Handle with Care

Proof: the part of a recipe where dough is allowed to rise.

Twice, during the baking of bread, proof is required. Yeast is proofed in water and a small bit of sugar to make sure it’s still active before going any further in the recipe. But proofing also describes a step where the dough doubles in size, the moment when it suddenly grows in dynamic proportion to what you started out with.

What makes the dough rise? The yeast, which converts glucose and other carbohydrates into carbon dioxide gas. Different breads proof differently. Some require only a single proofing; others need many. Between these stages, the baker is told to punch down the dough.

It’s no surprise to me that-in baking, and in life-the cost of growth is always a small act of violence.

DOUGH

3¾ cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 packages active dry yeast

1 cup heated milk

1 egg

1/3 cup butter, softened

CARAMEL

¾ cup dark brown sugar

½ cup unsalted butter

¼ cup light corn syrup

¾ cup pecan halves

2 tablespoons butter, softened

FILLING

½ cup pecans, chopped

2 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

You once told me that the best part of a lazy Sunday is to wake up and smell something so delicious you follow your nose downstairs. This is one of those recipes that, like most breads, requires you to be thinking ahead-but then again, when wasn’t I thinking ahead for you?

To make the dough, mix together 2 cups of the flour, 1/3 cup sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Add the heated milk, egg, and 1/3 cup butter, and beat at low speed for a minute. Add flour if necessary to make the dough easier to shape.

On a lightly floured surface, knead dough for 5 minutes. This, I will add, was your favorite part-you would stand on a chair and throw your weight into it. When finished, put the dough into a greased bowl and flip it over once, so the greased side faces up. Cover and let it proof until it doubles in size, about 1½ hours. It’s ready if you poke it and the mark of your finger is left behind.

Caramel comes next: Stirring constantly, heat ¾ cup brown sugar and ½ cup butter to boiling. Remove from the heat and add the corn syrup. Pour the mixture into a 13 by 9 by 2-inch ungreased pan. Sprinkle pecan halves over the mixture.

For the filling, mix together the chopped pecans, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, and cinnamon. Set aside.

Punch down the dough with your fist. Then, on a lightly floured surface, flatten it into a rectangle, about 15 by 10 inches. Spread it with 2 tablespoons of butter, then dust it evenly with the chopped pecan mixture. Beginning at the 10-inch side of the rectangle, roll the dough up tightly and pinch the edge closed. Roll it, stretch it, and mold it until it is cylindrical.

Cut into eight even slices and place them in a pan, not quite touching. Wrap the pan tightly with foil and refrigerate for at least 12 hours. Dream of them rising, that proof again, evidence that some things grow bigger than we ever expect.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F and bake 35 minutes. When golden, remove from the oven. Immediately invert on a platter, and serve warm.

Marin

Minutes later

I’ve always sort of wondered about the term bearing witness. Is it that testifying is such a hardship? Or is it childbirth lingo, the idea that a witness brings forth something new to the trial? That’s certainly true, but not in the way you’d imagine. Witness testimony is always flawed. It’s better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren’t camcorders; they don’t record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves choosing words and phrases and images. In other words, every witness who’s supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

Charlotte O’Keefe, who was on the witness stand now, was not even really capable of bearing witness to her own life, in spite of the fact that she’d lived it. By her own admission, she was biased; by her own admission, she remembered her history only when it was entwined with Willow’s.

I would make a lousy witness, of course. I didn’t know where my story started.

Charlotte had knotted her hands in her lap and sailed through the first three questions:

What’s your name?

Where do you live?

How many children do you have?

She’d stumbled on the fourth question, though:

Are you married?

Technically, the answer to that was yes. But practically, it had to be spelled out-or Guy Booker would use Charlotte and Sean’s separation to his own legal advantage. I had coached Charlotte through the right response, and we had not managed to practice it yet without her bursting into tears. As I waited for her to answer, I found myself holding my breath.

“Right now I am,” Charlotte said evenly. “But having a child with so many special needs-it’s caused a lot of problems in my marriage. My husband and I are separated right now.” She exhaled, a slow whistle.

Good girl, I thought.

“Charlotte, can you tell us about how Willow was conceived?” At the gasp of an elderly juror, I added, “Not the nuts and bolts…more like the decision you made to become a parent.”

“I was already a parent,” Charlotte said. “I’d been a single mother for five years. When I met Sean, we both knew we wanted more children-but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. We tried to get pregnant for almost two years, and we were just about to start fertility treatments when, well, it just happened.”

“How did that feel?”

“We were ecstatic,” Charlotte replied. “You know how sometimes, your life is so perfect you’re afraid for the next moment, because it couldn’t possibly be quite as good? That’s what it felt like.”

“How old were you when you became pregnant?”

“Thirty-eight.” Charlotte smiled a little. “A geriatric pregnancy, they call it.”

“Were you concerned about that?”

“I knew that the odds of having a Down syndrome child were higher once you were over thirty-five.”

I approached the stand. “Did you speak to your obstetrician about that?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell the court who your obstetrician was at the time?”

“Piper Reece,” Charlotte said. “The defendant.”

“How did you select the defendant as your ob-gyn?”

Charlotte looked down at her lap. “She was my best friend. I trusted her.”

“What did the defendant do to address your concerns about having a baby with Down syndrome?”

“She recommended that I do some blood tests-a quad screen, it was called-to see if I had an even greater chance than the norm to have a baby with neural defects, or Down syndrome. Instead of my risk being one in two hundred and seventy, it was one in one hundred and fifty.”

“What did she recommend?” I asked.

“Amniocentesis,” Charlotte replied, “but I knew that carried a risk, too. Since I was scheduled to have a routine ultrasound anyway at eighteen weeks, she said we could read the results of that first, then make a decision about the amnio based on what we saw. It wasn’t as accurate as amnio, but there were supposedly certain things that might turn up that would suggest Down syndrome, or rule it out as less likely.”

“Do you remember that ultrasound?” I asked.

Charlotte nodded. “We were so excited to see our baby. And at the same time, I was nervous-because I knew the technician was going to be looking for those Down syndrome markers. I kept watching her, for clues. And at one point she tipped her head and said, ‘Hmm.’ But when I asked her what she’d seen, she told me that Dr. Reece would read the results.”

“What did the defendant tell you?”

“Piper came into the room, and I knew, just from her face, that the baby didn’t have Down syndrome. I asked her if she was sure, and she said yes-that the technician had even remarked on how clear the images were. I made her look me in the eye and tell me that everything looked all right-and she said that there was only one measurement that was the slightest bit off, a femur that was in the sixth percentile. Piper said that wasn’t something to worry about, since I was short, that by the next ultrasound, that same measurement could be up in the fiftieth percentile.”

“Were you concerned about the sonogram images being clear?”

“Why would I be?” Charlotte said. “Piper didn’t seem to be, and I assumed that was the whole point of an ultrasound-to get a good picture.”

“Did Dr. Reece advise having a more detailed follow-up ultrasound?”

“No.”

“Did you have any other ultrasounds during your pregnancy?”

“Yes, when I was twenty-seven weeks pregnant. It wasn’t a test as much as a lark-we did it after-hours in her office, to find out the sex of the baby.”

I faced the jury. “Do you remember that ultrasound, Charlotte?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “I’ll never forget it. I was lying on the table, and Piper had the wand on my belly. She was staring at the computer screen. I asked her when I’d get a chance to look, but she didn’t answer. I asked her if she was okay.”

“What was her response?”

Charlotte’s eyes looked across the room and locked with Piper’s. “That she was okay. But that my daughter wasn’t.”

Charlotte

“What are you talking about? What’s the matter?” I’d sat up on my elbows, looking at the screen, trying to make sense of the images as they jostled with my movements.

Piper pointed to a black line that looked to me like all the other black lines on the screen. “She’s got broken bones, Charlotte. A bunch of them.”

I shook my head. How could that be? I had not fallen.

“I’ll call Gianna Del Sol. She’s the head of maternal-fetal medicine at the hospital; she can explain it in more detail-”

“Explain what?” I cried, riding the high wire of panic.

Piper pulled the transducer away from my belly, so that the screen went clear. “If it’s what I think it is-osteogenesis imperfecta-it’s really rare. I’ve only read about it, during medical school. I’ve never seen a patient who has it,” she said. “It affects collagen levels, so that bones break easily.”

“But the baby,” I said. “It’s going to be okay, right?”

This was the part where my best friend embraced me and said, Yes, of course, don’t be silly. This was the part where Piper told me it was the kind of problem that, ten years from now, we’d laugh about at your birthday party. Except Piper didn’t say any of that. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I honestly don’t know.”

We left my car at Piper’s office and drove back to the house to tell Sean. The whole way, I ran a loop of memory in my mind, trying to think back to when these breaks might have happened-at the restaurant, when I’d dropped that stick of butter and bent down to retrieve it? In Amelia’s room, when I stumbled over a tangled pair of pajama pants? On the highway when I stopped short, so the seat belt tightened against my belly?

I sat at the kitchen table while Piper told Sean what she knew-and what she didn’t. From time to time, I could feel you inside me, rolling a slow tango. I was afraid to touch my hands to my abdomen, and acknowledge you. For seven months we had been a unit-integrated and inseparable-but right now, you felt alien to me. Sometimes in the shower when I did a self-breast exam I had wondered what I would do if I were diagnosed-chemo, radiation, surgery?-and I had decided that I would want the tumor cut out of me right away, that I couldn’t bear sleeping at night and knowing it was growing beneath my skin. You-who had been so precious to me hours ago-suddenly felt that way: unfamiliar, upsetting, other.

After Piper left, Sean became a man of action. “We’ll find the best doctors,” he vowed. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

But what if there was nothing that could be done?

I watched Sean in his feverish zeal. Me, I was swimming through syrup, viscous and pendulous. I could barely move, much less take charge. You, who had once brought Sean and me so close together, were now the spotlight that illuminated how different we were.

That night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I stared at the ceiling until the red flush from the LED numbers on the clock radio spread like wildfire; I counted backward, from this moment to the one where you were conceived. When Sean got out of bed quietly, I pretended that I was asleep, but that was only because I knew where he was headed: to look up osteogenesis imperfecta on the Internet. I’d thought about doing that, too, but I wasn’t as brave as he was. Or maybe I was less naïve: unlike him, I believed what we learned could actually be worse than what we already knew.

Eventually, I did drift off. I dreamed that my water had broken, that I was having contractions. I tried to roll over to tell Sean, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move at all. My arms, my legs, my jaw; somehow I knew that I was broken beyond repair. And somehow I knew that whatever had been inside me all these months had liquefied, was soaking into the sheets beneath me, was no longer a baby at all.

The next day was a whirlwind: from a high-level ultrasound, at which even I could see the breaks, to a meeting with Gianna Del Sol to discuss the findings. She threw out terms that meant nothing at the time: Type II, Type III. Rodding. Macrocephaly. She told us that one other child with OI had been born at this hospital, years earlier, who’d had ten breaks-and who had died within an hour.

Then she sent us to a geneticist, Dr. Bowles. “So,” he said, getting right down to business-no I’m so sorry you had to hear this news. “The best-case scenario here,” he said, “would be a baby that survives the birth, but even if that’s the case, a Type III might have cerebral hemorrhage caused by birth trauma or an increased circumference of the head compared to the rest of the body. She will most likely develop severe scoliosis, have surgeries for multiple broken bones, need rodding in her spine, or vertebrae fused together. The shape of her rib cage won’t allow her lungs to grow, which can lead to repeated respiratory infections, or even death.”

Amazingly, this was a whole different run of symptoms from the ones Dr. Del Sol had given us already.

“And of course, we’re talking hundreds of broken bones, and realistically a very good chance she’ll never walk. Basically,” the geneticist said, “what you’re looking at is a lifetime, however short, of pain.”

I could feel Sean next to me, coiled like a cobra, ready to take out his own anger and grief on this man, who was talking to us as if it were not you, our daughter, who was the subject but a car whose oil we needed to change.

Dr. Bowles looked at his watch. “Any questions?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why didn’t anyone tell us before?”

I thought of all the blood tests I’d taken, the earlier ultrasound. Surely if my baby was going to be this sick-this hurt for her whole life-something would have shown up earlier?

“Well,” said the geneticist, “neither you nor your wife is a genetic carrier of OI, so it wouldn’t have been routinely tested for prior to conception, or flagged by the obstetrician as something to keep an eye on. It’s good news, actually, that the disease was a spontaneous mutation.”

My baby is a mutant, I thought. Six eyes. Antennae. Take me to your leader.

“If you have another child, there’s no reason to believe this will happen again,” he said.

Sean came out of his seat, but I put a hand on his arm to restrain him.

“How do we know whether the baby will…” I couldn’t say it. I lowered my eyes, so that he knew what I meant. “…at birth, or live longer?”

“It’s very difficult to tell at this point,” Dr. Bowles said. “We’ll schedule repeated ultrasounds, of course, but sometimes a parent whose child has a lethal prognosis will end up with a baby that survives, or vice versa.” He hesitated. “There is another option-several places in this country will terminate a pregnancy for maternal or fetal medical reasons, even this far along.”

I watched Sean fit his teeth around the word he did not want to say out loud. “We don’t want an abortion.”

The geneticist nodded.

“How?” I asked.

Sean stared at me, horrified. “Charlotte, do you know about those things? I’ve seen pictures-”

“There are many different methods,” Bowles answered, looking directly at me. “Intact D and E is one, but so is induction after stopping the fetus’s heart.”

“Fetus?” Sean said, exploding. “That’s not a fetus. That’s my daughter we’re talking about.”

“If termination isn’t an option-”

“Option? Fuck that. It should never even have been on the table,” Sean said. He reached for me, pulling me to my feet. “Do you think Stephen Hawking’s mother had to listen to this load of bullshit?”

My heart was hammering and I could not catch my breath. I didn’t know where Sean was taking me, and I didn’t particularly care. I just knew that I couldn’t listen to that doctor for one more moment, talking about your life or lack thereof as if it were a textbook he was reading on the Holocaust, the Inquisition, Darfur: truths that were so awful and graphic that you instead skipped over them, conceding their horror without suffering the details.

Sean dragged me down the hallway and into an elevator that was just closing. “I’m sorry,” he said, leaning against the wall. “I just…I couldn’t.”

We were not alone inside. To my right was a woman about ten years older than I was, pushing one of those state-of-the-art wheelchairs with a child sprawled across it. This one was a boy in his teens, thin and angular, his head supported by a brace on the back of the chair. His elbows twisted, so that his arms were flailed outward; his glasses were askew on the bridge of his nose. His mouth was open, and his tongue-thick and jellied-filled the bowl of his mouth. “Aaaaah,” the boy sang. “Aaaaah!”

His mother touched her hand to his cheek. “Yes, that’s right.”

I wondered if she really understood what he was trying to say. Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

I found myself staring at the woman’s fingers, stroking her son’s hair. Did this boy know his mother’s touch? Did he smile at her? Would he ever say her name?

Would you?

Sean reached for my hand and squeezed it tightly. “We can do this,” he whispered. “We can do it together.”

I didn’t speak until the elevator stopped at floor three and the woman pushed her son’s wheelchair off into the hallway. The doors sealed shut again, isolating Sean and me in a vacuum. “Okay,” I said.

“Tell us about Willow’s birth,” Marin said, pulling me back to the present.

“She was early. Dr. Del Sol had scheduled a C-section, but instead, I went into labor and everything happened very quickly. When she was born, she was screaming, and they took her away from me to X-ray her, to do tests. It was hours before I saw Willow, and when I did, she was lying on a foam pad in a bassinet, with bandages wrapped around her arms and legs. She had seven healing fractures and four new breaks caused by the birth.”

“Did anything else happen in the hospital?”

“Yes, Willow broke a rib, and it pierced her lung. It was…it was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen in my life. She went blue, and suddenly there were dozens of doctors in the room and they started doing CPR and stuck a needle in between her ribs. They told me her chest cavity had filled with air, which made her heart and trachea shift to the wrong side of her body, and then her heart had stopped beating. They did chest compressions-breaking even more of her ribs-and put in a chest tube to make the organs go back where they belonged. They cut her,” I said. “While I watched.”

“Did you talk to the defendant afterward?” Marin asked.

I nodded. “Another doctor told me that Willow had been without oxygen for a while, and that we wouldn’t know if there would be brain damage. He suggested that I sign a DNR form.”

“What’s that?”

“It means do not resuscitate. If anything like this happened to Willow again, the doctors wouldn’t intervene. They’d let Willow die.” I looked into my lap. “I asked Piper for advice.”

“Because she was your physician?”

“No,” I said. “Because she was my friend.”

Piper

I had failed.

That’s what I thought, when I looked down at you, battered and buttressed, a fountain of a chest tube blooming out from beneath your fifth rib on the left side. I had been asked by my best friend to help her conceive, and this was the outcome. After the wrenching question about whether or not you belonged in this world, it seemed that you were giving Charlotte your own answer. Without saying a word, I walked up to Charlotte, who was staring down at you as you slept, as if glancing away for even a moment might give you incentive to code again.

I had read your chart. The fractured rib had caused an expanding pneumothorax, a mediastinal shift, and cardiopulmonary arrest. The resultant intervention had caused nine further fractures. The chest tube had been inserted through the fascia and into the pleural space of your chest, sutured into place. You looked like a battlefield; the war had been fought on the broken ground of your tiny body.

Without saying a word, I walked up to Charlotte and reached for her hand. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m not the one you need to worry about,” she replied. Her eyes were red-rimmed; her hospital robe askew. “They asked if we wanted to sign a DNR.”

“Who asked that?” I had never heard of anything so stupid. Not even Terri Schiavo had been made DNR until tests indicated severe, irreversible brain damage. It was hard enough to get a pediatrician to be hands off when dealing with a severely preterm fetus with a high probability of death or lifetime morbidity-to suggest a DNR for a neonate on whom they’d just done the full-court press in terms of a code seemed improbable and impossible.

“Dr. Rhodes-”

“He’s a resident,” I said, because that explained everything. Rhodes barely knew how to tie his shoes, much less talk to a parent who’d been through an intense trauma with a child. Rhodes should never have brought up the DNR to Charlotte and Sean-particularly since Willow hadn’t yet been tested to see if she was mens sana. In fact, while he was ordering that test, he might have wanted to get one for himself.

“They cut her open in front of me. I heard her ribs break when they…when they…” Charlotte’s face was white, haunted. “Would you sign one?” she whispered.

She had asked me the same question, in not so many words, before you were even born. It was the day after her twenty-seven-week ultrasound, when I had sent her to Gianna Del Sol and the health-care team for high-risk pregnancies at the hospital. I was a good obstetrician, but I knew my limits-and I couldn’t provide her with the care she now needed. However, Charlotte had been traumatized by a stupid geneticist whose bedside manner was better suited to patients already in the morgue, and now I was doing damage control while she sobbed on my couch.

“I don’t want her to suffer,” Charlotte said.

I did not know how to tiptoe around the topic of a late-term abortion. Even someone who wasn’t Catholic, like Charlotte, would have a hard time swallowing that option-and yet, it was never chosen lightly. Intact D & Es were performed only by a handful of physicians in the country, physicians who were highly skilled and committed to ending pregnancies where there was a great maternal or fetal health risk. For certain conditions that weren’t apparent before the twelve-week cutoff for abortions, these doctors provided an alternative to giving birth to a baby with no chance of survival. You could argue that either outcome would leave a scar on the parent, but then again, as Charlotte had pointed out, there were no happy endings here.

“I don’t want you to suffer,” I replied.

“Sean doesn’t want to do it.”

“Sean isn’t pregnant.”

Charlotte turned away. “How do you fly across the country with a baby inside you, knowing you’ll be coming back without one?”

“If it’s what you want, I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what I want.” She looked up at me. “What would you do?”

Two months later, we stood on opposite sides of your hospital NICU bassinet. The room, filled with so many machines to keep their tiny charges alive and functional, was bathed in a rich blue light, as if we were all swimming underwater. “Would you sign one?” Charlotte asked me again, when I didn’t answer the first time.

You could argue that it was less traumatizing to terminate a pregnancy than it was to sign a DNR for a child who was already in this world. Had Charlotte made the decision to terminate at twenty-seven weeks, her loss would have been devastating but theoretical-she would not have met you yet. Now, she was forced to question your existence again-but this time, she could see the pain and suffering in front of her eyes.

Charlotte had come to me for advice multiple times: about conceiving, about whether or not to have a late-term abortion, and now, about a do not resuscitate order.

What would I do?

I would go back to the moment Charlotte had asked me to help her have a baby, and I’d refer her to someone else.

I’d go back to when we were more likely to laugh together than to cry.

I’d go back to the time before you had come between us.

I’d do whatever I had to, to keep you from feeling like everything was breaking apart.

If you chose to stop a loved one’s suffering-either before it began or during the process-was that murder, or mercy?

“Yes,” I whispered. “I would.”

Marin

“The learning curve was huge,” Charlotte said. “From figuring out how to hold Willow, or how to change her diaper without breaking a bone, to knowing that we might simply be carrying her in our arms and hear that little pop that meant she’d broken something. We found out where to order car beds and adapted infant carriers, so that the straps wouldn’t snap her collarbones. We started to understand when we had to go to the emergency room and when we could splint the break ourselves. We stocked our own waterproof casts in the garage. We traveled to Nebraska, because they had orthopedic surgeons who specialized in OI, and we started Willow on a course of pamidronate infusions at Children’s Hospital in Boston.”

“Do you ever-well, for lack of a better term-get a break?”

Charlotte smiled a little. “Not really. We don’t make plans. We don’t bother, because we never know what’s going to happen. There’s always a new trauma we have to learn to deal with. Breaking a rib, for example, isn’t like breaking your back.” She hesitated. “Willow did that last year.”

Someone in the jury sucked in their breath, a whistling sound that made Guy Booker roll his eyes and that absolutely delighted me. “Can you tell the court how you’ve managed to pay for all this?”

“That’s a huge problem,” Charlotte said. “I used to work, but after Willow was born, I couldn’t. Even when she was in preschool, I had to be ready to run if she had a break, and you can’t do that when you’re the head pastry chef at a restaurant. We tried to hire a nurse that we trusted to take care of her, but it cost more than my salary, and sometimes the agency would send along women who knew noth ing about OI, who didn’t speak English, who couldn’t understand what I told them about taking care of Willow. I had to be her advocate, and I had to be there all the time.” She shrugged. “We don’t give big birthday or Christmas gifts. We don’t have IRAs or a college fund for the kids. We don’t take vacations. All of our money goes to pay for what insurance doesn’t.”

“Like?”

“Willow’s in a clinical study for her pamidronate, which means it’s free, but once she’s a certain age she can’t be part of the study anymore, and each infusion is over a thousand dollars. Leg braces cost five thousand dollars each, rodding surgeries are a hundred thousand. A spinal fusion, which Willow will have to have as a teen, can be several times that, and that’s not counting the flight to Omaha to have it done. Even if insurance pays for part of these things, the rest is left to us. And there are plenty of smaller items that add up: wheelchair maintenance, sheepskin to line casts, ice packs, clothes that can accommodate casts, different pillows to make Willow more comfortable, ramps for handicapped access into the house. She’ll need more equipment as she gets older-reachers and mirrors and other adaptations for short stature. Even a car with pedals that are easier to press down on, so they don’t cause microfractures in her feet, costs tens of thousands of dollars to get rigged correctly, and Vocational Rehabilitation will pay for only one vehicle-the rest are your responsibility, for life. She can go to college, but even that will cost more than usual, because of the adaptations necessary-and the best schools for kids like Willow aren’t nearby either, which means more travel expenses. We cashed out my husband’s 401(k) and took out a second mortgage. I’ve maxed out two credit cards.” Charlotte looked over at the jury. “I know what I look like to all of you. I know you think I’m in this for a big payday, that this is why I started this lawsuit.”

I stilled, not sure what she was doing; this was not what we had practiced. “Charlotte, have you-”

“Please,” she said. “Let me finish. It is about cost. But not the financial kind.” She blinked back tears. “I don’t sleep at night. I feel guilty when I laugh at a joke on TV. I watch little girls the same age as Willow at the playground, and I hate them sometimes-that’s how bitterly jealous I can get when I see how easy it is for them. But the day I signed that DNR in the hospital, I made a promise to my daughter. I said, If you fight, I will, too. If you live, I will make sure your life is the best it can possibly be. That’s what a good mother does, right?” She shook her head. “The way it usually works, the parent takes care of the child, until years later, when the roles are reversed. But with Willow and me, I’ll always be the one taking care of her. That’s why I’m here today. That’s what I want you to tell me. How am I supposed to take care of my daughter after I’m gone?”

You could have heard a pin drop, a heart beat. “Your Honor,” I said. “Nothing further.”

Sean

The sea was a monster, black and angry. You were equally terrified and fascinated by it; you’d beg to go watch the waves crash against the retaining wall, but every time they did, you shivered in my arms.

I had taken the day off work because Guy Booker had said that all witnesses had to come to the trial on the first day. But as it turned out, I couldn’t be in the courtroom anyway, until my testimony. I stayed for ten minutes-just long enough for the judge to tell me to leave.

This morning, I’d realized that Charlotte thought I was coming to court to support her. I could see why, after the night before, she would expect that. In her arms, I had been explosive, enraged, and tender by turns-as if we were playing out our feelings in a pantomime beneath the sheets. I knew she was upset when I told her I was meeting Guy Booker, but she should have understood better than anyone why I still needed to testify against her in this lawsuit: you did what you had to do to protect your child.

After leaving the courthouse, I’d driven home and told the hired nurse to take the afternoon off. Amelia would need to be picked up at school at three, but in the meantime, I asked what you wanted to do. “I can’t do anything,” you said. “Look at me.”

It was true, your entire left leg was splinted. But all the same, I didn’t see why I couldn’t get a little creative to boost your spirits. I carried you out to the car, wrapped in blankets, and tucked you sideways across the backseat so that your leg was stretched along it. You could still wear your seat belt this way, and as you began to spot the familiar landmarks that led to the ocean, you got more and more animated.

There was nobody at the beach in late September, so I could park sideways across the lot that butted up to the retaining wall, giving you a bird’s-eye view. The truck’s cab sat high enough for you to see the waves, creeping forward and slinking backward like great gray cats. “Daddy?” you asked. “How come you can’t skate on the ocean?”

“I guess you can, way up in the Arctic, but for the most part, there’s too much salt in the water for it to freeze.”

“If it did freeze, wouldn’t it be awesome if there were still waves? Like ice sculptures?”

“That would be cool,” I agreed. I glanced over my headrest at you. “Wills? You okay?”

“My leg doesn’t hurt.”

“I wasn’t talking about your leg. I was talking about what’s going on today.”

“There were a lot of TV cameras this morning.”

“Yeah.”

“Cameras make my stomach hurt.”

I threaded my arm around the seat to reach your hand. “You know I’d never let any of those reporters bother you.”

“Mom should bake for them. If they really loved her brownies or her toffee bars, they might just say thank you and leave.”

“Maybe your mom could add arsenic to the batter,” I mused.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I shook my head. “Your mom loves you, too. You know that, right?”

Outside, the Atlantic reached a crescendo. “I think there are two different oceans-the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter,” you said. “It’s hard to remember what the other one’s like.”

I opened my mouth, thinking that you hadn’t heard what I said about Charlotte. And then I realized that you had.

Charlotte

Guy Booker was just the sort of person that Piper and I would have laughed at if we’d come across him at Maxie’s Pad-an attorney who had gotten so big in his own head that he had a personalized license plate which read HOTSHOT on his mint green T-Bird. “This is really about the money, isn’t it?” he said.

“No. But the money means the difference between good care and lousy care for my daughter.”

“Willow receives Katie Beckett monies through Healthy Kids Gold, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, but even so, that doesn’t cover all the medical expenses-and none of the out-of-pocket ones. For example, when a child’s in a spica cast, she needs a different kind of car seat. And the dental problems that are part and parcel of OI might run thousands of dollars a year.”

“If your daughter had been born a gifted pianist, would you be asking for money for a grand piano?” Booker said.

Marin had told me that he would try to get me angry, so that the jury would like me less. I took a deep breath and counted to five. “That’s comparing apples and oranges, Mr. Booker. This isn’t an arts education we’re talking about. It’s my daughter’s life.”

Booker walked toward the jury; I had to suppress an urge to check if he left a trail of oil. “You and your husband don’t see eye to eye about this lawsuit, Ms. O’Keefe, correct?”

“No, we do not.”

“Would you agree that the cause of your pending divorce is that your husband, Sean, doesn’t support this lawsuit?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“He doesn’t believe Willow was a wrongful birth, does he?”

“Objection,” Marin called out. “You can’t ask her what his opinion is.”

“Sustained.”

Booker folded his arms. “Yet, you’re going through with the lawsuit anyway, even though it will most likely split up your family, aren’t you?”

I pictured Sean in his coat and tie this morning, that tiny lift of spirit I’d had when I thought he was coming to court with me instead of against me. “I still think it’s the right thing to do.”

“Have you had conversations with Willow about this lawsuit?” Booker asked.

“Yes,” I said. “She knows I’m doing this because I love her.”

“You think she understands that?”

I hesitated. “She’s only six. I think a lot of the mechanics of the lawsuit have gone over her head.”

“What about when she’s older?” said Booker. “I bet Willow’s pretty good when it comes to computer skills?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever thought about the moment years from now when your daughter gets on the Internet and Googles herself? You? This case?”

“Well, God knows I’m not looking forward to that, but I hope that, if it happens, I’ll be able to explain to her why it was necessary…and that the quality of her life that day is a direct result of the lawsuit.”

“God knows,” Booker repeated. “Interesting choice of words. You’re a practicing Catholic, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“As a practicing Catholic, you’re aware that it’s a mortal sin to have an abortion?”

I swallowed. “Yes, I am.”

“Yet the premise of this lawsuit is that, if you’d known about Willow’s condition earlier, you would have terminated the pregnancy, right?”

I could feel the eyes of the jury on me. I had known that there was a point where I would be put on display-the sideshow oddity, the zoo animal-and this was it. “I know what you’re doing,” I said tightly. “But this case is about malpractice, not abortion.”

“That’s not an answer, Ms. O’Keefe. Let’s try again: if you’d found out that you were carrying a child who was profoundly deaf and blind, would you have terminated the pregnancy?”

“Objection,” Marin cried. “That’s irrelevant. My client’s child isn’t deaf and blind.”

“It goes to the mind-set of whether or not the child’s mother could have done what she says she could,” Booker argued.

“Sidebar,” Marin said, and they both approached the bench, continuing to argue loudly in front of everyone. “Judge, this is prejudicial. He can ask what my client’s decision was regarding actual medical facts that the defendant did not share with her-”

“Don’t tell me how to try my case, sweetheart,” Booker said.

“You arrogant pig-”

“I’m going to allow the question,” the judge said slowly. “I think we all need to hear what Mrs. O’Keefe has to say.”

Marin gave me a measured look as she walked past the witness stand-a reminder that I had been called to the mat, and was expected to deliver. “Ms. O’Keefe,” Booker repeated, “would you have aborted a profoundly deaf and blind child?”

“I…I don’t know,” I said.

“Are you aware that Helen Keller was profoundly blind and deaf?” he asked. “What if you found out that the baby you were carrying was missing a hand? Would you have terminated that pregnancy?”

I kept my lips pressed tight, silent.

“Are you aware that Jim Abbott, a one-handed pitcher, pitched a no-hitter in major league baseball and won an Olympic gold medal in 1988?” Booker said.

“I’m not Jim Abbott’s mother. Or Helen Keller’s. I don’t know how difficult their childhoods were.”

“Well, then, we’re back to the original question: If you had known about Willow’s condition at eighteen weeks, would you have aborted her?”

“I was never given that option,” I said tightly.

“Actually, you were,” Booker countered. “At twenty-seven weeks. And by your own testimony, it wasn’t a decision you could make then. So why should a jury believe that you would have been able to make it several weeks earlier?”

Malpractice, Marin had drilled into my head, over and over. That’s why you instigated this lawsuit. No matter what else Guy Booker claims, it’s about a standard of care and a choice you weren’t offered.

I was shaking so hard that I slipped my hands beneath my thighs. “This case isn’t about what I might have done.”

“Sure it is,” Booker said. “Otherwise, it’s a waste of our time.”

“You’re wrong. This case is about what my doctor didn’t do-”

“Answer the question, Ms. O’Keefe-”

“Specifically,” I said, “she didn’t give me a choice about ending the pregnancy. She should have known something was wrong from that very first ultrasound, and she should have-”

“Ms. O’Keefe,” the lawyer yelled, “answer the question!”

I wilted against the chair and pressed my fingers to my temples. “I can’t,” I whispered. I looked down at the grain of the wood on the railing before me. “I can’t answer that question for you now, because now there is a Willow. A girl who likes pigtails but not braids, and who broke her femur this weekend, and who sleeps with a stuffed pig. A girl who’s kept me awake at night for the past six and a half years wondering how to get through the next day without an emergency, and planning, as a backup, how to go from crisis to crisis to crisis.” I looked up at the lawyer. “At eighteen weeks of pregnancy, at twenty-seven weeks of pregnancy, I didn’t know Willow like I do today. So I can’t answer your question now, Mr. Booker. But the reality is, nobody gave me a chance to answer it back then.”

“Ms. O’Keefe,” the lawyer said flatly. “I’m going to ask you one last time. Would you have aborted your daughter?”

I opened my mouth, and then I closed it.

“Nothing further,” he said.

Amelia

That night, I ate dinner alone with my parents. You were sitting on the living room couch with a tray and Jeopardy! so that your leg could stay elevated. From the kitchen, I could hear the buzzer every now and then, and Alex Trebek’s voice: Ooh, I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. As if he really gave a damn.

I sat between my mother and father, a conduit between two separate circuits. Amelia, can you pass the green beans to your mother? Amelia, pour your father a glass of lemonade. They weren’t talking to each other, and they weren’t eating-none of us were, really. “So,” I said cheerfully. “During fourth period, Jeff Congrew ordered a pizza into French class and the teacher didn’t even notice.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened today?” my father asked.

My mother lowered her eyes. “I really do not want to talk about it, Sean. It was bad enough getting through it.”

The silence was a blanket so huge, it seemed to cover the entire table. “Domino’s delivered,” I said.

My father cut two precise squares of his chicken. “Well, if you won’t tell me what happened, I guess I’ll be able to read all about it tomorrow in the paper. Or maybe, hey, it’ll be on the eleven o’clock news…”

My mother’s fork clattered against her plate. “Do you think this is easy for me?”

“Do you think this is easy for any of us?”

“How could you?” my mother exploded. “How could you act like everything was getting better between us and then…then this?”

“The difference between you and me, Charlotte, is that I’m never acting.”

“It was pepperoni,” I announced.

They both turned to me. “What?” my father said.

“It’s not important,” I muttered. Like me.

You called out from the living room. “Mom, I’m done.”

So was I. I got up and scraped the contents of my plate, which was everything, into the trash. “Amelia, aren’t you forgetting to ask something?” my mother said.

I stared at her dully. There were a thousand questions, sure, but I didn’t want to hear the answers to any of them.

“May I be excused?” my mother prompted.

“Shouldn’t you be asking Willow that?” I said sarcastically.

As I passed you in the living room, you glanced up. “Did Mom hear me?”

“Not by a long shot,” I said, and I ran up the stairs.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn’t starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn’t enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.

I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size. In the bathroom, I tried to throw up, but I hadn’t eaten enough at dinner. I wanted to run barefoot till my feet bled; I wanted to scream, but I’d been silent for so long that I’d forgotten how.

I wanted to cut.

But.

I had promised.

I took the telephone handset off its cradle beside my mother’s bed and carried it into the bathroom for privacy, since any minute now, you would hobble upstairs to get ready for bed. I had programmed Adam’s number in. We hadn’t spoken in a few days, because he’d broken his leg and had surgery-he’d IMed me from the hospital-but I was hoping he was home now. I needed him to be home now.

He had given me his cell number-I was surely the only kid over age thirteen who didn’t have one, but we couldn’t afford it. It rang twice, and then I heard his voice, and I nearly burst into tears. “Hey,” he said, “I was just going to call you.”

It was proof that there was someone in this world who thought I mattered. I felt like I’d just been pulled back from a cliff. “Great minds think alike.”

“Yeah,” he said, but his voice sounded thin and distant.

I tried to remember how he had tasted. I hated that I had to pretend I knew, when in reality, it had already faded, like a rose you press into a dictionary under the Qs, hoping you can call back summer at any time, but then in December it’s nothing more than crumbling, brown bits of dried flower. Sometimes at night I’d whisper to myself, pretending that the words came out in the low, soft curve of Adam’s voice: I love you, Amelia. You’re the one for me. And then I’d open my lips the tiniest bit and pretend that he was a ghost, and that I could feel him sinking into me, onto my tongue, down my throat, into my belly, the only meal that could fill me.

“How’s the leg?”

“Hurts like hell,” Adam said.

I curled the phone closer. “I really miss you. It’s crazy here. The trial started, and there were reporters all over the front lawn. My parents are certifiable, I swear-”

“Amelia.” The word sounded like a ball being dropped from the Empire State Building. “I wanted to talk to you because, um, this isn’t working out. This long-distance thing-”

I felt a pang between my ribs. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say it,” I whispered.

“I just…I mean, we might never even see each other again.”

I felt a hook snag at the bottom of my heart, drawing it down. “I could come visit,” I said, my voice small.

“Yeah, and then what? Push me around in a wheelchair? Like I’m some kind of charity case?”

“I would never-”

“Just go get yourself some football player-that’s what girls like you want, right? Not some guy who bumps into a fucking table and snaps his leg in half-”

By now I was crying. “That doesn’t matter-”

“Yes it does, Amelia. But you don’t understand. You’ll never understand. Having a sister who’s got OI doesn’t make you an expert.”

My face was flaming. I hung up the phone before Adam could say anything else and held my palms to my cheeks. “But I love you,” I said, although I knew he couldn’t hear me.

First the tears came. Then the fury: I picked up the phone and hurled it against the bathtub wall. I grabbed the shower curtain and pulled it down in one good yank.

But I wasn’t mad at Adam; I was angry at myself.

It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you’d be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you’re going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn’t be there. Either that, or you’d confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.

I told myself that if I didn’t care, this wouldn’t have hurt so much-surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn’t a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

That’s why I reached into the tub and turned on the water: so that I would drown out my sobs, so that when I grabbed the razor blade I’d hidden in the box of tampons and drew it over my skin like a violin’s bow, no one would hear the song of my shame.

This past summer, my mother ran out of sugar and drove to the local convenience store mid-recipe, leaving us alone for twenty minutes-which is not that long a period of time, you’d think. But it was long enough to start a fight with you about which TV show we should watch; it was long enough to yell There’s a reason Mom wishes you were dead; it was long enough to watch your face crumple and feel my conscience kick in.

“Wiki,” I’d said, “I didn’t really mean it.”

“Just shut up, Amelia-”

“Stop being such a baby-”

“Well, you stop being such a dickhead!”

That word, on your lips-it was enough to stop me in my tracks. “Where did you hear that?”

“From you, you stupid jerk,” you said.

Just then, a bird smacked into the window so loudly that we both jumped.

“What was that?” you asked, standing on the couch cushions to get a better look.

I climbed up next to you, careful, because I always had to be. The bird was little and brown, a swallow or a sparrow, I could never tell the difference. It was sprawled on the grass.

“Is it dead?” you asked.

“Well, how would I know that?”

“Don’t you think we ought to check?”

So we went outside and trudged halfway around the house. Big surprise, the bird was still exactly where it had been moments before. I squatted down and tried to see if its chest was moving at all.

Nada.

“We need to bury it,” you said soberly. “We can’t just leave it out here.”

“Why? Things die all the time in nature-”

“But this one was our fault. The bird probably heard us yelling and that’s why it flew into the window.”

I highly doubted that the bird heard us at all, but I wasn’t going to argue with you.

“Where’s the shovel?” you asked.

“I don’t know.” I thought for a moment. “Hang on,” I said, and I ran into the house. I took the big metal mixing spoon Mom had in her bowl and carried it outside. There was still batter on it, but maybe that would be okay, like sending Egyptian mummies off to the afterlife with food and gold and their pets.

I dug a small hole in the ground about six inches away from where the bird was. I didn’t want to touch it-that totally creeped me out-so I sort of flicked it into the hole with the edge of the spoon. “Now what?” I asked, looking up at you.

“Now we have to say a prayer,” you said.

“Like a Hail Mary? What makes you think the bird was Catholic?”

“We could sing a Christmas carol,” you suggested. “That’s not really religious. It’s just pretty.”

“How about instead we say something nice about birds?”

You agreed to that. “They come in rainbow colors,” you said.

“They fly well,” I added. Until about ten minutes ago, anyway. “And they make nice music.”

“And birds remind me of chicken and chicken tastes really great,” you said.

“Okay, that’s good enough.” I shoveled the soil on top of the dead bird, and then you crouched down and made a pattern on the top with bits of grass, like sprinkles on a cake. We walked side by side into the house again.

“Amelia? You can watch whatever you want on TV.”

I turned to you. “I don’t wish you were dead,” I admitted.

When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a toddler.

What I wanted to say to you, but didn’t, was this: Don’t use me as your model. I’m the last person you should look up to.

For weeks after we buried that dumb bird, every time it rained, I would not sit near that window. Even now, I wouldn’t walk near that part of the yard. I was afraid that I’d hear something crunch and I’d look down and find the broken bones of the skeleton, the brittle wings, the chiseled beak. I was smart enough to look away, so that I’d never have to see what might surface.

People always want to know what it feels like, so I’ll tell you: there’s a sting when you first slice, and then your heart speeds up when you see the blood, because you know you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, and yet you’ve gotten away with it. Then you sort of go into a trance, because it’s truly dazzling-that bright red line, like a highway route on a map that you want to follow to see where it leads. And-God-the sweet release, that’s the best way I can describe it, kind of like a balloon that’s tied to a little kid’s hand, which somehow breaks free and floats into the sky. You just know that balloon is thinking, Ha, I don’t belong to you after all; and at the same time, Do they have any idea how beautiful the view is from up here? And then the balloon remembers, after the fact, that it has a wicked fear of heights.

When reality kicks in, you grab some toilet paper or a paper towel (better than a washcloth, because the stains don’t ever come out 100 percent) and you press hard against the cut. You can feel your embarrassment; it’s a backbeat underneath your pulse. Whatever relief there was a minute ago congeals, like cold gravy, into a fist in the pit of your stomach. You literally make yourself sick, because you promised your self last time would be the last time, and once again, you’ve let yourself down. So you hide the evidence of your weakness under layers of clothes long enough to cover the cuts, even if it’s summertime and no one is wearing jeans or long sleeves. You throw the bloody tissues into the toilet and watch the water go pink before you flush them into oblivion, and you wish it was really that easy.

I once saw a movie where a girl got her throat slashed, and instead of a scream, there was this low sigh-like it didn’t hurt, like it was just a chance to finally let go. I knew that feeling was coming, so I waited a moment between my second and third cuts. I watched the blood welling on my thigh and I tried to hold off as long as I could before I drew the razor across the skin again.

“Amelia?”

Your voice. I looked up, panicked. “What are you doing in here?” I said, folding my legs up, so that you couldn’t get a better glimpse of what you’d probably already seen. “Haven’t you ever heard of privacy?”

You were teetering on your crutches. “I just wanted to get my toothbrush, and the door wasn’t locked.”

“Yes it was,” I argued. But maybe I was wrong? I had been so focused on calling Adam, maybe I had forgotten. I fixed my meanest stare on you. “Get out!” I yelled.

You hobbled back to our room, leaving the door open. I quickly lowered my legs and pressed a wad of toilet paper against the cuts I’d made. Usually I waited until they stopped bleeding before I left the bathroom, but I just pulled up my jeans with that strategically placed padding and went into our bedroom. I stared at you, practically daring you to say something to me about what you’d seen, so that I could scream at you again, but you were sitting on the bed, reading. You didn’t say anything to me at all.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting. I wondered if you felt the same way, once your bones healed.

I lay back on my pillows. My thigh throbbed.

“Amelia?” you said. “Will you tuck me in?”

“Where’s Mom and Dad?” You didn’t really have to answer that-even if they were physically downstairs, they were so far removed from us that they might as well have been on the moon.

I could still remember the first night I hadn’t needed my parents to tuck me in. I might have been about your age, in fact. Before that night, there had been a routine-lamps off, sheets cozied tight, kiss on the forehead-and monsters in the drawers of my desk and hiding behind books on the shelf. And then one day, I just put down the book I’d been reading and closed my eyes. Had my parents been proud of this newly self-sufficient kid? Or had they felt like they’d lost something they couldn’t even name?

“Well, did you brush your teeth?” I asked, but then I remembered you had been trying to do just that when I was busy cutting. “Oh, forget your teeth. One night won’t make a difference.” I got out of bed and awkwardly leaned over yours. “Good night,” I said, and then I bobbed down like a pelican, fishing, and pecked your forehead.

“Mom tells me a story.”

“Then get Mom to tuck you in,” I said, throwing myself back on my own mattress. “I don’t have any stories.”

You were quiet for a second. “We could make one up together.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” I sighed.

“Once upon a time there were two sisters. One of them was really, really strong, and one of them wasn’t.” You looked at me. “Your turn.”

I rolled my eyes. “The strong sister went outside into the rain and realized the reason she was strong was because she was made out of iron, but it was raining and she rusted. The end.”

“No, because the sister who wasn’t strong went outside when it was raining, and hugged her really tight until the sun came out again.”

When we were little, we’d sometimes sleep in the same bed. It never started out that way, but in the middle of the night I’d wake up and find you vined around me. You gravitated toward warmth; me, I liked to seek out the cold spots in my sheets. I’d spend hours trying to move away from you in the little twin bed, but I never even thought of moving you back into your own. Polar north can’t get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.

“Then what happened?” I whispered, but you had already drifted off to sleep, and I was left to dream my own ending.

Sean

By unspoken arrangement, I slept on the couch that night. Except “sleep” was too optimistic an outcome. I basically tossed and turned. The one time I did nod off, I had a nightmare that I was on the witness stand and looked at Charlotte, and when I started to respond to Guy Booker’s question, black gnats poured out of my mouth.

Whatever wall Charlotte and I had broken down last night had been reconstructed twice as high and twice as thick. It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help?

I had filed for divorce, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over.

Had I ever really told her that?

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

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

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

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

Marin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded. “Two girls.”

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

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

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Both of them?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What type of OI does she have?”

“Type III-or progressively deforming OI.”

“What does that mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sat back down, opening the questioning to Guy Booker. “You’ve been treating this child since she was six months old, correct?”

“Yes. I was working at Shriners in Omaha at the time, and Willow was part of our pamidronate trials there. When I moved to Children’s in Boston, it made more sense to treat her closer to home.”

“Now how often do you see her, Dr. Rosenblad?”

“Twice a year, unless there’s a break in between. And let’s just say I’ve never seen Willow only twice a year.”

“How long have you been using pamidronate to treat children with OI?”

“Since the early nineties.”

“And you said that, prior to the advent of pamidronate for OI, these children had a much more limited life in terms of mobility, correct?”

“Absolutely.”

“So would you say that the medical technology in your field has increased Willow’s health potential?”

“Dramatically,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “She’s able to do things now that kids with OI couldn’t do fifteen years ago.”

“So if this trial were taking place fifteen years ago, the picture you’d be painting for us of Willow’s life might be even more grim, wouldn’t you agree?”

Dr. Rosenblad nodded. “That’s correct.”

“Given that we live in America, where medical research is blooming in laboratories and hospitals like yours on a daily basis, isn’t it likely that Willow might see even more medical advances in her lifetime?”

“Objection,” I said. “Speculative.”

“He’s an expert in his field, Judge,” Booker countered.

“He can give his opinion,” Judge Gellar said, “based on his knowledge as to what medical research is currently being done.”

“It’s possible,” Dr. Rosenblad replied. “But like I also pointed out, the wonder drugs that we thought bisphosphonates were might, over the long term, reveal some other problems we hadn’t counted on for OI patients. We just don’t know yet.”

“Conceivably, however, Willow could grow to adulthood?” Booker asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Could she fall in love?”

“Of course.”

“Could she have a baby?”

“Possibly.”

“Could she work outside the home?”

“Yes.”

“Could she live independently of her parents?”

“Maybe,” Dr. Rosenblad said.

Guy Booker spread his hands across the railing of the jury box. “Doctor, you treat illness, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Would you ever treat a broken finger by amputating the arm?”

“That would be a bit extreme.”

“Isn’t it extreme to treat OI then by preventing the patient from being born?”

“Objection,” I called out.

“Sustained.” The judge glared at Guy Booker. “I won’t have my courtroom turned into a pro-life rally, Counselor.”

“I’ll rephrase. Have you ever encountered a parent whose child is diagnosed with OI in utero who chooses to terminate the pregnancy?”

Rosenblad nodded. “Yes, often in cases where you’re talking about the lethal form of OI, Type II.”

“What about the severe form?”

“Objection,” I said. “What does this have to do with the plaintiff?”

“I want to hear this,” Judge Gellar said. “You may answer the question, Doctor.”

Rosenblad stepped through the minefield of his response. “Terminating a wanted pregnancy is no one’s first choice,” he said, “but when faced with a fetus who will become a severely disabled child, different families have different levels of tolerance. Some families know they’ll be able to provide enough support for a child with disabilities, some are smart enough to know, in advance, they won’t.”

“Doctor,” Booker said, “would you call Willow O’Keefe’s birth a wrongful one?”

I felt something at my side and realized that Charlotte was trembling.

“I am not in a position to make that decision,” Rosenblad said. “I’m just the physician.”

“My point exactly,” Booker answered.

Piper

I had not seen my ultrasound technician Janine Weissbach since she left my practice four years ago and went to work at a hospital in Chicago. Her hair, which had been blond, was now a sleek chestnut, and there were fine lines bracketing her mouth. I wondered if I looked the same to her, or if betrayal had aged me beyond recognition.

Janine had been allergic to nuts, and once there had been a minor war between her and a nurse on staff who’d brewed hazelnut coffee. Janine broke out in hives just from the smell that permeated our little lounge; the nurse swore she didn’t realize that liquefied nuts counted when it came to allergy; Janine asked how she’d ever passed her nursing exam. In fact, the brouhaha had been the biggest upset in my practice…until, of course, this.

“How is it that you came to know the plaintiff in this case?” Charlotte’s lawyer asked.

Janine leaned closer to the microphone on the witness stand. She used to sing karaoke, I remembered, at a local nightclub. She had referred to herself as pathologically single. Now, though, she wore a wedding band.

People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.

“She was a patient at the office where I was working,” Janine said. “Piper Reece’s ob-gyn practice.”

“You’re employed by the defendant?”

“I was for three years, but now I work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.”

The lawyer was staring off at a wall, as if she wasn’t even listening. “Ms. Gates,” the judge prompted.

“Sorry,” she said, snapping to attention. “You’re employed by the defendant?”

“You just asked me that.”

“Right. Um, can you tell us the circumstances under which you met Charlotte O’Keefe?”

“She came in for an eighteen-week ultrasound.”

“Who else was there?”

“Her husband,” Janine said.

“Was the defendant there?”

For the first time, Janine met my eye. “Not at first. The way we did it, I’d perform the ultrasound and discuss it with her; and she’d read the results and talk to the patient.”

“What happened during Charlotte O’Keefe’s ultrasound, Ms. Weissbach?”

“Piper had told me to be on the lookout for anything that might signify Down syndrome. The patient’s quad screen had shown a slightly elevated risk. I was excited to be working with a new machine-it had only just arrived, and was state of the art. I got Mrs. O’Keefe settled on the table, put some gel onto her abdomen, and then moved the transducer around to get several clear views of the fetus.”

“What did you see?” the lawyer asked.

“The femurs were measuring on the small side, which can sometimes be a flag for Down syndrome, but none of the other indicators were present.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Janine said. “Some of the images were incredibly clear. Particularly the one of the fetal brain.”

“Did you mention these findings to the defendant?”

“Yes. She said that the femur wasn’t off the charts, that it could simply be because the mother was short,” Janine answered.

“What about the clarity of the images? Did the defendant have anything to say about that?”

“No,” Janine said. “She didn’t.”

The night I’d driven Charlotte home from her twenty-seven-week ultrasound, the one with all the broken bones visible, I’d stopped being her friend and started being a doctor. I sat at the kitchen table and used medical terminology, which almost acted like a sedative itself: the pain in Char lotte’s and Sean’s eyes dulled as I heaped them with information they could not understand. I talked to them about the physician I’d already called for a consultation.

At one point, Amelia had flitted into the kitchen. Charlotte hastily wiped her eyes. “Hey, sweetie,” she said.

“I came to say good night to the baby,” Amelia said, and she ran up to Charlotte where she sat and wrapped her arms as best as she could around her mother’s belly.

Charlotte made a tiny sound, a mewling. “Not so tight,” she managed, and I knew what she was thinking: had this eager love broken some of your bones?

“But I want her to come out,” Amelia said. “I’m sick of waiting.”

Charlotte stood up. “I think I might go lie down, too.” She held out her hand for Amelia, and they walked out of the kitchen.

Sean sank into the seat she’d vacated. “It’s me, right?” He looked up at me, haunted. “I’m the reason the baby’s like this.”

“No-”

“Charlotte had one kid who was perfectly fine,” he said. “Do the math.”

“This is probably a spontaneous mutation. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent it.” I couldn’t have prevented it, either. But that didn’t keep me from feeling guilty, just like Sean. “You have to take care of her, because she can’t fall apart right now. Don’t let her look this up on the Internet before you see the doctor tomorrow; don’t tell her you’re worried.”

“I can’t lie,” Sean said.

“Well, you will, if you love her.”

Now, all these years later, I wondered why I could not forgive Charlotte for following this very same advice.

I didn’t like Guy Booker, but then again, when you choose malpractice insurance providers, you’re not going for the folks you want to have over for Christmas dinner. He was good at making someone squirm on the witness stand, like an insect being pinned by a collector who wanted to scrutinize it more closely. “Ms. Weissbach,” Booker said, standing up to do his cross-examination, “have you ever seen another fetus that had a similar finding in the measurement of the femur?”

“Of course.”

“Do you happen to know the outcome?”

Charlotte’s lawyer stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. The witness is just a technologist, not a physician.”

“She sees this every day,” Booker countered. “She’s specially trained to read sonograms.”

“Sustained.”

“Well,” Janine said, miffed. “For your information, it’s not so easy to read the results of an ultrasound. I may just be a technologist, but I’m also supposed to point out things that might be problematic.” She jerked her chin toward me. “Piper Reece was my boss. I was just doing my job.”

She did not say anything more, but I could hear it all the same: Unlike you.

Charlotte

Something was wrong with my lawyer. She was fidgeting; she kept missing questions and forgetting answers. It got me wondering: Was doubt contagious? Had Marin sat next to me all day while I fought the urge to stand up and put an end to all this, and then awakened this morning with the same gut instincts?

She had called in a witness I did not know-Dr. Thurber, who was British but had become the head of radiology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford before moving to Shriners in Omaha and applying his knowledge as a radiologist to OI kids. According to the endless list of credentials Marin had led him through, Dr. Thurber had read thousands of ultrasounds during his career, had lectured throughout the world, and donated two weeks of his vacation every year to provide care to expectant mothers in impoverished countries.

Basically, he was a saint. A really smart one.

“Dr. Thurber,” Marin said, “for those of us who aren’t familiar with ultrasounds, can you explain the technology?”

“It’s a diagnostic tool, in terms of obstetrics,” the radiologist said. “The equipment is a real-time scanner. Sound waves get emitted from a transducer, which is placed against the mother’s abdomen and moved around to reflect the contents of the uterus. The image gets projected onto a monitor-a sonogram.”

“What are ultrasounds used for?”

“To diagnose and confirm pregnancy, to assess fetal heartbeat and fetal malformations, to measure the fetus in order to assess the gestational age and growth, to see the location of the placenta, to determine the amount of amniotic fluid-among other things.”

“When are ultrasounds traditionally performed during pregnancy?” Marin asked.

“There’s no hard-and-fast rule, but sometimes scans can be done at about seven weeks to confirm pregnancy and rule out ectopic or molar pregnancies. Most women have at least one ultrasound performed between eighteen and twenty weeks.”

“What happens during that ultrasound?”

“By then, the fetus is large enough to check out the anatomy and to look for congenital malformations,” Dr. Thurber said. “Certain bones will be measured, to make sure the baby is the right size based on the date of conception. They’ll make sure organs are in the right place, and that the spine’s intact. Basically, it’s a confirmation that everything’s where it’s supposed to be. And of course, you get to go home with a picture that stays taped to your fridge for the next six months.”

There were a few laughs on the jury. Had I had a picture of you, from your ultrasound? I couldn’t remember. When I think back to that day, I only feel this great tidal wash of relief, from the moment Piper told me you were healthy.

“Dr. Thurber,” Marin asked, “did you have an opportunity to review the eighteen-week ultrasound that was performed on Charlotte O’Keefe?”

“I did.”

“And what did you see?”

He glanced at the jury. “Based on the ultrasound, there was definite cause for concern. Normally when you do an ultrasound, you’re looking at the brain through the skull, so it’s usually a little fuzzy, a little bit muddy and gray, because of reverberation artifacts from the side of the skull that the ultrasound beam first hits. In Mrs. O’Keefe’s sonogram, however, the intracranial contents were crystal clear-even that near field of the cerebral hemisphere, which is normally obscured. This suggests a demineralized calvarium. There are several conditions in which the skull presents undermineralized, including skeletal dysplasia, and OI. One then has the obligation to look at the long bones, and in fact femur length is a part of every obstetric ultrasound. In Mrs. O’Keefe’s case, the femur was also measuring a bit short. The combination of the short femur and the demineralized skull is strongly suggestive of osteogenesis imperfecta.” He let the words hang in the courtroom. “In fact, had the technologist pushed down on Mrs. O’Keefe’s belly as she was doing the ultrasound, she would have been able to watch the screen and see the skull of the fetus being squashed out of shape.”

I folded my hands over my stomach, as if you were still inside.

“If Mrs. O’Keefe had been your patient, Doctor, what would you have done?”

“I would have taken more images of the chest-looking for rib fractures. I would have measured all the other long bones to confirm that this was a generalized short-bone condition. And at the very least I’d have referred the case to a center with more experience.”

Marin nodded. “What if I told you that Mrs. O’Keefe’s obstetrician did none of those things?”

“Then,” Dr. Thurber said, “I’d say that physician made a very big mistake.”

“Nothing further,” Marin said, and she slipped into the seat beside me. She immediately let out a heavy sigh.

“What’s the matter?” I whispered. “He’s very good.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you’re not the only one with problems?” Marin snapped.

Guy Booker got up to cross-examine the radiologist. “They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, don’t they, Dr. Thurber?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“How long have you testified as an expert witness?”

“For ten years,” the doctor said.

“I’m guessing you don’t do this for free?”

“No, I’m paid, like all expert witnesses,” Thurber replied.

Booker looked at the jury. “Right. There sure seems to be a lot of money flying around these days, isn’t there?”

“Objection,” Marin said. “Does he really expect the witness to answer his rhetorical questions?”

“Withdrawn. Doctor, isn’t it true that osteogenesis imperfecta is very rare?”

“Yes.”

“So a small-town OB, for example, might go through her entire professional life without ever seeing a case?”

“That’s true,” Thurber answered.

“Isn’t it fair to say that only a specialist would have been looking for OI on an ultrasound?”

“There is the old medical saying about hearing hoofbeats and assum ing it’s a horse instead of a zebra,” Thurber agreed, “but any trained obstetrician should be able to look at an ultrasound and spot red flags. She might not be able to identify what they signify, but she would know them for their abnormality, and would recognize that the patient’s care needs to be taken to the next level.”

“Is there any condition other than osteogenesis imperfecta that can give you such a clear image of the near field of the brain during an ultrasound?”

“The lethal form of congenital hypophosphatasia, but it’s extremely rare and it still wouldn’t have changed the need for the patient to be referred to a tertiary-care center.”

“Dr. Thurber,” Booker said, “do you ever get a particularly clear image of intracranial contents of the skull…on a healthy baby?”

“Occasionally. If the plane of the ultrasound on a particular image happens by chance to go through one of the normal cranial sutures, instead of bone, the interior of the brain will be shown clearly. However, we take multiple pictures of the brain looking at different intracranial structures, and the sutures are very thin. It would be virtually impossible to see multiple pictures of the brain for multiple projections where the transducer manages to hit a suture every single time. If I saw one image that showed the near field of brain very clearly but the other images did not, I would assume that single image had been taken through a cranial suture. In this case, however, all of the images of the brain show the intracranial contents unusually well.”

“How about that femur length? Have you ever measured a short femur during an eighteen-week ultrasound and then seen a perfectly healthy baby delivered?”

“Yes. Sometimes the technologists’ measurement can be off by a hair because the fetus is moving around or in an odd position. They measure two or three times and take the longest axis, but even being a whisker off at eighteen weeks-we’re talking millimeters-can drop the percentile significantly. Many times when we see a borderline-short femur length, it’s just undermeasured.”

Booker walked toward him. “As useful as ultrasound technology is, it’s not an exact science, is it? Certain images might be clearer than others?”

“The clarity with which we see all structures in the fetus is variable, yes. It depends on many things-the size of the mother, the position of the fetus. There’s a continuum, really. On any given day we might not be able to see them well, or conversely we might be able to see everything clearly.”

“At an eighteen-week ultrasound, Doctor, can you definitively say that a child is going to have Type III OI?”

“You can tell that there’s something wrong skeletally. You can see indicators-like the ones that were in Charlotte O’Keefe’s file. As the gestational age increases, if you see broken bones, you can generally guess that the fetus has Type III OI.”

“Doctor, if Charlotte O’Keefe had been your patient, and you’d seen the results of her eighteen-week ultrasound, and there were no broken bones, you would have recommended she have follow-up care?”

“Based on the short femur length and demineralized calvarium? Absolutely.”

“And once you saw broken bones on a subsequent ultrasound, would you have done what Piper Reece did: immediately refer Mrs. O’Keefe to a maternal-fetal-medicine practitioner at a tertiary-care center?”

“Yes.”

“But would you have conclusively diagnosed Mrs. O’Keefe’s fetus with OI at eighteen weeks, based solely on that first ultrasound?”

He hesitated. “Well,” Thurber said. “No.”

Amelia

Sometimes I wonder what really constitutes an “emergency.” I mean, every teacher in my school knew about the trial and the fact that both of my parents were not only in it but squaring off against each other. The whole state knew, and maybe even the whole country, thanks to the newspaper and television coverage. Surely even if they thought my mother was insane or moneygrubbing, they felt a smidgen of sympathy for me, being trapped in the middle? And yet, I still got yelled at in math for not paying attention. I had a huge English test tomorrow, vocabulary, on ninety words that I was most likely never going to use in my life.

To that end, I was making flash cards for myself. Hypersensitive, I wrote. Too too too sensitive. But wasn’t that the point? If you were sensitive, weren’t you bound to take things too seriously in the first place?

Trepidation: fear. Use it in a sentence: I have trepidations about taking this stupid test.

“Amelia!”

I heard you calling, but I also knew I didn’t have to answer. After all, my mother-or maybe Marin-was paying that nurse who smelled like mothballs to watch over you. This was the second day she’d been here when I got off the bus, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t impressed. She was watching General Hospital when she should have been playing with you.

“Amelia!” you yelled, louder this time.

I screeched the chair back from my desk and thundered downstairs. “What?” I demanded. “I’m trying to study.”

Then I saw it: Nurse Ratched had barfed all over the floor.

She was leaning against the wall, her face the color of Silly Putty. “I think I ought to go home…,” she wheezed.

Well, duh. I didn’t want to catch the bubonic plague.

“Do you think you can watch Willow till your mother gets back?” she asked.

As if I hadn’t been doing just that my whole life. “Sure.” I hesitated. “You are going to clean it up, first, right?”

“Amelia!” Willow hissed. “She’s sick!”

“Well, I’m not going to do it,” I whispered, but the nurse was already heading to the kitchen to mop up her mess.

“I still have to study,” I said, after we were left alone. “Let me go up and get my notebook and flash cards.”

“No, I’ll go upstairs instead,” you answered. “I kind of want to lie down.”

So I carried you-you were that light-and settled you on the bed with your crutches next to you. You picked up your latest book to start reading.

Scrutinize: to observe carefully.

Stature: the full height of a human.

I glanced at you over my shoulder. You were the size of a three-year-old, even though you were six and a half now. I wondered how small you’d stay. I thought about how there are kinds of goldfish that get bigger when you put them in large ponds and wondered if that would help: what if, instead of sitting in this bed, in this stupid house, I showed you the whole wide world?

“I could quiz you,” you said.

“Thanks, but I’m not ready yet. Maybe later.”

“Did you know Kermit the Frog is left-handed?” you asked.

“No.”

Dissipated: dissolved, faded away.

Elude: to escape from. I wish.

“Do you know how big a grave is when it’s dug?”

“Willow,” I said, “I’m trying to study here. Could you just shut up?”

“Seven feet, eight inches, by three feet, two inches, by six feet,” you whispered.

“Willow!”

You sat up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“Great. Don’t get lost,” I snapped. I watched you carefully lever your crutches so that you could hop your way off the bed. Usually Mom walked you to the bathroom-or, really, hovered-and then privacy kicked in and you booted her out and closed the door. “Do you need a hand?” I asked.

“Nope, just some collagen,” you said, and I almost cracked a smile.

A moment later, I heard the bathroom door lock. Scrupulous, devout, annihilate. Lethargic, lethal, subside. The world would be a much easier place if, instead of handing over superstuffed syllables all the time, we just said what we really meant. Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest-like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn’t noticed-weren’t sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I’m sorry.

I made it through Lesson 13 and Lesson 14-devious, aghast, rustic-and glanced down at my watch. It was only three o’clock. “Wiki,” I said, “what time did Mom say she’d be home-” And then I remembered you weren’t there.

You hadn’t been, for a good fifteen or twenty minutes.

No one had to go to the bathroom that long.

My pulse started racing. Had I been so engrossed in learning the definition of arbitration that I hadn’t heard a telltale fall? I ran to the bathroom door and rattled the knob. “Willow? Are you okay?”

There was no answer.

Sometimes I wonder what really constitutes an emergency.

I lifted up my leg and used my foot to break down the door.

Sean

The soup that came out of the vending machine at the courthouse looked-and tasted-just like the coffee. It was my third cup today, and I still wasn’t quite sure what I was drinking.

I was sitting near the window of my hiding place-my biggest accomplishment on this, the second day of the trial. I had planned to sit in the lobby until Guy Booker needed me-but I hadn’t counted on the press. The ones who hadn’t squeezed into the courtroom figured out who I was quickly enough and swarmed, leaving me to back away muttering No comment.

I’d poked through the maze of the courthouse corridors, trying door-knobs until I found one that opened. I had no idea what this room was used for normally, but it was located almost directly above the courtroom where Charlotte was right now.

I didn’t really believe in ESP or any of that crap, but I hoped she could feel me up here. Even more, I hoped that was a good thing.

Here was my secret: in spite of the fact that I had defected to the other side, in spite of the fact that my marriage had crashed on the rocks, there was a part of me that wondered what would happen if Charlotte won.

With enough money, we could send you to a camp this summer, so that you could meet other kids like you.

With enough money, we could buy a new van, instead of repairing the one that was seven years old with spit and glue.

With enough money, we could pay off our credit card debt and the second mortgage we’d taken out after the health insurance bills escalated.

With enough money, I could take Charlotte away for a night and fall in love with her again.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn’t be the cost of failure for a good friend. But what if we hadn’t known Piper personally, only professionally? Would I have endorsed a case like that against a different doctor? Was it Piper’s involvement I objected to-or the whole lawsuit?

There were so many things we hadn’t been told:

How it feels when a rib breaks, when I’m doing nothing more than cradling you.

How much it hurts to see the look on your face when you watch your older sister skating.

How even the people in a position to help have to cause pain first: the doctors who reset your bones, the folks who mold your leg braces by letting you play in them and get blisters, so that they know what to fix.

How your bones were not the only things that would break. There would be hairline cracks we would not see for years in my finances, my future, my marriage.

Suddenly I wanted to hear your voice. I took out my cell phone and started to dial, only to hear a loud beep as the battery died. I stared down at the receiver. I could go out to the car and get the charger, but that would mean running the gauntlet again. While I was weighing the costs and the benefits, the door to my sanctuary opened, and a slice of noise from the hallway slipped inside, followed by Piper Reece.

“You’ll have to find your own hiding place,” I said, and she jumped.

“You scared me to death,” Piper said. “How did you know that’s what I was doing?”

“Because it’s why I’m here. Shouldn’t you be in court?”

“We took a recess.”

I hesitated, then figured I had nothing to lose. “How’s it going in there?”

Piper opened her mouth, as if she were going to reply, and then shut it. “I’ll let you get back to your phone call,” she murmured, her hand on the doorknob.

“It’s dead,” I said, and she turned around. “My phone.”

She folded her arms. “Remember when there were no cell phones? When we didn’t have to listen to everyone’s conversations?”

“Some things are better left private,” I said.

Piper met my gaze. “It’s awful in there,” she admitted. “The last witness was an actuary who gave estimates on the out-of-pocket cost for Willow’s care, and the grand total, based on her life expectancy.”

“What did he say?”

“Thirty thousand annually.”

“No,” I said. “I meant, how long will she live?”

Piper hesitated. “I don’t like thinking of Willow in terms of numbers. Like she’s already a statistic.”

“Piper.”

“There’s no reason she won’t have a normal life expectancy,” Piper said.

“But not a normal life,” I finished.

Piper leaned against the wall. I had not turned the lights on-I didn’t want anyone to know I was in here, after all-and in the shadows her face looked lined and tired. “Last night I dreamed about the first time we had you over for dinner-to meet Charlotte.”

I could recall that night like it was yesterday. I had gotten lost on the way to Piper’s house because I was so nervous. For obvious reasons, I’d never before been invited to someone’s house after giving her a speeding ticket; and I wouldn’t have gone at all, but the day before pulling Piper’s car over for doing fifty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, I’d gone to the house of my best friend-another cop-and found my girlfriend in his bed. I had nothing to lose when Piper called the department a week later and asked; it was impulsive and stupid and desperate.

When I got to Piper’s, and was introduced to Charlotte, she’d held out her hand for me to shake and a spark had caught between our palms, shocking us both. The two little girls had eaten in the living room while the adults sat at the table; Piper had just served me a slice of caramel-pecan torte that Charlotte had made. “What do you think?” Charlotte had asked.

The filling was still warm and sweet; crust dissolved on my tongue like a memory. “I think we should get married,” I said, and everyone laughed, but I was not entirely kidding.

We had been talking about our first kisses. Piper told a story about a boy who’d enticed her into the woods behind the jungle gym on the pretext that there was a unicorn behind an ash tree; Rob talked about being paid five bucks by a seventh-grade girl for a practice run. Charlotte hadn’t been kissed, it turned out, till she was eighteen. “I can’t believe that,” I said.

“What about you, Sean?” Rob asked.

“I can’t remember.” By then, I had lost sense of everything but Charlotte. I could have told you how many inches away from my leg hers was beneath the table. I could have told you how the curls of her hair caught the candlelight and held on to it. I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

“Remember how we had Amelia and Emma in the living room,” Piper said now. “We were having such a good time no one thought to check on them?”

Suddenly I could see it-all of us crowded into the tiny downstairs bathroom, Rob yelling at his daughter, who had commandeered Amelia into helping her dump dry dog food into the toilet bowl.

Piper started to laugh. “Emma kept saying it was only a cupful.”

But it had soaked up the water and swollen to fill the bowl. It was amazing, in fact, how quickly it had gotten out of control.

Beside me, Piper’s laughter had turned the corner, and in that way emotion has of hopping boundaries, she was suddenly crying. “God, Sean. How did we get here?”

I stood awkwardly, and then after a moment I slipped an arm around her. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” Piper sobbed, and she buried her face against my shoulder. “I have never, ever in my life been the bad guy. But every time I walk into that courtroom, that’s exactly what I am.”

I had hugged Piper Reece before. It was what married couples did-you went to someone’s house and you handed over the obligatory bottle of wine and kissed the hostess on the cheek. Maybe distantly I was aware that Piper was taller than Charlotte, that she smelled of an unfamiliar perfume instead of Charlotte’s pear soap and vanilla extract. At any rate, the embrace was triangular: you connected at the cheek, and then your bodies angled away from each other.

But right now Piper was pressed against me, her tears hot against my neck. I could feel the curve and weight of her body. And I could tell the exact moment she became aware of mine.

And then she was kissing me, or maybe I was kissing her, and she tasted of cherries, and my eyes closed, and the moment they did, all I could see was Charlotte.

We both pushed away from each other, our eyes averted. Piper pressed her hands to her cheeks. I have never, ever in my life been the bad guy, she had said.

There is a first time for everything.

“I’m sorry,” I said, at the same time Piper began to speak.

“I shouldn’t have-”

“It didn’t happen,” I interrupted. “Let’s just say it didn’t happen, all right?”

Piper looked up at me sadly. “Just because you don’t want to see something, Sean, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

I didn’t know if we were talking about this moment, or this lawsuit, or both. There were a thousand things I wanted to say to Piper, all of which began and ended with an apology, but what tumbled off my lips instead was this: “I love Charlotte,” I said. “I love my wife.”

“I know,” Piper whispered, “I did, too.”

Charlotte

The movie that had been filmed to show a day in your life was the last bit of evidence that Marin would offer to the jury. It was the emotional counterpart to the cold, hard facts the actuary had given, about what it costs in this country to have a disabled child. It felt like ages since the video crew had followed you around school, and to be honest, I had worried about the outcome. What if the jury looked at our daily routine and didn’t find it remarkably different from anyone else’s?

Marin had told me that it was her job to make sure the presentation came off in our favor, and as soon as the first images projected onto the courtroom screen, I realized I should not have worried. Editing is a marvelous thing.

It began with an image of your face, reflected in the windowpane you were peering through. You weren’t speaking, but you didn’t have to. There was a lifetime of longing in your eyes.

The view panned out the window, then, to watch your sister skating on the pond.

Then came the first few strains of a song as I knelt down to strap on your braces before school, because you could not reach them yourself. After a moment I recognized it: “I Hope You Dance.”

In the pocket of my jacket, my cell phone began to vibrate.

We were not allowed to have cell phones on in court, but I’d told Marin that I had to be reachable, just in case-and we’d compromised with this. I slipped my hand into my pocket and looked at the screen to see who was calling.

HOME, it read.

On the projector screen, you were in class, and kids were funneling around you like a school of fish, doing some kind of spider dance at circle time, while you sat immobile in your wheelchair.

“Marin,” I whispered.

“Not now.”

“Marin, my phone’s ringing-”

She leaned closer to me. “If you pick up that phone right now instead of watching this film, the jury will crucify you for being heartless.”

So I sat on my hands, getting more and more agitated. Maybe the jury thought it was because I couldn’t watch this. The phone would stop vibrating and then start a moment later. On the screen I watched you at physical therapy, walking forward toward the mat biting your lower lip. The phone vibrated again, and I made a small sound in the back of my throat.

What if you’d fallen? What if the nurse didn’t know what to do? What if it was something even worse than a simple break?

I could hear snuffling sounds behind me, purses being opened and rummaged through for Kleenex. I could see the jury riveted by your words, your elfin face.

The phone buzzed again, an electrical shock to my system. This time I slipped it out of my pocket to see the text message icon. I hid the receiver under the table and flipped it open.

WILLOW HURT-HELP

“I have to get out of here,” I whispered to Marin.

“In fifteen minutes…We absolutely cannot recess right now.”

I looked up at the screen again, my heart hammering. Hurt, how? Why wasn’t the nurse doing something?

You were sitting on the mat, your legs frogged. Above you a red ring dangled. You winced as you reached for it. Can we stop now?

Come on, Willow, I know you’re tougher than that…wrap your fingers around and give it a squeeze.

You tried, for Molly. But tears were streaming from your eyes, and the sound that came from you was a sharp, staccato burst. Please, Molly…can I stop?

The phone was vibrating again. I wrapped my hand around it.

And then I was on the mat with you, holding you in my arms, rocking you, and telling you that I would make it better.

If I had been more aware of what was happening in the courtroom, I would have noticed that every woman on the jury was crying, and some of the men. I would have seen the TV cameras in the back of the gallery that were recording for playback on that night’s news. I would have seen Judge Gellar close his eyes and shake his head. But instead, the moment the screen went to black, I bolted.

I could feel everyone watching me as I ran up the aisle and out the double doors, and they probably thought I was overcome with emotion or too fragile to look at you in Technicolor. The moment I shoved past the bailiffs I hit the redial button on my phone. “Amelia? What’s the matter?”

“She’s bleeding,” Amelia sobbed, hysterical. “There was blood all over the place and she wasn’t moving and-”

Suddenly, an unfamiliar voice was on the phone. “Is this Mrs. O’Keefe?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Hal Chen, one of the EMTs who-”

“What’s wrong with my daughter!”

“She’s lost a great deal of blood, that’s all we know right now. Can you meet us at Portsmouth Regional?”

I don’t know if I even said yes. I didn’t try to tell Marin. I just ran-across the lobby, out the courthouse doors. I pushed past the reporters, who were caught unawares, who pulled themselves together just in time to focus their cameras and point their microphones at the woman who was sprinting away from this trial, headed toward you.

Amelia

When I had been really little and the wind blew like mad at night, I had trouble sleeping. My father would come in and tell me that the house wasn’t made of straw or sticks, that it was brick, and like the little pigs knew, nothing could tear it down. Here’s what the little pigs didn’t realize: the big bad wolf was only the start of their problems. The biggest threat was already inside the house with them, and couldn’t be seen. Not radon gas or carbon monoxide, but just the way three very different personalities fit inside one small space. Tell me that the slacker pig-the one who only mustered up straw-really could get along with the high-maintenance bricklayer pig. I think not. I’ll bet you if that fairy tale went on another ten pages, all three of those pigs would have been at each other’s throats, and that brick house would have exploded after all.

When I broke down the door of the bathroom with my ninja kick, it gave more easily than I expected, but then again, the house was old and the jamb just splintered. You were in plain sight, but I didn’t see you. How could I, with all that blood everywhere?

I started to scream, and then I ran into the bathroom and grabbed your cheeks. “Willow, wake up. Wake up!”

It didn’t work, but your arm jostled, and out of your hand fell my razor blade.

My heart started to race. You’d seen me cutting the other night; I’d been so angry, I couldn’t remember if I’d hidden the blade back in its usual hiding place. What if you had been copying what you’d seen?

It meant this was all my fault.

There were cuts on your wrist. By now, I was hysterical crying. I didn’t know if I should wrap a towel around you and try to stop the bleeding or call an ambulance or call my mother.

I did all three.

When the firemen came with the ambulance, they raced upstairs, their boots muddy on the carpet. “Be careful,” I cried, hovering in the doorway of the bathroom. “She’s got this brittle bone disease. She’ll break if you move her.”

“She’ll bleed out if we don’t,” one of the firemen muttered.

One of the EMTs stood up, blocking my view. “Tell me what happened.”

I was crying so hard that my eyes had nearly swollen shut. “I don’t know. I was studying in my room. There was a nurse, but she went home. And Willow-And she-” My nose was streaming, my words curdled. “She was in the bathroom for a really long time.”

“How long?” the fireman asked.

“Maybe ten minutes…five?”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know,” I sobbed. “I don’t know.”

“Where did she get the razor blade?” the fireman asked.

I swallowed hard and forced myself to meet his gaze. “I have no idea,” I lied.

Buckle: a cake made in one layer with berries in the batter.

When you don’t have what you want, you have to want what you have. It’s one of the first lessons the colonists learned when they came to America and found that they couldn’t make the trifles and steamed puddings they’d loved in England because the ingredients didn’t exist here. That discovery led to a rash of innovation, in which settlers used seasonal fruits and berries to make quick dishes that were served for breakfast or even a main course. They came with names like buckle and grunt, crumble and cobbler and crisp, brown Betty, sonker, slump, and pandowdy. There have been whole books written on the origins of these names-grunt is the sound of the fruit cooking; Louisa May Alcott affectionately called her family home in Concord, Massachusetts, “Apple Slump”-but some of the strange titles have never been explained.

The buckle, for one.

Maybe it’s because the top is like a streusel, which gives it a crumbled appearance. But then why not call it a crumble, which is actually more like a crisp?

I make buckles when nothing else is going right. I imagine some beleaguered Colonial woman bent over her hearth with a cast-iron pan, sobbing into the batter-and that’s where I imagine the name came from. A buckle is the moment you break down, you give in, because when you cook one, you simply can’t mess up. Unlike with pastries and pies, you don’t have to worry about getting the ingredients just right or mixing the dough to a certain consistency. This is baking for the baking impaired; this is where you start, when everything else around you has gone to pieces.

TOPPING

1/3 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

½ cup light brown sugar

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and grated

BATTER

1½ cups flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

¾ cup unsalted butter, room temperature

¾ cup dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 large eggs

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

2 ripe peaches, peeled, pitted, and sliced (link) [1]

Butter and flour an 8 by 8-inch pan; preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

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

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

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

Charlotte

I think you can love a person too much.

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

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

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

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

Not to mention my paralyzing regret.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry.”

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

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

“Mom?” you asked.

“What, baby?”

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

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

“I had to go to the hospital.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s just waking up.”

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

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

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

“Do you want to see her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes you say that?”

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

Amelia

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

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

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

“You shouldn’t have.”

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

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

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

“I don’t think you’re pathetic.”

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

“My big sister,” you said simply.

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

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

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

Piper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Enough,” I murmured.

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

“That woman used to be my friend.”

“Used to be, Piper,” Rob repeated.

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

We both turned to her at once.

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

“You and Willow?”

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

“She what?”

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

“But she stopped?”

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

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

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

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

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

For God’s sake-that was the crux of this whole lawsuit.

“If it were Emma,” Rob said quietly, “wouldn’t you want to know?”

I blinked at him. “You don’t seriously think that Charlotte would listen to me if I told her her daughter was in trouble?”

Rob tilted his head. “Maybe that’s exactly why you have to try.”

As I drove through Bankton, I cataloged everything I knew about Amelia O’Keefe:

She wore size 7 shoes.

She didn’t like black licorice.

She could skate like an angel, and make it look easier than it ever was.

She was tough. Once, during a skating show, she’d done an entire program with a hole in her stockings and a blister rubbing her heel bloody.

She knew all the words to the Wicked sound track.

She bused her own plate, when I had to remind Emma to do it.

She’d fitted seamlessly, easily, thoughtlessly into our own home life, so much so that, when they were smaller, Emma and Amelia had been called the Twins by most of the teachers in the elementary school. They’d borrowed clothes from each other; they’d gotten their hair cut in tandem; they’d had sleepovers in the same narrow twin bed.

Maybe I was guilty of thinking of Amelia as an extension of Emma. Knowing ten concrete things about her did not make me an expert, but it was ten things more than her parents were paying attention to right now.

I did not realize where I was heading until I pulled into the hospital access drive. The guard at the booth waited for me to unroll my window. “I’m a doctor,” I said, not quite a lie, and he waved me ahead to the parking lot.

Technically, I still had operating privileges here. I’d known the OB staff well enough to be invited to their Christmas parties. But right now the hospital was so unfamiliar that when I walked through the sliding glass doors I nearly buckled at the smells: industrial cleaner and lost hope. I might not feel ready to take on a real patient yet, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to treat a fictional one. So I put on my best harried physician face and walked up to the elderly volunteer in a pink smock. “I’m Dr. Reece; I was called here on a consult…I need the room number for Willow O’Keefe?”

Because it was after visiting hours, and because I wasn’t wearing a lab coat, I was stopped by the nurses at the pedi desk. None of them were familiar, which actually worked in my favor. I knew, of course, the name of Willow’s OI doctor. “Dr. Rosenblad at Children’s asked me to check in on Willow O’Keefe,” I said, in the no-nonsense tone that usually keeps nurses from second-guessing. “Is the chart outside the door?”

“Yes,” one nurse said. “Did you want us to page Dr. Suraya?”

“Dr. Suraya?”

“The treating physician?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. I won’t be more than a few minutes,” and I hurried down the hall as if I had a thousand things to do.

The door to your room was ajar, and the lights were low. You were asleep on the bed, and Charlotte was asleep in a chair beside you. She was holding on to a book: 1,000,001 Things You Never Knew.

Your arm was splinted, in addition to your left leg. Bandages wrapped your ribs tight. I could guess, even without reading your chart, what collateral damage had been done during the act of saving your life.

I leaned down very gently and kissed the crown of your head. Then I tugged the book out of Charlotte’s hands and set it on the nightstand. I already knew she wouldn’t wake up-she slept so heavily. Sean was always saying she snored like a longshoreman, although the few times we had bunked together during family trips, I’d only noticed her making a soft, soughing sound when she slept. I had always wondered if this was because she was more comfortable with Sean to really let go or because he didn’t understand her the way I did.

She mumbled in her sleep, and shifted, and I froze like a deer in headlights. Now that I was here, I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. Did I think that Charlotte wouldn’t be sleeping by your side? That she would welcome me with open arms when I said I was worried about you? Maybe the reason I had driven all the way here was that I needed to see for myself, even for a moment, that you were all right. Maybe when Charlotte woke up, she would smell my perfume and wonder if she’d dreamed about me. Maybe she would remember that she’d fallen asleep holding the book, and wonder who’d moved it for her.

“You,” I whispered, “are going to be just fine.”

As I slipped away down the hospital corridor, I realized I was talking to all three of us.

Sean

To my surprise, Guy Booker showed up just after nine p.m. to tell me that the judge had agreed to a one-day continuance-so I wouldn’t have to testify starting tomorrow morning.

“That’s good, since she’s still at the hospital,” I told him. “Charlotte’s there with her. I came home with Amelia.”

“How’s Willow doing?”

“She’ll pull through okay. She’s a fighter.”

“Well, I know it was awful to get that call. But you do realize how great this is for our case?” he said. “It’s too late to say the lawsuit’s made her suicidal, but then again, if she’d died today-” He broke off abruptly, but not before I grabbed him by the collar and threw him against the wall.

“Finish your sentence,” I growled.

The blood drained from Booker’s face.

“You were going to say that, if she died, there wouldn’t be any damages, weren’t you, you son of a bitch?”

“If you thought it, then the jury will think it, too,” Booker choked out. “That’s all.”

I let him drop and turned my back. “Get out of my house.”

He was bright enough to slink out the door without another word, but less than a minute later, the doorbell rang again. “I told you to get lost,” I said, but instead of Guy Booker, it was Piper on the front porch.

“I…I’ll just go…”

I shook my head. “You weren’t who I was expecting.”

The memory of the kiss in the courthouse rose between us, pushing us each back a step. “I have to talk to you, Sean,” Piper said.

“I told you, just forget-”

“This isn’t about what happened this afternoon. This is about your daughter,” Piper said. “I think she might be bulimic.”

“No, she has OI.”

“You have another daughter, Sean. I’m talking about Amelia.”

We were having this conversation with the door wide open, both of us shivering. I stepped back to let Piper inside. She stood uncomfortably in the front hall. “There’s nothing wrong with Amelia,” I said.

“Bulimia’s an eating disorder. Which, by definition, is kept under wraps by the person who’s suffering from it. Emma’s heard her throwing up late at night. And Rob noticed during her last orthodontic checkup that the enamel’s been worn off the backs of her teeth-something that can be caused by repeated vomiting. Look, you can hate me for bringing this up, but especially given what we’re in the middle of right now, I would rather save Amelia’s life than know I had the chance to and didn’t.”

I looked up at the stairs. Amelia was in the shower, or at least she was supposed to be. She wouldn’t go into the bathroom you shared; instead she was using the one attached to the master bedroom. Although I’d cleaned up any evidence of what had happened to you, Amelia said it still freaked her out.

As a police officer, I sometimes had to consider the line between privacy and good parenting. I saw enough kids who appeared squeaky clean on the outside and were then busted for possession or theft or vandalism to know that people were never what you expected them to be-especially if they happened to be between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. I didn’t tell Charlotte, but sometimes I went through Amelia’s drawers just to see what she might be hiding. I’d never found anything. Then again, I had been looking for drugs, for alcohol-I had never thought to look for signs of an eating disorder. I wouldn’t even know what to look for. “She’s not skin and bones,” I said. “Maybe Emma got it wrong.”

“Bulimics don’t starve themselves, they binge and then purge. You wouldn’t see a weight loss. And there’s one more thing, Sean. In school, in the girls’ bathroom, Emma saw Amelia cutting herself.”

“Cutting?” I repeated.

“Like with a razor blade,” Piper replied, and suddenly, I understood. “Just go talk to her, Sean.”

“What do I say?” I asked, but she had already slipped out the door.

As Amelia showered, I could hear the water running through the pipes. Pipes-the same pipes we’d had the plumber in to fix four times over the past year, because they kept leaking. He’d said it was acid, which hadn’t made sense at the time.

Vomit was wicked acidic.

I walked upstairs and went into the bedroom you and your sister shared. If Amelia was bulimic, shouldn’t we have noticed food disappearing? I sat down at the desk and rummaged through the drawers but didn’t find anything except for packets of gum and a few old exams. Amelia brought home straight A’s. How could a kid who worked so hard, who did so many things right, have gone so far off track?

The bottom cabinet of Amelia’s desk didn’t close. I unhooked the drawer from its metal runners and pulled out a box of gallon-size Ziploc bags. I turned the box over in my hands as if I were examining a rare artifact. It didn’t really make sense for Amelia to have these up here when they were readily available in the pantry; it made even less sense for her to go to the trouble of hiding them behind the drawer. Then I turned to the bed. I pulled down the sheets but found only the stuffed, molting moose Amelia had slept with since I’d met Charlotte. I knelt beside the bed and ran my hands beneath the mattress.

They came by the fistfuls: torn candy wrappers, bread loaf wrappers, empty packages of cookies and crackers. They fluttered over my feet like plastic butterflies. Closer to the head of the bed were satin bras with the price tags still attached-in sizes far too big for Amelia-makeup with CVS price stickers, pieces of costume jewelry still riveted to their plastic display squares.

I sank to the floor, sitting in the center of all the evidence I hadn’t been willing to see.

Amelia

I was dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, and all I wanted to do was crawl into my pajamas and go to sleep and pretend today had never happened, but sitting on the floor in the middle of my room was my father. “Do you mind? I’m kind of not dressed…”

He turned around, and that’s when I noticed everything piled on the floor in front of him. “What is all this?” he asked me.

“Okay, so I’m a total pig. I’ll clean my room-”

“Did you steal these?” He lifted a handful of cosmetics and jewelry. They were horrible things-makeup I’d rather die than wear, earrings and necklaces for old ladies-but somehow sneaking them into my pockets had made me feel like a superhero.

“No,” I said, looking him in the eye.

“Who’s the bra for?” he asked. “Thirty-six D.”

“A friend,” I answered, and too soon realized I had screwed myself over: my father would know I didn’t have any friends.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, getting to his feet heavily.

“Well, maybe you could tell me, then. Because I don’t really understand why we have to have an inquisition while I’m freezing and soaking wet-”

“Did you make yourself throw up before you took that shower?”

My cheeks burned with the truth. It was the perfect time, because the running water covered the sound of retching. I’d gotten it down to a science. But I tried for a laugh. “Oh, yeah, right. I do that before every shower. Which is clearly why I’m a size eleven when everyone else in my grade is a size zer-”

He took a step forward, and I wrapped the towel more tightly around myself. “Just stop the lying,” he said. “Just…stop.” My father reached for me and yanked my wrist toward him. I thought he was trying to pull away the towel, but that was nowhere near as humiliating as what he was actually trying to see: my forearms and my thighs, with their gray-scale ladders of scars.

“She saw me doing it,” I said, and I didn’t have to explain that I was talking about you.

“Jesus Christ,” my father thundered. “What were you thinking, Amelia? If you were upset, why didn’t you come to us?”

But I bet he knew the answer to that one.

I burst into tears. “I never meant to hurt her. I just wanted to hurt myself.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because it’s the only thing I can manage to do right.”

He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look into his eyes. “The reason I’m angry isn’t that I hate you,” my father said tightly. “It’s because I goddamn love you.” And then his arms were tight around me, the towel the thinnest barrier between us, and it wasn’t creepy or embarrassing; it was just what it was. “This stops right now, you hear me? There are treatment programs and things like that-and you’re going to get yourself fixed. But until then, I’m going to watch you. I’m going to watch you like a hawk.”

The more he yelled, the more tightly he held on to me. And here’s the weirdest thing of all: now that the worst had happened-now that I’d been found out-it wasn’t disastrous. It felt, well, inevitable. My father was furious, but me, I couldn’t stop smiling. You see me, I thought, my eyes closing. You see me.

Charlotte

That night, I slept in the chair beside your hospital bed, and I dreamed of Piper. We were at Plum Island again and we were boogie-boarding, but the waves had gone red as blood and stained our hair and our skin. I rode in on a wave so majestic and forceful that it made the shore buckle. I looked behind me, but you were being thrashed underneath the cutting edge of the wave, rolling head over heels, your body raked over the sea glass and the porous stones. Charlotte, you cried, help me! I heard you, but I started walking away.

I was awakened by Sean, shaking my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered, looking at you. “She slept through the night?”

I nodded, stretched the muscles of my neck. And then I noticed Amelia standing behind him. “Shouldn’t Amelia be in school?”

“The three of us have to talk,” Sean said, in a tone that brooked no argument. He glanced down at you, asleep. “You think she’ll be okay for a few minutes, while we grab some coffee?”

I left word at the nurses’ desk and followed Sean into the elevator, with Amelia trailing meekly behind. What the hell had happened between them?

In the cafeteria, Sean poured coffee for both of us while Amelia lifted the tiny boxes of cereal and tried to decide between Cheerios and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We sat at a table. At this hour of the morning, the large room was filled with residents cramming down bananas and lattes before making rounds. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Amelia said.

“Well, you can’t,” Sean flatly replied.

“If you have something to say, Sean, we can wait till she gets back-”

“Amelia, why don’t you tell your mother why you can’t go to the bathroom?”

She looked down at her empty plastic bowl. “He’s afraid…that I’ll throw up again.”

I stared at Sean quizzically. “Has she got a virus?”

“Try bulimia,” Sean said.

I felt rooted to the chair. Surely I’d heard him wrong. “Amelia’s not bulimic. Don’t you think we’d know if Amelia was bulimic?”

“Yeah. Just like we knew that she’s been cutting herself for a year or so now? Shoplifting all kinds of crazy shit-including razor blades-which is how Willow got her hands on one?”

My jaw dropped. “I don’t understand.”

“Nope,” Sean said, leaning back in his chair. “Neither do I. I can’t figure out why a kid who’s got two parents that love her, and a roof over her head, and a pretty damn good life would hate herself enough to do any of that.”

I faced Amelia. “Is it true?”

She nodded, and I felt a twinge in my heart. Had I been blind? Or had I just been so busy watching you break that I failed to notice my older daughter going to pieces?

“Piper stopped by last night to tell me that Amelia might be having a problem. Apparently, we didn’t see it-but Emma has. Repeatedly.”

Piper. At the name, I felt myself go as still as glass. “She came to the house? And you let her in?”

“For God’s sake, Charlotte-”

“You can’t believe anything Piper says. For all you know, this is part of some ploy to get us to drop the lawsuit.” Distantly I realized that Amelia had confessed to the behavior, but that hardly seemed to matter. All I could see was Piper, standing in my house, pretending to be the perfect mother when I’d screwed up.

“You know, I’m starting to see why Amelia might have done this in the first place,” Sean muttered. “You are completely out of control.”

“Brilliant, there’s your old MO,” I said. “Blame Charlotte, because then none of this is your fault.”

“Did you ever consider that you’re not the only victim in the universe?” Sean said.

“Stop it!”

We both turned at the sound of Amelia’s voice.

She had her hands pressed over her ears, and tears in her eyes. “Just stop it!”

“I’m sorry, baby,” I said, reaching out to her, but she jerked away.

“No you’re not. You’re just glad it wasn’t something else that happened to Willow. That’s all you ever care about,” Amelia accused. “You want to know why I cut? Because it hurts less than all of this.”

“Amelia-”

“Just stop pretending you care about me, okay?”

“I’m not pretending.” Her sleeve had slipped, and I could see the scars tracking up to her elbow like some secret linear code. Last summer, Amelia had insisted on wearing long sleeves, even when it was ninety degrees outside. To be honest, I’d thought it was a sign of modesty. In a world where so many girls her age were hardly wearing anything, I thought it was refreshing that she wanted to be covered up. I hadn’t even begun to think that she might be not shy but truly calculating.

And because I didn’t have the words for this-because I knew at this point Amelia would not want to hear anything I’d want to say-I reached for her wrist again. This time, she let me take it. I thought of all the times, as a child, she had fallen off her bike and run crying into the house; of the times I’d lifted her onto the counter to clean gravel out of a scraped knee and to set it healing with a brush of my lips and a Band-Aid; of how once she stood by me as I wrapped your leg in a makeshift magazine splint, wringing her hands and urging me to kiss it and make it better. Now, I drew her arm closer, and pushed up the sleeve, and pressed my lips to the fine white lines that marched up her arm like the marks on a measuring cup, yet one more attempt to count the ways I’d failed.

Piper

The next day, Amelia came to the courthouse. I saw her walking with Sean down the corridor to the room that he’d hidden in before. I wondered if you were still in the hospital, if-given the situation-that might not be a blessing.

I knew I was the witness the jury had been waiting for-either to vilify or to vindicate. Guy Booker had begun his defense by putting the other two OBs who had bought into my practice on the stand as character references: Yes, I was an excellent physician. No, I’d never been sued before. In fact, I’d been named the New Hampshire Obstetrician of the Year by a regional magazine. Malpractice, they said, was a ridiculous charge.

Then it was my turn. Guy had been asking me questions for three-quarters of an hour: about my training, my role in the community, my family. But when he asked me the first question about Charlotte, I could feel the atmosphere in the room change. “The plaintiff testified that you two were friends,” Guy said. “Is that true?”

“We were best friends,” I said, and very slowly, she lifted her head. “I met her nine years ago. In fact, I was the one who introduced her to her husband.”

“Were you aware of the fact that the O’Keefes were trying to conceive a child?”

“Yes. To be honest, I think I wanted them to get pregnant just as much as they wanted it. After Charlotte asked me to be her doctor, we spent months looking at her ovulation cycle and doing everything short of fertility treatments to enhance conception-which is why it was such a thrill when we found out she was going to have a baby.”

Booker entered some papers into evidence and handed them to me. “Dr. Reece, are you familiar with these pages?”

“Yes, they’re notes I made in Charlotte O’Keefe’s medical file.”

“Do you remember them?”

“Not really. I’ve gone back and reviewed my notes, obviously, to prepare for this trial, but there wasn’t something so extraordinary that I remembered it immediately.”

“What do the notes say?” Booker asked.

I read from the pages. “Femur length measuring short at sixth percentile, within the curve of normality. Near field of fetal brain particularly clear.”

“Did that strike you as unusual?”

“Unusual,” I said, “but not abnormal. It was a new machine, and everything else on the fetus looked great. At eighteen weeks, based on that ultrasound, I fully expected the baby to be born healthy.”

“Were you disturbed by the fact that you could see the intracranial contents so well?”

“No,” I said. “We’re trained to see something that looks wrong, not something that looks too right.”

“Did you ever see something that looked wrong on Charlotte O’Keefe’s sonogram?”

“Yes, when we did one at twenty-seven weeks.” I glanced at Charlotte and remembered that moment when I first looked at the screen and tried to make the image into something it wasn’t, the sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized that I would have to be the one to tell her. “There were healing fractures of the femur and tibia, as well as several beaded ribs.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her that she needed to see another doctor, someone in maternal-fetal medicine who was better equipped to deal with a high-risk pregnancy.”

“Was that twenty-seven-week ultrasound the first indication you had that there might be something wrong with the plaintiff’s baby?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Reece, have you had other patients who were diagnosed with abnormal fetuses in utero?”

“Several,” I said.

“Have you ever advised a couple to terminate the pregnancy?”

“I’ve presented that option to numerous families when malformations are diagnosed that aren’t compatible with life.”

Once, I had a case where a thirty-two-week fetus had hydrocephaly-so much fluid on the brain that I knew the baby couldn’t be born vaginally, much less survive. The only way to deliver would have been C-section, but the fetal head was so large that the incision would have destroyed the mother’s uterus. She was young, it was her first pregnancy. I offered her the options, and eventually we drained the fluid from the head by piercing it with a needle, causing a cranial hemorrhage. The baby was then delivered vaginally, and died within minutes. I remembered showing up at Charlotte’s house that night with a bottle of wine, and telling her I had to drink the day away. I’d slept on her couch afterward, and had awakened to find her standing over me with a steaming mug of coffee and two Tylenol for my throbbing head. “Poor Piper,” she had said. “You can’t save them all.”

Two years later, that same couple came back to me when they were having another baby-who was born, thank goodness, perfectly healthy.

“Why didn’t you counsel termination for the O’Keefes?” Guy Booker asked.

“There was no definitive reason to believe the baby would be born impaired,” I said, “but even beyond that, I never thought termination would be an option for Charlotte.”

“Why not?”

I looked up at Charlotte. Forgive me, I thought.

“For the same reason she didn’t agree to amniocentesis when we thought there was a risk of Down syndrome,” I said. “She’d already told me she wanted this baby, no matter what.”

Charlotte

It was hard to sit here and listen to Piper giving a chronicle of our friendship. I imagine it had been just as hard for her when I had been the witness. “Were you close to the plaintiff after she gave birth?” Guy Booker asked.

“Yes. We’d see each other once or twice a week, and we talked every day. Our kids would play together.”

“What sorts of things did you do together?”

God, what had we done? It didn’t really matter. Piper had been the kind of friend with whom I didn’t have to fill in the spaces with random conversation. It was okay to just be with her. She knew that sometimes I needed that-to not have to take care of anyone or anything, to simply exist in my own space, adjacent to hers. Once, I remembered, we told Sean and Rob that Piper had a conference in Boston at the Westin Copley Place, and that I was going along to talk about having a baby with OI. In reality, there had been no conference. We checked in to the Westin and ordered room service and watched three sappy movies in a row, until we could not keep our eyes open.

Piper had paid. She always paid-treating me to lunch out, or coffee, or drinks at Maxie’s Pad. When I tried to go dutch, she’d make me put my wallet away. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford it, she said, and we both knew that I wasn’t.

“Did the plaintiff ever have a conversation with you where she blamed you for her daughter’s birth?”

“No,” Piper said. “In fact, the week before I was served, we went shopping together.”

Piper and I had tried on the same red blouse in between Emma’s and Amelia’s buying fits, and to my shock, it had looked fantastic on both of us. Let’s both get one, Piper had said. We can wear them home and see if our husbands can tell us apart.

“Dr. Reece,” Booker asked, “how has this lawsuit affected your life?”

She sat up a little straighter in the chair. It wasn’t very comfortable; it hurt your back, made you wish you were somewhere else. “I’ve never been sued before,” Piper said. “This was the first time. It’s made me doubt myself, even though I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I haven’t practiced since. Every time I try to get back on that horse…well, it starts moving away from me. I suppose I understand that, even if you’re a good physician, bad things sometimes happen. Bad things that nobody wishes for, and that nobody can explain.” She looked directly at me, so intently that a shiver went down my spine. “I miss being a doctor,” Piper said, “but nowhere near as much as I miss my best friend.”

“Marin,” I whispered suddenly, and my lawyer bent her head toward mine. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t…just don’t make it worse for her.”

Marin raised her eyebrow. “You have got to be kidding,” she murmured.

“Your witness,” Booker said, and she rose to her feet.

“Isn’t it a violation of medical ethics to treat someone you know well on a personal level?” Marin asked.

“Not in a small town like Bankton,” Piper said. “If that was the case, I wouldn’t have any patients. As soon as I realized there was a complication, I stepped down.”

“Because you knew you were going to be blamed?”

“No. Because it was the right thing to do.”

Marin shrugged. “If it was the right thing to do, why didn’t you call in a specialist as soon as you saw complications during the eighteen-week ultrasound?”

“There weren’t complications during that ultrasound,” Piper said.

“That’s not what the experts have said. You heard Dr. Thurber say that the standard of care, after an ultrasound reading like Charlotte’s, would have been a follow-up ultrasound, at the very least.”

“That’s Dr. Thurber’s opinion. I respectfully disagree.”

“Hm. I wonder whom a patient would rather listen to: a doctor who’s established in his field, with numerous awards and citations…or a small-town OB who hasn’t been near a patient in over a year.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Guy Booker said. “Not only was that not a question but my witness doesn’t need to be vilified.”

“Withdrawn.” Marin walked toward Piper, tapping a pen against her open palm. “You were best friends with Charlotte, right?”

“Yes.”

“What did you talk about?”

Piper smiled a little. “Everything. Anything. Our kids, our pipe dreams. How we sometimes wanted to kill our husbands.”

“But you never bothered to have a conversation about terminating this pregnancy, did you?”

During interrogatories I had told Marin that Piper had not discussed aborting the baby with me. And the way I had remembered it up to this point, that’s exactly the way it was. But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

“Actually,” Piper said, “we did.”

Although Piper and I were best friends, we didn’t touch very often. A quick hug sometimes, a pat on the back. But we weren’t like teenage girls, who walk with their arms twined around each other. Which was why it felt so strange to be sitting beside her on a couch, her arm wrapped around me while I cried against her shoulder. She was bony, birdlike, when I would have expected her to be strong and fierce.

I had held my hands over the bowl of my belly. “I don’t want her to suffer.”

Piper sighed. “I don’t want you to suffer.”

I thought of the conversation Sean and I had had after we left the geneticist’s office the day before, after being told you had-at worst-lethal OI and-at best-severe OI. I had found him in the garage, sanding the rails of the cradle he’d been making in anticipation of your arrival. It’s like butter, he said, holding out the narrow piece of wood. Feel it. But to me, it looked like a bone, and I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. “Sean doesn’t want to do it,” I said.

“Sean isn’t pregnant.”

I asked you how an abortion was performed, and I asked you to be honest. I had pictured being on the plane, having flight attendants ask me when I was due, whether it was a boy or a girl, those same flight attendants not making eye contact on the flight home. “What would you do?” I asked her.

She hesitated. “I’d ask myself what scares me the most.”

That’s when I looked up at her, the one question on my lips that I had not been brave enough to ask Sean, or Dr. Del Sol, or even myself. “What if I can’t love her?” I whispered.

Piper smiled at me, then. “Oh, Charlotte,” she said. “You already do.”

Marin

The defense called Dr. Gianna Del Sol to the stand, to establish that there was nothing she would have done differently if she’d been the primary physician to treat Charlotte instead of the referral. But when they called Dr. R. Romulus Wyndham, an OB and bioethicist with a list of credentials that took a half hour to run through, I started to worry. Not only was Wyndham smart but he was movie-star pretty, and he had the jury eating out of his hand. “Some tests that flag abnormality early are false positives,” he said. “In 2005, for example, a team from Reprogenetics kept growing fifty-five embryos that were diagnosed as abnormal during preimplantation genetic diagnosis. After a few days, they were shocked to find out that forty-eight percent of them-nearly half-were normal. Which means there’s evidence that embryos with genetically flawed cells might heal themselves.”

“Why might that be medically important to a physician like Piper Reece?” Booker asked.

“Because it’s proof that termination decisions made too early might not be prudent.”

As Booker took his seat, I rose in one smooth motion. “Dr. Wyndham, that study you just cited-how many of those embryos had osteogenesis imperfecta?”

“I…I don’t know that any of them did.”

“What was the nature of the abnormality, then?”

“I can’t say, precisely-”

“Were they major abnormalities?”

“Again, I’m not-”

“Isn’t it true, Dr. Wyndham, the study could have been showing embryos with very minor abnormalities that corrected themselves?”

“I suppose so.”

“There’s also a difference between waiting to see what happens to a days-old embryo and a weeks-old fetus, isn’t there, in terms of the point when you can safely and legally terminate a pregnancy?”

“Objection,” Guy Booker said. “If I can’t run a pro-life rally in court, she can’t run a pro-choice rally.”

“Sustained,” the judge said.

“Isn’t it true that if doctors followed your wait-and-see approach and withheld information about fetal conditions, it might make it harder to terminate a pregnancy-logistically, physically, and emotionally?”

“Objection!” Guy Booker called out again.

I walked toward the bench. “Please, Your Honor, this isn’t about abortion rights. It’s about the standard of care that my client should have received.”

The judge pursed his lips. “All right, Ms. Gates. But make your point fast.”

Wyndham shrugged. “Any obstetrician knows how hard it is to counsel patients with fetal abnormalities to terminate pregnancies when, in one’s medical opinion, the baby won’t survive. But it’s part of the job.”

“It might be part of Piper Reece’s job,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean she did it.”

We had a two-hour recess for lunch, because Judge Gellar had to go to the DMV to apply for a motorcycle license. Apparently, according to the clerk of the court, he planned to take a Harley cross-country next summer during his month off the bench. I wondered if that was what had made him dye his hair: black went better with leather.

Charlotte left the minute court was recessed, so that she could visit you at the hospital. I hadn’t seen Sean or Amelia since this morning, so I stepped out onto the janitor’s loading dock, a door most reporters didn’t know existed.

It was one of those late September days that felt like the long fingers of winter tugging the hem of New Hampshire-cold, bitter, with a biting wind. And yet, there still seemed to be a big crowd gathered on the front steps, which I could only just make out from where I was standing. A custodian pushed out the door and stood beside me to light up a cigarette. “What’s going on up there?”

“Freaking circus,” he said. “That case about the kid with the funky bones.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard it’s a nightmare,” I muttered, and hugging my arms to stay warm, I picked my way to the edge of the group in front of the courthouse.

At the top of the stairs was a man I recognized from the news: Lou St. Pierre, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Association of People with Disabilities. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, he had a degree from Yale Law, was a Rhodes scholar, and had won a gold medal in the breast stroke at the Paralympics. Now, he traveled both in his customized wheelchair and in a plane that he piloted himself to fly kids around the country for medical treatment. His service dog sat by the side of St. Pierre’s wheelchair, unflinching, while twenty reporters jammed microphones close to its nose. “You know why this lawsuit is so captivating? It’s like a train wreck. You can’t tear your eyes away, even though you’d rather not admit these kind of torts exist,” he said. “Plain and simple: this topic is loaded. This is exactly the kind of lawsuit that makes your skin crawl, because we’d all like to believe that we might love any child that comes into our family-instead of admitting that, in reality, we might not be that accepting. Prenatal testing reduces a fetus to one trait: its disability. It’s unfortunate that prenatal testing automatically makes the assumption that a parent might not want a child who’s disabled, and that it implies it’s unacceptable to live life with some sort of physical impairment. I know plenty of parents in the deaf community who would love a child just like them, for example. One person’s disability is another person’s culture.”

As if on cue, his service dog barked.

“Abortion’s already a hot-button issue: Is it okay to destroy a potential life? Termination takes that one step further: Is it okay to destroy this potential life?”

“Mr. St. Pierre,” a reporter called out. “What about the statistics that say raising a disabled child is stressful to a marriage?”

“Well, I agree. But there are also statistics that say it’s equally stressful to raise a child who’s a prodigy or an athletic superstar, and you don’t see any doctors advising parents to terminate those pregnancies.”

I wondered who’d called in the cavalry-Guy Booker, no doubt. Since this case was technically a malpractice suit, he wouldn’t invite another attorney from outside his practice to cochair Piper’s defense, but he made sure to stage this impromptu news conference all the same to stack his odds of winning.

“Lou,” another reporter asked. “Are you going to testify?”

“That’s what I’m doing right now in front of all you good people,” St. Pierre preached. “And I’m going to keep on talking in the hopes that I can convince anyone who’s listening never to bring another lawsuit like this to the great state of New Hampshire.”

Excellent. I’d lost my case because of a guy who wasn’t even a valid witness for the defense. I trudged back toward the loading dock door. “Who’s talking?” the custodian said, grinding his cigarette butt underneath his boot. “That dwarf?”

“He’s a Little Person,” I corrected.

The custodian stared at me blankly. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

The door banged shut behind him. I was freezing, but I waited before following him inside: I didn’t feel like making small talk with him the whole way up the staircase. He was, in truth, the perfect example of the greased slope Charlotte and I were dancing down. If it was acceptable to want to terminate a fetus that had Down or OI, what about when medical advances made it possible to see your child’s potential beauty, or her level of compassion? What about parents who wanted only a boy and learned they had conceived a girl? Who would be allowed to set the bars for access, and for rejection?

As much as it pained me to admit it, Lou St. Pierre was right. People were always saying they’d love any baby that came along, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Sometimes, it really did come down to the particular child in question. There had to be a reason why blond-haired, blue-eyed babies got plucked out of adoption agencies like ripe peaches but children of color and children with disabilities might linger in foster homes for years. What people said they would do and what people actually did were two very different things.

Juliet Cooper had stated it clearly: there really were some babies who were better off not being born.

Like you.

And me.

Amelia

Whatever goodwill I thought might rain down on me from basking in my father’s attention after he discovered my little secret quickly disappeared when I started to realize that I had created a new hell of my own making. I was not allowed to go to school, which would have been awesome beyond belief if not for the fact that, instead, I had to sit in a courthouse lobby reading the same newspaper over and over. I had envisioned my parents realizing how badly they’d messed up and falling all over each other to take care of me, the way they did for you when you had a break. But instead, they’d just yelled so loud in the hospital cafeteria that all the residents watched us like we were a reality TV show.

I wasn’t even allowed to visit you during the long lunch recess, when Mom went to the hospital. I guess I had become, officially, A Bad Influence.

So I have to admit I was a little surprised when my mother showed up with a chocolate milk shake for me before court reconvened. I was sitting in this totally airless conference room, where my father had left me while he went over his testimony with some stupid lawyer. How my mother even found me in this building was a mystery, but when she stepped through the door, I was actually happy to see her.

“How’s Willow?” I asked, because (a) I knew she expected it, and (b) I really did want to know.

“She’s doing okay. The doctor says we might be able to take her home tomorrow.”

“You kind of lucked out on the free babysitting,” I said.

My mother’s eyes flashed, hurt. “You don’t really believe I think that way, do you?”

I shrugged.

“I brought you this,” she said, and she passed over the milk shake.

I used to have a thing for chocolate Fribbles at Friendly’s. I’d beg my mom to get one, even though they were three times more expensive than kiddie cones. Sometimes, she said yes, and we’d split one and rhapsodize about chocolate ice cream, something you and Dad never really understood, having the rare misfortune to be born loving vanilla as you both were.

“You want to share?” I asked quietly.

She shook her head. “That one’s just for you. Provided it doesn’t come back up again.”

I flicked my eyes toward her and then back down at the lid of the shake, but I didn’t say anything.

“I think I understand,” my mother said. “I know what it’s like to start something and have it suddenly grow out of control. And you want to get rid of it, because it’s hurting you and everyone else around you, but every time you try to do that, it consumes you again.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. That was exactly what I felt like, every day of my life.

“You asked me not too long ago what the world would be like without Willow in it,” my mother said. “So here’s what I think: if Willow had never been born, I’d still look for her in the aisles of the grocery store, or at the bank, or in the bowling alley. I’d stare at every individual face in a crowd, trying to find hers. There’s this weird part about having kids-you know when your family is finished, and when it’s not. If Willow hadn’t been born, that’s how the world would be for me-unfinished.”

I slurped on the straw, on purpose, and tried not to blink, because then maybe the tears would reabsorb through osmosis.

“The thing is, Amelia,” my mother continued, “if you weren’t here…I’d feel the same exact way.”

I was afraid to look at her. I was afraid I had heard her wrong. Was this her way of saying that she didn’t just love me, which was a given for a mother, but she liked me? I imagined her making me open the lid of the shake to be sure I’d drunk it all. I would grumble, but deep down, I’d like that she was insisting. It meant she cared; it meant she wasn’t going to let me go that easily.

“I did a little research today, at the hospital,” my mother said. “There’s a place just outside of Boston that takes care of kids with eating disorders. They have an inpatient program, and when you’re ready, you get to move to a residential program with other girls who are going through the same issues.”

My head snapped up. “Inpatient? Like, as in, live there?”

“Just until they can help you get this under control-”

“You’re sending me away?” I said, panicking. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. My mother knew what it felt like; so why didn’t she understand that cutting me off was just like saying I’d never be good enough for this family? “How come Willow can break a thousand bones and she’s still perfect and gets to live at home, and I make one little mistake and get shipped off?”

“Your father and I aren’t shipping you off,” my mother said. “We’re doing this to help you-”

“He knows about it?” I felt my nose running. I had hoped that my father could be my last appeal; now, I found out he was a conspirator. The whole world hated me.

Suddenly Marin Gates stuck her head into the room. “We’re ready to rock and roll,” she said.

“I just need a minute-”

“Well, Judge Gellar needs you now.”

My mother looked at me, her eyes begging me to cut her a break. “You have to sit inside the courtroom now. Your dad’s testifying, and I can’t stay here and watch over you.”

“Go to hell,” I said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Marin, who was watching all this, whistled long and low. “Actually, she can,” she said. “Because you’re a minor, and she’s your mother.”

I wanted to hurt my mother as bad as she’d hurt me, so I turned to the lawyer. “I don’t think you’re allowed to keep that title if you try to get rid of all of your kids.”

I could see my mother flinch. She was bleeding, even if you couldn’t see the cut, and she knew, like me, that she deserved it. As Marin unceremoniously deposited me in the gallery next to a man wearing a red flannel shirt and suspenders who smelled like tuna fish, I made myself a promise: if my mother was going to ruin my life, there was absolutely no reason I couldn’t ruin hers.

Sean

On our wedding day, Charlotte made me forget all the vows I’d written and diligently memorized. There she was, walking down the aisle of the church, and those sentences were like fishing nets; they couldn’t possibly hold all the feelings I wanted to present to her. Now, as I sat across from my wife in a courtroom, I hoped my words would transform one more time. Into feathers, clouds, steam-anything that did not have the power to land a solid blow.

“Lieutenant O’Keefe,” said Guy Booker, “weren’t you originally a plaintiff in this case?”

He’d promised me that he’d make it short and sweet, that I would be off the stand so quickly I barely felt it. I didn’t trust him. It was his job to lie, cheat, and twist the truth into something the jury could believe.

Something I sorely hoped he’d be successful at, this time around.

“I was, at first,” I replied. “My wife had convinced me that this lawsuit was in Willow’s best interests, but I started to realize I didn’t feel that way at all.”

“How so?”

“I think this lawsuit’s broken our family apart. Our dirty laundry is running on the six o’clock news. I’ve started divorce proceedings. And Willow, she knows what’s going on. There was no hiding it, once it became public knowledge.”

“You realize that wrongful birth suggests your daughter should never have been born. Do you wish that, Lieutenant O’Keefe?”

I shook my head. “Willow may not be perfect, but-well-neither am I. Neither are you. She may not be perfect,” I repeated, “but she’s one hundred percent right.”

“Your witness,” Booker said, and as Marin Gates got to her feet, I took a deep breath to galvanize myself, the same way I did before I ran into a building with the SWAT team.

“You say that this lawsuit has broken your family apart,” she said. “But the same could be said of the divorce proceedings you initiated, isn’t that true?”

I looked at Guy Booker. He’d anticipated this question; we’d practiced an answer. I was supposed to say something about how my actions had been a measure to protect the girls-not to drag them through the mud. But instead of saying that, I found myself looking at Charlotte. At that plaintiff’s table, she seemed so tiny. She was staring down at the wood grain, as if she didn’t trust herself to look me in the eye.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “It is.”

Booker stood up, and then figured he couldn’t object to his own witness, I guess, because he sat back down.

I turned to the judge. “Sir? Do you mind if I talk directly to my wife?”

Judge Gellar raised his brows. “It’s the jury that needs to hear you, son.”

“With all due respect, Your Honor…I don’t think that’s true.”

“Judge,” Booker said. “May I approach?”

“No, Mr. Booker, you may not,” the judge said. “This man’s got something to say.”

Marin Gates looked like she’d swallowed a firecracker. She didn’t know whether to ask me anything else or just let me hang myself. And maybe I was doing that; I didn’t really care. “Charlotte,” I said, “I don’t know what’s right anymore, except admitting that I don’t know that. No, we don’t have enough money. And no, we haven’t had it easy. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been worth the trip.”

Charlotte lifted her face. Her eyes were wide and still. “Some guys at the station, they said they knew what they were getting into when they got married. Well, I didn’t. It was an adventure, and I was okay with that. See, you’re it, for me. You let me take you skiing, and you never mentioned you were afraid of heights. You sleep curled up against me, no matter how far I move to my side of the bed. You let me eat the vanilla half of your Dixie Cup, and you take my chocolate. You tell me when my socks don’t match. You buy Lucky Charms, because you know I like the marshmallows. You gave me two beautiful girls.

“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect-I guess that’s where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way. And I think we were both wrong about something. People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”

Silence settled over the courtroom. “We’re going to adjourn for the day,” Judge Gellar announced.

“But I’m not finished-” Marin argued.

“Yes, you are,” the judge said. “For God’s sake, Ms. Gates, that’s why you’re still single. I want this courtroom cleared, except for Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe.”

He banged his gavel, and there was a flurry of activity, and suddenly, I was sitting alone on the witness stand and Charlotte was standing behind the plaintiff’s table. She took a few steps forward, until she was standing level with me, her hands lightly resting on the wooden railing between us. “I don’t want to get a divorce,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

She shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “So what do we do?”

I leaned forward slowly, so that she could see me coming. I leaned forward, and touched my lips to hers, sweet and familiar, home. “Whatever comes next,” I whispered.

Amelia

My parents’ oh-so-touching reconciliation was the talk of the courtroom. You would have thought the news media was True Confessions the way the reporters all lined up talking about this great romantic moment. The jury would fall for it unless they were a bunch of cynics, like me; the way I saw it, Marin could practically go home and break open the champagne.

Which is exactly why I was a girl on a mission.

While they were all swooning and sighing over the melodrama, I was sitting in that gallery, embarrassed as hell, and learning something new about myself: I didn’t have to vomit for poison to come out of me. I could sweat it out, scream it out, and sometimes just whisper. If I was going to the bulimia camp in Boston, then I was going out with a bang.

I knew that the judge had deliberately played matchmaker and kept my mother and father in the courtroom together to work out Act Two of their drama, but that worked perfectly for me. I slipped out the back before Marin Gates could remember to come find me and ducked out of the courthouse without anyone noticing or caring who I was. I ran to the parking lot, to the mint green T-Bird.

When Guy Booker came out and found me leaning against his car, he scowled. “You scratch the paint job and you’ll be doing community service for the next five years,” he said.

“I’ll take my chances.”

“What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Waiting for you.”

He frowned. “How’d you know this was my car?”

“Because it’s so painfully subtle.”

Booker smirked. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Long story.”

“Well, then, skip it. It’s been an even longer day,” he said, unlocking the driver’s side door. He opened it, hesitating. “Go home, Amelia. Your mother doesn’t need to be worrying about where you are right now. She’s got a lot on her plate.”

“Yeah,” I answered, folding my arms. “Which is why I figured you’d be interested in what I heard her say.”

Marin

I had Juliet Cooper’s address from the jury selection process. I knew that she lived in Epping, a tiny town to the west of Bankton. So as soon as court was adjourned for the day, I programmed the street into my GPS and started driving.

An hour later I pulled into a small cul-de-sac, a horseshoe of modified Capes. Number 22 was just to the right of the circle as you came into it. It had gray siding and black shutters, a red lacquered door. There was a van in the driveway. When I rang the doorbell, a dog started barking.

I could have lived here. This might have been my home. In another lifetime, I might have walked right through the door instead of approaching like a stranger; I might have had a room upstairs filled with horseback-riding ribbons and school yearbooks and the other detritus adults leave behind at their childhood residences. I could have told you where the silverware drawer was in the kitchen, where the vacuum cleaner was stashed, how to use the TV remote.

The door opened, and Juliet Cooper was standing in front of me. Dancing at her feet was a terrier. “Mom?” a girl’s voice called. “Is it for me?”

“No,” she said, her eyes never leaving my face.

“I know you don’t want to see me,” I said quickly, “and I promise that I will go away and never speak to you again. But first, you have to tell me why. What is it about me that makes me so…so repulsive?”

As soon as I spoke, I knew this was a mistake. Maisie at the family court would probably have had me arrested if she’d known I was here; every adoption search website strongly reminded adoptees not to do exactly this: ambush the birth mother, make her accept you on your time frame rather than hers.

“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “After thirty-five years, I think you owe me five minutes.”

Juliet stepped outside, closing the door behind her. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and on the other side of the door I could still hear the dog barking. But she didn’t say a word to me.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior: Charlotte’s insistent belief that you would one day forgive her for the things she said in court, for example. Or my mad chase to Epping. The truth was, I was greedy. I knew that my adoptive parents wanted me more than anything, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to understand why my birth mother hadn’t, and until I did, there would always be a part of me that felt like a failure.

“You look just like him,” she said finally.

I stared at her, although she still would not meet my gaze. Had it been a love affair that ended badly, with Juliet pregnant and my birth father refusing to support her? Had she gone on loving him, knowing their baby was somewhere in the world; had it eaten away at her even as she made a new life for herself with a husband and family?

“I was sixteen,” Juliet murmured. “I was riding my bike home from school, through the woods, a shortcut. He came out of nowhere and knocked me off. He stuffed a sock in my mouth and pulled my dress up, and he raped me. Then he beat me up, so badly that the only way my parents recognized me was by my clothing. He left me bleeding and unconscious, and two hunters found me.” She lifted her face, so that she was looking directly at me, finally. Her eyes were too bright, her voice thin. “I didn’t speak for weeks. And then, just when I thought I could start over again, I found out I was pregnant,” she said. “He was caught, and the police wanted me to testify, but I couldn’t. I didn’t think I could stand to see his face again. And then, when you were born, a nurse held you up, and there he was in you: the black hair and the blue eyes, those fists swinging. I was glad there was a family that wanted you so badly, because I didn’t.”

She took a deep, trembling breath. “I’m sorry if this isn’t the reunion you’d hoped for. But seeing you, it brings it all back, when I’ve worked so hard to forget it. So please,” Juliet Cooper whispered, “will you leave me alone?”

Be careful what you wish for. I staggered backward, silent. No wonder she had not wanted to look at me; no wonder she had not welcomed the letter I wrote that Maisie had forwarded; no wonder she only wanted me to go away. I’d want the same thing.

We had that much in common.

I started down the stone steps to my car, trying to see through the rush of tears. At the bottom, I hesitated, then turned back. She was still standing there. “Juliet,” I said. “Thank you.”

I think my car knew where I was headed long before I did. But when I pulled into the old white Colonial where I’d grown up, with the thicket of overgrown roses and the weathered gray trellis that never managed to tame them, I felt something burst inside me. This was the place where my photos were in the albums stacked in the front closet. This was the place where I knew how to work the garbage disposal. This was the place where, in an upstairs bedroom, I still kept pajamas and a toothbrush and a few sweaters, just in case.

This was home, and these were my parents.

It was dark out by now, nearly nine p.m. My mother would be wearing a fuzzy robe and slipper socks, and eating her nightly dish of ice cream. My father would be surfing the channels of the television, arguing that Antiques Roadshow was far more of a reality show than The Amazing Race. I let myself in through the side door, which we’d never locked the whole time I was growing up. “Hi,” I called out, so that they wouldn’t be alarmed. “It’s just me.”

My mother stood up when I came into the living room. “Marin!” she said, hugging me. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood.” This was a lie. I’d driven sixty miles to get here.

“But I thought you were wrapping up that big trial,” my father said. “We’ve been watching you on CNN. Nancy Grace, eat your heart out…”

I smiled a little. “I just…I felt like seeing you guys.”

“Are you hungry?” my mother asked. It had taken her thirty seconds; surely that was a record.

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll get you a little ice cream,” my mother said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Everyone can use a little ice cream.”

My father patted the spot on the couch beside him, and I stripped off my coat and sank down into the cushions. They were not the ones I’d grown up with. I had jumped on those so often that they’d been rendered flat as pancakes; several years ago my mother had had the furniture reupholstered. These pillows were softer, more forgiving. “You think you’re going to win?” my father asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not over till it’s over.”

“What’s she like?”

“Who?”

“That O’Keefe woman?”

I thought hard before I spoke. “She’s doing what she thinks is right,” I said. “I don’t think you can blame her for that.” Although I have, I thought. Although I was doing the same thing.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was. My mother sat down beside me on the couch and passed over a bowl of ice cream. “I’m on a mint-chocolate-chip kick,” she said, and in unison, we lifted our spoons, so synchronized that we might have been twins.

Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.

I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they’d taken something incredibly precious for granted.

Amelia

I tried looking it up on the Internet, but there’s nothing that tells you what you’re supposed to wear to court if you’re a witness. I figured, though, that I definitely wanted the jury to remember me. I mean, they’d had a parade of really boring doctors for the most part; compared to them, I planned to stand out.

So I spiked my hair, which made it look even darker blue. I wore a bright red sweater and my purple high-top Converses, and my lucky jeans, the ones with the hole in the knee, because I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

It was pretty ironic, but even last night, my parents hadn’t slept in the same bed. Mom was overnight with you at the hospital; Dad and I were back home. Although Guy Booker had said he’d pick me up to go to court, I figured I could hitch a ride with my father and still make it look like I was unhappy to be dragged there. Guy and I had both decided that the longer we could keep my testimony a secret, the better.

My father, who had already testified, was now allowed to be in the courtroom gallery, which left me alone in the lobby, which was perfect. Shaking, I stood next to a bailiff. “You okay?” she asked.

I nodded. “Butterflies,” I said, and then I heard Guy Booker’s voice:

“The defense calls Amelia O’Keefe.”

I was led inside, but all hell had broken loose. Marin and Guy were up at the bench, arguing; my mother was in tears; my father was standing up, craning his neck around to locate me.

“You can’t call Amelia,” Marin argued.

Booker shrugged. “Why not? You’re the one who put her on the witness list.”

“Is there a reason for calling this witness,” Judge Gellar asked, “beyond simply rubbing the opposing counsel’s face in the fact that you can?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Booker said. “Miss O’Keefe has information that this court needs to hear, given the implications of a wrongful birth lawsuit.”

“All right,” the judge said. “Bring her in.”

As I walked toward the front of the courtroom, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. It felt like they were poking holes, and all my confidence was quickly leaking out. As I passed by my mother, I heard her whispering to Marin. “You promised,” she said. “You told me it was just a precaution…”

“I had no idea he’d do this,” Marin whispered back. “Do you have any clue what she’s going to say?”

Then I was in the little wooden cage, like I was a specimen for the jury to scrutinize under a microscope. They brought a Bible over to me and made me swear on it. Guy Booker smiled at me. “Can you tell us who you are, for the record?”

“Amelia,” I said, and I had to lick my lips because they were so dry. “Amelia O’Keefe.”

“Amelia, where do you live?”

“Forty-six Stryker Lane in Bankton, New Hampshire.” Could he hear my heart? Because, God, it was like a bongo drum in my chest.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“And who are your parents, Amelia?”

“Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe,” I said. “Willow’s my sister.”

“Amelia, in your own words, can you explain to the court what this lawsuit is about?”

I couldn’t look at my mother. I pulled my sleeves down, because my scars were burning. “My mom thinks that Piper should have known earlier that there was going to be a problem with Willow, and should have told her. Because then, she would have had an abortion.”

“Do you think your mother’s telling the truth?”

“Objection!” Marin shot up so fast it made me jump in the chair.

“No, I’ll allow this,” the judge said. “You can give your answer, Amelia.”

I shook my head. “I know she’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” I said, making the words as neat and small as I could, “I heard her say so.”

I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that’s the only way to find out the truth. And-although I certainly wouldn’t admit this out loud-I was feeling sort of protective toward you. You had seemed so down after this latest break and surgery, and when you said Mom wants to get rid of me, it pretty much made me feel like my insides had gone to jelly. We all protected you, in our own ways. Dad blustered around, angry at anything that made life harder for you. Mom, well, she was apparently stupid enough to gamble everything in order to get more for you in the long run. And me, I guess I just lacquered a shell around myself, so that when you got hurt, it was easier to pretend I didn’t feel it, too.

No one’s throwing you away, my mother had said, but you were already crying.

I’m sorry about my leg. I thought if I didn’t break anything for a long time, you’d think I was just like any other kid-

Accidents happen, Willow. Nobody is blaming you.

You do. You wish you’d never had me. I heard you say it.

I had held my breath. My mother could tell herself whatever she wanted to help herself get to sleep at night, but she wasn’t fooling anyone-especially you.

Willow, my mother had replied, you listen to me. Everyone makes mistakes…including me. We say and we do things we wish we hadn’t. But you, you were never a mistake. I would not, in a thousand years-in a million years-have missed out on having you.

I felt as if I’d been nailed to the wall. If that was true, then everything that had happened in the past year-this lawsuit, losing my friends, watching my parents split-was all for nothing.

If this was true, then my mother had been lying all along.

Charlotte

There’s a cost for everything. You might have a beautiful baby girl, but you learn she’ll be disabled. You move heaven and earth to make that child happier, but you leave your husband and your other daughter miserable. There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

As soon as Amelia finished talking, the judge turned to Marin. “Ms. Gates, your cross-examination?”

“I don’t have any questions for this witness,” she said, “but I’d like to recall Charlotte O’Keefe to the stand.”

I stared at her. She hadn’t said anything to me via whisper or note, so I stood up cautiously, unsure. Amelia was escorted past me by a bailiff. She was crying. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed.

Stiffly, I sat down on the wooden chair. Stick to the message, Marin had said, over and over. But it had gotten harder and harder to remember what that message was.

“Do you remember that conversation your daughter was just talking about?” Marin asked. Her voice struck like a bullet.

“Yes.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“We’d just brought Willow home from the hospital, after the first day of testimony here. She broke her femur so badly it needed surgery.”

“Were you upset?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was Willow?”

“Very.”

She walked toward me, waiting until I met her eye. And I saw in her the same veiled worry that I’d seen in Amelia when she stepped off that witness stand; in Sean, moments after the courtroom emptied the day before; in you, the night we’d had that very talk-the hidden fear that you might not be good enough for someone you loved. Maybe I felt that, too, and maybe that’s why I had started this lawsuit all those months ago-so that when you looked back on your childhood, you didn’t blame me for bringing you into a world full of hurt. But love wasn’t about sacrifice, and it wasn’t about falling short of someone’s expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else’s life would not have been as rich without us here.

“When you had that conversation with your daughter, Charlotte,” Marin began. “When you said all those things right in the middle of this lawsuit…were you lying?”

“No.”

“Then what were you doing?”

“My best,” I whispered. “I was only doing my best.”

Piper

“That,” Guy Booker said, leaning closer to me, “is a slam dunk.” He stood up, buttoning his suit jacket, and faced the jury to begin his closing. “The plaintiff,” he said, “is a liar. She says this lawsuit isn’t about the money, but even her husband has told you that it is, and can’t support her in this lawsuit. She says she wishes that her daughter was never born, but then she tells her daughter the opposite. She tells you that she wished she had the choice to terminate her pregnancy, and she’s pointing a finger at Piper Reece, a hardworking physician whose only sin, ladies and gentlemen, was having the poor fortune to become friendly with Charlotte O’Keefe.”

He spread his palms wide. “Wrongful birth. Wrongful birth. It just makes you itchy to say it, doesn’t it? Yet the plaintiff is saying that her daughter-her beautiful, smart, trivia-loving, beloved little girl-should never have existed. This mother discounts all of those positive traits and says they don’t cancel out the fact that her child has osteogenesis imperfecta. Yet you’ve heard the experts-who admitted that nothing Piper Reece did as a physician was negligent. In fact, as soon as Piper did see a complication during the plaintiff’s pregnancy, she did exactly what she was supposed to: she called in someone who could take care of it. And for this, ladies and gentlemen, she’s had her life ruined, watched her practice flounder, had her career and her confidence stripped away.”

He stopped walking in front of the jury box. “You heard Dr. Rosenblad say something we all know: terminating a wanted pregnancy is nobody’s first choice. However, when parents are faced with the reality of a fetus who will become a profoundly disabled child, all the choices are bad. If you find in favor of the plaintiff, you’re buying into her faulty logic: that you can love your child so much you’d sue a doctor-a close friend-because you believe she should never have been born. You’re buying into a system that says obstetricians should determine which disabilities are worth living with and which aren’t. And that, my friends, is a dangerous track to walk. What kind of message does that send to people who live daily with handicaps? Which disabilities will be considered ‘too disabled’ to be worthy of a life? Right now, ninety percent of patients whose fetuses are diagnosed with Down syndrome choose to abort, even though there are thousands of people with Down who lead happy, productive existences. What happens when science becomes more advanced? Will patients choose to terminate fetuses with a potential for future heart disease? Or those that might get B’s instead of A’s? Or those who don’t look like supermodels?”

He began to walk back to the defense table. “Wrongful birth, ladies and gentlemen, presumes that every baby should be perfect-and Willow O’Keefe isn’t. But I’m not perfect, either. Neither is Ms. Gates. Judge Gellar’s not even perfect, although I’ll admit he’s pretty darn close. I’ll even hazard a guess that all of you have some flaw, somewhere. So I ask you to think hard while you’re considering your verdict,” Booker said. “Look at this wrongful birth suit, and make the right choice.”

When he sat down, Marin Gates rose. “It’s ironic that Mr. Booker would refer to choices, because that’s exactly what Charlotte O’Keefe wasn’t given.”

She stood behind Charlotte, whose head was bowed. “This case isn’t about religion. It’s not about abortion. It’s not about the rights of the disabled. It’s not about whether Charlotte loves her daughter. It’s not about any of those issues that the defense would like you to believe. This case is about one thing only: whether Dr. Piper Reece provided the appropriate standard of care during Charlotte’s pregnancy.”

After all this time, all these witnesses, I still didn’t know the answer to that myself. Even if I had looked at that eighteen-week ultrasound and found cause for concern, I would simply have recommended waiting to see what developed-and the outcome would have been the same. In that, I had saved Charlotte several months of an anxious pregnancy. But did that make me a good obstetrician or a negligent one? Maybe I had made assumptions about Charlotte, simply because I knew her too well, that I wouldn’t have made with another patient. Maybe I should have been looking more carefully for signs.

Maybe if I had, having my best friend sue me would not have come as such a shock.

“You’ve heard the evidence. You’ve heard that there was an anomaly during the eighteen-week ultrasound that suggested follow-up care, that flagged a fetal abnormality. Even if a physician wasn’t sure what that abnormality signified, ladies and gentlemen, it was up to her to look more closely and find out. Piper Reece did not do that after the eighteen-week ultrasound, pure and simple. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is negligence.”

She walked toward me. “Willow, the child who was born as a result, is going to have special needs her whole life. They’re expensive, they’re significant, they’re painful. They’re ongoing, they’re cumulative, they’re traumatic. They’re overwhelming. They’re exacerbated by age itself. Your job today is to decide whether Willow will be able to have a better, fuller life, with all the appropriate care she needs. Will she get the surgeries she needs? The adapted vehicles? The specialists’ care? Will she continue to get therapy and walking aids-all out-of-pocket expenses for the O’Keefes, which have run them into significant debt? Today, these decisions are in your hands,” Marin said. “Today you have the opportunity to make a choice…the way Charlotte O’Keefe never did.”

The judge said a few words to the jury, and then everyone began to file out of the courtroom. Rob walked up to the bar that separated the gallery from the front of the court and put his hands on my shoulders. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. I tried to offer him a smile.

“Thank you,” I said to Guy Booker.

He stuffed a pad into his briefcase. “Don’t thank me yet,” he said.

Charlotte

“You’re making me dizzy,” Sean said as I entered the conference room. Amelia was pacing back and forth, her hands speared through her electric hair. As soon as she saw me, she turned.

“So here’s the thing,” she said, talking fast. “I know you’re thinking about killing me, but that wouldn’t be the brightest move in a courthouse. I mean, there are cops all over the place, not to mention the fact that Dad’s here and he’d be obligated to arrest you-”

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said.

She stopped moving. “No?”

How had I never noticed before how beautiful Amelia had become? Her eyes, under the fringe of that ridiculous hair, were huge and almond-shaped. Her cheeks were naturally pink. Her mouth was a tiny bow, a purse string holding her opinions tight. I realized that she did not look like me, or like Sean. Mostly, she resembled you.

“What you did…what you said,” I began. “I know why.”

“Because I don’t want to go to Boston!” Amelia blurted. “That stupid treatment facility. You’re just going to leave me behind there.”

I glanced at Sean, and then back at her. “Maybe we shouldn’t have made that decision without you.”

Amelia narrowed her eyes, as if she didn’t quite trust what she was hearing.

“You may be angry at us, but that’s not really why you told Guy Booker you’d testify,” I continued. “I think you did it because you were trying to protect your sister.”

“Well,” Amelia said. “Yeah.”

“How could I be angry at you, then, for doing the same thing I’m trying to do?”

Amelia threw herself into my arms with the force of a hurricane. “If we win,” she said, muffled against my chest, “can I buy a Jet Ski?”

“No,” Sean and I said simultaneously. He stood up, his hands in his pockets. “If you win,” he said, “I was thinking I might move back home for good.”

“What if I lose?”

“Well,” Sean said, “I was still thinking I’d move back home for good.”

I looked at him over the crown of Amelia’s head. “You drive a hard bargain,” I said, and I smiled.

On the way to Disney World, during an airport layover, we had eaten in a Mexican restaurant. You had a quesadilla; Amelia had a burrito. I had fish tacos, and Sean had a chimichanga. The mild sauce was too hot for us. Sean convinced me to get a margarita (“It’s not like you’re the one who’ll be flying the plane”). We talked about fried ice cream, which was on the dessert menu and didn’t seem possible: wouldn’t the ice cream melt when it was put into the deep fryer? We talked about which rides we would go on first in the Magic Kingdom.

Back then, possibility stretched out in front of us like a red carpet. Back then, we were all focused on what could happen, instead of what had gone wrong. On our way out of the restaurant, the hostess-a girl with pockmarks on her cheeks and a nose stud-gave us each a helium balloon. “What’s the point of this?” Sean said. “You can’t take them on the plane.”

“Not everything has to have a point,” I replied, looping my arm through his. “Live a little.”

Amelia nipped a hole in the neck of her balloon with her teeth and suctioned her lips over it. She took a deep breath, and then looked at us with a dazzling smile. “Hello, parents,” she said, but her voice was high and reedy, that of a Munchkin, not Amelia’s at all.

“God only knows what’s in there-”

“Duh, Mom,” Amelia trilled. “Helium.”

“Me, too,” you said, and Amelia took your balloon and showed you how to breathe it in.

“I really don’t think they should be sucking in helium-”

“Live a little,” Sean said, grinning, and he nipped a corner of his balloon and sucked in.

They all started talking at me, their voices a comedy, a bird chorus, a rainbow. “Do it, Mom,” you said. “Do it!”

So I followed suit. The helium burned a little as I swallowed it, one great gulp. I could feel my vocal cords buzzing. “Maybe this isn’t so bad after all,” I peeped.

We sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” We recited the Lord’s Prayer. And when a man in a business suit stopped Sean to ask if he knew the way to Baggage Claim, Sean took a long drag of his balloon and said, “Follow the yellow brick road.”

I cannot remember laughing as much as I did that day, or feeling so liberated. Maybe it was the helium, which made me lighter, made me feel like I could close my eyes and fly to Orlando with or without the plane. Or maybe it was the fact that, no matter what we said to one another, we were not ourselves.

Four hours later, the jury had still not returned a verdict. Sean had driven to the hospital to check on you and had just called to say he was on his way back, had there been any news? Amelia was writing haikus on the white board in the conference room:

Help, I’m clearly trapped

Behind this very white board.

Please do not erase.

The rule for today

Is that there are no more rules.

Guess you’re out of luck.

I headed to the bathroom for the third time since court had adjourned. I didn’t have to go, but I ran the water in the sink and splashed some on my face. I kept telling myself this was not such a big deal, but that was a lie. You did not drag your family to the verge of dissolution for nothing; to have gone through this with nothing to show would have been disastrous. If I had entered into this lawsuit to assuage my con science, how could I reconcile an outcome where I left feeling even more guilty?

I patted my face dry and dabbed at my sweater, where it had gotten wet. I tossed the toweling into the trash just as there was a flush in one of the stalls. The door opened as I stepped away from the sink, and I inadvertently smacked it back against the person who was trying to exit. “Sorry,” I said, and then I realized that the woman standing in front of me was Piper.

“You know, Charlotte,” she said softly, “so am I.”

I looked at her, silent. Of all the things to notice, I realized that she didn’t smell the way she used to. She’d changed her perfume or her shampoo.

“So you admit it,” I said. “That you made a mistake.”

Piper shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Not professionally, anyway. But on a personal level, well…I’m sorry that this is how things have turned out between us. And I’m sorry that you didn’t get the healthy baby you wanted.”

“Do you realize,” I replied, “in all the years after Willow was born, you never said that to me?”

“You should have told me you were waiting to hear it,” Piper said.

“I shouldn’t have had to.”

I tried not to remember how Piper and I had huddled together in the bleachers at the skating rink, reading the classified ads and trying to match up personal ads with each other. How we would take walks, pushing you in a stroller, punctuating the cold air with so many starbursts of conversation that three miles passed in no time at all. I tried not to remember that I had thought of her as the sister I’d never had, that I’d hoped you and Amelia would grow up just as close.

I tried not to remember, but I would.

Suddenly the door of the bathroom opened. “There you are,” Marin sighed. “The jury’s back.”

She hurried out the door, and Piper quickly rinsed her hands under the faucet. I could feel her a half step behind me as we walked toward the courtroom again, but her legs were longer, and eventually she caught up.

As we stepped in, side by side, a dozen camera flashes went off, and I could not see where I was headed. Marin pulled me forward by the wrist. I thought, although I could have imagined it, that I heard Piper whisper good-bye.

The judge entered, and we all sat down. “Madame Foreman,” he said, turning to the jury, “have you reached a verdict?”

The woman was small and birdlike, with glasses that made her eyes seem overly magnified. “Yes, Your Honor. In the case of O’Keefe versus Reece, we find for the plaintiff.”

Marin had told me 75 percent of all wrongful birth cases were found in favor of the defendant. I turned to her, and she grabbed my arm. “That’s you, Charlotte.”

“And,” the foreman said, “we award damages in the amount of eight million dollars.”

I remember falling back into my chair, and the gallery erupting. My fingers felt numb, and I had to work to breathe. I remember Sean and Amelia, climbing over the bar to hold me tight. I heard the uproar from a group of parents of special-needs kids who’d taken up residence in the back of the court during the trial, and the names they’d called me. I heard Marin telling a reporter that this was the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire history, and that justice had been done today. I looked through the crowd, trying to find Piper, but she was already gone.

Today, when I went to take you home from the hospital, I would tell you that this was finally over. I would tell you that you’d have everything you needed, for the rest of your life-and after mine ended. I’d tell you that I had won, that the verdict had been read out loud…although I didn’t really believe it.

After all, if I had won this lawsuit, why was my smile as hollow as a drum, and my chest too tight?

If I had won this lawsuit, why did it feel like I’d lost?

Weeping: the release of extra moisture.

In baking, just as in life, there are tears when something’s gone wrong. Meringues are only whipped egg whites and sugar; they are meant to be eaten right away. If you hesitate, water will seep between the filling and the meringue, and weeping-little beads that form on the snowy, white peaks-will occur. There are all sorts of theories on how to prevent this-from using only fresh egg whites to using superfine sugar, from adding cornstarch to precooking the meringue. Ask me, and I’ll tell you the only foolproof method:

Do not bake while your heart is breaking.

1 pie shell, blind-baked

1½ cups granulated sugar

6 tablespoons cornstarch

Pinch of salt

1 1/3 cups cold water

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

5 egg yolks

½ cup fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon grated lemon zest

Prepare the pie shell. Meanwhile, combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt, and water in a nonreactive saucepan. Mix until there are no lumps, and whisk as the mixture gradually comes to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the butter.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Add a small amount of the hot liquid mixture and whisk until smooth. Add the egg mixture to the saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat, continuing to whisk as it thickens, approximately 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice and zest.

6 large egg whites at room temperature

Pinch of cream of tartar

Pinch of salt

¾ cup sugar

On low speed, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt until combined. Increase the speed and whip until they form stiff peaks. Beat in the sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Add the filling to the pie shell and top it with the meringue. Make sure you spread the meringue all the way to touch the edges of the crust. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Let the pie cool for about 2 hours, then refrigerate to prevent weeping.

Or just think happy thoughts.

Willow

March 2009

In school we have Hundred Day. It falls in late November, and we have to bring in a hundred of something, anything. When Amelia was in first grade, she brought in a hundred chocolate chips, but by the time she made it off the bus, she was down to fifty-three. Me, I brought a list of seventy-five bones I’ve broken and the names of twenty-five more that I haven’t.

A million is ten thousand hundreds. I can’t even think of ten thousand. Maybe there are that many trees in a forest or water molecules in a lake. Eight million is even more than that, and it is the number of dollars written on the big blue check that has been on our refrigerator for almost six months now.

My parents talk about that check a lot. They say that pretty soon the van will officially wheeze itself to death and we’ll have to use the money to buy a new one, but then they find a way to keep the old one running. They talk about how the registration deadline for camps for kids like me is coming up, and how they’ll have to send in a deposit. I have the brochures next to my bed. In them, there are kids in every color who have OI, like me. They all look happy.

Maybe that’s what happens to kids who go away somewhere. Amelia did, and when she came home, she had brown hair again and her own easel. She paints all the time-portraits of me while I’m sleeping, still lifes of coffee mugs and pears, landscapes in colors they’d never really be. I have to look really hard at her arms to see the silver scars, and even when she catches me looking, she hardly ever bothers to pull down her sleeves.

It was Saturday. My father was parked in front of the television, watch ing the Bruins. Amelia was outside somewhere, sketching. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, playing solitaire with the index cards of her recipes. She had over a hundred (if only she was in the first grade!), and she’d decided to put them together in a cookbook. It was a compromise, because she didn’t have to bake all the time anymore like she used to for Mr. DeVille. He still stocked her pies and tarts and macaroons when she went off on a tear in the kitchen, but now her big plan was to publish the book, and give all the money she made to the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation.

We didn’t need money, because ours was all tacked to the refrigerator.

“Hey,” my mother said, as I climbed onto a chair. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” The mail, fanned out on the table like a bright scarf, caught my eye.

“There’s something in there for you,” my mother said.

It was a card-and inside was a picture of Marin with a boy who was probably around Amelia’s age. He had buck teeth and skin the color of chocolate. His name was Anton, and she had adopted him two months ago.

We didn’t see Piper, and Amelia and Emma weren’t friends anymore. The sign in front of the building that used to be her office didn’t have her name on it now. It said GRETEL HANDELMAN, CHIROPRACTOR, instead. And then one Saturday morning my dad and I went out to get bagels, and there was Piper in line in front of us. My dad said hello and she asked how I was doing, but even though she was trying to smile, it looked all wrong, like a wire that was bent out of shape and wouldn’t ever really be straight again. She told my dad that she was working part-time at a women’s free health clinic in Boston, and that she was on her way there right now. Then she knocked over the cup full of straws at the cash register, and she was in such a hurry to leave that she forgot to pay until the girl who had brought her her coffee reminded her it wasn’t free.

I missed Piper, but I think my mother missed her more. She didn’t really have any friends now. She didn’t hang out with anyone but me, Amelia, and Dad.

It was kind of sad, actually.

“Wanna bake?” I asked.

My mother rolled her eyes. “You cannot seriously tell me you’re hungry. You just had lunch.”

I wasn’t hungry, but I was bored.

She looked up at me. “Tell you what. Go get Amelia, and we’ll figure out a plan of action. A movie, maybe.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” my mother said.

We could treat ourselves to movies now. And we went out to restaurants. And I was going to get a sports wheelchair so that I could actually play kickball in the gym with my class. Amelia said the reason we could spend money all of a sudden was the check that was still on the refrigerator. At school there were jerks who said we were rich, but I knew that wasn’t really true. I mean, after all, my parents had never cashed the check. We still had a rusty old car and our little house and the same clothes. A lot of zeros didn’t mean anything, really, except security-my parents could splurge a little, because if their funds ran out, there was a backup. That meant they didn’t fight nearly as much, which wasn’t something you could buy at a store anyway. I didn’t know much about bank accounts, but I was smart enough to realize that checks didn’t do you any good unless they were deposited. My parents, though, didn’t seem to be in any great rush. Every few weeks my mother would say, I really ought to bring that to the bank, and my father would grunt in agreement, but somehow it never got done, and the check stayed tacked on the fridge.

I went into the mudroom to get my boots and my coat, my mother’s voice trailing behind. “Be-”

“Careful,” I finished. “Yeah, I know.”

It was March, but it was still cold enough out for my breath to make funny shapes through my scarf: one that looked like a chicken and another that was a hippo. I started down the slope of the backyard carefully. There wasn’t snow anymore, but the ground still crunched under the soles of my boots. It made a sound like teeth biting.

Amelia was probably in the woods; she liked to draw the birches because she said they were tragic, and that something so beautiful shouldn’t have to die so quickly. I dug my hands into my pockets and tucked my nose under the edge of my scarf. With each step, I thought of something I knew:

The average woman consumes six pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.

Three Mile Island is really only two and a half miles long.

Cockroaches like to eat the glue on the backs of stamps.

I hesitated as I came to the edge of the pond. The reeds were nearly as tall as I was, and I had to work hard to push myself through them without tangling one of my arms or legs. Right now, for the first time in months, I had no healing fractures, and I planned to keep it that way.

My father told a story once about how he was out in his police cruiser when he realized all the cars in front of him were stopped dead. He slowed down and put the car into park, then opened the door to see what was going on. The minute he stepped onto the pavement, though, he landed flat on his back. Black ice; it was a miracle that he had even managed to brake safely.

The ice on the pond was like that: so clear that I could see the weeds and sand right through it, like it was a pane of glass. I got down carefully on my hands and knees, and inched forward.

I’d never been allowed on the ice, and like most things that you aren’t allowed to do, it was all I thought about.

I couldn’t get hurt this way-I was moving so slowly, and I wasn’t standing up. My back was hunched like a cat’s, my eyes staring down at the surface. Where did the fish go in the winter? Could you see them, if you looked carefully?

I moved my right knee, and my right hand. My left knee, and my left hand. I was breathing hard, not because it was so difficult but because I could not believe it was this easy.

There was a moan that rippled across the surface of the pond, as if the sky was crying. And then suddenly, all around me, the ice became a spiderweb, and I was the bug stuck at its center.

Grasshoppers have white blood Butterflies taste with their hind feet Caterpillars have about four thousand muscles…

“Help,” I said, but I couldn’t yell and breathe at the same time.

The water sucked at me all at once. I tried to grab for the ice, but it broke away in sheets; I tried to swim, but I didn’t know how without a life jacket. My jacket and pants and boots were a sponge, and it was so cold, cold like frostbite, cold like an ice-cream headache.

An armadillo can walk underwater.

Minnows have teeth in their throats.

A shrimp can swim backward.

You would think I’d have been scared. But I could hear my mother, telling me a story before I went to bed, about a coyote who wanted to capture the sun. He climbed the tallest tree, and he put it in a jar and brought it home. That jar, though, it couldn’t hold something so strong, and it burst. See, Wills? my mother had said. You are filled with light.

There was glass above me, and the runny eye of the sun in the sky, and I beat my fists against it. It was like the ice had sealed itself on top of me again, and I couldn’t push through. I was so numb, I had stopped shivering.

As the water filled my nose and mouth, as the sun got tinier and tinier, I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure:

That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue.

That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming.

That I was loved.

That this time, it was not me who broke.

Recipe: (1) a set of instructions for preparing a dish; (2) something likely to lead to a certain outcome.

Follow these rules, and you will get what you want: it’s the easiest prescription in the world. And yet, you can observe a recipe down to the letter, and it will not make a difference when the end product sits in front of you and you realize it’s not what you wanted.

For a long time, I could only see you sinking. I pictured you, with your skin pale blue and your hair streaming out behind you like a mermaid’s. I would wake up screaming, beating the mattress with my hands, as if I could reach through the ice and drag you to safety.

But that wasn’t you, no more than the skeleton you’d been given was you. You were more than that, lighter. You were the steam that fogged the mirror in the morning when Sean dragged me out of bed and forced me to take a shower. You were the crystals painting my car windshield after a night’s frost. You were the heat rising off the pavement like a ghost in the middle of the summer. You never left me.

I do not have the money anymore. It was yours, after all. I slipped the check into the silk lining of the coffin when I kissed you good-bye for the last time.

Here are the things I know for sure:

When you think you’re right, you are most likely wrong.

Things that break-be they bones, hearts, or promises-can be put back together but will never really be whole.

And, in spite of what I said, you can miss a person you’ve never known.

I learn this over and over again, every day I spend without you.

SABAYON

6 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

2 cups heavy cream, whipped

½ cup light rum or Grand Marnier

Whisk the eggs and sugar in a double boiler. Once they are completely mixed, fold in the whipped cream. Remove from the heat, pass through a sieve, and add the rum.

CLOUDS

5 egg whites

Pinch of salt

1/3 cup sugar

2 cups milk or water

Place the egg whites and salt in a mixing bowl; on low speed, mix until smooth. Gradually increase the speed and sprinkle in the sugar. Beat until the whites hold a soft peak-this is meringue, the cloud I imagine you resting on nowadays. Meanwhile, simmer the milk or water. Take a spoonful of the meringue and gently drop it into the simmering liquid. Cook the meringue for 2 to 3 minutes and, with a slotted spoon, turn it over and continue cooking for another 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer the poached meringue to a paper towel. The clouds are fragile.

Cooking spray

2 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon corn syrup

Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray, wiping any excess off with a paper towel.

Place the sugar and corn syrup in a saucepan and cook over low heat. Stir occasionally, until the sugar is dissolved. Raise the heat to high and bring the mixture to a boil, until a candy thermometer registers 310 degrees F (hard-crack stage). Remove from the heat and cool slightly. Let the syrup stand to thicken, about 1 minute.

Dip a fork into the sugar syrup and wave it back and forth over the baking sheet to paint long threads. The syrup will begin hardening almost immediately. With practice you can form the strands into lace, swirls, the letters of your name.

To serve, spoon some of the sabayon sauce into a shallow bowl or onto a large plate and top with 2 poached meringues. Gently place a few threads of spun sugar around the meringue, not on top, or it will deflate.

The outcome of this recipe is a work of art, if you can make it through the complicated preparation. Above all else: handle everything with care. This dessert, like you, is gone before you know it. This dessert, like you, is impossibly sweet.

This dessert fills me, when I miss you the most.