My Sister's Keeper (27 page)

I cross my arms. “What do you want? I'm working.”

“Good. Sara Fitzgerald just offered us a plea bargain. Come out to
dinner with me and I'll tell you all about it.”

“I am not going out to dinner with you,” I tell him.

“Actually, you are.” He shrugs. “I know you, and eventually
you're going to give in because even more than you don't want to be with me,
you want to know what Anna's mother said. Can't we just cut to the chase?”

Izzy starts laughing. “He does know you, Julia.”

“If you don't go willingly,” Campbell adds, “I have no
problem using brute force. Although it's going to be considerably more
difficult for you to cut your filet mignon if your hands are tied
together.”

I turn to my sister. “Do something. Please.”

She waves at me. “See ya, Katie.”

“See ya, Hubbell,” Campbell replies. “Great
movie.”

Izzy looks at him, considering. “Maybe there's hope,” she says.

“Rule number one,” I tell him. “We talk about the trial, and
nothing but the trial.”

“So help me God,” Campbell adds. “And may I just say you look
beautiful?”

“See, you've already broken the rule.”

He pulls into a parking lot near the water and cuts the engine. Then he gets
out of the car and comes around to my side to help me out. I look around, but I
don't see anything resembling a restaurant. We are at a marina filled with
sailboats and yachts, their honey-colored decks tanning in the late sun.
“Take off your sneakers,” Campbell says.

“No.”

“For God's sake, Julia. This isn't the Victorian age; I'm not going to
attack you because I see your ankle. Just do it, will you?”

“Why?”

“Because right now you've got an enormous pole up your ass and this is
the only G-rated way I can think of to make you relax.” He pulls off his
own deck shoes and sinks his feet into the grass growing along the edge of the
parking lot. “Ahhh,” he says, and he spreads his arms wide.
“Come on, Jewel. Carpe diem. Summer's almost over; better enjoy it while
you can.”

"What about the plea bargain—

“What Sara said is going to remain the same whether or not you go
barefoot.”

I still do not know if he's taken on this case because he's a glory hound,
because he wants the PR, or if he simply wanted to help Anna. I want to believe
the latter, idiot that I am. Campbell waits patiently, the dog at his side.
Finally I untie my sneakers and peel off my socks. I step out onto the strip of
lawn.

Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes
that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to
brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire;
we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating
across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little
longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction.
Campbell sits down on the grass. “What's rule number two?”

“That I get to make up all the rules,” I say. When he smiles at
me, I'm lost.

Last night, Seven the Bartender slipped a martini into my waiting hand and
asked me what I was hiding from.

I took a sip before I answered, and reminded myself why I hate martinis—they're
straight bitter alcohol, which of course is the point, but they also taste that
way, which is always somehow disappointing. “I'm not hiding,” I told
him. “I'm here, aren't I?”

It was early at the bar, just dinnertime. I stopped in on my way back from
the fire station, where I'd been with Anna. Two guys were making out in a booth
in the corner, one lone man was sitting at the other end of the bar. “Can
we change the channel?” He gestured toward the TV, which was broadcasting
the evening news. “Jennings is so much hotter than Brokaw.”

Seven flicked the remote, then turned back to me. “You're not hiding,
but you're sitting in a gay bar at dinnertime. You're not hiding, but you're wearing
that suit like it's armor.”

“Well, I'd definitely take fashion advice from a guy with a pierced
tongue.”

Seven lifted a brow. “One more martini, and I could convince you to go
see my man Johnston and get your own done. You can take the pink hair dye out
of the girl, but you never lose those roots.”

I took another sip of the martini. “You don't know me.”

At the end of the bar, the other customer lifted his face to Peter Jennings
and smiled.

“Maybe,” Seven said, “but neither do you.”

Dinner turns out to be bread and cheese—well, a baguette and Gruyere—on
board a thirty-foot sailboat. Campbell rolls up his pants like a castaway and
sets the rigging and hauls line and catches the wind until we are so far away
from the shore of Providence that it is only a line of color, a distant,
jeweled necklace.

After a while, when it becomes clear to me that any information Campbell
feels like providing me with won't be doled out until after dessert, I give in.
I lie on my back with my arm draped over the sleeping dog. I watch the sail, loose
now, flap like the great white wing of a pelican. Campbell comes up from
belowdecks, where he's been hunting down a corkscrew, and holds out two glasses
of red wine. He sits down on the other side of Judge and scratches behind the
German shepherd's ears. “You ever think about being an animal?”

“Figuratively? Or literally?”

“Rhetorically,” he says. “If you hadn't drawn that human
card.”

I think about this for a while. “Is this a trick question? Like, if I
say killer whale you're going to tell me that means I'm a ruthless,
cold-blooded, bottom-feeder fish?”

“They're mammals,” Campbell says. “And no. It's just a
simple, making-polite-conversation inquiry.”

I turn my head. “What would you be?”

“I asked you first.”

Well, a bird is out of the question; I'm too scared of heights. I don't
think I have the right attitude to be a cat. And I am too much of a loner to
function in a pack, like a wolf or a dog. I think of saying something like tarsier
just to show off, but then he'll ask what the hell that is and I can't remember
if it is a rodent or a lizard. “A goose,” I decide.

Campbell bursts out laughing. “As in Mother? Or Silly?”

It is because they mate for life, but I would rather fall overboard than
tell him this. “What about you?”

But he doesn't answer me directly. “When I asked Anna the same
question, she told me she'd be a phoenix.”

The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my
mind. “They don't really exist.”

Campbell strokes the dog's head. “She said that depends on whether or
not there's someone who can see them.” Then he looks up at me. “How
do you see her, Julia?”

The wine I have been drinking suddenly tastes bitter. Was all this—the
charm, the picnic, the sunset sail—engineered to tip my hand in his favor at
tomorrows trial? Whatever I recommend as guardian ad litem will weigh heavily
in Judge DeSalvo's decision, and Campbell knows it.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart
twice, along the very same fault lines.

“I'm not going to tell you what my decision is,” I say stiffly.
“You can wait to hear it when you call me as a witness.” I grab for
the anchor and try to reel it in. “I'd like to go back now, please.”

Campbell yanks the line out of my hand. “You already told me that you
don't think it's in Anna's best interests to be a kidney donor for her
sister.”

“I also told you she's incapable of making that decision by
herself.”

“Her father moved her out of the house. He can be her moral
compass.”

“And how long is that going to last? What about the next time?” I
am furious at myself for falling for this. For agreeing to go out to dinner,
for letting myself believe that Campbell might want to be with me,
rather than use me. Everything—from his compliments on my looks to the
wine sitting on the deck between us—has been coldly calculated to help him win
his case.

“Sara Fitzgerald offered us a deal,” Campbell says. “She said
if Anna donates the kidney, she will never ask her to do anything for her
sister again. Anna turned it down.”

“You know, I could have the judge throw you in jail for this. It's
completely unethical to try to seduce me into changing my mind.”

“Seduce you? All I did was lay the cards on the table for you.
I made your job easier.”

“Oh, right. Forgive me,” I say sarcastically. “This isn't
about you. This isn't about me writing my report with a definite slant
toward your client's petition. If you were an animal, Campbell, you know what
you'd be? A toad. No, actually, you'd be a parasite on the belly of a toad.
Something that takes what it needs without giving a single thing back.”

A vein throbs blue in his temple. “Are you finished?”

“Actually, I'm not. Is anything that comes out of your mouth ever
honest?”

“I did not lie to you.”

“No? What's the dog for, Campbell?”

“Jesus Christ, will you shut up already?” Campbell says, and he
pulls me into his arms and kisses me.

His mouth moves like a silent story; he tastes like salt and wine. There is
no moment of relearning, of adjusting the patterns of the past fifteen years;
our bodies remember where to go. He licks my name along the course of my
throat. He presses himself so close to me that any hurt left on the surface
between us spreads thin, becomes a binding instead of a boundary.

When we break away to breathe again, Campbell stares at me. “I'm still
right,” I whisper.

It is the most natural thing in the world when Campbell pulls my old
sweatshirt up over my head, works at the clasp of my bra. When he kneels before
me with his head over my heart, when I feel the water rocking the hull of the
boat, I think that maybe this is the place for us. Maybe there are entire
worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide.

MONDAY

How great a matter a little fire kindleth!

-THE NEW TESTAMENT, James 3:5

CAMPBELL

WE SLEEP IN THE TINY CABIN, moored to its slip. Tight quarters, but that
hardly seems to matter: all night long, she fits herself around me. She snores,
just a little. Her front tooth is crooked. Her eyelashes are as long as the
nail of my thumb.

These are the minutiae that prove, more than anything else, the difference
between us now that fifteen years have passed. When you're seventeen, you don't
think about whose apartment you want to sleep in. When you're seventeen, you
don't even see the pearl-pink of her bra, the lace that arrows between her
legs. When you're seventeen it's all about the now, not the after.

What I had loved about Julia—there, I've said it now—was that she didn't
need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilted
army-surplus jacket and combat boots, she did this without apology. It was a
great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her
appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I
depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit.

No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.

After Julia, there weren't all that many women. None whose names I took the
time to remember, anyway. It was far too complicated to maintain the facade;
instead, I chose the coward's rocky route of one-night stands. Out of
necessity—medical and emotional—I have gotten rather skilled at being an escape
artist.

But there are a half-dozen times this past night when I had the opportunity
to leave. While Julia was sleeping, I even considered how to do it: a note
pinned to the pillow, a message scrawled on the deck with her cherry lipstick.
And yet the urge to do this was nowhere near as strong as the need to wait just
one more minute, one more hour.

From the spot where he's curled up on the galley table tight as a cinnamon
bun, Judge raises his head. He whines a little, and I completely understand.
Detangling myself from Julia's rich forest of hair, I slip out of the bed. She
inches into the warm spot I've left behind.

I swear, it makes me hard again.

But instead of doing what comes naturally—that is, calling in sick with some
latent strain of smallpox and making the clerk of the court reschedule the
hearing so that I can spend the day getting laid—I pull on my pants and go
above-deck. I want to make sure I'm at the courthouse before Anna, and need to
shower and change. I leave Julia the keys to my car—it's a short walk to my
place. It's only when Judge and I are on our way home that I realize unlike
every other bloodshot morning that I have left a woman, I haven't fashioned
some charming symbol of my exit for Julia, something to lessen the blow of
abandonment upon waking.

I wonder if this was an oversight. Or if I have been waiting all this time for
her to come back, so that I can grow up.

When Judge and I arrive at the Garrahy building for the hearing, we have to
fight our way through the reporters who have lined up for the Main Event. They
thrust microphones in my face, and inadvertently step on Judge's paws. Anna
will take one look at walking this gauntlet, and bolt.

Inside the front door, I flag down Vern. “Get us some security out
here, will you?” I tell him. “They're going to eat the witnesses
alive.” Then I see Sara Fitzgerald, already waiting. She is wearing a suit
that most likely hasn't seen the outside of the plastic dry cleaner's bag for a
decade, and her hair is pulled back severely into a barrette. She doesn't carry
a briefcase, but a knapsack instead. “Good morning,” I say evenly.

The door blows open and Brian enters, looking from Sara to me.

“Where's Anna?”

Sara takes a step forward. “Didn't she come here with you?”

“She was already gone when I got back from a call at five A.M. She left
a note and said she'd meet me here.” He glances at the door, at the
jackals on the other side. “I bet she took off.”