluating his options, and he’d never left. He was six-six, blond, brawny, and had the mental acuity of a spatula.

“Here you go, ma’am,” Moose said, sliding a pale ale toward Charlotte, who barely even flicked a glance at him.

There was something wrong with Charlotte tonight. She’d tried to back out of our standing date, but I wouldn’t allow it, and for the past few hours she’d been distant and distracted. I attributed it to concern over you-with the pamidronate treatment and the femur breaks and the rodding surgery, she had plenty on her mind-and I was determined to divert her attention. “He winked at you,” I announced as soon as Moose turned away to help another customer.

“Oh, get out,” Charlotte said. “I’m too old to be flirted with.”

“Forty-four is the new twenty-two.”

“Yeah, well, talk to me when you’re my age.”

“Charlotte, I’m only two years younger than you!” I laughed and took a sip of my own beer. “God, we’re pathetic. He’s probably thinking, Those poor middle-aged women; the least I can do is make their day by pretending I find them even remotely sexy.”

Charlotte lifted her mug. “Here’s to not being married to a guy too young to rent a car from Hertz.”

I was the one who’d introduced your mother and your father. I think it’s human nature that those of us who are married cannot rest easy until we find mates for our single friends. Charlotte had never been married-Amelia’s father had been a drug addict who’d tried to clean up his act during Charlotte’s pregnancy, failed miserably, and moved to India with a seventeen-year-old pole dancer. So when I was pulled over for speeding by a really good-looking cop who wasn’t wearing a wedding band, I invited him to dinner so that he could meet Charlotte.

“I don’t do blind dates,” your mother told me.

“Then Google him.”

Ten minutes later she called me, frantic, because Sean O’Keefe was also the name of a recently paroled child molester. Ten months later, she married the other Sean O’Keefe.

I watched Moose stack glasses behind the bar, the light playing over his muscles. “So how goes it with Sean?” I asked. “Have you managed to convince him to do it yet?”

Charlotte startled, nearly knocking over her beer. “To do what?”

“The rodding surgery for Willow. Hello?”

“Right,” Charlotte said. “I forgot I’d told you about that.”

“Charlotte, we talk every day.” I looked at her more carefully. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I just need a good night’s sleep,” she replied, but she was looking down into her beer, running one finger along the rim of the glass until it sang to us. “You know, I was reading something at the hospital, some magazine. There was an article in there about a family who sued the hospital after their son was born with cystic fibrosis.”

I shook my head. “That pass-the-buck mentality drives me crazy. Pin the blame on someone else to make yourself feel better.”

“Maybe someone else really was at fault.”

“It’s the luck of the draw. You know what an obstetrician would say if a couple had a newborn with CF? ‘Oh, they got a bad baby.’ It’s not a judgment call, it’s just a statement of fact.”

“A bad baby,” Charlotte repeated. “Is that what you think happened to me?”

Sometimes, I let myself run on without thinking-like right now, when I remembered too late that Charlotte’s interest in this subject was more than theoretical. I felt heat flood my face. “I wasn’t talking about Willow. She’s-”

“Perfect?” Charlotte challenged.

But you were. You did the funniest Paris Hilton impression I’d ever seen; you could sing the alphabet backward; your features were delicate, elfin, fairy-tale. Those brittle bones were the least important part of you.

Suddenly Charlotte folded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, honestly, my mouth shouldn’t be able to function unless my brain’s engaged.”

“I’m just exhausted,” Charlotte said. “I ought to call it a night.” When I started to get up off my stool, she shook her head. “Stay here, finish your beer.”

“Let me walk you out to the car-”

“I’m a big girl, Piper. Really. Just forget I even said anything.”

I nodded. And, stupid me, I did.

Amelia

So there I was in the school library, one of the few places where I could pretend my life wasn’t totally ruled by your OI, when I stumbled across it: a photograph in a magazine of a woman who looked just like you. It was weird, like one of those FBI photos where they artificially age a kid who’s been kidnapped ten years, so that you might be able to recognize him on the street. There was your flyaway silk hair, your pointy chin, your bowed legs. I’d met other OI kids before and knew you all had similar features, but this was really ridiculous.

Even more weird was the fact that this lady was holding a baby, and was standing next to a giant. He had his arm around her and was grinning out of the photo with a really heinous overbite.

“Alma Dukins,” the text below it read, “is only 3'2''; her husband, Grady, is 6'4''.”

“Whatcha doing?” Emma said.

She was my best friend; we’d been best friends for, like, ever. After the whole Disney nightmare, when kids in school found out I’d been shipped off to a foster home overnight, she (a) didn’t treat me like a leper, and (b) threatened to deck anyone who did. Right now, she’d come up behind my chair and notched her chin over my shoulder. “Hey, that woman looks like your sister.”

I nodded. “She’s got OI, too. Maybe Wills was switched at birth.”

Emma sank into the empty chair beside me. “Is that her husband? My dad could totally fix his teeth.” She peered at the magazine. “God, how do they even do it?”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, although I had been wondering the same thing.

Emma blew a bubble with her gum. “I guess everyone’s the same height when you’re lying down doing the nasty,” she said. “I thought Willow couldn’t have kids.”

I kind of thought that, too. I guess no one had ever really discussed it with you, because you were only five, and believe me I didn’t want to think about anything as repulsive as this, but if you could break a bone coughing, how would you ever get a baby out of you, or a you-know-what in?

I knew if I wanted rugrats, I’d be able to have them one day. If you wanted kids, though, it wouldn’t be easy, even if it was possible. It wasn’t fair, but then again, what was when it came to you?

You couldn’t skate. You couldn’t bike. You couldn’t ski. And even when you did play a game that was physical-like hide-and-seek-Mom used to insist that you get an extra count of twenty. I pretended to be bent out of shape by this so you wouldn’t feel like you were getting special treatment, but deep down I knew it was the right thing to do-you couldn’t get around as fast as I could, with your braces or crutches or wheelchair, and it took you longer to wiggle into a hiding spot. Amelia, wait up! you always said when we were walking somewhere, and I would, because I knew there were a million other ways I would leave you behind.

I would grow up, while you’d stay the size of a toddler.

I would go to college, move away from home, and not have to worry about things like whether I could reach the gas pump or the buttons on the ATM.

I’d maybe find a guy who didn’t think I was a total loser and get married and have kids and be able to carry them around without worrying that I’d get microfractures in my spine.

I read the finer print of the magazine article.

Alma Dukins, 34, gave birth on March 5, 2008, to a healthy baby girl. Dukins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta Type III, is 3'2'' tall and weighed 39 pounds before her pregnancy. She gained 19 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter, Lulu, was delivered by C-section at 32 weeks, when Alma’s small body could not accommodate the enlarging uterus. She weighed four pounds, six ounces, and was 16½ inches long at birth.

You were at the stage when you played with dolls. Mom said I used to do that, too, although I only remember dismembering mine and cutting off all their hair. Sometimes I would catch Mom watching you wrap your fake baby’s arm in a cast, and it was like a storm cloud passed over her face-she was probably thinking that chances were you’d never have a real baby, mixed with feeling relief that you wouldn’t have to know what it was like to watch your own kid break a million bones, like she did.

But in spite of what my mother thought, here was proof that someone with OI could have a family. This Alma woman was Type III, like you. She didn’t walk like you could-she was wheelchair-bound. And yet she’d managed to find a husband, goofy smile and all, and have a baby of her own.

“You ought to show Willow,” Emma said. “Just take it. Who’s going to know?”

So I checked to see if the librarian was still on her computer, ordering clothes from Gap.com (we’d done our share of spying on her), and then I faked a coughing fit. I doubled over and tucked the magazine inside my jacket. I smiled weakly as the librarian glanced at me to make sure I wasn’t hacking out a lung on the floor or anything.

Emma expected me to keep the magazine for you, to show you or even Mom that one day you could grow up and get married and have a kid. But I had stolen it for a completely different reason. See, this year, you were starting kindergarten. And one day you’d be a seventh grader, like me. And you might be sitting in this library and come across this stupid magazine and see what I had seen when I looked at it: the space between Alma and her husband, that baby, too huge in her arms.

To me, this didn’t look like a happy family. It was a circus freak show, minus the big top. Why else would it be in a magazine? Normal families didn’t make the news.

In English class I asked to go to the bathroom. There, I tore the page out of the magazine and ripped the picture into the tiniest pieces I could. I flushed them down the toilet, the best I could do to protect you.

Marin

People think of the law as a virtual hallowed hall of justice, but the truth is that my job more closely resembles a bad sitcom. I once represented a woman who was carrying a frozen turkey out of her local Stop-n-Save grocery store the day before Thanksgiving, when the turkey slipped through the plastic bag and fractured her foot. She sued the Stop-n-Save, but we also included the company that made the plastic bags, and she walked away-without crutches, mind you-several hundred thousand dollars richer.

Then there was the case that involved a woman driving home at two a.m. on a back road at eighty miles per hour, who collided with a lost tractor trailer that had backed up across the road to turn around. She was killed instantly, and her husband wanted to sue the tractor-trailer company because they didn’t have lights along the side of the truck so that his wife could have seen it. We brought a wrongful death suit against the driver of the truck, citing loss of consortium-asking for millions to make up for the fact that the husband had lost his beloved wife’s company. Unfortunately, during the case, the defendant’s attorney uncovered the fact that my client’s wife had been on her way home from a rendezvous with her lover.

You win some, you lose some.

Looking at Charlotte O’Keefe, who was sitting in my office with her cell phone clutched in her hands, I was pretty sure which way this case was going to go. “Where’s Willow?” I asked.

“Physical therapy,” Charlotte said. “She’s there till eleven.”

“And the breaks? They’re healing well?”

“Fingers crossed,” Charlotte replied.

“You’re expecting a call?”

She looked down, as if she was surprised to find herself holding her phone. “Oh, no. I mean, I hope not. I just have to be available if Willow gets hurt.”

We smiled politely at each other. “Should we…wait a little longer for your husband?”

“Well,” she said, coloring. “He’s not going to be joining us.”

To be honest, when Charlotte had called me to set up a meeting and talk about representation, I’d been surprised. Sean O’Keefe had made his feelings pretty damn clear when he’d stormed out of Bob’s office. Her phone call indicated that he’d calmed down enough to pursue litigation, but now-looking at Charlotte-I was starting to get a sinking feeling. “But he does want to file a lawsuit, right?”

She shifted on her chair. “I don’t understand why I can’t do this on my own.”

“Besides the obvious answer-that your husband’s bound to find out sooner or later-there’s a legal reason. You and your husband are both responsible for the care and raising of Willow. Let’s say you hire a lawyer by yourself and settle with the doctor, and then you get hit by a car and die. Your husband can go back and sue the doctor on his own, because he wasn’t a party to your settlement and didn’t release the doctor from future liability. Because of this, any defendant is going to insist that any settlement that’s reached or judgment in a trial include both of the parents. Which means that, even if Sergeant O’Keefe doesn’t want to be part of this lawsuit, he’s going to be impleaded-that is, brought into the lawsuit-so that it won’t be litigated again in the future.”

Charlotte frowned. “I understand.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s not. But…we don’t have money to hire a lawyer. We’re barely scraping by as it is, with everything Willow needs. That’s why…that’s why I’m here today to talk about the lawsuit.”

Every plaintiff mill firm-Bob Ramirez included-began a case with a cost-benefit analysis. It’s what had taken us so long to contact the O’Keefes between meetings: I would review a claim with experts, I would do due diligence to ascertain other suits like this and what the payouts had been. Once I knew that the estimated settlement would at least cover the costs of our time and the experts’ fees, I’d call the prospective clients and tell them they had a valid complaint. “You don’t have to worry about attorney’s fees,” I now said smoothly. “That would become part of the settlement. However, realistically, you do need to know that most wrongful birth suits settle out of court for less money than a jury would award, because malpractice insurance companies don’t want the press. Of the cases that do go to court, seventy-five percent find in favor of the defendant. Your particular case, which hinges on a misread sonogram, might not sway the jury-sonograms don’t make the most convincing evidence at a trial. And there will be considerable public scrutiny. There always is, when someone brings a wrongful birth suit.”

She looked up at me. “You mean people will think I’m in it for the money.”

“Well,” I said simply. “Aren’t you?”

Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. “I’m in it for Willow. I’m the one who brought her into this world, so it’s up to me to make sure that she suffers as little as possible. That doesn’t make me a monster.” She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. “Or does it?”

I gritted my teeth and passed her a box of Kleenex. Well, wasn’t that the $64,000 question?

It was probable that, by the time this lawsuit got to court, you would be old enough to fully understand the ramifications of what your mother was doing-just like I had, one day, when I was told about my adoption. I knew what it was like to feel as if your own mom didn’t want you. In fact, I’d spent my whole childhood inventing excuses for her. Daydream 1: She was desperately in love with a boy who’d gotten her pregnant, and her family couldn’t bear the stain of shame, so they sent her to Switzerland and told everyone she was at boarding school when, instead, she was having me. Daydream 2: She was headed off to the Peace Corps to save the world when she found herself pregnant-and realized she had to put the needs of others above her own desire for a baby. Daydream 3: She was an actress, America’s sweetheart, who would lose her family-values mid-west audience if they learned that she was a single mom. Daydream 4: She and my father were poor, struggling dairy farmers who wanted their baby to have a better life than they could offer.

I figured there was one seminal moment when a woman realized what it meant to be a mother. For my birth mom, maybe it was when she passed me to a nurse and said good-bye. For the mother who’d raised me, it was when she sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that I had been adopted. For your mother, it was making the decision to file this lawsuit in spite of the public and private backlash. Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

“I wanted another baby so much,” Charlotte said quietly. “I wanted to experience that, with Sean. I wanted us to take her to the park and push her on the swings. I wanted to bake cookies with her and go to her school plays. I wanted to teach her how to ride a horse and water-ski. I wanted her to take care of me when I got old,” she said, looking up at me. “Not the other way around.”

I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to believe that a person who had brought a baby into this world would quit so easily when the going got tough. “I think most parents know there’s going to be some bad to go with the good,” I said evenly.

“I wasn’t naïve-I already had a daughter. I knew I’d take care of Willow when she was hurt. I knew I’d have to get up in the middle of the night when she had nightmares. But I didn’t know she was going to be hurt for weeks at a time, for years at a time. I didn’t know I’d be up with her every night. I didn’t know that she would never get better.”

I looked down, pretending to straighten some papers. What if the reason my mother had given me away was that I didn’t measure up to what she had hoped for? “What about Willow?” I said, bluntly playing devil’s advocate. “She’s a smart kid. How do you think she’ll handle her mother saying she should never have been born?”

Charlotte flinched. “She knows that’s not the truth,” she said. “I could never imagine my life without her in it.”

A red flag went up in my mind. “Stop right there. Don’t say that. You can’t even hint at it. If you file this lawsuit, Mrs. O’Keefe, you have to be able to swear-under oath-that if you’d known about your daughter’s illness earlier, if you’d been given the choice, you would have terminated the pregnancy.” I waited until her gaze met mine. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Her eyes slid away, focusing on something outside my window. “Can you miss a person you’ve never known?”

There was a knock at the door, and the receptionist popped her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, Marin,” Briony said, “but your eleven o’clock is here.”

“Eleven?” Charlotte said, jumping to her feet. “I’m late. Willow’s going to panic.” She grabbed her purse, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried out of my office.

“I’ll be in touch,” I called after her.

It wasn’t until that afternoon, when I began to think about what Charlotte O’Keefe had said to me, that I realized she’d answered my question about abortion with another question.

Sean

At ten o’clock on Saturday night, it became clear to me that I was going to hell.

Saturday nights were the ones that made you remember every sleepy picture-postcard New England town had a split personality, that the healthy, smiling guys you saw featured in Yankee magazine might pass out drunk at the local bar. On Saturday nights, lonely kids tried to hang themselves from the closet racks in their dorm rooms and high school girls got raped by college boys.

Saturday nights were also when you’d catch someone bobbing and weaving so bad in a car that it was only a matter of time before the drunk rammed into someone else. Tonight I was pulled over behind a bank parking lot when a white Camry crawled by, practically on the dotted yellow line. I flicked on my blues and followed the driver, waiting for the car to pull onto the shoulder.

I stepped out and approached the driver’s window. “Good evening,” I said, “do you know why-” But before I could finish asking the driver to tell me why he thought I’d pulled him over, the window rolled down and I found myself staring at our priest.

“Oh, Sean, it’s you,” Father Grady said. He had a shock of white hair that Amelia called his Einstein-do, and he was wearing his clerical collar. His eyes were glassy and bright.

I hesitated. “Father, I’m going to have to see your license and registration…”

“Not a problem,” the priest said, digging in his glove compartment. “You’re just doing your job.” I watched him fumble, dropping his license three times before he managed to hand it to me. I glanced inside the car but didn’t see any bottles or cans.

“Father, you were all over the road there.”

“Was I?”

I could smell alcohol on his breath. “You have any drinks tonight, Father?”

“Can’t say that I have…”

Priests couldn’t lie, could they? “You mind stepping out of the car for me?”

“Sure, Sean.” He stumbled out of the door and leaned against the hood of his Camry, his hands in his pockets. “Haven’t seen your family at Mass lately…”

“Father, do you wear contact lenses?”

“No…”

This was the beginning of the test for horizontal gaze nystagmus, an involuntary jerking of the eyeball that could suggest drunkenness. “I’m just going to ask you to follow this light,” I said, taking a penlight out of my pocket and holding it several inches away from his face, a bit above eye level. “Follow it only with your eyes-keep your head still,” I added. “Understand?”

Father Grady nodded. I checked his equal pupil size and tracking as he followed the beam, marking down a lack of smooth pursuit, and an end-point nystagmus as I moved the beam toward his left ear.

“Thanks, Father. Now, can you stand on your right foot for me, like this?” I demonstrated, and he lifted his left foot. He wobbled but stayed upright. “Now the left,” I said, and this time, he pitched forward.

“Okay, Father, one last thing-can you walk for me, heel to toe?” I showed him how and then watched him trip over his own feet.

Bankton was so tiny we didn’t ride with partners. I could have probably let Father Grady go; no one would have been the wiser, and maybe he’d even put a good word in to heaven for me. But letting him go also meant I would be lying to myself-and surely that was just as grievous a sin. Who might be driving on the roads that led to his house…a teenager, coming home from a date? A dad flying back from a business trip out of town? A mom with a sick kid, headed to the hospital? It wasn’t Father Grady I was trying to rescue, it was the people he might hurt in his condition.

“I hate to do this, Father, but I’m going to have to arrest you for driving under the influence.” I Mirandized him and gently led the priest into the back of the cruiser.

“What about my car?”

“It’ll be towed. You can get it tomorrow,” I said.

“But tomorrow’s Sunday!”

We were only about a half mile from the station, which was a blessing, because I didn’t think I could stand to make small talk with my priest after I’d arrested him. At the station, I went through the rigmarole of implied consent and told Father Grady I wanted him to take a Breathalyzer test. “You have the right to have a similar test or tests done by a person of your choosing,” I said. “You’ll be given the opportunity to request this additional test, if you want. If you do not permit a test at the direction of the law enforcement officer, you may lose your license for a period of one hundred and eighty days, not concurrent with any loss of license if found guilty of the charge of DUI.”

“No, Seanie, I trust you,” Father Grady said.

It didn’t surprise me when he blew a.15.

Since my shift was ending, I offered to take him back home. The road snaked in front of me as I passed the church and drove up a hill to the little white house that served as the rectory. I parked in the driveway and helped him walk a relatively straight line to the door. “I was at a wake tonight,” he said, turning his key in the lock.

“Father,” I sighed. “You don’t have to explain.”

“It was a boy-only twenty-six. Motorcycle accident last Tuesday, you probably know all about it. I knew I’d be driving home. But there was the mother, sobbing her heart out, and the brothers, completely shattered-and I wanted to leave them with a tribute, instead of with all that loss.”

I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t need to borrow anyone else’s problems. But I found myself nodding at the priest all the same.

“So it was a few toasts, a few shots of whiskey,” Father Grady said. “Don’t you lose sleep over this, Sean. I know perfectly well that doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.”

The door swung open in front of us. I’d never been inside the rectory before-it was homey and small, with framed psalms hanging on the walls for decoration, a crystal bowl of M &M’s on the kitchen table, and a Patriots banner behind the couch. “I’m just going to lie down,” Father Grady murmured, and he stretched out on the couch.

I took off his shoes and covered him with a blanket I found in a closet. “Good night, Father.”

His eyes opened a crack. “See you tomorrow at Mass?”

“You bet,” I said, but Father Grady had already started to snore.

When I had told Charlotte that I wanted to go to church the next morning, she asked if I was feeling all right. Usually, she had to drag me to Mass, but part of me had wanted to know if Father Grady was going to do a sermon about our encounter last night. Sins of the fathers, that’s what he could call it, I thought now, and I snickered. Beside me, in the pew, Charlotte pinched me. “Sssh,” she mouthed.

One of the reasons I didn’t like going to church was the stares. Piety and pity were a little too close to each other for my tastes. I’d listen to a blue-haired old lady tell me she was praying for you, and I’d smile and say thanks, but inside, I was ticked off. Who’d asked her to pray for you? Didn’t she realize I did enough of that on my own?

Charlotte said that an offer to help was not a comment on someone else’s weakness, and that a police officer ought to know that. But hell, if you wanted to know what I was really thinking when I asked a lost out-of-towner if he needed directions or gave a battered wife my card and told her to call me if she needed assistance, it was this: pull yourself up by your bootstraps and figure a way out of the mess you’ve gotten yourself into. There was a big difference, the way I saw it, between a nightmare you woke up in unexpectedly and a nightmare of your own making.

Father Grady winced as the organist started a particularly rousing version of a hymn, and I tucked away my grin. Instead of leaving the poor guy a glass of water last night, I should have mixed him up a hangover remedy.

Behind us, a baby started to wail. As mean-spirited as it was of me, it felt good to have everyone focused on a family other than ours. I heard the furious whispers of the parents deciding who would be the one to take the baby out of the church.

Amelia was sitting on my other side. She elbowed me and mimed for a pen. I reached into my pocket and handed her a ballpoint. Turning over her palm, she drew five tiny dashes and a hangman’s noose. I smiled and traced the letter A on her thigh.

She wrote: _A_A_

M, I wrote with my finger.

Amelia shook her head.

T?

_ATA_

I tried L, P, and R, but no luck. S?

Amelia beamed and scribbled it into the puzzle: SATA_

I laughed out loud, and Charlotte looked down at us, her eyes flashing a warning. Amelia took the pen and filled in the N, then held up her hand so I could see. Just then, loud and clear, you said, “What’s Satan?” and your mother turned bright red, hauled you into her arms, and hurried outside.

A moment later, Amelia and I followed. Charlotte was sitting with you on the steps of the church, holding the baby who’d been screaming during the whole Mass. “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Thought we’d be safer when the lightning struck.” I smiled down at the baby, who was stuffing grass into his mouth. “Did we pick up an extra along the way?”

“His mother’s in the bathroom,” Charlotte said. “Amelia, watch your sister and the baby.”

“Do I get paid for it?”

“I cannot believe you’d have the nerve to ask me that after what you just did during Mass.” Charlotte stood up. “Let’s take a walk.”

I fell into step beside her. Charlotte had always smelled of sugar cookies-later I learned that it was vanilla, which she would rub on her wrists and behind her ears, perfume for a pastry chef. It was part of why I loved her. Here’s a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we’d rather curl up with someone like Charlotte-a woman who’s soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn’t feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can’t wait to come back to. “You know what?” I said genially, wrapping an arm around her. “Life is great. It’s a gorgeous day, I’m with my family, I’m not sitting in that cave of a church…”

“And I’m sure Father Grady enjoyed hearing Willow’s little outburst, too.”

“Believe me, Father Grady’s got bigger problems on his plate,” I said.

We had crossed the parking lot, heading toward a field overrun with clover. “Sean,” Charlotte said, “I’ve got a confession to make.”

“Maybe you ought to take that inside, then.”

“I went back to the lawyer.”

I stopped walking. “You what?”

“I met with Marin Gates, about filing a wrongful birth lawsuit.”

“Jesus Christ, Charlotte-”

“Sean!” She threw a glance toward the church.

“How could you do that? Just go behind my back like my opinion doesn’t matter?”

She folded her arms. “What about my opinion? Doesn’t that matter to you?”

“Of course it does-but some bloodsucking lawyer’s opinion, I don’t give a shit about. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They want money, pure and simple. They don’t give a damn about you or me or Willow; they don’t care who’s screwed during the process. We’re just a means to an end.” I took a step closer to her. “So Willow’s got some problems-who doesn’t? There’s kids with ADHD and kids who sneak out at night to smoke and drink and kids who get beat up at school for liking math-you don’t see those parents trying to blame someone else so they can get cash.”

“How come you were perfectly willing to sue Disney World and half of the public service system in Florida for cash? What’s different here?”

I jerked my chin up. “They played us for fools.”

“What if the doctors did, too?” Charlotte argued. “What if Piper made a mistake?”

“Then she made a mistake!” I shrugged. “Would it have changed the outcome? If you’d known about all the breaks, all the trips to the ER, all we’d have to do for Willow, would you have wanted her any less?”

She opened her mouth, and then resolutely clamped it shut.

That scared the hell out of me.

“So what if she winds up in a lot of casts?” I said, reaching for Charlotte’s hand. “She also knows the name of every bone in the freaking body and she hates the color yellow and she told me last night she wants to be a beekeeper when she grows up. She’s our little girl, Char lotte. We don’t need help. We’ve handled this for five years; we’ll keep handling it ourselves.”

Charlotte drew away from me. “Where’s the we, Sean? You go off to work. You go out with the guys for poker night. You make it sound like you’re with Willow twenty-four/seven, but you have no idea what that’s like.”

“Then we’ll get a visiting nurse. An aide…”

“And we’ll pay her with what?” Charlotte snapped. “Come to think of it, how are we going to afford a new car big enough to carry Willow’s chair and walker and crutches, since ours is going on two hundred thousand miles? How are we going to pay off her surgeries, the parts insurance won’t cover? How are we going to make sure her house has a handicapped ramp and a kitchen sink low enough for a wheelchair?”

“Are you saying I can’t provide for my own kid?” I said, my voice escalating.

Suddenly, all the bluster went out of Charlotte. “Oh, Sean. You’re the best father. But…you’re not a mother.”

There was a shriek, and-instinct kicking in-both Charlotte and I sprinted across the parking lot, expecting to find Willow twisted on the pavement with a bone breaking through her skin. Instead, Amelia was holding the crying baby at arm’s length, a stain streaking the front of her shirt. “It barfed on me!” she wailed.

The baby’s mother came hurrying out of the church. “I’m so sorry,” she said, to us, to Amelia, as Willow sat on the ground, laughing at her sister’s bad luck. “I think he might be coming down with something…”

Charlotte stepped forward and took the baby from Amelia. “Maybe a virus,” she said. “Don’t worry. These things happen.”

She stood back as the woman gave a wad of Baby Wipes to Amelia to clean herself off. “This conversation is over,” I murmured to Charlotte. “Period.”

Charlotte bounced the baby in her arms. “Sure, Sean,” she said, too easily. “Whatever you say.”

By six o’clock that night, Charlotte had caught whatever the baby had, and was sick as a dog. Vomiting like crazy, she’d sequestered herself in the bathroom. I was supposed to work the night shift, but it was blatantly clear that wasn’t going to happen. “Amelia needs help with her science homework,” Charlotte murmured, patting her face with a damp towel. “And the girls need dinner…”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “What else do you need?”

“To die?” Charlotte moaned, and she shoved me out of the way to kneel in front of the toilet again.

I backed out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Downstairs, you were sitting on the living room couch eating a banana. “You’re gonna spoil your appetite,” I said.

“I’m not eating it, Daddy. I’m fixing it.”

“Fixing it,” I repeated. On the table in front of you was a knife, which you weren’t supposed to have-I made a mental note to yell at Amelia for getting you one. There was a slice down the center of the banana.

You popped open the lid of a mending kit we’d taken from the hotel room in Florida, pulled out a prethreaded needle, and started to sew up the wound in the banana skin.

“Willow,” I said. “What are you doing?”

You blinked up at me. “Surgery.”

I watched you for a few stitches, to make sure you didn’t poke yourself with the needle, and then shrugged. Far be it from me to stand in the way of science.

In the kitchen, Amelia was sprawled across the table with markers, glue, and a piece of poster board. “You want to tell me why Willow’s out there with a paring knife?” I said.

“Because she asked for one.”

“If she asked for a chain saw, would you have gotten it out of the garage?”

“Well, that would kind of be overkill for cutting up a banana, don’t you think?” Looking down at her project, Amelia sighed. “This totally sucks. I have to make a board game about the digestive system, and everyone’s going to make fun of me because we all know where the digestive system ends.”

“Funny you should use that word,” I said.

“G-R-O-double-S, Dad.”

I started pulling pots and pans out from beneath the counter and set out a frying pan. “What do you say to pancakes for dinner?” Not that they had a choice; it was the only thing I knew how to cook, except for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“Mom made pancakes for breakfast,” Amelia complained.

“Did you know that dissolvable stitches are made out of animal guts?” you called out.

“No, and now I kind of wish I didn’t…”

Amelia rubbed a glue stick over her poster board. “Is Mom better yet?”

“No, baby.”

“But she promised me she’d help draw the esophagus.”

“I can help,” I said.

“You can’t draw, Dad. When we play Pictionary you always make a house, even when that has nothing to do with the answer.”

“Well, how hard can an esophagus be? It’s a tube, right?” I rummaged for a box of Bisquick.

There was a thump; the knife had rolled under the couch. You were twisting uncomfortably. “Hang on, Wills, I can get that for you,” I called.

“I don’t need it anymore,” you said, but you hadn’t stopped squirming.

Amelia sighed. “Willow, stop being such a baby before you pee in your pants.”

I looked from your sister to you. “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“She’s making that face she makes when she’s trying to hold it in-”

“Amelia, enough.” I walked into the living room and crouched down beside you. “Honey, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

You flattened your lips together. “I want Mom to take me.”

“Mom’s not here,” Amelia snapped.

I hoisted you off the couch to carry you into the downstairs bathroom. I’d just wrangled your awkwardly cast legs into the doorframe when you said, “You forgot the garbage bags.”

Charlotte had told me how she’d line them inside your cast before you went to the bathroom. In all the time you’d been in your spica, I hadn’t been pressed into duty for this-you were wildly self-conscious about having me pull down your pants. I reached around the doorframe to the dryer, where Charlotte had stashed a box of kitchen trash bags. “Okay,” I said. “I’m a novice, so you have to tell me what to do.”

“You have to swear you won’t peek,” you said.

“Cross my heart.”

You untied the knot that was holding up the gigantic boxer shorts we’d pulled over your spica, and I lifted you up so that they would pool at your hips. As I pulled them off, you squealed. “Look up here!”

“Right.” I resolutely fixed my eyes on yours, trying to maneuver the shorts off you without seeing what I was doing. Then I held up the garbage bag, which would have to be tucked in along the crotch line. “You want to do this part?” I asked, blushing.

I held you under the armpits while you struggled to line the cast with the plastic. “Ready,” you said, and I positioned you over the toilet.

“No, back more,” you said, and I adjusted you and waited.

And waited.

“Willow,” I said, “go ahead and pee.”

“I can’t. You’re listening.”

“I’m not listening-”

“Yes you are.”

“Your mother listens…”

“That’s different,” you said, and you burst into tears.

Once the floodgates opened, they opened universally. I glanced down at the bowl of the toilet, only to hear you cry louder. “You said you wouldn’t peek!”

I snapped my eyes north, juggled you into my left arm, and reached for the toilet paper with the right.

“Dad!” Amelia yelled. “I think something’s burning…”

“Oh shit,” I muttered, giving only a passing thought to the swear jar. I stuffed a wad of paper into your hand. “Hurry up, Willow,” I said, and then I flushed the toilet.

“I h-have to w-wash my hands,” you hiccuped.

“Later,” I bit out, and I carried you back to the couch, tossing your shorts into your lap before racing to the kitchen.

Amelia stood in front of the stove, where the pancakes were charring. “I turned off the burner,” she said, coughing through the smoke.

“Thanks.” She nodded and reached around me onto the counter for…Were those what I thought they were? Sure enough, Amelia sat down and picked up the hot glue gun. She’d affixed about thirty of my good clay poker chips around the edge of her poster board.

“Amelia!” I yelled. “Those are my poker chips!”

“You have a whole bunch. I just needed a few…”

“Did I tell you you could use them?”

“You didn’t tell me I couldn’t,” Amelia said.

“Daddy,” you called out from the living room, “my hands!”

“Okay,” I said under my breath. “Okay.” I counted to ten, and then car ried the pan to the trash to scrape out its contents. The metal lip grazed my wrist and I dropped the pan. “Sonofabitch,” I cried, and I switched on the cold-water faucet, thrusting my arm beneath it.

“I want to wash my hands,” you wailed.

Amelia folded her arms. “You owe Willow a quarter,” she said.

By nine o’clock, you girls were asleep and the pots had been washed and the dishwasher was humming in the kitchen. I went around the house, turning out the lights, then crept into the dark bedroom. Charlotte was lying down with one arm thrown over her head. “You don’t have to tiptoe,” she said. “I’m awake.”

I sank down beside her. “You feeling any better?”

“I’m down a dress size. How are the girls?”

“Fine. Although I’m sorry to say Willow’s patient didn’t survive.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.” I rolled onto my back. “We had peanut butter and jelly for dinner.”

She patted my arm absently. “You know what I love about you?”

“Hmm?”

“You make me look so good by comparison…”

I propped my arms behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. “You don’t bake anymore.”

“Yeah, but I don’t burn the pancakes,” Charlotte said, smiling a little. “Amelia ratted you out when she came in to say good night.”

“I’m serious. Remember how you used to make crème brûlée and petit fours and chocolate éclairs?”

“I guess other things became more important,” Charlotte answered.

“You used to say you’d have your own bakery one day. You wanted to call it Syllable-”

“Syllabub,” she corrected.

I may not have remembered the name right, but I knew what it meant, because I’d asked you: syllabub was the oldest English dessert, made when dairymaids would shoot warm milk straight from the cow into a pail that held cider or sherry. It was like eggnog, you told me, and you promised me you’d make me some to try, and the night you did you dipped a finger in the sweet cream and traced a trail down my chest that you kissed clean.

“That’s what happens to dreams,” Charlotte said. “Life gets in the way.”

I sat up, picking at a stitch on the quilt. “I wanted a house, a backyard, a bunch of kids. A vacation every now and then. A good job. I wanted to coach softball and take my girls skiing and not know every fucking doctor in the Portsmouth Regional Hospital emergency room by name.” I turned to her. “I may not be with her all the time, but when she breaks, Charlotte, I feel it. I swear I do. I’d do anything for her.”

She faced me. “Would you?”

I could feel its weight on the mattress: the lawsuit, the elephant in the room. “It feels…ugly. It feels like we’re saying we didn’t love her, because she’s…the way she is.”

“It’s because we want her, because we love her, that I’d ever think about this in the first place,” Charlotte said. “I’m not stupid, Sean. I know people are going to talk, and say I’m after a big settlement. I know they’re going to think I’m the worst mother in the world, the most selfish, you fill in the blank. But I don’t care what they say about me-I care about Willow. I want to know that she’ll be able to go to college and live on her own and do everything she dreams of. Even if that means that the whole world thinks I’m horrible. Does it really matter what everyone else says if I know why I’m doing it?” She faced me. “I’m going to lose my best friend because of this,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”

In her previous life as a pastry chef, I’d always been amazed to watch tiny Charlotte hauling fifty-pound bags of flour around. There was strength in her that went far beyond my own size and force. I saw the world in black and white; it was why I was a career cop. But what if this lawsuit and its uncomfortable name was only a means to an end? Could something that looked so wrong on the outside turn out to be undeniably right?

My hand crept across the quilt to cover hers. “You won’t,” I said.

Charlotte

Late May 2007

Your first seven breaks happened before you entered this world. The next four happened minutes after you were born, as a nurse lifted you out of me. Another nine, when you were being resuscitated in the hospital, after you coded. The tenth: when you were lying across my lap and suddenly I heard a pop. Eleven was when you rolled over and your arm hit the edge of the crib. Twelve and thirteen were femur fractures; fourteen a tibia; fifteen a compression fracture of the spine. Sixteen was jumping down from a stoop; seventeen was a kid crashing into you on a playground; eighteen was when you slipped on a DVD jacket lying on the carpet. We still don’t know what caused number nineteen. Twenty was when Amelia was jumping on a bed where you were sitting; twenty-one was a soccer ball that hit your left leg too hard; twenty-two was when I discovered waterproof casting materials and bought enough to supply an entire hospital, now stocked in my garage. Twenty-three happened in your sleep; twenty-four and twenty-five were a fall forward in the snow that snapped both forearms at once. Twenty-six and twenty-seven were nasty fractures, fibula and tibia tenting through the skin at a nursery school Halloween party, where, ironically, you were wearing a mummy’s costume whose bandages I used to splint the breaks. Twenty-eight happened during a sneeze; twenty-nine and thirty were ribs you broke on the edge of the kitchen table. Thirty-one was a hip fracture that required a metal plate and six screws. I stopped keeping track after that, until the ones from Disney World, which we had not numbered but instead named Mickey, Donald, and Goofy.

Four months after you were put in the spica cast, it was bivalved. This meant that it was cut in half and secured with low-budget clips that broke within hours, so I replaced them with bright strips of Velcro. Gradually, we’d remove the top, so that you could practice sitting up like a clam on the half shell, and you could strengthen the stomach and calf muscles that had deteriorated. According to Dr. Rosenblad, you’d have a couple of weeks in the bottom of the shell; then you’d graduate to just sleeping in it. Eight weeks later you’d stand with a walker; four weeks after that, you’d be moving to the bathroom on your own.

The best part, though, was that you could go back to preschool. It was a private school, held for two hours each morning in the basement of a church. You were a year older than other kids in the class, but you’d missed so much school because of breaks that we’d decided to repeat the year-you could read at a sixth-grade level, but you needed to be around other kids your age for socialization. You didn’t have many friends-children were either frightened by your wheelchair and walker or, oddly, jealous of the casts that you’d come to school wearing. Now, driving to the church, I glanced into the rearview mirror. “So what are you going to do first?”

“The rice table.” Miss Katie, whom you ranked somewhere just shy of Jesus on the adoration scale, had set up an enormous sandbox full of colored rice grains, which kids could pour into different size containers. You loved the noise it made; you told me it sounded like rain. “And the parachute.”

This was a game where one child ran under a brightly colored round of silk while the rest held on to its edges. “You’re going to have to wait a while for that, Wills,” I said, and I pulled into the parking lot. “One day at a time.”

I unloaded your wheelchair from the back of the van and settled you into it, then pushed you up the ramp that the school had added this past summer, after you’d enrolled. Inside, other students were hanging their coats in their cubbies; moms were rolling up dried finger paintings that were hanging on a clothes rack. “You’re back!” one woman said, smiling down at you. Then she looked up at me. “Kelsey had her birthday party last weekend-she saved a goody bag for Willow. We would have invited her, but, well, it was at the Gymnastics Hut, and I figured she might feel left out.”

As opposed to not being invited? I thought. But instead, I smiled. “That was very thoughtful.”

A little boy touched the edges of your spica cast. “Wow,” he breathed. “How do you pee in that thing?”

“I don’t,” you said, without cracking a smile. “I haven’t gone in four months, Derek, so you’d better watch out ’cause I could blow like a volcano any minute.”

“Willow,” I murmured, “no need to be snarky.”

“He started it…”

Miss Katie came into the hallway as she heard the commotion of our arrival. She did the slightest double take when she saw you in the bivalved cast but quickly recovered. “Willow!” she said, getting down on her knees to your level. “It is so nice to see you!” She summoned her assistant, Miss Sylvia. “Sylvia, can you keep an eye on Willow while her mom and I have a talk?”

I followed her down the hallway past the bathrooms with their impossibly squat toilets to the area that doubled as music room and gymnasium. “Charlotte,” Kate said, “I must have misunderstood. When you called to tell me Willow was coming, I thought she was out of that body cast!”

“Well, she will be. It’s a gradual thing.” I smiled at her. “She’s really excited to be back here.”

“I think you’re rushing things-”

“It’s fine, really. She needs the activity. Even if she breaks again, a break after a few weeks of really great play is better for her body than just sitting around at home. And you don’t have to worry about the other kids hurting her, beyond the usual. We wrestle with her. We tickle her.”

“Yes, but you do all that at home,” the teacher pointed out. “In a school environment…Well, it’s riskier.”

I stepped back, reading her loud and clear: we’re liable when she’s on our grounds. In spite of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I routinely read on online OI forums of private schools who kindly suggested that a healing child be kept at home, ostensibly for the child’s best interests but more likely because of their own rising insurance premiums. It created a catch-22: legally, you had clear grounds to sue for discrimination, but once you did, you could bet that, even if you won your case, your child would be treated differently when she returned.

“Riskier for whom?” I said, my face growing hot. “I paid tuition to have my daughter here. Kate, you know damn well you can’t tell me she’s not welcome.”

“I’m happy to refund you tuition for the months she’s missed. And I would never tell you that Willow’s not welcome-we love her, and we’ve missed her. We just want to make sure she’s safe.” She shook her head. “Look at it from our point of view. Next year, when Willow’s in kindergarten, she’ll have a full-time aide. We don’t have that resource here.”

“Then I’ll be her aide. I’ll stay with her. Just let her”-my voice snapped like a twig-“let her feel like she’s normal.”

Kate looked up at me. “Do you think being the only child with a parent in the classroom is going to make her feel that way?”

Speechless-fuming-I strode down the hall to where Miss Sylvia was still waiting with you, watching you show off the cast’s Velcro straps. “We have to go,” I said, blinking back tears.

“But I want to play at the rice table…”

“You know what?” Kate said. “Miss Sylvia will get you your own bag to take home! Thanks for coming to say hello to all your friends, Willow.”

Confused, you turned to me. “Mommy? Why can’t I stay?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Miss Sylvia returned with a Ziploc full of purple rice grains. “Here you go, pumpkin.”

“Tell me this,” I said, eyeing each of the teachers in turn. “What good is a life if she doesn’t get to live it?”

I pushed you out of the school, still so angry that it took me a moment to realize you were deathly silent. When we reached the van, you had tears in your eyes. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said, with a resignation in your voice that no five-year-old ought to have. “I didn’t want to stay anyway.”

That was a lie; I knew how much you had been looking forward to seeing your friends.

“You know how, when there’s a rock in the water, the water just moves around the sides of it as if it’s not there?” you said. “That’s kind of how the other kids acted when you were talking to Miss Katie.”

How could those teachers-or those other kids-not see how easily you bruised? I kissed you on the forehead. “You and I,” I promised, “are going to have so much fun this afternoon, you aren’t going to know what hit you.” I leaned down to hoist you out of your wheelchair, but one of the Velcro straps on the cast popped open. “Shoot,” I muttered, and as I jostled you to one hip to fix it, you dropped your Ziploc bag.

“My rice!” you said, and you instinctively twisted in my arms to reach it, which is exactly the moment I heard the snap: like a branch breaking, like the first bite of an autumn apple.

“Willow?” I said, but I already knew: the whites of your eyes had flashed, blue as lightning, and you were slipping away from me into the sleepy trance that would overcome you when it was a particularly bad fracture.

By the time I settled you in the back of the van, your eyes were nearly closed. “Baby, tell me where it hurts,” I begged, but you didn’t answer. Starting at the wrist, I gently felt up your arm, trying to find the tender spot. I had just hit a divot beneath your shoulder when you whimpered. But you had broken bones in the arm before, and this one wasn’t stuck through the skin or twisted at a ninety-degree angle or any of the other hallmarks I associated with the kind of severe break that made you slip into a stupor. Had the bone pierced an organ?

I could have gone back into the school and asked them to call 911, but there was nothing an EMT could do for you that I didn’t know how to do myself. So I rummaged in the back of the van and found an old People magazine. Using it as an immobilizer, I wrapped an Ace bandage around your upper arm. I winged a prayer that you wouldn’t have to be casted-casts made bone density drop, and each place a cast ended was a new weak point for a future break. You could get away with a Wee Walker boot or an Aircast or a splint most of the time-except for hip fractures, and vertebrae, and femurs. Those breaks were the ones that made you go still and quiet, like now. Those breaks were the ones that had me driving straight to the ER, because I was too scared to handle them on my own.

At the hospital, I pulled into a handicapped spot and carried you into triage. “My daughter has osteogenesis imperfecta,” I told the nurse. “She’s broken her arm.”

The woman pursed her lips. “How about you do the diagnosis after you get a medical degree?”

“Trudy, is there a problem?” A doctor who looked too young to even be shaving was suddenly standing in front of us, peering down at you. “Did I hear you say OI?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s her humerus.”

“I’ll take care of this one,” the doctor said. “I’m Dr. Dewitt. Do you want to put her in a wheelchair-”

“We’re good,” I said, and I hoisted you higher in my arms. As he led us down the hall to Radiology, I gave him your medical history. He stopped me only once-to sweet-talk the technician into giving up a room quickly. “Okay,” the doctor said, leaning over you on the X-ray table, his hand on your forearm. “I’m just going to move this the tiniest bit…”

“No,” I said, stepping forward. “You can move the machine, can’t you?”

“Well,” Dr. Dewitt said, nonplussed. “We don’t usually.”

“But you can?”

He looked at me again and then made adjustments to the equipment, draping the heavy lead vest over your chest. I moved to the rear of the room so the film could be taken. “Good job, Willow. Now just one more of your lower arm,” the doctor said.

“No,” I said.

The doctor looked up, exasperated. “With all due respect, Mrs. O’Keefe, I really need to do my job.”

But I was doing mine, too. When you broke, I tried to limit the number of X-rays that were done; sometimes I had them skipped altogether if they weren’t going to change the outcome of the treatment. “We already know she’s got a break,” I reasoned. “Do you think it’s displaced?”

The doctor’s eyes widened as I spoke his own language to him. “No.”

“Then you don’t really have to X-ray the tibia and fibula, do you?”

“Well,” Dr. Dewitt admitted. “That depends.”

“Do you have any idea how many X-rays my daughter will have to get in the course of her lifetime?” I asked.

He folded his arms. “You win. We really don’t need to X-ray the lower arm.”

While we waited for the film to develop, I rubbed your back. Slowly, you were returning from wherever it was that you went when you had a break. You were fidgeting more, whimpering. Shivering, which only made you hurt more.

I stuck my head out of the room to ask a technician if she had a blanket I might wrap around you and found Dr. Dewitt approaching with your X-rays. “Willow’s cold,” I said, and he whipped off his white coat and settled it over your shoulders as soon as he stepped into the room. “The good news,” he said, “is that Willow’s other break is healing nicely.”

What other break?

I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until the doctor pointed to a spot on your upper arm. It was hard to see-the collagen defect left your bones milky-but sure enough, there was the ridge of callus that suggested a healing fracture.

I felt a stab of guilt. When had you hurt yourself, and how could I not have known?

“Looks like it’s about two weeks old,” Dr. Dewitt mused, and just like that, I remembered: one night, when I carried you to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I had nearly dropped you. Although you’d insisted you were fine, you had only been lying for my sake.

“I am amazed to report, Willow, that you’ve broken one of the bones that’s hardest to break in the human body-your shoulder blade.” He pointed to the second image on the light board, to a crack clear down the middle of the scapula. “It moves around so much, it’s hardly ever fractured on impact.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“Well, she’s already in a spica cast…Short of mummification, the best thing is probably going to be a sling. It’s going to hurt for a few days-but the alternative seems like cruel and unusual punishment.” He bandaged your arm up against your chest, like the broken wing of a bird. “That too tight?”

You looked up at him. “I broke my clavicle once. It hurt more. Did you know that clavicle means ‘little key’-not just because it looks like one but because it connects all the other bones in the chest?”

Dr. Dewitt’s jaw dropped. “Are you some kind of Doogie Howser prodigy?”

“She reads a lot,” I said, smiling.

“Scapula, sternum, and xiphoid,” you added. “I can spell them, too.”

“Damn,” the doctor said softly, and then he blushed. “I mean, darn.” His gaze met mine over your head. “She’s the first OI patient I’ve had. It must be pretty wild.”

“Yes,” I said. “Wild.”

“Well, Willow, if you want to come work here as an ortho resident, there’s a white coat with your name on it.” He nodded at me. “And if you ever need someone to talk to…” He took a business card out of his breast pocket.

I tucked it into my back pocket, embarrassed. This probably wasn’t goodwill as much as it was preservation for Willow-the doctor had evidence of my own incompetence, two breaks up there in black and white. I pretended to be busy rummaging for something in my purse, but really, I was just waiting for him to leave. I heard him offer you a lollipop, say good-bye.

How could I claim to know what was best for you, what you deserved, when at any moment I might be thrown a curveball-and learn that I hadn’t protected you as well as I should have? Was I considering this lawsuit because of you, or to atone for all the things I’d done wrong up to this point?

Like wishing for a baby. Each month when I’d realized that Sean and I had again not conceived, I used to strip and stand in the shower with the water streaming down my face, praying to God; praying to get pregnant, no matter what.

I hoisted you into my arms-my left hip, since it was your right shoulder that had broken-and walked out of the examination room. The doctor’s card was burning a hole in my back pocket. I was so distracted, in fact, that I nearly ran over a little girl who was walking in the door of the hospital just as we were walking out. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” I said, and backed up. She was about your age, and she held on to her mother’s hand. She wore a pink tutu and mud boots with frog faces on the toes. Her head was completely bald.

You did the one thing you hated most when it happened to you: you stared.

The little girl stared back.

You’d learned early on that strangers would stare at a girl in a wheelchair. I’d taught you to smile at them, to say hello, so that they’d realize you were a person and not just some curiosity of nature. Amelia was your fiercest protector-if she saw a kid gawking at you, she’d walk right up and tell him that was what would happen if he didn’t clean his room or eat his vegetables. Once or twice, she’d made a child burst into tears, and I almost didn’t reprimand her because it made you smile and sit up straighter in your wheelchair, instead of trying to be invisible.

But this was different; this was an equal match.

I squeezed your waist. “Willow,” I chided.

The girl’s mother looked up at me. A thousand words passed between us, although neither of us spoke. She nodded at me, and I nodded back.

You and I walked out of the hospital into a late spring day that smelled of cinnamon and asphalt. You squinted, tried to raise your arm to shield your eyes, and remembered that it was bound tight against your body. “That girl, Mommy,” you said. “Why did she look like that?”

“Because she’s sick, and that’s what happens when she takes her medicine.”

You considered this for a moment. “I’m so lucky…my medicine lets me have hair.”

I was careful not to cry around you, but this time I could not help it. Here you were, with three out of four extremities broken. Here you were, with a healing fracture I hadn’t even known occurred. Here you were, period. “Yes, we’re lucky,” I said.

You put your hand against my cheek. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said. And just as I’d done for you in the ER, you patted my back, the very same spot you’d broken in your own body.

Sean

“Stop, goddammit!” I yelled as I sprinted across the empty park, holding the can of spray paint. The kid still had a lead on me, not to mention the benefit of being thirty years younger, but I wasn’t going to let him get away. Not even if it killed me, which, judging from the stitch in my side, it just might.

It had been one of those unseasonably warm spring days that made me remember what it felt like to be a kid, listening to the slap of girls’ flip-flops as they walked past you at the town pool. I admit, during my lunch break, I’d put on some running shorts and taken a quick dip. We wouldn’t be swimming for a while-out of solidarity with you, since you couldn’t go into a pool until you were out of your spica cast. There was nothing you wanted to do more than swim-something you’d never really learned to do because of various breaks. Even after Charlotte had discovered fiberglass casts-which were waterproof and wicked expensive-you somehow managed to miss the swim-lesson season for one reason or another. When Amelia was being a particularly nasty preadolescent, she’d lord over you the fact that she was headed to a pool party or out to the beach. Then you’d spend the whole day sulking or, in one memorable case, getting on the Internet and submitting a bid request for an in-ground pool-something we had neither the land nor the money for. Sometimes I thought you were obsessed with water-frozen in the winter or chlorinated in the summer; all you wanted was exactly what you couldn’t have.

Sort of like the rest of us, I guess.

Now, my hair was still wet; I smelled of chlorine-and I was trying to figure out how I could mask that from you when I got home. The car win dows were rolled down as I cruised by the local park, where a Little League game had recently broken up. And then I noticed a kid spray-painting graffiti on the dugout in broad daylight.

I don’t know what frustrated me more-the fact that this boy was defacing public property or the fact that he was doing it right under my nose, without even the pretense of hiding. I parked far away and sneaked up behind him. “Hey,” I called. “You want to tell me what you’re doing?”

He turned around, caught in the act. He was tall and whip-thin, with stringy yellow hair and a sad attempt at a mustache crawling over his upper lip. His gaze met mine, clear and defiant, and then he dropped the spray can and started running.

I took off, too. The boy darted away from the park’s borders and crossed beneath an overpass, where his sneaker slipped in a puddle of mud. He stumbled, which gave me just enough time to throw my weight into him and shove him up against the concrete wall, with my arm pushing into his throat. “I asked you a question,” I grunted. “What the fuck were you doing?”

He clawed at my arm, choking, and suddenly I saw myself through his eyes.

I wasn’t one of those cops who liked to use my position to bully people. So what had set me off so quickly? As I fell back, I figured it out: it wasn’t the fact that the boy had been spray-painting the dugout, or that he hadn’t shown remorse when I first arrived on the scene. It was that he’d run. That he could run.

I was angry at him because you, in this situation, couldn’t have escaped.

The kid was bent over, coughing. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he gasped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really sorry.”

He stared at me like an animal that had been cornered. “Get it over with, already. Arrest me.”

I turned away. “Just go. Before I change my mind.”

There was a beat of silence and then, again, the sound of running footsteps.

I leaned against the wall of the overpass and closed my eyes. These days, it felt like anger was a geyser inside of me, destined to explode at regular intervals. Sometimes that meant a kid like this one was on the receiving end. Sometimes it was my own child-I’d find myself yelling at Amelia for something inconsequential, like leaving her cereal bowl on top of the television, when it was an infraction I was just as likely to commit myself. And sometimes it was Charlotte I complained to-for cooking meat loaf when I’d wanted chicken cutlets, for not keeping the kids quiet when I was sleeping after a late-night shift, for not knowing where I’d left my keys, for making me think there might be someone to be angry with in the first place.

I was no stranger to lawsuits. I’d sued Ford, once, after riding around in a cruiser gave me a herniated disk. And okay, maybe it was their fault and maybe it wasn’t, but they settled and I used the money to buy a van so we could move your wheelchairs and adaptive equipment around-and I’m quite sure that Ford Motor Company never even blinked when they cut the check for twenty thousand dollars in damages. But this was different; this wasn’t a lawsuit that blamed something that had happened to you-it was a lawsuit to blame the fact that you were here. Although I could easily earmark what we could do for you with a big settlement, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that, in order to get it, I’d have to lie.

For Charlotte, this didn’t seem to be a problem. And that got me thinking: What else was she lying about, even now, that I didn’t realize? Was she happy? Did she wish she could have started over, without me, without you? Did she love me?

What kind of father did it make me if I refused to file a lawsuit that might net you enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, instead of scraping money here and there and taking on extra shifts at high school basketball games and proms so that we’d have enough to buy you a memory-foam mattress, an electric wheelchair, an adapted car to drive? Then again, what kind of father did it make me if the only way to net those rewards was to pretend I didn’t want you here?

I leaned my head back against the concrete, my eyes closed. If you had been born without OI, and wound up in a car crash that left you paralyzed, I would have gone to an attorney’s office and had them look up every accident report that involved that make and model car to see if there was something faulty with the vehicle, something that might have led to the crash-so that the people responsible for hurting you would pay. Was a wrongful birth lawsuit really all that different?

It was. It was, because when I even whispered the words to myself in front of the mirror while I was shaving, it made me feel sick to my stomach.

My cell phone began to ring, reminding me that I’d been away from the cruiser longer than I’d intended. “Hello?”

“Dad, it’s me,” Amelia said. “Mom never picked me up.”

I glanced down at my watch. “School ended two hours ago.”

“I know. She’s not home, and she’s not answering her cell phone.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Ten minutes later, a sullen Amelia swung into the cruiser. “Great. I just love being driven home in a cop car. Imagine the rumor mill.”

“Lucky for you, Drama Queen, that the whole town knows your father’s a policeman.”

“Did you talk to Mom?”

I had tried, but like Amelia said, she wasn’t answering any phone. The reason why became crystal clear when I pulled into our driveway and saw her carefully extricating you from the backseat-not just confined by your spica cast but sporting a new bandage that bound your upper arm to your body.

Charlotte turned as she heard us drive up, and winced. “Amelia,” she said. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I totally forgot-”

“Yeah, so what else is new?” Amelia muttered, and she stalked into the house.

I took you out of your mother’s arms. “What happened, Wills?”

“I broke my scapula,” you said. “It’s really hard to do.”

“The shoulder blade, can you believe it?” Charlotte said. “Clear down the middle.”

“You didn’t answer your phone.”

“My battery died.”

“You could have called from the hospital.”

Charlotte looked up. “You can’t actually be angry with me, Sean. I’ve been a little busy-”

“Don’t you think I deserve to know if my daughter gets hurt?”

“Could you keep your voice down?”

“Why?” I demanded. “Why not let everyone listen? They’re going to hear it all anyway, once you file-”

“I refuse to discuss this in front of Willow-”

“Well, you’d better get over that fast, sweetheart, because she’s going to hear every last ugly word of it.”

Charlotte’s face turned red, and she took you out of my arms and carried you into the house. She settled you on the couch, handed you the television remote, then walked into the kitchen, expecting me to follow. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“With me? You’re the one who left Amelia sitting for two hours after school-”

“It was an accident-”

“Speaking of accidents,” I said.

“It wasn’t a serious break.”

“You know what, Charlotte? It looks pretty fucking serious to me.”

“What would you have done if I called you, anyway? Left work early again? That would be one less day you were getting paid, which means we’d be doubly screwed.”

I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. Here was the underlying message in that goddamn lawsuit, the invisible ink that would show up between the lines of every court document: Sean O’Keefe doesn’t make enough money to take care of his daughter’s special needs…which is why it’s come to this.

“You know what I think?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “That if the shoe was on the other foot-if I’d been with Willow when she got hurt-and I didn’t call you, you’d be furious. And you know what else I think? The reason you didn’t call me has nothing to do with my job or with your cell phone battery. It’s that you’ve already made up your mind. You’re going to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, no matter what I say.” I stormed out of the house to my cruiser, still idling in the driveway, because God forbid I left my shift early.

I smacked my hand on the steering wheel, inadvertently honking the horn. The noise brought Charlotte to the window. Her face was tiny and white, an oval whose features were blurred at this distance.

I had asked Charlotte to marry me with petit fours. I went to a bakery and had them write a letter in icing on top of each one: MARRY ME, and then I mixed them up and served them on a plate. It’s a puzzle, I told her. You have to put them in order.

ARMY REM, she wrote.

Charlotte was still at the window, watching me with her arms crossed. I could barely see in her the girl I’d told to try again. I could no longer picture the look on her face when, the second time, she got it right.

Amelia

When Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer’s office we’d gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you’d been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.

I didn’t do it for the reason you’d think-to drown out the noise you were making. I knew that’s what my parents thought: that I was totally unsympathetic. I wasn’t about to try to explain it to them, either, but the truth was, I needed that music. I needed to distract myself from the fact that, when you were crying, there was nothing I could do to stop it, because that just made me hate myself even more.

Everyone-even you, in the bottom half of your spica cast, with your arm strapped up against your chest-was already sitting at the dinner table when I got there. Mom had cut your meat loaf into tiny squares, like postage stamps. It made me think of when you were little, sitting in your high chair. I used to try to play with you-rolling a ball or pulling you in a wagon-and every time I was told the same thing: Be careful.

Once, you were sitting on the bed and I was bouncing on it, and you fell off. One minute we were astronauts exploring the planet Zurgon, and the next, your left shin was bent at a ninety-degree angle and you were doing that freaky zoning-out thing you did when you had a bad break. Mom and Dad went out of their way to say this wasn’t my fault, but who did they think they were kidding? I was the one who’d been jumping, even if it had been your idea in the first place. If I’d never been there, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

I slid into my chair. We didn’t have assigned seats, like some families did, but we all took the same ones for every meal. I was still wearing my headphones, with my music turned up loud-emo stuff, songs that made me feel like there were people with even crappier lives than mine. “Amelia,” my father said. “Not at the table.”

Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. I blinked at my father, cranked the volume, and said-too loudly, “Pass the potatoes.”

I sounded like the biggest brat on earth, and maybe I wanted to be: like Pinocchio, if I acted like a self-centered teenager, eventually I’d become one, and everyone would notice me and cater to me instead of hand-feeding you your meat loaf and watching you to make sure you weren’t slipping in your chair. Actually, I’d just settle for having someone notice I was even a member of this family.

“Wills,” my mother said, “you have to eat something.”

“It tastes like feet,” you answered.

“Amelia, I’m not going to ask you again,” Dad said.

“Five more bites…”

“Amelia!”

They didn’t look at each other; as far as I knew they hadn’t spoken since this afternoon. I wondered if they realized that they could be on opposite sides of the globe right now, and still be having this dinner conversation, and it wouldn’t make a difference.

You squirmed away from the fork Mom was waving in front of your face. “Stop treating me like a baby,” you said. “Just because I broke my shoulder doesn’t mean you have to treat me like I’m two years old!” To illustrate this, you reached for your glass with your free arm, but you knocked it over. Milk landed in part on the tablecloth and mostly smack in the middle of Dad’s plate. “Goddammit!” he yelled, and he reached toward me and ripped the headphones out of my ears. “You’re part of this family, and you’ll act that way at the dinner table.”

I stared at him. “You first,” I said.

His face turned a steamy red. “Amelia, go to your room.”

“Fine!” I shoved my chair back with a screech and ran upstairs. With tears leaking out of my eyes and my nose running, I locked myself in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror was someone I didn’t know: her mouth twisted, her eyes dark and hollow.

These days, it seemed as if everything pissed me off. I got pissed off when I woke up in the morning and you were staring at me like I was some zoo animal; I got pissed off when I went to school and my locker was near the French classroom when Madame Riordan had made it her personal mission to make my life horrible; I got pissed off when I saw a gaggle of cheerleaders, with their perfect legs and their perfect lives, who worried about things like who would ask them to the next dance and whether red nail polish looked trampy, instead of whether their moms would remember to pick them up from school or be otherwise occupied at the emergency room. The only times I wasn’t pissed off, I was hungry-like right now. Or at least I thought it was hunger. Both felt like I was being consumed from the inside out; I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

The last time my parents had been fighting-which was, like, yesterday-you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth…testimony…deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don’t you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn’t really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.

They’re mad at me, you said.

No. They’re mad at each other.

Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn’t figure this out?

You looked at me. Figure what out?

I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I’d read out loud.

Normally you didn’t like that-reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn’t this the way it all started?

I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink’s car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars’ worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.

You liked that last one best, and I’d gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?

That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. “Do you and Daddy hate each other?” you asked.

“No, Wills,” she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. “Everything’s absolutely fine.”

I stood up, my hands on my hips. “When are you going to tell her?” I demanded.

My mother’s gaze could have cut me in half, I swear. “Amelia,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument, “there is nothing to tell.”

Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I realized what a total liar my mother was. I wondered if that was what I was destined for, if you could inherit that tendency the same way she had passed me the ability to double-joint my elbows, to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.

I leaned over the toilet bowl, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited, so that this time when I told myself I was empty and aching, I would finally be telling the truth.

Blind Baking: the process of baking a pie crust without the filling.

Sometimes, when you’re dealing with a fragile dough, it will collapse in spite of your best intentions. For this reason, some pie crusts and tart shells must be baked before the filling is added. The best method is to line the tart pan or pie plate with the rolled-out dough and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. When you are ready to bake, prick the crust in several spots with a fork, line the pie plate or tart shell with foil or parchment paper, and fill it with rice or dried beans. Bake as directed, then carefully remove the foil and the beans-the shell will have retained its form because of them. I like seeing how a substance that weighs heavily can, in the end, be lifted; I like the feel of the beans, like trouble that slips through your fingers. Most of all, I like the proof in the pastry: it is the things we have to bear that shape us.

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

Pinch of salt

1 tablespoon sugar

½ cup + 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 large egg yolk

1 tablespoon ice water

In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and butter. Pulse until coarse. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and ice water. With the processor running, add the yolk mixture to the flour and butter until a ball forms. Remove the dough, wrap it in plastic, flatten to a disk, and chill for 1 hour.

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface and place it in a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill before baking.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Remove the tart pan from the fridge, prick the crust all over with a fork, line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans. Bake for 17 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and continue baking for another 6 minutes. Cool completely before filling.

Sweet Pastry Dough tart shell-blind baked

2-3 apricots

2 egg yolks

1 cup heavy cream

¾ cup sugar

1½ tablespoons flour

¼ cup chopped hazelnuts

Peel the apricots, slice, and arrange in the bottom of a blind-baked tart shell.

Combine the egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flour. Pour over the apricots and sprinkle with the hazelnuts. Bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35 minutes.

When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It’s the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue.

Marin

June 2007

Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it-me included-spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people’s walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact. Perhaps it was bad form to check one’s Facebook in the middle of the workday, but once, I’d walked in on Bob Ramirez tooling around with his MySpace page and I realized that there was very little he could say to me without being a hypocrite.

These days I used Facebook to join groups-Birth Mothers and Adoptees Searching, Adoption Search Registry. Some members actually found the people they were looking for. Even if that hadn’t happened to me, there was a nice comfort to logging on and reading the posts that proved I wasn’t the only one frustrated by this whole process.

I logged in and checked my mini-feed. I’d been poked by a girl from high school who’d asked me to be her friend a week ago but whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I had been dared to take a quiz on Flixster by my cousin in Santa Barbara. I’d been voted by my other friends as the person you’d most prefer to be stuck in handcuffs with.

I glanced at the information just above this, my profile.

NAME: Marin Gates

NETWORKS: Portsmouth, NH / UNH Alumni / NH Bar Association

SEX: Female

INTERESTED IN: Men

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single

Single?

I reloaded the page. For the past four months on my Facebook page that line had read: In a relationship with Joe McIntyre. I clicked on the home page and scrolled through the news feed. There it was: a picture of his face and a status update: Joe McIntyre and Marin Gates have ended their relationship.

My jaw dropped open; I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.

I grabbed my coat and stormed into the reception area. “Wait!” Briony said. “Where are you going? You’ve got a conference call at-”

“Reschedule it,” I snapped. “My boyfriend just dumped me via Facebook.”

It was not like Joe McIntyre was the One. I’d met him at a Bruins game with clients; he passed me in the aisle and spilled his beer down the front of my shirt. Not an auspicious beginning, but he had indigo eyes and a smile that contributed to global warming, and before I knew it, I’d not only promised that he could pay my dry-cleaning bill but also given him my phone number. On our first date, we found out that we worked less than a block away from each other-he was an environmental lawyer-and that we’d both graduated from UNH. On our second date, we went back to my place and didn’t get out of bed for two straight days.

Joe was six years younger than me, which meant that at twenty-eight he was still playing the field and that at thirty-four I had traded in my wristwatch for a biological clock. I expected this fling to be a little fun: someone to go to a movie with on a Saturday night and get flowers from on Valentine’s Day. I wasn’t banking on forever; I fully figured that I would tell him sometime in the next few months that we were looking for different things in our lives right now.

But I sure as hell wouldn’t have broken the news to him on Facebook.

I strode around the corner and walked into the reception area of the law firm where he worked. It was much less grandiose than Bob’s, but then again, we were a plaintiff’s attorney, we weren’t trying to save the world. The receptionist smiled. “Can I help you?”

“Joe’s expecting me,” I said, and I headed down the hall.

When I opened the door to his office, he was dictating into a digital recorder. “Furthermore, we believe it’s in the best interests of Cochran and Sons to-Marin? What are you doing here?”

“You broke up with me on Facebook?”

“I was going to send a text, but I thought that would be worse,” Joe said, jumping up to close the door as a colleague wandered by. “C’mon, Marin. You know I’m not good at the touchy-feely stuff.” Then he grinned. “Well, the metaphorical touchy-feely stuff…”

“You are such an insensitive troll,” I said.

“This was a lot more civilized, if you ask me. What was the alternative? Some big argument where you tell me to fuck off and die?”

“Yes!” I said, and then I took a deep breath. “Is there someone else?”

“There’s something else,” Joe said soberly. “For God’s sake, Marin. You’ve blown me off the past three times I’ve tried to get together. What did you expect me to do? Just sit around waiting for you to have time for me?”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was reading marriage license applications-”

“Exactly,” Joe replied. “You don’t want to go out with me. You want to go out with your birth mother. Look, at first, I thought it was kind of hot-you know, you were so passionate when you talked about finding her. Except it turns out you’re not passionate about anything but that, Marin.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “You’re so busy living in the past, you’ve got nothing to give right now.”

I could feel my neck heating up beneath the collar of my suit. “Do you remember those two amazing days-and nights-at my house?” I said, leaning toward him until we were a breath away. I watched his pupils dilate.

“Oh yeah,” he murmured.

“I faked it. Every time,” I said, and I walked out of Joe’s office with my head high.

My birthday is January 3, 1973. I’ve known this, obviously, my whole life. The adoption decree I’d gotten from Hillsborough County was dated in late July, because of the six-month waiting period to fi nalize an adoption and the time it takes to schedule the hearing. There’s a lot of debate about that six-month period, in the adoptive community. Some people feel it should be longer, to give the birth mom time to change her mind; some people feel it should be shorter, to give the adoptive parents peace of mind that their newborn won’t be taken away. Where you fall on the spectrum, of course, depends on whether you have a baby to give away or one to receive.

I was a few days late. My father used to say that he was counting on me being his little tax deduction, but then I foiled that by arriving in the new year. On the slip of paper that came home from the hospital with me, saved in my baby book, was a bassinet card with my name torn off-but I could still make out a loop in the middle of the last name that hadn’t been ripped away: a cursive y or g or j or q. I knew this about my former self, and I knew that my birth parents had lived in Hillsborough County, and that my mother had been seventeen. In the seventies, there was still a good chance that a seventeen-year-old would marry the father of her baby, and that had led me to the records room.

Using a due date calculator on a pregnancy website, I figured out that I must have been conceived sometime around April tenth in order to be due on New Year’s Eve. (April tenth. A high school spring formal dance, I imagined. A midnight car ride to the shore. The waves on the sand, the sun breaking like a yolk over the ocean at dawn, he and she, sleeping in each other’s arms.) At any rate, if she found out she was pregnant a month later, that meant getting married in the early summer of 1972.

In 1972, Nixon went to China. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic games. A stamp cost eight cents. The Oakland A’s won the World Series, and M*A*S*H premiered on CBS.

On January 22, 1973, nineteen days after I was born and living with the Gates family, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

Did my mother hear about that and curse her bad timing?

A few weeks ago I had started scouring the records of Hillsborough County for marriage certificates from the summer of 1972. If my mother was seventeen, there must have been a parental consent form attached, too. Surely that would limit the numbers I had to wade through.

I had blown Joe off for two consecutive weekends while I waded through over three thousand marriage certificate applications, and learned incredibly creepy things about my home state (like that a girl between thirteen and seventeen, and a boy between fourteen and seventeen, could marry with parental consent), and yet, I didn’t find an application that looked like it might belong to my birth parents.

The truth is, even before Joe dumped me, I had resigned myself to giving up my search.

I went back to work after I left his office, and somehow phoned in a performance the rest of the day. That night, I came back to my house, opened a bottle of wine and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, and faced the truth: I had to decide if I really wanted to find my birth mother. Presumably, she had gone through significant moral contortions deciding whether or not to give me up; surely I owed her the same self-assessment in deciding whether or not to find her. Curiosity wasn’t good enough; neither was a medical scare that had left me wondering about my origins. Once I had a name: then what? Knowing where I came from did not necessarily mean I was brave enough to hear why I had been given away. If I was going to do this, I was going to be opening the door for a relationship that would change both of our lives.

I reached for the phone and dialed my mother. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Trying to figure out how to TiVo The Colbert Report,” she said. “What are you doing?”

I glanced down at the melting ice cream, the half-empty bottle of wine. “Embarking on a liquid diet,” I said. “And you have to push the red button to get the right menu on the screen.”

“Oh, there it is. Good. Your father gets cranky when I watch the show and he falls asleep.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Am I passionate?”

She laughed. “Things must be really bad if you’re asking me that.”

“I don’t mean romantically. I mean, you know, about life. Did I have hobbies when I was little? Did I collect Garbage Pail Kids cards or beg to be on a swim team?”

“Honey, you were terrified of the water till you were twelve.”

“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Did I stick with things, even when they were hard? Or did I just give up?”

“Why? Did something happen at work?”

“No, not at work.” I hesitated. “If you were me, would you look for your birth parents?”

There was a bubble of silence. “Wow. That’s a pretty loaded question. And I thought we’d already had this discussion. I said that I’d support you-”

“I know what you said. But doesn’t it hurt you?” I asked bluntly.

“I’m not going to lie, Marin. When you first started asking questions, it did. I guess a part of me felt like, if you loved me enough, you wouldn’t need to find any other answers. But then you had the whole scare at the gynecologist’s, and I realized this wasn’t about me. It was about you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m old and tough.”

That made me smile. “You’re not old, and you’re a softy.” I drew in my breath. “I just keep thinking, you know, this is a really big deal. You dig up the box, and maybe you find buried treasure, but maybe you find something rotting.”

“Maybe the person you’re afraid of hurting is yourself.”

Leave it to my mother to hit the nail on the head. What if, for example, I turned out to be related to Jeffrey Dahmer or Jesse Helms? Wouldn’t that be information I’d be better off not knowing?

“She got rid of me over thirty years ago. What if I barge into her life and she doesn’t want to see me?”

There was a soft sigh on the other end of the phone. It was, I realized, the sound I associated most with growing up. I’d heard it running into my mother’s arms when a kid had pushed me off the swing at the playground. I’d heard it during an embrace before my newly minted prom date and I drove off to the dance; I’d heard it when she stood at the threshold of my college dorm, trying not to cry as she left me on my own for the first time. In that sound was my whole childhood.

“Marin,” my mother said simply, “who wouldn’t want you?”

Honestly, I am not the kind of person who believes in ghosts and karma and reincarnation. And yet, the very next day I found myself calling in sick to work so that I could drive to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to talk to a psychic about my birth mother. I took another swig of my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and imagined what the meeting would be like; whether I would come out of it with information that would send me in the right direction for my adoption search, like the woman who’d recommended Meshinda Dows and her prophecies in the first place.

The previous night I had joined ten adoption support groups online. I created a name for myself (Separ8tedatbirth@yahoo.com) and made lists from the websites in an empty Moleskine notebook.

1. USE STATE REGISTRIES.

2. REGISTER WITH ISRR-the Index of Search and Reunion Resources, the biggest registry there is.

3. REGISTER WITH THE WORLD WIDE REGISTRY.

4. TALK TO YOUR ADOPTIVE PARENTS…AND COUSINS, UNCLES, OLDER SIBLINGS…

5. FIGURE OUT YOUR CONDUIT. In other words, who arranged the adoption? A church, a lawyer, a physician, an agency? They might be a source of information.

6. FILE A WAIVER OF CONFIDENTIALITY, so if your birth mom comes looking for you, she knows that you want to be contacted.

7. POST YOUR INFO REGULARLY. There are people who really do forward all over in the hope that your info gets to the right place!

8. PLACE ADS IN THE PRIMARY NEWSPAPERS OF YOUR BIRTH CITY.

9. ABOVE ALL ELSE, IGNORE ANY SEARCH COMPANY YOU SEE ON TV ADS OR TALK SHOWS! THEY ARE SCAMS!

At two in the morning, I was still online in an adoption search chat room, reacting to horror stories from people who wanted to save me the trouble of making the same mistakes. There was RiggleBoy, who had contacted a 1-900 search number and given them his credit card information, only to be socked with a bill for $6500 at the end of one month. There was Joy4Eva, who’d found out that she was taken away from her birth family for neglect and abuse. AllieCapone688 gave me a list of three books that she used when she was getting started-which cost less than all she’d spent on private investigators. Only one woman had a happy ending: she’d gone to a psychic named Meshinda Dows, who had given her such accurate information that she found her birth mom in a week’s time. Try it, FantaC suggested. What have you got to lose?

Well, my self-respect, for one. But all the same, I found myself Googling Meshinda Dows. She had one of those websites that takes forever to load, because there was a music file attached-in this case, an eerie mix of chimes and humpback whale songs. Meshinda Dows, the home page read, Certified psychic counselor.

Who certified psychic counselors? The U.S. Department of Snake Oil and Charlatans?

Serving the Cape Cod community for 35 years.

Which meant she was within driving distance from my home in Bankton.

Let me be your bridge to the past.

Before I could chicken out, I clicked on the email link and sent her a message explaining my search for my birth mom. Within thirty seconds of sending it, I got a reply:

Marin, I think I can be of great help to you. Are you free tomorrow afternoon?

I did not question why this woman was online at three in the morning. I didn’t let myself wonder why a successful psychic would have an opening so quickly. Instead, I agreed to the sixty-dollar consultation fee and printed out the driving directions she gave me.

Five hours after I’d left my house that morning, I pulled into Meshinda Dows’s driveway. She lived in a tiny house that was painted purple with red trim. She was easily in her sixties, but her hair was dyed jet black and reached her waist. “You must be Marin,” she said.

Wow, already she was one for one.

She led me into a room that was divided from the foyer with a curtain made of silk scarves. Inside were two couches facing each other across a square white ottoman. On the ottoman were a feather, a fan, and a deck of cards. The shelves in the room were covered with Beanie Babies, each sealed in a small plastic bag with a heart-shaped tag protector. They looked like they were all suffocating.

Meshinda sat down, and I followed suit. “I take the money up front,” she said.

“Oh.” I dug in my purse and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills, which she folded and stuck into her pocket.

“Why don’t we start with you telling me why you’re here?”

I blinked at her. “Shouldn’t you know that?”

“Psychic gifts don’t always work that way, hon,” she said. “You’re a little nervous, aren’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“You shouldn’t be. You’re protected. You have spirits around you,” she said. She closed her eyes and squinted. “Your…grandfather? He wants you to know he’s breathing better now.”

My jaw dropped open. My grandfather had died when I was thirteen, of complications from lung cancer. I had been terrified to visit him in the hospital and see him wasting away.

“He knew something important about your birth mother,” Meshinda said.

Well, that was convenient, since Grandpa couldn’t confirm or deny that now.

“She’s thin and has dark hair,” the psychic continued. “She was very young when it happened. I’m getting an accent…”

“Southern?” I asked.

“No, not Southern…I can’t quite place it.” Meshinda looked at me. “I’m also getting some names. Strange ones. Allagash…and Whitcomb…no, make that Whittier.”

“Allagash Whittier is a law firm in Nashua,” I said.

“I think they have information. It might have been a lawyer there who handled the adoption. I’d contact them. And Maisie. Someone named Maisie has some information, too.”

Maisie was the name of the clerk of the Hillsborough County court who’d sent me my adoption decree. “I’m sure she does,” I said. “She’s got the whole file.”

“I’m talking about another Maisie. An aunt or a cousin…she adopted a baby from Africa.”

“I don’t have an aunt or a cousin named Maisie,” I said.

“You do,” Meshinda insisted. “You haven’t met her yet.” She wrinkled up her face, as if she was sucking on a lemon. “Your birth father is named Owen. He has something to do with the law.”

I leaned forward, intrigued. Was that why I’d been attracted to the career?

“He and your birth mom have had three more children.”

Whether or not that was true, I felt a pang in my chest. How come those three got to stay, but I was given away? The old adage I’d been told over and over-that my birth parents loved me but couldn’t take care of me-had never quite rung true. If they loved me so much, why had I been dispensable?

Meshinda touched a hand to her head. “That’s it,” she said. “Nothing else coming through.” She patted my knee. “That lawyer,” she advised. “That’s the place to start.”

On the way back home, I stopped off at McDonald’s to eat something and sat outside at the human Habitrail playspace that was filled with toddlers and their caregivers. I called 411 and was connected to Allagash Whittier. By telling them I was an associate with Robert Ramirez, I was able to sweet-talk my way past the paralegals to a lawyer on staff. “Marin,” the woman said, “what can I do for you?”

On the small bench where I sat, I curled a little closer into myself, to make the conversation more private. “It’s sort of a strange request,” I said. “I’m trying to find some information about a client your firm may have had in the early seventies. It would have been a young woman, around sixteen or seventeen?”

“That shouldn’t be hard to find-we don’t get too many of those. What’s the last name?”

I hesitated. “I don’t have a last name, exactly.”

The line went silent. “Was this an adoption case?”

“Well. Yes. Mine.”

The woman’s voice was frosty. “I’d suggest you try the courthouse,” she said, and she hung up.

I clutched the cell phone between my hands and watched a little boy shriek his way down a curved purple slide. He was Asian, his mother was not. Was he adopted? One day, would he be sitting here like I was, facing a dead end?

I dialed 411 again, and a moment later was connected to Maisie Donovan, the adoption search administrator for Hillsborough County. “You probably don’t remember me,” I said. “A few months ago, you sent me my adoption decree…”

“Name?”

“Well, that’s what I’m looking for…”

“I meant your name,” Maisie said.

“Marin Gates.” I swallowed. “It’s the craziest thing,” I said. “I saw a psychic today. I mean, I’m not one of those nutcases who goes to psychics or anything…not that I have a problem with that if it’s something, you know, you like to do every now and then…but anyway, I went to this woman’s house and she told me that someone named Maisie had information about my birth mother.” I forced a laugh. “She couldn’t give me much more detail, but she got that part right, huh?”

“Ms. Gates,” Maisie said flatly, “what can I do for you?”

I bowed my head toward the ground. “I don’t know where to go from here,” I admitted. “I don’t know what to do next.”

“For fifty dollars, I can send you your nonidentifying information in a letter.”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever’s in your file that doesn’t give away names, addresses, phone numbers, birth date-”

“The unimportant stuff,” I said. “Do you think I’ll learn anything from it?”

“Your adoption wasn’t through an agency; it was a private one,” Maisie explained, “so there wouldn’t be much, I imagine. You’d probably find out that you’re white.”

I thought of the adoption decree she’d sent me. “I’m about as sure of that as I am that I’m female.”

“Well, for fifty dollars, I’m happy to confirm it.”

“Yes,” I heard myself say. “I’d like that.”

After I wrote the address where I needed to send my check on the back of my hand, I hung up and watched the children bouncing around like molecules in a heated solution. It was hard for me to imagine ever having a child. It was impossible to imagine giving one up.

“Mommy!” one little girl cried out from the top of a ladder. “Are you watching?”

Last night on the message boards, I had first seen the labels a-mom and b-mom. They weren’t rankings, as I’d first thought-just shorthand for adoptive mom and birth mom. As it turned out, there was a huge controversy over the terminology. Some birth mothers felt the label made them sound like breeders, not mothers, and wanted to be called first mother or natural mother. But by that logic, my mom became the second mother, or the unnatural mother. Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who’d sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who’d cried with me over boyfriends, who’d clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?

Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

Suddenly, I found myself thinking of Charlotte O’Keefe.

Piper

The patient was about thirty-five weeks into her pregnancy and had just moved to Bankton with her husband. I hadn’t seen her for any routine obstetric visits, but she’d been slotted into my schedule during my lunch break because she was complaining of fever and other symptoms that seemed to me like red flags for infection. According to the nurse who’d done the initial history, the woman had no medical problems.

I pushed open the door with a smile on my face, hoping to calm down what I was sure would be a panicking mother-to-be. “I’m Dr. Reece,” I said, shaking her hand and sitting down. “Sounds like you haven’t been feeling too well.”

“I thought it was the flu, but it wouldn’t go away…”

“It’s always a good idea to get something like that checked out when you’re pregnant anyway,” I said. “The pregnancy’s been normal so far?”

“A breeze.”

“And how long have you been having symptoms?”

“About a week now.”

“Well, I’ll give you a chance to change into a robe, and then we’ll see what’s going on.” I stepped outside and reread her chart while I waited a few moments for her to change.

I loved my job. Most of the time when you were an obstetrician, you were present at one of the most joyous moments of a woman’s life. Of course, there were incidents that were not quite as happy-I’d had my share of having to tell a pregnant woman that there’d been a fetal demise; I’d had surgeries where a placenta accreta led to DIC and the patient never regained consciousness. But I tried not to think about these; I liked to focus instead on the moment when that baby, slick and wriggling like a minnow in my hands, gasped its way into this world.

I knocked. “All set?”

She was sitting on the examination table, her belly resting on her lap like an offering. “Great,” I said, fitting my stethoscope to my ears. “We’ll start by listening to your chest.” I huffed on the metal disk-as an OB I was particularly sensitive to cold metal objects being placed anywhere on a person-and set it gently against the woman’s back. Her lungs were perfectly clear; no rasping, no rattles. “Sounds fine,” I said. “Now let’s check out your heart.”

I slid aside the neckline of the gown to find a large median sternotomy scar-the vertical kind that goes straight down the chest. “What’s that from?”

“Oh, that’s just my heart transplant.”

I raised my brows. “I thought you told the nurse that you didn’t have any medical problems.”

“I don’t,” the patient said, beaming. “My new heart’s working great.”

Charlotte didn’t start seeing me as a patient until she was trying to get pregnant. Before that, we were still just moms who made fun of our daughters’ skating coaches behind their backs; we’d save seats for each other at school parent nights; occasionally we’d get together with our spouses for dinner at a nice restaurant. But one day, when the girls were playing up in Emma’s room, Charlotte told me that she and Sean had been trying to get pregnant for a year, and nothing had happened.

“I’ve done it all,” she confided. “Ovulation predictors, special diets, Moon Boots-you name it.”

“Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.

“Well,” she said. “I was thinking about seeing you.”

I didn’t take on patients I knew personally. No matter what anyone said, you couldn’t be an objective physician if it was someone you loved lying on your operating table. You could argue that the stakes for an OB were always high-and there’s no question I gave 100 percent every time I walked into a delivery-but the stakes were just that tiny bit higher if the patient was personally connected to you. If you failed, you were not just failing your patient. You were failing your friend.

“I don’t think that’s the greatest idea, Charlotte,” I said. “It’s a tough line to cross.”

“You mean the whole you’ve-got-your-hand-up-my-cervix-now-sohow-can-you-look-me-in-the-eye-when-we-go-shopping part?”

I grinned. “Not that. Seen one uterus, seen them all,” I said. “It’s just that a physician should be able to keep her distance, instead of being personally involved.”

“But that’s exactly why you’re perfect for me,” Charlotte argued. “Another doctor would try to help us conceive but wouldn’t really give a damn. I want someone who cares beyond the point of professional responsibility. I want someone who wants me to have a baby as much as I want to.”

Put that way, how could I deny her? I called Charlotte every morning so that we could dissect the letters to the editor in the local paper. She was the first one I ran to when I was fuming at Rob and needed to vent. I knew what shampoo she used, which side of her car the gas tank was on, how she took her coffee. She was, simply, my best friend. “Okay,” I said.

A smile exploded on her face. “Do we start now?”

I burst out laughing. “No, Charlotte, I’m not going to do a pelvic exam on my living room floor while the girls are playing upstairs.”

Instead, I had her come to the office the following day. As it turned out, there was no medical reason that she and Sean were having trouble getting pregnant. We talked about how eggs decline in quality after women hit their thirties, which meant it might take longer to happen-but could still happen. I got her started on folic acid and on tracking her basal body temperature. I told Sean (in what had to have been his favorite conversation with me to date) that they should have sex more often. For six months, I tracked Charlotte’s menstrual calendar in my own appointment book; I’d call on the twenty-eighth day and ask if she’d started her period-and for six months, she had. “Maybe we should talk about fertility drugs,” I suggested, and the next month, just before her appointment with a specialist, Charlotte got pregnant the old-fashioned way.

Considering how long it took, the pregnancy itself was uneventful. Charlotte’s blood tests and urine cultures always came back clean; her blood pressure was never elevated. She was nauseated round the clock, and she’d call me after throwing up at midnight to ask why the hell it was called morning sickness.

At her eleventh week of pregnancy, we heard the heartbeat for the first time. At the fifteenth, I did a quad screen on her blood to check for neural defects and Down syndrome. Two days later, when her results came in, I drove to her house during my lunch break. “What’s wrong?” she asked, when she saw me standing at the door.

“Your test results. We have to talk.”

I explained that the quad screen wasn’t foolproof, that the test was designed specifically to have a 5 percent screen positive rate, which means that 5 percent of all women who took the test were going to be told that they had a higher than average risk of having a Down syndrome baby. “Based on your age alone, your risk is one in two hundred and seventy of having a baby with Down,” I said. “But the blood test came back saying that, actually, your risk is higher than average-it’s one in one hundred and fifty.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest.

“You’ve got a few options,” I said. “You’re scheduled for an ultrasound in three weeks anyway. We can take a look during that ultrasound and see if anything is a red flag. If it does show something, we can send you for a level two ultrasound. If not, we can reduce your odds again to one in two hundred and fifty, which is nearly average, and assume the test was a false reading. But just remember-the ultrasound isn’t one hundred percent peace of mind. If you want absolute answers, you’ll have to have amniocentesis.”

“I thought that could cause a miscarriage,” Charlotte said.

“It can. But the risk of that is one in two hundred and seventy-right now, less than the chance that the baby has Down syndrome.”

Charlotte rubbed a hand down her face. “So this amniocentesis,” she said. “If it turns out that the baby has…” Her voice trailed off. “Then what?”

I knew Charlotte was Catholic. I also knew, as a practitioner, that it was my responsibility to give everyone all the information I had whenever possible. What they chose to do with it, based on their personal beliefs, was up to them. “Then you can decide whether or not to terminate,” I said evenly.

She looked up at me. “Piper, I worked too hard to have this baby. I’m not going to give it up that easily.”

“You should talk this over with Sean-”

“Let’s do the ultrasound,” Charlotte decided. “Let’s just take it from there.”

For all of these reasons, I remember very clearly the first time we saw you on the screen. Charlotte was lying down on the examination table; Sean was holding her hand. Janine, the ultrasound tech who worked at my practice, was taking the measurements before I went in to read the results myself. We would be looking for hydrocephalus, an endocardial cushion defect or abdominal wall defect, nuchal fold thickening, a short or absent nasal bone, hydronephrosis, echogenic bowel, shortened humerior femurs-all markers used in the ultrasound diagnosis of Down syndrome. I made sure that the machine we used was one that had only recently arrived, brand-new, the ultimate technology at the time.

Janine came into my office as soon as she finished the scan. “I’m not seeing any of the usual suspects for Down,” she said. “The only abnormality is the femurs-they’re in the sixth percentile.”

We got readings like that all the time-a fraction of a millimeter for a fetus might look much shorter than normal and, at the next sonogram, be perfectly fine. “That could be genetics. Charlotte’s tiny.”

Janine nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to just mark it down as something to keep an eye on.” She paused. “There was something weird, though.”

My head snapped up from the file I was writing in. “What?”

“Check out the pictures of the brain when you’re in there.”

I could feel my heart sink. “The brain?”

“It looks anatomically normal. But it’s just incredibly…clear.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

So the ultrasound machine was exceptionally good at its job-I could see why Janine would be over the moon, but I didn’t have time to rhapsodize about the new equipment. “I’m going to tell them the good news,” I said, and I went into the examination room.

Charlotte knew; she knew as soon as she saw my face. “Oh, thank God,” she said, and Sean leaned over to kiss her. Then she reached for my hand. “You’re sure?”

“No. Ultrasound isn’t an exact science. But I’d say the odds of having a normal, healthy baby just increased dramatically.” I glanced at the screen, a frozen image of you sucking your thumb. “Your baby,” I said, “looks perfect.”

In my office, we did not advocate recreational ultrasounds-in layman’s terms, that means ultrasounds beyond those medically necessary. But sometime in Charlotte’s twenty-seventh week, she came to pick me up to go to a movie, and I was still delivering a baby at the hospital. An hour later, I found her in my office with her feet propped on the desk as she read a recent medical journal. “This is fascinating stuff,” she said. “‘Contemporary Management of Gestational Trophoblastic Neoplasia.’ Remind me to take one of these the next time I can’t fall asleep.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d be this late. She made it to seven centimeters and then stopped dead.”

“It’s no big deal. I didn’t really want to see a movie anyway. The baby’s been dancing on my bladder all afternoon.”

“Future ballerina?”

“Or placekicker, if you believe Sean.” She looked up at me, trying to read my face for clues about the baby’s sex.

Sean and Charlotte had chosen not to find out in advance. When parents told us that, we wrote it in their files. It had taken a Herculean effort for me to not peek during the ultrasound, so that I wouldn’t inadvertently give away the secret.

It was seven o’clock; the receptionist had gone home for the day; the patients were all gone. Charlotte had been allowed to wait for me only because everyone knew we were friends. “We wouldn’t have to tell him that we know,” I said.

“Know what?”

“The baby’s sex. Just because we missed the movie doesn’t mean we can’t catch another one…”

Charlotte’s eyes widened. “You mean an ultrasound?”

“Why not?” I shrugged.

“Is it safe?”

“Absolutely.” I grinned at her. “Come on, Charlotte. What have you got to lose?”

Five minutes later, we were in Janine’s ultrasound suite. Charlotte had hiked her shirt up beneath her bra, and her pants were pushed down low on her abdomen. I squirted gel onto her belly, and she squealed. “Sorry,” I said. “Cold.” Then I picked up the transducer and moved it over her skin.

The picture of you rose on the screen like a mermaid coming up to the water’s surface: black one moment, and then slowly solidifying into an image we could recognize. There was a head, a spine, your tiny hand.

I swept the transducer to a point between your legs. Instead of the crossed bones of a fetus cramped inside the womb, your soles touched each other, your legs practically forming a circle. The first break I saw was the femur. It was angulated, bent acutely, instead of being straight. On the tibia I could see a line of black, a new fracture.

“So?” Charlotte said happily, craning her neck to see the screen. “When do I get to see the family jewels?”

I swallowed, moving the transducer up to see the barrel of your chest and the beaded ribs. There were five healing fractures here.

The room started spinning around me. Still holding the transducer, I leaned forward, settling my head between my knees. “Piper?” Charlotte said, coming up on her elbows.

I had learned about osteogenesis imperfecta in medical school, but I had never actually seen a case. What I remembered about it were pictures of fetuses with in vitro fractures like yours. Fetuses that died at birth or shortly after.

“Piper?” Charlotte repeated. “Are you okay?”

Pulling myself upright, I drew in a deep breath. “Yes,” I said, my voice breaking. “But Charlotte…your daughter’s not.”

Sean

The very first time I heard the words osteogenesis imperfecta was after Piper drove Charlotte home, hysterical, from that off-the-cuff ultrasound in Piper’s office. With Charlotte sobbing in my arms, I tried to make sense of the words Piper was lobbing at me like missiles: collagen deficiency, bones angulated and thickened, beaded ribs. She had already called a colleague, Dr. Del Sol, who was a high-risk maternal-fetal-medicine physician at the hospital. We had an appointment for another ultrasound at 7:30 a.m.

I had just come home from work-a construction detail that had been hellish because it had rained the entire afternoon and evening. My hair was still damp from the shower, my shirt sticking to the damp skin of my back. Amelia was upstairs watching TV in our bedroom, and I had been holding a container of ice cream, eating right out of it with a spoon, when Piper and Charlotte came into the house. “Damn,” I said. “You caught me right in the act.” Then I realized that Charlotte was crying.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye. Take the mother who was handing a toy to her toddler in the backseat one moment, and in a massive motor vehicle accident the next. Or the frat boy who was chugging a beer on the porch as we drove up to arrest him for sexually assaulting another student. The wife who opened the door to find a police officer bearing the news of her husband’s death. In my job, I’d often been present at the transition when the world as you knew it became the disaster you never expected-but I had not been on the receiving end before.

My throat felt like it had been lined with cotton. “How bad?”

Piper looked away. “I don’t know.”

“This osteopatho-”

“Osteogenesis imperfecta.”

“How do you fix it?”

Charlotte had drawn back from me, her face swollen, her eyes red. “We can’t,” she said.

That night, after Piper had left and Charlotte had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, I got on the Internet and Googled OI. There were four types, plus three more that had recently been identified, but only two of them showed fractures in utero. Type II infants would die before birth, or shortly after. Type III infants would survive but could have rib fractures that caused life-threatening breathing problems. Bone abnormalities would get worse and worse. These children might never walk.

Other words started jumping off the screen:

Wormian bones. Codfish vertebrae. Intramedullary rodding.

Short stature-some people grow only three feet tall.

Scoliosis. Hearing loss.

Respiratory failure is the most frequent cause of death, followed by accidental trauma.

Because OI is a genetic condition, it has no cure.

And

When diagnosed in utero, the majority of these pregnancies end in pregnancy interruption.

Below this was a photograph of a dead infant who’d had Type II OI. I could not tear my eyes away from the knotted legs, the shifted torso. Was this what our baby looked like? If so, wasn’t it better to be stillborn?

At that thought, I squeezed my eyes shut, and prayed to God that He hadn’t been listening. I would have loved you if you’d been born with seven heads and a tail. I would have loved you if you never drew breath or opened your eyes to see me. I already loved you; that didn’t stop just because there was something wrong with the way your bones were made.

I quickly cleared the search history so that Charlotte wouldn’t accidentally bring up the photograph when she was surfing the Net, and moved upstairs quietly. I stripped in the dark and slid into bed beside your mother. When I wrapped my arms around her, she shifted closer to me. I let my hand fall over the swell of her belly just as you kicked, as if to tell me not to worry, not to believe a word I read.

The next day, after another ultrasound and an X-ray, Dr. Gianna Del Sol met us in her office to go over the report. “The ultrasound showed a demineralized skull,” she explained. “Her long bones are three standard deviations off the mean, and they’re angulated and thickened in a way that shows both healing fractures and new ones. The X-ray gave us a better picture of the rib fractures. All of this indicates that your baby has osteogenesis imperfecta.”

I felt Charlotte’s hand slip underneath mine.

“Based on the fact that we’re seeing multiple fractures, it seems like we’re talking about Type II or Type III.”

“Is one worse than the other?” Charlotte asked. I looked into my lap, because I already knew the answer to that.

“Type IIs normally do not survive after birth. Type IIIs have significant disabilities and sometimes early mortality.”

Charlotte burst into tears again; Dr. Del Sol passed her a box of tissues.

“It’s very hard to tell whether an infant has Type II or Type III. Type II can sometimes be diagnosed by ultrasound at sixteen weeks, Type III at eighteen. But every case is different, and your earlier ultrasound didn’t reveal any fractures. Because of that, we can’t give you an entirely accurate prognosis-beyond the fact that the best-case scenario is going to be severe, and the worst case will be lethal.”

I looked at her. “So even when you think it’s Type II, and that a baby has no chance of survival, it might beat the odds?”

“It’s happened,” Dr. Del Sol said. “I read a case study about parents who were given a lethal prognosis yet chose to continue the pregnancy and wound up with an infant with Type III. However, Type III kids are still severely disabled. They’ll have hundreds of breaks over the course of their lives. They may not be able to walk. There can be respiratory issues and joint problems, bone pain, muscle weakness, skull and spinal deformities.” She hesitated. “There are places that can help you, if termination is something you want to consider.”

Charlotte was twenty-seven weeks into her pregnancy. What clinic would do an abortion at twenty-seven weeks?

“We’re not interested in termination,” I said, and I looked at Charlotte for confirmation, but she was facing the doctor.

“Has there ever been a baby born here with Type II or Type III?” she asked.

Dr. Del Sol nodded. “Nine years ago. I wasn’t here at the time.”

“How many breaks did that baby have when it was born?”

“Ten.”

Charlotte smiled then, for the first time since last night. “Mine only has seven,” she had said. “So that’s already better, right?”

Dr. Del Sol hesitated. “That baby,” she said, “didn’t survive.”

One morning, when Charlotte’s car was being serviced, I took you to physical therapy. A very nice girl with a gap between her teeth whose name was Molly or Mary (I always forgot) made you balance on a big red ball, which you liked, and do sit-ups, which you didn’t. Every time you curled up on the side of your healing shoulder blade, your lips pressed together, and tears would streak from the corners of your eyes. I don’t even think you knew you were crying, really-but after watching this for about ten minutes, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told Molly/Mary that we had another appointment, a flat lie, and I settled you in your wheelchair.

You hated being in the chair, and I couldn’t say I blamed you. A good pediatric wheelchair was best when it was fitted well, because then you were comfortable, safe, and mobile. But they cost over $2800, and insurance would pay for one only every five years. The wheelchair you were riding in these days had been fitted to you when you were two, and you’d grown considerably since then. I couldn’t even imagine how you’d squeeze into it at age seven.

On the back of it, I had painted a pink heart and the words HANDLE WITH CARE. I pushed you out to the car and lifted you into your car seat, then folded the wheelchair into the back of the van. When I slid into the driver’s seat and checked you in the rearview mirror, you were cradling your sore arm. “Daddy,” you said, “I don’t want to go back there.”

“I know, baby.”

Suddenly I knew what I would do. I drove past our exit on the highway, to the Comfort Inn in Dover, and paid sixty-nine dollars for a room I had no plans to use. Strapped in your wheelchair, I pushed you to the indoor pool.

It was empty on a Tuesday morning. The room smelled heavily of chlorine, and there were six chaise lounges in various states of disrepair scattered around. A skylight was responsible for the dance of diamonds on the surface of the water. A stack of green and white striped towels sat on a bench beneath a sign: SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.

“Wills,” I said, “you and I are going swimming.”

You looked at me. “Mom said I can’t, until my shoulder-”

“Mom isn’t here to find out, is she?”

A smile bloomed on your face. “What about our bathing suits?”

“Well, that’s part of the plan. If we stop off home to get our suits, Mom’ll know something’s up, won’t she?” I stripped off my T-shirt and sneakers, and stood before you in a pair of faded cargo shorts. “I’m good to go.”

You laughed and tried to get your shirt over your head, but you couldn’t lift your arm high enough. I helped, and then shimmied your shorts down your legs so that you were sitting in the wheelchair in your underpants. They said THURSDAY on the front, although it was Tuesday. On the butt was a yellow smiley face.

After four months in the spica cast, your legs were thin and white, too reedy to support you. But I held you under the armpits as you walked toward the water and then sat you down on the steps. From a supply bin against the far wall, I took a kid’s life jacket and zipped it onto you. I carried you in my arms to the middle of the pool.

“Fish can swim at sixty-eight miles an hour,” you said, clutching at my shoulders.

“Impressive.”

“The most common name for a goldfish is Jaws.” You wrapped your arm around my neck in a death grip. “A can of Diet Coke floats in a pool. Regular Coke sinks…”

“Willow?” I said. “I know you’re nervous. But if you don’t close your mouth, a lot of water’s going to go into it.” And I let go.

Predictably, you panicked. Your arms and legs started pinwheeling, and the combined force flipped you onto your back, where you splashed and stared up at the ceiling. “Daddy! Daddy! I’m drowning!”

“You’re not drowning.” I lifted you upright. “It’s all about those stomach muscles. The ones you didn’t want to work on today at therapy. Think about moving slowly and staying upright.” More gently this time, I released you.

You bobbled, your mouth sinking under the water. Immediately, I lunged for you, but you righted yourself. “I can do it,” you said, maybe to me and maybe to yourself. You moved one arm through the water, and then the other, compensating for the shoulder that was still healing. You bicycled your legs. And incrementally, you came closer to me. “Daddy!” you shouted, although I was only two feet away. “Daddy! Look at me!”

I watched you moving forward, inch by inch. “Look at you,” I said, as you paddled under the weight of your own conviction. “Look at you.”

“Sean,” Charlotte said that night, when I thought she might have already fallen asleep beside me, “Marin Gates called today.”

I was on my side, staring at the wall. I knew why the lawyer had phoned Charlotte: because I hadn’t answered the six messages she’d left on my cell, asking me whether I had returned the signed papers agreeing to file a wrongful birth lawsuit-or if they’d somehow gotten lost in the mail.

I knew exactly where those papers were: inside the glove compartment of my car, where I’d shoved them after Charlotte handed them to me a month ago. “I’ll get around to it,” I said.

Her hand lighted on my shoulder. “Sean-”

I rolled onto my back. “You remember Ed Gatwick?” I asked.

“Ed?”

“Yeah. Guy I graduated from the academy with? He was on the job in Nashua. Responded to a call last week about suspicious activity at a residence, made by a neighbor. He told his partner he had a bad feeling about it, but he went inside, just in time for the meth lab in the kitchen to blow up in his face.”

“How awful-”

“My point being,” I interrupted, “that you should always listen to your gut.”

“I am,” Charlotte said. “I did. You heard what Marin said. Most of these cases settle out of court anyway. It’s money. Money that we could put to good use for Willow.”

“Yeah, and Piper becomes the sacrificial lamb.”

Charlotte got quiet. “She has malpractice insurance.”

“I don’t think that protects her against backstabbing by her best friend.”

She drew the sheet around her, sitting up in bed. “She would do it if it was her daughter.”

I stared at her. “I don’t think she would. I don’t think most people would.”

“Well, I don’t care what other people think. Willow’s opinion is the only one that counts,” Charlotte said.

That, I realized, was the reason that I hadn’t signed those damn papers. Like Charlotte, I was only thinking of you. I was thinking of the moment you realized that I wasn’t a knight in shining armor. I knew it would happen eventually-that’s what growing up is all about. But I didn’t want to rush it. I wanted to be your champion for as long as I could keep you believing in me.

“If Willow’s opinion is the only one that counts,” I said, “how are you going to explain to her what you’re doing? I mean, you want to lie on the witness stand-say you would have aborted her-that’s up to you. But to Willow, it might sound a hell of a lot like the truth.”

Tears sprang to Charlotte’s eyes. “She’s smart. She’ll understand that it doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface. She’ll know deep down that I love her.”

It was a catch-22. My refusal to sign those papers didn’t mean Charlotte wouldn’t try to proceed without me. If I refused to sign those papers, the rift between the two of us would hurt you, too. But what if Charlotte’s prediction came true-that the money we’d get as a payout would go a long way toward justifying whatever wrong we’d done to get it? What if this lawsuit made it possible for you to have any adaptive aid you needed, any therapy not covered by insurance?

If I really wanted what was best for you, how could I sign those papers?

How could I not?

Suddenly, I wanted to make Charlotte see how this was tearing me up inside. I wanted her to feel the same sick knot that I felt every time I opened up my glove compartment and saw that envelope. It was like Pandora’s box-she had opened it, and what had flown out but a solution to a problem we never imagined could be solved. Closing the lid now wouldn’t change anything; we couldn’t unlearn what we now knew to be possible.

I guess, if I was being honest, I wanted to punish her for putting me into this situation, where there was no black and white but a thousand shades of gray.

She was surprised when I grabbed her and kissed her. She backed away at first, looking at me, and then leaned into my body, trusting me to take her down a dizzy road where I’d taken her a thousand times before. “I love you,” I said. “Do you believe that?”

Charlotte nodded, and as soon as she did, I tightened my fingers in her hair, forcing her head back and pinning her to the mattress. “Sean, you’re crushing me,” she whispered, and I covered her mouth with one hand and roughly ripped aside her pajama bottoms with the other. I forced my way inside her, even as she fought against me, even as I watched her back arch with surprise and maybe pain, even as her eyes filled with tears. “Doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface,” I whispered, her own words striking her like a whip. “You know deep down that I love you.”

I had started this wanting to make Charlotte feel like crap, but somehow, I wound up feeling like crap myself. So I rolled off her, yanking up my boxers. Charlotte turned away, curling into a ball. “You bastard,” she sobbed. “You fucking bastard.”

She was right; I was one. I had to be, or I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did next: walk out to the car and get those papers from the glove compartment. Sit in the dark in the kitchen the whole of the night, staring at them, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something more acceptable. Knock down a shot of whiskey for each of the lines where Marin Gates had placed a little yellow Post-it arrow, pointing to the space where my signature was supposed to be.

I fell asleep at the kitchen table, waking before the sun did. When I tiptoed into the bedroom, Charlotte was still sleeping. She was on her side curled like a snail, the sheet and comforter balled at the bottom of the bed. I pulled them over her gently, the way I sometimes did for you when you’d kicked your blankets loose.

I left the papers, signed in all the right places, on the pillow beside her. With a note paper-clipped to the top. I’m sorry, I had written. Forgive me.

Then I drove to work, wondering the whole time whether that message had been intended for Charlotte, for you, or for myself.

Amelia

Late August 2007

Let’s just say right off the bat that we lived in the sticks, and although my parents seemed to think this was going to be a huge benefit to me later in life (Why? Because I’d know what green grass smelled like firsthand? Because we didn’t have to lock our front door?), I for one wished I’d had a vote when it came to settling down. Do you have any idea what it’s like not to be able to get a cable modem when even Eskimos have them? Or to go shopping for school clothes at Wal-Mart because the nearest mall is an hour and a half away? Last year in social studies, when we were studying cruel and unusual punishment, I wrote a whole essay about living where the retail opportunities were somewhere between zero and nil, and although everyone in my class totally agreed with me, I only got a B, because my teacher was the kind of Birkenstock-granola hippie who thought Bankton, New Hampshire, was the best place on earth.

Today, though, all the planets must have aligned, because my mother had agreed to road-trip to Target with you and Piper and Emma.

It had been Piper’s idea-right before the school year started she occasionally decided to do a mother-daughter shopping extravaganza. My mother usually had to be persuaded to come along, because we never seemed to have enough cash. Inevitably, Piper would wind up buying things for me, and my mother would feel guilty and swear she was never going shopping with Piper again. What’s the big deal? Piper would say. I like making the girls happy. What’s the big deal indeed? If Piper wanted to pad my wardrobe, I wasn’t about to deny her that one small joy.

When Piper called this morning, though, I thought my mother would jump at the opportunity. You had once again managed to outgrow a pair of shoes without ever wearing them. Usually it was just one or the other-the left one got used while the right foot was stuck in a cast for a few months-but with the spica you’d worn this spring, both your feet had managed to grow a whole size, and the soles of your old shoes were barely even scuffed. Now-six months later, when you were officially learning to walk again-it had taken my mother a week to figure out that the reason you winced every time she made you use the walker to get to the bathroom by yourself had nothing to do with pain in your legs but actually with your feet being stuffed into too-tight sneakers.

To my surprise, my mother didn’t want to go. She had been in a really weird mood; she had practically leapt out of her skin when I came up behind her while she was drinking a cup of coffee and reading some legal papers that looked totally boring and full of words like IN RE and WHOSOEVER. And when Piper called and I handed her the phone, Mom dropped it twice. “I can’t,” I heard her tell Piper. “I’ve got some really important errands to run.”

“Please, Mom?” I said, dancing around in front of her. “I promise, I won’t even take a stick of gum from Piper. Not like last time.”

Something I said must have struck a chord, because she looked down at those papers and then up at me. “Last time,” she repeated absently, and the next thing I knew, we were on our way to Concord, to go shopping. My mother was still a little out of it, but I didn’t notice. Piper’s van had a DVD system, and you and Emma and I had wireless headphones on so that we could listen to 13 Going on 30, which is the best movie ever. The last time I’d watched it had been at our house, and Piper had done the whole “Thriller” dance along with Jennifer Garner, leading Emma to proclaim that she just wanted to die of embarrassment on the spot, even though I secretly thought it was really cool that Piper could remember all the steps.

Two hours later, Emma and I were running through the juniors’ section. Even though most of the styles seemed to have been made by Skanky Ho Enterprises, with V-necks that reached down to the belly button and pants so low-rise they could have been kneesocks, it was exciting to shop in an area that wasn’t the kids’ section. Across the aisle, Piper was pushing your wheelchair, navigating aisles that were completely not made for disabled people. Meanwhile, my mother-whose mood had deteriorated, if possible-kept kneeling down to try shoes on your feet. “Did you know those plastic thingies on the ends of the shoelaces are called aglets?” you asked.

“As a matter of fact I did,” she said, exasperated, “because you told me the last time we did this.”

I watched Emma reach up on her tiptoes to take down a blouse that would, as my mother would say, show the entire world your business. “Emma!” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“You wear it with a camisole,” she said, and I pretended I had known that all along. The truth is that Emma could probably put that on and look like she was sixteen, because she was already five-five, and tall and thin like her mother. I didn’t wear camisoles. It was just too depressing to know that the roll at my belly stuck out farther than my boobs.

I slipped my hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt. Inside was a plastic Ziploc bag. I’d been carrying them around for the past week. Twice now I’d made myself sick in places that weren’t bathrooms-once behind the gym at school, once in Emma’s kitchen, when she was upstairs looking for a CD. I’d do it when it got to the point where it was all I could think about-Would I be found out? Would it stop the ache in my belly?-and the only way to make it go away was to just give in and do it already, except after it happened, I hated myself for not holding out.

“This would look good on you,” Emma said, holding up a pair of sweatpants big enough for an elephant.

“I don’t like yellow,” I said, and I wandered across the aisle.

Piper and my mother were in the middle of a conversation. Well, that’s not really accurate. Piper was in the middle of a conversation and my mother was physically present in the same general space. She was zoned out, nodding at the right times but not really listening. She thought she could fool people, but she wasn’t that great an actress. Take you, for example. How many fights had she had with Dad about whether or not to hire a lawyer, while you were sitting in the next room? And then, when you asked why they were arguing, she’d insist they weren’t. Did she really think you were so incredibly involved in Drake & Josh episodes that you weren’t hanging on every word?

I wished she’d listen. I wished she could hear the things you asked me when we were lying in bed at night, before we fell asleep: Amelia, will we all live here forever? Amelia, will you help me brush my teeth, so I don’t have to ask Mom to do it? Amelia, can your parents ever send you back to the place you came from?

Was it any wonder that I found myself staring in the mirror at my disgusting face and even more disgusting body? My mother was going to a lawyer to sue over a kid who had turned out less than perfect.

“Where’s Emma?” Piper asked.

“In the juniors’ section, scoping out tops.”

“Decent ones, or the tight kind that look like ads for porn?” Piper asked. “Some of the clothing they make for kids your age must be illegal.”

I laughed. “Emma could always hire a lawyer. We know a good one.”

“Amelia!” my mother cried out. “Look what you made me do!” But she said this before she managed to knock over the entire display of blouses.

“Oh, shoot,” Piper said, hurrying to fix the racks. Over her head, my mother gave me a tight-lipped shake of her head.

She was angry at me, and I didn’t even know why. I slipped through the forest of girls’ clothing, my hands spread to brush against the vines of pant legs and sleeves. I ducked my head as I passed by Emma again. What had I done wrong?

Then again, what didn’t I do wrong?

It was almost like she was mad I had brought up the lawyer in front of Piper. But Piper was her best friend. This legal thing was front and center in our house, like a dinosaur at the dinner table that we all pretended wasn’t sticking its big, slimy face into the mashed potatoes. She couldn’t have forgotten to mention it to Piper, could she?

Unless…she very intentionally hadn’t.

Was this why she hadn’t wanted to go shopping with Piper? Why we hadn’t recently dropped by Piper’s house when we were in the neighborhood, the way we used to? When my mother talked about damages and getting enough money to really take care of you the way that would help you the most, I hadn’t really given much thought to the person who’d be on the receiving end of the lawsuit.

If it was the doctor she had been seeing when she was pregnant…well, that was Piper.

Suddenly I wasn’t the only person in my mother’s life who had turned out to be a disappointment. But instead of feeling let off the hook, I just felt sick.

I stood up, turning corners blindly, until I found myself standing in the lingerie section. I was crying by then, and just my luck, the only Target employee who was on the floor instead of the cash registers happened to be standing right in front of me. “Hon?” she asked. “Are you okay? Are you lost?”

As if I were five years old and had been separated from my mother. Which, actually, was not all that far off the mark.

“I’m fine,” I said, ducking my head. “Thanks.” I pushed past her, heading through the bras, even as one got caught on my sleeve. It was pink and silky, with brown polka dots. It looked like the kind of thing Emma would wear.

Instead of putting it back on its hanger, I stuffed it into my pocket, next to my Ziploc bags. I curled my fingers around it and checked to see whether the employee had been watching. The satin was cold between my fingers. I could swear it was pulsing, a secret heartbeat.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the woman asked again.

“Yes,” I said, the lie coming easily, reminding me that, even as much as I hated her right now, I was my mother’s daughter.

Piper

September 2007

I’ve always said that the best part of my job is that I don’t do the work: that’s up to the prospective mother, and I basically monitor what’s going on and keep it running smoothly.

“Okay, Lila,” I said, removing my hand from between her legs. “We’re at ten centimeters. Almost there. You’ve got to push for me now.”

She shook her head. “You do it,” she muttered.

She’d been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. “You are so beautiful,” her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.

“You are so full of shit,” Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed. I could see the fetal head swelling closer, and I held up my hand to keep it from popping out too fast and tearing the perineum. “Again,” I urged. This time, the fetal head rushed forward like a tide, and as the mouth and nose broke the seal of Lila’s skin, I suctioned them. The rest of the head was delivered, and I slipped the cord over it, supporting it as I turned the baby to control the shoulders. Five seconds later, the baby was balanced in the scale of my hands. “It’s a boy,” I said, as he announced, with a healthy cry, his own presence.

The cord was clamped, and Lila’s husband cut it. “Oh, baby,” he said, kissing her on the mouth.

“Oh, baby,” Lila echoed, as her newborn son was settled in her arms by the labor nurse.

I smiled and resumed my position at the foot of the birthing chair. Now came the unceremonious part of the happy event: waiting around for the placenta to present itself like a late houseguest; checking the vagina, cervix, and vulva for lacerations and repairing them if necessary; doing a digital rectal exam. To be honest, the parents were usually so engrossed in the newest addition to their family, some women didn’t even notice what was going on below their waists anymore.

Ten minutes later I congratulated the couple, stripped off my gloves, washed my hands, and headed outside to begin filling out the mountain of paperwork. I had barely taken two steps outside the patient’s door, though, when a man wearing jeans and a polo shirt approached. He looked lost, like a father who was staggering into the birthing pavilion to locate his wife. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“Are you Dr. Reece? Dr. Piper Reece?”

“Guilty as charged.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out what looked like a folded blue brochure, which he handed to me. “Thanks,” he said, and he turned on his heel.

I opened the document and saw the words WRONGFUL BIRTH ACTION.

Birth of an unhealthy child.

Parents’ right to recover is based on the defendant’s negligent deprivation of the parents’ right not to conceive a child or to prevent the child’s birth.

Medically negligent.

Defendant failed to exercise due care.

Plaintiffs suffered injury or loss.

I had never been sued before, although, like every other obstetrician, I had medical malpractice insurance. On some level, I’d known that my lack of lawsuits was sheer luck-that it would happen sooner or later. I just hadn’t expected it to feel like such a personal affront.

There had certainly been tragedies during my career-babies that were stillborn, mothers whose complications during childbirth led to excessive bleeding and even brain death. I carried those incidents with me, every day; I didn’t need a lawsuit to make me revisit them over and over, and wonder what could have been done differently.

Which disaster had precipitated this? My eyes scanned to the top of the page again, reading the plaintiffs’ names, which I’d somehow missed the first time around.

SEAN AND CHARLOTTE O’KEEFE v. PIPER REECE.

Suddenly I couldn’t see. The space between my eyes and the paper was washed red, like the blood that was pounding so loudly in my ears that I did not hear a nurse ask if I was all right. I staggered down the hall to the first door I could find-into a supply closet filled with gauze and linens.

My best friend was suing me for medical malpractice.

For wrongful birth.

For not telling her earlier about your disease, so that she would have had the chance to abort the child she’d begged me to help her conceive.

I sank down onto the floor and cradled my head in my hands. One week ago, we’d driven down to Target with the girls. I’d treated her to lunch at an Italian bistro. Charlotte had tried on a pair of black pants and we’d laughed about low-rise waistbands and how there should be support thongs for women over forty. We’d bought Emma and Amelia matching pajamas.

We’d spent seven hours together in close quarters, and not once had she managed to mention that she was in the process of suing me.

I pulled my cell phone out of the clip at my waist and speed-dialed her-number 3, outranked only by Home and Rob’s office. “Hello?” Charlotte answered.

It took me a moment to find my voice. “What is this?”

“Piper?”

“How could you? Everything was fine for five years, and all of a sudden out of nowhere you slap a lawsuit on me?”

“I really don’t think we should be talking on the phone-”

“For God’s sake, Charlotte. Do I deserve this? What did I ever do to you?”

There was a beat of silence. “It’s what you didn’t do,” Charlotte said, and the line went dead.

Charlotte’s medical records were back at my office, a ten-minute drive from the hospital birthing pavilion. As I entered, my receptionist glanced up. “I thought you were at a delivery,” she said.

“It’s over.” I walked past her, into the records room, and pulled Charlotte’s file, then headed back outside to my car.

I sat in the driver’s seat with the file in my lap. Don’t think of this as Charlotte, I told myself. This is just any other patient. But when I tried to bring myself to open the manila folder with the bright tabs on the edge, I couldn’t do it.

I drove to Rob’s practice. He was the only orthodontist in Bankton, New Hampshire, and pretty much had a monopoly on the adolescent market there, but he still went out of his way to make the dental experience something kids would enjoy. In one corner of the office was a projection TV, where a generic teen comedy was currently playing. There was a pinball machine and a computer station where patients could play video games. I walked up to his receptionist, Keiko. “Hi, Piper,” she said. “Wow, I don’t think we’ve seen you here in a good six months-”

“I need to see Rob,” I interrupted. “Now.” I grasped the file in my hands more tightly. “Can you tell him I’ll meet him in his office?”

Unlike my office, which was all the colors of the sea and designed to put a woman at ease, in spite of the plaster models of fetal development that dotted the shelves like little Buddhas, Rob’s was luxurious, paneled, masculine. He had an enormous desk, mahogany bookshelves, Ansel Adams prints on the wall. I sat down in his tufted leather chair and spun it around once. I felt small here. Inconsequential.

I did the one thing I’d wanted to do for two hours now: burst into tears.

“Piper?” Rob said as he came in to find me sobbing. “What’s the matter?” He was at my side in a second, smelling of toothpaste and coffee as he folded me into his embrace. “Are you okay?”

“I’m being sued,” I managed. “By Charlotte.”

He drew back. “What?”

“Med mal. For Willow.”

“I don’t get it,” Rob said. “You weren’t even at the delivery.”

“This is about what happened before.” I glanced down at the file, still on the desk. “The diagnosis.”

“But you did diagnose it. You referred her to the hospital when you found out.”

“Apparently, Charlotte thinks I should have been able to tell her earlier-because then she could have had an abortion.”

Rob shook his head. “Okay, that’s ridiculous. They’re die-hard Catholics. Remember that time you and Sean started arguing about Roe v. Wade and he left the restaurant?”

“That doesn’t matter. I have other patients who are Catholic. You counsel termination no matter what, if it’s an option. You don’t make the decision for the couple, based on your own assumptions about them.”

Rob hesitated. “Maybe this is about money.”

“Would you ruin your best friend’s reputation as a doctor just to get a settlement?”

Rob glanced down at the file. “If I know you, you documented every last detail of Charlotte’s pregnancy in there, right?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, what does it say in the file?”

“I…can’t open it. You do it, Rob.”

“Sweetheart, if you don’t remember, it’s probably because there’s nothing to remember. This is crazy. Just look through the file, and turn it over to the malpractice carrier. That’s what you have insurance for, right?”

I nodded.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

I shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it. As the door closed behind him, I took a deep breath and opened the manila folder. I started at the very beginning, with Charlotte’s medical history.

Not to be confused, I thought to myself, with our personal history.

HEIGHT: 5'2''

WEIGHT: 145

Patient has been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for a year.

I flipped the page-lab results that confirmed pregnancy; the blood tests for HIV, syphilis, hep B, anemia; urinalysis that screened for bacteria, sugar protein. All had been normal, until the quad screen, and the elevated risk for Down syndrome.

The eighteen-week ultrasound had been part of routine pregnancy care, but I’d also been looking to confirm Down syndrome. Had I been so focused on that one task I never thought to look for any other anomalies? Or had they simply not been there?

I pored over the ultrasound report, scrutinized the pictures for any inkling of a break that I might have missed. I stared at the spine, at the heart, at the ribs, at the long bones. A fetus with OI might have had breaks at that point in time, but the collagen defect in the bones would have made them even more difficult to see. You couldn’t really fault a physician for not red-flagging something that appeared, for all intents and purposes, normal.

The last image on the ultrasound report was of the fetal skull.

I flattened my hands on either side of the page, pinning down a picture of the brain that was sharp and focused.

Crystal clear.

Not because of the quality of our new equipment, as I’d assumed at the time, but because of a demineralized calvarium, a skull that had not ossified correctly.

As physicians, we’re taught to look for things that are abnormal-not things that are too perfect.

Had I known back then, long before I knew you and your illness, that a demineralized calvarium was a hallmark of OI? Should I have known? Had I pushed down gently on Charlotte’s belly, to see if the fetal skull gave way to the pressure? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember anything, except telling her that her baby didn’t seem to have Down syndrome.

I couldn’t remember if I’d taken measures that I could point to, now, that could be used to prove this wasn’t my fault.

I reached into my pocketbook and took out my wallet. Buried in the very bottom, among the gum wrappers and the pens from pharma companies, was a rubber-banded stack of business cards I had accumulated. I shuffled through them until I found the one I was looking for. Picking up Rob’s phone, I dialed the law firm’s number.

“Booker, Hood and Coates,” the receptionist said.

“I’m one of your medical malpractice clients,” I replied. “And I think I need your help.”

That night, I could not sleep. I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror, trying to see if I already looked different than I had when the day had begun. Could you see doubt written on a face? Did it settle in the fine lines around the eyes, the bracket of the mouth?

Rob and I had decided not to tell Emma what had happened, at least not until there was something concrete to tell. It occurred to me that Amelia might mention something now that school had started up again-but then, maybe Amelia didn’t know what her parents were doing, either.

I sat down on the toilet seat and looked at the moon. Full, orange, it seemed to be balanced on the windowsill. The light spilled into the bathroom and across the tile floor, pooling in the bowl of the tub. It wouldn’t be long before dawn, and then I would be expected to go to work and take care of patients who were pregnant or trying to become pregnant, when I could no longer be sure of my own judgment.

The few times I’d been so upset that I couldn’t sleep-like after my father died, and when my office manager stole several thousand dollars from the practice-I’d called Charlotte. Although I was the one who was used to being phoned in the middle of the night for an emergency, she hadn’t complained. She’d acted as if she’d been expecting me to call, and even though I knew she had a thousand things to do the next day with Willow or Amelia, she’d stay up with me for hours, talking about everything and nothing, until my mind stopped racing long enough for me to relax.

I was licking my wounds, and I wanted to call my best friend. Except this time, she was the one who’d caused them.

A daddy longlegs was crawling up the wall. It left me almost breathless. Everything I knew about physics and gravity told me that it should be tumbling to the ground. The closer it got to the ceiling, the more I was riveted. It tucked two legs around the curl at the top of the wallpaper, where the strip had begun peeling off.

I’d asked Rob to fix it a thousand times; he’d ignored me. But now that I was looking at it-really looking-I realized I didn’t like this wallpaper at all. What we needed was a fresh start. A good, new coat of paint.

I stood on the lip of the tub, reached up with my right hand, and in one swift pull, tore away a long tongue of wallpaper.

Most of the strip, though, was still affixed to the wall.

What did I know about removing wallpaper?

What did I know about anything?

I needed a steamer. But at three in the morning, I wasn’t going to get one, so I turned on the hot-water faucets in the bath and the sink, letting steam cloud the room. I tried to curl my fingernails under the edges, to scrape the strip free.

There was a sudden rush of cold air. “What the hell are you doing?” Rob asked, bleary, standing in the doorway.

“Stripping the wallpaper.”

“In the middle of the night? Piper,” he sighed.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He turned off the taps. “You have to try.” Rob led me by the hand back to bed, where I lay down and drew the covers over me. I curled onto my side, and he fitted his arm around my waist.

“I could redo the bathroom,” I whispered when his even breathing told me he was asleep again.

Charlotte and I had spent one day last summer reading every kitchen and bath makeover magazine in the Barnes & Noble racks. Maybe you should go minimalist, Charlotte had suggested, and then, turning the page, French provincial?

Get an air tub, she’d suggested. A TOTO toilet. A heated towel rack.

I’d laughed. A second mortgage?

When I met with Guy Booker at the law firm, would he take inventory of this house? Of our mutual funds and retirement accounts and Emma’s college savings and all the other assets that could be taken away in a settlement?

Tomorrow, I decided, I would get one of those steamers. And whatever other tools I needed to strip wallpaper. I would fix it all myself.

“I think I dropped the ball,” I admitted as I sat across from Guy Booker at a gleaming, imposing conference table.

My lawyer reminded me of Cary Grant-white hair with a raven’s wing of color at the temples, tailored suit, even that little divot in his chin. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” he said.

He had told me that we had twenty days to file an answer to the complaint I’d been served-a formal pleading for the court. “You say that osteogenesis imperfecta can be diagnosed by a woman’s twentieth week of pregnancy?” he asked.

“Yes-the lethal kind, anyway, by ultrasound.”

“Yet the patient’s daughter survived.”

“Right,” I said. Thank God.

I liked that he was referring to Charlotte as “the patient.” It made it feel more clinical. It was one step farther away.

“So she’s got the severe type-Type III.”

“Yes.”

He flipped through the file again. “The femur was in the sixth percentile?”

“Right. That’s documented.”

“But it’s not a definitive marker for OI.”

“It can mean all sorts of things. Down syndrome, skeletal dysplasia…or a short parent, or the fact that we took a bad measurement. A lot of fetuses with standard deviations like Willow’s at eighteen weeks go on to be perfectly healthy. It’s not until a later ultrasound, when that number falls off the charts, that we know we’re dealing with some abnormality.”

“So your advice would have been to wait and see, regardless?”

I stared at him. Put that way, it didn’t seem like I’d made a mistake. “But the skull,” I said. “My technician pointed it out-”

“Did she say to you that she thought there might be a medical issue?”

“No, but-”

“She said it was a very clear picture of the brain.” He looked up at me. “Yes, your ultrasound technician called attention to something unusual-but not necessarily symptomatic. It might have been a technical issue with the machine, or the position of the transducer, or just a damn good scan.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said, feeling tears claw at the back of my throat. “It was OI, and I missed it.”

“You’re talking about a procedure that isn’t a conclusive test for the presence of OI. Or in other words, had the patient been seeing another physician instead of you, the same thing would have happened. That’s not malpractice, Piper. That’s sour grapes, on the part of the parents.” Guy frowned. “Do you know of any physician who would have diagnosed OI based on the eighteen-week ultrasound of a demineralized calvarium, a shortened femur, and no obvious skeletal fractures?”

I glanced down at the table. I could nearly see my own reflection. “No,” I admitted. “But they would have sent Charlotte for further testing-a more advanced ultrasound, and a CVS.”

“You’d already suggested further testing once to the patient,” Guy pointed out. “When her quad screen came back with a greater chance of having a Down syndrome baby.”

I met his gaze.

“You advised amniocentesis then, didn’t you? And what was her response?”

For the first time since I’d been handed that little blue folder, I felt the knot in my chest release. “She was going to have Willow no matter what.”

“Well, Dr. Reece,” the lawyer said. “That sure as hell doesn’t sound to me like wrongful birth.”

Charlotte

I started lying all the time.

At first it was just tiny white lies: responses to questions like “Ma’am, are you okay?” when the dental receptionist called my name three times and I didn’t hear her; or when a telemarketer phoned and I said that I was too busy to do a survey, when in fact I’d been sitting at the kitchen table staring into space. Then I began to lie in earnest. I’d cook a roast for dinner, completely forget it was in the oven, and tell Sean as he sawed through the blackened char that it clearly was the shoddy cut of meat the market had started stocking. I’d smile at neighbors and tell them, when they asked, that we were all doing well. And when your kindergarten teacher called me up and asked me to come to school because there had been an incident, I acted as if I had no idea what might have upset you in the first place.

When I arrived, you were sitting in the empty classroom in a tiny chair beside Ms. Watkins’s desk. The transition to public school had been less divine than I’d expected it to be. Yes, you had a full-time aide paid for by the state of New Hampshire, but I had to argue every last right for you-from the ability to go to the bathroom by yourself to the chance to interact in gym class when the play wasn’t too strenuous and you weren’t in danger of suffering a break. The good news was that this took my mind off the lawsuit. The bad news was that I wasn’t allowed to stay and make sure you were doing all right. You were in a classroom with new kids who didn’t know you-and who didn’t know about OI. When I asked you after your first day what you did in school, you told me how you and Martha played with Cuisenaire rods, how you were on the same team for Capture the Flag. I’d been thrilled to hear about this new friend and asked if you wanted to invite her over to the house. “I don’t think she can, Mom,” you told me. “She has to cook dinner for her family.”

As far as I knew, the only friend you’d made in this class was your aide.

Your eyes flickered toward me when I shook the teacher’s hand, but you didn’t speak. “Hi, Willow,” I said, sitting down beside you. “I hear you had a little trouble today.”

“Do you want to tell your mom what happened, or should I?” Ms. Watkins asked.

You folded your arms and shook your head.

“Willow was invited to participate in some imaginary play with two children this morning.”

My face lit up. “But-that’s terrific! Willow loves to pretend.” I turned to you. “Were you being animals? Or doctors? Space explorers?”

“They were playing house,” Ms. Watkins explained. “Cassidy was role-playing the mom; Daniel was the dad-”

“And they wanted me to be the baby,” you exploded. “I’m not a baby.”

“Willow’s very sensitive about her size,” I explained. “We like to say she’s just space-efficient.”

“Mom, they kept saying that because I was littlest I had to be the baby, but I didn’t want to be the baby. I wanted to be the dad.”

This, I could tell, was news to Ms. Watkins, too. “The dad?” I said. “How come you didn’t want to be the mom?”

“Because moms go into the bathroom and cry and turn on the water so no one can hear them.”

Ms. Watkins looked at me. “Mrs. O’Keefe,” she said, “why don’t you and I talk for a moment outside?”

For five whole minutes we drove in silence. “It is not okay for you to trip Cassidy when she walks by you for snack.” Although I did have to give you some credit for ingenuity-there wasn’t much you could do to hurt someone without also hurting yourself, and this was a pretty clever, if diabolical, tactic. “The last thing you want, Willow, is for Ms. Watkins to think you’re a troublemaker after one week of school.”

I did not tell you that, when we had gone into the hall and Ms. Wat kins asked if there was something going on at home that might lead to you acting out in school, I had flat-out lied. “No,” I said, after pretending to think a minute. “I can’t imagine where she got that from. But then again, Willow’s always had a remarkable imagination.”

“Well?” I prompted, still waiting for some recognition from you that you’d crossed a line you shouldn’t have. “Do you have something you want to say?”

I glanced in the rearview mirror for your response. You nodded, your eyes full of tears. “Please don’t get rid of me, Mommy.”

If I hadn’t been paused at a stoplight, I probably would have crashed into the car in front of me. Your narrow shoulders were shaking; your nose was running. “I’ll be better,” you said. “I’ll be perfect.”

“Oh, Willow, honey. You are perfect.” I felt trapped by my seat belt, by the ten seconds it took for the light to change. As soon as it did, I pulled into the first side street I could. I turned off the ignition and slipped into the backseat to take you out of your car seat. It had been adapted, like your infant car bed-this was upright but foam lined the straps, because otherwise even braking could cause a fracture. I gently untangled you and rocked you in my arms.

I had not talked to you about the lawsuit. I told myself that I was trying to keep you blissfully ignorant for as long as possible-much the same reason I hadn’t told Ms. Watkins about it. But the longer I put off this conversation, the greater the likelihood you’d find out about it from a classmate, and I couldn’t let that happen.

Had I really been trying to protect you? Or had I just been protecting myself? Would this be the moment I’d point to, months from now, as the beginning of the unraveling between us: yes, we were sitting on Appleton Lane, under a sugar maple, the moment that my daughter started to hate me.

“Willow,” I said, my throat suddenly so dry that I could not swallow. “If anyone’s been bad, it’s me. Do you remember when we went to visit that lawyer after your breaks at Disney World?”

“The man or the lady?”

“The lady. She’s going to help us.”

You blinked. “Help us do what?”

I hesitated. How was I supposed to explain the legal system to a five-year-old? “You know how there are rules?” I said. “At home, and at school? What happens if someone breaks those rules?”

“They get a time-out.”

“Well, there are rules for grown-ups, too,” I said. “Like, you can’t hurt someone. And you can’t take something that’s not yours. And if you break the rules, you get punished. Lawyers can help you if someone breaks a rule and hurts you in the process. They make sure that the person who did something wrong takes responsibility.”

“Like when Amelia stole my glitter nail polish and you made her buy me another one with her babysitting money?”

“Exactly like that,” I said.

Your eyes welled up again. “I broke the rules in school and the lawyer’s going to make me move out of the house,” you said.

“No one is moving,” I said firmly. “Especially not you. You didn’t break the rules. Someone else did.”

“Is it Daddy?” you asked. “Is that why he doesn’t want you to get a lawyer?”

I stared at you. “You heard us talking about that?”

“I heard you yelling about it.”

“It wasn’t Daddy. And it wasn’t Amelia.” I took a deep breath. “It was Piper.”

“Piper stole something from our house?”

“This is where it gets complicated,” I said. “She didn’t steal a thing, like a television or a bracelet. She just didn’t tell me something that she should have. Something very important.”

You looked down at your lap. “It was something about me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s nothing that would ever change the way I feel about you. There’s only one Willow O’Keefe on this planet, and I was lucky enough to get her.” I kissed the top of your head, because I wasn’t brave enough to look you in the eye. “It’s a funny thing, though,” I said, my voice knotting around a rope of tears. “In order for this lawyer to help us, I have to play a game. I have to say things I don’t really mean. Things that might hurt if you heard them and didn’t know I was really just acting.”

Now I watched your face carefully to see if you were following me. “Like when someone gets shot on TV but not in real life?” you said.

“Right,” I said. They’re fake bullets, so why do I still feel like I’m bleeding out? “You’re going to hear things, and maybe read things, and you’ll think to yourself, My mom would never say that. And you’d be right. Because when I’m in court, talking to that lawyer, I’m pretending to be someone else, even though I look the same and my voice sounds the same. I might fool everyone else in the world, but I don’t want to fool you.”

You blinked up at me. “Can we practice?”

“What?”

“So I can tell. If you’re acting or not.”

I drew in my breath. “Okay,” I said. “You were absolutely right to trip Cassidy today.”

You stared at me fiercely. “You’re lying. I wish you weren’t, but you’re lying.”

“Good girl. Ms. Watkins needs to pluck her unibrow.”

A smile fluted across your face. “That’s a trick question, but you’re still lying, because even if she really does look like there’s a caterpillar between her eyes, that’s something Amelia would say out loud but not you.”

I burst out laughing. “Honestly, Willow.”

“True!”

“But I didn’t say anything yet!”

“You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you,” you said with a shrug. “All you have to do is say my name and I know.”

“How?”

When I looked down at you, I was struck by how much of myself I could see in the shape of your eyes, in the light of your smile. “Say Cassidy,” you instructed.

“Cassidy.”

“Say…Ursula.”

“Ursula,” I parroted.

“Now…,” and you pointed to your own chest.

“Willow.”

“Can’t you hear it?” you said. “When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth.”

“Willow,” I repeated, feeling the pillow of the consonants and the swing of the vowels. Were you right? Could it drown out everything else I would have to say? “Willow, Willow, Willow,” I sang; a lullaby, a parachute, as if I could cushion you even now from whatever blows were coming.

Marin

October 2007

You have never seen anything like the amount of time and dead trees that go into a civil lawsuit. Once, during a suit brought against a priest for sexual assault, I had sat through a deposition of a psychiatrist that went on for three days. The first question was: What is psychology? The second: What is sociology? The third: Who was Freud? The expert was getting paid $350 an hour and wanted to make damn sure he took his time. I think we lost three stenographers to carpal tunnel syndrome before we finally got his answers on record.

It was eight months since I’d first met with Charlotte O’Keefe and her husband, and we were still in the learning phase. Basically, it involved the clients going about their everyday lives and, every now and then, getting a call from me saying that I needed this document or that information. Sean was promoted to lieutenant. Willow started full-day kindergarten. And Charlotte spent the seven hours that Willow was in school waiting for the phone to ring, in case her daughter had another break.

Part of getting ready for the depositions involved questionnaires called interrogatories that help lawyers like me see the strengths and weaknesses of the case, and whether or not it should settle. Discovery is aptly named: you are meant to find out if your case is a loser, and where the black holes are, before you’re sucked into them.

Piper Reece’s interrogatory had landed in my inbox this morning. I’d heard, through the grapevine, that she had taken a leave of ab sence from her practice and had her mentor come out of retirement to cover for her.

This entire lawsuit was predicated on the assumption that she had not told Charlotte about her baby’s medical condition early on-had not given her information that might have led to terminating the pregnancy. And there was a little piece of me that wondered if it had been an oversight on the obstetrician’s part or a subconscious slip. Were there obstetricians who-instead of recommending abortions-suggested adoption? Had one of them taken care of my own mother?

I had finally received my nonidentifying letter from Maisie in the Hillsborough County Court Records Office. Dear Ms. Gates, the letter had read.

The following information has been compiled from the court record of your adoption. Information in the record indicates the birth mother’s obstetrician contacted his attorney seeking advice for a patient who was considering adoption. The attorney was aware of the Gateses’ interest in adopting. The attorney met with the birth parents after you were born and made arrangements for the adoption.

You were born in a Nashua hospital at 5:34 p.m. on January 3, 1973. You were discharged from the hospital on January 5, 1973, into the care of Arthur and Yvonne Gates. Their adoption of you became final on July 28, 1973, in Hillsborough County Court.

Information recorded on the original birth certificate indicates the birth mother was seventeen when she gave birth to you. She was a Hillsborough County resident at the time. She was Caucasian, and her occupation was Student. The birth father was not identified on the birth certificate. At the time of the adoption, she was living in Epping, NH. The adoption petition identifies your religious affiliation as Roman Catholic. The birth mother and maternal grandmother signed a consent to your adoption.

Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any additional assistance.

Sincerely, Maisie Donovan

I realized that the point of the nonidentifying letter was to give information that wasn’t specific-but there were so many other things I wanted to know instead. Had my father and mother broken up during the pregnancy? Had my mother been scared, in that hospital by herself? Had she held me even once, or just let the nurse take me away?

I wondered if my adoptive parents, who had raised me decidedly Protestant, had known I was born Catholic.

I wondered if Piper Reece had figured that, if Charlotte O’Keefe didn’t want to raise a child like Willow, someone else might be more than happy to have the chance.

Clearing my head, I picked up the interrogatory she’d filled out and flipped through the pages to read her side of the story. My questions had begun generically and then gotten more medically specific at the end of the document. The first one, in fact, had been a complete softball: When did you first meet Charlotte O’Keefe?

I scanned the answer and blinked, certain I’d read that wrong.

Picking up the phone, I called Charlotte. “Hello?” she said, breathless.

“It’s Marin Gates,” I said. “We need to talk about the interrogatories.”

“Oh! I’m so glad you called. There must be a mistake, because we got one with Amelia’s name on it.”

“That’s not a mistake,” I explained. “She’s listed as one of our witnesses.”

“Amelia? No, that’s impossible. There is no way she’s testifying in court,” Charlotte said.

“She can describe the quality of life in your family, and how OI has affected her. She can talk about the trip to Disney World, and how traumatic it was to be taken out of your custody and put in a foster home-”

“I don’t want her having to relive that-”

“She’ll be a year older by the time the trial starts,” I said. “And she may not need to be called as a witness. She’s listed just in case, as protocol.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even tell her, then,” Charlotte murmured, which reminded me why I had called in the first place.

“I need to talk to you about Piper Reece’s interrogatory,” I said. “On it, I asked her when she first met you, and she said that you had been best friends for eight years.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Best friends?”

“Well,” Charlotte said. “Yes.”

“I’ve been your lawyer for eight months,” I said. “We’ve met half a dozen times in person and talked three times that much on the phone. And you never thought it might be the tiniest bit important to give me that little detail?”

“It has nothing to do with the case, does it?”

“You lied to me, Charlotte!” I said. “That has a hell of a lot to do with the case!”

“You didn’t ask me if I was friends with Piper,” Charlotte argued. “I didn’t lie.”

“It’s a lie of omission.”

I picked up Piper’s interrogatory and read out loud. “‘In all of the years we’ve been friends, I never had any indication that Charlotte felt this way about her prenatal care. In fact, we had been shopping together with our daughters a week before I got served with what I feel is a baseless lawsuit. You can imagine how shocked I was.’ You went shopping with this woman the week before you sued her? Do you have any idea how cold-blooded that’s going to look to a jury?”

“What else did she say? Is she doing all right?”

“She’s not working. She hasn’t worked for two months,” I said.

“Oh,” Charlotte said, her voice small.

“Look, I’m a lawyer. I’m well aware that my job requires destroying the lives of people. But you apparently have a personal connection to this woman, in addition to a professional one. It’s not going to make you sympathetic.”

“Neither is telling a court that I didn’t want Willow,” Charlotte said.

Well, I couldn’t argue with that.

“You may get what you want out of this lawsuit, but it’s going to come at a great cost.”

“You mean everyone’s going to think I’m a bitch,” Charlotte said. “For screwing my best friend. And for using my child’s illness to get money. I’m not stupid, Marin. I know what they’re going to say.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Charlotte hesitated. “No,” she said firmly. “No, it’s not.”

She’d already confessed to having problems getting her husband on board with this lawsuit. Now I’d found out that she had a hidden history with the defendant. What you didn’t tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did; I only had to look as far as my stupid nonidentifying letter to feel it firsthand.

“Charlotte,” I said, “no more secrets.”

The purpose of a deposition is to find out what happens to a person when he or she is thrown into the trenches of a courtroom. Conducted by the opposing party’s lawyer, it involves trying to impeach a potential witness’s credibility based on statements in the interrogatories. The more honest-and unflappable-a person is, the better your case begins to look.

Today, Sean O’Keefe was being deposed, and it scared me to death.

He was tall, strong, handsome-and a wild card. Of all the face-to-face meetings I’d had with Charlotte to prepare, he’d come to only one. “Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I had asked, “are you committed to this lawsuit?”

He had glanced at Charlotte, and an entire conversation had unraveled between them in utter silence. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he had said.

It was my belief that Sean O’Keefe would rather be drawn and quartered than led to a witness stand for this trial, which should not really have been my problem-except it was. Because he was Willow’s father, and if he screwed up on the stand, my case would be ruined. For this suit to succeed, the malpractice lawyers needed to believe that, when it came to wrongful birth, the O’Keefes presented a united front.

Charlotte, Sean, and I rode up in the elevator together. I had specifically scheduled the deposition during the hours you were in school, so child care wasn’t an issue. “Whatever you do,” I said, last-minute quarterbacking, “don’t relax. They’re going to lead you down the path to hell. They’ll twist your words.”

He grinned. “Go ahead, make my day.”

“You can’t play Dirty Harry with these guys,” I said, panicking. “They’ve seen it before, and they’ll trap you with your own bravado. Just remember to keep calm, and to count to ten before you answer anything. And-”

The elevator doors opened before I could finish my sentence. We stepped into the luxurious offices, where a paralegal in a fitted blue suit was already waiting. “Marin Gates?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mr. Booker’s expecting you.” She led us down the hall to the conference room, a panorama of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out toward the golden dome of the Statehouse. Tucked into one corner was the stenographer. Guy Booker was deep in conversation, his silver head bent. He stood up as we approached, revealing his client.

Piper Reece was prettier than I expected. She was blond, lanky, with dark circles underneath her eyes. She wasn’t smiling; she stared at Charlotte as if she’d just been run through with a sword.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was doing everything possible not to look at her.

“How could you?” Piper accused. “How could you do this?”

Sean narrowed his eyes. “You’d better stop right there, Piper-”

I stepped between them. “Let’s just get this over with, all right?”

“You have nothing to say?” Piper continued, as Charlotte settled herself at the table. “You don’t even have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me off to my face?”

“Piper,” Guy Booker said, putting a hand on her arm.

“If your client is going to be verbally abusive to mine,” I announced, “we’ll walk out of here right now.”

“She wants abusive?” Sean muttered. “I’ll show her abusive…”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him down into a chair. “Shut up,” I whispered.

It was perhaps the first and only time in my life that I would ever have anything in common with Guy Booker-neither one of us relished being present at this deposition. “I’m quite sure my client can restrain herself,” he said, facing Piper as he stressed the last two words. He turned to the stenographer. “Claudia, you ready to get started?”

I looked at Sean and mouthed the word calm. He nodded and cracked his neck on each side, like a prizefighter readying to head into the ring.

That snap, that audible pop: it made me think of you, breaking a bone.

Guy Booker opened a leather folder. It was buttery, most likely Italian. Part of the reason Booker, Hood & Coates won so many cases was the intimidation factor-they looked like winners, from their opulent offices to their Armani suits and their Waterman pens. They probably even had their legal pads hand-made and watermarked with their corporate seal. Was it any wonder that half the opponents threw in the towel after a single glance?

“Lieutenant O’Keefe,” he said. His voice was smooth, no friction between the words. I’m your pal, I’m your buddy, his tone suggested. “You believe in justice, don’t you?”

“It’s why I’m a police officer,” Sean answered proudly.

“Do you think lawsuits can bring about justice?”

“Sure,” Sean said. “It’s the way this country works.”

“Would you consider yourself particularly litigious?”

“No.”

“I guess you must have had good reason, then, to sue Ford Motor Company in 2003?”

Shocked, I turned toward Sean. “You sued Ford?”

He was scowling. “What does that have to do with my daughter?”

“You received a settlement, didn’t you? Of twenty thousand dollars?” He leafed through his leather folder. “Can you explain the nature of the complaint?”

“I slipped a disk in my back, sitting in the cruiser seat the whole day. Those things are designed for crash test dummies, not real humans doing their jobs.”

I closed my eyes. It would have been really nice, I thought, if either of my clients had been honest with me.

“About Willow,” Guy said. “How many hours per day would you say you spend with her?”

“Maybe twelve,” he said.

“Of those twelve hours, how many is she asleep?”

“I don’t know, eight, if it’s a good night.”

“If it’s not a good night, how many times would you say you have to get up with her?”

“It depends,” Sean said. “Once or twice.”

“So the amount of time you’re with her, and not trying to get her back to sleep-that’s probably about four or five hours a day?”

“Sounds fair.”

“During those hours, what do you and Willow do?”

“We play Nintendo. She beats the pants off me at Super Mario. And we play cards…” He blushed a little. “She’s a natural at Five-Card Stud.”

“What’s her favorite TV show?” Guy asked.

“Lizzie McGuire, this week.”

“Favorite color?”

“Magenta.”

“What kind of music does she listen to?”

“Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers,” Sean said.

I could remember sitting on the couch with my mother and watching The Cosby Show. We’d make a bowl of microwave popcorn and eat the entire thing. It had never been the same after Keshia Knight Pulliam had gotten too old and had been supplanted by Raven-Symone. If I had been raised by my birth mother, would my childhood have been colored differently? Would we have been hooked on soap operas, PBS documentaries, Dynasty?

“I hear Willow goes to kindergarten now.”

“Yeah, she just started two months ago,” Sean said.

“Does Willow have a good time in school?”

“It’s hard for her sometimes, but I’d say she enjoys it.”

“No one’s denying that Willow is a child with disabilities,” Guy said, “but those disabilities don’t prevent her from having a positive educational experience, do they?”

“No.”

“And they don’t prevent her from sharing good times with your family, do they?”

“Absolutely not.”

“In fact, would you say as Willow’s father that you’ve done a good job making sure she has a good, rich life?”

Oh, no, I thought.

Sean sat up a little straighter, proud. “Damn right I have.”

“Then why,” Guy asked, going in for the kill, “are you saying that she should never have been born?”

The words went through Sean like a bullet. He jerked forward, flattening his hands on the table. “Don’t you put words in my mouth. I never said that.”

“Actually, you did.” Guy took a copy of the complaint from his folder and slid it across the table toward Sean. “Right here.”

“No.” Sean set his jaw.

“Your signature on this document represents the truth, Lieutenant.”

“Hey, listen, I love my daughter.”

“You love her,” Guy repeated. “So much that you think she’d be better off dead.”

Sean reached for the complaint and crumpled it in his hand. “I’m not doing this,” he said. “I don’t want this; I never wanted this.”

“Sean…” Charlotte stood up and grabbed his arm, and he rounded on her.

“How can you say this won’t hurt Willow?” he said, the words torn from his throat.

“She knows these are only words, Sean, words that don’t mean anything. She knows we love her. She knows that’s why we’re here.”

“Guess what, Charlotte,” he said. “Those are only words, too.” And with that, he strode out of the conference room.

Charlotte stared after him, and then at me. “I-I have to go,” she said. I stood up, not sure if I was supposed to follow her out or stay and try to patch up the damage with Guy Booker. Piper Reece was red-faced, staring into her lap. Charlotte’s low heels sounded like gunshots as she hurried down the hallway.

“Marin,” Guy said, leaning back in his chair. “You can’t possibly think you’ve got a viable case here.”

I could feel a bead of sweat running between my shoulder blades. “Here’s what I know,” I said, with much more conviction than I actually possessed. “You just saw firsthand how this illness has ripped their family apart. Seems to me a jury will see that, too.”

I gathered my notes and my briefcase and walked down the hall with my head high, as if I actually believed what I’d said. And only when I was in the elevator alone, and the doors had shut behind me, did I close my eyes and admit that Guy Booker was right.

My cell phone started to ring.

“Shit,” I muttered, wiping my eyes, digging in my briefcase to answer it. Not that I wanted to: it was either Charlotte, apologizing for what had to be the biggest debacle of my career so far, or Robert Ramirez, firing me because bad news travels fast. But no number flashed on the screen; it was a private caller. I cleared my throat. “Hello?”

“Is this Marin Gates?”

“Speaking.”

The elevator doors opened. On the far side of the lobby, I could see Charlotte pleading with Sean, who was shaking his head.

For a moment I almost forgot I was still on the phone. “This is Maisie Donovan,” a reedy voice said. “I’m the clerk of-”

“I know who you are,” I said quickly.

“Ms. Gates,” she replied, “I have your birth mother’s current address.”

Amelia

I had been waiting for the bomb to drop. The best part of the stupid lawsuit was that it had been filed just as school was starting, when who was hooking up with whom was far more interesting than some random legal battle, so the news hadn’t spread through the halls like electricity through a conductor. We’d been back for two months now, studying vocabulary and slogging through assemblies on boring topics by boring people and sitting for the NECAP tests, and every day when the last bell rang I marveled at the fact that I’d somehow gotten another reprieve.

Needless to say, Emma and I hadn’t been hanging out. On the first day of school, I’d cornered her when we were headed into the gym. “I don’t know what my parents are doing,” I’d said. “I always said they were aliens, and this only proves it.” Normally that would have made Emma laugh, but instead she just shook her head. “Yeah, that’s really funny, Amelia,” she said. “Remind me to crack jokes the next time someone you trust screws you over.”

After that, I’d been too embarrassed to say anything to her. Even if I told her that I was on her side, and that I thought it was ridiculous my parents were suing her mother, why would she believe me? If I were in her shoes, I’d assume that I was spying, and that anything I said could be used against me. She didn’t tell people what had gone wrong between us-after all, that would embarrass her, too-so I figured she just said that we’d had a huge fight. And here’s what I learned when I kept my distance from Emma: that the people I had always assumed were my friends actually had been Emma’s, and just suffering my presence. I can’t say it surprised me to find this out, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t hurt when I was holding my lunch tray and walked by the table where they were all sitting, without anyone making room. Or when I took out my PB and J sandwich, which had as usual gotten crushed by my math textbook in my locker so that the jelly was oozing through like blood on a crime victim’s clothing, and didn’t have Emma to say, Here, have half of my tuna fish.

After a few weeks, I had nearly gotten used to being invisible. In fact, I’d gotten quite skilled at it. I would sit in class so quiet and still that sometimes I could get flies to land on my hands; I slouched at the back of the bus so low that, one day, the driver headed back toward the school without even bothering to pull over at my stop. But one morning, I walked into homeroom and immediately knew something was different. Janet Efflingham’s mother worked as a receptionist at a law firm and had told everyone about a big stinking fight my parents had had in a conference room there during a deposition. The whole school knew that my mother was suing Emma’s.

I would have thought this put Emma and me right back into the same sorry, pathetic lifeboat, but I had forgotten that the best defense is a good offense. I was sitting in math class, which was the hardest one for me, because my chair was behind Emma’s and we used to pass notes back and forth (Doesn’t Mr. Funke look hotter now that he’s getting divorced? Did Veronica Thomas get breast implants over the long Columbus Day weekend or what?), when Emma decided to go public-and take the collective sympathy of the school with her.

Mr. Funke had a transparency up on the screen. “So if we’re talking about twenty percent of Millionaire Marvin’s earnings, and he’s made six millon dollars this year, what’s the amount of alimony he has to pay to Whining Wanda?”

That’s when Emma said, “Ask Amelia. She knows all about being a gold digger.”

Somehow, Mr. Funke seemed oblivious to the comment-although everyone else started snickering, and I could feel my cheeks burning. “Maybe it would help if your asshole mother learned how to do her stupid job,” I shot back.

“Amelia,” Mr. Funke said sharply. “Go down to Ms. Greenhaus.”

I stood up and grabbed my backpack-but the front pocket where I kept my pencils and my lunch money was still open, and a rain of pennies and quarters and dimes scattered over the floor in front of my desk. I almost knelt down to pick them up but then figured everyone would find that even more hilarious-a money-grubber’s daughter grubbing money?-and instead I just left all the coins behind and fled.

I had no intention of going to the principal’s office. Instead, I turned right when I should have turned left and walked toward the gym. During the day, the phys ed staff left the double doors open for ventilation. I panicked for only a moment about a teacher seeing me leave the school, then remembered that no one noticed me. I wasn’t important enough.

Outside, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and started running. I ran across the soccer field and through the trees that lined the neighborhood closest to the school. I ran until I came to the main road that cut through town, and then I finally let myself slow down.

The CVS pharmacy was the last building you came to if you were heading out of town, and don’t think I hadn’t considered it. I wandered through the aisles. I slipped a Snickers bar into my pocket. And then I saw something even better.

The only problem with being invisible in school was that, when I came home, I could still see myself. I could run hard and fast and never escape that.

My parents, they didn’t seem to want the kids they had. So maybe I’d just offer up one who was completely different.

Charlotte

“I was on a website this morning,” I argued, “and a girl with Type III broke her wrist trying to lift up a half gallon of milk, Sean. How can you say that Willow’s not going to need some kind of special care or live-in help? And where’s that money going to come from?”

“So she buys two quarts of milk instead,” Sean said. “We always said we weren’t going to let her define herself by her disability-but here you are, doing just that.”

“The ends justify the means.”

Sean pulled into our driveway. “Yeah. Tell that to Hitler.” He turned off the ignition; in the back, I could hear the soft sound of your snoring; whatever you’d done in school today had completely knocked you out. “I don’t know you,” he said quietly. “I don’t understand the person who’s doing this.”

I had tried to calm him down after the deposition at Piper’s lawyer’s office-the deposition that never actually happened-but he was having none of it. “You say you’d do anything for Willow, but if you can’t do this, then you’re lying to yourself,” I said.

“I’m lying,” Sean repeated. “I’m lying? You’re lying. Or at least you say you are, and that Willow will understand that all those awful things you say in front of a judge, well, you never meant them. Or at least I hope to God you’re lying, because otherwise you lied to me all those years ago about wanting to keep the baby.”

We both got out of the car; I slammed the door harder than I had to. “It’s so damn convenient to be high and mighty when you’re living in the past, isn’t it? What about ten years from now? You’re telling me that when Willow’s got a state-of-the-art wheelchair, and she’s enrolled in a summer camp for Little People, when she’s got a pool in the backyard so she can build up her bone mass and muscles and a car adapted for her to drive like other kids her age, when it doesn’t matter if the insurance company refuses to pay for another set of braces because we can always cover it ourselves without you having to work double shifts-you’re telling me that she’s going to remember what was said in a courtroom when she was just a baby?”

Sean stared at me. “Yeah. Actually, I am.”

I took a step away from him. “I love her too much to let this opportunity go.”

“Then you and I,” Sean said, “have very different ways of showing love.”

He reached into the back and unbuckled your car seat. Your face was flushed; you slowly swam out of your dreams. “I’m out, Charlotte,” Sean said simply as he carried you into the house. “You do what you have to, but don’t drag me down with you.”

I thought, not for the first time, that, under any other circumstance, a fight like this would have led me directly to Piper. I would have called her and given her my side of the story and not Sean’s. I would have felt better, knowing she’d listened.

And I would have done what I learned directly from you: let time heal the break that had somehow come between your father and me, a fracture that hurt no matter which way we turned.

“What the hell?” Sean asked, and I glanced up to find Amelia standing in the front hallway.

She was eating an apple, and her hair had been dyed an unnatural electric blue. She smirked at me. “Rock on,” she said.

You stared at her. “Why does Amelia have cotton candy on her head?”

I sucked in my breath. “I can’t do this now,” I said, “I just can’t.” And I walked up the stairs as if each step was made of glass.

During the last eight weeks of my pregnancy, there were three seconds every morning that were perfect. I’d float to the surface of consciousness, and for those few blissful moments, I would have forgotten. I’d feel the slow roll of you, the snare drum of your kicks, and I’d think everything was going to be fine.

Reality always dropped like a curtain: that kick might have fractured your leg yet again. That turn you’d completed inside me could have hurt you. I’d lie very still on my pillow and wonder if you would die during delivery, or moments after. Or whether we would be lucky enough to win the jackpot: you’d survive, and be severely disabled. It was no small irony, I thought, that if your bones broke, so did my heart.

Once, I had a nightmare. I had given birth and no one would talk to me, tell me what was going on. Instead, the obstetrician and the anesthesiologist and the nurses all turned their backs on me. “Where’s my baby?” I demanded, and even Sean shook his head and backed away. I struggled to a sitting position until I could look down between my legs and see it: what should have been a baby was just a pile of shattered crystal; between the shards I could see your tiny fingernails, a bloom of brain, an ear, a loop of intestine.

I had woken up, screaming; it took hours to fall back asleep. That next morning, when Sean woke me up, I said I could not get out of bed. And I meant it: I was certain that the very act of living, for me, would be a threat to your survival. With every step I took you might be jarred; by contrast, with care, I might keep you from breaking apart.

Sean had called Piper, who showed up at the house and talked to me about the logistics of pregnancy the way she’d describe them to a small child: the amniotic sac, the fluid, the cushion between my body and yours. I knew all this, of course, but then again, I thought I’d known other things that had turned out to be wrong: that bones grew stronger, not weaker; that a fetus not having Down syndrome must mean it was otherwise healthy. She told Sean maybe I just needed a day to sleep this off, and she’d check back in with me later. But Sean was still worried, and after calling in sick to work, he phoned our priest.

Father Grady, apparently, made house calls. He sat down on a chair that Sean brought into the bedroom. “I hear you’re a little worried.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said.

“God doesn’t give people burdens they can’t handle,” Father Grady pointed out.

That was all very well and good, but what had my baby done to piss Him off? Why would she have to prove herself by being hurt, before she even got here?

“I’ve always believed that He saves truly special babies for parents He trusts,” Father Grady said.

“My baby might die,” I said flatly.

“Your baby might not stay in this world,” he corrected. “Instead, she’ll get to be with Jesus.”

I felt tears in my eyes. “Well, let Him have someone else’s baby.”

“Charlotte!” Sean said.

Father Grady looked down at me with wide, warm eyes. “Sean thought maybe it would help if I came over to bless the baby. Do you mind?” He lifted his hand, left it hovering over my abdomen.

I nodded; I was not about to turn down a blessing. But as he prayed over the hill of my belly, I silently said my own prayer: Let me keep her, and you can take everything else I have.

He left me with a holy card propped on my nightstand and promised to pray for us. Sean walked him back downstairs, and I stared at that card. Jesus was stretched across the crucifix. He had suffered pain, I realized. He knew what it was like to feel a nail breaking through your skin, shattering the bone.

Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, I found Sean sitting at the kitchen table cradling his head in his hands. He looked so beaten, so helpless. I was so busy worrying about this baby myself, I had not seen what he was going through. Imagine making a career out of protecting people, and then not being able to rescue your own unborn child. “You’re up,” he said the obvious.

“I thought maybe I’d go for a little walk.”

“Good. Fresh air. I’ll come with you.” He stood too quickly, rattling the table.

“You know,” I said, trying to smile, “I need to be by myself.”

“Oh-right. No problem,” he said, but he looked a little wounded. I could not understand the physics of this situation: we were in the thickest, most suffocating mess together; how could we possibly feel so far apart?

Sean assumed I needed to clear my head, think, reflect. But Father Grady’s visit had gotten me wondering about a woman who’d stopped going to our church a year ago. She lived a half mile down the street, and from time to time I saw her putting out her garbage. Her name was Annie, and all I knew about her was that she’d been pregnant, and then one day she wasn’t, and after that, she never came to Mass again. The rumor was that she’d had an abortion.

I had grown up Catholic. I had been taught by nuns. There were girls who’d gotten pregnant, but they either disappeared from the class rosters or left for a semester abroad, returning quieter and skittish. But in spite of this, I’d voted Democratic ever since I turned eighteen. It might not be my personal choice, but I thought women ought to have one.

These days, though, I was wondering if it wasn’t my personal choice because I was Catholic, or simply because I had never been forced to make it in practice, instead of theory.

Annie’s house was yellow, with fairy-tale trim and gardens that were full of day lilies in the summertime. I walked up to the front door and knocked, wondering what I would say to her if she answered. Hi, I’m Charlotte. Why did you do it?

It was a relief when no one answered; this was feeling more and more like a stupid idea. I’d started back down the driveway when suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Oh, hi. I thought I heard someone on the porch.” Annie was wearing jeans, a sleeveless red shirt, and gardening gloves. Her hair was caught up in a knot on the back of her head, and she was smiling. “You live up the road, don’t you?”

I looked at her. “There’s something wrong with my baby,” I blurted.

She folded her arms across her chest, and the smile vanished from her face. “I’m sorry,” she said woodenly.

“The doctors told me that if she lives-if-she’s going to be so sick. So, so sick. And I’m not supposed to think about it, but I don’t understand why it’s a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.” I wiped my face with my sleeve. “I can’t tell my husband. I can’t tell him I’ve even thought about this.”

She scuffed at the ground with her sneaker. “My baby would have been two years, six months, and four days old today,” she said. “There was something wrong with her, something genetic. If she lived, she would have been profoundly retarded. Like a six-month-old, forever.” She took a deep breath. “It was my mother who talked me into it. She said, Annie, you can barely take care of yourself. How are you going to take care of a baby like that? She said, You’re young. You’ll have another one. So I gave in, and my doctor induced me at twenty-two weeks.” Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. “Here’s what no one tells you,” she said. “When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” She looked up at me. “You can’t win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don’t have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn’t do the wrong thing. But I don’t feel like I did the right thing, either.”

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

“They gave me a choice,” Annie said, “and even now, I wish they hadn’t.”

Amelia

That night, I let you brush my hair and stick scrunchies all over it. Usually, you just made massive knots and annoyed me, but you loved doing it-your arms were too short for you to manage even a ponytail yourself, so when other girls your age were playing around with their hair and putting in ribbons and braids, you were stuck at the mercy of Mom, whose braiding experience was limited to challah. Don’t go thinking I’d suddenly developed a conscience or anything-I just felt bad for you. Mom and Dad had been yelling about you as if you weren’t there ever since they’d come home. I mean, for God’s sake, your vocabulary was better than mine half the time-they couldn’t possibly think this had all gone over your head.

“Amelia?” you asked, finishing off a braid that hung right over my nose. “I like your hair this color.”

I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a cool punk chick, in spite of my best intentions. I looked more like Grover the Muppet.

“Amelia? Are Mom and Dad going to get a divorce?”

I met your gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know, Wills.”

I was already anticipating the next question: “Amelia?” you asked. “Is it my fault?”

“No,” I said fiercely. “Honest.” I pulled the barrettes and scrunchies out of my hair and started unraveling the knots. “Okay, enough. I’m not beauty queen material. Go to bed.”

Everyone had forgotten to tuck you in tonight-not that I was expecting any better, with the pathetic level of parenting skills I was witnessing these days. You crawled into your bed from the open end-it still had bars on either side of the mattress, which you hated, because you said they were for babies even if they did keep you safe. I leaned down and tucked you in. Awkwardly, I even kissed your forehead. “’Night,” I said, and I jumped under my own covers and turned off the light.

Sometimes, in the dark, the house felt like it had a heartbeat. I could hear it pulsing, waa waa waa, in my ears. It was even louder now. Maybe my new hair was some kind of superconductor. “You know how Mom always says that I can be anything when I grow up?” you whispered. “That’s a lie.”

I came up on one elbow. “Why?”

“I couldn’t be a boy,” you said.

I smirked. “Ask Mom about that sometime.”

“And I couldn’t be Miss America.”

“How come?”

“You can’t wear leg braces in a pageant,” you said.

I thought about those pageants, girls too beautiful to be real, tall and thin and plastic-perfect. And then I thought of you, short and stubby and twisted, like a root growing wrong from the trunk of a tree, with a banner draped across your chest.

MISS UNDERSTOOD.

MISS INFORMED.

MISS TAKE.

That made my stomach hurt. “Go to sleep already,” I said, more harshly than I meant to, and I counted to 1036 before you started snoring.

Downstairs, I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was absolutely no food in this house. I would probably have to eat ramen for breakfast. It was getting to the point, honestly, where if my parents didn’t go to the grocery store, they could be called to task for child abuse.

Been there, done that.

I rummaged through the fruit drawer and unearthed a fossilized lemon and a knob of ginger.

I slammed the refrigerator door shut and heard a moan.

Terrified-did people who broke into houses rape girls with blue hair?-I crept toward the kitchen doorway and looked into the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw it: the quilt draped across the back of the couch, the pillow my father had pulled over his head when he rolled over.

I felt the same pang in my stomach that I had felt when you were talking about beauty queens. Moving back through the kitchen as silent as snow, I trailed my fingers along the countertop until they closed over the hilt of a carving knife. I carried it upstairs with me into the bathroom.

The first cut stung. I watched the blood rise like a tide and spill down into my elbow. Shit, what had I done? I ran the cold water, held my forearm underneath it until the blood slowed.

Then I made another parallel cut.

They weren’t on my wrists, don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly why I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period. I could feel everything building up inside of me like steam heat, and I was just turning a valve. It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She’d prick little holes all over the place. So it can breathe, she said.

I was just breathing.

I closed my eyes, anticipating each thin cut, feeling that wash of relief when it was done. God, it felt so good-that buildup, and the sweet release. I would have to hide these marks, because I would rather die than let anyone know I’d done this. But I was also proud of myself, a little bit. Crazy girls did this-the ones who wrote poetry about their organs being filled with tar and who wore so much black eyeliner they looked Egyptian-not good girls from good families. That meant either I was not a good girl or I did not come from a good family.

Take your pick.

I opened the tank of the toilet and stuck the knife inside. Maybe I would need it again.

I stared at the cuts, which were pulsing now, just like the rest of the house, waa waa waa. They looked like the ties of railroad tracks. Like a tower of stairs you’d find on a stage. I pictured a parade of ugly people like me, we beauty queens who could not walk without braces. I closed my eyes, and I imagined where those steps would lead.